48

Samuel Beckett

1906–1989

 

Yet another of Ireland's Nobel Prize winners, Samuel Beckett, in his spare, bleak plays, seems to many of his admirers to epitomize the sense of despair many felt immediately after the war, the sense of alienation and isolation, of suppressed rage with life, which characterize the modern age.  In 1969, the citation of the Nobel committee spoke of 'his writings, in which - in new forms for the novel and drama - the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation'.  According to Robert Hogan, 'He remains perhaps the century's most acclaimed and influential avant-garde writer'.

      Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in Foxrock, a genteel, largely Protestant suburb of Dublin, on 13th April 1906.  He had a comfortable upbringing in a material sense.  He was educated at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen in Northern Ireland – OSCAR WILDE'S [97] old school.  He entered Trinity College in the autumn of 1923, where he studied modern languages (French in particular) and took his bachelor's degree in 1927.  For a few months he taught French at a Protestant school in Belfast before going to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris as a lecturer.

      It was in Paris that he made friends with the Irish poet and art critic Thomas McGreevy, through whom he was introduced into the circle of JAMES JOYCE [25].  Joyce was to be the greatest literary influence on Beckett's own work.  He was one of a number of the friends who assisted the nearly blind Joyce by reading and researching material for 'Work in Progress' eventually published as Finnegans Wake.  Beckett was also one of the young men in whom Joyce's daughter took a romantic interest.

      Beckett had literary ambitions of his own.  His first publications were a long poem called 'Whoroscope' in 1930, and a short study of Proust for a London publishers in 1931.  In the autumn of 1930 he went back to Dublin to teach French at Trinity College, where McGreevy introduced him to JACK YEATS [26], whom Beckett deeply admired.  Indeed the later pictures of Yeats, with their isolated figures and blasted landscapes, have much in common with Beckett's writing.

      Beckett's stay in Dublin was fraught with ill health and personal and emotional problems, especially with his demanding mother.  Having taken his master's degree, he went back to Paris in December 1931.  There he began a novel (which remained unpublished till after his death) and a collection of stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, which makes use of familiar Dublin in a unique way, pointing towards his later work.

      Beckett now identified with his French friends, and during the occupation he worked with the French Resistance, though in 1942 he was forced to flee south to Roussillon.  Later he was awarded the Croix de Guerre.  Ireland may have been neutral - Samuel Beckett was not.

      On his return to Paris, Beckett settled into his major period of production.  He was now writing in French rather than English.  Molloy was finished in 1948, and was followed by Malone Meurt.  By the first months of 1950 he had finished L'Innommable.

      But these books, when published, either in French or English, made little impact compared with the sensation that was caused by the production of his play En Attendant Godot in a theatre studio early in 1953.  As Waiting for Godot, it was successfully produced in London and New York.  Its novelty and strange atmosphere at once made it a talking point not only among the avant-garde, but the general public.  It was the beginning of the Theatre of the Absurd, which many saw as growing out of the existential philosophies of Sartre and Camus.

      His earlier work came back into print, often in his own translations.  In 1956 came Fin de Partie (Endgame in English).  He ceased to write novels, and his plays became briefer and more etiolated.  In 1961 he married his long-time companion Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil.  Though they maintained flats beside each other in Paris, much of their time was spent in the country or in North Africa.  In July 1989 Beckett's wife died, and he himself passed away on 22nd December.

      The following year one critic observed that 'by the year 2000 Beckett criticism will equal that of Wagner and Napoleon, who are the most written about personae in history'.  Beckett himself was an obsessively private person, and his biographers have not even yet fully plumbed the depths of his experiences.  It is clear now, however, that though he wrote in French and published in Paris as a European author, much of his initial inspiration draws on his early experiences in Dublin.  Indeed, it was the ambition of the actor Peter O'Toole to film Waiting for Godot in the bleak rocky district of the Burren in the west of Ireland, as its windswept acres seemed to echo the barren isolation of the play.  Like Joyce, who influenced him greatly, Beckett never escaped from Ireland, and a haunted childhood and illness were major matters in his life.  Many would now regard as his best work not the later briefer items, but the more closely grained world of his novels and early plays.

      When the Nobel committee spoke of destitution, they seemed to be thinking of the bleakness of life and soul which his work reflects, and thinking how appropriate this was for an era threatened with annihilation at a moment's notice.  Personal courage would have no place in an atomic war, but for Beckett, waiting for the end had become intolerable, while life itself was even more so.

      Quite how his work will wear with time is still a matter of controversy, but his influence on the literature of the late twentieth century was very great.  'Beckettian' is an adjective that everyone understands the meaning of, even if they cannot understand the meaning of Beckett.