Your Habits Are a Painkiller | Samuel Beckett's Complete Philosophy

Chapter 1: The Life

It is the twenty-third of October, nineteen sixty-nine, and in a small hotel near the sea in a coastal town in Tunisia a lean, silent man is on holiday with his wife, trying, as he has tried his whole life, to be no one in particular. He is sixty-three years old. The news, when it reaches him, does not arrive as a telephone call from a newspaper or a knock at the door from a well-wisher. It comes as a telegram from his publisher in Paris, and the telegram does not read like congratulation. It reads like a warning. In effect it tells him that the thing has happened, that there is no undoing it now, and that he had better find somewhere to hide.

It is not bad news of the ordinary kind. No one has died. There is no illness, no debt, no disgrace. What has happened is that a committee in Sweden has chosen to give this man the highest honour that exists in the world of letters, the prize that crowns a whole life's work and sets a name down in the short permanent list of the age. He has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And when his wife understands what the telegram means, she says a single word. Catastrophe.

His name was Samuel Beckett, and the word she chose was not a joke, or not only a joke. It was very nearly the truth of how he felt. Here is the knot this whole episode exists to untie. Beckett had spent his entire life making an art out of failure, out of poverty of means, out of silence and diminishment and the sense of having almost nothing to say and no good reason to say it. He had written some of the barest, most stripped-down works any serious writer ever put his name to, works about men who cannot go on and go on anyway, and now the world had decided to reward him for it with its loudest possible applause. The great poet of the uncelebrated had been, of all things, celebrated. He did not travel to Sweden to collect the prize. He took another room, under a false name, and waited for the noise to pass. The most famous thing he ever wrote is a kind of refusal to stop, a voice saying in the same breath that it cannot go on and that it will go on, and to understand how a man builds a life and an art out of that sentence, we have to go back to a comfortable house on the edge of Dublin, and to a boy who had almost every advantage and could not, for all of it, feel at home in the world.

He was born on the thirteenth of April, nineteen oh six, in a house called Cooldrinagh in a leafy, prosperous village south of Dublin, Foxrock, the kind of place where solicitors and surveyors and doctors kept large gardens and sent their sons to good schools. He liked to say he was born on Good Friday, and that year the calendar obliged him, for Good Friday did fall on the thirteenth, so that he could claim to have entered the world on the day of the crucifixion, under an unlucky number, as though the joke had been arranged in advance. The family was Protestant, part of the Anglo-Irish professional class that ran much of the country's business without ever quite belonging to its Catholic majority. His father was a genial, easygoing man, a quantity surveyor who loved long walks and golf and had little use for books. His mother was another matter. She was devout, exacting, formidable, a woman of iron routine and deep and anxious faith, and the bond between her and her second son was the great difficult love of his early life, close and painful and never fully resolved. Much later, when people asked him about his childhood, he would give strange, bleak answers, saying he had had little talent for happiness, and that even in the womb he had felt trapped.

For all of that, the outward boyhood was sunlit and privileged. He was a genuine athlete, quick and wiry, good at tennis and boxing and above all at cricket, good enough that he would go on to play two first-class matches for his university and to leave a small, real mark in the game's official record, a left-handed batsman and a slow left-arm bowler. He remains, to this day, the only winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature who also appears in the cricketers' almanac, which is the kind of fact that would have made him wince and would delight everyone else. He was sent away to a good boarding school in the north of Ireland, the same school that had once turned out Oscar Wilde, and then to Trinity College in the heart of Dublin, where he read modern languages, French and Italian, and took a brilliant first-class degree. He was clever, well-read, fluent, marked out early as a young man of unusual gifts, with the whole comfortable machinery of a settled Irish life laid out in front of him. He wanted almost none of it.

What he wanted was somewhere else, and in nineteen twenty-eight, at the age of twenty-two, he found it. He went to Paris on a two-year exchange, to teach English at an elite college there, and Paris undid him in the best way. It was the literary capital of the world, and by a piece of enormous luck he was carried almost at once into the innermost circle of the greatest and most difficult writer then living, his fellow Irishman James Joyce. For a young man steeped in languages and hungry for seriousness, this was like being admitted to the presence of a god. Joyce was half-blind by then and at work on the vast, dense, dream-language book that would occupy his last years, and Beckett made himself useful, running errands, reading aloud to him, taking dictation, discussing the endless music of the sentences. He revered Joyce. He wrote an early essay defending the older man's impossible new book, and a prize-winning poem, and for a while he seemed destined to be a junior member of the great modernist project, a scholar and disciple in the master's shadow.

The shadow had its dangers. Joyce's daughter Lucia, a troubled and gifted young woman sliding toward the mental illness that would eventually engulf her, fell in love with Beckett, and Beckett, who came to the house to see her father and not her, could not return the feeling. When this became clear there was pain and awkwardness and a rupture with the family, later mended, and the whole episode seems to have left him with a lasting sense that his very presence could cause harm he had not intended. It was around this time, too, that he began to understand he could not simply live as a footnote to Joyce, however much he loved him. The problem of how to be a writer who was not merely a lesser Joyce would take him more than fifteen years to solve, and the solving of it is the hinge of everything that came after.

First, though, came the wilderness. He tried the respectable path and it nearly killed him. He went back to Trinity to lecture, the natural career for a young man of his gifts, and discovered that standing in front of students and being an authority filled him with something close to horror. He lasted barely more than a year and resigned, throwing away the safe future with both hands, to the despair of his family. Then followed the lost decade, the nineteen thirties, years of drift and poverty and false starts. He wrote a book of stories and a strange, clever first novel about a man who wants nothing more than to escape the demands of the world and retreat into the private theatre of his own mind, and almost no one read them. He wandered between Dublin and London and the cities of Germany. His father died suddenly in nineteen thirty-three, a loss that hit him hard, since his father had been the warm and undemanding one. He fell into a long depression, with a racing heart and night terrors and a body that seemed to be turning his misery into physical symptoms, and in London he did something very unusual for a man of his background in that era. He put himself into psychoanalysis, spending two years talking through the roots of his unhappiness with a young therapist. During those London years the therapist took him one evening to hear a famous Swiss psychiatrist give a lecture, and the older man described a young patient of his, a girl who, he said, had never been properly born, who had somehow failed to fully arrive in her own life. The phrase went into Beckett like a splinter and never came out. He would still be turning it over half a century later. It named something he felt about himself, and about the strange half-lived quality of being conscious at all.

By nineteen thirty-seven he had made his choice of country. He left Ireland and his mother's orbit for good and settled in Paris, the city that would be his home for the rest of his life, writing, translating, living cheaply, still unknown, still unsure what his own work was for. And then, on a January night in nineteen thirty-eight, walking home in the small hours, he was stabbed in the chest by a stranger, a pimp who had accosted him on the street and whom he had brushed past. The blade went in close to his heart and just missed his lung, and he collapsed on the pavement and was carried to hospital, where for a while it was not certain he would live. He recovered slowly over the following weeks. Among those who came to see him as he lay there was a woman he had met only slightly before, a quiet, practical, musically gifted Frenchwoman named Suzanne, some years older than he was, and out of those hospital visits grew the companionship that would last, through every difficulty, until the end of both their lives. Later, when the case came to court, Beckett went to look at the man who had nearly killed him and asked him simply why he had done it. The man said only that he did not know, sir. He was sorry, he did not know. Beckett, who might have pursued him, let the matter drop. The pointlessness of it, a man almost murdered for no reason at all by someone who could not even say why, seems to have struck him less as an outrage than as a piece of ordinary, bottomless truth about the world, the kind of truth he had already begun, without quite knowing it, to build his art around.

He was thirty-one years old, alive by an inch, settled at last in the city he had chosen, bound now to the woman he would stay with, and still, by any outward measure, a failure, a gifted man of letters with a drawer of unpublished pages and no clear idea of what he was doing. Everything that would make him one of the essential voices of the century was still ahead of him, and almost none of it had been written. What lay immediately ahead was not literature at all. It was a war that would sweep across Europe within two years, close over Paris, and force this shy, watchful, undecided man to find out, in hiding and in danger, exactly what he was made of.

Chapter 2: The Suffering of Being

Before Samuel Beckett wrote a single one of the works the world remembers, he wrote one short book of ideas, and folded up small inside it is nearly everything that came after. He was twenty-five years old, back in Dublin and miserable in his brief career as a lecturer, when a London publisher asked him for a study of the great French novelist Marcel Proust, the author of the enormous novel about memory and lost time. What Beckett produced was not really a work of criticism at all. It was a young man's fierce, gloomy meditation on time, on habit, and on the pain of simply being alive, dressed up as an essay about somebody else. To read it now is to see the whole underground foundation of his life's work already laid, before he had any idea what he would build on top of it.

Start with habit, because habit is where he starts, and because it is the thing he understood more deeply than almost any writer before him. We tend to think of our habits as small conveniences, the route we take to work, the side of the bed we sleep on. Beckett saw habit as something far larger and far stranger. Habit, for him, is the great deadener, the anaesthetic that makes ordinary life possible. It is the treaty we sign with existence so that we do not have to feel the full weight of it every moment. Think of what it would be like to notice, freshly and completely, every single thing around you at once, the pressure of the chair, the sound of your own blood, the sheer improbable fact that you exist at all and will not always. No one could bear it for long. Habit is what dulls that down to a manageable hum. It wraps the world in a soft grey familiarity so that we stop really seeing it, and in that not-seeing we are able to get through the day. Habit is the ballast that keeps the ship steady. It is also, and this is the catch, the thing that keeps us mildly asleep for most of our lives.

Because the price of the anaesthetic is that it numbs the good along with the bad. When everything is familiar, nothing is fully alive. We move through our own days like sleepwalkers, and the world, which is astonishing, becomes merely the backdrop we barely glance at. And then, every so often, the anaesthetic fails. There are moments, Beckett noticed, when one habit has worn out and the next has not yet formed, brief gaps in the protective crust, when we are suddenly exposed to reality without the padding. A journey to a strange city, the first night in an unfamiliar room, the hours after a loss when the old routines no longer fit. In those moments the dull background hum of getting by, what he called the boredom of living, gives way to something sharper and truer, which he called the suffering of being. It hurts. It is frightening. And it is also, he insisted, the only time we are really awake. The suffering of being is the tax we pay for actually seeing the world instead of sleeping through it. Most people flee those moments as fast as they can, back into the safety of the next routine. The artist, Beckett came to think, is the one who stays in the open a little longer, and looks.

Underneath habit lies the deeper problem, which is time. Here Beckett takes Proust's great subject and makes it bleaker than Proust ever quite did. We imagine that we are one continuous person moving through the years, the same self at seven and at seventy. Beckett did not believe it. He thought we were not one self but a long procession of selves, each one dying quietly as the next takes its place, so that the person who forms a desire is never the same person who finally satisfies it. Consider what that does to wanting anything. You long for something for years, you strive and wait, and by the time it comes to you, the you that wanted it is gone, replaced by someone slightly different who wants something else, and the prize arrives, as it were, addressed to a person who no longer lives here. This is why attainment so often tastes of ash. We are always a step behind our own longing, and the self we are trying to satisfy is always yesterday's self, already dead. Nothing, in this view, can ever truly be possessed, because possession would require that the one who wanted and the one who has be the same, and they never are. We are strangers even to ourselves, a crowd of successive ghosts wearing one name.

