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SAMUEL BECKETT(13 April 1906–22 December 1989)
The Irishman Samuel Beckett, who wrote in both English and French with
equal brilliance, is held by many to be the 20 th century’s greatest playwright, but he
was also an outstanding avant-garde novelist, poet, and theater director. His works
offer a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often
coupled with black comedy and gallows humor, always
severe, and grotesquely comic. He seeks to represent the
mind purified down to its last bitter, almost unbearably
pure negation—and kept alive simply by the force of that
negation. Since the 1940s, he generally wrote in French
and then sometimes translated his French into an
eloquent, Irish-tinged English. Beckett remained until his
death vigorously active in fiction, mime, film, and drama
for stage and radio. In 1969 he received the Nobel Prize
for Literature. Among the most influential writers of the
20th century, Beckett defies easy classification, being
considered by many as one of the last modernists and by
many others as one of the first postmodernists. His plays
in any case exemplify what Martin Esslin called the “Theater of the Absurd.”
Samuel Barclay Beckett was born the second of 2 sons in Cooldrinagh house
in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, the Anglican family home of William Frank
Beckett, a surveyor, and Maria Jones Roe, a nurse, when both parents were 35. At
age 5 Beckett attended a local school, where he started to learn music, before moving
to Earlsfort House School near Harcourt Street in central Dublin,
then in 1919 to Portora Royal School (which Oscar Wilde had
also attended) in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. A natural
athlete living in a large house with a tennis court, Beckett
excelled at cricket as a southpaw batsman and medium-pace
bowler; he even has an entry in the “bible” of cricket, Wisden
Cricketers’ Almanack. He attended Trinity College (Dublin’s
Protestant university) from 1923 to 1927, studying French,
Italian, and English and graduating with a BA. After teaching
briefly at Campbell College in Belfast, Beckett became a lecteur
d’anglais in the very prestigious École Normale Supérieure in
Paris. While there, he met Joyce, who had a profound effect on
him, and went on to become Joyce’s research assistant.
Beckett published his first work in 1929, a critical essay
which defends Joyce’s work and method from charges of wanton obscurity and was
Beckett's contribution to Our Examination Round His Factification for Incamination
of Work in Progress, a book of essays on Joyce, among whose other contributors was
William Carlos Williams. Beckett first short story “Assumption” appeared the same
Samuel Beckett c. 1980
Beckett c. age 11
Snodgrass, Becket Introduction 2
year. His close relationship with the Joyce family cooled a bit when he rejected
advances from Joyce’s daughter Lucia, owing to her progressing schizophrenia. In
1930 he won a small literary prize for “Whoroscope,” a poem drawing on the
biography of René Descartes, and returned to Trinity College the same year as a
lecturer. As the result of an ill-received November literary parody of a poet he
invented, Beckett resigned from Trinity at the end of 1931, terminating his brief
academic career. He went abroad, mostly writing and teaching in French lycées but
serving occasionally as Joyce’s secretary, translator, and critical defender. Beckett’s
earliest works—erudite but somewhat pretentious and obscure—are generally
considered to have been strongly influenced by Joyce.
In the 1930s the sparseness of Beckett’s short poems in French—which
contrasted with the density of his English poems in Echo’s Bones and Other
Precipitates (1935)—shows Beckett in the process of
simplifying his style. In 1931, while spending time in London,
he published Proust, a critical study, and wrote in 1932 what
was actually his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling
Women, which he decided to abandon after many rejections
from publishers (it eventually appeared in 1992). However,
despite his inability to get this novel published, it was a
source for many of Beckett’s early poems, as well as the
short-story collection More Pricks Than Kicks (1933). Also in
1933, following his father’s death, Beckett began 2 years’
psychoanalysis, aspects of which show up in his later works.
Beckett published in 1934 several favorable essays and
reviews comparing the work of friends with Celtic Revival
contemporaries, invoking Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and the
French symbolists as their precursors—articles that were in fact establishing the
outlines of an Irish poetic modernist canon.
While working on Murphy and reading about film, Beckett reputedly wrote in
mid-1936 to Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin to offer himself as their
apprentice (nothing came of the overture). Also in 1936 he took many notes on the
works of philosopher Arnold Geulincx, who left a
significant impression, being mentioned in Murphy.
