But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet...
He hams his Brummie accent, I tell myself, the way so many ex-pats ham their lost identity. The moustache is a pose. Yet, he hams this unpredictable matey belligerence, this curiously Midlands attitud...
But whatever the exact psychology of the process {receiving recognition or literary success}, the present has a way of contaminating the past. And the writing will change accordingly. Turmoil and dile...
And when Deirdre Bair went to interview Beckett for the biography the first thing he said was, ‘So you’ve come to demonstrate that it was all, after all, autobiographical.