Samuel Beckett Biography and List of Works

Irish novelist and playwright, one of the great names of Absurd Theatre with Eugéne Ionesco, although recent study regards Beckett as postmodernist. His plays are concerned with human suffering and survival, and his characters are struggling with meaninglessness and the world of the Nothing. Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. In his writings for the theater Beckett showed influence of burlesque, vaudeville, the music hall, commedia dell'arte, and the silent-film style of such figures as Keaton and Chaplin.

"We all are born mad. Some remain so."
(from Waiting for Godot, 1952)

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin into a prosperous Protestant family. He was educated at the Portora Royal School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he took a B.A. degree in 1927, having specialized in French and Italian. Beckett worked as a teacher in Belfast and lecturer in English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. During this time he became a friend of James Joyce , taking dictation and copying down parts of what would eventually become Finnegans Wake (1939). He also translated a fragment of the book into French under Joyce's supervision.

In 1931 Beckett returned to Dublin and received his M.A. He taught French at Trinity College until 1932, when he resigned to devote his time entirely to writing. After his father died, Beckett received an annuity that enabled him to settle in London, where he underwent psychoanalysis (1935-36).

As a poet Beckett made his debut in 1930 with WHOROSCOPE, a ninety-eight-line poem accompanied by seventeen footnotes. In this dramatic monologue, the protagonist, Rene Descartes, waits for his morning omelette of well-aged eggs, while meditating on the obscurity of theological mysteries, the passage of time, and the approach of death. It was followed with a collection of essays, PROUST (1931), and a novel MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS (1934). From 1933 to 1936 he lived in London. In 1938 he was hospitalised by a stab would he had received from a pimp to whom he had refused to give money. Around this time he met Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, a piano student, whom he married in 1961. Beckett's career as a novelist really began in 1938 with MURPHY, which depicted the protagonist's inner struggle between his desires for his prostitute-mistress and for total escape into the darkness of mind. The conflict is resolved when he is atomised by a gas explosion.

When World War II broke out, Beckett was in Ireland, but he hastened to Paris and joined a Resistance network. Sought by the Nazis, he fled with Dechevaux-Dumesnil to Southern France, where they remained in hiding in the village of Roussillon for two and half years. Beckett worked as country labourer and wrote WATT, his second novel, which was published in 1953 and was the last of his novels written originally in English. It portrayed the futile search of Watt (What) for understanding in the household Mr. Knott (Not), who continually changes shapes.

After the war Beckett worked briefly with the Irish Red Cross in Paris. Between 1946 and 1949 he produced the major prose narrative trilogy, MOLLOY, MALONE MEURT, and L'INNOMMABLE, which appeared in the early 1950s. The novels were written in French and subsequently translated into English. With the change of language Beckett escaped from everything with which he was familiar. These books reflected Beckett's bitter realization that there is no escape from illusions and from the Cartesian compulsion to think, to try to solve insoluble mysteries. Beckett was obsessed by a desire to create what he called "a literature of the unword." He waged a lifelong war on words, trying to yield the silence that underlines them.

WINNIE: Win! (Pause.) Oh this is a happy day, this will have been another happy day! (Pause.) After all. (Pause.) So far.
(from Happy Days, 1961)

EN ATTENDANT GODOT (Waiting for Godot), written in 1949 and published in English in 1954, brought Beckett international fame and established him as one of the leading names of the theatre of the absurd. Beckett more or less admitted in a New York Post interview by Jerry Tallmer that the dialogue was based on conversations between Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil and himself in Roussillon. In the 1950s he published FIN DE PARTIE (1957), which developed further one of Beckett's central themes, men in mutual dependence (Hamm and Clov occupy a room with Nagg and Nell who are in dustbins), and KRAPP'S LAST TAPE (1959), where he returned to his native language. The play depicted an old man sitting alone in his room. At night he listens to tape recordings from various periods of his past.

In several works Beckett used dark humour to establish distance from his grim subjects. In his last full-length novel, COMMENT C'EST (1961, How It Is) the protagonist crawls across the mud dragging a sack of canned food behind him. He overtakes another crawler who he tortures into speech and is left alone waiting to be overtaken himself by another crawler who will torture him in turn.