Beckett set out for extensive travel around Germany,
registering his repugnance of the Nazi savagery
sweeping that country and filling several notebooks with
lists of noteworthy artwork that he had seen. He returned
to Ireland briefly in 1937 to oversee the publication of
Murphy (1938), which he translated into French the
following year and which contains themes common in
some of his later works, such as physical inactivity,
insanity, and characters living inside their own heads. He had a falling out with his
mother, which contributed to his decision to live permanently in Paris. He allegedly
Samuel Beckett c. 1930s
Samuel Beckett 1927
Snodgrass, Becket Introduction 3
had a brief affair with Peggy Guggenheim during the Christmas season of 1937, and
then in January 1938 suffered a near fatal stabbing when he refused the solicitations
of a notorious pimp (eventually dropping the charges, partly because he found the
pimp otherwise well-mannered). The publicity surrounding the stabbing attracted the
attention of a previous Paris acquaintance Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, who then
began what would be a lifelong companionship. Beckett became a familiar face in
and around Left Bank cafés, where he strengthened his allegiance with Joyce, who
had arranged a private hospital room for Beckett after his stabbing, and forged new
alliances with artists Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp, with whom he
regularly played chess.
Upon Germany’s 1940 occupation of France, Beckett joined the French
Resistance, working as a courier. The Gestapo nearly caught him on several
occasions over the next 2 years, and when his unit was betrayed in August 1942, he
and Suzanne fled south on foot to the small village of Roussillon in Provence. There
he worked on his novel Watt (1953)—similar in theme to Murphy but less exuberant
in style—while continuing to assist the Resistance by storing armaments in his
backyard and indirectly helping the Maquis sabotage the German army in the
Vaucluse mountains. Beckett constantly downplayed his contributions in fighting the
German occupation, yet the French government awarded him the Croix de guerre and
the Médaille de la Résistance for his wartime efforts.
In 1945 Beckett returned to Dublin for a brief visit, during which he had a
revelation about his future literary direction—that he would remain forever in the
shadow of Joyce, certain never to best him in knowing more about how to creatively
understand and control the world. This revelation prompted him to change direction
and acknowledge his interest in ignorance and impotence. In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre’s
magazine Les Temps Modernes published the first part of
Beckett’s short story “Suite” (later to be called “La Fin,” or
“The End”), not realizing that Beckett had only submitted the
first half of the story (Simone de Beauvoir declined to publish
the second half). He also began writing his 4 th novel Mercier et
Camier, which was not published until 1970 but presaged his
most famous work, the play Waiting for Godot. Beckett’s most
outstanding prose achievements in the post-WWII period were
probably three interrelated novels Molloy (1951), Malone
meurt (1951: Malone Dies) and L’innommable (1953: The
Unnamable). In these novels—sometimes referred to, against
the author’s own explicit wishes, as a “trilogy”—the prose
becomes increasingly bare and stripped down. Molloymakes use
of the structure of a detective novel, while still retaining the time, place, movement,
and plot elements of a conventional novel. In Malone Dies movement and plot are
minimal, although an interior monologue still gives some indication of place and the
passage of time. By the time of The Unnamable (1953) almost all sense of place and
time are abolished, and the essential theme is the conflict between the drive to
Samuel Beckett c. 1940s
Snodgrass, Becket Introduction 4
continue speaking and thus existing, and the almost equally strong urge towards
silence and oblivion. After these three novels, Beckett struggled for many years to
produce a sustained work of prose, creating only brief “stories.” In the late 1950s,
however, he created one of his most radical prose works Comment c'est (1961: How
It Is), written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs in “telegraph” style, which
relates the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud, dragging a
sack of canned food.
After World War II, Beckett wrote almost entirely in French and (with the
exception of a collaborative translation of Molloy) translated his works into English
himself. He argued that, despite being a native English speaker, writing in French
made it easier for him to write “without style.” This, together with his “revelation”
that his art must be subjective and drawn wholly from his own inner world, set the
course for the works for which he is best remembered today. Certainly, his most
famous work is his play En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) about a pair of
derelicts waiting in a bleak place for Godot [symbolically God], who tantalizes them
by promising to come but never does. Depicting the vacancy experienced when
something is expected but never found, the characters talk, complain, and try to kill
time, but the play ends with them still waiting. Critic Vivian Mercier famously
explained that with it Beckett had “achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in
which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. . . . a [two-act]
play in which nothing happens, twice.” Written in 1948–1949 and first published in
1952, the play premiered in 1953, with an English translation appearing 2 years later.
Beckett’s works, drawing from 17 th-century French thinker René Descartes and his
follower Geulinex, almost uniformly probe the idea of the mind compelled to
question itself, often developing a brilliant, sterile dialectic of its own. Beckett’s
characters all have stories to tell, and as long as they can keep talking and keep some
sort of empty verbal game going, they can reassure themselves of their own Being,
even if any sort of comfort or security beyond the absolute minimum eludes them.
