Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

Quotation

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.

Books

Please browse our Amazon list of titles about Samuel Beckett. For rare and hard to find works we recommend our Alibris list of titles about Samuel Beckett.

Research

COPAC UK: Samuel Beckett
Library of Canada: Samuel Beckett
Library of Congress: Samuel Beckett
Other Library Catalogs: Samuel Beckett

Biographical

Irish writer. He was a great fan of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, and a very close friend of James Joyce. Beckett's first writing around 1930 was in an admiringly critical vain, a short work about Proust titled "Proust." He later wrote his own first short stories, "More Pricks Than Kicks(1934)." His first novel "Dream of Fair to Middling Women" is largely autobigraphical. His second novel, "Murphy" was not published until 1938. Beckett joined the French Resistance during the war. He began to write exclusively in French and his first novel "Mercier et Camier" certainly points to "Waiting for Godot." He also wrote the trilogy, "Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable," during this period. "Waiting for Godot (1949)" was a huge success after its first public performance in 1953.

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 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 Northamptonshire. 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 up the post of lecteur d'anglais in the Ecole Normale Superieure, rue d'Ulm Paris. While there he was introduced to James Joyce by Thomas MacGreevy. This meeting was to have a profound effect on the younger man. Beckett continued his writing career while assisting Joyce in various ways. 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. This was Beckett's contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, 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 hastily-composed poem "Whoroscope", which draws from a biography of Rene Descartes that Beckett happened to be reading when he was asked to submit. Beckett's relationship with the Joyce family cooled when he rejected the advance of Joyce's daughter Lucia.

He returned to Trinity College as a lecturer in 1930, but left after less than two years and began to travel in 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 several characters recurring.
Beckett attampted to publish a book of poems in 1934, with no success. He also published a number of essays and reviews around time including Recent Irish Poetry (in The BookmanAugust, 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". In May of that year Beckett wrote to McGreevy that he had been reading about film and wished to go to Moscow to study with Eisenstein; in the Summer of 1936 he wrote to Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, offering to become their apprentices. Nothing came of this. He finished "Murphy" and 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'. Around December 1937, he had a brief affair with Peggy Guggenheim. In January of 1938, 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. When asked by Beckett for the motive, his assailant replied "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur": "I do not know, sir".

World War II

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 Vauclusedepartementin the Provence Alpes Cote d'Azur region.

Although Samuel Beckett rarely if ever spoke about his wartime 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 Medaille de la Resistance 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 revelation 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). In 1946 Sartre's magazine "Les Temps Modernes" published the first part of Beckett's story 'Suite', not realizing that Beckett has only submitted the first half of the story. Simone de Beauvoir refused to publish the second part. Beckett began to write Mercier et Camier, his fourth novel. In 1947 he began writing Eleutheria.

During the late 1940s and early 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 (finished in 1947, published in 1951, English, partly translated by Patrick Bowles, 1953), Malone Dies (finished in 1948, published in 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, which was famously described by the critic Vivian Mercier as 'a play in which nothing happens, twice'. Like most of his works after 1947, the play was first written in French (under the title En attendant Godot) 1952, with the English translation appearing in three years later. The play was a critical and popular success in Paris. It opened in London in 1955 to mainly bad reviews, but the tide turned with positive reactions by Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times and, later, Kenneth Tynan. After this, the play became extremely popular, with highly successful performances in the United States and Germany, and it is still frequently performed today.

As already noted, Beckett was now writing mainly in French. 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 (written in English), Embers (1959) and Happy Days (written in English)(1960). In general, the 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, and relating the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud with a sack of canned food, 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 bed in the nursing home where he spent the last period of his life, suffering from emphysema and possible Parkinson's disease.

Suzanne died on July 17, 1989. Beckett died on December 22 of the same year and was interred in the Cimetiere 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. [This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and uses material adapted in whole or in part from the Wikipedia article on Samuel Beckett.]

Books from Alibris: Samuel Beckett