If that were the whole story it would be unbearable, and Proust offered one escape, which fascinated the young Beckett. There is a kind of memory, Proust said, that redeems all this. Not the memory we summon on purpose, which gives us only faded, secondhand copies of the past, but the involuntary kind, the sudden flood that ambushes us. A particular taste, a smell, the feel of an uneven paving stone underfoot, and without warning an entire vanished world comes rushing back, not as a picture but as a living presence, the past made real again for one piercing instant. In Proust it is the taste of a small cake dipped in tea that unlocks a whole lost childhood. For a moment, in that involuntary flood, the procession of dying selves is bridged, and the man who tastes the cake and the child who tasted it long ago become, briefly, one. It is the closest thing to salvation the great novel allows.

Beckett was drawn to this and, being Beckett, could not fully believe in it. He was more austere, less willing to be consoled. But he never lost his fascination with the idea that the past is not gone but sealed somewhere inside us, waiting, and that time might be undone by accident, by a taste or a sound, when we are not trying. It is worth holding on to this, because years later he would build an entire play around a man and a machine trying to do on purpose what Proust said could only happen by chance, to reach back and touch a former self, and finding only how far away that self had drifted.

All of this was still theory, worked out on paper by an unhappy young man who had not yet found his own voice. But you can watch him begin to turn it into fiction, comically, in the first novel he published, a book called Murphy, about a young man in London who wants one thing above all else, which is to be left alone inside his own mind. Murphy despairs of the ordinary world of jobs and love and effort, and his solution is to strip naked, tie himself into a rocking chair with seven scarves, and rock himself into a kind of trance in which his body goes still and his mind floats free, released at last from the demands of living. It is a joke, and it is also completely serious. Here already is a figure who will haunt Beckett for the rest of his career, the man who wants out, who longs to shut down the machinery of the self and sink into the quiet, who finds the world of wanting and striving and being someone too much to bear and dreams of a dim, still place beyond it. Murphy wants what habit gives us all in weaker doses, an escape from the suffering of being. He simply wants the full dose, permanently.

This is the ground Beckett stood on before the war changed everything. A world in which habit keeps us numb and half-asleep, in which time dissolves the self into a line of strangers, in which nothing can be held and nothing repeated, and in which the only fully waking moments are the painful ones we spend most of our energy avoiding. It is a hard vision, and it would have stayed a merely literary hardness, a clever young man's pessimism, if history had left him alone. History did not leave him alone. Within a few years he would be living, not writing about, a world in which every comfortable habit had been torn away, in which people waited without knowing for what, and in which the suffering of being was not a theory in a book but the daily air he breathed.

Chapter 3: The Years in Hiding

When the German army rolled into Paris in the summer of nineteen forty, Samuel Beckett was a citizen of a neutral country. Ireland had stayed out of the war, and as an Irishman he had every right, and every reason, to go home to safety and sit the whole thing out in peace. He did not go. He would say later, in the flat way he had of turning a grave choice into a shrug, that he preferred France at war to Ireland at peace. It is one of the most revealing sentences he ever spoke. Given a clear path to comfort and safety, this shy, unassertive man, who had never in his life pushed himself forward, quietly chose danger, because the danger was shared and the safety would have been a kind of desertion.

Within a year he had done something far riskier than merely staying. In nineteen forty-one he joined an underground Resistance network in occupied Paris, a cell that gathered intelligence on German troop movements and forwarded it, in secret, to London. Beckett's role suited his gifts. Reports came in from agents all over the occupied zone, and he translated them from French, condensed them, and helped prepare them to be photographed and smuggled onward. It was patient, meticulous, and lethally dangerous work, the kind that ended, for many who did it, in arrest, torture, and death. He kept at it for more than a year. Ever afterward, when anyone tried to praise his courage, he waved it away with two dismissive words. Boy scout stuff, he called it, as though translating documents that could get him shot were a hobby for schoolboys. The modesty was real, and so was the risk he was pretending away.

In the late summer of nineteen forty-two the network was betrayed. An informer gave it up from the inside, and the arrests began, sweeping through the cell, taking friends and colleagues, many of whom would not survive the camps. Beckett and Suzanne were among the lucky few who got word in time. They fled their apartment with almost nothing, sometimes only hours ahead of the secret police, and disappeared into the city, moving from one borrowed room to another while they worked out how to escape. Then they made the long, frightening journey south, across the line that divided occupied France from the so-called free zone, traveling partly on foot, hiding, waiting for the right moment to cross, until at last they reached a remote village high in the hills of the south, a place called Roussillon, far from anything, where two strangers might be able to vanish.

There they stayed for roughly two and a half years, waiting for a war to end that showed no sign of ending. Beckett, the Trinity scholar, the friend of the greatest writer in Europe, spent those years as a farm laborer, working the fields for a local family in exchange for food, bringing in the grape harvest, digging potatoes, doing whatever the seasons demanded. He and Suzanne lived on almost nothing, always with the low, constant fear that a stranger's question or a careless word might expose them. The days were long, empty, and monotonous, filled with the dull work of survival and the endless business of waiting. He helped the local Resistance a little, storing weapons, but mostly he simply endured, one indistinguishable day after another, in a nowhere at the edge of the world.

And at night, by lamplight, to keep his mind from going out entirely, he wrote a book. It was a strange one, a long, obsessive, circling comic novel called Watt, about a servant in a peculiar house who tries and fails to make sense of everything around him, and it reads like the work of a man using the machinery of logic to hold off madness, counting and sorting and permuting to fill the silence. He said himself that he wrote it only to get away from the war and the waiting, a way of staying sane in a place where there was nothing to do but stay alive. It is not the book anyone starts with. But something in those years, the emptiness, the fear, the two people passing time in a bare room with no idea when or whether their ordeal would end, sank down into him and would rise again, transformed, in the work that made him famous. He had learned in his own body what it is to wait for a deliverance that may never arrive.

When the fighting finally reached its end and France was free, the new government did not forget what he had done. He was decorated for his Resistance work, given the war-cross his adopted country awarded for courage under the occupation, an honor he accepted and then, characteristically, never mentioned again, filing it away with the same embarrassment he brought to every form of praise. He had risked his life for years, and he would sooner talk about almost anything else.

There was one more thing he needed to see before he could begin his real work, and he went looking for it. In the last months of the war he volunteered with an Irish Red Cross unit and went to Normandy, to a town called Saint-Lo that the fighting had almost wiped from the earth. It had been bombed nearly to powder, and he served there in a makeshift hospital as a storekeeper and interpreter, among the rubble of what had been a living town. He watched people pick their way back into the ruins and begin, somehow, to live again, to set up house in the wreckage, to go on. He wrote a short piece about the place afterward and called it, unforgettably, a capital of ruins. That image stayed with him, a whole civilization reduced to broken stone, and human beings moving through it, patient and battered, refusing to stop. He had gone through the war watching the comfortable, familiar world he had described so coldly in his study of habit be torn away for real, from millions of people at once. Now he had to find a way to write about what was left when everything had been taken. The answer, when it came, would come suddenly, and not in France at all, but in a quiet room back in the city of his birth.

Chapter 4: The Way of Subtraction

The most important moment in Samuel Beckett's artistic life was not a triumph or a disaster. It was a quiet recognition that came to him in his mother's room, in Dublin, in nineteen forty-five, and it changed the direction of everything he wrote afterward. For years he had been stuck, gifted and stalled, unable to find a way of writing that was truly his own. The reason, he now understood, had a name, and the name was James Joyce. He had spent his youth in the orbit of the greatest and most encyclopedic writer of the age, and he had absorbed, without quite meaning to, an idea of what a great writer was. A great writer, on the Joyce model, was a kind of god over his material, a master who knew everything, who could bend a dozen languages to his will, who added layer upon layer of learning and allusion and music until the work contained an entire world. Joyce was always adding, always reaching for more, more knowledge, more control, more command. And Beckett, standing in his mother's room, saw with sudden clarity that this was a road he could never travel, because it was not his road at all.

What he saw was that his own way ran in exactly the opposite direction. Where Joyce moved toward more, Beckett would move toward less. Where Joyce added, Beckett would take away. His talent, he realized, was not for mastery but for something stranger and harder to value, for impoverishment, for lack of knowledge, for subtracting rather than adding. He would later put it almost exactly like that, that his own way lay in poverty, in ignorance and impotence, in stripping down rather than building up. Most writers spend their lives trying to seem to know more, to be more in control, to demonstrate their power over the page. Beckett decided to do the reverse. He would work with weakness instead of strength, with not-knowing instead of knowing, with the bare and the failing and the diminished, because that, and not the godlike mastery of Joyce, was the truth of his own experience. It sounds like a confession of defeat. It was in fact the most liberating decision of his life, because it turned everything he had thought were his handicaps, his doubt, his emptiness, his sense of having nothing solid to say, into his actual subject and his actual strength.

It helps to picture the difference in the most literal way. When Joyce corrected the proofs of his books, he did not trim them. He covered the margins with additions, more words crowded into every blank space, the text swelling with each pass until the printers despaired, because for Joyce every empty space was an invitation to put something more in. Beckett, revising, would come to do the very opposite. He crossed out. He thinned. He hunted for the word that could be removed, the sentence that could be cut, the clever effect that could be dropped, until what was left was only what could not be taken away without the whole thing falling down. Two men, two Irishmen, two exiles in the same foreign city, working with the same alphabet, moving in perfectly opposite directions, one toward everything and the other toward almost nothing. And it is worth remembering where Beckett was standing when he understood this. He was back in the house of his childhood, in the room of the mother whose anxious and overwhelming love had shaped his earliest unhappiness, and she was old now and beginning to fail, her hands unsteady with the illness that would soon carry her away. To be there, at the source, and at an ending, seems to have been part of what shook the vision loose. He had come home to the place where his troubles began, and instead of the old paralysis he found, at last, a way forward, and it was made out of exactly the things he had always felt he lacked.

He backed the decision with a strange and drastic practical choice. He began to write in French. This was his adopted country's language, not his own, a tongue he knew well but had not been raised in, and he turned to it deliberately, for his most serious work, precisely because it was not his native instrument. In English he was too fluent, too rich, too able. The temptation, in English, was always to be brilliant, to reach for the dazzling phrase, to show what he could do, and showing what he could do was exactly the Joycean trap he was trying to escape. French was thinner in his hands, more resistant, poorer. Writing in it, he could not fall back on native virtuosity. He had to say things plainly because he could not easily say them ornately. He remarked that in French it was easier to write without style, and by style he meant all the beautiful evasions that let a writer avoid the bareness underneath. The foreign language was another form of subtraction, another way of taking away his own advantages so that only the essential would be left. He would spend the rest of his career writing his major works first in French and then translating them into English himself, becoming that rare thing, a great writer in two languages, neither of which could hide him from the void he was determined to face.

