AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF Samuel Barclay Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett (1977) 

Samuel Barclay Beckett (born April 13, 1906 in Dublin , † December 22, 1989 in Paris ) was an Irish writer . He is considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His most famous work is " Waiting for Godot " (En attendant Godot) , which was premiered on January 5, 1953 in Paris. The first performance in the German-speaking world took place on 8 September 1953 in Schlossparktheater Berlin.

Beckett was initially British, after the independence of Ireland in 1921 then Irish citizen, but lived since 1937 constantly in France. He wrote his first texts in English, in his middle and most fertile phase he wrote mainly French, later he moved between the two languages, often from text to text, and often translated his works even in the other language.

Table of Contents

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·         1life and work

o    1.1Family, childhood and youth

o    1.2Literary beginnings

o    1.3The breakthrough and the time of recognition

o    1.4Aftermath

·         2works

o    2.1essays

o    2.2Novels and prose

o    2.3Shorter prose

o    2.4Poems and poetry collections

o    2.5plays

o    2.6radio plays

o    2.7pieces for film and television

·         3literature

·         4web links

·         5individual proofs

Life and work 

Family, childhood and youth 

Samuel Beckett was the second son of the couple Bill and May Beckett (née Roe). The paternal lineage of the family came from the Huguenots , who probably came to Ireland from France in the 18th century. At first she acquired some wealth with the production of precious materials and later, from the time of her grandfather generation, worked in the construction industry. Beckett's father himself was a busy calculator and a respected member of the civil society of Dublin. May Beckett also came from a respectable Protestant family. The village Foxrock, a suburb of Dublin, was at the beginning of the 20th Century as an address for wealthy, who wanted to retire, yet living close to the bustling city center of Dublin. The Becketts lived there in a spacious house ( Cooldrinagh ) with some land ownership and had several maids over the years. The mother led the household with severity, careful on cleanliness and manners, and was considered a regular churchgoer. The father used to be sociable, was a member of several gentlemen's clubs, loved to play golf or go on long hikes.

Contrary to the rumor that he had manipulated his date of birth and even moved to April 13, Good Friday as a symbol of suffering, Beckett was born on that day. His three-year older brother was named Frank. Since the age of five Beckett attended a kindergarten school near Foxrock, where he already received first lessons in French and piano lessons. From 1915 he was sent to the Earlsfort House High School near the Dublin train station terminus and stayed there for a total of four years. Early on he was a good athlete, playing tennis, cricket and golf and received lessons in boxing. In 1919 he moved to the traditional Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, a boarding school where Oscar Wilde had also learned for some time and which was after the division of Ireland in the northern part of the country beyond the border. There he developed his first literary interests and read books by the humorist Stephen Leacock . He was considered to be a smarter, but overall not outstanding student and was especially known for his good essays and athletic ability.

Beckett's childhood and adolescence were overshadowed by the fierce struggle by which the predominantly Catholic Irishmen deprived Protestant England independence in 1921 after nearly 400 years of foreign rule. ^[1]

In October 1923, at the age of 17, Beckett began studying French and Italian at the prestigious Dublin Trinity College , traveling to France in 1926 and to Italy in 1927.

Literary Beginnings 

After completing his studies, Samuel Beckett became English lecturer for two years at the Paris École normale supérieure , the French elite college for teaching subjects. In Paris, he made contact with literary circles and learned in addition to the Frenchmen Jules Romains , Philippe Soupault and Paul Valéry also know his 24 years older compatriot James Joyce , whose works he translated in part. Joyce had long ago withdrawn from politically troubled, Victorian-influenced Ireland to Paris, and now, thanks to his scandal-ridden Ulysses(1922), attained a degree of fame. In Paris, Beckett made first serious literary attempts, first with poetry in English. Since 1928 he traveled several times to Germany, u. a. because he fell in love with his cousin " Peggy " (actually Ruth Margaret) Sinclair, who lives in Kassel . The love for her continued Beckett with his first novel Dream of Fair to middling women ( dream of more to less beautiful women , in 1932, published 1993) a monument.

