SAMUEL BECKETT:
1906-1989
BRIEF CHRONOLOGY
1906-30: Samuel Barclay Beckett, b. Good Friday, 13 April, 1906 [erron. registered 14 June], son of Bill Beckett, a quantity surveyor (b.1871), of Huguenot descent, at ‘Cooldrinagh’, Foxrock, S. Co. Dublin, built by his father (whose own father was a successful contractor and builder of the National Library of Ireland), with Maria (called May; née Roe; ed. Moravian Mission School, Gracehill, nr. Ballymena, Co. Antrim; m. 31 Aug. 1901); named after the home of Samuel Robinson Roe, maternal grandfather, a successful miller at Celbridge, residing in a former Cooldrinagh in Leixlip; ed. by Ida Elsner and her sister, Leopardstown Rd., later at Earlsfort House, a prep. school on Earlsfort Tce., then at Portora Royal Sch., in Enniskillen, 1920 - there joining his br. Frank (b. 26 July 1902); taken by his father with Frank to view O’Connell St. burning from Glencullen Rd. during 1916 Rising; reads Keats; participated with Claud [C. E. R.] Sinclair in persecution of a schoolmaster, Thackaberry and suffers animosity from another, W. R. Tetley [of whom he later wrote ‘For Future Reference’]; distinguishes himself as all-round cricketer; proceeds to TCD, 1923-1927 on Foundation Schol.; assigned to A. A. Luce as tutor; shares rooms with Gerald Stewart, also from Portora; drives his father’s car in Dublin; comes first in his year; attends ‘at homes’ chez T. B. Rudmose-Brown (Prof. of French) at Malahide, and with the Starkies; attends premier of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (March 1924) and The Plough and the Stars (Feb. 1926); also Yeats’s Oedipus the King (Dec. 1926) and Oedipus at Colonus (Sept. 1927) and revivals of Synge; learns of Dante through language lessons from Bianca Esposito (Ottolenghi in “Dante and the Lobster”); plays cricket for TCD, touring in England in 1926-27 seasons and gaining citation in Wisden’s Cricket Almanac; sees T. C. Murray’s Autumn Fire, Synge’s Well of the Saints, and the Dublin plays of O’Casey at the Abbey, being present in the balcony with Geoffrey Thompson during the Plough and the Stars riot, 1926; reading Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and contemporary French poets; visits Loire, meeting Charles C. Clarke, 1926;
1927-29: BA (1st; Gold Medal and £50 prize), 1927; visits Florence, summer 1927, staying at pension run by Signora Ottolenghi (via Campanella 14), piazza Oberdam; undertakes to write MA on ‘Unanisme’ at Rudmose-Brown’s instigation; spent two terms teaching French at Campbell College, Belfast (‘rich and thick’), 1928; visits the Sinclair household at Kassel (Cissie being his paternal aunt, married to William [‘Boss’] Sinclair); appt. lecteur at École Normale Sup., Paris, Oct. 1928-30 [‘I slept through the École’], arriving 1 Nov. 1928; forms friendship with Tom MacGreevy, previous - and tenaciously still - holder of the ENS scholarship, and intro. by him to James Joyce, whose secretary Beckett is sometimes called; part of transition circle; contrib. essay ‘Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’ to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (June 1929), with Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, MacGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, and William Carlos Williams; partial rift with Joyce over Lucia Joyce’s unrequited infatuation with him, 1929; contrib. “Che Sciagura” [“What a misfortune” - viz, castration in its Dantean context] to TCD Miscellany (14 Nov. 1929); subscribes to “Revolution of the word” manifesto (transition, 1929) and contrib. “Assumption” to transition, 16/17 (June 1929); travels to Dublin and Kassel, Christmas 1929; develops interest in theories of motion; issue Whoroscope (1930; ltd. edn. 300), based on Descartes’s life, winner of Hours Press (Paris) prize on subject of ‘Time’, judged by Richard Aldington and Nancy Cunard; socialises with Cunard and her boyfriend Henry Crowther;
1930-32: publishes ‘For Future
Reference’ in transition (June 1930); visits Joyce’s in order to
disillusion Lucia about his attachment to her, 1930; engages in translating
Joyce’s “ALP” with Alfred Péron; poem refused by AE (George Russell); reading
Arthur Schopenhauer; jun. lect. TCD, 1930-32,
initially on 3-year appointment; passes Christmas and New Year in Kassel,
1930-1931; taught four terms at TCD under Prof. Rose, occupying rooms at No. 39
[New Square], and resigning afterwards because ‘he could not bear the absurdity
of teaching to others what he did not know himself’; contrib. poetry to New Review, 1931; writes and produces Le
Kid, at Players Theatre, TCD, Feb.
