A Note About Samuel Beckett

By Edward Mendelson

Samuel Beckett was born in 1906 in Foxrock, a few miles from Dublin. His father and grandfather had prospered in the building trade, and Samuel and his older brother grew up among servants in a comfortable middle-class home. The family belonged to the Protestant minority in Ireland, and young Samuel attended a Protestant day school that, unlike most other such schools, also accepted Catholics and Jews among its pupils. At 13 he was sent off to a boarding school, where, among other academic and athletic successes, he won the light-heavyweight championship in boxing.

As an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, he impressed his teachers with his exceptional skill in modern languages, and discovered in himself a continuing passion for music and the visual arts. After graduation he taught French and English at a prominent school in Belfast. But he was already becoming afflicted by the anxiety, insomnia, and the almost painful wish for privacy that he experienced for the rest of his life, and he took no pleasure in schoolteaching. After a year, he took up a visiting lectureship in English at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he stayed for two years, but the most exciting experience he had in Paris was his friendship with the writer whom he most revered, James Joyce. He returned to Dublin for a year to lecture at Trinity College, but returned to Paris and a restless life of writing and study. After his father died in 1933, Beckett moved to London, where he spent two years in intense psychotherapy.

He had been writing poems and stories for some years, and now began publishing them. A book of stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, appeared in 1934, followed by a pamphlet of poems, Echo’s Bones, in 1935, and Beckett’s first novel, Watt, in 1938. He spent a few months in 1936–37 on a harrowing visit to Germany that confirmed his hatred for Nazism, and then settled in Paris again to make his living as a writer. Not long after he arrived there he was stabbed in a bizarrely random but almost fatal crime by a pimp who was annoyed when Beckett ignored him. A Frenchwoman whom Beckett had met ten years earlier, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, read about the crime in a newspaper and visited him in the hospital. They stayed together for the rest of Beckett’s life, first as somewhat distant lovers—Beckett never felt a close connection between sex and love—later, after a secret wedding in 1961, as husband and wife.

Beckett had a deep sense of morality—something that is emphasized by all his biographers but generally ignored by reviewers and critics. When France was occupied by the Nazis in 1940, Beckett joined the French Resistance at great personal risk. (Because Ireland was neutral in the war, Beckett, as an Irish national, could have lived safely and peacefully in occupied Europe had he wanted to.) When the Gestapo was close to capturing him, he fled Paris for a village in the south of France where he worked on a farm until the end of the war.

Returning to Paris in 1945, Beckett began writing novels and plays in French, a language that challenged him partly because he wrote less fluently than he did in his Joyce-influenced English. Three novels appeared in the early 1950s—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable and his first publicly performed play, Waiting for Godot, was performed in 1953. Together with such later plays as Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Happy Days, and such later novels and stories as How It Is and Stories and Texts for Nothing, these works gave Beckett a reputation as an “absurdist” writer who insisted on the meaninglessness of life. This was the exact opposite of Beckett’s vision. Beckett always understood that the isolated figures in his prose and drama had chosen their isolation, or suffered from an isolation that someone else inflicted on them, that they lived in a moral universe where suffering was the result of human choices.

Beckett always insisted on the dignity of individual choices and the value of personal freedom. He defended artistic freedom by forbidding his plays to be performed in theaters that were subject to official censorship. He defended his own artistic integrity by forbidding directors and actors to change the words he had written. But he was also a sympathetic director of his own plays, who worked closely with actors who invariably came to revere him as both a man and an author.

He defended his privacy with the same passion with which he defended his freedom and integrity. When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, he went into hiding to avoid publicity; his wife regarded the prize as a “catastrophe.” He accepted the prize—without making any speeches—and promptly gave away most of the prize money to Trinity College, Dublin, and in anonymous gifts to writers and artists he admired. He was often ill during his last years, but kept writing almost until his death in 1989.