A year before his own death, which came twenty years after Beckett’s, the painter Avigdor Arikha spoke to me of his friendship with the man who had, as he put it, made his life meaningful. I think it’s fair to say that Avigdor was the Irishman’s closest friend during the last thirty years of his life. He was surely the only one who was Beckett’s intellectual peer, with his seven languages and his encyclopaedic knowledge of Western literature and art. Suddenly, Avigdor broke down in tears. Here was a man who had known unimaginable hardship in his life, a deportee and camp survivor, now eighty years old himself and sobbing before me. “I miss him more and more every day,” he told me through his tears. I had the temerity to ask him: “What in particular do you miss?” He summoned the words, though he knew they were not quite right, that Beckett was no saint and would have been appalled to hear his friend attribute any special quality to him. “He was the only one,” Avigdor continued, “the only person I ever met on whom the dirt of the world, the nastiness, had left no trace. It could not touch him.”  

Dan Gunn, remembering George Craig