Tutorials

literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

Roman Fever

August 21, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Roman Fever (1934) is one of the most famous and frequently reprinted of Edith Wharton’s short stories. It first appeared in her collection of stories The World Over which was published in 1936.

The Colosseum in moonlight

Roman Fever – critical comments

Daisy Miller

This story offers a satirical version of the theme treated by Henry James in his famous novella Daisy Miller. James’s heroine Daisy incautiously ventures out into the Colosseum at night, catches fever, and later dies. His story is one of unfulfilled promise and a life tragically foreshortened.

Edith Wharton’s use of the same scenario is lighter, more satirical, and it has a positive outcome in the creation of Barbara – who is mentioned but never appears in the story. Edith Wharton was a close friend of Henry James and knew his work well. In fact their literary styles are vaguely similar – though James focuses more intensely on the psychological complexities between his characters.

The Colosseum at Night

This image and mise en scene combines two cultural elements which contemporary readers might find puzzling. In the nineteenth century, European locations such as Paris, Rome, and Athens – anywhere south of the English Channel – represented places of general permissiveness and sexual license to visitors from Anglo-Saxon cultures. This included upper-class tourists from both Britain and America.

There was a great deal of what we would now call ‘sexual tourism’ which went along with the Grand Tour – and the levels of permissiveness increased the further south and east the journey progressed. Other works playing with the same theme include Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902) and E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1905).

At the same time, female tourists on this journey would be expected to maintain the sort of standards which obtained in London and New York. Unmarried women would be chaperoned on all occasions, and certainly not allowed out late at night.

However, the excuse of seeing the Colosseum at night might give a single man and woman an excuse to be alone together – unsupervised. Hence the details mentioned in the story that special arrangements could be made to make the building accessible after its formal closing hours. Alida Slade reminds Grace that –

“It wasn’t easy to get in, after the gates were locked for the night. Far from easy. Still, in those days it could be managed, it was managed, often. Lovers met there who couldn’t meet elsewhere. You know that?”

Grace Ainsley met Alida’s fiancé Delphin Slade that night, and they had a sexual liaison that led to pregnancy. Her indisposition at the time was described as an ‘illness’, and within two months she was married to Horace Ainsley – just in time for the child (Barbara) to be passed off as a natural product of that union.

Parallels

The architecture of the story is underpinned by a number of very subtle parallels. Alida and Grace originally met each other in Rome many years ago, on a night with a full moon, as the night of the story is to be and as was the night of Grace’s meeting with Delphin.

The two women have daughters Jenny and Barbara who are also friends. They have gone off with Italian aviators and will probably fly back by moonlight. In other words, the daughters are doing the modern equivalent of what their mothers did. Moreover, the daughters too seem to be in competition for the same man – the aviator who is a Marchese, the Campolieri boy who is ‘one of the best matches in Rome’.

The parallels even reach further back in family history. For when Grace Ansley’s great aunt was in Rome many years before, she was also in competition with her sister for the love of the same man, and sent her out on a night-time expedition for a flower – which resulted in the girl’s death.

Roman Fever – study resources

Roman Fever – Capuchin Classics – Amazon UK

Roman Fever – Capuchin Classics – Amazon US

Roman fever – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

Roman fever – New York Review Books – Amazon US

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Roman Fever – eBook at About.com

Roman Fever – free audioBook – Amazon UK

Roman Fever (and other stories) – Virago edition – Amazon UK

Roman Fever (and other stories) – Virago edition – Amazon US

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Roman Fever – plot summary

Part I
Alida Slade and Grace Ansley, two middle-aged upper-class American women are sitting on the restaurant terrace of their hotel overlooking Rome after lunch. They have known each other for many years, and their daughters (who are also friends) have gone out for the afternoon.

The two women compare their own youthful experiences of Rome with those possible for young women of their daughters’ generation. They are ostensibly full of sympathetic understanding for each other, but actually there is an understated competition between them in matronly feeling and virtue.

Part II
A great deal of their concern centres upon the traditional worry of catching fever in Rome as a result of incautious excursions in public after sunset. Alida Slade suddenly recalls that Grace Ansley once caught a severe chill in such circumstances many years before.

Furthermore, she knows that Grace went out to meet Delphin Slade in the Colosseum at night, even though he had just become engaged to Alida herself. She even remembers the exact words of the letter inviting Grace to meet him there – because as she suddenly decides to reveal, she wrote the letter herself.

It is clear that the two women were in competition for the same man. Alida claims that she wrote the letter as a sort of joke – so that Grace would turn up at the Colosseum and be left wandering around alone late at night, waiting for somebody who wouldn’t turn up.

But Grace reveals that she replied to the letter and she did meet Delphin Slade, and they did visit the Colosseum by night. The two women are forced to acknowledge the full scale of rivalry and animosity between them.

They then revert to a form of competitive and patronising sympathy for each other. But Grace plays her trump card by obliquely revealing that her daughter Barbara was the product of this one night’s romantic liaison.

