Irish playwright Samuel Beckett was a man who weighed his words, a solitary, lonely figure obsessed by silence, whose works struggled to express the absurdity of life.
One hundred years after his birth, his tragicomic plays stalked by a host of unforgettable, often grotesque, characters remain among the most important of 20th century theatre.
Born in Foxrock, near Dublin on April 13, 1906, Beckett was raised in a middle -class home, the son of a quantity surveyor and brought up to be a Protestant by his deeply religious mother.
After attending the same school as Oscar Wilde, he read French as well as Italian and Latin at Trinity College, Dublin.
It was French though that was to become his adopted tongue, with many of his most important works written first in French and then translated by him into English.
Ever in search of just the right words to express the meaningless of the life, Beckett apparently enjoyed the discipline and economy imposed on him by writing in a foreign language.
“From the first line, I was captivated by the stunning beauty of his text,” wrote French editor Jerome Lindon, who first published Beckett’s triology of novels Molloy, Malone and The Unnamable turned down by other publishers.
Beckett first visited Paris in 1928 where he taught English at the Ecole Normale Superiéure. During this time he met fellow countryman James Joyce who was to become a lifelong friend.
His first published work was an essay on Joyce and a year later he won his first literary prize for a poem called Whoroscope.
The tall writer with his piercing blue eyes and austere, hawk-like profile returned to Ireland to teach, but resigned not long afterwards and embarked on a five-year nomadic journey of Ireland, France, England and Germany, writing and doing odd jobs along the way.
He finally settled in Paris in 1937, and wrote his first novel Murphy in 1938 which was turned down by 42 publishers.
When war broke out, Beckett refused to flee to neutral Ireland and joined the French Resistance until 1942, when several members of his group were arrested and he was forced to head to the unoccupied south with his French girlfriend Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, who was later to become his wife.
After the war he returned to Paris, and his most prolific period as a writer began.
His first real triumph was the 1953 play Waiting for Godot. The play, in which “nothing happens, twice” as one critic famously put it, became an instant hit running for 400 performances at the Theatre de Babylone.
In the play two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, meet near a bare tree on a country road, and sit to wait for the promised arrival of Godot, trying to kill time, eating, telling jokes and remembering the past.
The play is a powerful metaphor for Beckett’s vision of the human condition, and the playwright abandoned conventional theatrical elements such as plot, characterisation, or explanation.
Beckett’s world is peopled by lonely men and women, many of them deformed or handicapped, struggling in vain to express themselves and communicate with others, lost and sad.
Endgame in 1957 continued in this vein, with Beckett exploring the theme of mutual dependance with his characters, the blind Hamm, and Clov occupying a claustrophic space with Nagg and Nell who live in dustbins.
His search for the perfect expression, his pre-occupation with the importance of silence and gestures, led him over the decades to strip away the usual conventions of the novel and stage.
In the 1963 Happy Days, Winnie is for some unknown reason encased in sand which gradually buries her up to the neck as she details the contents of her handbag, and hopes fervently that today will be a “happy day”.
Beckett’s theatre grew increasingly minimalist arriving at his 1970 play Breath, which lasts 35 seconds and has no actors or dialogue, just a litter-strewn stage, two cries and an intake of breath.
“He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him,” British playwright Harold Pinter once said of Beckett.
Beckett was among the first of the playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd to win fame, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.
But he refused to attend the ceremony and is rumoured to have given away much of the money to support struggling artists.
“He was the nicest man I knew. A man of crazy and unstinting generosity. The poorer and more dispossessed you were, the greater chance that he would give you unlimited help,” his editor Lindon told Agence France-Presse.
Beckett continued to write until his death in France on December 26, 1989, but the task grew increasingly difficult for in the end he said: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” – AFP