SAMUEL BECKETT, PLAYWRIGHT, WINNER OF NOBEL PRIZE; AT 83
Author: By Charles Campbell, Associated Press
Date: Wednesday, December 27, 1989
Page: 67
Section: OBITUARY
PARIS -- Samuel Beckett, the Irish-born poet, playwright and novelist
whose despairing vision of the world in "Waiting For Godot" symbolized the
pessimistic strain in modern writing, has died in Paris, his adopted home. He
was 83.
Mr. Beckett died Friday, but the death was not announced until after a
private funeral service yesterday. His publisher, Jerome Linden, said Mr.
Beckett died of respiratory failure.
The model of an artist who makes no compromise for the sake of popularity,
the Nobel Prize-winning writer attributed his success to "an intuitive sense
of despair."
"There are no landmarks in my work," Mr. Beckett once said. "We are all
adrift. We must invent a world in which to survive, but even this invented
world is pervaded by fear and guilt. Our existence is hopeless."
Mr. Beckett lived in Paris since 1937, working with the Resistance during
World War II, for which he won the Croix de Guerre with a gold star in 1945.
He once said he preferred "France in war to Ireland in peace."
He wrote some of his works in French and some in English, translating them
himself into the other language.
Mr. Beckett's last published work was an 1,801-word novella in March
called "Stirrings Still," a meditation on old age. Only 200 copies were
published and sold for $1,720 each.
In 1952, French director Roger Blin staged Mr. Beckett's two-act fable
about two tramps waiting for a third, Godot.
Their grim jokes are interrupted by a brutal fat man driving a slave with
a heavy burden. The fat man later returns blinded and moves on. The tramps end
the play still waiting for Godot.
The play was translated and performed in more than 20 languages. When it
was staged last year at New York's Lincoln Center with Robin Williams and
Steve Martin as the two tramps, it sold out.
The stunning triumph of the 1952 production focused attention on Mr.
Beckett's earlier works, with their recurring theme of the despairing
vagabond.
Later plays, including "Endgame," developed Mr. Beckett's themes of man's
losing battle against destiny.
Mr. Beckett won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. Always secretive
about his personal life, he refused to attend the award ceremonies.
Mr. Beckett was born in Dublin. He studied modern languages at Trinity
College and first came to Paris in 1928 to lecture in English at the Ecole
Normale Superieure.
In Paris, he met another Irish expatriate, James Joyce. "Joyce had a moral
effect on me," Mr. Beckett said later. "He made me realize the meaning of
artistic integrity."
After Mr. Beckett's father, William, died in Dublin in 1933, his mother
urged him to drop literature.
Mr. Beckett moved from Dublin and settled permanently in Paris in 1937.
In 1938, Mr. Beckett was stabbed in a Paris street brawl. A woman passing
by on her bicycle stopped to help and had him taken to a hospital.
That woman, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, became his lifelong companion and
they married in 1961. She died in July. The couple had no children.
AA0580;12/26 LDRISC;12/27,21:21 BECKET27
|