In 1930, Beckett returned to Dublin and became assistant French at Trinity College. But he felt the regular activity as a burden, announced and went in 1932, after a long journey through Germany, back to Paris, only to return again a short time later to Dublin. In 1933, after the sudden death of his father, he resisted the pressure of his mother to join his brother as a partner. Instead, he went to London, where he lived on maternal gratuities and laboriously and often in a depressive mood as an author. A small volume of narrative texts, which he wrote in 1934 under the ambiguous title More Pricks than Kicks ( More spanking than wings or More dick than seventh heaven), but was unsuccessful and was soon banned. For a long time he did not find a publisher for his first novel Murphy . In 1934, while working on Murphy , he began a psychoanalysis with Wilfred Bion in London , which lasted two years and brought him into contact with the psychoanalyst CG Jung , whose lectures he attended. ^[2]

The decision to travel through Germany (1936/37) - a diary from this period was discovered only after his death - probably arose out of the need to reorientate himself after his previous literary failure. As Beckett wrote in his diary, "My plans are now simply to get to Germany, & then selon le vent. I hope to be away long, long time. "

The first nine weeks Samuel Beckett spent in Hamburg , where he attended theaters, concerts, the university and especially the Hamburger Kunsthalle . In addition to the collection accessible to the public, he was also interested in the pictures of the artists of the " Brücke ", which had already been deposed by the National Socialist cultural administration and which he was only allowed to see with special permission. In Hamburg, but also in the other cities of his trip to Germany, Beckett found contact with the modern art scene that still exists despite the persecution. In addition to artists of the former Hamburg Secession , he met the collector of modern art Margrit Durrieuand art historian Rosa Schapire , who was discriminated against for her Jewish background.

Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil and Samuel Beckett.

His visit to the cemetery Ohlsdorf on 25 October 1936 he later processed in the story First Love . ^[3] Another long station of Beckett's Germany trip was Berlin . Here, he notes in his diary records, it was still possible in the Crown Prince's Palace to see drawings of the regime of unpopular artists, but not their exiled in the magazine paintings. In Dresden , where he maintained close contact with the former director of the Gemäldegalerie Will Grohmann , who had been dismissed by the Nazis , he still had pictures of Edvard Munch , Oskar Kokoschka , Otto Dixand even visit Max Liebermann , which astonished him after his experiences with the attitude of the then German authorities Jews . Finally, in his last station in Munich , the political climate had already become so dangerous to free culture that he could no longer access the literature he wanted. Thus, according to Beckett's notes, publisher Reinhard Piper could not bring himself to hand over to him a banned biography of Ernst Barlax, as he feared that Beckett might be searched when leaving Germany.

After the trip to Germany and a short return to Ireland, Beckett finally settled in Paris in October 1937. A key reason for this was the young pianist Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil (1900-1989) ^[4] , which, after a life-threatening stab wound was inflicted it to him in a raid by an unknown person, had visited the hospital and soon after his partner and in 1961 his Wife was. Linguistically, too, he shifted to French, for example by translating Murphy (which had finally appeared in London in 1938) into French.

On a visit to Ireland in 1939, he was surprised by the outbreak of war and returned immediately to Paris. At the end of 1940 he joined the French resistance, the Resistance . When in 1942 his resistance cell Réseau Gloria (Gloria SMH) was betrayed to the Gestapo , Beckett disappeared and went with his partner Suzanne in the unoccupied southern half of France, in the village of Roussillon (Vaucluse) . Here he worked as a harvest helper and casual worker and wrote at night on his first ever English-language novel Watts (printed until 1953).

The breakthrough and the time of recognition 

After the liberation of France in 1944, he returned to Paris in April 1945 and, after a brief visit to Ireland, volunteered as a Red Cross helper. As such, he worked until the end of the year, mostly as an interpreter, in a military hospital in the Norman town of Saint-Lô . Back in Paris, he began his most prolific creative period as a French-speaking author. At first, however, he had trouble finding publishers for his books until Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil won the publisher of the Éditions de Minuit , Jérôme Lindon, for him.

