I want you to picture someone for a second. Just
imagine a Nobel Prize -winning author, you know,
the kind of towering literary figure whose very
name is basically synonymous with stark minimalism,
the avant -garde, and just the absolute darkest,
most unfathomable depths of existential dread.
Right. So you're probably picturing someone very
serious. Exactly. Someone sitting in a dimly
lit, sparsely furnished room, agonizing over
the sheer futility of human existence, maybe
wearing a black turtleneck. Gaunt features, you
know, a deeply furrowed brow just staring out
a window at some bleak landscape. Right, exactly.
But now I want you to take that exact same guy
and I want you to imagine him as a first -class,
highly competitive athlete. Which is just, I
mean, it's so hard to picture. It really is.
Imagine him sneaking through the shadows of occupied
Paris as this daring anti -Nazi espionage agent,
literally dodging the Gestapo. Perhaps most unbelievably
of all, imagine him spending his mornings casually
driving a young Andre the Giant to school in
a modified pickup truck, just chatting about
sports. It sounds utterly incompatible with the
man who, you know, built a literary monument
out of the concept of the absolute void. It does.
But welcome to our deep dine into the life, the
works, and the wonderfully absurd philosophy
of Samuel Beckett. We are looking at an incredibly
comprehensive biographical and critical overview
of his life today. And it is quite a life. It
really is. So our mission for the two of us and
for you listening right now, you know, the vital
third person in this room with us is to take
a journey. We need to figure out how a man who
dedicated his entire artistic life to exploring
concepts of failure. nothingness and ignorance
somehow managed to become one of the most towering,
influential figures of the 20th century. Yeah,
and to understand how he achieved that, we have
to look closely at the entirely unexpected trajectory
of his life. Because the man mapping the void
didn't actually start there. Right, because I
always assumed a writer like Beckett must have
emerged fully formed from some tragic, impoverished,
bohemian background. You know, it feels like
a prerequisite for writing about misery. Sure.
But looking at these sources, his early life
was actually Shockingly comfortable. Highly comfortable,
actually. I mean, he was born in 1906 in Fox
Rock, which is this very affluent suburb of Dublin.
He attended the prestigious Portora Royal School,
which is actually the same institution Oscar
Wilde attended. And then he went on to Trinity
College Dublin. And while he was a brilliant
student, the thing that truly set him apart in
those early days was, well, it was his physicality.
He was a formidable athlete. Wait, so the master
of existential dread was a jock? A very serious
one, yeah. He excelled at cricket as a left -handed
batsman and a left -arm medium -paced bowler.
He even played two first -class games for Dublin
University against Northamptonshire. Wow. And
that level of play actually earns him an incredibly
niche distinction. Out of all the brilliant minds
to ever win the Nobel Prize in literature, Samuel
Beckett remains the only one to be listed in
the wisdom cricketers' almanac, you know, the
Bible of the sport. That is wild. I mean, we
tend to think of these avant -garde writers as
just floating brains. Completely disconnected
from the real world. It's a super common misconception,
but his athleticism is actually crucial to understanding
him. He was profoundly aware of the body, of
movement, of physical endurance. Oh, very interesting.
Yeah. Later in his work, when you see characters
trapped in urns or buried up to their necks in
sand, that obsession with physical limitation
and the decay of the body stems directly from
someone who once knew what it was to have absolute
physical control. That makes so much sense. Right.
But his intellectual life was accelerating just
as fast. After graduating, he moved to Paris
in 1928 to work as an Englishman. lecturer and
that is where the great collision of his life
happens. He meets James Joyce. Okay let's unpack
this because meeting James Joyce in Paris in
the 1920s wasn't just meeting a famous writer.
Joyce was an absolute titan. Oh he was the center
of the literary universe at that moment. A close
friend introduced the young Beckett to Joyce
and Joyce had this profound almost gravity -like
pull on him. Right. Beckett basically became
a sort of assistant helping research the famously
impenetrable book that would eventually become
Finnegan's Wake. I want to put this in perspective
for you, the listener. Imagine being a brilliant
young software developer. You're ambitious. You
want to launch your own startup. You want to
disrupt the industry. And your very first job
is sitting at a shared desk with Steve Jobs while
he's inventing the iPhone. That is a great way
to look at it. Right. It would be overwhelmingly
inspiring, sure. Right. But how paralyzing would
that be? Like how on earth do you find your own
voice or your own lane when you're working directly
for a genius who is literally redefining the
boundaries of your entire field? You are describing
the exact psychological trap Beckett fell into.
Joyce was the ultimate maximalist. His method
was to pack all of human history, multiple languages,
intricate puns, and basically every myth ever
written into a single dense paragraph. Which
is just exhausting to even think about. It is,
and Beckett was desperately trying to write his
own material during this time. He showed flashes
of brilliance. I mean, he won a small literary
prize for a poem called Horoscope, which he wrote
hastily after reading a biography of Rene Descartes.
Right. But overall, he was completely suffocated
by Joyce's shadow. He had to realize he was never
going to beat James Joyce at his own game. Exactly.
