Information and Guide to Anglo-Irish writer Samuel Beckett created and maintained in Dublin, Ireland
Scenes from the life of Sam
He regaled one friend with memories of being in the womb, took another shopping for jerseys in Paris, and said he regretted calling his play Godot. As the centenary of his birth approaches, we publish moving memories of the great writer from friends, collaborators and admirers
Sunday February 26, 2006
The Observer
Beckett at the Royal Court Theatre in 1976. Photograph: Jane Brown |
Irish writer Francis Stuart (1902-2000)
I knew Beckett when he was on the staff of Trinity College [in 1930-1]. We were both from Protestant backgrounds, and we were both awkward. We used to go to this pub, Davy Byrne's, which had a back room. When I say 'we', there was a varying collection of would-be writers and what in those days were called 'bohemians', and people who weren't really writers, sort of hangers-on to the arts. I was very uncouth. I don't know if Beckett was uncouth but he felt 'out of it', and that brought us together. He used to have a ploy. He would ask one of the girls for a pair of nail scissors and then he would be doing his nails, which gave distance to him.
We had a game, whoever could stick a stamp highest on the wall got a free round of drinks. Beckett was tall, but he wasn't the tallest. We had a heavyweight boxer in Ireland called Jack Doyle who used to come there. It was a foregone conclusion that he would put the thing [highest], and when he came, he put his stamp, of course, beyond our reach. The rule was that you couldn't take your feet off the ground, naturally, yet when it came to Beckett's turn, Beckett put a stamp just higher than Jack Doyle's and yet we never saw how he did it; he was so lithe, reaching up. He was very athletic.
The last time I met Sam Beckett was in that very cold winter in Paris in '87. He gave me an appointment in this hotel. I hadn't seen him for exactly 50 years. And there he was, standing by the reception desk in - as it was very cold - a sort of overcoat and beret, ready, it looked to me, for flight. We went into the lounge and he ordered some wine. It wasn't particularly easy, not easy at all, I wished I hadn't come, but gradually it warmed up and there was real warmth, I felt. And for me it was a moving experience, and we talked. He said, of course, he was through with Ireland. I knew what his attitude was already, but he asked about Dublin and about mutual [acquaintances]. One thing that he said was, 'You know, Francis, my days are filled with trivia.'
Beckett the playwright
British actor Peter Woodthorpe (1931-2004) who played Estragon in the 1955 British premire of Waiting for Godot.
I was a biochemistry student at Cambridge, and was in the Footlights revue at the Scala when I received a phone call: 'Peter Hall would like you to play a part in a new play at the Arts Theatre.' I was sent the script and had a fit. I couldn't understand a word. But I had signed a contract, so I went to rehearsals and said 'Sir' to them all. The important thing Peter Hall said when he started was: 'I don't understand this play and we are not going to waste time trying to understand it.' The nerves built up on the first night. I have never seen people so ill. Peter Bull [who played Pozzo] was vomiting in basins and running to the loo. It was really panic. Then Peter came on and within two pages he jumped, in his nerves, eight pages. He played five of them, then suddenly realised his mistake and went right back to the beginning. And no one ever spotted that we had done those pages before! I didn't understand the play but I know that I felt how to do it. Its poetry spoke to me, and its humour. And once I got it, I never lost it. I played it by instinct and feeling.
On the first night there was only one curtain call and there were boos and cat-calls. But then the whole atmosphere changed - dramatically changed - after the Sunday reviews by Hobson and Tynan. There were two shows on a Sunday and they were sold out. Cheers and bravos and laughter. What it was was the power of those two papers [The Observer and the Sunday Times] with the theatre-going public. Nobody bothered with the 'dailies'. We heard that Sam Beckett was over in London to see the show [when it had transferred to the Criterion Theatre]. After the show he came to the dressing room. And there was this very frightening man; his appearance was extraordinary. It gave me a frisson: the recession of the eyes, and the lightness of them, a piercing blue. And I thought of him as a giant bird, a giant crow. Then suddenly his face changed totally. There was a beautiful smile and he just said, 'Bloody marvellous!' And he held me. But he disliked the production. Beckett also said to me that he deeply regretted calling it 'Godot', because everybody interpreted it as God. He said it had nothing to do with God. He was passionate about it.
Beckett the man
Writer and radio producer Martin Esslin (1918-2002)
I was trying to write a book about the theatre of the absurd in 1960 and I managed to get an interview with Beckett in the rue des Favorites at the beginning of 1961. I had, of course, looked up all the cuttings about him beforehand but there was very little in the BBC cuttings library, except for a long Observer profile which contained some rather sarcastic references to his being very much under the sway of his mother, and the suggestion was that he might well be homosexual.