It originated in 1946 the novel Mercier et Camier (printed only in 1970) and 1948 the novels Molloy and Malone meurt (both printed in 1951). Also in 1948, the piece En attendant Godot , for which initially no location could be found. It was not until the beginning of 1953 that it was performed with surprising success at the Théâtre de Babylone by Roger Blin , who himself played Pozzo, and made his author one of the figureheads of the absurd theater . ^[5] In 1946 came the tales of the tape text pour rien (1956), 1949 the novel L'Innomable(printed in 1953) and another piece in 1954-56: Fin de partie (first performed in 1957).

In 1953, Beckett began to translate his French-written works into English , starting with Molloy . This led him to partly write English again, whereby he then mostly translated these texts into French. In 1956 he designed, starting with All that case , for the English radio station BBC a series of radio plays ( Radio Plays ), a genre that was hardly known in France at that time and with which Beckett opened up a new field for him.

Samuel Beckett, 1961 portrayed by Reginald Gray

In 1957/58 he wrote the novel From an Abandoned Work , 1958, the radio play like piece Krapp's Last Tape (1961 Marcel Mihalovici staged in Bielefeld as an opera). In 1960 he wrote the French novel Comment c'est and the English piece Happy Days (premiered in New York in 1961), which he translated into French in 1962 as Oh les beaux jours (first performed in Venice in 1963). Beckett was first awarded a literary prize in 1961, the Prix ​​international of the éditeurs . In 1963 he wrote in addition to the radio plays Words and Music and Cascando the one-act play, In the same year, the radio play All that fall was adapted and transmitted as a Tous ceux qui tombent for French television with the co-operation of the author .

With this, Beckett had arrived in the professional world of images, which had always interested him. In 1964, he conceived and shot the silent film-like film Film , in collaboration with director Alan Schneider (who had already made Godot in 1961 ) , starring the silent film star Buster Keaton , who received the "Prix de la Jeune Critique" in Venice the following year. However, film remained the last original film Becketts, because in 1965 he turned to the medium of television and wrote as his first genuine television play Dis Joehe offered to the BBC. Since the production was delayed there, but the piece had now been transferred to German, the Süddeutsche Rundfunk decided to produce it under the direction of the author. It was sent in 1966, on his 60th birthday, and opened the doors of the SDR, which until 1985 still produced several pieces of and with him.

Beckett tried in Berlin as a theater director in 1967 with his play End Game (fin de partie) of 1956. In 1968 appeared under the title Comédie et actes divers a collection of French-translated or translated into French pieces.

Beckett's grave on the Cimetière du Montparnasse

At the latest from the end of the fifties Beckett was a recognized author. His lyrics were quickly accepted for printing and his pieces were immediately performed or produced. He even figured, although by nature rather shy and notoriously depressive, somewhat as a star in the Paris literary scene. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature , but stayed away from the handover ceremony. In 1968 he was appointed a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In 1970, Beckett wrote the story Le Dépeupleur (Der Verwaiser), 1977 appeared with Fizzles eight short prose pieces . Jasper Johns created graphics and book designs in close collaboration with Beckett. 1978 Verssammlung appeared Mirlitonnades , a work of "simplicity with double bottom" ^[6] . There followed many other shorter texts, which appeared now and then collected at the Éditions de Minuit . ^[7] However, Beckett retired as a person more and more and disappeared as a writer slowly out of the public consciousness.

Samuel Beckett died on December 22, 1989 at the age of 83. His final resting place is on the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. ^[8th]

Aftermath

Above all, Beckett's fame is based on waiting for Godot , whose two central figures seem to embody a basic human situation: hoping for a supposedly near fulfillment or Redeemer figure. The hopeless permanent state of waiting and the nonsense dialogues of the two protagonists illustrate in a paradigmatic way the characteristics of the absurd theater, which consistently translates the existentialist view of the meaninglessness of the world, the dubiousness of language and the self-alienation of man into the dramatic form. ^[9] The mystery Godot has also led in Germany to countless interpretations, including by Günther Anders in his work "The antiquity of man".

According to Le Monde, dated December 21, 2007, Beckett currently holds second place , albeit behind Eugène Ionesco , on the list of French playwrights most widely performed outside France.

