Samuel Beckett

Dublin to the rue d'Ulm

Beckett grew up comfortably Protestant in Catholic Ireland — his father was a quantity surveyor, the professional who prices building work — and was schooled at Portora Royal, a Protestant boarding school in Enniskillen, before entering Trinity College Dublin — Ireland's oldest university — in 1923 to read French and Italian. He was a genuine athlete as well as a scholar: he is the only winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature who also appears in the cricket record books as a first-class player, the game's top competitive grade. In October 1928 Trinity sent him to Paris on an exchange as lecteur d'anglais, the visiting English tutor, at the École Normale Supérieure on the rue d'Ulm in the 5th arrondissement.

The exchange lasted two years and decided everything. He returned to Trinity in 1930 as a lecturer in French, took his master's degree in 1931 and published a short book on Marcel Proust — the French novelist of À la recherche du temps perdu ("In Search of Lost Time") — the same year — and in 1932 abandoned academic life altogether, to his family's dismay. There followed six restless years between Dublin, London and Germany: a first collection of stories, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), a first novel, Murphy (1938), and a long poem, Whoroscope, which had won a prize offered by Nancy Cunard, the English heiress who ran the Hours Press in Paris and printed it in 1930. It was his first published book, and it was published in Paris.

Joyce's circle — and the secretary myth

In Paris the young Beckett was taken into the circle around James Joyce, the Irish novelist then twenty-four years his senior and at work on the enormous, multilingual book that would become Finnegans Wake. Beckett wrote the opening essay for the 1929 volume of tributes to that work-in-progress, "Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce", and as Joyce's eyesight failed he read aloud to him, ran errands, took down passages and helped with the research the book devoured.

That is the whole basis of the claim, repeated in a thousand articles, that Beckett was "James Joyce's secretary". He never was. He held no post, took no wage and had no title; he was one of several young admirers who helped an almost-blind writer, and he said so himself. The friendship was also not smooth: Joyce's daughter Lucia fell in love with Beckett, he told her plainly that he came to the house for her father, and the Joyces cut him off for a period as a result. What he took from Joyce mattered more than any job would have. Joyce, he came to think, worked by knowing and adding — omniscience, omnipotence, more words — and his own way had to be the opposite: subtraction, impoverishment, less and less until what remains cannot be removed.

The knife, January 1938

Beckett moved to Paris permanently in the summer of 1937, and in January 1938, walking home at night, he was accosted by a stranger — a pimp, as it turned out — who stabbed him in the chest. The blade narrowly missed his heart and punctured a lung. He was carried to hospital, where Joyce arranged and paid for a private room. Asked at the trial why he had done it, his assailant answered that he did not know: "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur" — "I don't know, sir" — a line so exactly like the dialogue Beckett would later write that biographers have never let it go.

Among the visitors to his hospital bed was Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, a pianist he knew slightly from a Paris tennis club. She stayed. They lived together through the war and its aftermath, she carried his manuscripts around Paris publishers when nobody would take them, and they married in 1961; she died five months before he did. The attack has become the shorthand story about Beckett's Paris — a random assault by a man with no reason, on a street he had chosen to live on — because it sits so close to the shape of everything he wrote after it.

The Resistance cell, and the flight to Roussillon

Beckett was in Ireland visiting his mother when war broke out in 1939, and went straight back to France. As a citizen of neutral Ireland he could have sat the war out in Dublin in complete safety; he said he preferred France at war to Ireland at peace. In 1941 he joined Gloria SMH, a Franco-British intelligence network in Paris, translating and collating agents' reports on German troop movements and typing them up for transmission to London — dangerous clerical work, done in his own flat.

The network was betrayed in August 1942 and its members arrested in numbers; Beckett and Suzanne left their apartment within hours and went south on foot and by train, eventually reaching Roussillon, a small red-ochre village in the Vaucluse in Provence. They spent the rest of the Occupation there under false papers, Beckett working as an agricultural labourer for local farmers and writing the novel Watt at night. France awarded him the Croix de Guerre — the war cross, the country's decoration for bravery under fire — for the Gloria work; he called it all "boy scout stuff" and rarely spoke of it. In 1945 he went back north to Saint-Lô in Normandy, a town flattened in the fighting that followed the Allied landings of June 1944, as storekeeper and interpreter for an Irish Red Cross hospital.

Writing in French, and Godot at the Babylone

After the war he made the decision his whole reputation rests on: he began writing in French. His stated reason was simple, and it is worth taking literally — in French it was easier to write without style. English was his instrument, and he played it too well; the borrowed language forced plainness, stripped the ornament he distrusted in himself, and put a useful distance between the writer and the words. He then translated the results back into English himself, so that the English versions are neither originals nor ordinary translations.

The French years produced an extraordinary run: the three novels Molloy (1951), Malone meurt ("Malone Dies", 1951) and L'Innommable ("The Unnamable", 1953), all issued by Les Éditions de Minuit ("Midnight Editions"), the small Left Bank publisher founded in secret under the Occupation to print writers the Germans had banned, which became his house for life. In the middle of writing them, as a relief from the novels, he wrote a two-act play about two tramps on a country road waiting for a man who does not come.

En attendant Godot ("Waiting for Godot") was published by Minuit in 1952 and first performed on 5 January 1953 at the Théâtre de Babylone, a tiny house on the boulevard Raspail in Montparnasse run by Jean-Marie Serreau, in a staging by the actor-director Roger Blin — who also played Pozzo, the bullying landowner who passes along the road, with Lucien Raimbourg and Pierre Latour as Vladimir and Estragon, the two tramps who wait, and Jean Martin as Lucky, the servant Pozzo drives on a rope. Nothing about it should have worked: no plot, no scenery beyond a tree, no arriving Godot. Audiences argued in the aisles, and the play ran, and within three years it had been staged across Europe and America. The English Waiting for Godot is Beckett's own.

The prize he would not collect

Fame did not change the routine: a flat in the 14th arrondissement, work in the mornings, a country retreat at Ussy-sur-Marne, and a stream of plays that got shorter and stranger — Fin de partie ("Endgame", 1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1958), Happy Days (1961). His Paris friendships were with artists as much as writers: he knew the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, whose spindly plaster tree was made for the 1961 Paris revival of Godot, and the French artist Marcel Duchamp, who had once exhibited a factory-made urinal as sculpture, with whom he played chess.

In October 1969 the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, which chooses the Nobel Prize in Literature each year, gave him the prize. Beckett, on holiday in Tunisia, did not go to Stockholm; his publisher Jérôme Lindon of Minuit collected the prize on his behalf, and Beckett gave the money away, largely to writers and to the Trinity College library. He kept working into his eighties, in prose that shrank towards silence, and died on 22 December 1989 in Paris, five months after Suzanne. They are buried together in Montparnasse Cemetery under a plain granite slab: his one instruction about the stone was that it could be any colour anybody liked, so long as it was grey.