1933-34: Stays unhappily in London, 1933-35; enters hospital; death of Peggy Sinclair, 3 May 1933 - same day has his own operation; proposes to vote for de Valera in 1933 elections, but accepts his father’s ‘bribe’ of £1 to vote for Cosgrave’s party’ (or did he?), 24 Jan. 1933; does not renew acquaintance with Ethna MacCarthy at this period; works at writing in attic room of father’s premisses at 6 Clare St., dismembering Dream to make More Pricks Than Kicks, a collection of stories centred on Belacqua Shuah, a Dantean TCD student, and based on the Purgatorio, Canto IV, ll.130ff (‘Shuah’ being Hebrew word for ‘depression’ - a ‘barely fictionalised Beckett’ acc. Deirdre Bair [1978, 130ff.]); adds further stories following the Dantean plot to a scabrous ending for Belacqua on the operating table; death of father following heart-attack, 26 June 1933; receives annuity of £200 from his father’s estate of £35,000; More Pricks than Kicks accepted by Charles Prentice at Chatto & Windus (24th May 1934); a final story at first solicited but ultimately refused by Prentice on grounds that ‘people would shudder and be confused’ at the resurrection of Belacqua; initially sells only 500 copies; meets Nuala Costello, a friend of Lucia Joyce and embarks on ‘an affair, such as it was’ (but more a dining friendship) till December; applies for post at National Gallery, London, Oct. 1933, but not shortlisted; contemplates seeking work as copy-writer; consults Geoffrey Thompson, by then a psychologist; travels to England, 20 Jan. 1934; “Gnome”, written Jan. 1932, printed Dublin Magazine (July-Sept 1934); “Home Olga”, a poetical tribute to James Joyce, appears in Hours Press anthology Negro (Jan. 1934); settles at 48 Paultons Sq., nr. King’s Rd., Chelsea, and within range of MacGreevy at Cheyne Gdns.; underwent intense sessions with Wilfred Bion at Jungian Tavistock Clinic, London, 1934-35; contrib. “A Case in a Thousand”, story, to The Bookman (1934); castigates ‘antiquarianism’ of Irish literature in “Recent Irish Poetry”, pseud. as Andrew Belis, in The Bookman, No. 86 (1934), dismissing ‘the altitudinous complacency of the Victorian Gael’ and literary revival poets who ‘flee from self-awareness’, while aspersing Austin Clarke’s ‘prosodoturfy’ in particular; publication of More Pricks than Kicks (24 May 1934; 1,500 copies); reviewers incl. Edwin Muir (Listener, 4 July 1934); contrib. review of Feuillerat on Proust to Spectator (ed. Derek Vershoyle), 23 June 1934; changes accommodation to 34 Gertrude St. on returning to London, Aug. 1934, resuming sessions with Bion in Oct.; returns to Dublin, Christmas 1934;
1935-37: Sinclair family, now living at Howth, offended by the inclusion of Peggy’s letter in More Pricks (also in Dream); returns to London, Feb. 1935, resuming psycho-analysis (now at session 133); reading Jane Austen; receives and ignores letters from Lucia Joyce, from Zurich and London; reads The Imitation of Christ in copy lent by MacGreevy; returns to Dublin for 3 weeks, late April 1935; taken by Bion to C. J. Jung’s lecture at Institute of Psychological Medicine and hears him speak of girl who ‘had never really been born’; completes ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’, 1935 (orig. commissioned for The Bookman, by then defunct); Reavey publishes Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (Dec. 1935), based on Ovid’s version of the story of Narcissus; proceeds rapidly with Murphy, the initial inspiration being based on episode of the kites; ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’ commissioned by The Bookman 1935, though unpub. until 1983 (Disjecta); notes that by 30 Sept. 1935, the Board has banned 618 books of which More Pricks than Kicks was No. 465; returns to Dublin with intention of remaining, Dec. 1935; reviews Jack Yeats, The Amaranthers (“An Imaginative Work”, Dublin Magazine, 1936); purchases a painting by Jack Yeats (“Morning”) at £30 on down-payment of borrows £10; meets Clarke and finds him oblivious to his 1934 Bookman review; reading Geulincx in TCD Library (‘Ubi nhil vales, ibi nihil velis’); contrib. to Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (1936); continues writing Murphy at Clare St., completing it in June 1936; sends typescript to Chatto & Windus; hands over agency for the book to Reavey, who offers it to