Whether clinging to hopelessness as their one hope or, like the heroine of Happy
Days, clinging to love in the grip of the grave, they bear witness, as more
comfortable folk could not, to the essential holiness of existence. Despite the widely
held view that Beckett’s work is essentially pessimistic, the will to live invariably
prevails in the end. Beckett bought some land in 1953 near a hamlet 40 miles
northeast of Paris and built a cottage for himself with the help of some locals,
including the Bulgarian-born father of the famous André the Giant, whom for years
Beckett drove to school in his truck. From the late 1950s until his death, Beckett had
a relationship with Barbara Bray, a widow who worked as a script editor for the
BBC; it was a relationship that was to last, in parallel with his relationship with
Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, for the rest of his life. In 1961, he married Suzanne
in a civil ceremony in England.
The success of Waiting for Godot opened up a career in theater for Beckett. He
went on to write many successful full-length plays, including Fin de partie
(Endgame, published in 1957, first performed 1958), even more despairing than
Snodgrass, Becket Introduction 5
Godot and just as funny; Krapp's Last Tape (1958, written
in English); Happy Days (1961, also written in English);
and Play (1963). Like Waiting for Godot, these plays
were instrumental in the so-called “Theatre of the
Absurd” and deal in a very black-comedy way with
themes similar to those of roughly contemporary
existentialist thinkers. But although many of the themes
are similar, Beckett shared relatively little with
existentialism as a whole. All of his plays basically deal
with the subject of despair and the will to survive, in spite
of that despair, in the face of an uncomprehending and
incomprehensible world.
The tendency of Beckett’s works towards
compactness, already evident in the 1950s, increased
throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. After his 1st commission from the BBC
Third Programme for a radio play All That Fall in 1956, he continued writing
sporadically for radio and extended his scope to include cinema, television, and a
new career as a theater director. He began to write in English again, although he also
wrote in French until the end of his life. The
legendary English actress Billie Whitelaw, after first
meeting Beckett in 1963in an encounter that she
described as “trust at first sight,” went on to work
with him for 25 years, being regarded as the impetus
for some of his most experimental plays and
the“supreme interpreter of his work.” In the theater of
his late period, Beckett’s characters—already few in
number in earlier plays—are whittled down to bare
essentials. The television drama Eh Joe (1963) is
animated only by the camera steadily closing in upon the face of the title character.
The play Not I (1972) consists almost solely of, in Beckett’s words, “a moving mouth
with the rest of the stage in darkness.” Like Krapp’s Last Tape,
many of these later plays explore memory, often a forced
recollection of haunting past events from a moment of stillness
in the present.
In October 1969 Beckett heard that he had won the Nobel
Prize for Literature while on holiday in Tunis with Suzanne. In
his typical ascetic fashion, he gave away all of the prize money.
Although an intensely private man, Beckett was not only
unexpectedly amiable but frequently prepared to talk about his
work and the process behind it. In three “closed space
stories”—the prose pieces Company (1980), Ill Seen Ill Said
(1982), and Worstward Ho (1984), later collected in Nohow
On—Beckett continued his preoccupation with memory and its
Samuel Becket 1960s
Samuel Beckett 1969
Samuel Becket c. 1980
Snodgrass, Becket Introduction 6
effect on the confined and observed self. After a long period of inactivity, his poetry
experienced a revival in the ultra-terse French mirlitonnades, with some only six
words long. He wrote his last work, the 1988 poem “What is the Word” (“Comment
dire”), which grapples with the inability to find words to express oneself, while
suffering from emphysema (and possibly Parkinson’s disease) and confined to the
nursing home where he spent his final days. He died in December 1989. His wife
Suzanne had died the previous July. The two were interred together in the Cimetière
du Montparnasse in Paris, sharing a simple granite gravestone that follows Beckett’s
directive, “any color, so long as it’s grey.”
Of all the English-language modernists, Beckett’s work represents the most
sustained attack on the realist tradition, opening up theater and fiction that dispenses
with conventional plot and unities of time and place
in order to focus on essential components of the
human condition. Havel, Albee, Stoppard, Pinter, and
Minghella are among the great many writers and
directors who have publicly stated their indebtedness
to him. In 1961, Beckett received the International
Publishers’ Formentor Prize in recognition of his
work, which he shared that year with Jorge Luis
Borges. An Post, the Irish postal service, issued a
commemorative stamp of Beckett in 1994. The
Central Bank of Ireland launched two Centenary
commemorative coins on 26 April 2006, the
centennial year of his birth—€10 Silver Coin and €20 Gold Coin, and he is also
depicted on an Irish commemorative coin celebrating his 100th Centennial. On 10
December 2009, the new bridge across the River Liffey in Dublin was opened and
named the Samuel Beckett Bridge.
Samuel Beckett 1985, Age 80