And then, having stripped himself down, he wrote as he had never written before. The years just after the war, roughly nineteen forty-six to nineteen fifty, were the most astonishing of his life, a sustained explosion of creation that he himself looked back on with a kind of wonder. He would call it a frenzy. For a man who had produced comparatively little in all his decades of drift, what happened now was extraordinary. Sitting in a small Paris apartment, writing steadily, day after day, as if the pages had been dammed up for years and the dam had finally broken, he produced in a handful of seasons the work that would make him immortal. Three novels came, one after another, the great trilogy that follows a human voice down into the dark. A play came, about two men waiting by a tree. More novels, more stories, more of the strange bare music he had found. It poured out of him, this man who had made not-knowing his method, as though emptying himself of everything he did not know was the thing that finally let him speak. It is one of the quiet lessons of his life that the breakthrough came not when he found more to say, but when he gave up the need to sound as though he knew.

None of it would have reached the world without Suzanne. The manuscripts sat in a drawer, difficult, unfashionable, unlike anything the publishers of the day were looking for, and it was she who took them out and carried them, one rejection after another, from publishing house to publishing house across Paris, refusing to give up on work she believed in more steadily than he did. He was too proud and too easily discouraged to sell himself. She was neither, and it was her patience, tramping the streets with his pages under her arm, that finally found a small, bold publisher willing to take a chance on this bleak, funny, unclassifiable writer. Without her faith and her legwork, the drawer might simply have stayed shut.

The principle underneath it all was as simple to state as it was hard to live by. Less is truer than more. The honest thing, Beckett had come to believe, was not to cover the emptiness of our situation with beautiful noise, but to admit the emptiness, to let the work be as poor and bare and uncertain as the life it came from. Where other artists reached for richness, he reached for the minimum. Where others tried to fill the silence, he tried to find out how much silence a work could hold and still be a work. He had turned his back on the idea of the artist as a master in full command, and put in its place a new and humbler and far more unsettling figure, the artist as a man who admits he is lost, who knows almost nothing, who can barely go on, and who makes something true precisely out of that admission. Everything he wrote from here on would be built on that foundation of deliberate poverty. And the first great structure he raised on it was a play that has almost nothing in it at all, two men on an empty road, and it changed the theatre forever.

Chapter 5: Waiting for Godot

There is a country road. There is a single bare tree. It is evening. Two old men, shabby and footsore, wait beside the road for someone who has, they believe, promised to come, and who does not come, and the whole of the play is the waiting. That is very nearly all there is to it, and out of that almost-nothing Samuel Beckett made the work that broke the theatre open and remade it, the play that more than any other says the word modern when we think of the modern stage. It should not work. A play in which two men stand around waiting, in which no story develops and no problem is solved and the promised visitor never arrives, sounds like a recipe for tedium. Instead it is one of the most strangely gripping things ever put on a stage, and once you have truly seen it, you do not forget it, because you recognize it. You have been in that play. We all have.

The two men are old friends, or something like friends, bound together by long habit and by having no one else. Beckett names them Vladimir and Estragon, though they call each other by children's nicknames, Didi and Gogo, and mostly we think of them simply as the two tramps. One is more anxious and thoughtful, forever worrying at the situation, trying to keep their spirits and their dignity up. The other is more physical and forgetful, preoccupied with his aching feet and his hunger, ready at any moment to give up. They have agreed to meet a man they call Godot by this tree, and to wait for him, and so they wait. They are not entirely sure they are in the right place. They are not sure it is the right day. They are not even entirely sure who Godot is or what they expect from him, only that his coming will somehow settle things, will save them, will mean that the waiting was worth it and that they can stop.

And while they wait, they pass the time, because the time must somehow be passed. This is the real action of the play, the filling of empty hours. They talk and fall silent and talk again. They argue and make up. They consider leaving and do not move. They take off a boot and struggle with it and put it back on. They eat, a carrot, a radish, a stub of turnip, and discuss which they prefer. They contemplate the tree and wonder aloud, half seriously, whether they might hang themselves from it, if only to feel something happen, and decide against it, partly for fear that one of them might succeed and leave the other alone. They invent little games and routines to keep the emptiness at bay, small structures of habit thrown up against the void of an afternoon that will not end. Twice they resolve, at the very end of an act, to go. Yes, let's go, they say. And the stage direction, which has become one of the most famous in all of theatre, says simply that they do not move. They cannot go. They are waiting for Godot.

Into the flatness of this waiting, once in each act, comes a disturbance. A loud, swaggering man arrives driving another man before him on the end of a rope. The one holding the rope is called Pozzo, florid and cruel and full of himself, the picture of a master. The one on the rope is bent under a heavy load of bags and stools, and Pozzo calls him Lucky, which is either a joke or the cruelest thing in the play. Pozzo treats this broken servant like an animal, tugging the rope, ordering him about, and yet the two of them are as chained to each other as the tramps are, unable to part. At Pozzo's command the silent servant suddenly performs, and what pours out of him is one of the most extraordinary passages Beckett ever wrote, a long, mad, broken monologue, a torrent of half-remembered learning about God and man and reason collapsing into gibberish, a mind that was once full pouring itself out in ruins while the others shout at him to stop. Then Pozzo gathers his things and drives his servant onward, off down the road, and the tramps are alone again with their waiting. It is the only thing that resembles an event, and it changes nothing.

At the close of each act, a boy appears. He is a messenger, he says, from Mr Godot. And he brings the same news both times, delivered in a child's flat, uncertain voice. Mr Godot will not be coming this evening. But he will surely come tomorrow. The boy cannot answer their questions, cannot say much of anything, and slips away into the dusk, and the tramps are left to face another night and, presumably, another identical day of waiting.

The second act is the first act again, with a difference, and the difference is the quiet horror of the play. It is the next day, or what they take to be the next day, though time in this world has come loose from its moorings and no one can be sure how much has passed. The tree, bare yesterday, has put out a few leaves, the one small sign that time moves at all. The two tramps go through their rituals again, remembering little of the day before. And when Pozzo and his servant return, they are ruined. Pozzo is now blind, helpless, roaring for help, and his servant is now dumb, unable to make a sound, and neither of them remembers the tramps at all, remembers ever having met them. Everything is the same and everything is worse. The pattern repeats, but on a downward slope, running out, wearing away. This is not the cheerful repetition of a routine. It is the repetition of a life circling its own drain, each turn a little lower than the last.

Now, who is Godot? This is the question the play has provoked for seventy years, and Beckett refused, to the end of his life, to answer it. People saw God in the name, the English word for God with a diminishing tail on it, and asked whether the play was about waiting for a God who never comes, and Beckett would neither confirm it nor deny it. Others said Godot was death, or meaning, or salvation, or hope itself, or simply the thing each of us privately waits for, the arrival that will make sense of everything and let us rest. Beckett always said that if he had known who Godot was, he would have put it in the play. That was not evasion. It was the whole point. Godot is defined entirely by his absence, by the fact that he is awaited and does not come. To name him, to say he is God or death or anything else, would be to end the waiting, and the play is the waiting. It is about the condition of expecting, of living leaning forward toward a promised meaning that stays always just over the horizon, tomorrow, surely tomorrow. Whatever it is you are waiting for, the play seems to say, this is what the waiting is like.

And once, in the second act, the whole vision of the play condenses into a single terrible sentence. Pozzo, blind now and out of patience with all their questions about time, about when, about how long, turns on them and cries that they are all of them tormenting him with their talk of time. Have you not done tormenting me with your time, he says. And then, in a rush, one must live with what one has. They give birth astride of a grave, he says, the light gleams an instant, then it is night once more. There it is, the whole of it, the human span reduced to a single flash between two darknesses, birth and death so close together that the mother is astride the grave even as the child is born. It is the bleakest sentence in the play, and it lands with such force because everything around it is so quiet, so shabby, so ordinary. Two old men waiting by a tree, and suddenly the floor drops away and you see how brief it all is.

The play very nearly did not reach the stage at all, and when it did, in a small Paris theatre in the January of nineteen fifty-three, directed by a bold young French actor and director who believed in it when almost no one else did, the first audiences did not know what to make of it. Some walked out, baffled and offended by a play in which, as far as they could see, nothing happened. Others sat riveted, sensing that they were watching something entirely new, a play that had thrown out plot and scenery and resolution and everything the theatre was supposed to provide, and had held them anyway, with nothing but two men and a tree and the passing of time. Word spread. The bafflement turned into fascination and then into fame, and within a few years the strange little play about waiting had been performed all over the world and had changed what a play was allowed to be. An Irish critic wrote the line that has followed it ever since, that Beckett had achieved a theoretical impossibility, a play in which nothing happens, twice, and that yet keeps its audiences glued to their seats. Nothing happens, twice. It was meant half as a joke, and it turned out to be one of the truest descriptions of the human situation anyone had managed in a very long while.

The deepest proof of what the play was came a few years later, and not from the critics. In nineteen fifty-seven a company took Waiting for Godot into a California prison and performed it for over a thousand convicts, an audience that had never seen a serious play in its life and was thought certain to jeer this baffling piece off the stage. Instead the prisoners fell silent, and then they understood it, completely and immediately, more directly than the sophisticated audiences of Paris and London had understood it. They knew at once what these two men by the road were doing, because it was what they themselves did every day. They were waiting. Serving time, waiting for a release that might never come, marking off identical days in a place they could not leave, they recognized their own lives on that stage, and some of them wept. Word came back that in the prison, Godot was understood to be the outside, freedom, the world beyond the wall, the thing you wait for and wait for and are never sure will come. Beckett, who trusted the reactions of the uneducated far more than the theories of professors, treasured that response above all the praise he ever received. The people who had the least, who knew the most about waiting, had grasped his play the fastest. It told him he had reached bedrock, had written not a clever puzzle but a true picture of what it is to be alive and expecting, and it is on that bedrock that the play still stands today, as fresh and as strange and as recognizable as it was on that first bewildering night by the little bare tree.

Chapter 6: The Comedy of the Abyss

Here is the thing most people expect least from Samuel Beckett, and the thing that matters most if you want to understand him. He is funny. Not in spite of the darkness, and not as a little relief from it, but funny right at the heart of the darkness, so that the laughter and the despair are the same thing seen from two sides. The reputation says Beckett is the great gloom of the twentieth century, difficult and depressing, a writer you endure rather than enjoy. The reality is that his plays, performed well, produce more laughter than almost anything else in the serious theatre, and that the laughter is not a mistake or a misunderstanding. It is the point. Beckett is a comedian of the abyss, and his comedy is not the sugar on the medicine. It is the medicine.

The comedy comes from low places, and he was proud of that. He did not draw on the polished wit of the drawing room, the clever repartee of sophisticated people. He drew on the oldest and cheapest forms of laughter there are, the ones that play to everyone. He loved the music hall and the circus, the world of the touring comic and the acrobat and the clown. Above all he loved the silent cinema, the great stone-faced comedians of the age of Chaplin and Buster Keaton and the fat man and thin man forever falling out and making up. His two tramps by the tree wear bowler hats and struggle with their boots and their trousers because that is the uniform of the little tramp of the silent screen, the shabby dignified nobody that the whole world laughed at and loved. When one of them cannot get his boot off, when their trousers fall down, when they nearly lose their balance and windmill their arms, Beckett is reaching straight back into the world of slapstick, the pratfall, the banana skin, the pie in the face. He puts the deepest questions of human existence into the mouths and bodies of clowns.