Principal characters

Mrs Grace Ansley	a middle-aged American woman
Horace Ansley	her husband
Barbara	her daughter
Mrs Alida Slade	a middle-aged American woman, and long term friend
Mr Delphin Slade	Alida’s husband, a corporation lawyer
Jenny	Alida’s daughter

Video documentary

Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
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The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
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The Reef deals with three topics with which Edith Wharton herself was intimately acquainted at the period of its composition – unhappy marriage, divorce, and the discovery of sensual pleasures. The setting is a country chateau in France where diplomat George Darrow has arrived from America, hoping to marry the beautiful widow Anna Leith. But a young woman employed as governess to Anna’s daughter proves to be someone he met briefly in the past and has fallen in love with him. She also becomes engaged to Anna’s stepson. The result is a quadrangle of tensions and suspicions about who knows what about whom. And the outcome is not what you might imagine.
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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

Romantic Moderns

October 14, 2011 by Roy Johnson

writers, artists, and the English sense of place

Romantic Moderns is a major piece of work by a young cultural historian with a free-ranging approach to her subject. It’s a study of a particular strain in English art that Alexandra Harris correctly describes as ‘romantic’, and illustrates as permeating every aspect of cultural life. The period she covers is the late 1930s through to the immediate post-war period. It would be interesting to know if the title of the PhD on which the book is based had a sub-title more specific than the one she provides here – because ‘from Virginia Woolf to John Piper’ is rather wide in scope. After all, Woolf was born in 1882, and Piper lived until 1992 – so that’s a span covering the late Victorian era, two world wars, and the digital age.

Her writing is certainly lively and entertaining. She throws off multiple references that explode like fireworks in almost every paragraph. A consideration of architecture leads to books on buildings, then pictures of buildings, and on to novels that feature them. This cultural enthusiasm is both a strength and a weakness, because whilst the names, titles, and references come thick and fast, it’s sometimes difficult to identify the main point of her argument.

She’s fizzing with information, but I was sometimes longing for an overview or a generalization. The nearest I spotted was that the people she discusses were all interested in the relationship between ‘art and place’.

She covers an astonishingly wide range of topics. Subjects include English country houses (of the Brideshead type) seascapes, Victorian revivalism, cuisine and gastronomy, the BBC, literary criticism, watercolour painting, music, travel writing, film, landscape gardening, and even the weather.

The artists whose work she discusses include John Betjemann, Eric Ravilious, Cecil Beaton, Edward Bawden, Paul Nash, Benjamin Britten, and Graham Sutherland – and those are just some of the best known. She also deals with a whole host of lesser figures – architects, film-makers, milliners, and interior designers,

It’s a world of country gardens, southern seascapes, churches, and images of a bucolic past. There are no cities, motor cars, iron foundries, or telephones in the iconography of this view of the world. Almost all topographical references come from below a line drawn between the Severn and the Wash. In fact you could be forgiven for thinking that the whole of English culture had been generated within the boundaries of Sussex.

The other worrying and recurrent problem in her approach is that modern English romantic art began much earlier than the late thirties in which she pitches most of her comment. The Georgian poets, water-colourists, and engravers all got under way in the second decade of the century, as a reaction to the brutality of the first world war and a sense that an idyllic past was being lost.

She makes a brave case for pastoral romanticism being an enduring feature in English culture, but it is based on selective (though widespread) evidence, and a nostalgic enthusiasm for a view of the world based on the village green. This can be seen as embarrassingly conservative at a time of Hitler’s extermination of Jews, Stalin’s show trials, and the onset of a fully mechanised second world war.

Her capacity for detail uncovers some interesting points – such as T.S. Eliot exchanging views on blood and soil with anti-Semitic and eugenics-supporting Viscount Lymington. It was but a small step from this to Eliot’s belief in religious notions of ‘continuity’ and nationhood. But the arguments on inherent (almost genetic) national feeling for pastoralism are somewhat dented when she cites the work of Bill Brandt, who was German, and Eliot himself, who came from St Louis, Missouri – not East Coker.

The latter part of the book deals with an unashamed celebration of the glamour and romance of the large English country house, focusing on its presence in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Osbert Sitwell, and Evelyn Waugh. This doesn’t add a lot more to what has gone before, except to intensify an overt nostalgia for disappearing aristocratic worlds.

It might seem churlish to dwell on the weaknesses of such an enthusiastic and beautifully written study, but I think it would be patronising to a work pitched at this level not to take its arguments seriously enough to question them. Anyway, the book is already a runaway success, and its rich cream pages and high quality colour illustrations are sure to delight anyone who buys it.

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Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, London: Thames and Hudson, 2010, pp.320, ISBN: 0500251711

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Rupert Brooke biography

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

national icon of the young ‘doomed’ poet

Rupert Brooke (1887—1915) was only ever on the fringe of the Bloomsbury Group – but he was well acquainted with its central figures, such as Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. He was born in Rugby in Warwickshire, where his father taught classics and was a housemaster at the famous public school. He himself attended the school, along with Duncan Grant. The boy soon grew into a man whose handsome figure transfixed admirers of both sexes. He was almost six foot tall, academically clever, and good at sports – representing the school in cricket and rugby. He was also highly creative: he wrote verse throughout his childhood, having gained a love of poetry from reading Browning.

In 1906 he won a scholarship to King’s College at Cambridge University, and whilst there he became a member of the Apostles, a semi-secret debating society whose other members included Bertrand Russell, E.M.Forster, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and John Maynard Keynes. He helped to found the Marlowe Society drama club, acted in plays, and wrote poetry.

In 1910 his father died suddenly, and Brooke was for a short time in Rugby a deputy housemaster. Thereafter he lived on an allowance from his mother. His first intimate relationship is thought to have been with Denham Russell-Smith, the younger brother of one of his close friends at Rugby.

In 1911 Brooke published his first collection of verse, Poems, and his work was featured in the periodical Georgian Poetry, edited by his friend, Sir Edward Marsh. Over the next twenty years, the book sold almost 100 000 copies. He became famous and popular in both literary and political circles.

