Beckett's Unhappy Days

...But the friendship collapsed a few years later when Joyce's daughter, Lucia, an unstable woman, fell in love with Beckett...

...When he got involved in the Resistance, he did so only because his friends were being harassed by the Gestapo...

...The French government, at the end of the fighting, awarded him a Croix de Guerre, an honor that with typical modesty he never revealed to any friends or scholars...

...clear to me at last that the dark I have been fighting off all this time is in reality my most...

...In Play, the three characters, two women and a man, each stuck in a jar, recite the story of their triangle...

...By the end of the book, I had not only satisfied my voyeurism—one of the reasons, after all, for reading any biography—but also was wiser about plays and novels that always appeared to me hermetic, discrete objects, referring to nothing outside of themselves: That they are autobiographical was news to me...

...The rest, as they say, is history...

...His prose and poetry were sophomorie jottings...

...It soon made its way to England and America, where reactions were more varied...

...According to a rumor that has not died, the aspiring poet served as Joyce's paid secretary...

...unshatterable association till my dying day of story and night with the light of understanding and...

...He would face his terror head on...

...After his appointment ran out, Beckett returned to Ireland, a country he had come to associate with stolidity, tedium and artistic repression, to teach at Trinity...

...This rumor, in turn, has fed speculation that Godot and Endgame are really about "Shem" and "Sam...

...I am," he once wrote, "what her savage loving has made me...

...It is recorded in an early draft of Krapp'sLast Tape (1958), the most autobiographical of his writings: "The turning point at last...

...He lowered the blinds and spent the days in darkness with blankets lowered over his head...

...Ads were taken out in the papers asking lowbrow theatergoers to stay away, while actors and audience were asked to gather after the performance for a discussion of Godot's seemingly complicated oscillations between hope and despair, of its picture of life as a wasteland, of its pathos and humor...

...Beckett is no Ionesco, a second-rater boringly going on about absurdity, repeating it again and again in play after play...

...Their love-hate duet, with May determined to dominate and Sam equally determined not to be dominated regardless of the price he had to pay, occupied a pivotal role in the future Nobel laureate's life...

...He has been the subject of dozens of books in almost every language, with new ones appearing regularly...

...The point here is not that art should ennoble men, or paint them in a kindlier light, but that it shouldn't betray them, either...

...Already self-contained and taciturn—hallmarks of his character—he earned grades that hovered around average...

...For in Samuel Beckett: A Biography (Harcourt Brace, 736 pp., $19.95), Deirdre Bair tells us all we could ever want to know about the shadowy Irishman...

...Soon a terrible depression overtook him—neither his first nor his last—in part because he was living at home in Foxrock with his mother, who constantly badgered him to make something of himself...

...and Watt, another in the same vein, worse than the first...

...But something happened, during a brief visit to Dublin, that compensated for the loss: One night, walking through the streets, he had a revelation...

...This I imagine is what I have chiefly to set down this evening against the day when my work will be done and perhaps no place left in memory and no thankfulness for the miracle that—for the fire it set alight...

...Still dependent on his family for money, he moved to Paris permanently, spent a great deal of time sitting silently in cafes drinking, and wrote...

...More important, his works, particularly the controversial Waiting for Godot, have entered the public consciousness...

...at the side of the stage a shadowy figure lifts and lowers his arms in a gesture of "helpless compassion...

...Give me Brecht any time...

...Beckett's response to the brouhaha was twofold...

...a collection of short stories, some of them very fine, entitled More Pricks Than Kicks...

...The Paris he returned to was not the one he fled...

...The two years there were crucial...

...her anguish caused her father to promptly exile his amanuensis from the circle of the faithful...

...Theirs was the relationship of a professor and his trusted research assistant...

...What I saw then was that the assumption I had been going on all my life, namely...

...If the 20th century has revealed the meaninglessness of man's efforts, it has also revealed man's ability to survive all the same...