Works 

(Below are the German titles listed, the original titles can be found above.)

Essays  ·         Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce. (1929) ·         Proust (1931) ·         Three Dialogues (with Georges Duthuit) (1949) Novels and prose  ·         Dream of more to less beautiful women (1932) ISBN 3-518-39383-9 (Ger.1996) ·         Murphy (1934-1937, published 1938) ISBN 3-499-13525-6 ·         Watts (about 1943, published 1953) ISBN 3-518-38904-1 ·         The Outcast (L'Expulsé) (1946, published 1955) ·         Mercier and Camier (1946, published 1970) ISBN 3-518-38905-X ·         Molloy (1951) ISBN 3-518-39802-4 ·         Malone dies (1951) ISBN 3-518-38907-6 ·         The Nameless (1953) ISBN 3-518-38908-4 ·         As it is (1961) ISBN 3-518-38909-2 ·         Fizzles (8 prose pieces ) (1977) ·         Company (Company) (1977-1979) ISBN 3-518-01800-0 ·         Badly seen badly said (Mal vu mal dit) (1982) ISBN 3-518-11119-1 ·         Worstward Ho (1983) ISBN 3-518-40198-X Shorter prose  ·         More beatings than wings (1934) More Pricks Than Kicks ·         Narratives and texts about nothing (1945-1950) ·         First Love (Premier Amour) (1945, first published in 1970) ·         From a Discontinued Work (1954-1955) ·         All Strange Away (1963-1964) ·         Dreaming Dreamily (Imagination morte imaginez) (1965) ·         The Emperor (Le Dépeupleur) (1971) ·         End Now (Assez) (1966) ·         Bing (1966) ·         Losiness (Sans) (1969) ·         How the story was told (As the story was told) (1973) ·         neither (1976) as a libretto to the opera by Morton Feldman . In 1977 in Rome ·         Still not anymore (Stirrings Still) (1988) Poetry and poetry collections  ·         Whoroscope (1930) ·         Mirlitonnades (Flute Tones / Trumpet Tones) (1977-1978) ·         Comment dire (1989) - his last work

Plays  ·         Eleutheria (1947) ·         Waiting for Godot (1952) ·         Endgame (1957) ·         Act without words I (1957) ·         The last volume (1958) ·         Act without words II (1959) ·         Happy days (1961) ·         Game (Play) (1963) ·         Coming and going (Come and Go) (1966) ·         Fragments 1, 2 (1960s) ·         Breath (Breath) (1969) ·         Not Me (1972) ·         At that time (That Time) (1976) ·         Kicks (1976) ·         Rockaby (1981) ·         Ohio Impromptu (1981) ·         Catastrophe (1982) ·         What Where (1983) Radio plays  ·         All that fall there (1956). Translation: Erika andElmar Tophoven . With: Tilla Durieux (Mrs. Rooney), Eduard Marks (Mr. Rooney), Werner Schumacher (Christy), Siegfried Lowitz (Mr. Slocum), Charles Brauer (Tommy), Erich Weiher (Mr.Arabell), Gerda Schöneich (Miss Fitt), Nikolaus von Festenberg (Jerry). Director: Fritz Schröder-Jahn. North German Broadcasting Corporation, Süddeutscher Rundfunk 1957 ·         Ash glow (1959) ·         Cascando (1963) ·         Words and Music (1963) ·         pochade radiophonique (1963) Pieces for film and television  ·         Film (1965, with Buster Keaton ) ·         Hey Joe (1966, TV play) ·         Ghost Trio (Ghost Trio) (1976) ·         Square I + II (1981) ·         ... only clouds ... (... but the clouds ...) (1977) ·         Night and Dreams (1982)

Literature 

·         Chris Ackerley: The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett . Grove, New York 2004, ISBN 0-8021-4049-1 .

·         Anne Atik: As it was. Memories of Samuel Beckett . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-518-41399-6 .

·         Deirdre Bair: Samuel Beckett. A biography . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1994, ISBN 3-499-12850-0 .

