And so S. Beckett, with his first piece for theatre, became famous at the ripe old age of 47. After Godot, Beckett produced a number of lesser-known works which continued to stretch the boundaries of what was possible and acceptable in the theater.

Endgame is an apocalyptic, post-civilization romp with Hamm as the blind and wheel-chair-bound king, Clov as his whining subservient pawn, a three-legged dog (Hamm: "Is my dog ready?" Clov:"He lacks a leg,") and parents in trash cans begging for sustenance ("Where's me pap?")

Krapp's Last Tape (1958) in which Old Krapp celebrates his final birthday in ritual manner-- recording his thoughts on the year past while listening to random passages of tapes made during youth and middle age-- portrays three selves with little in common, trapped by time and separated by the unreeling years.

Play, a lover's triangle where a man and two women, encased in funeral urns, are battered into "telling" by an inquisitor's light-- trying to get it right, to tell the truth-- has as its second act an exact repeat of the first, a stunning take on Heraclitus' assertion that we never step twice into the same stream. The play may be an exact repeat for the actors-- but for the audience, whose first trip into these hellish waters is one fraught with confusion at the rapid-fire speech and fragmentary nature of what they aren't quite hearing, their second trip brings it all, with the gift of familiarity, into shocking perspective. Beckett plays another of his little jokes here, with the ending threatening a third repetition just before the light goes out once and, thankfuly, for all.

Not I (1963) is a mad-woman's monologue, where all that is seen in the absolute dark of the stage is a mouth appearing out of the void, accompanied by a rush of words describing her plight. Most of what she is saying, if we can catch it, describes our own situation as audience as much as it describes hers. Not concerned with the play's intelligibility, but rather with its effect, Beckett described the words as "verbal ammunition."

    Beckett had been writing fiction since the early thirties, but until the attention brought by Godot, the novels went relatively unnoticed. He rendered this public oversight obsolete with the publication in 1951-53 of the trilogy, Molloy/Malone Dies/ The Unnamable. Here again, Beckett was to sweep aside a genre's standards, and the novel would never be the same. The trilogy was the center of gravity of a body of work which began with 300-page ruminations lined with the complexities and frustrations of a search for voice, and ended in the late '80s with 48-page, larger-than-large-type novellas wrought with frighteningly precise focus, covering the same routes and distances in a fraction of the time.

Beckett's subject, both onstage and onpage, has always been the same-- a dialogue between, and search for, the many levels of self: I tell the story; I listen to myself tell the story; I know I am listening to myself tell the story; none of me knows if it's the right one. And what are we to make of stories in which, instead of plot and character becoming logical conclusion, we find story, situation and being dissolving in a rain of contradictions?

"Then I went into the house and wrote, it is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining."--Molloy (1947)

With his fiction, Beckett straps us into the front seat of a roller-coaster mind with fifty-mile hills, explosive drops, impossible curves, and tracks that splinter and scream with the constant threat of disaster. All this exhilaration, and beautiful prose to boot.

    Stripped of our trappings-- our occupations, politics, myths, and interests-- we all become Beckett's Character: alone, clawing our way through the muddied chaos of a maddened world, enduring beyond the limits of endurance, hoping when all seems hopeless, surviving the storms of life sheltered only by our will and persistence.

"You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."--The Unnamable (1949)

    I found Samuel Beckett in the Winter of 1980-81. I had seen him before, but I hadn't noticed, or hadn't looked closely enough, or perhaps I just hadn't been prepared. After reading some short works of fiction and a few of the one-act plays, I ordered the then twenty-plus volume Collected Works, and spent the next few years swimming in them. I filed ten feet of shelf space and a filing cabinet with criticism, unpublished ephemera, video and audio tapes, and several pounds of miscellany. I attended symposiums and world premieres, produced and directed three programs of the one-act plays, joined the Samuel Beckett Society, subscribed to the Journal of Beckett Studies, and gradually drowned. It was a good death, an embracing of a voice that I felt was speaking in the clearest and most accurate terms about what it meant to be human and in the world.

The years rolled by, and I lost track of my passion somehow-- not that it diminished, but that I found other focused pursuits, while Sam rested quietly on my shelves. It's nine years later and he's gone, and when I heard that he had died I felt guilty that I hadn't kept up-- that he'd published a few more books I don't own, written a few more plays that I haven't seen.

There are those who claim that Beckett's work is too dark, too nihilistic-- but it is a darkness shot through with blazing lights of humor, hope, and humanity. There are those who claim that his work is "difficult"-- but is is a difficulty in the reading of words pared to their essence; unfamiliarly perfect sentences; paragraphs that echo every other; and stories that reflect with terrifying clarity the uncertainty and havoc of our time.

Beckett: "It's a beautiful day, isn't it?"
The friend: "Yes, it makes one glad to be alive."
Beckett: "Aw now, I wouldn't go that far.."