Samuel Beckett

Friday, the thirteenth is traditionally regarded in Ireland as a day of ill-omen, a day on which, for example, no sensible farmer would take his beasts to market or begin to plough a field. In the light of this, one feels, Samuel Beckett must have derived a certain amount of sardonic amusement from his own natal day, for not only was it Friday,13 April but it was also Good Friday of 1906. If the Dublin of the day had possessed, as Beckett's first novel does, 'a swami who cast excellent nativities for sixpence', one wonders what 'little bull of incommunication' he might have produced for the new arrival. Prospects might well have seemed bright enough, if one ignored the planets and attended only to social considerations.

Samuel was the second son of William and Mary Roe Beckett and the family home was 'Cooldrinagh' in the well-to-do Dublin suburb of Foxrock. William Beckett was a quantity surveyor who had married a nurse and the Becketts were Protestants of Huguenot stock. Samuel went to kindergarten and preparatory school in Dublin and was a boarder at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen from 1920 to 1923. He began to learn French while at prep school and demonstrated his considerable intellectual and academic ability from an early age, excelling particularly in French, Classics and English and combining his scholarly abilities with a talent for athletic activity. He enjoyed boxing and distance swimming but his favourite sports were rugby and cricket. Between 1923 and 1927 he read for a degree in Modern Languages (French and Italian) at Trinity College, Dublin, got the best First of his year and was awarded the Large Gold Medal in Modern Literature in 1927. He was briefly a teacher at Campbell College in Belfast, a city which he dubbed 'a terrible place full of bigotry' and then, late in 1928, he went to teach at the École Normale Superieure in Paris. He met James Joyce and, in 1929, contributed an essay to the anthology, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. His poem, 'Whoroscope', won the £10 prize in a poetry competition organised by Nancy Cunard and he also completed a critical study of Proust.

In the summer of 1930, Beckett returned to Dublin to take up a post as a Lecturer in French at Trinity but he resigned this post after a few terms and went back to France at Easter,1932. He lived for brief periods in Kassel, Paris, London and Dublin and worked on but did not complete a first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Some of the material from this went into his first collection of short stories, More Pricks than Kicks, which was published in 1933 and sold very poorly. Beckett spent two rather dreary years in London between 1933 and 1935, the period from which much of the bleak landscape of Murphy derives. It was at this time that Beckett worked as an orderly at a hospital for the mentally ill where one of his friends was a doctor. His consuming sympathy for the sick was reinforced by the pain he felt at the deaths of various members of his own family, including his father who died of a heart attack in 1933.

During late 1935 and much of 1936, Beckett travelled widely in Germany. In 1937, he settled in Paris, taking up his residence in a seventh-floor flat at 6, rue des Favorites, which he retained until 1961. Murphy was published in London in 1938 and when war broke out the following year Beckett, who was then visiting his mother in Dublin, returned to Paris and, by 1940, was a member of a Resistance group engaged in gathering information on German troop movements. The group was betrayed to the Gestapo in 1942 and Beckett fled to Roussillon, a village in the Vaucluse, where he remained for two years, during which time he wrote his second novel, Watt which remained unpublished until 1953. He returned to his old flat in Paris after the war. There followed half a dozen years of seclusion during which many of the works he submitted to publishers were rejected. In 1951, however, Molloy was published in Paris and Malone Meurt appeared later in the same year. The third volume of the famous trilogy, L'Innomable came out in 1953 but, earlier that same year, had appeared the work which was to win Beckett world-wide fame, his celebrated play, En Attendant Godot. This most discussed of all modern plays had its world premiere at the Theatre de Babylone in Paris early in 1953. The work transformed Beckett from a lonely, idiosyncratic writer long inured to failure into a hugely successful literary giant who had now to exert all his talent for privacy to escape the pestering attentions of press interviewers.

Public honours were showered upon him: an honorary degree from his old university in 1959; the Prix Formentor in 1961; the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. As he grew older his writings became ever more dessicated and, more and more, Beckett concerned himself with the minutiae of play production, often working with favourite players such as Billie Whitelaw and the late Jack MacGowran and Patrick Magee. Beckett's Collected Poems in English and French appeared as recently as 1977. The fortunate few who were privileged to get close to this austere and private man testify to his great natural courtesy and unfailing generosity.