Samuel Beckett: A light that never goes out

Samuel Beckett was born 108 years ago on Sunday. His friend and publisher John Calder recalls a modest genius who loved to talk late into the night over a glass of whiskey.

SAMUEL Beckett died in 1989 at the age of 83. I was always very close to him as a friend as well as an author and was privileged to publish him from the time I met him, shortly after the first London performance of Waiting for Godot, which only Harold Hobson had reviewed favourably in his Sunday Times regular column. Hobson had gone back several times to review it again, which led to other drama critics going back to see it again and change their minds about its merit.

I came to know Beckett as a man of great learning which he modestly concealed. He was also a great conversationalist, willing to stay up talking until late in the night on a variety of topics, from the day’s news to the things that interested us both, such as literature, music and painting. He enjoyed his wine, which accompanied a small appetite, but he also was not averse to an Irish whisky.

Because he was so easily recognised he was frequently accosted in the street. This led to his food shopping trips becoming so rare that he weakened his body through starvation until a collapse led to his having to move to an old people’s home. There he was fed and received a daily doctor’s visit, seldom going out except to feed the birds. I would bring him books and occasionally a bottle of Jameson, and we talked about the state of the world until he was tired.

His reputation was always very high, from the time when his plays and then his novels became widely known, and he worked indefatigably at revising, cutting and rewriting until he had achieved what he considered to be the maximum of content for a minimum of description and word use. He disliked discussing his work and he seldom did except for the occasional query on my part, but he never wanted to make a change once he had finished something to his own satisfaction. What we discussed was a wide range of topics, mainly about the work of others. Sometimes he would bring something he had read to my attention, which I would then contract for publication if available.

The profundity of Beckett’s conversation went, like his writing, into the most basic questions about human existence. Although he had no strong religious opinions, the lingering remains of his mother’s deep piety and his Calvinist education gave a dualistic tint to his thinking, so that as an agnostic he was always in two minds and it is not difficult to see a manichaeistic tendency in all his work. He cited Geulincx, who he probably discovered as an almost unknown theologian in the Trinity Library during his short-term teaching at his old university before his career as a writer had begun. Geulincx saw the will of God as the source of all existence, but he did not see any reason for God to ever know that we exist or remember that He had created us.

Beckett above all was aware of the immensity of space and time. It is interesting to extend his thinking to the point where we can imagine that both of these are limitless, so that God, as Schopenhauer might have put it, is always too busy creating new worlds to even have to know that we exist. Beckett asks many questions about theology but one of the most interesting is: “What was God doing with Himself before the Creation?”.

No writer since Shakespeare has come as near as Beckett to portraying the complexity of human nature, the creativity of mankind and the essential tragedy of life’s shortness, always making us face the certainty of death. “We are born astride of a grave,” says Pozzo. “The light gleams an instant and then it’s night once more.” It is one of the great speeches in Waiting for Godot, followed shortly by Vladimir’s despairing one. Once described as “a play in which nothing happens — twice”, it is now seen as the 20th century’s equivalent of Hamlet, ripe with rich, poetic quotations which have become part of the language of our time. Although his poems are less well-known, those of his middle period and later life will eventually become prominent among his other writing.

I have written a book on his philosophy, which really covers his entire output, and a second one on his theology,. The latter goes into the deep ambiguity of his attitudes, to some extent mocking and numerous in the principal plays and novels, but which emphasises, particularly in the very late Ill Seen Ill Said, how he used his deep knowledge of religious belief to invent a theology of his own. The ill seen ghostly female presence of his late novella is the Virgin Mary, hidden by the author as well as the fictional narrator, and I think I was the first to discover this, which did not please the author when I put it to him. He would neither admit nor deny. It can be seen as the last chapter of the New Testament, and the reason that this spectral presence is still haunting the earth is probably that there is no record of Mary’s death, tradition having it that she was bodily lifted up to Heaven. Beckett has simply delayed this event up to the time of his text.

The Bible plays a large part in all of Beckett’s work, and in his last short novel, Worstward Ho, he goes back to the very beginning of human existence to describe in most scientific terms the act of creation itself, where one atom in space eventually meets another and fuses, leading ultimately to life and evolution. It is a beautiful text, largely misunderstood because of some memorable lines referring to failure in everyday, not Darwinian terms. Beckett’s work is not voluminous compared to the enormous amount of writing about him, and this will continue both because the ambiguities give opportunities to different interpretations and because of the richness of the writing itself, which does not allow for imitation or follow-ups.

Whereas most literature is about the author’s own social circle or about one to which he had some access, Beckett preferred to look at and described those at the bottom of humanity so that tramps, refugees or those lost in a world that has abandoned them or is disappearing make up most of the background to his work. Molloy is a tramp, Moran a priggish self-regarding, churchgoing member of the Irish bourgeoisie, a class the author knew well, but all his characters, however they start out, end in disaster or, as in the principal plays, are not far from that fate. A deep pessimism is what many people find most difficult to take in Beckett’s work, so different from the values of a consumer society that surrounds us urging us to be always optimistic, smiling and expecting the best. A deep realism infects all of Beckett’s work, constantly reminding us that we are all on the way to inevitable death and that the suffering of the world is always near and inescapable.

But the biggest paradox about reading Beckett or seeing his plays is that one always feels better afterwards, not in a light-minded manner but deep down inside ourselves in a way that is beyond explanation. There is no explanation. It is the way it is.

There can now be no question but that Beckett is the greatest literary genius of the 20th century whose work in spite of its gloom is strangely life-enhancing. It is not possible to get to know his work well without becoming an addict and the fascination never fades.

nJohn Calder is a publisher and author whose work includes Pursuit: the Uncensored Memoirs of John Calder; The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett; and The Theology of Samuel Beckett