Samuel Beckett: His life story

The 100th anniversary of the birth of one of Ireland’s greatest writers is being commemorated in a series of events. Paul Vallely reads between the lines to find the influences that shaped a genius

Friday 31 March 2006   

Biographer: You were born, you say, in Cooldrinagh, County Dublin, on 13 April 1906, Good Friday.

Beckett: Born on an Easter Friday after long labour. First saw the light and cried at the close of the day when in darkness Christ at the ninth hour cried and died

Biographer: So how come your birth certificate says 13 May 1906, which was a Sunday?

Beckett: I speak in the present tense. It is the mythological present. Don’t mind it.

1916. The Easter Rebellion raged in Dublin. But Cooldrinagh was safe enough. Beckett’s father took him to a hilltop to see the far-off fires of revolution burning. Soon after he was sent away to Portora Royal School, in Enniskillen, where he became an accomplished cricketer. Later at Trinity College, Dublin, he read French and Italian, and played for the first team.

Entry from Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack:

Samuel Barclay Beckett. Left-hand opening batsman, and a useful left-arm medium-pace bowler. Two first-class games for Dublin University against Northamptonshire in 1925 and 1926, scoring 35 runs in his four innings and conceding 64 runs without taking a wicket.

Spectator: It’s the sort of day that makes one glad to be alive.

Beckett: Oh, I don’t think I would go quite so far as to say that.

Sporting prowess did not bring happiness. The young Beckett was often so depressed that he stayed in bed until mid-afternoon. A college roommate recalled him returning one night with an aluminium strip from one of the printing machines which were the fashionable novelty on railway platforms in those days. Beckett’s said: “Pain pain pain”. He fixed it to the wall of their room.

On graduating, Beckett obtained a two-year exchange post as a lecturer in Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He met James Joyce and wrote a study of Proust which concluded that habit and routine were the “cancer of time”; on his return to Trinity he lasted barely four terms before handing in his notice.

Senior Lecturer: But here you are teaching the cream of Irish society.

Beckett: The cream of Ireland: rich and thick.

Back in Paris Joyce’s eyesight had deteriorated. Beckett became his amanuensis as Joyce dictated what was to become Finnegan’s Wake. In the middle of one session there was a knock at the door which Beckett didn’t hear.

Joyce: Come in

Beckett writes it down. Later he reads the master’s work back to him.

Joyce: What’s that ‘Come in’?

Beckett: Yes, you said that

Joyce thinks for a moment and then speaks.

Joyce: Let it stand

Beckett, fascinated, began writing himself. His first poem, “Whoroscope”, won a literary prize.

Old Beckett: A young man with nothing to say and an itch to make.

His imitation extended beyond the literary. Beckett began to drink the wine Joyce drank, and hold his cigarette in the same affected way. He even, with great discomfort, wore shoes that were too narrow for him in order to ape his dandy master.

Beckett: There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.

Then Joyce’s mad daughter Lucia fell for her father’s young secretary. The young Irishman eventually rejected her advances, causing a rift with Joyce that lasted for years. When Beckett died in 1989, he had burnt his letters from Lucia, at the instigation of Joyce’s nephew Stephen, but a striking snapshot of Lucia as a feral dancer, clad from head to toe in silvery fish scales, was found among his papers.

Beckett: I am dead and have no feelings that are human.

Lucia plunged into a series of disastrous encounters, outbursts and breakdowns, which ended in a lobotomy and her death in an asylum. Beckett’s next lover was the mercurial Peggy Guggenheim, the modern art collector and American heiress, whose nickname for him was Oblomov, a Russian literary byword for inertia.

His father’s death only made things worse. Bill Beckett had a heart attack in 1933.

Father: Fight, fight, fight

Son: (silence)

Father: What a morning (he dies)

Beckett travelled to London to begin two years of psychotherapy. His therapist took him to hear Jung lecture at the Tavistock about our memories of the womb.

Beckett: I remember feeling trapped, being imprisoned and unable to escape, of crying to be let out, but no one could hear, no one was listening.

This married with the conceit which was beginning to form at the heart of his artistic vision.

Beckett: There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express – together with the obligation to express.

Then in 1938 Beckett was stabbed in the chest by a Parisian pimp, improbably named Monsieur Prudent. He nearly died. Joyce arranged for him to have a private room at the hospital and the pair resumed their friendship. Later, Beckett met his assailant and asked him the reason for the attack.

Prudent: Je ne sais pas, Monsieur (I don’t know).

It might have been a line from one of Beckett’s own incomprehending protagonists pondering the business of alienation and the impossibility of genuine communication.

