Samuel Beckett

• 1. Introduction

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  Samuel Beckett once described his own method as "impoverishment" - as taking away rather than adding, subtracting rather than building. That single word unlocks one of the strangest and most enduring careers in modern literature. Born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock on the 13th of April 1906, Beckett would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, befriend both James Joyce and Alberto Giacometti, join the French Resistance, and drive a young André Roussimoff to school in rural France - a boy who grew up to become the professional wrestler André the Giant. He wrote plays in which, as one critic memorably put it, nothing happens, twice. His most famous work, Waiting for Godot, was voted the most significant English-language play of the twentieth century in a poll conducted by London's Royal National Theatre in 1998. What made a cricket-playing son of a quantity surveyor from County Dublin into the conscience of the modern stage? The answers run from the cafes of the Left Bank to the Maquis hiding in the mountains of the Vaucluse.

• 2. Cricket, Joyce, and the Stabbing

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  Beckett left Portora Royal School in Enniskillen in 1923, an institution that had also educated Oscar Wilde, and entered Trinity College Dublin to study modern literature and Romance languages. He was a natural athlete who excelled at cricket as a left-handed batsman and a left-arm medium-pace bowler. He later played two first-class games against Northamptonshire, making him the only Nobel literature laureate to appear in Wisden.

  After graduating in 1927, Beckett took up the post of lecteur d'anglais at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where the poet Thomas MacGreevy introduced him to James Joyce. The meeting had, by his own account, a profound effect. Beckett began assisting Joyce with research toward the book that became Finnegans Wake. The relationship deepened until Beckett rejected the advances of Joyce's daughter Lucia, after which the friendship cooled.

  In January 1938, a man who went by the name of Prudent stabbed Beckett in the chest in a Paris street after Beckett refused his solicitations. Joyce arranged a private room for him at the hospital. At a preliminary hearing, Beckett asked Prudent his motive. Prudent answered: "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur. Je m'excuse." Beckett eventually dropped the charges, partly because he found Prudent likeable and well-mannered. The publicity surrounding the attack drew a woman named Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil to visit him. She would remain his companion for the rest of his life.

• 3. Resistance and Revelation

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  After Germany occupied France in 1940, Beckett joined the Resistance network known as Reseau Gloria, working as a courier. Over the following two years he was nearly caught by the Gestapo on several occasions. In August 1942, his network was betrayed. He and Suzanne fled south on foot to the village of Roussillon in the Vaucluse, where he spent two years and indirectly assisted the Maquis in sabotage operations against German forces in the nearby mountains. For this work the French government later awarded him the Croix de Guerre and the Resistance Medal. To the end of his life, Beckett referred to all of it as "boy scout stuff".

  While in hiding in Roussillon, Beckett worked on the novel Watt. He started it in 1941 and finished it in 1945, though it was not published until 1953.

  In 1945, on a brief visit to Dublin, Beckett sat in his mother's room and experienced what he later called a revelation. He had felt he could never match Joyce by knowing more, by accumulating and controlling material. The revelation was that his path lay in the opposite direction. He later explained it: "I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one's material. He was always adding to it... I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding." His biographer James Knowlson described the moment as pivotal for his entire career. Beckett eventually fictionalised it in Krapp's Last Tape, where a tape recording of the younger Krapp breaks off mid-revelation before the audience can hear the crucial words. Beckett later told Knowlson the missing words were "precious ally".

• 4. Writing Without Style

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  After the war, Beckett made a deliberate choice to write primarily in French. He explained the reason plainly: it was easier to write "without style" in a language not his own. This was not a modest disclaimer. It was a precise artistic decision that produced the works for which he is best known.

  In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre's magazine Les Temps modernes published the first part of Beckett's short story "Suite", not realizing that Beckett had submitted only half the story. Co-editor Simone de Beauvoir refused to publish the second part. That same year Beckett began writing Mercier et Camier, his first long prose work in French. It preceded and prefigured a play he wrote not long afterward: En attendant Godot.

  Beckett worked on Waiting for Godot between October 1948 and January 1949. Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil became its de facto agent, sending the manuscript to producers until they found Roger Blin, who directed its Paris premiere. The play was published in 1952 and premiered in 1953. The critic Vivian Mercier wrote that Beckett had achieved a theoretical impossibility: "a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats." When it opened in London in 1955, it drew mainly negative reviews at first. Harold Hobson's positive notice in The Sunday Times, followed by Kenneth Tynan's, turned the tide. After a showing in Miami, the play found a wide and enthusiastic audience in the United States and Germany. Beckett refused to allow it to be adapted into film, though he permitted a television broadcast. He never sold, donated, or gave away the manuscript of any play except this one.

