Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, playwright, poet and theatre director who wrote in both English and French, and whose plays Waiting for Godot (1953), Endgame (1957), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Happy Days (1961), and the novel trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable (1951–53), reduced literature to its bare bones — a voice, a body, a tree, a dustbin, a mound — to explore the condition of human beings who must go on in a world without meaning. Associated with the “Theatre of the Absurd”, he was a comic writer of genius, steeped in the music hall and silent film, and a stylist of extraordinary precision. He won the Nobel Prize in 1969 “for his writing, which — in new forms for the novel and drama — in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation”.

Life

Foxrock and Trinity

Beckett was born on Good Friday, 13 April 1906, in Foxrock, a prosperous suburb south of Dublin, into a Protestant middle-class family. His father, William, was a quantity surveyor; his mother, May, was a strict, anxious, devout woman with whom he had a lifelong, painful bond. He went to Portora Royal School (like Oscar Wilde) and then Trinity College Dublin (1923–27), where he studied French and Italian, read Dante with passion, and excelled at cricket and golf.

Paris and Joyce

In 1928 he became lecturer in English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and met James Joyce, who became his mentor and friend. Beckett helped with research for Work in Progress (later Finnegans Wake), and wrote his first published essay, “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” (1929). Joyce’s daughter Lucia fell in love with him; when he told her he came only to see her father, Joyce broke with him for a time. He wrote a study of Proust (1931), which drew on Schopenhauer — habit, memory, suffering — and a poem in the voice of Descartes, Whoroscope (1930).

He returned to Trinity as a lecturer, but resigned after a year, unable to bear teaching. The following years were wretched: his father died in 1933, he underwent psychotherapy in London with Wilfred Bion, he published a collection of stories, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), and a novel, Murphy (1938), about a man who tries to withdraw into his mind, tied naked to a rocking chair, and works in a mental hospital.

He settled permanently in Paris in 1937. In January 1938 he was stabbed in the street by a pimp called Prudent; the knife narrowly missed his heart. His attacker’s answer to his question why — “I don’t know, sir” — fascinated him. In hospital he was visited by Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, a pianist, who became his companion for the rest of his life (they married secretly in 1961).

War and the Resistance

When war came he said he “preferred France in war to Ireland in peace”. He joined the Resistance cell Gloria SMH, translating and typing intelligence reports. When the cell was betrayed in 1942, he and Suzanne fled on foot to the unoccupied south, hiding in the village of Roussillon in the Vaucluse, where he worked as a farm labourer and wrote the novel Watt. After the liberation, he worked as a storekeeper and interpreter for the Irish Red Cross hospital at Saint-Lô in Normandy, a town flattened by bombing. He received the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance.

The “siege in the room”

In 1946, visiting his mother in Dublin, he had a revelation — later dramatised in Krapp’s Last Tape. He realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, of adding; “I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.”

Back in Paris, he began writing in French — “because in French it is easier to write without style” — and in a burst of creativity from 1946 to 1950, “the siege in the room”, wrote the novels Mercier and Camier, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, the play Waiting for Godot, and stories. He later translated most of his work into English himself.

Godot and fame

En attendant Godot was first performed at the tiny Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on 5 January 1953, directed by Roger Blin. It became a sensation. In London (1955) it was first dismissed, then championed. Beckett became famous — and hid from fame. He gave few interviews, refused to explain his work, and spent long periods at a small cottage he built at Ussy-sur-Marne.

When the Nobel Prize was announced in 1969, Suzanne exclaimed “Quelle catastrophe!” He did not attend the ceremony and gave away the prize money, much of it to needy writers and artists.

In later decades he directed his own plays in Paris, Berlin and London, wrote for radio and television, and produced ever shorter works. He died in Paris on 22 December 1989, five months after Suzanne, and is buried with her in Montparnasse cemetery.

Waiting for Godot

The play

Subtitled “a tragicomedy in two acts”, Waiting for Godot takes place on a country road, by a single bare tree, at evening. Two tramps, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), are waiting for someone called Godot, with whom they may or may not have an appointment. Estragon struggles with his boot; Vladimir examines his hat. They bicker, joke, discuss the two thieves crucified with Christ (“One of the thieves was saved. It’s a reasonable percentage”), contemplate hanging themselves from the tree, eat a carrot.