The clown was his central human figure, and it is worth asking why. A clown is a person to whom things are done, who is knocked about by a world too big and too hard for him, who falls and gets up and falls again, and whose whole art is in the getting up, in the battered, hopeful dignity with which he faces the next disaster. That is Beckett's image of all of us. We are the little tramp, dropped into a situation we did not choose and cannot control and do not understand, tripped up by our own bodies and by a universe that pays us no attention, and the only real question is how we carry it, whether we can keep some grace and some humor as the pratfalls of existence knock us down. The tramp keeps his hat on straight. That, for Beckett, is nearly heroic.

His comedy runs on a very old engine, the double act. Almost all comic pairs are built the same way, one who thinks he is in charge and one who is baffled, the straight man and the fool, the thin worried one and the round forgetful one, and the humor comes from the friction between them, the misunderstandings, the bickering that never quite ends the partnership. Beckett's two tramps are a cross-talk act, trading lines back and forth in the rhythm of comedians who have worked together for forty years and have run out of new things to say and go on saying the old things anyway, because the patter is how they get through the night. The routines, the repeated phrases, the little bits of business they perform to fill the silence, all of it comes from the stage of the cheap comedian, and all of it is turned, in Beckett's hands, into something that makes you laugh and then, a beat later, makes the laugh catch in your throat.

He thought hard about laughter itself, harder than almost any writer, and he divided it into kinds. In the strange novel he wrote to keep himself sane during the war, one of his characters lays out a whole ladder of laughs, descending from the ordinary to the terrible. There is the laugh at what is good, the merry laugh of simple pleasure. Below it, the laugh at what is not true, the bitter laugh of the person who sees through a lie. And at the very bottom, the deepest and least joyful of all, there is what he called the mirthless laugh, the laugh that laughs at what is unhappy, the laugh laughing at the laugh itself, the laugh of a person who has seen the worst and has nothing left to do about it but laugh. It is the pure laugh, he said, the highest of all, and there is not a grain of merriment in it. That is the laugh Beckett is finally after. Not the giggle and not the guffaw, but the strange, cleansing, unsmiling laughter of someone standing in front of the abyss with no illusions left and choosing, of all the possible responses, to laugh.

The clearest statement of his whole comic philosophy is put in the mouth of an old woman who lives, in one of his plays, inside a rubbish bin. From in there, she says the truest thing anyone in Beckett ever says about all this. Nothing, she says, is funnier than unhappiness. Nothing is funnier than unhappiness. It sounds like a provocation, and it is a plain description of how his work operates. Unhappiness, misfortune, the whole catalogue of ways that life defeats us, is not the enemy of comedy but its richest material, because at bottom comedy and suffering come from the same place, the gap between what we want and what we get, between our dignity and our circumstances, between the soul's demands and the body's boots. The person who can see that unhappiness is funny has not stopped taking it seriously. He has found the one form of freedom that even the worst situation cannot take away, which is the freedom to laugh at it.

And this is what saves Beckett's comedy from cruelty, and saves his whole vision from mere despair. The laughter is not contempt. He is not laughing down at his broken clowns from somewhere safe above them. He is laughing with them, and as one of them, because he knows he is in the same situation and wearing the same battered hat. There is a deep tenderness in it, a fellow feeling for everyone stuck in the human predicament, which is to say for everyone. To laugh at unhappiness the way Beckett does is an act of courage, a refusal to lie about how hard things are, and at the same time an act of love, a refusal to let the hardness have the last word. His characters keep each other company, crack their sad jokes, perform their little routines, and go on, and the laughter they raise in the dark is the sound of human beings declining to be crushed. It is the opposite of giving up. That is why an evening of Beckett, which by any summary should be unbearable, so often sends people out into the night feeling not flattened but strangely lightened, even glad. They have laughed at the very worst, in good company, and found that they could.

Chapter 7: Endgame

If Waiting for Godot is about waiting for something to begin, the play that followed it is about something ending. Beckett often said it was the work he cared for most, the one that came out closest to what he wanted, and it is harsher and colder and more tightly wound than anything before it. Where Godot has open sky and a country road and the faint green hope of a tree in leaf, this play shuts the doors and pulls down the blinds. It takes place entirely inside one bare grey room, and the room feels less like a place in the world than like the inside of a dying mind. The play is called Endgame, and everything in it is running down toward a stop.

Picture the room. Grey walls, grey light, and high up on the back wall two small windows, too high to reach without a ladder, one looking out on a dead sea and one on a dead land. The door to a kitchen. A shrouded object or two. It has the feel of a shelter, the last shelter, after some enormous unnamed disaster has emptied the world outside, and the few who are left have crawled in here to see out the end. Nothing lives beyond these walls anymore, as far as anyone in the room can tell. The light itself seems to be failing. There is a sense throughout that this is the last room in the last hour of the last day, and that when whatever is happening here finishes, there will be nothing at all.

At the center of the room, in an armchair on castors, sits a man named Hamm. He is blind, and he cannot stand, and he cannot move himself except by being pushed, and he is the king of this little dying kingdom. He is a tyrant and a ham actor and a suffering old man all at once, grandly theatrical, cruel and self-pitying and, in his way, magnificent, forever demanding attention, ordering the others about, staging his own misery for whatever audience he can command. Everything in the room revolves around him because he insists that it must, and because he cannot get up to make it happen himself. He is helpless and he is in charge, both completely, and the contradiction is the engine of the whole play.

His servant is called Clov. Where Hamm cannot stand, Clov cannot sit. He shuffles about the room on stiff legs, fetching and carrying, climbing the ladder to peer out of the high windows and report on the nothing outside, obeying Hamm's endless commands with a weary contempt. Clov wants, more than anything, to leave. He says so, again and again. He goes to the door, he threatens to walk out and abandon the old man to his blindness and his chair. And he does not go. He needs Hamm as much as Hamm needs him, chained to the room by something he cannot name, and the two of them circle each other all through the play, the blind master who cannot move and the crippled servant who cannot rest, unable to bear each other and unable to part. Why don't you kill me, Hamm asks him at one point, and Clov answers, I don't know the combination of the cupboard. They stay together because leaving is a door neither of them can quite work out how to open.

And there are two more. Down in the front of the room stand two ash bins, and in them live Hamm's ancient parents, Nagg and Nell, legless, poking their white heads out over the rims when something stirs them. They are the oldest and gentlest presences in this hard little world, and they belong to another time, before the disaster, when there were bicycles and lakes and courtship. They surface to ask for food, to quarrel and make up, to remember, and above all to reach out toward each other from their separate bins, two old people who cannot quite touch, still trying, after everything, to reach. At one point one of them tells a long joke, slowly, the way the very old tell a story they have told a thousand times, and it is funny and unbearable at once. And somewhere in the course of the play the old woman, quietly, stops answering. She has died in her bin, or simply run down, and no one is entirely sure, and the play moves on, because in this room even death has lost its power to interrupt anything.

The whole situation is one of supplies running out. There is a recurring, awful comedy of shortage. The painkiller Hamm depends on is nearly gone, and then it is gone, no more, none left in the world. The little comforts are running out one by one, the pap for the old people, the sweets, the things that make the endless day bearable. Nothing new can come. And the deepest fear in the play, stranger than any fear of death, is the fear that something might start living again. When Clov thinks he sees a flea, they move quickly to kill it, because from a flea, humanity might begin all over again, and the one thing worse than this ending would be to have the whole miserable story start once more from the beginning. Late in the play Clov believes he glimpses a small boy outside, a possible survivor, a possible future, and it registers not as hope but as threat. They have had enough. They want it to be over. Something is taking its course, Clov says, and that quiet phrase is as close as the play comes to describing itself. Something is taking its course. The end is coming. It is just taking its time.

To fill the time that will not pass, Hamm does the thing Beckett's people always do. He tells a story. All through the play he returns to a tale he is slowly composing, his chronicle, doled out a few lines at a sitting, about a ragged man who once came crawling to him across the snow to beg a little bread for his starving child. Hamm tells it grandly, and then stops to fuss over his own phrasing, tries a word, dislikes it, reaches for a better one, exactly like a writer at his desk laboring over a sentence. He is the artist of his own small apocalypse, and his story may be the true account of how Clov first came to him as a boy, or it may be pure invention, and the play never lets us know. What matters is the compulsion, the need to shape the emptiness into a narrative, to be telling something even now, even here, at the end of the world, with no one left to listen but a blind man's dying parents and a servant halfway out the door. And the play knows exactly what it is. At one point Clov turns his telescope on the audience itself and reports, with dry alarm, that he sees a multitude in transports of joy, which is a bleak little joke at the expense of the solemn faces actually watching. At another, one of them asks whether they might not be beginning to mean something, and the other bursts out laughing at the very idea. Beckett builds the grimmest room he can imagine and then, from inside it, winks. The figures trapped in the endgame are half aware that they are characters in a play about the end, saying their lines because the lines must be said, and that little hall of mirrors is part of what keeps the whole thing from collapsing into mere gloom. It is desolate and it is playing, at the very same time.

The title tells you how to see it. In the game of chess, the endgame is the final phase, when most of the pieces are gone from the board and only a few remain, and the outcome is no longer really in doubt. A player who knows he has lost may still play on, forced by the rules to make his moves, shuffling his cornered king back and forth, delaying a defeat that everyone can see coming. That is exactly this play. Hamm is a losing king who will not resign, playing out a game whose result is already decided, making his moves because the moves must be made, dragging out the finish because the finish, once it arrives, is the end of everything. Me to play, Hamm says, twice, as though he were lifting a piece toward a square. He is playing out the last moves of a lost game, and he knows it, and he goes on, because going on is all there is to do, even here, even now.

And the play does not so much end as run out. Clov, at the very last, appears dressed for the road, in a hat and coat, carrying an umbrella and a bag, ready at last to leave. He goes to the door. And there he stops, and stands, looking at the old man, unmoving, on the threshold, neither in nor out. Hamm, alone as far as he knows, plays his final little scene, covers his face with the old handkerchief he uncovered at the start, and falls silent. Nothing is resolved. No one is saved and no one quite dies and no one actually leaves. The game is simply suspended at the point where there are no good moves left, and the curtain comes down on a picture held in perfect, terrible balance, the servant frozen in the doorway, the master hidden under his cloth, the end arrived and not arrived, forever.

It would be easy to think that a work this bleak must have poured out of a man in despair, but the opposite is nearer the truth, and it tells us something essential about Beckett. He was, above everything, a craftsman, and in his later years he became the exacting director of his own plays, most famously at a theatre in Berlin, where he staged them himself, over and over, with a precision that astonished the actors. He did not talk to them about despair or the meaning of life. He talked about rhythm. He treated the script like a piece of music, a score, timing every pause to the second, counting the steps an actor took across the stage, shaping the rise and fall of the voices, caring above all how the thing sounded and moved. The bleakness on the surface was held in place by an absolute control underneath, the control of an artist who knew exactly what he was doing, down to the length of a silence. Endgame is a play about everything falling apart, and it is built like a watch. That is the paradox of the man. He looked into the emptiest room he could imagine, and then he shaped what he found there with the patience and the love of a master, so that the ending, when it comes, comes in perfect time.

