Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett (possibly April 13, 1906 - December 22, 1989) was an absurdist Irish playwright, novelist and poet. Although Beckett insisted he was born on Good Friday, April 13 1906, his birth certificate puts the date a month later. Beckett's work is stark, fundamentally minimalist, and deeply pessimistic about human nature and the human situation. His later work explores his themes in increasingly cryptic and attenuated style. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1969 and elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.

Table of contents

1 Early life and education

2 Early writings

3 World War Two

4 Fame: novels and the theatre

5 Later life and work

6 Beckett's legacy

7 Selected bibliography

7.1 Dramatic works
7.2 Prose
7.3 Poetry

8 Books on Samuel Beckett

9 External links

Early life and education

The Beckett family (originally Becquet) were of Huguenot stock and had moved to Ireland from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The family home, Cooldrinagh in the fashionable Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court and had been built in 1903 by Beckett's father William. The house and garden, together with the surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, Foxrock railway station and Harcourt Street station at the city terminus of the line were all later to feature in his prose and plays.

At the age of five, Beckett started attending a local kindergarten where he first started to learn music and then moved to Earlsford House School in the city centre near Harcourt Street. In 1919, Beckett went to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh (Oscar Wilde's old school). A natural athlete, he excelled at cricket as a left hand batsman and left arm medium pace bowler. Later on, he was to play for Dublin University and played two first-class games against Northhamptonshire. As a result, he became the only Nobel laureate to have an entry in Wisden, the cricket bible.

Early writings

He studied French, Italian and English at Trinity College, Dublin from 1923 to 1927, graduating with a B.A. and shortly thereafter took a teaching post in Paris. There he was introduced to James Joyce by Thomas MacGreevy. This meeting and the relationship that developed between the two writers was to be a massive influence on the younger man. Beckett continued his writing career while assisting Joyce with the assembly of Finnegan's Wake. In 1929 he published his first work, Dante...Bruno. Vico...Joyce, a critical essay defending Joyce's work, chiefly from allegations of wanton obscurity and dimness which was Beckett's contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. This was a book of essays on Joyce which also included contributions by Eugene Jolas, Robert McAlmon, William Carlos Williams and MacGreevy, amongst others. His first short story, "Assumption", was published the same year in Jolas' periodical transition, and in 1930 he won a small literary prize with his poem "Whoroscope", which largely concerns René Descartes, another major influence.

He returned to Trinity College as a lecturer in 1930, but left after less than two years and began to travel throughout Europe. He also spent time in London, publishing his critical study of Proust there in 1931. Two years later, in the wake of his father's death, he began two years of Jungian psychotherapy with Dr. Wilfred Bion, who took him to hear Jung's third Tavistock lecture, an event which he would still recall many years later. In 1932 he wrote his first novel, "Dream of Fair to Middling Women", but after many rejections from publishers he decided to abandon it. The book was eventually published in 1992. Despite his inability to have Dream published, it did serve as a source for many of his early poems and for his first full-length book, "More Pricks Than Kicks" 1933. This was a collection of short stories or vignettes with the same characters recurring which is sometimes mistakenly called a novel.

He also published a number of essays and reviews around time including Recent Irish Poetry (in The Bookman August, 1934) and Humanistic Quietism (a review of MacGreevy's Poems in The Dublin Magazine, also 1934). These two reviews focused on the work of MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin and Blanaid Salkeld, comparing them favourably with their Celtic Twilight contemporaries and invoking Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and French symbolists as their precursors. In describing these poets as forming 'the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland', Beckett traced the outlines of an Irish poetic modernist canon. Unsurprisingly, these reviews were reprinted in the early 1970s in The Lace Curtain as part of a conscious attempt by the editors of that journal to revive this alternative tradition.