A tyrannical landowner, Pozzo, arrives, driving his slave, Lucky, by a rope around the neck. Lucky carries Pozzo’s bags and stool. Ordered to “think”, Lucky delivers a torrential, broken monologue of scholastic and scientific gibberish about “a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard” and humanity that “wastes and pines”. Pozzo and Lucky leave. A boy arrives: Mr Godot will not come this evening, but surely tomorrow. Night falls suddenly. “Well, shall we go?” “Yes, let’s go.” They do not move.

The second act repeats the first, with differences. The tree has grown a few leaves. Pozzo has gone blind; Lucky has gone dumb. Pozzo cannot remember meeting them, and cries out: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” The boy returns: Godot will not come today, but surely tomorrow. The tramps again consider hanging themselves; Estragon’s belt-cord breaks and his trousers fall down. “Well, shall we go?” “Yes, let’s go.” They do not move.

The Irish critic Vivian Mercier wrote that Beckett had written a play in which nothing happens, twice.

Interpretations

Who is Godot? Beckett said: “If I knew, I would have said so in the play.” Readings include:

• God (the obvious one, which Beckett resisted: “If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God”);
• any hope or saviour — political, religious, personal — that never arrives;
• the absurd condition, in Albert Camus‘s sense: the human demand for meaning meeting the world’s silence;
• habit — “Habit is a great deadener” — as the way people endure time;
• the two tramps as the two halves of a self, or as an old couple, or as refugees hiding during the war.

The trilogy

Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953) progressively strip away narrative, character and world.

In Molloy, the crippled vagrant Molloy writes in his mother’s room, recounting his journey toward her on crutches and a bicycle; in the second part, the detective Moran sets out to find Molloy and gradually disintegrates into a Molloy-like figure. In Malone Dies, a dying old man in a bed tells himself stories, makes an inventory of his possessions, and dies mid-sentence. In The Unnamable, there is only a voice, uncertain where it is or who it is, compelled to speak, ending: “…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

The later plays

• Endgame (1957): in a bare room with two small windows, blind, paralysed Hamm sits in a wheelchair; his servant Clov, who cannot sit down, waits on him; Hamm’s legless parents, Nagg and Nell, live in dustbins. Outside, the world seems dead. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” Clov prepares to leave, but stands immobile as the curtain falls.
• Krapp’s Last Tape (1958): on his 69th birthday, an old man listens to a tape he recorded thirty years before — about the night of his revelation and a love affair he ended in a punt — and records a new one. “Perhaps my best years are gone… But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now.”
• Happy Days (1961): Winnie is buried up to her waist, then up to her neck, in a mound under blazing light, chattering cheerfully — “Oh this is a happy day!” — and taking things from her handbag.
• Not I (1972): only a mouth, lit in the dark, pouring out a torrent of words.
• Rockaby, Footfalls, Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe (dedicated to Václav Havel, then a political prisoner).
• Worstward Ho (1983): “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Themes

• Waiting and habit: time as something to be got through.
• The body’s decay: blindness, lameness, immobility, old age.
• Language and silence: the compulsion to speak, the impossibility of saying.
• Endurance: going on without hope or reason.
• Comedy: music hall routines, hats, boots, falling trousers.
• Cartesian dualism: minds trapped in failing bodies; he absorbed Descartes and the Occasionalist Geulincx (“where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing”).

Influence

Beckett shaped Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, Sarah Kane, minimalist music (Morton Feldman, Philip Glass), and visual art (Bruce Nauman). Godot became a universal metaphor — performed in besieged Sarajevo (Susan Sontag, 1993) and post-Katrina New Orleans.

Key terms

Theatre of the Absurd

Martin Esslin's term (1961) for drama portraying the senselessness of the human condition.

Lessness

Beckett's art of reduction and subtraction.

Tragicomedy

The mixture of despair and clowning.

Using Beckett in conversation

• On persistence: “Fail again. Fail better.”
• On endurance: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
• On hope deferred: waiting for Godot.
• On life’s brevity: “They give birth astride of a grave.”