Samuel Beckett was an extraordinary writer; but he was extraordinary in a number of other ways. An Irishman, he was not Catholic like most of his countrymen but Protestant, from a Huguenot family which had come to Ireland in the eighteenth century, fleeing religious persecution. He himself travelled in the opposite direction, leaving Ireland when still quite young, like many famous Irishmen before him, and settling in France.
Beckett wrote most of his work in two languages: his native English and French. He spoke a number of other languages besides these; he was highly educated and had been a good student, but he preferred to keep his distance from the world of academe and rejected the academic career path.
His parents were well off and he had a comfortable childhood in which he lacked for nothing; as an adult he spurned material comforts and led an ascetic life. When his writing brought fame and fortune, he made no use of his money except for necessities, and gave much of it away. He also shunned publicity, refusing interviews, television appearances and readings. He even refused to go in person to collect his Nobel Prize, asking his French publisher to attend the ceremony for him. Throughout his life he fiercely guarded his privacy and independence. But he was an extraordinarily warm person, kind and generous to his friends.
He avoided involvement in politics and never took sides or spoke out in public conflicts of any kind; but during World War II he unhesitatingly joined the Resistance, which nearly cost him his life and later earned him the French Military Cross. The certificate was signed by General de Gaulle. After the war he stood up for victims of persecution in various parts of the world, including those living under communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe. This, too, he did quietly and with no publicity. When Poland was under martial law he gave a sizeable chunk of his royalties to ‘Solidarity’, and he dedicated one of his last plays, Catastrophe, to Václav Havel, who at the time was serving a three-year sentence in a communist prison in Czechoslovakia.
His work absorbed him to the exclusion of almost all else. ‘I love the word, words have been my only loves,’ says the narrator in one of his short pieces of fiction, and Beckett might have said as much of himself. He wrote poems, short stories, essays and novels, but he is best known as a playwright and innovator of theatrical forms – the creator of a new kind of theatre.
His style is at once plain and difficult: the words are simple, but they conceal a multiplicity of meanings that have to be teased out. His writing is condensed, concise and direct, in accordance with his principle that ‘less means more’; it is also extremely disciplined in its attention to rhythm and form, so much so that it is almost like music, to which indeed it has been compared. When directing his own plays Beckett always planned everything in the minutest detail: the intonation of every phrase spoken, its rhythm and tempo and where the stresses should fall, the number of steps an actor was to take on stage, the exact number of seconds every action was to take. Under his direction his plays were like complex pieces of machinery in which every part worked smoothly in perfect coordination with every other.
He writes in a minor key; his work is gloomy and depressing. At the same time it is full of humour, ingenious word games and comic dialogue which is genuinely funny. In his prose works, too, there is much black humour. But it is not the humour that dispels the stifling atmosphere of gloom in Beckett’s work; it is something that one can only call beauty. The beauty of his prose – its symmetry, its echoes and refrains, its cadences, its counterpoint, its crystalline clarity – is striking even when – perhaps especially when – he is writing about chaos and doubt. And this beauty, this attention to form, is a source of catharsis.
From: Dialogues on Beckett
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