Samuel Beckett
was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, near Dublin, Ireland.
Raised in a middle class, Protestant home, the son of a quantity
surveyor and a nurse, he was sent off at the age of 14 to attend
the same school which Oscar Wilde had attended. Looking back
on his childhood, he once remarked, "I had little talent
for happiness."
Beckett was consistent in his loneliness. The unhappy boy
soon grew into an unhappy young man, often so depressed that
he stayed in bed until mid afternoon. He was difficult to engage
in any lengthy conversation--it took hours and lots of drinks
to warm him up--but the women could not resist him. The lonely
young poet, however, would not allow anyone to penetrate his
solitude. He once remarked, after rejecting advances from James
Joyce's daughter, that he was dead and had no feelings that were
human.
In 1928, Samuel Beckett moved to Paris, and the city quickly
won his heart. Shortly after he arrived, a mutual friend introduced
him to James Joyce, and Beckett quickly became an apostle of
the older writer. At the age of 23, he wrote an essay in defense
of Joyce's magnum opus against the public's lazy demand for easy
comprehensibility. A year later, he won his first literary prize--10
pounds for a poem entitled "Whoroscope" which dealt
with the philosopher Descartes meditating on the subject of time
and the transiency of life. After writing a study of Proust,
however, Beckett came to the conclusion that habit and routine
were the "cancer of time", so he gave up his post at
Trinity College and set out on a nomadic journey across Europe.
Beckett made his way through Ireland, France, England, and
Germany, all the while writing poems and stories and doing odd
jobs to get by. In the course of his journies, he no doubt came
into contact with many tramps and wanderers, and these aquaintances
would later translate into some of his finest characters. Whenever
he happened to pass through Paris, he would call on Joyce, and
they would have long visits, although it was rumored that they
mostly sit in silence, both suffused with sadness.
Beckett finally settled down in Paris in 1937. Shortly thereafter,
he was stabbed in the street by a man who had approached him
asking for money. He would learn later, in the hospital, that
he had a perforated lung. After his recovery, he went to visit
his assailant in prison. When asked why he had attacked Beckett,
the prisoner replied "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur", a
phrase hauntingly reminiscent of some of the lost and confused
souls that would populate the writer's later works.
During World War II, Beckett stayed in Paris--even after it
had become occupied by the Germans. He joined the underground
movement and fought for the resistance until 1942 when several
members of his group were arrested and he was forced to flee
with his French-born wife to the unoccupied zone. In 1945, after
it had been liberated from the Germans, he returned to Paris
and began his most prolific period as a writer. In the five years
that followed, he wrote Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot, Endgame,
the novels Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and Mercier
et Camier, two books of short stories, and a book of criticism.
Samuel Beckett's first play, Eleutheria, mirrors his
own search for freedom, revolving around a young man's efforts
to cut himself loose from his family and social obligations.
His first real triumph, however, came on January 5, 1953, when
Waiting for Godot premiered at the Théâtre
de Babylone. In spite of some expectations to the contrary, the
strange little play in which "nothing happens" became
an instant success, running for four hundred performances at
the Théâtre de Babylone and enjoying the critical
praise of dramatists as diverse as Tennessee Williams, Jean Anouilh,
Thornton Wilder, and William Saroyan who remarked, "It will
make it easier for me and everyone else to write freely in the
theatre." Perhaps the most famous production of Waiting
for Godot, however, took place in 1957 when a company of
actors from the San Francisco Actor's Workshop presented the
play at the San Quentin penitentiary for an audience of over
fourteen hundred convicts. Surprisingly, the production was a
great success. The prisoners understood as well as Vladimir and
Estragon that life means waiting, killing time and clinging to
the hope that relief may be just around the corner. If not today,
then perhaps tomorrow.
Beckett secured his position as a master dramatist on April
3, 1957 when his second masterpiece, Endgame, premiered
(in French) at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Although English
was his native language, all of Beckett's major works were originally
written in French--a curious phenomenon since Beckett's mother
tongue was the accepted international language of the twentieth
century. Apparently, however, he wanted the discipline and economy
of expression that an acquired language would force upon on him.
Beckett's dramatic works do not rely on the traditional elements
of drama. He trades in plot, characterization, and final solution,
which had hitherto been the hallmarks of drama, for a series
of concrete stage images. Language is useless, for he creates
a mythical universe peopled by lonely creatures who struggle
vainly to express the unexpressable. His characters exist in
a terrible dreamlike vacuum, overcome by an overwhelming sense
of bewilderment and grief, grotesquely attempting some form of
communication, then crawling on, endlessly.
Beckett was the first of the absurdists to win international
fame. His works have been translated into over twenty languages.
In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He continued
to write until his death in 1989, but the task grew more and
more difficult with each work until, in the end, he said that
each word seemed to him "an unnecessary stain on silence
and nothingness."
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