He was a leader of a group of young ‘Neo-pagans’, who slept outdoors, embraced a religion of nature, and took up vegetarianism. Astonishing though it might seem, at one time Virginia Woolf joined them in Grantchester to swim naked at midnight in Byron’s Pool where Lord Byron used to bathe whilst a student at Cambridge. Other Neo-Pagan hangers-on included Augustus John, then in his heyday of wandering gypsy-Bohemian. Virginia Woolf wrote of this phase in a memoir:

Under his influence the country near Cambridge was full of young men and women walking barefoot, sharing his passion for bathing and fish diet, disdaining book learning, and proclaiming that there was something deep and wonderful in the man who brought the milk and in the woman who watched the cows.

In 1911 Brooke was secretly engaged to Noel Olivier, five years his junior. The affair was for all participants frustrating and subsequently Brooke had an affair with the actress Cathleen Nesbitt. Overworked and emotionally empty, Brooke suffered a nervous breakdown.

In the spring of 1912, Brooke and Ka Cox went to Germany, where in a mood of homesickness he wrote a poem about his home ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, which is among his most admired poems.

Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain?… oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

It is interesting to note that Brooke’s method of poetic composition was to first of all assemble a list of pairs of rhyming words, and then fill in the lines which preceded them. The Old Vicarage is now occupied by the Cambridge physicist Mary Archer and her husband Jeffrey, the ‘novelist’, former politician, and ex-jailbird.

The group of five sonnets called 1914 that Rupert Brooke wrote in December 1914 and finished in January 1915 became, within a few months, some of the most praised and widely read poems of their day. They glorified England and the idea of dying for England.

IF I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

In fact, he never saw active service.

His poetry gained many enthusiasts and he was taken up by Edward Marsh, who brought him to the attention of Winston Churchill, who was at that time First Lord of the Admiralty. Through these connections he was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary Sub-Lieutenant shortly after his 27th birthday and took part in the Royal Naval Division’s Antwerp expedition in October 1914.

He sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February 1915 but developed sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. He died on 23 April 1915 off the island of Lemnos in the Aegean on his way to a battle at Gallipoli. As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, he was buried at in an olive grove on the island of Skyros, Greece.

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
Twentieth century literature

Russian Literature: a short introduction

August 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Russian poetry and prose 1800-2000

Catriona Kelly takes a rather unusual approach to the task of presenting two centuries of Russian literature without going for a chronological list or a ‘great writers’ structure. What she does instead is take Pushkin as a central starting point, then follows themes that arise from a consideration of his work and looks at other Russian writers en passant.

Starting from the importance of Pushkin to Russian society and culture, she puts nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature into a context which includes the political, social, and cultural history of a country which has gone from absolute monarchy, through totalitarian dictatorship, to a rough-hewn and precarious democracy in less than a hundred years. This book is not simply about literature: you’ll learn a lot about history from it too.

Her early chapters discuss Pushkin’s language and his thematic connections with other Russian writers as diverse as the poets Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak, and novelists Gogol, Chekhov, and Mikhail Bulgakov.

There’s a thoughtful chapter on novels and poetry during the Soviet period, and she makes a brave attempt to re-examine literature from this dark era and defend it against accusations of crude propaganda.

She also looks at the role and significance of women in Russian literature – both as subjects and authors. Her observations seem to be based on a close acquaintance with ‘gender-aware criticism’ in the last years of the twentieth century, and there are cascades of new names in addition to those already well known, such as Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva.

There are also chapters on religious belief and the nature of good and evil (plenty on Dostoyevsky there); Russia’s imperialistic relations with its neighbours and the cult of the exotic; and the writer as a guide to public morals.

This book could easily have as its alternative sub-title ‘An Introduction to Alexander Pushkin’, but taking him as her inspiration she considers just about every other major Russian writer of the last two hundred years – plus plenty more besides.

These very short introductions from OUP are an interesting and attractive format – a small, pocket-sized book, stylishly designed, with illustrations, maps, endnotes, suggestions for further reading.

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Catriona Kelly, Russian Literature: a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp.164. ISBN: 0192801449

Samuel Beckett complete works

July 28, 2009 by Roy Johnson

C=criticism
D=drama
F=fiction
P=poetry
T=translation
X=miscellaneous

Beckett is an interesting case of a bilingual author. He began writing in English, then switched to the French language when he went to live there. But he also translated his own work from French back into English. Keep in mind too that he was Irish.

English Works

1929. Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce (C); Assumption (F); Che sciagura (F?)

1930. ‘For future reference’; ‘Whoroscope’; ‘From the only poet to a shining whore, for Henry Crowder to sing’ (P)

1931. The possessed (D?); Proust (C); ‘Hell crane to starling’; ‘Alba’; ‘Casket of pralinen for a daughter of a dissipated mandarin’; ‘Text’; ‘Yoke of liberty’; ‘Return to the vestry’ (P)

1932. Sedendo et quiescendo; ‘Text’ (F); ‘Home olga’ (P); ‘Dante and the lobster’ (F)

1934. More pricks than kicks (F); ‘Poems, by R. M. Rilke, Thomas Mc Greevy’; ‘Ex cathezra’; ‘Papini’s Dante’; ‘The essential and the incidential’ (C); ‘Gnome’ (P); ‘A case in a thousand’ (F)

The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett is a good introduction to the man and the writer. Includes a potted biography of Beckett, an outline of the stories, novels, plays, and poetry, and pointers towards the main critical writings – from the 1960s to critics of the present day. Also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist journals. These guides are very popular. Strongly recommended. Buy the book here

