II. A Brief Outline of the Life of Samuel Beckett

Short biography of Samuel Beckett

Though he continued with sports, his attention turned increasingly to academics when at 17 he entered Trinity College, choosing French and Italian as his subjects. Beckett enjoyed the vibrant theater scene of post-independence Dublin, preferring revivals of J.M. Synge plays. Moreover, he had the opportunity to watch American films and discover the silent comedies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin that would crucially influence his interest in the vaudevillian tramp. 

After graduation, Beckett traveled to Paris where he first met the fellow Dubliner who would become a seminal influence and close friend, James Joyce. In addition to acting as one of Joyce's favored assistants in the construction of the Work in Progress (later to be titled Finnegans Wake), Beckett began writing himself, inspired by the vibrant Parisian literary circle. In 1930, he published his first poem, "Whoroscope," winning a reward of ten pounds in a poetry competition. Shortly after, he published his brief but groundbreaking Proust, a study of the recently deceased author whom Beckett admired so much; the work at once illuminated its subject but also helped the fledgling and unsure artist shape his own aesthetic. When he returned to Dublin later that year to lecture at Trinity, Beckett was writing his first stories- which would later comprise More Pricks Than Kicks(1934). 

Beckett was restless in his teaching posts, and his reluctance to settle down in a respectable career worried his family, especially his mother from whom he became estranged for several years. Returning to Paris in 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. While reminiscent in its digressive tendencies of Fielding and Sterne, Dream was also highly autobiographical, a powerful indication that Beckett was emerging from Joyce's shadow and developing his own voice. Out of money, he went back to Dublin and then moved temporarily to London where he worked on much of his next novel, Murphy. Still without a steady source of income (his works were not selling, and Murphy, which had been turned down by dozens of publishers, would not appear until 1938), he moved constantly for the next few years before settling permanently in Paris in 1937. 

Walking home late one night with some friends, Beckett was nearly killed when he was stabbed by a "pimp." In hospital, Joyce looked after his young friend, paying his expenses and bringing around numerous visitors. Recuperating, Beckett also received attention from a French acquaintance, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dusmesnil, who would soon become his life companion (and wife, though not until 1961). 

When Paris was invaded in 1941, Beckett and Suzanne joined the Resistance. Later they were forced to flee when their cell was betrayed, leaving their apartment only hours before the Gestapo arrived. They took refuge in Rousillion, in the south of France, where Beckett worked on a farm in exchange for room and board. There he continued work on a novel he had begun in Paris, Watt. After the Germans were defeated and the couple returned to Paris in 1945, Beckett travelled to Ireland to visit his mother. He claimed to have had while sitting in her room an artistic revelation: "I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel." And only then did Beckett began to write primarily in French, finding greater linguistic possibilities in a language that he famously said had no style. In his second language, he enjoyed a period (1947-1950) that is certainly his most prolific and that many consider his finest. His first French novel, Mercier et Camier--which, with its wandering duo, minimalist style, and insistence on repetition, predicts the concerns and form of Waiting for Godot--, was not published until years later. In this time, he also wrote his famous novel trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable). Also, in 1947, he wrote his first play, Eleutheria, which he would not allow to be published during his lifetime and which, after his death, became a cause of great controversy when Beckett's American publisher, Barney Rosset, released an English translation against the wishes of the Beckett estate. In 1948-49, he also wrote Waiting for Godot. Its production in Paris in January 1953, by the director and actor Roger Blin (with whom Beckett would develop a lifelong friendship), brought the artist his first real public success both in and outside of France. 

In the 1950s and 1960s, Beckett's playwriting continued with a series of masterpieces, including Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, and Happy Days. He involved himself in various productions of his plays across Europe and in the United States, wrote his first radio plays, and created remarkably innovative prose fiction, including the epic How It Is(1961) and the haunting The Lost Ones (1970). Worldwide appreciation of his work growing, he received in 1969 the Nobel Prize (the third Irishman of the century to be so honored). Characteristically, he was unhappy with the increased public attention that accompanied the prize and in response to a demand for a new work chose instead to release the still unpublished Mercier and Camier. At this time, he also underwent successful operations on his eyes to correct the cataracts that had been plaguing him for years. 

The 1970s were a less prolific period, though he managed somenew projects, including television plays for the BBC, and continued to interest himself in producions of his theatrical works. In 1977 he began the autobiographical Company and in the early 1980s crafted more prose pieces (including Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho) as well as more plays (including Rockaby and Ohio Impromptu). His last major work, the prose fiction Stirrings Still, was written in 1986.

In the same year, Beckett began to suffer from onsetting emphysema. After his first hospitilization, he wrote in bed his final work, the poem What is the Word. Moved into a nursing home, Le Tiers Temps, his deteriorating health prevented him from writing, and his efforts were given instead to translation of his works. Suzanne died on 17 July 1989, and Beckett followed her on 22 December. He is buried in Montparnasse Cemetary in Paris. 

--Benjamin Strong

Dublin had produced a number of expressive playwrights for over three hundred years (R.S. Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, J. B. Shaw, S. O'Casey, J.M. Synge, and others), and so it is no surprise that Samuel Beckett, often considered to be the greatest dramatist of the 20th century at all, had to be born right in this city. It seems that Beckett was destined in terms of his date of birth as well - Good Friday, as a date of Christ's crucifixion, April 13 1906, brought an almost mystical symbolism into his personal life and writings. Christ's death and the attendant theory that one of the two thieves who has to have been crucified with him was saved while the other was damned are the motifs which Beckett used in various forms throughout his writing.

