Samuel Beckett article by Irish author Paul R. Hyde. Samuel Beckett quote, Murphy, comment by other writers

Samuel Beckett

"How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at His little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?" Samuel Beckett.

"Beckett is dead, a consummation he long claimed to seek. 'I have no bone to pick with graveyards' is one of the best of his bitter-sweet comments on the whole business. The world mourns the loss of a great writer, for whom recognition was almost a burden, and those of us who knew him will also miss a courteous, punctilious, faintly lunatic friend; a soft touch for a sob story or a permanent loan." John Montague.

Few can crawl out of the long shadow of Joyce but Beckett managed this feat and began to slowly crawl in the opposite direction. From the perfect opening sentence of Murphy, 'The sun shone, having no alternative, upon the nothing new', readers know they are in the company of a prose-master who has nothing to say but will say nothing beautifully and that he will do his level best to avoid all the comforts of meaning – which had, in any case, become quite meaningless. (And the writer who is not envious of that sentence is either dishonest or is not a true writer.)

Described as a minimalist, as a pioneer of metafiction, as a creative innovator and a philosophical writer etc., Beckett nonetheless defies all definition and would have been happy with none. His characters are eccentric & displaced nobodies, derelicts who can no longer distinguish between life and death. And his subject matter is all that has been left out of literature, the detritus of being and of consciousness - which is to say everything. Of him Harold Pinter said, "...the more he grinds my nose in the shit, the more I am grateful to him." That is quite an achievement for one who was long a wise investor in John Jameson & Sons.

There can be little doubt that without the paradoxical and legendary success of Waiting for Godot - the play in which nothing happens twice - Beckett's work would never have enjoyed world-wide acclaim. Beckett's belief that 'success' is merely a perverse form of failure had no effect on the axiom that 'nothing succeeds like success'. Godot - influenced by Maeterlinck's Les Aveugles (1890) - was staged in a theatre about to close down when there was nothing to lose. And having failed to fail, Beckett was thereafter 'damned to fame'.

His voice was, very probably, unique in western literature. He was, above all, a great humorist. Who else could have written about the hot & steamy death of a lobster?

For his comic and stoic spirit, his ruthless honesty, his pitiless vision of the pitiful, and the lifelong struggle with language, Beckett has no master. Many will imitate but none will follow.

It was Madeleine Renaud who remarked of Beckett: "... he is one of those exceptional men to whom love and lucidity are on the same level." Those who understand Beckett's work at its deepest levels, know that Beckett is, in the end, the supreme poet of that most saddening and unnatural experience – love.

PS. Alec Reid's book All I can Manage, More than I could (1968) is one of the best books ever on Beckett and his theatre.

Further reading:

Damned to Fame by James Knowlson. Bloomsbury, 1996.
The Long Sonata of The Dead by Michael Robinson, 1970 London.
All I Can Manage, More Than I Could; An Approach to the Plays of Samuel Beckett by Alec Reid Grove Press NY. 1971.
Samuel Beckett; The Last Modernist by Anthony Cronin. Harper Collins.