1935. ‘Echo’s bones and other precipitates’ (P)

1936. ‘An imaginitive work!’ (C); ‘Cascando’ (P)

1938. – Murphy (F); ‘Ooftish’ (P); ‘Denis Devlin’ (C)

1945. ‘McGreevy on Yeats’ (C)

1946. ‘Saint-Lo’ (P)

1949. Three dialogues (C)

1953. Watt (F, 1942-1944)

1956. ‘From an abandoned work’ (F)

1957. All that fall (D)

1958. ‘Fourteen letters on Endgame’ (X); Krapp’s last tape (D)

1959. Embers (D)

1961. Happy Days (D)

1962. Words and music (D)

1963. Play (D)

1965. Film

1966. Come and Go; Eh Joe (D)

French Works

1945. ‘La peinture des van Velde, ou le monde et le pantalon’ (C)

1946. ‘Suite’; ‘L’expulse’ (F); Poemes 38-39

1948. ‘Trois poemes’; ‘Peintres de l’empechement’ (C)

1951. Molloy; Malone meurt (F, c.1949)

1952. ‘Henri Hayden, homme-peintre’ (C); En attendant Godot (D, c.1949)

1953. L’innommable (F, c.1949)

1954. ‘Hommage a Jack B. Yeats’ (C)

1955. ‘Trois poemes’; Nouvelles et Textes pour rien (F, 1945, 1950)

1957. Fin de partie; Acte sans paroles I (D)

1961. Comment c’est (F)

1963. Cascando; Acte sans paroles II (D, latter c.1956)

1965. Imagination morte imaginez (F)

1966. Assez; Bing (F)

Samuel Beckett: an illustrated life gives a short account of Beckett’s little-known private life in a book which is packed with rare photographs and shots of his stage productions. The life is quite surprising: a privileged upbringing, with talented academic prospects which he abandoned for a bohemian life. Fighting with the Maquis during the war. Little artistic success, but lots of relationships with women – and then the big breakthrough with Waiting for Godot. This is a stunning little book. Buy the book here

Translations and Miscellaneous

1930. Texts and poems translated from the Italian

1931. ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ (T)

1932. ‘Poetry is vertical’ (X); Translations from Breton, Crevel, and Eluard

1934. ‘Negro’ (T)

1937. Contributions to a symposium on the Spanish Civil War (X)

1938-1939. Translations of art texts

1948-1950. Translations for post-war Transition

1958. Anthology of Mexican poetry (T, 1951)

1960. The old tune (T)

1963. Second testament (T)

Principal and Unpublished Works

1928. Research essay on Unanimistes

1931. Le kid (D)

1932. ‘Le bateau ivre’ (T); ‘Dream of fair to middling women’ (F)

1945. ‘Premier amour’; ‘Mercier et Camier’; ‘Les bosquets de Bondy’ (F)

1947. Eleutheria (D)

The Cambridge Companion to Beckett
The world fame of Samuel Beckett is due to a combination of high academic esteem and immense popularity. An innovator in prose fiction to rival Joyce, his plays have been the most influential in modern theatre history. This book provides thirteen introductory essays on every aspect of Beckett’s work, some paying particular attention to his most famous plays (e.g. Waiting for Godot and Endgame) and his prose fictions (the ‘trilogy’ and Murphy). Other essays tackle his radio and television drama, his theatre directing and his poetry, followed by more general issues such as Beckett’s bilingualism and his relationship to the philosophers. Buy the book here

Samuel Beckett – web links

Samuel Beckett at Mantex
Biographical notes, complete bibliography, selected criticism, book reviews, videos, and web links.

Samuel Beckett Online Resources
This is a giant collection of papers, reviews, videos, journals. An old site, but packed with information. It looks very much like a labour of love by an enthusiast.

Samuel Beckett Exhibition at University of Texas
Biograhical notes, manuscripts, mini-essays, a timeline, and illustrations.

The Samuel Beckett Endpage
Performances, illustrated journals, interviews, and conferences

Samuel Beckett at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Some very rare examples of television films of Beckett’s shorter and less well known works. Full technical details of directors, actors, and production.

Samuel Beckett at Literary History.com
Collection of articles on literary criticism, plus reviews.

Echo’s Bones – a newly discovered story

Samuel Beckett – at Wikipedia
Life and career, Works, Collaborators, Legacy, Honours and awards, Selected works, Further reading, Web links.

More on Samuel Beckett
Twentieth century literature
More on biography

Samuel Beckett greatest works

November 10, 2010 by Roy Johnson

major works of prose fiction and drama

Samuel Beckett began writing in the 1930s, and was deeply influenced in his early period by James Joyce, for whom he worked briefly as secretary. He was also influenced by the literary developments of the avant-garde modernist movement and both the existentialist and absurdist tendencies in cultural life which arose just before and intensified after the second world war. However, after Joyce’s death in 1941 he began to develop a style of his own – a style which became more gaunt and sinewy to reflect his increasingly bleak view of life, which is witheringly unsentimental at its most generous and darkly tragic at its most powerful.

His writing became progressively minimalist, yet it is characterised by a lyrical beauty that reveals his deep feeling for the rhythms of speech and the cadences of the written word. He is not afraid to use repetition, assonance, alliteration, and the other common devices of poetry in his prose fiction. Since much of his work is written in the form of both spoken and ‘internal’ monologues, this has made his work a great favourite for actors.