"For Beckett, all literature and all life reduce to his portrait of the artist-liar as old bum: "You either lie or hold your peace," says Molloy, and Beckett's heroes do not hold their peace. Do we?"
(from Samuel Beckett by Ruby Cohn, 1962)

In the 1960s Beckett wrote for radio, theatre, and television. In the 1970s appeared MIRLITONNADES (1978), a collection of short poems, COMPANY (1979) and ALL STRANGE AWAY (1979), which was performed in 1984 in New York. CATASTROPHE (1984) was written for Vaclav Havel and was about the interrogation of a dissident. Beckett lived on the rue St. Jacques and maintained his usual silence even when his eightieth birthday was celebrated in Paris and New York. At the age of seventy-six he said: "With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence... the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is. Even though everything seems inexpressible, there remains the need to express. A child needs to make a sand castle even though it makes no sense. In old age, with only a few grains of sand, one has the greatest possibility." (from Playwrights at Work, ed. by George Plimpton, 2000) Beckett's wife died in 1989. The author had moved just previously to a small nursing home, where he lived in a barely furnished room, writing until the end. Beckett died, following respiratory problems, in a hospital on December 22, 1989. It is rumoured that Beckett gave much of the Nobel prize money to needy artists.

En attendant Godot (1953; Waiting for Godot) - Tragi-comedy in two acts, opened at the Théâtre de Babylone on January 5, 1953, and made history. Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, who call each other Gogo and Didi, meet near a bare tree on a country road. They wait for the promised arrival of Godot, whose name could refer to 'God' or also the French name for Charlie Chaplin, 'Charlot.' To fill the boredom they try to recall their past, tell jokes, eat, and speculate about Godot. Pozzo, a bourgeois tyrant, and Lucky, his servant, appear briefly. Pozzo about Lucky: "He can't think without his hat." Godot sends word that he will not come that day but will surely come the next. In Act II Gogo and Didi still wait, and Godot sends a promising message. Gogo and Didi try to hang themselves and then declare their intention of leaving, but they have no energy to move.

VLADIMIR: We have to come back tomorrow.
ESTRAGO; What for?
VLADIMIR: To wait for Godot.
ESTRAGON: Ah! (Silence.) He didn't come?
VLADIMIR: No.

For further reading: Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut by Ruby Cohn (1962); Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist by Anthony Cronin (1966); Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson (1966); Samuel Beckett by J. Friedman (1970); Beckett by A. Alvarez (1973); Samuel Beckett: A Biography by Deirdre Bairs (1978); The Beckett Actor: Jack MacCowran, Beginning to End by Jordan R. Young (1988); Beckett's Dying Words by Christopher Ricks (1993); The Beckett Country by Eoin O'Brien (1994); Beyond Minimalism by Enoch Brater (1995); Beckett Writing Beckett by H. Porter Abbott (1996); Conversations With and About Beckett, ed. by Mel Gussow (1996); Damned to Fame by James Knowlson (1996); Samuel Beckett by Anthony Cronin (1997); Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis by Phil Baker (1998) - Trivia: When Beckett won the Nobel Prize, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil commented: 'This is a catastrophe - Note: Billie Whitelaw (1932-) became in the 1960s a noted interpreter of Samuel Beckett's works. Her performances include Play, Not I, and Footfalls. She has also acted in such films as Frency (written by Anthony Shaffer, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock, 1972), The Omen (1976), The Water Babies (1979), Maurice (based on E. M. Forster's posthumously published novel, dir. by James Ivory, 1987), and The Krays (1990). - Television adaptations: Beckett on film (2000), prod. by RTE and Gate theatre, directors include Conor PcPherson, Neil Jordan, David Mamet, Atom Egoyan, Richard Eyre, Karel Reisz, Anthony Minghella et al.

OUR EXAGMINATION ROUND HIS FACTIFICATION FOR INCAMINATION OF WORK IN PROGRESS, (1929)