Dent, Faber, Hogarther Press, et al.; infatuation with Betty Stockton, summer 1936, producing poem in Dublin Magazine (Dec. 1936); departs for Wanderjahr in Germany, 29 Sept. 1936; by plane from Dublin to Amstersdam and onwards by boat, visiting Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin (at New Year), Potsdam, Munich via Würzburg and Nuremburg, travelling by foot and train and keeping a diary of ideas in six notebooks, now held in Reading (discovered by Edward Beckett in his uncle’s trunk after his death, and made available to James Knowlson); returns to London by Lufthansa, 2 April 1937; returns to Ireland; refuses suggested agency to Lord Rathdowne; begins work on play about Samuel Johnson and Mrs Thrale (“Human Wishes”), postulating Johnson’s impotence (‘the time I spent on that red herring’); travels by boat to England, 16 Oct. 1937, and proceeds to Paris, 26 Oct. 1937; returns to give evidence at the Gogarty-Sinclair libel trial, and cross-examined by J. M. Fitzgerald, KC; reported in The Irish Times as ‘the bawd and blasphemer from Paris’; leaves Dublin immediately after without visiting his mother, on his br. Frank’s advice, Nov. 1937;
1938-39: finds accommodation at The Liberia Hotel
[hôtel Liberia]; Murphy accepted by T. M. Ragg at Routledge through good
offices of Herbert Read; contrib. poem “Ooftish”, to final issue of transition
(1938), along with review of Denis Devlin’s current collection; became
friends with Geer and Bram van Velde, Alberto Giacometti, Marcel Duchamp and
Peggy Guggenheim; studies psycho-analytical texts by Freud, Jung, Adler and
Rank; turns to writing in French, to ‘cut away the excess, strip away the
colour’; stabbed by Robert Jules Prudent, a pimp, in the street, on leaving a
film with Alan and Belinda Duncan, 7 Dec. 1938, and removed to the Broussais
hospital; visited in hospital by Joyce, and also by Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil
(d.1989), an acquaintance from 1929, and a pianist, with whom he lives in a
companionate relationship for fifty-two years thereafter; stabbing reported in Irish
Times, 8 Jan. 1929; corrects proofs of Murphy in hospital;
infuriated by blurb; discharged 23 Jan, 1938; approached by Jack Kahane (f. of
Maurice Girodias) to translate marquis de Sade’s Les cent-Vingt Jours de
Sodom, and decides against though attracted by the work; commences writing
poetry in French, 1938; commences French trans. of Murphy, with Péron,
March 1938; visits Dublin, Nov. 1938-New Year 1939; read and impressed with
1940-49: visits Joyces at Saint Gerand-le-Puy, Feb.
1940; quit Paris for Ireland, June 1940; returns to Paris (‘war Europe
preferable to peace in Ireland’); became active in Paris Resistance, collating
information on Germany troop movements; Alfred Péron arrested, 16 Aug. 1942 (d.
Red Cross camp, Switzerland, June 1945); escapes Nazi round-up in Paris, first
hiding in the Bois de Boulogne; 1942; briefly hides in home of Nathalie
Sarraute; took refuge in Unoccupied France at Roussillon in the Vauclose,
behind Avignon, 1942, and registers there as originating in ‘Dublin, England’;
writing Watt, begun in Paris 11 Feb. 1941; stalled at Hôtel Escoffier,
and resumed at
1950-59: Molloy submitted by Suzanne to Jérôme Lindon at Edition de minuit (corner of bvds. St.-Germain and St-Michel), autumn 1950 [‘I read Molloy in a few hours as I have never read a book before ... a sacred masterpiece’); Lindon offers contract for all three novels, 15 Nov. 1950; Molloy published, 15 March 1951; photographed by Gisele Freund; settles in a house built with the legacy in mother’s will, at Ussy-sur-Marne, nr. Paris, 1952; Jerôme Lindon publishes En attendant Godot in his éditions de minuit (17 Oct. 1952); comes to public prominence with Paris staging of En attendant Godot, dir. Roger Blin - also acting the part of Pozzo with Lucien Raimbourg as Vladimir, Pierre Latour as Estragon, and Jean Martin as Lucky, at Théâtre de Babylone (bvd. Raspail, Montparnasse), 19 Jan. 1953; Watt published by Olympia Press (Paris), 1953, later trans. into French as Watt by Ludovic and Agnès Janvier in collab. with the author (publ. 1968); Mitchell moves to Paris, 1954; death of Frank Beckett, Sept. 1954; Fin de partie, first version, 1955; one-act version, June 1956, trans. into English as Endgame (1958), premiered at Royal Court, Oct. 1958, and widely