If you’ve been following along with us, you know that we have been enjoying re-discovering the literary talents of Ireland. And there really are so many! We’ve posted already about Joyce and Yeats, and we’ll have a few more coming up, including on contemporary Irish writers. Today we write about Samuel Beckett: tomorrow, 3 August, marks the 67th anniversary of the English-language premiere of his most famous play, Waiting for Godot. It was originally written in French as En attendant Godot, and in 1955 it premiered at the Arts Theatre in London.
Although Beckett is a quintessentially Irish writer, he, like Joyce, lived most of his life outside of Ireland. In Beckett’s case, in France. Not only that, he wrote most of his works in French and only later translated or had them translated into English. He wrote in French partly as a reaction against Joyce, whom he saw as too intimidating to emulate directly.
Beckett was born in 13 April 1906 in Foxrock, a wealthy suburb of Dublin. His early schooling was in Dublin. And he attended Trinity College, studying French, Italian, and English literature, and graduating in 1927. He taught briefly for a time in Paris, from 1928 to 1930, and it was there that he met Joyce, who took the younger writer under his wing. Beckett served Joyce for a time as a research assistant, when Joyce was writing Finnegan’s Wake; he translated a chapter of the novel into French.
Returning to Dublin in 1930, he taught at Trinity College for a year, during which he made quite an impression. He offered a lecture in French on a writer, Jean du Chas of Toulouse, who, he said, was part of an anti-Cartesian movement. The only problem was that he had made the whole thing up. His parody (or joke?) didn’t go over well, and he resigned his position at the end of that year.
Beckett travelled around Europe for the next few years, writing essays, poems, and at least one novel, unpublished during his lifetime. He returned to Ireland briefly in 1937. He quarelled with his mother, after which he decided to live in Paris permanently. During the German occupation of France in World War II, Beckett joined the French resistance and received a decoration from the French government for his efforts.
Although friends with Joyce, and although he learned a great deal from him, Beckett strongly reacted against Joyce’s style. Joyce was important to him because of his love of language, among other things, but he thought that Joyce had put too much into his writing. Beckett said that he preferred to write in French because you could write without style. Of Joyce he wrote:
‘I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.’
In ‘Waiting for Godot’, Beckett’s tragicomedy and absurdism are paramount. Vladimir and Estragon spend the first act waiting for Godot whom they are not certain they have ever met. An encounter with the traveler Pozzo and his slave Lucky leaves them no more enlightened. The act ends with a boy informing them that Godot will not be arriving that day but possibly tomorrow. In the second act, they again wait, in slightly changed scenery. Lucky and Pozzo return, different, Pozzo being blind and Lucky mute. They are not sure they have met before. The boy reappears to say Godot is not coming, and says he is the boy they met yesterday. Vladimir unleashes a torrent of abuse, and when the boy departs they consider suicide. They do not have a rope, so decide to return the next day to do the act. The play ends with them standing there.
‘A play in which nothing happens, twice’, wrote Vivian Mercier, the theatre critic. Perhaps not surprisingly, the play was not successful in its first British performances. The American premiere in Miami was scarcely better. Eventually the play made it to Broadway, and to better reviews. Today, of course, it is a classic, a grim but humorous meditation on the modern condition. In 1969 Beckett received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the committee praised him ‘for his writing, which – in new forms for the novel and drama – in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation’.
We end not with grim nihilism – this ain’t that kind of blog – but with a fun fact! Beckett was always keen on manual labour. In school, he was particularly good at cricket, both as batsman and bowler. He twice played first-class games for Dublin University, and remains the only Nobel laureate in the pages of Wisden’s, the bible of cricket history. We think that’s an honour unlikely to be repeated for a long time.
