Samuel Beckett

From Philosopedia

Beckett, Samuel (13 Apr 1906 - 22 Dec 1989)

One of the greatest modern writers in English, Beckett was an unbeliever. He was born on Good Friday to affluent, Protestant, Anglo-Irish Dubliners. His mother was moody and demanding, his father was a steady person, his older brother was likable, and as a youth he enjoyed tennis courts, a croquet lawn, maids, gardeners, stables, pets, and a happy childhood. In 1923 at the time of Irish independence, Beckett went to Trinity College to read French, graduated with first-class honors, and in 1928 went to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris as an English Assistant. The 1920s in Paris allowed him not only a change from the parochialism of his home but also an introduction to the post-war views on post-order, post-hope, post-belief, and pre-postmodernism. Absurdism was a popular topic of the time.

Lois Gordon in The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906—1946 (1995) tells of the friendship of James Joyce and Beckett. They liked each other, took long walks, smoked cigars, drank, enjoyed such repartee as “What do you think of the next life?” “I don’t think much of this one.” It was a time when writing was fragmented, when language was said to be a distortion of experience, when artists painted blank canvases, and Cézanne became popular in the very museums that once had banned his work.

Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press published Beckett’s Whorescope, fewer than one hundred lines of arcane incoherence which Beckett described: “I wrote the first half before dinner . . . had a guzzle of salad and Chambertin at the Cochon de Lait, went back to the École and finished it about three in the morning. . . . That’s how it was and them were the days.”

One of his sexual partners, Peggy Guggenheim, called him Oblomov. A friend, Walter Lowenfels, said Beckett, who had begun to drink heavily and refused to hold a job, told him,

All I want to do is sit on my arse

and fart and think of Dante.

After forty-two rejections, Murphy, his first novel, was published in 1938, and it eliminated the usual elements of plot, character, and setting. One reviewer described it as “verbal acrobatics . . . too allusive to be generally comprehensible,” but its royalties allowed him to pay his debts. Also in 1938, Beckett, stabbed by a neighborhood pimp, almost died and was possibly saved by a young woman who came to his assistance. She, it transpired, was Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil and became his companion, then his wife. The two joined the Resistance, and, although he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance, he kept the honors quiet for over thirty years, feeling war was dumb as well as distracting to a writer.

Eugen Joseph Weber, author of The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (1996), remarks about Beckett’s war service,

• Rejecting the humanism of grand principles and sentimentalism, Beckett was a moralist of impotence, rather like Camus—but, unlike Camus, of impotence asserted. Anti-idealists can have ideals, too.

Beckett once heard Jung speak, Weber wrote, but the people who entertained him most were the Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and Buster Keaton. Little wonder that in 1969, Beckett came up with his thirty-second play, Breath, described by Weber as “a pile of rubbish, a breath, and then a cry.” Weber finds that the composer John Cage had much in common with Beckett, for Cage in a Beckett-like serious prank wrote Imaginary Landscapes for twelve randomly tuned radios, and his composition entitled4’ 3” is one in which the performer does not play.

According to the Irish poet John Montague, Beckett included “God bless” in his greetings, an “uncanny salutation, a familiar Irish phrase made strange by his worldwide reputation for godlessness.” Beckett wrote principally in French and lived in Paris. Jim Herrick, in New Humanist (January, 1990), states that Beckett’s

• bleak vision (like that of Philip Larkin on a smaller scale represented the negative minimum of our beliefs—that we are alone in the universe except for one another, that there is no hope in the end, and that there is nothing of value except what we give it. From this minimum, however, he created works of such pathos and beauty that he almost contradicted himself.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969, after the success of his Waiting for Godot (1952, written in French, and 1956, translated by Beckett into English), in which he comes across as a philosopher. Martin Seymour-Smith notes, “. . . for there is as little more than philosophy in it as is possible under theatrical conditions. However, these conditions, like the ones created by fiction, imply an inescapable empiricism: paradoxically, the philosophy is filtered through the reality, if only of the illusion, and becomes a parody of itself. God is more Charlot (Chaplin: real fun) than ‘God,’ who is conspicuously not there in any form.” At the play’s end, the joke seems to be on the audience, which has assumed Godot is “God.” But God is not there in any form, and this is one of Beckett’s purposes. “If Godot were God I would have called him that,” Beckett said in a little known statement.

Just as the British deliberately mis-pronounce many French and other foreign words, so North Americans do not pronounce Godot as is done in Britain and Ireland (with the emphasis on the first syllable, /ˈɡɒdoʊ/). North Americans usually pronounce the word with an emphasis on the second syllable, /ɡəˈdoʊ/. Beckett himself said the emphasis should be on the first syllable, that the North American pronunciation is a mistake, or so said Karla Knudsen when producing the play in 2004 in Georgia. The T is silent, or at least no one has ever alleged that Beckett pronounced the word with a T on the end, which wags would say would have been absurd.

Murphy, one of Beckett’s memorable characters, requested in his fictional will, “With regard to the disposal of these my body, mind, and soul, I desire that they be burnt and placed in a paper bag and brought to the Abbey Theatre, Abbey Street, Dublin, and without pause in what the great and good Lord Chesterfield calls the necessary house, where their happiest hours have been spent, on the right as one goes down into the pit, and I desire that the chain be pulled upon them, if possible during the performance of a piece, the whole to be executed without ceremony or show of grief.” Except that when his friend Cooper lugged the ashes but stopped off at a pub, a fight ensued and the bag of ashes scattered so that “by closing time the body, mind, and soul of Murphy were freely distributed over the floor of the saloon; and before another dayspring greyened the earth had been swept away with the sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the vomit.”

Unlike his works and life, Beckett’s own funeral and burial were traditional.

Click for a 2009 photo of Beckett's gravesite at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

(See entry for Michael Fraenkel.)

{CE; TRI; TYD; Eugene Weber, “The Anti-Hero as Hero,” The New Republic, 6 May 1996}