Chapter 8: The Need of the Other

Once you have seen a few of Beckett's works, you begin to notice something that is easy to miss in any single one of them. His people almost never appear alone. They come in twos. Look back over the plays and the pattern is unmistakable. Two tramps by a tree. A master and the servant he leads on a rope. A blind man in a chair and the crippled servant who tends him. Two old people leaning out of their separate bins toward each other. Even in the novels, the wanderers tend to travel in pairs, or to split into a man and the man sent to find him. The couple, not the individual, is Beckett's basic human unit, and the bond between the two is one of the great subjects hidden in plain sight all through his work. He is, among everything else, a poet of the strange, chafing, unbreakable ties between one person and another.

These are not, for the most part, love stories, not in the ordinary sense. The bond that holds Beckett's pairs together is something more basic and more desperate than romance. It is need. Each of the two needs the other simply in order to get through, to fill the unfillable time, to have someone to talk to, to argue with, to blame, to reach toward. Take the other away and the one left behind would face the empty hours entirely alone, and that, in Beckett's world, is the thing no one can bear. So they stay together, these mismatched couples, not because they are happy, and often not even because they are kind to each other, but because the alternative, solitude in the dark, is worse than any amount of friction. They cannot go on together, and they cannot part. That is the exact shape of the human tie as Beckett draws it.

Underneath the need to pass the time lies a deeper need, and it may be the most quietly frightening idea in all his work. His characters need the other person in order to be sure that they themselves exist. In a universe that gives back no answer, that offers no God and no meaning to confirm that we are real and that our lives are witnessed, the only proof any of us has that we are here at all is another pair of eyes that sees us. The other is the witness. When one of the tramps despairs, the other tells him, in effect, I am here, I see you, you are not imagining yourself. The boy who comes with the message is asked, almost desperately, to promise that he really saw them, that he will say tomorrow that he met them, that they were here. To be seen is to be certified as real. And so the deepest function of the couple is to hold each other in existence, to keep saying, by their presence, yes, you are there, I can see you, you have not vanished. Company is not a luxury in Beckett. It is the thread by which a person hangs onto the fact of their own being.

This is why the tenderness and the cruelty are so tightly braided together in these bonds, and cannot be pulled apart. The pairs wound each other. They bully, they whine, they take each other for granted, they threaten to leave. And in the same breath they cannot do without each other, cover each other against the cold, wait through the night side by side, ask after each other's aching feet. The love, where there is love, does not cancel the cruelty, and the cruelty does not cancel the love. They exist together, the way they do in a marriage that has gone on for fifty years and worn down to its bare essentials, where the couple can no longer quite stand each other and could not survive apart. Beckett understood that this is not a failure of human connection but very nearly its truest form, two creatures clinging together out of a need so deep it looks nothing like the greeting cards, keeping each other company at the edge of the void because the void is real and the company is all there is.

And that is the note on which this whole vision of togetherness turns toward its opposite. For as terrible as the couple's bickering dependence can be, it is warmth, it is relief, it is the human answer to the dark. The real horror, the thing worse than any bad companionship, would be to lose the other altogether. To be truly, finally alone, with no one left to say I see you, would be to lose the last proof that you exist, and to be handed over to a solitude in which even your own reality begins to dissolve. Beckett knew this too, and he did not flinch from it. At the very same time as he was writing his plays about couples keeping each other company, he was writing three novels that went to the other place entirely, that stripped away the companion and the witness and everyone else, until nothing was left but a single voice alone in the darkness, no longer sure it had a body, no longer sure of anything, talking on and on to no one, because there was no one left to talk to. That is where we go next, into the deepest and loneliest country Beckett ever mapped.

Chapter 9: The Voice Goes On

While Beckett was writing the plays that made his name, he was also writing, in that same great outpouring just after the war, three novels that go further into the dark than anything he ever put on a stage. They are harder than the plays, and stranger, and far less known to the general public, and yet many of the people who have given their lives to reading him believe that these three books are the true center of everything he did, the place where he went as deep as it is possible to go. They are usually spoken of together, as a trilogy, because they form a single continuous descent, each one going lower than the last, until at the bottom there is almost nothing left but a voice in the dark that cannot stop and cannot say anything and will not be quiet. To follow them down is to take the most extreme journey in modern literature, and it ends on the words that this whole episode has been circling from its first minute.

The first book follows a man called Molloy, and it is the most nearly ordinary of the three, which is not saying much. Molloy is an old vagrant, filthy, decrepit, his body failing him in every way, and he is trying, for reasons he cannot fully explain, to reach his mother. He sets out on a broken bicycle, and when the bicycle fails he goes on crutches, and when the crutches fail he crawls, dragging himself through a forest by his elbows, and all the while he is telling the story from somewhere else, a room he has ended up in, a bed, uncertain how he got there, his memory dissolving even as he speaks. And then, halfway through, the book starts again with a completely different man, a tidy, self-satisfied agent named Moran who is given the task of going out to find Molloy. Moran begins his journey sure of himself, respectable, in command of his life, and as he travels he falls apart. His body begins to fail in exactly the ways Molloy's has failed. His certainties crumble. By the end he is a ragged, crawling wreck, almost indistinguishable from the man he was sent to hunt, and we are left to wonder whether the pursuer and the pursued were ever really two people at all, or whether the whole thing is one self split in a mirror, hunting for a version of itself it can never catch.

One moment from this first book shows the whole method in miniature, and it has become justly famous. Down at the seashore, Molloy gathers a supply of small stones to suck on, and is seized by a need to suck them in perfect rotation, so that no stone is ever favored and each is sucked in its proper turn. He works out, over many patient pages, an elaborate system for distributing the sixteen stones among his four pockets and cycling them through in strict order, a feat of pure logic in the service of something utterly pointless, and he pursues it with the gravity of a philosopher proving the existence of God. It is very funny, and it is at the same time the exact image of the Beckett mind, a great engine of reason grinding away in the void, imposing intricate order on nothing whatever, because the alternative to counting the stones is to sit still and face the emptiness the counting was invented to fill.

The second book strips away even the journey. It is called Malone Dies, and there is no road in it anymore, no bicycle, no forest, only a man named Malone lying in a bed in a bare room, old and dying, waiting to be dead. That is the entire situation. He has no idea how long it will take. And to pass the time until the end comes, he does the one thing he still can. He tells himself stories. He invents a character, a boy, and begins to follow the boy's life, and then loses interest, or loses the thread, and abandons him, and starts another. Between the stories he takes a careful inventory of the few possessions he has left, his little pile of objects, the pencil he is writing with, which is getting shorter and shorter as the book goes on. Everything runs down together, the stories he cannot finish, the pencil wearing to a stub, the light in the room, the life in the man. He is narrating his own death from the inside, filling the last of his time with inventions he no longer believes in, and when the pencil is a splinter and the voice is a whisper, the book simply stops, because the man has stopped.

And then comes the third book, and here Beckett goes somewhere almost no writer has ever been. It is called The Unnamable, and by now everything has been taken away. There is no story, no character in the ordinary sense, no place, no body that can be relied on, no name, nothing to hold. There is only a voice. A voice that does not know where it is, whether it is in a great empty space or sealed in a jar by the roadside, whether it has a body or has ever had one, whether the things it remembers ever happened or were only other stories it once told. It cannot even be sure it is the one speaking. And this voice cannot stop. It talks and talks, denying what it just said, unsaying itself, insisting it must find the right words, the true words that would finally say who or what it is, and never finding them, because every word it reaches for falsifies, every sentence is a mask over the silence it is trying to reach. It is language trying to catch the self and discovering that the self keeps slipping out of every net of words thrown over it. The book is exhausting, and it is meant to be, because it is enacting the most exhausting situation imaginable, a consciousness with nothing left to it but the compulsion to keep speaking and no power to say anything true. And it suspects that it is not even the true author of its own words. The voice imagines that it has been sending out substitutes all along, invented figures, a man stuck in a jar by a restaurant door, a limbless creature in the mud, sent out to do its living and its suffering in its place, and it disowns them one by one as impostors who are not really itself. Worse, it comes to fear that the words it speaks are not its own at all, that it is only reciting a lesson drummed into it long ago, that somewhere behind it are shadowy figures who set it talking and will not let it stop until it says the one right thing that would finally set it free, the thing it can never find. It is the loneliest idea imaginable, a self that cannot even be certain the voice inside its own head belongs to it, that suspects it is being spoken rather than speaking, and that must go on regardless, hunting through the endless words for the ones that would let it rest. Even the shape of the writing enacts the descent. The first book still has its chapters and its paragraphs and the ordinary furniture of a novel, but by this last one the sentences swell and run together, the breaks between them fall away, and the final pages become a single unbroken flood of words with no stop in sight, the punctuation stripped off like everything else, so that the reader too begins to feel what it is to be trapped inside a voice that cannot pause for breath.

Follow the three books as one and you see what Beckett was doing. He was stripping away, layer by layer, everything that a novel is supposed to have. First the world went, the ordinary furniture of places and events, leaving only a bed and a dying man. Then the body went, and the name, and the last shreds of a stable self, leaving only a voice. He was doing to the novel exactly what he had set out to do after the war, taking away rather than adding, subtracting down toward the irreducible minimum, to find out what is left of a human being when you remove everything removable. And what he found at the bottom, when the world and the body and the name and the story were all gone, was not silence. It was a voice, still going, still trying to speak, unable to stop. The thing that cannot be taken away, the last thing, is the compulsion to go on.

And so the trilogy ends on the sentence that is the keystone of Beckett's whole vision, the words that say in the barest possible form what he spent his life trying to say. The voice, at the very end, worn out, with nothing left, with no reason to continue and no ability to continue, says this. You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on. Those are the last words of the book, and they are the truest words he ever wrote. You must go on, because something in you or above you demands it. I can't go on, because there is no strength left and no hope and no reason. I'll go on, anyway, in the teeth of the impossibility, because going on is simply what is done, what is left, what happens. Obligation without hope. Continuation without reason. It is the human condition reduced to seven words, and once you have heard it you hear it everywhere, in every tired morning, in every grief that somehow gives way to another ordinary day, in every person who has no idea how they will keep going and keeps going.

There is one last turn, and it is the strangest and most hopeful thing about these bleak and difficult books. A literature that is entirely about exhaustion turns out to be inexhaustible. A voice that insists it has nothing to say goes on saying it, beautifully, for hundreds of pages, and the saying that there is nothing to say is itself a saying, is itself something, is itself a refusal of the silence it claims to want. Beckett set out to write his way down to nothing, and he could not get there, because the very act of writing, the very voice trying to reach the end, keeps generating more, keeps going on. The failure to fall silent is, seen from another angle, a kind of triumph, the triumph of the voice that will not stop. He wanted to reach zero and found he could not, and in that discovery, buried at the bottom of his darkest work, is something that looks, if you turn it to the light, almost exactly like the will to live.

Chapter 10: Krapp's Last Tape

The most tender and the most personal of all Beckett's plays needs only one actor, one table, and a machine. It is a play about a man listening to himself, and it may be the most moving thing he ever wrote, because underneath its strangeness it is about something everyone alive will one day feel, the ache of looking back across the years at the person you used to be, and hardly knowing him. Beckett found a way to put that ache on a stage, and the way he found was a tape recorder.

