SAMUEL BECKETT

There was a time, now long past, when it was possible for a well-schooled person, in the West, to have read all the available books and to be conversant with all the established schools of thought. In that narrow world of small libraries and limited ideas, intellectuals could enjoy each other’s company, or dispute with one another, on a common ground of knowledge and understanding. That time ended with the advent of movable type, the multiplication of learning, and the liberation of inquiry. Ever since, it has only been possible to master a single field — or, in the case of a truly gifted polymath, two or three fields. The result has been, in so-called educated circles, a priesthood of specialists and a laity of generalists.

Specialists are an interesting breed. Not necessarily wise, but massively expert, they speak an arcane language of their own, and can only communicate, on any meaningful level, with fellow-specialists in the same field. Notoriously, some of them are quite poorly informed on other matters.

Generalists, by contrast, never acquire a virtuoso competence in any particular field. They are the product of what is often referred to and admired, as an all-round education. Yet at their best, they do have some familiarity with a wide spectrum of the cultural heritage, with the history and current state of the arts and sciences. Given that, they are at ease with each other, conversationally, and can range over several intellectual topics with a shared appreciation of what the specialists have achieved.

There is, however, a sub-species of shallow sophisticates who chatter about the arts, though less about the sciences, with a fragile command of third-hand information. Glibly they pronounce upon authors whose books they have not read, but whose work they have seen reviewed. They are up-to-date on the latest fashionable trends in painting, though they seldom visit a gallery. And they speak highly of avant-garde music, while rarely listening to it, if ever. These are the circles in which reputation counts more than substance. Moreover, often enough, the opinions they pass around are ill-informed and half-baked.

A classic example of this kind of gossiping superficiality is the widely held notion of Samuel Beckett as a playwright of sordid despair, who was essentially too “difficult” to be bothered with. His take on the human condition was felt to be unnecessarily morbid, veiled in dramatic and linguistic obscurity, and best summed up with a few slick references to garbage-cans and quicksands. Especially were these responses voiced by people who had never actually attended a production of “Waiting for Godot”, and whose preference in the theatre was for the less demanding entertainments of George Bernard Shaw, who could always be relied on to sugar-coat the pill of his radicalism with an easily digested sweetening of witticisms and workaday plot-lines.

Beckett, in fact, was not at all the kind of depressive and depressing playwright he was thought to be by people who had not taken the time or trouble to engage him on his own terms. Quite contrary to their empty assumptions, he wrote in everyday language and everything he said was, at first hearing accessible. What made audiences uncomfortable, of course, was the implications of what he said. For he presented a bleak view of life that confronted futility and evasiveness with unsparing honesty. His characters inhabit a world that seems to lack either meaning or purpose; and they peel away the layers of the self to reach only the core of an endless question-mark. In this, Beckett is a deeply serious writer (contrast Shaw, who was essentially a magnificent jester). But it should not be forgotten that being serious is not the same thing as being solemn. Beckett, indeed, is full of wry humour. On an almost vacant stage, his stories spell out the enigma of identity and circumstance, the burden of triviality: but they are never maudlin, they never slither into self-pity, let alone into a wallow of conscious tragedy; rather, at bottom, they emerge as comedy, as a scrupulous witness to the comedy of human pretension.

During his lifetime and since, Beckett’s work has been properly appreciated, on the whole, by serious critics and serious theatre-goers. However, if the impression does persist, to some extent and in certain quarters, that Beckett was as unreachable in his work as he was, reputedly, aloof in person, such an impression can be traced, in part, to his refusal, always, to speak on his work’s behalf. The plays, he insisted, must stand or fall on their own merits alone. He never gave interviews to the press or to broadcasters; and unlike some writers, he never haunted the salons of patronage, where the arts are treated as fodder for the chit-chat of cultural hangers-on. That was a world which roused his impatience and trespassed on his reserve. His reluctance to enter it was seen, by its denizens, as stand-offish. But that judgment is unjust. He was simply a very private man, incapable of small talk, who wanted only to be left alone to get on with his work. And when he was not at his desk, or directing his plays, far from being cripplingly shy, he enjoyed life with a small coterie of close friends. Existence, for him, when he wrote about it, was an arbitrary compound of the mundane and the bizarre, at once a platitude and a puzzle. When he lived it himself, it was an experience of ordinary human warmth and cold, and an acceptance of ordinary human business — getting the laundry done, shopping for groceries, reading the newspaper on a bus.

If his fellow-Parisians recognized him on the street, as they may sometimes have done, for he had a memorable face, they refrained, with Gallic tact, from intruding on him with any kind of fulsome buttonholing. And as he went about his day, self-contained and absorbed, that was entirely as he would have wished. Fame and its rewards were never something he sought, least of all the life of a celebrity. So while he perhaps saw the 1969 award of the Nobel Prize for Literature as a gratifying endorsement of his work, he probably did not welcome the attendant publicity or the expectation that he should become some kind of public figure. That sort of thing was anathema to his personal temperament and at odds with the temper of his work. Indeed, as his career drew to a close, its tendency became more and more marked to strip everything down to the bare bones, to reduce everything to essentials, to pare away language, to abbreviate and compress, to arrive, in his final statement, at a species of non-statement, at an eloquent but inarticulate silence. Which is what we all come to in the end.

Samuel Beckett died in 1989, at the age of eighty-five.