Beckett’s Friendship by André Bernold review – a bizarrely charming memoir

Silence is golden in this unconventional portrait, translated into English at last

It is one of literature’s most exquisite ironies that Samuel Beckett was the most sought after, photographed and pestered author of the 20th century. I remember mooching around Paris when I was 18, working out where he lived from Deirdre Bair’s biography, staring through the plate glass of the front door of his apartment block, seeing with a shock of confirmation the word “BECKETT” on his letter box, and wondering whether I should hang around and say hello when he left, or entered. In the end I intuited his most likely reaction – a kind of pained decency – and fled before inflicting myself on him.

But his work spoke to people in ways others’ didn’t; it reached into, and addressed, an intimate part of the self. There was something heroic about it; no wonder people wanted to touch his hem. In years to come, I would hear of, and meet, many people who had done what I did, but without fleeing, and were treated with courtesy and patience by the man. André Bernold was one of them, and, in 1979 he somehow – the details are somewhat vague – instigated a friendship that lasted until Beckett’s death in 1989.

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