In 1935 he worked on his novel "Murphy", which still showed the heavy influence of Joyce, and then in 1936 departed for extensive travel around Germany, during which time he filled several notebooks with lists of noteworthy artwork that he had seen, and also noted his distaste for the Nazi savagery which was then overtaking the country. He returned to Ireland briefly in 1937. During this visit, Murphy (1938) was published and the next year translated into French by the author. After a falling-out with his mother he decided to settle permanently in Paris. He returned to that city after the outbreak of war in 1939, preferring, in his own words, 'France at war to Ireland neutral'. In December, when refusing the solicitations of a pimp, he was stabbed and nearly killed. While recovering he met the woman who would be his lifelong companion, Suzanne Descheveaux-Dumesnil. After his recovery, he would met the man who had stabbed him and asked him why he did it, getting the memorable reply - "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur" or "Sir, I do not know".

World War Two

Following the 1940 occupation by Germany, Beckett joined the French Resistance, working as a courier. During the next two years, on several occasions he was almost caught by the Gestapo but in August 1942 his unit was betrayed by a former Catholic priest and he and Suzanne fled south on foot to the safety of the small village of Roussillon, in the Vaucluse département on the Provence Alpes Cote d'Azur region.

Although Samuel Beckett rarely spoke about his war time activities, during the two years he stayed in Roussillon, he helped the Maquis sabotage the German army in the Vaucluse mountains. While in hiding, he began work on the novel Watt which he would complete in 1945. For his efforts in fighting the German occupation, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance by the French government.

Fame: novels and the theatre

In 1945, Beckett returned to Dublin for a brief visit. During his stay, he had a relevation while walking on the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire in which his entire literary future apparently appeared to him. This experience was later recorded in the play Krapp's Last Tape (1958).

During the 1950s, Beckett wrote his best known novels, the series written in French (often referred to, against Beckett's explicit wishes, as "the Trilogy") and later translated into English, mostly by the author: Molloy (1951, English, partly translated by Patrick Bowles, 1953), Malone Dies (1951, English translation 1956) and The Unnamable (1953, English translation 1957). In these three novels, the reader can trace the development of Beckett's mature style and themes. Molloy has many of the characteristics of a conventional novel; time, place, movement and plot. Indeed, on one level it is a detective novel. In Malone Dies, movement and plot are more or less dispensed with, but there is still some indication of place and the passage of time. The 'action' of the book takes the form of an interior monologue. Finally, in The Unnamable all sense of place and time have also disappeared. The essential theme seems to be the conflict between the voice's drive to continue speaking so as to continue existing and its almost equally strong urge to find silence and oblivion. It is tempting to see in this a reflection of Beckett's experience and understanding of what the war had done to the world. Despite the widely held view that Beckett's work is essentially pessimistic, the will to live seems to win out, as the book ends with the words 'I can't go on. I'll go on.'

Beckett is most famous for the play Waiting for Godot (1952, English translation 1955), which was famously described by the critic Vivian Mercier as 'a play in which nothing happens, twice'. On first performance, it opened to mainly bad reviews but slowly became very popular and is still frequently performed today. Like most of his works after 1947, the play was first written in French (under the title En attendant Godot). Beckett is thus considered one of the great French "absurdist" playwrights of the twentieth century, along with Ionesco and Jean Genet. He translated his works into the English language himself, with the exception of some sections of Molloy (see above). The success of the play opened up a career in theatre, and Beckett went on to write numerous successful plays, including Endgame (1957) the aforementioned Krapp's Last Tape, Embers (1959) and Happy Days (1960. In general, thes plays of this period reflect the same themes as the novels, despair and the will to survive in the face of an uncomprehended world. In all the work of this period, it is also possible to see the working out of Beckett's belief that writing was a process of self-relevation and of dealing with the space between the self and the world of objects. In most, if not all, of these writings, there is also an important element of comedy in the handling of the themes.

Later life and work

The 1960s were a period of change, both on a personal level and as a writer. In 1961, in a secret civil ceremony in England, he married Suzanne, mainly due to reasons relating to French inheritance law. The success of his plays led to invitations to attend rehearsals and productions around the world, leading eventually to a new career as a theatre director. In 1959 he had his first commission from the BBC for a radio play, Embers. He was to continue writing for radio and ultimately for film, with the work Film (1964), and, from the mid 1970s, for television. He also started to write in English again, although he continued to do some work in French until the end of his life.

