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