Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born on April 13, 1906, in Foxrock, a prosperous suburb south of Dublin, to William Beckett, a quantity surveyor, and Maria Roe Beckett, known as May, who had trained as a nurse ^[1]. The family was Protestant and comfortably middle class. Beckett later insisted his childhood was largely happy, though his relationship with his exacting mother remained tense for decades ^[2].

He attended Earlsfort House school in Dublin and then Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, the same boarding school Oscar Wilde had attended. Beckett excelled at sport as much as at study: he was a strong swimmer, boxer, and cricketer, and he remains the only Nobel laureate in literature with an entry in Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, having played two first-class matches for Dublin University ^[3].

In 1923 he entered Trinity College Dublin to read French and Italian. He took his degree in 1927 with a gold medal in modern languages, a result that earned him a two-year exchange lectureship at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris ^[1]. That appointment, taken up in 1928, moved the center of his life permanently toward France.

In Paris the young lecturer was introduced to James Joyce, then at work on the book that became Finnegans Wake. Beckett ran errands for the older writer, read to him as Joyce's eyesight failed, and contributed the opening essay to a 1929 volume defending the work in progress ^[2]. The association shaped him, though Beckett later said he had to escape Joyce's method of accumulation and find his own way through subtraction.

His first separate publication was Whoroscope, a poem about Descartes that won a small Paris competition in 1930. A short critical study of Proust followed in 1931 ^[1]. Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer in French but resigned after four terms, unable to bear teaching. The decision opened a restless decade: he drifted between London, Germany, and Dublin, underwent psychoanalysis with Wilfred Bion at the Tavistock Clinic, and published the story collection More Pricks Than Kicks in 1934 and the novel Murphy in 1938 after dozens of rejections ^[2].

In January 1938 a Paris pimp named Prudent stabbed Beckett on the street, nearly killing him; the knife narrowly missed his heart ^[2]. While he recovered, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, a pianist he had met years earlier, visited him in hospital. She became his lifelong companion. Beckett settled in Paris for good that year.

When Germany invaded France in 1940, Beckett, as a citizen of neutral Ireland, could have left. He stayed, saying later that he preferred France at war to Ireland at peace. By 1941 he had joined a Paris Resistance cell called Gloria SMH, translating and typing intelligence reports on German troop movements for transmission to London ^[4].

The cell was betrayed in August 1942. Beckett and Suzanne fled hours ahead of the Gestapo and eventually reached Roussillon, a village in the Vaucluse, where they hid for the rest of the war. Beckett worked as an agricultural laborer and wrote the novel Watt at night, partly, he said, to stay sane ^[2]. He also stored weapons for the local maquis. In 1945 the French government awarded him the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance, honors he almost never mentioned ^[4].

After the liberation he volunteered with the Irish Red Cross hospital at Saint-Lô in Normandy, a town so destroyed that Beckett described it in a radio piece as the Capital of the Ruins ^[1]. The war years gave his later work its recurring furniture: waiting, hunger, uncertain refuge, and speech continuing in the dark.

Between 1946 and 1950 Beckett produced the work on which his reputation rests, and he did it in French, a deliberate choice he explained by saying it was easier to write without style. In what he called the siege in the room, he wrote the novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, a trilogy that pares narrative away until only a voice remains ^[1]. He then translated most of his French work into English himself, effectively composing each book twice.

In the same burst he wrote a play, En attendant Godot. Suzanne hawked the manuscript around Paris until the director Roger Blin staged it at the Théâtre de Babylone in January 1953. Two tramps wait by a tree for someone who never comes; the reviewer Vivian Mercier famously described the English version as a play in which nothing happens, twice ^[3]. Waiting for Godot divided its first audiences and then conquered the world's stages, and it is the achievement most people name first when asked about Samuel Beckett achievements ^[1].

The plays that followed extended the compression. Endgame (1957) confines its characters to a bare room and two dustbins. Krapp's Last Tape (1958) sets an old man against tape recordings of his younger self. Happy Days (1961) buries its heroine to the waist, then to the neck, in earth. Beckett also wrote for radio, television, and once for cinema: Film (1965), a nearly silent short starring Buster Keaton, which he traveled to New York to help direct ^[5]. In 1969 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing which, in new forms for the novel and drama, transforms the destitution of modern man into his exaltation ^[6]. Beckett, dismayed by the attention, did not attend the ceremony and gave much of the prize money away ^[2].

Beckett married Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil in a quiet civil ceremony in Folkestone, England, in March 1961, chiefly to secure her inheritance rights under French law; by then they had been together more than twenty years ^[2]. The marriage endured despite long separations and Beckett's relationship with Barbara Bray, a BBC script editor and translator who remained close to him until his death ^[2].

A collection of Samuel Beckett facts would have to include his contradictions. He was famously private, refusing almost all interviews, yet generous to friends, students, and strangers who wrote to him; he answered letters by hand for decades. He loved chess, Beethoven, and watching rugby and cricket on television. Tall, gaunt, with pale blue eyes and a shock of grey hair, he became one of the most photographed literary faces of the century while insisting the work, not the man, was what mattered ^[1].

From 1953 he divided his time between a small Paris apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Jacques and a plain cottage he built at Ussy-sur-Marne, where most of the late writing was done ^[2].

The late work grew shorter and stranger. Plays such as Not I (1972), in which only a spotlit mouth is visible, Footfalls (1976), and Rockaby (1981) run minutes rather than hours. The late prose, including Company (1980), Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), and Worstward Ho (1983), compressed his themes into pages of exact, rhythmic sentences; Worstward Ho contains the often quoted instruction to fail again and fail better ^[1].

Beckett increasingly directed his own plays, notably at the Schiller-Theater in Berlin, keeping precise notebooks that recorded every move and pause ^[5]. He supported imprisoned writers, dedicating the 1982 play Catastrophe to the jailed Czech dramatist Václav Havel ^[4].

Suzanne died in July 1989. Beckett, suffering from emphysema and probably Parkinson's disease, had moved into a modest Paris nursing home called Le Tiers Temps, where he kept a television for tennis and little else. He wrote his final poem, What Is the Word, there. He died on December 22, 1989, and was buried beside Suzanne in the Cimetière du Montparnasse under a plain granite stone ^[6].

Any Samuel Beckett biography ends with an influence out of proportion to the slimness of his books. Critics grouped him with the Theatre of the Absurd, a label he never accepted, but his real bequest was permission: after Godot, a play needed neither plot nor scenery to hold a stage. Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee, and Caryl Churchill all acknowledged the debt ^[3].

His manuscripts are studied at the University of Reading, which houses the Beckett International Foundation and the largest archive of his papers, and his complete letters have appeared in a four-volume Cambridge edition ^[7]. In Dublin, a bridge over the Liffey designed by Santiago Calatrava was named for him in 2009, and an Irish naval vessel carries his name. The centenary of his birth in 2006 brought festivals in Dublin, Paris, and beyond ^[1].

Productions of Waiting for Godot continue to surface wherever waiting is the condition of life: in San Quentin prison in 1957, in besieged Sarajevo in 1993 under Susan Sontag's direction, in post-Katrina New Orleans in 2007 ^[3]. Few writers have made less material go further, which is why readers still ask who was Samuel Beckett and find the question harder, and richer, than it looks.