The picture is simple and unforgettable. An old man of sixty-nine sits at a table in a small pool of light, surrounded by darkness. He is shabby and short-sighted and a little clownish, and he has a habit, which the play lingers on with slow comic patience, of eating bananas, fumbling with the skins, nearly slipping on one, the small foolish business of an old man alone. On the table is a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and in a drawer he keeps a collection of tapes, because every year, on his birthday, for most of his adult life, this man has sat down and recorded a spoken diary, a summing up of the year just past. Boxes and boxes of them, decades of his own voice, catalogued in a ledger. Tonight is his birthday again, and before he makes this year's recording, he chooses an old tape to play, and settles down to listen to himself as he was, thirty years ago, on the birthday when he turned thirty-nine.

What comes out of the machine is the voice of a younger, stronger, insufferably pleased-with-himself man. The Krapp of thirty-nine is pompous and ambitious, full of grand plans and grand opinions, certain that his best years are ahead of him and that his great work is coming. And that younger voice, in its turn, pauses on the tape to sneer at an even younger Krapp, the one he was ten years before that, mocking his youthful ideals and aspirations. So there are three men here, layered inside one, and each one despises the one before. The old man at the table listens to his brash middle-aged self with a mixture of impatience, contempt, and helpless pain, snorting at the big words, winding forward through the parts he cannot bear, an old man laughing bitterly at the fool he used to be, who was himself laughing at a still earlier fool. It is the idea Beckett had carried since he was young, that we are not one continuous self but a procession of strangers wearing the same name, and here it is made real and audible, the strangers actually talking to one another across the years, out of a machine, in the dark.

But the old man keeps winding back to one passage, and it is not one of the grand ones. It is the only tender thing on the tape, and it is the reason he still listens. The younger voice describes an afternoon in a small boat, drifting on a still lake, lying with a woman he loved, the sun on them, the boat rocking gently, a moment of perfect quiet closeness. Even the ambitious young man recording it seems to sense that this, this and not his plans, was the real thing, and yet he was in the act of giving it up, choosing his work and his solitude over the woman and the love. The old man at the table, who made that choice and has lived with its consequences into a lonely old age, winds the tape back to the drifting boat and plays it again, and again, the one memory worth keeping, the thing he threw away, returning to it the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth. He records his bitter little summary of the present year, an old man with almost nothing left, and then he abandons his own recording, and puts the old tape on one last time, to hear about the boat, and the girl, and the drifting.

Everything turns on the machine itself, and this was Beckett's stroke of genius. Human memory is merciful. It softens, it blurs, it rewrites the past to let us live with it, so that the person we remember being is a comfortable fiction we have polished over the years. The tape recorder does none of that. It is exact. It gives back the past raw and unaltered, the actual voice, the actual words, the actual pompous self with nothing smoothed away, and it is merciless precisely because it does not lie. The old man cannot pretend he was wiser or kinder or less foolish than he was, because there he is, on the tape, exactly as he was, condemned out of his own mouth. The machine is a kind of perfect, cruel memory, and it hands a man his younger self with all the gentle forgetting stripped out.

There is one more layer, quiet and easy to miss. On the tape, the younger man describes a great vision that once came to him, a night of revelation at the end of a jetty in a wild storm, when he suddenly understood the whole direction his life and work should take. Beckett was doing something very private here. He was taking his own real turning point, the recognition that had set his whole art in motion, and giving it, transformed into a storm on a pier, to this failed and foolish character. He put his own deepest moment into the mouth of a man who got everything wrong, as if to ask what any revelation is finally worth, whether the great insight that seems to light up a life leads anywhere better than a lonely room and a drawer of tapes. And the old man, when the young voice reaches the vision, winds impatiently past it. He does not want the revelation. He wants the boat, and the girl, and the water. He has learned, too late, which of the two mattered. The play ends with him sitting motionless in the light, the tape running on in silence, an old man staring before him, listening to nothing, while the machine turns.

Chapter 11: Voices and Shadows

Beckett did not stay on the stage. He was, at heart, an explorer of limits, forever asking how much could be taken away and still leave something, and each new technology of the twentieth century offered him a fresh way to strip a human being down. Radio let him remove the body and keep only the voice. Film let him remove the voice and keep only the watched image. Television let him make ghosts. And in each of these he ran the same experiment he ran everywhere, the experiment in subtraction, isolating one thread of what it is to be a person and holding it up alone in the dark.

Radio came first, and it suited him perfectly. When a great broadcasting company asked him for a radio play in the middle nineteen fifties, he found himself working in a medium made entirely of sound and darkness, with no bodies at all, no faces, no scenery, nothing but voices and noises arriving out of the black. He loved this. On the radio, a character does not stand before you in the flesh. He is made of sound, assembled in your own head, and he might not really be there at all, might be a voice with no body behind it, a thing that exists only while it is speaking and vanishes into silence when it stops. His first radio play sends an old woman on a slow, painful journey along a country road to a railway station, and the whole world of it, the wind, the animals, the footsteps, the labored breath, is built purely from sound, so that the listener assembles a whole aching human being out of nothing but noise in the dark. Later he went further still, into radio plays where a man sits alone on a shore and the voices he conjures, the dead and the absent, may be memories or hallucinations or simply the sounds of his own mind, indistinguishable from the sea. This was a power no other medium had. On a stage or a screen, you can see which people are really present and which are merely imagined. On the radio you cannot. A remembered footstep and a real one make exactly the same sound, a voice from the next room and a voice from beyond the grave arrive on precisely equal terms, so that the boundary between the world outside a man and the world inside his head simply dissolves. Beckett seized on this at once. In his hands radio became the perfect instrument for rendering a mind from the inside, because on the radio there is no way to tell a mind from a world, and the ghosts sound exactly as solid as the living. Radio gave him the disembodied voice in its purest form, the voice with no owner, speaking out of the darkness, which was, after all, the very thing he had reached at the bottom of his novels.

Then, once and only once, he made a film, and gave it the plainest possible title. He called it simply Film. It is almost completely silent, and for its central figure he reached back to his beloved silent cinema and cast one of its greatest survivors, the old stone-faced clown Buster Keaton, near the end of his life, to play a man fleeing through the world. And what is this man fleeing? He is fleeing being seen. The film is built on an old idea from philosophy, the proposition that to be is to be perceived, that a thing exists only insofar as it is perceived by some eye. Beckett took that idea and turned it into a chase. His man hurries through the streets and up to a room, and everywhere he goes he is desperate to escape all perception. He turns a mirror to the wall. He covers the window. He shoos out the cat and the dog, drapes the birdcage and the fishbowl, tears down a picture that seems to watch him, trying frantically to put himself beyond the reach of every eye, animal, human, or painted, as if by escaping all perception he could finally cease to exist and find peace. Beckett built the whole film on a single unnerving trick of the camera. It opens on a vast close-up of a human eye, blinking, and from then on two ways of seeing are at work. There is the fleeing man, whom the camera follows only from behind, so that for almost the entire film we never see his face, only the back of his hunched head and his hand thrown up against the world. And there is the perceiving eye that stalks him, our eye, the camera's eye, which he can tolerate so long as it stays behind him at a careful angle, and which makes him cringe and shield himself in terror the instant it threatens to come round and see him full in the face. And at the end he discovers the one perceiver he can never escape. Himself. His own eye, his own awareness, watches him from inside, and there is no turning that mirror to the wall. To be conscious is to be perceived by oneself, endlessly, with no way out. It is the horror underneath ordinary self-awareness, the fact that we are watched from within every waking second, that we can never once get outside our own gaze and rest.

Television drew him last, and there he made ghosts. The small grey screen, with its ability to fade and dissolve, to let a figure flicker and thin and disappear, gave him a way to make images that were barely there at all. He made short television pieces in which a face floats in darkness while a voice speaks to it, or a woman paces to the rhythm of unheard music, or figures in hooded robes tread the four sides of a square in an endless silent pattern, crossing and turning, never touching, like the movements of a machine or the pacing of the trapped. In that piece the four hooded figures each avoid the exact center of the square as they cross it, swerving around a single spot where nothing is, as though at the middle of the pattern there were something too dreadful to step on, an emptiness with a shape. These are among the strangest things he made, closer to moving paintings or to visual music than to plays, and they have the quality of apparitions, of shapes glimpsed at the edge of sleep, present and not present, dissolving even as you watch.

Set them side by side, the radio and the film and the television work, and you see one steady purpose running through them all. Each medium let him take away one more thing. The theatre had already let him throw out plot and scenery and leave two men and a tree. Radio let him throw out the body itself and leave a pure voice speaking in the dark. Film let him throw out the voice and leave a pure image being watched. He was mapping the human being by dividing it into its parts and studying each one in isolation, the voice without the body, the body without the voice, the watcher and the watched. And the two things he kept circling back to, across every medium he touched, were the same two poles. There is the disembodied voice, speaking out of darkness to no one, which is what we become when everything else is stripped away and only the talking remains. And there is the watched body, the self that cannot escape being seen, hunted by a gaze it can never shake off, which turns out in the end to be its own. A voice that cannot stop, and an eye that cannot look away. Between those two, Beckett seemed to feel, the whole of our strange condition is contained.

Chapter 12: Happy Days

Of all the images Samuel Beckett invented, and he invented a great many unforgettable ones, this may be the one that stays with people longest, because it is at once so absurd and so exactly true to how we live. A woman is buried up to her waist in a mound of earth, unable to move from the spot, under a blazing pitiless light that never goes out, and she is determined, through all of it, to have a happy day. She is not in despair. She is cheerful. That is the whole terror and the whole tenderness of the play, and it is one of the few great roles Beckett wrote for a woman, a part actresses have longed to play ever since, because there is a lifetime of the human comedy in that one trapped, chattering, indomitable figure.

Her name is Winnie, and she is somewhere in middle age, and in the first act the mound holds her fast to the waist. Beside her, within reach, is a big black bag, and behind the mound, mostly out of sight, lives her husband, a man called Willie, who almost never speaks and almost never appears, who reads his newspaper and grunts, now and then, just enough to let her know he is there. That is all. A woman fixed in the ground, a nearly silent man behind her, a merciless light, and the long, long day to be got through. And Winnie gets through it the way human beings actually do get through their days, which is by keeping busy with small things.

She performs her routine. She wakes to the bell and says her prayers. She takes her toothbrush from the bag and brushes her teeth, and examines the handle, and reads the tiny writing on it, and wonders about it aloud. She puts on her spectacles and takes them off. She does her lips. She puts up her parasol against the terrible sun. She rummages in the bag, which holds a whole little world of objects, a comb, a mirror, a bottle of medicine, a music box, a revolver she calls by a pet name. She talks, constantly, filling the silence with a bright stream of chatter, addressed to Willie whether or not he answers, remembering scraps of old poetry, recalling better days, commenting on every tiny event. She organizes the unbearable into a manageable program of little tasks, and she performs it with genuine good cheer.

And she keeps saying, over and over, that this is a happy day. Another heavenly day, she says. Oh, this is going to be a happy day. She counts her blessings without pause. There is so much to be thankful for, she insists, the light, the bag, her old things, the fact that Willie is near, the small mercies of an ordinary morning. Whenever the darkness threatens to break through, whenever she brushes up against the horror of her situation, she reaches for another reason to be grateful and papers the horror over with brightness. Her optimism is heroic and relentless and slightly mad, and it never quite fails.