He said, 'How very nice to meet you. You can ask me anything about my life but don't ask me to explain my work.' We got on like a house on fire. He told me all about going to Germany before the war and wandering through Europe and how it left him feeling. And [we talked about] Trinity College, Dublin and so on.
He opened a bottle of whiskey and I thought, my goodness, what a wonderful man. Then I thought, my God, can I ask him 'Are you married?' or 'What about women?' He was so scathing about this article in The Observer that I thought he would get furious and throw me out. And so I was in this Racinian conflict of conscience, between my duty as a researcher and my duty as a potential friend. In the end my friendship won and I didn't ask him. The same evening I went to the theatre with a friend. It was very late; we were having dinner after the theatre in a little Chinese restaurant and we came out about 2 at night. It was a wonderful spring evening. The Champs-ElysŽes was completely deserted, when, suddenly from the other side, I heard a voice saying, 'Mr Esslin, meet my wife,' and there was Beckett with Suzanne. This stumpy little woman was then introduced. And I said to myself: 'My God, virtue has been rewarded.' Anyhow, so I met her. Then I went back to London and wrote my piece.
At the beginning of 1961 I had got the job as assistant head of the Radio Drama Department of the BBC. During that period I did a lot of stuff with Beckett, and always got on very well. What is wonderful about him was that if he disliked anything he always said, 'It's my fault, it's the text, not the production.' He was the most courteous and considerate of people, never wanting to hurt anybody.
Sam told me (and I know he's told other people) that he remembers being in his mother's womb at a dinner party, where, under the table, he could remember the voices talking. And when I asked him once, 'What motivates you to write?' he said: 'The only obligation I feel is towards that enclosed poor embryo.' Because, he said, 'That is the most terrible situation you can imagine, because you know you're in distress but you don't know that there is anything outside this distress or any possibility of getting out of that distress' - and, if you remember, in Endgame, Sam had an absolutely mystical obligation towards that poor, suffering, enclosed being that doesn't know there is a way out. If you look through his work you find it confirmed over and over again. And the whole complex of Imagination Dead Imagine and Lessness and all these others always relates to this enclosed space from which there is no way out.
Beckett the friend
Eileen O'Casey (1900-95), singer, actress and wife of playwright Seán O'Casey
Seán never met Samuel Beckett, although there was mutual admiration. When Seán had his 80th birthday in 1960, Beckett wrote in the Irish Times: 'I send my enduring gratitude and homage to my great compatriot, Seán O'Casey, from France, where he is honoured.'
After Seán's death, I visited Paris and met Beckett there. From then on he became one of my dearest friends. On one occasion I had gone to Paris to see Seán's publishers, and also another old friend, Tom Curtiss, the theatre critic of the Herald Tribune. The weather was fine and Beckett took me to a restaurant where we ate outside. Then he took me for a walk around Paris. I told him I wanted to do some shopping: clothes for my son Breon, and for the husband of my daughter Shivaun. Beckett said he would go shopping with me, as he knew the places to go. He took me to my hotel and we arranged to meet the following day. I was dead tired after so much walking. To my dismay, at nine the next morning the telephone rang and the receptionist was telling me in an awed voice, 'Madame O'Casey, Monsieur Samuel Beckett is below waiting for you.' I am afraid I had to tell Beckett I would not be ready for an hour. He was as good as his word and took me to all the best shops, where I could get what I wanted: the shop for the lovely thin jerseys and the shop where he bought his own shirts.
Beckett the director
Actress Billie Whitelaw (1932-) worked on many occasions with Beckett. In Not I (1973) she was covered in a hood, shrouded in black and placed high up in a chair on a podium. It was a very demanding role and on one occasion she collapsed.
Sam and I used to work in the afternoon at my home. We used to go back and say [the play] together all the time. I'll tell you what, in my emotional memory, happened when I collapsed at rehearsal. It was nothing to do with Sam, nothing to do with Not I; it was to do with sensory deprivation. If you are blindfolded and have a hood over your face, you hyperventilate, you suffer from sensory deprivation. And I hung on and hung on until I couldn't any longer. I just went to pieces because I was convinced I was like an astronaut tumbling out into space. That's when I fell down; I couldn't go on. They lifted me down and, I think Jocelyn [Herbert, the designer] or Robbie [Hendry, the stage manager] or somebody, got me a brandy and milk, and I remember Sam walked down the central aisle of the Royal Court saying, 'Oh Billie, what have I done to you, what have I done to you?' And I drank the brandy and milk and said, 'OK, that's another barrier cracked. Back up in there, but can we have a little slit in there and a little blue light so that I know I'm here, because I can see that?' So the reason for the breakdown had nothing to do with the play or the rehearsal, it had to do with the pure technicality of being blindfolded, hooded, speaking at great speed and hyperventilating.