Beckett returned briefly to Ireland in 1937 but after a falling-out with his manic-depressive mother, he moved permanently to Paris. War had broken out, but his Irish citizenship allowed him to stay in German-occupied Paris. He joined the French Resistance. It suited his literary minimalism. His main task was to translate details of German troop movements into English for transmission to London.

But in 1942 his cell was infiltrated by a German agent. Most of its members were arrested by the Nazis. Beckett and his French-born partner, Suzanne Descheveaux-Dumesnil, fled their apartment just before the Gestapo arrived. They headed south, to Roussillon in unoccupied Vichy France. Once Beckett hid in a tree under which enemy soldiers were gathered. But although he was later awarded the Croix de Guerre for his work he dismissed it as “boy scout stuff”.

It was not the kind of drama to find its way into his plays or novels. In those he preferred internal conflicts. Later he said that his most famous work, Waiting for Godot, was based on conversations between Suzanne and himself in Roussillon, a bickering couple acting out rituals of dependency and disconnection.

Estragon: They’re not mine.

Vladimir: (stupefied) Not yours!

Estragon: Mine were black. These are brown.

Vladimir: You’re sure yours were black?

Estragon: Well, they were a kind of grey.

Vladimir: And these are brown? Show.

Estragon: (picking up a boot) Well, they’re a kind of green.

During the war Joyce died, in exile in Zurich, and the mantle of Greatest Living Irishman passed to Beckett. But they were, in some ways, literary opposites.

Beckett: James Joyce was a synthesiser, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyser, trying to leave out as much as I can.

That was not all. Beckett had abandoned the language of Joyce for that of his adopted land. His English was too poetic and he wanted greater clarity and greater economy.

Beckett: Cut away the excess, to strip away the colour.

It was in French that Beckett then produced his greatest works: Godot, Endgame and his great trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. But if they were written in French he translated them into English in a voice which was distinctively Irish – plaintive, lonely and painfully funny. They were produced after a moment of epiphany. As he watched his mother suffer from Parkinson’s disease, he was struck by a sudden terrifying vision which he later fictionalised in Krapp’s Last Tape.

Beckett: I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel.

It was Godot which catapulted this arcane writer to international fame and financial success in 1952. The play, in which, famously, “nothing happens, twice”, had, in the words of the critic Kenneth Tynan, “no plot, no climax, no denouement; no beginning, no middle and no end”. Yet Beckett’s mythical universe, populated by lonely creatures struggling vainly to express the unexpressable – and desperately continuing with life in the face of apparent meaninglessness – struck a chord with the age.

Estragon: Why don’t we hang ourselves?

Vladimir: With what?

Estragon: You haven’t got a bit of rope?

Vladimir: No.

Estragon: Then we can’t.

Beckett’s work continued to draw on the pain of his personal experience – the impulses behind Endgame could be found in the agonising months that Beckett spent at the bedside of his dying brother, Frank, in 1954 – but his attempt to speak the unspeakable created something universal. So much so that in 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Suzanne: (reads telegram) “Dear Sam and Suzanne. In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel Prize. I advise you to go into hiding.”

Beckett: (considers the telegram from his editor but says nothing)

Suzanne: This is a catastrophe.

Karl Ragnar Gierow, of the Swedish Academy: Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. Beckett’s writing houses a love of mankind that grows in understanding as it plumbs further into the depths of abhorrence…

Beckett says nothing , and flees to Portugal.

The world poured out its congratulations. A Monsieur Georges Godot (his real name) even wrote from Paris, saying how sorry he was to have kept Beckett waiting.

Throughout the Seventies and early Eighties, Beckett continued to write. The works got more distilled, more intense, more impenetrable, even though he had started to write in English again. He avoided the public eye, declining almost all interviews, and even maintaining his silence when his 80th birthday was celebrated all around the world. Instead he continued to live on the Rue St Jacques and meet his friends to drink espresso and smoke thin cigarettes in the neighbourhood café. He had a country house outside Paris but once revealed: “I never go anywhere.”

During the last 10 years of his life, the task of writing became increasingly difficult as, within Beckett’s creative process, the editor gained the upper hand over the writer. In the end, each word seemed to him “an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”.

By the mid-Eighties, his failing health – he suffered from emphysema – put an end to his words. He spent his last years in a nursing home, watching rugby, reading his favourite books, receiving visitors and drinking. Suzanne died in July 1989. Beckett died on 22 December that same year and is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.

Beckett: I’m done (pause) I’m done. But it takes such a long time.

Old Friend: And now that it’s nearly over, Sam, can I ask you, was there much of the journey you found worthwhile?

Beckett: Precious little. (But his eyes sparkle as he speaks.)