This new-found fame, coupled with the Nobel award, meant that academic interest in the life and work grew, creating eventually something of a 'Beckett industry'. Other writers also started to seek out Beckett, with the result that a steady stream of students, poets, novelists and playwrights passed through Paris hoping to meet the master. In 1961, he published his last full-length prose work, the anti-novel Comment C'est/How It Is. This work, written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs in a style approaching telegraphese, is generally considered to mark the end of Beckett's middle period as a writer.

There followed a series of short minimalist plays and prose works exploring themes of the self confined and observed. Beckett came to focus more clearly on his long-standing opposition to the tyranny of realism in art and of what he viewed as the dictatorship of social norms and expectations. In the 1982 play Catastrophe, dedicated to Vaclav Havel, he turned his attention to harder forms of dictatorship. In the last ten years of his life, this minimalist style resulted in three of Beckett's most important prose works, the three novellas Company (1979), Ill Seen Ill Said (1982) and Worstward Ho! (1984). His last work, the poem What is the Word (1989), was written in his deathbead

Suzanne died on July 17, 1989. Beckett died on December 22 of the same year and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris, France. His gravestone is a massive slab of polished black granite. Chiselled into its surface is "Samuel Beckett 1906-1989" below the name and dates for Suzanne, who is buried with him. At the foot of his grave stands one lone tree, a reminder of the stage set for his most famous play.

Beckett's legacy

Of all the English-language modernists, Beckett's work represents the most sustained attack on the realist tradition. He, more than anyone else, opened up the possibility of drama and fiction that dispense with conventional plot, characterisation and the unities of place and time in order to focus on essential components of the human condition. Writers like Havel, Aidan Higgins and Harold Pinter have publicly stated their indebtedness to Beckett's example, but he has had a much wider influence on experimental writing since the 1950s, from the Beat generation to the happenings of the 1960s and beyond. In an Irish context, he has acted as a major model and influence on writers like Trevor Joyce and Catherine Walsh who are writing in modes that look to the modernist tradition as an alternative to the dominant realist mainstream.

Selected bibliography

Dramatic works

Eleutheria (1940s, first published 1995)
Waiting for Godot (first published 1952)
Endgame (published 1957)
Happy Days (published 1960)
All That Fall (radio play, 1956)
Act Without Words I (1956)
Act Without Words II (1956)
Krapp's Last Tape (1958)
Rough for Theatre I (late 1950s)
Rough for Theatre II (late 1950s)
Embers (1959)
Rough for Radio I (radio play, never broadcast, 1961, rewritten as Cascando)
Rough for Radio II (radio play, early 1960s)
Words and Music (radio play, 1961)
Cascando (radio play, 1962)
Play (1963)
Film (film, 1963)
The Old Tune (radio play, adaptation of Robert Pinget's La Manivelle, published 1963)
Come and Go (1965)
Eh Joe (television play, 1965)
Breath (1969)
Not I (1972)
That Time (1975)
Footfalls (1975)
Ghost Trio (television play, 1975)
... but the clouds ... (television play, 1976)
A Piece of Monologue (1980)
Rockaby (1981)
Ohio Impromptu (1981)
Quad (1982)
Catastrophe (1982)
Nacht und Träume (television play, 1982)
What Where (1983)

Prose

Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932 /1992)
Proust (1931)
More Pricks and Than Kicks (1934)
Murphy (1938)
Molloy (1950)
Malone Meurt (1951)
L'Innomable (1953)
Watt (1953)
Nouvelles et textes pour rien (1954)
Molloy (1955)
Malone Dies (1956)
The Unnameable (1958)
Texts for Nothing I (1959)
Comment C'est (1961)
How It Is (1961)
Company (1979)
Mal vu mal dit (1981)
Ill Seen Ill Said (1982)
Worstward Ho! (1984)
Stirrings Still (1988)
Soubresauts (1989)