• 5. The Trilogy and Its Logic

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  Molloy, published in 1951, still resembles a conventional novel in many respects: it has time, place, movement, and something approaching a plot. It borrows the structure of a detective novel. Malone meurt, published the same year, dispenses with movement and plot. What remains is largely an interior monologue. In the third novel, L'innommable, published in 1953, almost all sense of place and time dissolves. The book reduces to a conflict between a disembodied voice that must keep speaking in order to keep existing and its equally strong pull toward silence. The famous final phrase holds both impulses at once: "you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on".

  Beckett resisted the word "trilogy" for these three novels, and said so explicitly. His publisher's French house, Les Editions de Minuit, was run by Jerome Lindon, who became a strong supporter of these works and of the later prose.

  After the trilogy, Beckett struggled for years to produce sustained prose. The brief fragments later collected as Texts for Nothing document that struggle. In the late 1950s he produced Comment c'est, published in 1961, a work whose unnamed narrator crawls through mud dragging a sack of canned food, narrated in unpunctuated paragraphs of compressed, telegraphic prose. The book is generally regarded as closing his middle period.

• 6. The Collaborators

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  Billie Whitelaw worked with Beckett for twenty-five years and first met him in 1963, describing that encounter in her autobiography as "trust at first sight". She came to be known as his muse and the supreme interpreter of his work. Her role as the Mouth in Not I - a 1972 play consisting almost solely of, in Beckett's words, "a moving mouth with the rest of the stage in darkness" - became the image most closely associated with her. She described working with him on Footfalls by saying: "I felt like a moving, musical Edvard Munch painting." When directing Happy Days, Beckett told her where to look during a difficult passage: "Inward." She stopped performing his plays in 1989 when he died.

  Jack MacGowran was the first actor to build a one-man show from Beckett's work. He debuted End of Day in Dublin in 1962 and revised it several times, winning the 1970-1971 Obie for Best Performance By an Actor when he performed it off-Broadway. Beckett wrote the radio play Embers and the teleplay Eh Joe specifically for MacGowran.

  The English stage designer Jocelyn Herbert worked with Beckett until his death, collaborating on Happy Days and Krapp's Last Tape at the Royal Court Theatre. Beckett said she had become his closest friend in England, praising her ability to resist the designer's temptation to overstate. German director Walter D. Asmus began working with Beckett at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin in 1974 and continued until Beckett's death in 1989.

• 7. Late Minimalism

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  Beckett's 1969 piece Breath lasts for only thirty-five seconds and has no characters. It was written as the introductory piece for a theatrical revue and likely intended as an ironic comment on it. His play Play, from 1963, places three characters immersed up to their necks in large funeral urns. Not I reduced a human presence to a single lit mouth against total darkness.

  In his television works of the 1970s and 1980s, Beckett incorporated musical frames drawn from classical composers. Ghost Trio, broadcast in 1977, used an excerpt from Beethoven. Nacht und Träume, broadcast in 1983, used Schubert. Both drew on well-known images from art history to suggest themes of longing, ambiguity, and suffering.

  His most politically direct work from this period was Catastrophe, first performed in 1982 and dedicated to Vaclav Havel, which dealt explicitly with the mechanics of dictatorship. His final work was the poem "What is the Word", written in 1988 while he was in a nursing home and grappling with an inability to find words - a theme that had run through his work for decades. Suzanne died on the 17th of July 1989. Beckett died on the 22nd of December 1989, suffering from emphysema and possibly Parkinson's disease. He was buried with Suzanne at the Cimetiere du Montparnasse beneath a simple granite gravestone of his own specification: "any colour, so long as it's grey."

• 8. What He Left Behind

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  Vaclav Havel, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, John Banville, and Jon Fosse have all publicly acknowledged their debt to Beckett's example. Composers including Luciano Berio, Philip Glass, Morton Feldman, and Gyorgy Kurtag created musical works from his texts. Filmmakers and visual artists including Charlie Kaufman, Paul Auster, and Bruce Nauman have cited his influence.

  The rights to perform Beckett's plays are controlled by his estate, currently managed by his nephew Edward Beckett. The estate maintains strict control over productions and does not grant licences to stagings that depart from the author's stage directions - a policy that has generated controversy.

  On the 10th of December 2009, a new bridge across the River Liffey in Dublin was opened and named the Samuel Beckett Bridge in his honour. Designed by Santiago Calatrava, it is shaped to suggest a harp lying on its side. Calatrava had also designed the James Joyce Bridge further upstream, opened on Bloomsday - the 16th of June - in 2003. The Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival, founded in 2011, is held annually in the town where Beckett spent his school years. In 2022, director James Marsh made a biopic of Beckett with Gabriel Byrne and Fionn O'Shea playing the writer at different stages of his life.