...unfortunately, along with her looks he inherited her intractability: Being a good boy, or what good boys grow up to be—solid members of the Dublin community— wasn't for him...

...Yet despite the fact that his plays have been analyzed, scrutinized, allegorized, and hailed as the central works of Modernism, Beckett has remained something of a mystery—a recluse who refuses to offer explanations of either himself or his artistic progeny...

...his homecoming was a daily celebration...

...Written as a "marvelous, liberating" diversion from the rigors of prose, it was his first successful effort at playwriting...

...The mother, May, was a tall, gaunt woman with a demonic will who tried to shape the world around her to her bourgeois demands—"a veritable slave to manners, morals and class...

...It was then that he developed a reputation for unorthodox brilliance in modern languages...

...In New York, smart hype produced better results...

...Born on April 3, Good Friday, 1906, Samuel Beckett was "a pale, sickly baby, long and thin, crying constantly, decidedly different from his robust and placid older brother [Frank...

...As Elie Wiesel wrote in the Messengers of God, "It is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime and still not give up the act of laughter...

...Beckett, in fact, once referred to the light as the fourth character...

...But he had now finally found the proper medium...

...During the next 15 years, there were few signs that Beckett would one day become a world famous writer...

...First, his belief that action in the world, particularly political action, is senseless, a waste of time...

...B ' air, whose critical powers are dim at best, has nonetheless amply and movingly detailed the suffering, integrity and genius that were needed to accept this view of life and distill it in each successive work...

...Trite as the affirmation may sound, life goes on—tragicomic in its fumbling yet heroic attempt to overcome impotence and emptiness...

...In Endgame, Hamm and Clov are deeply aware that they are actors who strut and fret their hour upon the stage and are condemned to repeat this madness every night an audience shows up...

...and Proust, an intelligent critical essay occasionally overburdened by its prose...

...Like his hero Proust, Beckett locked himself away in a Paris apartment—accompanied only by Suzanne, his long-time roommate and now his wife—and more or less stayed there for five years, working assiduously...

...the rest of the world must take care of itself...

...In London and Miami, audiences less sophisticated than the French poured out en masse before the evening was halfway done...

...hortly thereafter began the famous "seige in a room...

...For all I care the rest of the world may go to hell at tomorrow's sunset...

...In addition, he had a small trunkful of unpublished material: Included was Murphy, like most experimental novels an impoverished affair that dives into the void and comes up empty-handed...

...Second, I find that Beckett's voice can no longer lay the same claim to my attention it once did, for it has become the voice of the antihuman...

...On the other hand, constant productions of his play brought him into closer contact with the theater in an effort to assure that his meaning was not being violated...

...Most of the old gang were dead or had moved...

...What is this attitude except a less bohemian version of George Jean Nathan's infamous remark: "If all the Armenians were to be killed tomorrow and if half of Russia were to starve to death the day after, it would not matter to me in the least, what concerns me alone is myself and the interest of a few close friends...

...of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of critical articles...

...Beckett idolized Joyce, aping his mannerisms to the point of wearing a pair of shiny, ill-fitting shoes—ill-fitting because they were Joyce's size...

...He began writing poetry and met James Joyce—the sun shining on the small, intense group of Irish expatriates in Paris...

...In 1921, he was elected to the school's Literary and Scientific Society, and he was well liked by his fellows, but more for his athletic prowess than for his conceptual dexterity...

...By the end of November (1931) he had taken to his bed permanently, lying rigidly in the fetal position facing the wall...

...and in France there is even a journal devoted to studying Beckett...

...in the second to the neck...

...Produced and directed by Roger Blin, Godot won the immediate acclaim of anyone who was anyone in Paris (a city where everyone fancies himself someone...

...He remained as depressed and as determined as ever to set down his vision of doom...

...But the stage, by its very nature, was metonymically related to one of his essential ideas—esse es percipi (to be is to be perceived) and the horror resulting therefrom...