·         Enoch Brater: The Essential Samuel Beckett . Thames & Hudson, New York 2003, ISBN 0-500-28411-3 .

·         Rolf Breuer: Samuel Beckett: An Introduction; with previously unpublished photographs by Wilhelm Pabst . Fink, Munich 2005.

·         John Calder (ed.): As no other dare fail: for Samuel Beckett on his 80th birthday, London 1986 80th anniversary commemorative.

·         Rosemarie Clausen : Samuel Beckett staged . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1969. (several editions)

·         Gilles Deleuze : Exhausted , in SB: square, pieces for television . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1996, ISBN 3-518-40824-0 .

·         Gerry Dukes: Samuel Beckett . Penguin, ISBN 0-14-029470-8 .

·         Raymond Federman : Journey Into Chaos: Samuel Beckett's Early Fiction (1965); Samuel Beckett, His Works and His Critics , An Essay in Bibliography (1970) with John Fletcher

·         Andrew Gibson: Samuel Beckett . Reaction, London 2010, ISBN 978-1-86189-517-2 .

·         Gaby Hartel, Carola Veit: Samuel Beckett . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-518-18213-7 .

·         Gaby Hartel, Michel Glasmeyer (ed.): The Eye of Prey. Beckett's film, television and video works . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-518-12460-4 .

·         Sigrid Irimia-Tuchtenhagen:  Beckett, Samuel. In: Biographical Bibliographic Church Lexicon (BBKL). Volume 18, Bautz, Herzberg 2001, ISBN 3-88309-086-7 , Sp. 158-167.

·         Frank Kelleter: Modernity and Death: Edgar Allan Poe - TS Eliot - Samuel Beckett. Peter Lang, Frankfurt 1998, ISBN 3-631-31089-7 .

·         James Knowlson: Samuel Beckett. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-518-41482-8 .

·         Stefanie Krämer: The motive of purgatory with Samuel Beckett (= Halle Studies on English and American Studies , Volume 21). Lit, Münster 2004, ISBN 978-3-8258-7747-7(Dissertation University of Paderborn 2003, 204 pages).

·         Caroline Mannweiler: L'éthique beckettienne et sa réalisation dans la forme . Rodopi, Amsterdam 2012, ISBN 978-90-420-3551-5 .

·         Yann Mével, L'imaginaire mélancolique DE Samuel Beckett de Murphy à Comment c'est, Rodopi, coll. "Faux titre", 2008 ( ISBN 9789042024564 )

·         Goedart Palm: Beckett or not to be , essay in the magazine for literature and contemporary criticism .

·         Gert Pinkernell : Names, titles and dates of French literature ( online ), section Samuel Beckett (main source for the biographical part of the article)

·         Andreas P. Pittler: Samuel Beckett . dtv , Munich 2006, ISBN 3-423-31082-0 .

·         Ulrich Pothast: The metaphysical vision: Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy of art and life and Samuel Beckett's own way to make use of it . New York 2008, ISBN 978-1-4331-0286-8 .

·         Friedhelm Rathjen : Samuel Beckett . Rowohlt, Reinbek at Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-499-50678-5 .

·         Friedhelm Rathjen: Beckett. An introduction to the work . ReJoyce, Scheeßel 2007, ISBN 978-3-00-020690-0 .

·         Norbert W. Schlinkert : Wanderer in Absurdistan: Novalis, Nietzsche, Beckett, Bernhard and the rest. An investigation into the appearance of the absurd in prose. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 978-3-8260-3185-4 , pp. 75-96.

·         Norbert W. Schlinkert: Flight, movement and death in literature. Insight into texts by Samuel Beckett and Michael Lentz . Part 1 in eXperimenta 10/15 , pp. 11-13; Part 2 in eXperimenta 11/15 , pp. 64-66.

·         Wieland Schmied: Meeting with Samuel Beckett in Berlin . Rimbaud Verlag , Aachen 2006, ISBN 3-89086-681-6 .

·         Jan Wilm & Mark Nixon (ed.): Samuel Beckett and German Literature . Transcript, Bielefeld 2013, ISBN 978-3-8376-2067-2 .