This is the idea Beckett had been carrying since he was a young man, the one about habit, the great anaesthetic that lets us survive by keeping us from feeling the full weight of our situation. Here he does not explain it. He shows it, in a single body, more powerfully than any argument could. Winnie in her mound is every one of us, going through our small daily routines, our brushing and dressing and chatting and counting of blessings, performing the cheerful business of an ordinary day while the ground quietly rises around us and the light beats down and the end comes on. Her routines are our routines. Her determined good cheer is the face we all put on. She is the human genius for carrying on, for making a program out of survival, for calling it a happy day, dramatized and lit and fixed on a stage so we cannot look away from it.

Then comes the second act, and Beckett tightens the screw. When the curtain rises again, the mound has risen too. Now Winnie is buried to the neck. She cannot turn her head. She cannot move her hands. She can no longer reach the bag, or the toothbrush, or the parasol, or any of the small things that filled her day. All she has left is her face, and her voice, and whatever she can see by moving her eyes. And she is still cheerful. She still greets the day. She still finds, sunk to the neck in the earth with nothing left to do and nothing left to reach for, that there is much to be thankful for, that it is, all things considered, a happy day. And here the play becomes almost impossible to bear, because you genuinely cannot tell anymore whether you are watching the most inspiring thing in the world or the most horrifying. Is Winnie a heroine, keeping her courage and her gratitude to the very last, refusing to let her circumstances defeat her spirit? Or is she a study in denial, chattering brightly about heavenly days while she is buried alive, unable to face for one honest second what is actually happening to her? Beckett will not tell you. He fuses the courage and the delusion so tightly that they cannot be pulled apart, and that is his final honesty, because in our own lives they cannot be pulled apart either. The cheerfulness that gets us through is the same cheerfulness that keeps us from seeing where we are. Winnie, sunk to her neck, smiling at the light, is the bravest and the most frightened person in all of Beckett, and she is both at once, and so are we.

Chapter 13: Fail Better

There is one idea that changes how you hear everything else in Beckett, that turns what looks at first like pure despair into something far stranger, tougher, and even, in its bleak way, bracing. The idea is this. Beckett made failure his subject on purpose. He did not write about failing men because he had run out of successful ones to write about. He chose failure, deliberately, as the truest thing an artist could be about, and he built a whole philosophy of art on it, and near the end of his life he compressed that philosophy into two words that escaped his books entirely and went out into the world on their own. Fail better. To understand what he meant by them is to understand him.

He laid out the argument young, in nineteen forty-nine, in a short published conversation about painting, of all things, three exchanges with a friend in which he tried to say what the modern artist was really up against. And what he said was startling. The situation of the artist now, he suggested, is that there is nothing to express, and nothing to express it with, and nothing to express it from, no power to express and no desire to express, together, and this is the strange part, together with the obligation to express. Sit with that, because it is the knot at the center of his whole working life. There is nothing to say. There is no good way to say it. There is no real reason to say it. And yet one is obliged to say it, driven to, unable not to. To be an artist, he wrote, is to fail as no one else dares to fail, and failure is the artist's whole world. Not a risk of the job. The job itself.

Why failure? Because of the thing he had discovered at the bottom of his novels, that words can never quite catch the truth they reach for, that every expression falsifies a little, tidies and falsifies and falls short of the raw reality it is trying to name. Most artists hide this. They polish their work until it looks like a success, like a full and adequate saying of the thing, and in doing so, Beckett thought, they tell a kind of lie, because no saying is ever full or adequate. The honest artist is the one who admits the shortfall, who lets the failure show, who works openly in the gap between what must be expressed and what can be expressed, and never pretends to have closed it. This is why his work gets barer and more broken as it goes, why his sentences hesitate and correct themselves and take back what they have just said. He is not failing by accident and leaving the mess in. He is failing on purpose, honestly, because honest failure is closer to the truth of our situation than any smooth success could ever be. To succeed, in the ordinary sense, would be to lie.

In his old age this became a discipline, almost a spiritual practice, carried out in a series of tiny, intense, whittled-down books, some of them only a few pages long, that are entirely about the struggle to say something and the impossibility of ever getting it right. They circle a single dim image, a figure lying in the dark, a faint light, an old face, and they try to describe it, and fail, and try again, and correct themselves, word by careful word, closing in on something they can never quite reach. They are hard to read and strangely beautiful, and they are the purest expression of his whole idea, the sound of a great writer, at the end of his life, doing nothing but failing, as well and as truthfully as it can possibly be done.

One of these last books gives the discipline a human face. It imagines a man lying alone on his back in the dark, and a voice that comes to him there, telling him things, memories of a life that may be his own, a boy and his father, a certain day, a certain light, all of it addressed to him as you, you did this, you felt that. The man cannot be sure the voice is telling the truth, or that the remembered life is really his, or that there is any voice at all and not simply his own mind manufacturing a companion to break the silence. The book is called Company, and that is precisely its subject, the last and barest form of the thing, a mind so alone in the dark that it devises a voice to keep itself company, and half believes it, and goes on listening, because a doubtful companion is better than none at all. Failure, and going on, and the need for company, all folded together into a few dim pages. It is as far as the taking-away could go and still leave a living person on the floor of the dark, listening.

And in one of these last small books he wrote the words. The passage goes, in its stripped and stumbling way, something like this. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. That is the whole of it. And notice what it does not say. It does not say try again and succeed. It does not promise that effort will be rewarded, that if you keep going you will get there in the end. The goal it holds out is not success at all. The goal is to fail better, to fail more truly, more honestly, more completely, to get closer to the real shape of our condition by failing at it in a finer and finer way. It is the least motivational sentence imaginable, and that is exactly why it is so bracing, because it asks nothing false of you. It does not require that you win. It only asks that you keep going, and fail, and keep going, and fail better.

There is a large irony in what happened to those two words next, and Beckett, who loved a bitter joke, would have appreciated it. Fail better slipped loose from its dark little book and went out into the world as a slogan of encouragement. It turned up on office walls and gym posters, in the mouths of coaches and athletes and business leaders, printed on mugs, quoted by people building companies and chasing victories, almost none of whom had read a word of the man who wrote it or knew that it came from a book whose title means something like toward the worst. They took it to mean pick yourself up and try harder and you will succeed next time, which is very nearly the opposite of what he meant. And yet they were not entirely wrong to love it, because underneath his darkness and their brightness there is one thing shared, which is the refusal to stop. He meant something sadder and deeper than they know, but the core is genuinely there. Keep going. Fail, and keep going.

For in the end his idea of failure and his idea of going on are the same gesture seen from two sides, the same truth turned over in the hand. The voice at the bottom of his novels that cannot go on and goes on anyway is failing, endlessly, and continuing, endlessly, and those are not two things but one. To fail better and to go on are the same act. You do the thing that cannot be done and comes to nothing, and you do it again, a little more honestly, and that doing-again, in the face of its own certain failure, with no promise of reward, is not despair. It is the closest thing to courage that Beckett believed in, and it is the quiet, unheroic heroism at the center of everything he wrote.

Chapter 14: The Body in the Dark

In his last decades on the stage, Beckett kept doing the one thing he had always done, only now he did it to the plays themselves. He took things away. The early plays already had almost no scenery and almost no plot. The late ones go further, past the point where you would think a play could survive at all. The stories vanish. The characters shrink to fragments. Sometimes there is no whole person on the stage anymore, only a piece of one, lit in a small pool of light in a vast blackness. These late works are barely plays in the ordinary sense. They are images, apparitions, held for a few minutes in the dark, and they are among the most haunting things he ever made.

The most extreme of them takes the reduction almost as far as it can go. The stage is completely black, and high up, above the level of a standing person's head, a single spotlight picks out one thing, and one thing only. A mouth. Just a mouth, a woman's lips and teeth and tongue, disembodied, floating in the darkness, with no face and no body visible around it at all. And this mouth talks. It pours out a torrent of words at a furious, headlong, almost unbearable speed, a broken rush of fragments telling, in snatches, the story of a woman who barely lived, who went through her days numb and nearly silent and now, suddenly, cannot stop the flood of speech. And the strangest thing of all is that the mouth refuses to say the word I. It tells the whole story in the third person, of her, of she, insisting to the point of panic that this life it is describing belongs to someone else, that it is not I, never I, someone else. A human being reduced to a talking mouth in the dark, disowning her own life even as she screams it out. Audiences came away shaken, having watched what felt less like a play than like a nightmare made visible, a single organ of speech running on and on in the void.

Another of these late pieces gives us a woman pacing. She is pale and worn, wrapped in grey rags, and she walks a narrow strip of dim light at the front of the stage, back and forth, a fixed number of steps one way, then a turn, then the same number back, the faint sound of her feet marking each pass. She has worn a track in the floor with this pacing. A voice speaks in the darkness, an old woman's voice, perhaps her mother's, perhaps only in her head, and between them they turn over some old sorrow, some life that may have been half lived or never lived at all. The whole play is that revolving, the feet going back and forth, the mind going back and forth over the same worn ground, a figure so faint she seems on the edge of not existing, pacing out the last of herself in a strip of light.

There are others, each one a single concentrated image. Three grey heads stick up out of three tall urns, side by side, and speak in turn, faster and faster, only when a harsh spotlight stabs at them, three people telling the tangled story of an old betrayal, prodded into speech by the light like specimens under interrogation. A woman sits in a rocking chair and rocks, slowly, toward stillness, while her own recorded voice croons her down into the dark. Two old men, nearly identical, sit at a bare table, and one reads aloud from a book while the other listens and, now and then, knocks on the table for a passage to be read again. In every case the same thing is happening. A whole world has been boiled down to one small, strange, unforgettable picture, held in the dark.

He was chasing something he seemed to feel more urgently the older he got, which we might call the least. How little, he kept asking, can there be on a stage and still have it hold a human presence, still have it matter, still have it be? Not a story, it turns out. Not a whole body. Not even, in the most extreme case, a face. Just a mouth. Just a pair of pacing feet. Just a voice and a rocking chair. He was removing everything that could be removed to find the irreducible thing underneath, the last flicker of a person that cannot be taken away without the light simply going out. It is the same impulse that drove him from English into a poorer language, and from the crowded novel down to the bare voice, now carried to the very end, the lifelong art of taking away arriving at last at the almost nothing.

And here is the discovery that makes these late plays more than an old man's shrinking. As they got smaller, they got stronger. You might expect that less on the stage would mean less power, that a mouth alone in the dark could not hold an audience the way a full drama could. The opposite is true. A single lit mouth in a wall of blackness grips harder than a stage full of furniture, because there is nothing to distract from it, nothing to dilute it, nowhere else for the eye or the mind to go. The concentration is total. By taking almost everything away, he did not weaken the image, he intensified it, focused it to a point that burns. These fragments, these apparitions, these bodies and half-bodies in the dark, are the final proof of the faith he had staked everything on, that less is not poorer but truer, and that the least, held steady in the light, can be almost too much to bear. He went on making them, and writing his little scraps of prose, almost to the end, when there was very nearly nothing left of him either.

Chapter 15: Grey Upon Grey

The world made up its mind about Samuel Beckett early, and the picture it settled on was of a great gloom, a prophet of despair, the most depressing writer of the century, a man who must surely have been as bleak and forbidding in person as the empty rooms and dustbins of his plays. Almost everyone who actually knew him will tell you it was nearly the opposite. The private Beckett, the man behind the myth, was one of the kindest, gentlest, funniest, and most quietly generous people that any of his friends had ever met, and if you want to understand him fully, you have to hold those two things together, the desolation on the page and the tenderness in the life, because they came from the same source.