staged thereafter, and called ‘more inhuman than Godot’ by Beckett; trans. Godot, 1953, the English version being published as Waiting for Godot (Feb. 1956); opens disasterously in Miami, dir. Alan Schneider, 3 Jan. 1956 [‘we always want to do what you want’]; Beckett withdraws mimes from Dublin Theatre Festival in protest against supposed censorship of O’Casey’s Drums of Father Ned and a dramatisation of Joyce’s Ulysses by McClelland, imposing an embargo on performance of his works in Dublin, 1958-60; first radio play, All that Fall (BBC, 3 Jan. 1957), based on the biblical text, ‘The Lord upholdest all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down’; gives financial assistance to Douglas Rick Cluchey, San Quentin inmate, to produce Waiting for Godot there, 1957; issues Embers (1959), also for radio, and deemed unsuccessful; writes Krapp’s Last Tape (1959), for Patrick Magee and a tape-record, beginning Feb. 1958; performed Royal Court London (28 Oct. 1958; publ. 1959); commences work on Comment c’est [How It Is] as “Pim”, Dec. 1958-summer 1960; receives D. Litt. from TCD, June 1959;
1960-69: Krapp’s Last Tape translated into French by author with Pierre Leyris, performed Théâtre Recamier (Paris, 22 March 1960); joined in Paris by Barbara Bray (b. 1924), a BBC script-editor whom he met in London in 1958; Bray moves Paris and resumes relationship, 1961; m. Suzanne, Folkestone, Kent, March 1961; Prix International des Editeur, with Jorge Luis Borges, may 1961; writes Cascando, radio play in French, Dec. 1961; Krapp’s Last Tape, with Cyril Cusack (Dublin 1960); premiers Happy Days (NY 1961; London 1962), his first play written in English, trans. into French as Oh les beaux jours; writing Play, in English, 1961-1962; premiered as Spiel at the Ulmer Theater, Ulm-Donay (14 June 1963); first performed as Play in Britain at Old Vic (7 April 1964), and in France at Pavillion de Marson (Paris, 11 June 1964); first published in German as Spiel in Theater Heute (July 1963); publ. in English (1964) and in French (1964; author’s trans.); travels to America to make Film (1965) with Buster Keaton, enacting Berkeley’s precept ‘esse est percipi’, summer 1964; wins Prix Filmcritica, Venice 1965 and Special Jury Prize, Tours 1966; writes and issues Imaginez morte imaginez (1965); his first TV play; another follows, Eh Joe (BBC2, July 1966); glaucoma diagnosed, 1967; writes Assez and begins Le dépeupleur, Autumn 1965; trans. Textes pour rien as Texts for Nothing (1966); notified of his election by Nobel panel in telegram from Lindon (‘Dear Sam and Suzanne. In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel Prize - I advise you to go into hiding. With affection’); receives the Prize, Oct. 1969 (with commendation for ‘sounding liberation to the oppressed and comfort to those in need’); shelters in Tunisia from world acclaim;
1970-97: Undergoes first operation for glaucoma, Oct.
1970; second operation, Feb. 1971; Mercier et Camier and Premier
amour issued by Lindon (1970); More Pricks than Kicks reprinted
(1970); writes Not I, 1970 (publ. 1973), in which the part of Mouth is
brilliantly played by Billie Whitelaw to his coaching, Jan. 1973; trans. Not
I into French as Pas Moi, 1973; trans. and revises Mercier Et Camier,
Aug. 1973; That Time written June 1974-Aug. 1975 (publ. 1976); directed Godot
in German, Berlin March 1975; writes Footfalls, 1975; directs Pas
Moi, Paris (April 1975); issues Mirlotonnades (1978), poetic
sequence; issues Company/Compagnie (1979; written May 1977-Aug. 1979;
performed 1980); begins Mal vu mal dit, 1980; writes Worstward Ho!,
1981; late works incl. Rockaby and Ohio Impromtu, Catastrophe,
and Nacht und Träume, and ‘dramaticules’ such as Come and Go,
Breath, &c.; responds to Deirdre Bair’s request for permission to
write a biography with the statement that he would ‘hinder nor help’; besides
his Paris flat, he spent much time away from Paris in a two-room apartment at
Ussy-sur-Marne,
Samuel Beckett
28/10/2008 17:30 revised 6/12/2008 16:52
URL: http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/html/pgil_datasets/authors/b/Beckett,Samuel/life.htm
Academic
year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Rubén Moratalla Mayo
rumoma@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press
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