He also combines his bleak, unsparing view of life with a very comical attitude to human frailty – often wrapped up in quasi and cod-philosophic observations. It is a black humour very consonant with the underlying public mood of post-holocaust shock prevalent during the latter half of the twentieth century.

Murphy is Samuel Beckett’s first novel, published in 1938. It was written in English, unlike many of his later works which were written in French then translated into English. It is the story of a work-shy man, wandering adrift in London, who believes that human desire can never be satisfied. He seeks to withdraw from life into a state of what he sees as catatonic bliss. Murphy’s fiancée Celia tries to humanise him by finding him a job working as a nurse in a mental institution, but he sees the insanity of the patients an attractive alternative to his conscious existence from which he cannot escape.

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Watt Beckett’s second novel was written during World War Two (1942-1944), while he was hiding from the Gestapo in Provence in southern France. It was first published in English in 1953 and tells a semi-incoherent story of Watt’s journey to become the manservant of a Mr Knott, and his struggle to understand the house they live in. It’s written with some of Beckett’s characteristically deadpan humour and quasi-philosophic jokes. He also uses deliberately unidiomatic language and pokes fun at contemporary figures and institutions. Watt has previously appeared in editions that are littered with major and minor errors. The new Faber edition offers for the first time a corrected text based on a scholarly appraisal of the manuscripts and their textual history.

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The Trilogy This is the famous trilogy that is generally regarded as the pinnacle of Beckett’s work as an experimental novelist. He was pushing the developments of modernism, existentialism, and absurdism as far as they would go. The three novels follow the bleak logic of Beckett’s move away from movement and life, towards stasis and death. Molloy (1951) is set in an indeterminate place and comprises the inner monologues of Molloy and a private detective called Moran. Both live in a state of semi-absurdity and seem almost to merge into the same person as they lose bodily mobility and end up using crutches. Malone Dies (1951) is the story of an old man who is confined to bed in a hospital or an asylum (he is not sure which). All notions of conventional plot or logical sequences of events are abandoned. The narrative is merely Malone’s obsession with the trivia of his existence, stripped of all physical effects except an exercise book and a pencil that is getting shorter and shorter. The Unnameable (1953) takes these experiments in prose fiction one stage further. It concerns a person with no name who lives under an old tarpaulin sheet. He is not even sure if he is dead or alive – and neither are we.

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The Expelled This collection of four stories or nouvelles represents work which dates from 1945, though they were all published much later, in French and then in English. Full contents: The Expelled, The Calmative, The End, and First Love. All the stories make use of a first-person narrator, and exploit its potential for expressing the frailties of human memory, the inability to distinguish the past from the present, and even a profound doubt concerning the purpose of life itself. The stories document the human condition of an unstoppable progress towards death.

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Beckett in performance

Billie Whitelaw in Not I (1972)

How It Is Published in French in 1961, and in English in 1964, this presents a novel in three parts, written in short paragraphs, which tell of a narrator lying in the dark, in the mud, repeating his life as he hears it uttered – or remembered – by another voice. Told from within, from the dark, the story is tirelessly and intimately explicit about the feelings that pervade his world, but fragmentary and vague about all else therein or beyond. The novel counts for many readers as Beckett’s greatest accomplishment in the prose narrative form. It is also his most challenging work, both stylistically and for the radical pessimism of its vision, which continues the themes of reduced circumstance, of another life before the present, and the self-appraising search for an essential self.

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Company These four last prose fictions span the final decade of Beckett’s life. In the title sytory a solitary listener lying in darkness calls up images from a past life. Ill Seen Ill Said is a meditation on an old woman living out her final days in an isolated cottage, watched over by a dozen mysterious sentinels. In Worstward Ho, a breathless speaker unravels the sense of life, acting out the repeated injunction to ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ Stirrings Still was published in the Guardian a few months before Beckett’s death in 1989. It is his last prose work and testament. The Faber edition also includes several short prose texts (Heard in the Dark I & II, One Evening, The Way, Ceiling) which represent works in progress or fragments composed around the same time as his final writing.

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Works for Radio Beckett was one of the most original and influential dramatists of the twentieth century, and a writer with an acute ear for the subtleties of sound and rhythm in both speech and writing. Yet the works he created for radio broadcast are relatively unknown. Now these historic BBC broadcasts are commercially available for the first time. A four-CD set covers the period 1957-1976 and comprises the five works created by Beckett specifically for the broadcast medium: All That Fall, Embers, Words and Music, Cascando and Rough for Radio, plus the rarely heard curio, The Old Tune, and the monologue, From an Abandoned Work.

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Complete Dramatic Works This one-volume compendium contains all of Beckett’s dramatic texts written between 1955 and 1984. It includes both the major dramatic works and the shorter and more compressed texts he created for the stage and for radio. Full contents: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, All That Fall, Acts Without Words, Krapp’s Last Tape, Roughs for the Theatre, Embers, Roughs for the Radio, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio,…but the clouds…, A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht und Traume, What Where.

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Samuel Beckett – web links

Samuel Beckett at Mantex
Biographical notes, complete bibliography, selected criticism, book reviews, videos, and web links.

Samuel Beckett Online Resources
This is a giant collection of papers, reviews, videos, journals. An old site, but packed with information. It looks very much like a labour of love by an enthusiast.

Samuel Beckett Exhibition at University of Texas
Biograhical notes, manuscripts, mini-essays, a timeline, and illustrations.

The Samuel Beckett Endpage
Performances, illustrated journals, interviews, and conferences

Samuel Beckett at Literary History.com
Collection of articles on literary criticism, plus reviews.