After receiving his B.A. degree from Trinity College, he was awarded the post of lector in Paris where he set off for at the age of 22. The French capital became the strongest factor influencing his style and the spirit of his writings. 
On his way to France, Beckett travelled first to Germany to visit his father's sister Frances Beckett Sinclair who lived with her husband William and their three children in Kassel. The Sinclairs were artists living sort of bohemian life among their many friends from the art world. Beckett immediately took a fancy to their easy-going life-style. He was also greatly attracted to one of the Sinclairs' daughter Peggy with whom he fell in love. They probably wanted to merry, as Peggy's sister remembers, but the family did not agree, because they were first cousins. Soon after, she went away to music and dancing school to Vienna in Austria and at the age of 18 she contracted tuberculosis and two years later died in Germany. Peggy was Samuel's first love and she is generally believed to be the original for the green-eyed heroines who appear in Beckett's writings.

In Paris Beckett also started to explore philosophy, he read Arthur Schopenhauer, René Descartes who led him to Arnold Geulincx and occasionalism. (See Chapter IV.) Beckett returned to Dublin in 1930, at the age of 24, and was appointed a lector in French at Trinity College. In January after having spent there four terms, Beckett resigned this academic post. 
In Dublin he suffered from serious depression. He spent all his time in a dark room and missed Paris where he had possessed more personal freedom. On his doctor's recommendation, Beckett left for Germany and after six months he returned back to Paris. He lived in a Paris hotel and realised that he needed to earn money to be able to stay there. As a consequence, he started to write poems, stories, and the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which has never been published, but the portions of which he used in the collection of stories More Pricks Than Kicks.ⁱⁱⁱ

In 1933 when Hitler took power, Beckett was in Dublin. This was the beginning of very hard period of Beckett's mental breakdown. His great love Peggy died from tuberculoses that year, and soon Beckett's father had a massive heart attack, which totally overwhelmed him. 
After spending several months in Ireland, Beckett headed for London, where he spent two miserable years, depressed and confused about the quality of his writing, having no idea how great his talent really was. Nevertheless, Beckett began to write furiously, the result of which was the collection of poems Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates (1935). In addition, he started to write a novel, for which London became the setting - Murphy (1938). 

The character of Murphy is very like Beckett himself, it is one of the novels where the the places and the names of the streets are named exactly. There appears Stadium road where Beckett lived at that time, Lots Road, Cremorne Road, and where Beckett as well as Murphy wandered about London, both usually in a very depressed state. 

Soon after the beginning of the war Beckett returned to Paris to be with his friends. During the war the Gestapo discovered Beckett's activities in connection with the French Resistance movement. As a result, he was forced to find a sanctuary in Roussillon in the apartment of his companion Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil's friend. Here, in the south of France he spent a long period of time during the war years. While hiding from the Nazis, he wrote another novel Watt (1942-1944), which is considered "an important bridge from the pre-war to the post-war writings"and where the basic Beckettean themes as the alienation from the world, appear. (See chapter Theme.) 

After the war he returned back to Ireland again to be with his mother. Mary Roe Beckett was, at that time, dying from Parkinson's disease and throughout her final illness, Beckett cared for her. About his mother's death he later wrote in Krapp's Last Tape:

From writing the novels Beckett turned to writing drama, which gave him the new possibilities for expressing his ideas. In 1972 Beckett confessed how and why he started to write plays: "I turned to writing plays to relieve myself of the awful depression the prose led me into. Life at that time was too demanding, too terrible, and I thought the theatre would be a diversion." Beckett found in theatre a new way of making public his private world and these dramatic writings were the works which made him successful and famous across the world. 

In 1949 he wrote En attendant Godot in French, which soon made its way across the Atlantic establishing Beckett as the most original and influential dramatist of the century. The first English edition translated by Beckett himself, was published in New York by B. Rossett, and due to it Beckett in his 50es started to become well-known amongst the general public. 
Waiting for Godot was followed by All That Fall, a radio play broadcast in 1957. That was Beckett's first post-war play written in English, and the beginning of a long and creative relationship with BBC. All That Fall was followed by Krapp's Last Tape (1958), Endgame (1958), Embers (1959), Happy Days (1961), Words and Music (1962), and others. 

In December 1965 the Swedish Academy announced Samuel Beckett as the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Beckett avoided the publicity by travelling to Africa and it was J. Lindon, a French publisher, who accepted the award for "a body of work that, in new forms of fiction and the theatre, has transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation.” 
Towards the close of his life, Beckett gradually started to lose mobility and it started to be difficult and later absolutely impossible for him to walk. In 1989, six months after the death of Suzanne, Samuel Beckett, on December 12, at the age of 83 went off. 

Beckett expressed his attitude to his literary writing is in these words: "All this business of a labour to accomplish before I can end the words to say; "a truth to recover in order to say it before I can handle an imposed task, once known, long neglected, finally forgotten; to perform, before I can be done, done with speaking, done with listening, I invented it all in a hope that it will console me, help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as someone on the road moving between a beginning and an end, gaining ground, losing ground, getting lost, but somehow in the long run making headway, all lies, I've nothing to do, say nothing in particular, I have to speak whatever that means." 

iii First published as More Pricks Than Kicks. London: Chatto & Windus, 1934