Beckett the mentor
American writer Paul Auster (1947-)
I moved to Paris in February 1971, a few weeks after my 24th birthday. I met Joan Mitchell, the American painter who lived in a house once owned by Monet in the town of VŽtheuil. Years earlier, Joan had been married to Barney Rosset, the founder and publisher of Grove Press, and she and Beckett knew each other well. One evening she and I happened to be discussing his work, and when she found out how important it was to me, she looked up and said, 'Would you like to meet him?' 'Yes,' I answered. 'Of course I would.' 'Well, just write him a letter,' she announced, 'and tell him I said so.'
I went home and wrote the letter, and three days later I received a reply informing me to meet him at La Closerie des Lilas the following week. I can't remember what year it was. It might have been as early as 1972 - or as late as 1974.
I saw him only once after that - on a subsequent visit to Paris in 1979 - and over the years we exchanged a couple of dozen notes and letters. It could hardly be classified as a friendship, but given my admiration for his work (which bordered on idolatry when I was a young man), our personal encounters and fitful correspondence were exceedingly precious to me. Among a hoard of memories, I would cite the moving speech he delivered one afternoon in a Paris cafe about his love for France and how lucky he felt to have spent his adult life there, and the kind and encouraging letters he wrote whenever I sent him something I had published: books, translations, articles about his work. There were funny moments as well: the unforgettable line from our first meeting when, gesturing with his arm and failing to attract the waiter's attention, he turned to me and said, in that soft Irish brogue of his, 'There are no eyes in the world harder to catch than a barman's.'
But one remark from that afternoon at La Closerie des Lilas stands out from the others, and not only does it reveal much about Beckett the man, it speaks to the dilemma all writers must live with: eternal doubt, the inability to judge the worth of what one has created. During the conversation, he told me that he had just finished translating Mercier and Camier, his first French novel, which had been written in the mid-forties. I had read the book in French and had liked it very much. 'A wonderful book,' I said. I was just a kid, after all, and I couldn't suppress my enthusiasm. But Beckett shook his head and said, 'Oh no, no, not very good. In fact, I've cut out about 25 per cent of the original. The English version is going to be quite a bit shorter than the French.' After that we started talking about other things. Then, out of the blue, five or 10 minutes later, he leant across the table and said, 'You really liked it, huh? You really thought it was good?' This was Samuel Beckett, remember, and not even he had any grasp of the value of his work. No writer ever knows, not even the best ones. 'Yes,' I said to him. 'I really thought it was good.'
Beckett the master Tom Stoppard, playwright (1937-)
There's stuff I've written I can't bear to watch. They get rotten like fruit and the softest get rotten first. They're not like ashtrays. You make an ashtray and come back next year and it's the same ashtray. Beckett and Pinter have a lot more chance of writing ashtrays because they've thrown out all the potentially soft stuff. I think Beckett has redefined the minima of what theatre could be ... In 1956 when Waiting for Godot was done in Bristol, Peter O'Toole was in the company. I was immobilised for weeks after I saw it. Historically, people had assumed that in order to have a valid theatrical event you had to have x. Beckett did it with x minus 5. And it was intensely theatrical. He changed the ground rules.
· Extracted from 'Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett', edited by James and Elizabeth Knowlson, published next month by Bloomsbury, £20. Copyright remains with the contributors.
What where
· Born 13 April 1906, Foxrock, Dublin.
· Educated at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, and Trinity College, Dublin.
· Went to Paris in 1928 as a reader in English. Taught French at Trinity College, Dublin until 1932.
· Published his first book of poetry, Whoroscope, 1930; More Pricks than Kicks, a collection of stories, 1934.
· Settled in Paris in 1939, preferring 'France at war to Ireland neutral'. Awarded the Croix de Guerre by General Charles de Gaulle, 1945.
· Waiting for Godot (1955) brought him international fame.
· Married lifelong companion Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil in 1961.
· Won Nobel Prize for Literature, 1969.
· Died shortly after his wife, 1989.