...It is not hard, I think, to see the correspondences between certain images in his work, notably the room in Endgame, and his state of mind as described by Bair: "He became so sloppy that his family hardly knew him...

...And bring their own aspirin...

...My work," he wrote to Alan Schneider, apropos of Endgame, "is a matter of fundamental sounds, and I accept responsibility for nothing else...

...He held— and holds today, presumably—that an artist's job is to be an artist...

...In Happy Days, Winnie appears in the first act buried in a mound to the waist...

...Remained a mystery, that is, until now...

...Had he died in 1945, he would have left behind a legacy no more substantial than that of any promising avant-garde bohemian ostensibly obsessed with his "art" but mostly with himself...

...Equally important, the theater made it possible to give concrete life to his images of despair, as can be seen from a short rundown of several of his plays following Godot...

...Yet in the struggle between language and silence the odds are heavily stacked against language—hence, against meaning—since we all sink inexorably into death, the greatest, most terrifying silence of all...

...He had, it is true, published a number of awful poems...

...Where there was once laughter—and we remember that Godot was subtitled a tragicomedy—there is now a monstrous seriousness and pathos, a mouth condemned to talk until it is overtaken by death...

...His trousers were stained and spotted with remains of food and spilled liquor...

...However, much as I admire his contributions to drama and the English language, certain things about Beckett trouble me...

...it was once much spoken of...

...He wore a filthy pullover sweater on top of a shabby shirt that he had bought in Germany the year before and seldom washed...

...In Not I all that appears is the mouth of a 70-year-old woman, spewing words to keep from disappearing into the abyss (you may remember the abyss...

...Instead of being overcome by the impossibility of saying anything, he would write about the impossibility of saying anything...

...He tried to keep productions everywhere under his control through an endless stream of correspondence, and when he was willing to travel, through his own intervention...

...Sam was often the unwilling recipient of her efforts...

...Other than travel, the loathsome task of dealing with journalists and curious visitors, and the extra money, fame changed little in Beckett's life...

...And compassion is "helpless...

...Samuel Beckett has given up the act of laughter...

...Thus it is not surprising that in traveling through Nazi Germany a few weeks before the war, the political situation made no impression on him...

...Beckett's real work began after his return from Roussillon in the Vau-cluse, where he had gone to escape from the Nazis, who were hunting him for his intelligence gathering activities on behalf of the Resistance...

...All of his characters are obsessed by the notion that they exist only in relation to the Watcher, and that when he ceases to exist, they might too...

...Intellectually, Beckett blossomed in his third year at Trinity College...

...From this isolation issued what many consider to be his greatest achievements: the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable, and, of course, Waiting for Godot...

...The father, William, a rather rotund and successful Dublin surveyor who liked to drink, eat and take walks, was adored by the two sons...

...The agony these caused him may account for Gogo's business with the boots at the opening of Godot...

...If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them...

...Bair offers what should be the final word on the matter: "Joyce was quick to appreciate Beckett's intelligence and wit and soon had him performing errands and doing research on a routine basis...

...Beckett's descent—or ascent, if you like—into minimalism reflects the basic dilemma expressed in his entire oeuvre: It is impossible to say anything urgent, urgent to say something...

...As he subsequently said, "I don't think anyone has exploited impotence before...

...Following his graduation in 1928, he went to France to take up a position as a lecteur at France's Ecole Normale Superieure...

...His battered green raincoat had a pocket permanently distorted by the bottle of stout he carried in it, and his boots were threadbare...

...But they can speak only when the spotlight hits them...

...Unable to return the affection, he eventually had to spurn Lucia...

...When it shines somewhere else, they sink back into the darkness...

...Beckett's school days, first at Earls-fort House School and later at Portora Royal School, weren't especially distinguished...

...On the one hand, he did not care a fig for what the audience thought ("That bog," says Vladimir, pointing to the spectators), nor was he particularly responsive to those besieging him for an explanation of the play's meaning...