Echo’s Bones – a newly discovered story

Samuel Beckett – at Wikipedia
Life and career, Works, Collaborators, Legacy, Honours and awards, Selected works, Further reading, Web links.

Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of Modernism
Biography of modern art collector who was Beckett’s lover in the 1930s

More on Samuel Beckett
Twentieth century literature
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Samuel Beckett life and works

July 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Samuel Beckett was born near Dublin on April 13, 1906. He had an uneventful childhood, and as a young man he studied modern languages at Trinity College, Dublin, graduating in 1927. Beckett then spent two years (1928-1930) teaching English at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. After returning to Trinity College for a year of graduate work in 1931, he taught French there in 1931-1932. He spent the next few years wandering in London and through France and Germany, contributing stories and poems to avant-garde periodicals, before settling in Paris in 1937.

Finding himself in what at the time was the capital of modernism, he embraced it fully. He had a long-standing affair with the rich art patroness Peggy Guggenheim, and for a short time he worked as secretary to James Joyce, who was also living in Paris at that time. Early in World War II, during the German occupation of France, the Gestapo discovered Beckett’s activities in connection with the French Resistance movement, and he was compelled to flee to the unoccupied zone about 1942. He found sanctuary at Roussillon in the department of Vaucluse.

After the war he returned to Paris and began writing in earnest. He was writing novels in the period 1940-50, but later turned to drama. Waiting for Godot brought him international fame after 1952, as translations and productions of the play proliferated throughout the world. However, he continued to lead an utterly secluded life. It is worth noting that he wrote much of his later work in French, and then translated it himself into English. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in literature and died in Paris on 22 Dec 1989.

Writings

Beckett’s first novel, Murphy (1938), contains all the elements of his later work: the normal, busy world; someone who cannot come to terms with it; and a language whose low-keyed precision is disturbed by nothing it undertakes to describe, however grotesque or ridiculous.

In Beckett’s next novel, Watt (1942-1944), the language remains explicit though the situations become increasingly strange. In the trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable (1947-1949), the reader is plunged into a world of terminal exhaustion and tragi-comic desperation where Beckett appears most at home.

Samuel Beckett: an illustrated life gives a short account of Beckett’s little-known private life in a book which is packed with rare photographs and shots of his stage productions. The life is quite surprising: a priviledged upbringing, with talented academic prospects which he abandonded for a bohemian life. Fighting with the Maquis during the war. Little artistic success, but lots of relationships with women – and then the big breakthrough with Waiting for Godot. This is a stunning little book. Buy the book here

In Beckett’s world, readers are clearly told everything except the things they are used to knowing. Thus, in Waiting for Godot, which was written in 1948 and published in French in 1952 and in English in 1953, it is clear that two tramps are waiting for Godot, that they return to their rendezvous night after night, that they fill up time with games and dialogues, and that Godot may make an immense difference to their lives. But who Godot may be and what difference he will make is never indicated. Beckett denied that Godot was a symbol for God and that any general scheme of systematic meanings underlay the work. Its mysteriousness is the deliberate instrument of the play’s disturbing power.

Endgame, possibly Beckett’s most remarkable single work, appears to be about the end of humanity. His later works include the plays Happy Days (1961), Not I (1973), That Time (1976), Rockaby (1981), and the novel How It Is (1964). These bleak, enigmatic works are unsettlingly funny. Their precision of style and extravagance of conception are hallmarks of a first-class comic writer.

Samuel Beckett – web links

Samuel Beckett at Mantex
Biographical notes, complete bibliography, selected criticism, book reviews, videos, and web links.

Samuel Beckett Online Resources
This is a giant collection of papers, reviews, videos, journals. An old site, but packed with information. It looks very much like a labour of love by an enthusiast.

Samuel Beckett Exhibition at University of Texas
Biograhical notes, manuscripts, mini-essays, a timeline, and illustrations.

The Samuel Beckett Endpage
Performances, illustrated journals, interviews, and conferences

Samuel Beckett at Literary History.com
Collection of articles on literary criticism, plus reviews.

Echo’s Bones – a newly discovered story

Samuel Beckett – at Wikipedia
Life and career, Works, Collaborators, Legacy, Honours and awards, Selected works, Further reading, Web links.

More on Samuel Beckett
Twentieth century literature
More on biography

Samuel Beckett selected critcism

November 7, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The biography of Beckett by Deirdre Bair [Samuel Beckett, 1975], while not having any particular critical pretensions itself, is a very useful adjunct to this list of Samuel Beckett criticism, containing as it does not only the background, context, composition and publishing details of the work but also a good deal of miscellaneous comment and anecdote from Beckett himself and his friends, in the form of interviews and correspondence. Enoch Brater’s Why Beckett (1989) takes the form of a pictorial biography, with over a hundred (often excellent) black-and-white photographs. There are some good points (and quotes) in the succinct text, too.

These biographical works have now been superseded by James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (1996), a work of great insight as well as scholarship by someone who was close to Beckett in his last years.

It is inevitably the case that Beckett features, often centrally, in many works on twentieth-century fiction and drama, where his place as an innovator and explorer of extremes is recognized. The Irish context of his work is also receiving more attention than formerly. See for example Beckett: The Irish Dimension by Mary Junker (1995), and the excellent short accounts of Beckett’s work given in Richard Kearney’s Transitions …, Robert Welch’s Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing (1993), and Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland (1996).

[Works are listed here in chronological order.]

Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, New York: Doubleday, 1961.

Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press, 1962.

Frederick J Hoffman, Samuel Beckett: The Language of Self, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962.

