Copied, without permission, from today’s The Writer’s Almanac. None of the words that follow are mine:
It’s the birthday of the playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, born in a rich suburb of Dublin, Ireland called Foxrock (1906). His mother was a tall, strict woman, famous in her neighborhood for her short temper. Beckett started rebelling against her at an early age by climbing trees and jumping out of them, spreading his arms to break his fall on the branches.
He moved to Paris and became one of James Joyce’s assistants and disciples. He wanted badly to write like Joyce, but he had little success. He was struggling to support himself as a translator and miserable about his failures as a writer, when one day he was attacked and stabbed in the chest by a pimp, the knife barely missing his heart.
Word spread that he was in the hospital, and a surprising number of people came to visit him. He didn’t know he had so many friends. James Joyce brought him yellow roses and Nora Joyce baked him a custard pudding. Even the Irish ambassador came. One of his visitors was a French woman named Suzanne who had seen him give a lecture. She later became his wife.
Beckett got involved in the French Resistance during World War II, and he helped transmit secret messages across the boarder in packs of cigarettes. He had been struggling for years to write a novel, and the effort had only made him miserable, so in the midst of the war he decided to try playwriting. He said, “Life at the time was too demanding, too terrible, and I thought theatre would be a diversion.”
Beckett never published the first play he wrote, but he began to use playwriting as a way to cheer himself up after he got blocked writing a novel. He was struggling with a new play just after the war was over, so he decided to write another play. As an exercise, he made it as simple as possible: it would be a play about two men, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for a man named Godot, who never arrives. He finished it in just a few months, faster than he’d ever finished anything he’d ever written. And that was Waiting For Godot (1952), the play in which Beckett wrote, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”
He didn’t have much hope that it would ever be produced, but his wife thought it was a masterpiece, and she showed it to everyone involved with the theater that she could find. It was finally produced in 1953, and became an international sensation.
Samuel Beckett said, “I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.”
He also said, “All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.”
He also wrote, “I didn’t invent this buzzing confusion. It’s all around us…the only chance of renewal is to open our eyes and see the mess.”
