Today, April 13, 2006, is the centannary of Samuel Beckett's birth.
There is a lingering doubt about the date. Mr. Beckett's birth certificate, registered June 13, 1906, shows his birth as May 31, a Sunday. The discrepancy is attributed to registration practices of the time or human error or a mix of these. Mr. Beckett clearly enjoyed giving April 13, 1906 as his nativity, as it was both Friday the 13th and Good Friday.
If you are unfamiliar with Mr. Beckett's works, you need to improve your life with a little reading.*
If you know nothing of Mr. Beckett, well, then your life is very poor indeed.
A good beginning is James Knowlson's Damned to Fame (1996). And a good capper is Anthony Cronin's Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1999). We recommend you skip Deirdre Bair's lifeless error-riddled biography (1978).
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SAM
Ubi Nihil Vales, Ibi Nil Velis
You are reading about Mr. Beckett at Pave because Mr. Beckett spent much of his life in France and much of that residing at No.6 Rue des Favorites in Paris. Also because we like Mr. Beckett.
Mr. Beckett had many adventures in France. He survived a near-fatal stabbing by one Robert Jules Prudent, a Parisian pimp. While awaiting arraignment, when asked by Mr. Beckett about his motive, Prudent replied, "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur. Je m'excuse." Contrary to a popular retelling, Mr. Beckett, though amused by this response, was not so amused as to drop the charges and Prudent served two months with two years probation for criminal assualt.
Early in the war Mr. Beckett became involved with the Musée de L'Homme, a French Resistance group (and assigned the target-on-the-forehead codename "L'Irlandais"). His réseau, "Gloria", was discovered and he fled from the Gestapo to southern France. In Roussillon, he worked as a member of the Maquis. For his war work he was awarded the Croix de guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance, though he dismissed all this as so much "boy scout stuff".
He served with the Irish Red Cross in post-war Saint-Lô.
After his novel Watt (1945, pub. 1953) with few exceptions, he wrote directly in French followed by translation to English, which he did himself or supervised. Mr. Beckett professed to enjoy the impairment to style writing in French imposed.** It is in French that his best known works were written.
Mr. Beckett won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, accepting the prize but declining the celebrity. He did not attend the ceremony and he did not give a self-applauding Nobel lecture, unlike Nobel Lit no-talents and blowhards we know.
The beautifully appointed Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris will be sponsoring a discussion with author John Banville, a wholly different sort of writer than Mr. Beckett, in what the CCI advertises as "the first event at the Centre Culturel Irlandais to mark the centenary of Samuel Beckett's birth". This seems a weak start to things, but, happily, we are informed Mr. Banville has managed a berth for Mr. Beckett somewhere amongst his influences. So there you are.
Billetterie
Centre Culturel Irlandais
5, rue des Irlandais
75005 Paris
01 58 52 10 30
Admission €5
7:30P (19:30 CEST)
Details here.
* Mr. Beckett's works also come in French flavors.
** This is not because of some superior quality exclusive to the French language as many make out. It is the natural trimming coincident to writing in one's B language.
PFFT (What is this?): Mussing 100 years of solitude 4 | Rayonnement français 4
If you know nothing of Mr. Beckett, well, then your life is very poor indeed.
Beckett, of all people...
I think you're raising your hopes a little high, Damian. I'm afraid the average Pave reader (except perhaps for andy) might, indeed, live a very poor life outside quoting The Simpsons about the French.
Zoomer, if the average Pave reader was as you conjecture, then they would fit right in with Beckett.
[Beckett thought] thinking as boring, invalid, and quite unnecessary. His characters did not need to think in order to be…
Actually, quite a wonderful philosophy :)