Martin Esslin (ed), Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs (NJ): Prentice-Hall, 1965.

John Fletcher, The Novels of Samuel Beckett, London: Chatto and Windus, 1964.

Raymond Federman, Journey to Chaos: Samuel beckett’s Early Fiction, Berkley (CA): University of California Press, 1965.

John Fletcher, Samuel Beckett’s Art, London: Chatto and Windus, 1967.

Ruby Cohn, A Casebook on ‘Waiting for Godot’, New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Ronald Hayman, Samuel Beckett, London: Heinemann, 1968.

Michael Robinson, The Long Sonata of the Dead: A study of Samuel Beckett, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970.

Raymond Federman and John Fletcher, Samuel Beckett: His Work and His Critics, Berkley (CA): University of California Press, 1970

Melvin J. Friedman (ed) Samuel Beckett Now: Critical Approaches to his Novels, Poetry, and Plays, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Francis Doherty, Samuel Beckett, London: Hutchinson, 1971.

Colin Duckworth, Angels of Darkness: Dramatic Effect in Beckett with Special Reference to Ionesco, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972.

John Fletcher, Beckett: A Study of his Plays, New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

Brian Finney, ‘How It Is’: A Study of Samuel Beckett’s Later Fiction, London: Covent Garden Press, 1972.

Al Alvarez, Samuel Beckett, New York: Viking, 1973.

Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Hugh Kenner, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, 1973.

H. Porter Abbott, The Fiction of Samuel Beckett, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973.

Ruby Cohn (ed), Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975.

Hannah-Case Copeland, Art and the Artist in the works of Samuel Beckett, Paris: Mouton, 1975.

James Eliopulos, Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Language, The Hague: Mouton, 1975.

Katherine Worth (ed), Beckett the Shape Changer, London: Routledge, 1975.

John Pilling, Samuel Beckett, 1976.

S.E. Gontarski, Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’: A Manuscript Study, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977.

Beryl Fletcher et al, A Student’s Guide to
The Plays of Samuel Beckett, London: Faber and Faber, 1978.

James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, 1979.

Robin J. Davis, Samuel Beckett: Checklist and Index of his Published Works, Stirling: The Library: University of Stirling, 1979.

Samuel Beckett: an illustrated life gives a short account of Beckett’s little-known private life in a book which is packed with rare photographs and shots of his stage productions. The life is quite surprising: a priviledged upbringing, with talented academic prospects which he abandonded for a bohemian life. Fighting with the Maquis during the war. Little artistic success, but lots of relationships with women – and then the big breakthrough with Waiting for Godot. This is a stunning little book. Buy the book here

Barbara R. Gluck, Beckett and Joyce: Friendship and Fiction, Lewisberg (PA): Bucknell University Press, 1979.

Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, Samuel beckett: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1979.

Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett’s Theatre, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Helene L. Baldwin, Samuel Beckett’s Real Silence, 1981.

John C. DiPierro, Structures in Beckett’s ‘Watt’, York (SC): French Literature Publications, 1981.

J.E. Dearlove, Accommodating the Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Nonrelational Art, Durham: Duke University Press, 1982.

Lance St. John Butler, Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being: A Study in Ontological Parable, 1984.

Virginia Cooke, Beckett on File, London: Methuen, 1985.

S.E. Gontarski, The Intent of ‘Undoing’ in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Enoch Brater (ed), Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context, 1986.

S.E. Gontarski (ed) On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, New York: Grove Press, 1986.

John Calder (ed), As No Other Dare Fail: for Samuel Beckett on his 80th birthday, 1986.

James Knowlson (ed), Samuel Beckett: A Celebration, 1986.

Eoin O’Brien (ed), The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Ireland, 1986.

Peter Gidal, Understanding Beckett: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Work of Samuel Beckett, London: Macmillan, 1986.

Ruby Cohn (ed) Samuel Beckett: ‘Waiting for Godot’: A Casebook, London: Macmillan, 1987.

Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theatre, 1987.

James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (eds), Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company, London: Macmillan, 1987.

Alan Warren Friedman et al, Beckett Translating/ Translating Beckett, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987.

Jane Alison Hale, The Broken Window: Beckett’s Dramatic Perspective, West Lafayette (IN): Purdue University Press, 1987.

Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.

Robin J. Davis and Lance St. John Butler (eds) Make Sense Who May: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988.

Mary A. Doll, Beckett and Myth: An Archetypal Approach, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988.

Brian Fitch, Beckett and Babel: An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.

Lawrence Graver, Samuel Beckett: ‘Waiting for Godot’, London: Thames and Hudson 1989.

Jonathan Kalb, Beckett in Performance, 1989.

Katherine Worth, ‘Waiting for Godot’ and ‘Happy Days’, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990.

M.R. Axelrod, The Politics of Style in the Fiction of Balzac, Beckett, and Cortazar, 1992.

Steven Connor, ‘Waiting for Godot’ and ‘Endgame’, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992.

Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama, 1993.

Eyal Amiran, Wandering and Home: Beckett’s Metaphysical Narrative, University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1993.

Paul Davies, The Ideal Real: Beckett’s Fiction and Imagination, Toronto: Associated University Press, 1994.

Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words, 1995.

H. Porter Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, London: Harper-Collins, 1996.

James Acheson, Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice: Criticism, Drama, and Early Fiction, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997.

Thomas Coisineau, ‘Waiting for Godot’: Form in Movement, Boston: Twayne, 1990.

Anthony Farrow, Early Beckett: Art and Allusion in ‘More Pricks than Kicks’ and ‘Murphy’, Try (NY): Whitson, 1991.