To meet him was to be struck first by the face. He was tall and very thin, all sharp bones and lean angles, with a beak of a nose and famously pale, piercing blue eyes, set in a head that looked as though it had been carved for exactly this purpose, the head of an eagle or an ascetic saint. He wore old sweaters and kept his hair cropped short and bristling. And out of this severe, weathered, almost frightening face came enormous courtesy, a soft Irish voice, a dry and constant humor, and a warmth toward the people he loved that never wavered. He was shy to the point of pain, and hopeless at the public rituals of literary life, but among friends, in a quiet café over a glass of whiskey, he was the best of company, a wonderful listener, a man who could sit in a long companionable silence with you and make the silence feel like conversation.

He protected his privacy with an absolute, lifelong stubbornness. He gave almost no interviews. He refused, again and again, to explain his own work, to say what it meant, to tell people how to take it, believing that the work was there on the page and the stage and had to speak for itself or not at all. He hated publicity, avoided photographers, declined the honors and ceremonies that other writers spend their lives chasing. When the greatest of those honors arrived, the prize he had received as a kind of catastrophe, appalled that it would strip away the anonymity he needed in order to live and to work, he did the thing that tells you most about him. He kept almost none of the money. He gave it away, quietly, without announcement, in gift after gift, to friends who were struggling, to painters and writers who had no money, to people in need and institutions he cared about, until most of the small fortune was simply gone, dispersed into other lives. Fame he could not give away, and it pained him to the end. The money he could give away, and he did.

The generosity was not only a matter of the prize. It ran through the whole texture of his days. He lived simply, almost to the point of austerity, in a plain apartment, wearing the same old clothes, driving a small battered car around the city and out to the country, wanting very little, as though the poverty of means he practiced in his art were also a way of living. And what he had, of money and of time, he gave. He answered his letters, all of them, in his own hand, including letters from strangers and unknowns and struggling young writers who had no claim on him at all. He quietly settled debts and paid the bills of friends who had fallen on hard times. Actors who came to work with him, braced to meet a forbidding genius, found instead a patient, courteous, endlessly encouraging man who took them to dinner and asked after their families. The kindness was not a performance for the public. It was simply who he was when no one was watching, which is the only place kindness truly counts.

And once, near the end, this most private and least political of men made a rare public gesture, and it was entirely in character. A playwright in a country to the east had been thrown into prison for his dissent, silenced by his government, and Beckett, who kept clear of politics all his life, wrote a short, fierce play in his support and dedicated it to him, a small act of solidarity from one writer to another who was not free. It was not a manifesto or a speech. It was closer to a hand reached across a wall, the same plain fellow feeling that ran under everything he did, the sense that we are all in the same hard situation together and owe one another what warmth we can manage.

His truest life was in Paris, among a small circle of friends, many of them painters and sculptors and fellow writers, artists as serious and as uncompromising as he was. He had a deep love of painting all his life, and some of his closest friendships were with visual artists. One of the greatest sculptors of the age, a friend of his, made the spare, spindly tree that stood on stage for one famous revival of the play about waiting, two artists of the bare and the essential collaborating on a single thin tree in an empty space. Another neighbor and friend was a fellow writer of despair, an exile like himself who spent his life composing dark, brilliant, hopeless aphorisms, and the two of them would walk and talk together, two of the bleakest minds in Europe keeping each other the gentlest company. Beckett loved chess and played it seriously all his life, sometimes against artists as gifted at the board as they were in the studio. He loved music, and long walks, and silence. He was, for a man reputed to believe in nothing, remarkably faithful, to his friends, to his art, to the few people and things he had chosen.

At the center of the life, through all of it, was Suzanne, the woman who had come to his hospital bed before the war and carried his unwanted manuscripts around Paris when no one else believed in them. They were together for more than half a century, and they married, quietly and privately, when they were no longer young, partly for practical reasons, to settle matters of inheritance under the law. It was not a simple or a conventional marriage. They were very different, they had their distances, and in his later years there were other deep attachments in his life. But the loyalty between them, forged in danger and poverty and the long years before the fame, held to the very end, two people bound by everything they had survived together.

And the end, when it came, was quiet and bare, as he would have wanted. His last years were spent in a small, plain room in a modest nursing home in Paris, an old man growing frail, his breath failing him, still scratching out tiny fragments of prose when he could, still working, still trying to say the little that was left to say. Suzanne went first, in the summer of nineteen eighty-nine, and he followed her that same winter, in December, his heart and lungs giving out at last. They were buried together in a great cemetery in Paris, under a single simple slab of granite. He had left instructions about the stone, and they were entirely in keeping with the man and with everything he had made. It could be any color at all, he said, so long as it was grey. And so it is, a plain grey stone over the two of them, giving nothing away, exactly the color of the light in his plays, exactly the color of the world he spent his life learning to see clearly and to face without flinching and, somehow, against all the evidence, without despair.

Chapter 16: Still Going On

It is one of the strangest careers in the history of art. A shy Irishman writing bleak, difficult books in a borrowed language, about tramps and dustbins and dying men and disembodied voices, work that by every reasonable expectation should have found a few hundred devoted readers and vanished into the libraries, instead became one of the most performed, most quoted, most imitated bodies of work of the entire century, and reshaped what art was allowed to be. Decades after his death, his plays are staged constantly, all over the world. His phrases have entered languages he never wrote in. And people who have never sat through a minute of his theatre, who could not tell you a single title, nonetheless live, without knowing it, inside ideas and images that he made. How that happened, and what it means, is the last thing worth understanding about him.

Start with the theatre, because that is where the earthquake struck. Before that play about two men waiting by a tree, serious drama in the western world mostly meant one kind of thing, the well-made play, with its solid plot, its believable characters, its rising tension and its satisfying resolution, its living room and its clear message, life shown as a story that develops and concludes. Beckett walked in and swept the table clear. He wrote a play with no real plot, no development, no resolution, almost no scenery, and it held audiences spellbound, and in doing so it proved that all the things everyone had thought a play needed were optional. After that, the stage was suddenly open. A play could be two people in dustbins, or a mouth in the dark, or an hour of waiting. It could be built of silence and pause and repetition. It could refuse to explain itself. A whole generation of playwrights came through the door he had opened, the dramatists of menace and silence and the loaded pause, playwrights like Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, who learned from him that on a stage a silence can be more frightening than any speech, and that comedy can be balanced over the void, and critics reached for a name and called it a theatre of the absurd, a theatre that took the meaninglessness modern people felt and put it directly on the stage instead of hiding it inside a tidy story. Nearly all of it traces back, one way or another, to that bare tree and that empty road.

The change in how the work was received is itself part of the story. That first audience did not know whether to be baffled or offended, and a good many simply walked out. Critics called it a hoax, a bore, a piece of pretentious nonsense. And within a single generation the nonsense had become a classic, taught in schools, set in examinations, performed in every country on earth, the most famous serious play of its century. What had looked like a provocation turned out to be a mirror, and each new age has found something different in it. Audiences in the anxious decades of the Cold War saw their own dread of an ending that never quite arrived. Audiences living under harsh and oppressive governments saw their own condition in it at once, the endless waiting for a deliverance forever promised and forever delayed, understanding it as directly as the convicts in that prison once had. In one European city besieged and shelled and cut off from the world, a production of the play about waiting was staged by candlelight for an audience of the trapped, who needed no one to explain to them what it means to wait, in the dark, for a rescue that may never come. That is the mark of a true classic. It does not belong only to its own moment. It waits, quietly, for each new set of people who will need it, and it is there for them when they arrive, saying their own situation back to them more truthfully than they could have said it themselves.

But his shadow reached far past the theatre. The whole idea he had staked his life on, that in art less can be more, that stripping away is a form of truth, that bareness and silence and reduction have their own enormous power, spread outward into everything. You can feel it in the spare, stripped fiction that came after him, in painters and sculptors of the minimal and the empty, in filmmakers who trust silence and stillness, in an entire modern taste for the pared-down and the essential. The word for it became simply his name turned into an adjective. A grey room, a stalled conversation, a pair of figures waiting pointlessly in an empty place, and we call it Beckettian, and everyone knows what we mean. And the reach went all the way down into ordinary speech, the truest measure of how deep an artist has sunk into a culture. Waiting for Godot became a phrase that anyone can use and almost everyone understands, a byword for any hopeless, endless wait for something that is never going to come, used every day by people who have no idea they are quoting a play, which is a kind of immortality most writers never touch.

And there is that other phrase, the two small words from the darkest corner of his late work that somehow became a motto for the whole striving modern world, printed on the walls of the very places, the offices and the training grounds, dedicated to winning. That his hard, sad instruction about how to fail became a global slogan for how to succeed is an irony he would have savored, and it is also, underneath the misunderstanding, a strange kind of proof. Even garbled, even turned inside out, his voice carried. The world reached for his words to say something it badly needed to say to itself about persistence, and his were the words that fit.

Underneath all of this runs the argument that has never been settled, the question of what he finally was. For a long time the easy answer was that Beckett was the great nihilist, the artist of nothingness, the man who looked at human life and found it empty, pointless, and absurd, and said so more relentlessly than anyone. And it is true that he offered no comforts, told no reassuring lies, held out no heaven and no happy ending and no hidden meaning that makes the suffering worthwhile. But the longer people have lived with his work, the less that easy answer satisfies, because it leaves out almost everything that actually happens in it. Look at what his creatures do. They wait together. They keep each other company in the dark. They crack their sad jokes and perform their little routines and share their carrots and worry about each other's aching feet. They fail, and they go on. The voice that has lost everything does not fall silent, it continues. The tramps who cannot leave do not abandon each other, they stay. There is, running through all the desolation, an unbroken thread of something that looks a great deal like tenderness, like solidarity, like a stubborn refusal to let the darkness have the last word or to let despair curdle into cruelty. That is not nihilism. Nihilism does not bother to be kind. What Beckett offers is something harder and rarer than either false hope or flat despair. It is the refusal of both. He will not lie to you about how hard it is, and he will not stop, and he will not let his people stop, and he will not let them turn on each other. He faces the worst with open eyes, and keeps going, and keeps the company, and that combination, clear sight and continued going, is not the absence of a value. It is very nearly the deepest value there is.

Which may be why this most difficult and forbidding of writers speaks so directly, so gently, to a person lying awake in the dark. Because in the dark, with the busyness of the day stripped away, we are all closer to his territory than we like to admit in the daylight. We know about the suffering of being, about the habits that carry us and the time that dissolves us, about waiting for things that may not come, about failing at what matters most and having to rise the next morning and try again. Beckett does not offer to fix any of it. He does something rarer. He tells the truth about it, plainly and without panic, and then he shows us people going on anyway, in each other's company, with their small routines and their sad jokes and their unbreakable, unreasonable persistence. And at the very end of everything he stripped away, when the world and the body and the name and the hope were all gone, what he found left was not nothing after all. It was a voice, still speaking. It was a hand, still reaching for another hand. It was attention, and company, and the refusal to stop. That is what he leaves us with, and it is more than it sounds, and it is, perhaps, exactly enough. He could not go on. He went on. So, somehow, in the dark, do we all.