23 - Samuel Beckett (1906–1989): Language, narrative, authority

Summary

Late in 1950, in a Paris café opposite the premises of a recently relaunched, once clandestine publishing house in the rue Bernard-Palissy, a forty-four-year-old expatriate Irishman, the author of a modest body of work published in English more than a decade earlier, sat together with his partner considering the typescript of the three novels he had completed in his adoptive French during the previous two-and-a-half years. This was not the first time that the pair had sought a publisher. There had been, it seems, dozens of fruitless attempts already. Spirits were accordingly at a low ebb, and money was tight. As the two discussed the dwindling prospects of success, the writer is said to have turned to his companion, partly in jest but more likely in desperation, to deliver the following glum verdict: ‘If they publish it this time, I'll treat you to a pack of cigarettes. But promise me you won't try again.’

Some nineteen years later, in the autumn of 1969, the scene was very different. To the same protagonists, Samuel Beckett and Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, now married, and on holiday in Tunisia at the time, came a telegram bearing unexpected, even perturbing news: Beckett had just been awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature. The change in fortune could not have been more dramatic. At the award ceremony later that year, the poet, critic and dramatist Karl Ragnar Gierow explained the Swedish Academy's decision. Beckett’s work of the late 1940s, he argued, notably the trilogy of novels written in French that had proved so hard to place only twenty years before (Molloy, Malone meurt and L’Innommable), together with the play En attendant Godot, first performed amid controversy in 1953, was grounded in an experience of the Second World War.