S.E. Gontarski (ed) The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Vol 2: ‘Endgame’, London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

S.E. Gontarski (ed) The Beckett Studies Reader, Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1993.

S.E. Gontarski (ed) The Theatrical Notesbooks of Samuel Beckett, Vol 4: The Shorter Plays, London: Faber and Faber, 1993.

Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Samuel Beckett – web links

Samuel Beckett at Mantex
Biographical notes, complete bibliography, selected criticism, book reviews, videos, and web links.

Samuel Beckett Online Resources
This is a giant collection of papers, reviews, videos, journals. An old site, but packed with information. It looks very much like a labour of love by an enthusiast.

Samuel Beckett Exhibition at University of Texas
Biograhical notes, manuscripts, mini-essays, a timeline, and illustrations.

The Samuel Beckett Endpage
Performances, illustrated journals, interviews, and conferences

Samuel Beckett at Literary History.com
Collection of articles on literary criticism, plus reviews.

Echo’s Bones – a newly discovered story

Samuel Beckett – at Wikipedia
Life and career, Works, Collaborators, Legacy, Honours and awards, Selected works, Further reading, Web links.

More on Samuel Beckett
Twentieth century literature
More on biography

Samuel Beckett web links

December 10, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a selection of web-based archives and resources

This short selection of Samuel Beckett web links offers quick connections to resources for further study. It’s not comprehensive, and if you have any ideas for additional resources, please use the ‘Comments’ box below to make your suggestions. Some of the university-based web sites tend to be old-fashioned in terms of design, but they are often rich in terms of the materials they contain.

Samuel Beckett – web links

Samuel Beckett at Mantex
Biographical notes, complete bibliography, selected criticism, book reviews, videos, and web links.

Samuel Beckett Online Resources
This is a giant collection of papers, reviews, videos, journals. An old site, but packed with information. It looks very much like a labour of love by an enthusiast.

Samuel Beckett Exhibition at University of Texas
Biograhical notes, manuscripts, mini-essays, a timeline, and illustrations.

The Samuel Beckett Endpage
Performances, illustrated journals, interviews, and conferences

Samuel Beckett at Literary History.com
Collection of articles on literary criticism, plus reviews.

Echo’s Bones – a newly discovered story

Samuel Beckett – at Wikipedia
Life and career, Works, Collaborators, Legacy, Honours and awards, Selected works, Further reading, Web links.

More on Samuel Beckett
Twentieth century literature
More on biography

Samuel Beckett: An Illustrated Life

June 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

short biographical study – with rare archive photos

This short biographical study offers an introduction to Samuel Beckett and his amazingly difficult and rather bohemian life, which was unrelenting devoted to creativity no matter what his circumstances. It’s written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Beckett is a well-known author, but not much is generally known about his personal life. He avoided interviews and shunned publicity – even sending his publisher to collect his Nobel Prize.

This short book isn’t an attempt to deliver a full scale biography (that has already been done by Deirdre Bair, Anthony Cronin, and James Knowlson) but it offers a potted account of his life accompanied by the most original set of photographs that I have ever seen – some from his personal life, and others from stage productions.

Beckett was from a fairly well-to-do family; he had a privileged, well educated upbringing, and by the time he graduated with first class honours from Trinity College Dublin it looked as if a standard academic career was his natural progression route.

But he had won a lectureship at the Ecole Normale Superieure – and during his time in Paris he fell in with fellow Dubliner James Joyce. This experience led him to give up his work as an academic and to embrace the Bohemian life of being a poet, a critic, a translator, and a novelist – from which activities he made no money at all. He lived on allowances from his family until he was middle-aged.

The 1930s passed in a flurry of Bohemianism, occasional publication in obscure magazines, and a fair amount of hardship. He suffered from a number of what seemed to have been psycho-somatic ailments, and even spent some time in psycho-analysis. He also had a rather complex personal life – a wife whom he married for ‘testamentary’ reasons, and overlapping and simultaneous relationships with other women which required ‘timetabling’.

Samuel Beckett’s bookshelves

The war years were a period of hardship and bare survival. He spent time hiding from the Nazis (and fighting with the Maquis) in southern France, then working with the Red Cross. After the war he returned to live in Paris and began to write in French.

The period immediately after the war he called ‘the siege in the room’, where he shut himself away and produced an enormous amount of writing – none of which was immediately published. This period lasted for about four years. And then in the early 1950s he had his first successes – novels published in France, followed by a big breakthrough with Waiting for Godot.

From that point on, his star rose, and yet his work was always surrounded by controversy. People found his writing difficult to understand; theatre directors weren’t sure how to stage his plays; he had different publishers for the three or four genres in which he wrote; and rather like Vladimir Nabokov he spent a lot of time translating his work from one language to another – and sometimes back again.

As he got older his works got shorter, more compressed, and eventually reached the point of silence as he produced mimes and silent films. However, it’s quite possible that his oeuvre will continue to grow, even after his death, because he wrote so much which never got into print. This is a short but very attractive publication that’s worth it just for the photographs.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Gerry Dukes, Samuel Beckett: an illustrated life, New York: Overlook Press, 2004, pp.161, ISBN 1585676101

More on Samuel Beckett
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Samuel Beckett – web links

major works of prose fiction and drama

Beckett in performance

Samuel Beckett – web links

Samuel Beckett – web links

Samuel Beckett – web links

a selection of web-based archives and resources

Samuel Beckett – web links

short biographical study – with rare archive photos

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