Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram Van Velde

The received wisdom is that you should never meet your heroes, but here are two heroes who deliver. This book is a transcript of conversations (written from memory) between the author and two celebrated artists: Samuel Beckett and the Dutch painter Bram van Velde. It is a weird and absorbing book, with a great deal to say to anyone who is interested in words, art or the notion of celebrity.

Both Beckett and van Velde are fascinating in their own right, and their comments on art and its place in the world would be of interest to intellectual types however they were presented. What makes this book so odd is the way Beckett and van Velde's words are framed by the interviewer, the younger author Charles Juliet. Juliet's awe of his subjects, the two older men's occasional discomfort with his questions and theories and both their preference for silence all make for some uneasy and even fraught exchanges.

The conversations Juliet has (separately) with Beckett and van Velde revolve around the fact that both artists would rather not be speaking to him at all. Both men have retreated from communication and have a deep suspicion of language. 'Writing has led me to silence,' says Beckett. At the time of his conversations with Juliet, Beckett's writing is becoming more and more condensed and elliptical - he tells Juliet about a play he is writing with 14 lines of dialogue, lasting one minute. 'I'm always working on something. It may be long at first, but it gets shorter and shorter,' he explains.

Van Velde is contemptuous of words ('just noise') and sometimes envious of those he feels can use them more skilfully than him. When Juliet tells him about a painter who also writes and dabbles in philosophy, van Velde retorts 'He's lucky. He's got words. He doesn't need to paint any more.' A thread running through Juliet's conversations with both artists is the concept of the unsayable: art's attempts to express the inexpressible, the sentence-by-sentence struggle with language.

The interviewer/interviewee dynamic can make for a compelling dramatic set-up, and sometimes these exchanges, particularly those between Beckett and Juliet, read like a scene from a play. My favourite moment in the play would be when Juliet finally finds the courage to tell Beckett everything his writing has meant to him; what he loves; what he has learned; how it has affected his own writing, 'in a jumble, in one breath, perhaps even passionately.' And Beckett simply stands, excuses himself, and walks out the room.