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."