And the paralysis of living under that literary
shadow was heavy. But the actual city of Paris
was about to offer him a much more literal physical
danger. And this event completely shattered his
understanding of how the world operates. Yeah,
we are talking about January 1938. Beckett was
walking down a street in Paris. A notoriously
dangerous area. Yes. And he is approached by
a local pimp who went by the name Prudent. This
guy solicits him. Beckett refuses. And in response,
Prudent pulls out a knife and stabs Beckett in
the chest, nearly killing him. Oh my god. Just
right there on the street. Just right there.
The blade narrowly missed his heart. Joyce actually
had to step in and arrange for Beckett to have
a private room at the hospital to recover. Wow.
So Joyce comes to the rescue. He does. And the
massive publicity from the stabbing also brought
Beckett back into contact with a woman named
Suzanne Deschvaux de Menil. She would eventually
become his lifelong companion and future wife.
So the violence radically altered his personal
life, too. The part of the story that blows my
mind is the trial. So Beckett recovers, he goes
to court for the preliminary hearing, and he
finally gets to face his attacker. Right. He
asked the question that would be burning in anyone's
mind. Why did you stab me? I would expect a monologue
about disrespect or a robbery gone wrong or something,
but Pruden just looks at him and replies, I do
not know, sir. I apologize. And Beckett just
drops the charges. He lets the guy go. What's
fascinating here is how perfectly this bizarre
real world exchange mirrors the theater of the
absurd that Beckett would later pioneer. Tell
me more about that. Well, for anyone unfamiliar
with the term, the theater of the absurd is a
theatrical movement that abandons logical plot,
realistic character motivations and clear dialogue.
Instead, it uses irrational situations to reflect
the fundamental meaninglessness of human existence.
I put yourself in issues. You are nearly murdered
on the street. Your life almost ends and the
universe's only explanation is a polite shrug.
I don't know. My bad. The dark comedy of that
is just. staggering. The philosophical implication
is huge. In traditional storytelling, you know,
the kind of novels that dominated before Beckett,
every action has a clear logical motive. Cause
and effect. Right. A character does something
terrible because of a childhood trauma or greed
or revenge. But Beckett's lived reality just
proved to him that violence, suffering, and life
-altering events occur for absolutely no reason
at all. Just totally random. Completely. It is
an entirely incomprehensible universe. Decades
later, when the author Solomon Rushdie survived
his own horrific stabbing, he cited this exact
response from Beckett's attacker to explain why
he had no desire to interview the man who stabbed
him. Sometimes looking into the void yields Absolutely
no answers. Wow. And if a random stabbing in
1938 taught him that individual violence has
no inherent meaning, the events of 1939 forced
him to confront that same meaningless chaos on
a global industrialized scale. World War II breaks
out. And being an Irish citizen, Beckett had
an easy out. Ireland remained neutral during
the war. He could have safely packed his bags,
returned to the comfortable suburbs of Dublin,
and just waited it out. Which a lot of people
did. Exactly. Instead, he made the deliberate
choice to stay in Paris, famously stating that
he preferred France at war to Ireland at peace.
And when the Germans occupied France in 1940,
he didn't just hide in his apartment, he actively
joined the French resistance. Specifically, a
network called Rizzo Gloria. Right. He worked
as a courier, which was incredibly dangerous.
A courier wasn't just dropping off mail. He was
receiving highly sensitive pieces of information
like microfilm containing details about German
troop movements. Geez. Yeah. And he was transloading
them, then smuggling them to other operatives
right under the noses of the Gestapo. If he had
been caught with those translations, it would
have meant torture and execution. And his network
was eventually compromised, wasn't it? It was,
yeah. Betrayed by a double agent in 1942. Dozens
of his fellow resistance members were arrested
and sent to concentration camps. Beckett and
Suzanne were tipped off just in time. They had
to literally flee their apartment and walk on
foot, hiding in the woods, heading south until
they reached the small, unoccupied village of
Rissalon. And even then, he didn't stop. No.
Even there, he secretly helped the local Maquis
resistance fighters store weapons in his garage
for sabotage operations against the German forces.
I mean, for all of this immense bravery, the
French government later awarded him the Croix
de Guerre and the Resistance Medal. So how does
this giant of literature describe his harrowing,
life -risking, anti -Nazi espionage? He dismissed
the whole thing as Boy Scout stuff. Boy Scout
stuff. It sounds overly humble, but you have
to view it through his psychological state at
the time. Okay, how so? Coming out of the war,
having witnessed the Holocaust, the devastation
of Europe, and the atomic bomb. He felt that
any individual action was terrifyingly small,
and that sheer scale of destruction directly
triggered the most important artistic breakthrough
of his life. It happened in 1945, right after
the war. He was back in Dublin for a brief visit,
sitting in his mother's room, and he had what
he called a revelation. He looked back at his
old mentor, James Joyce. He did. He realized
that Joyce's entire method was about adding.
Joyce assumed a position of total knowledge.
He controlled the material, he expanded it, he
layered it with endless complexity. Sure. But
sitting in that room, Beckett realized that his
own path had to be the exact opposite. He had
to embrace impoverishment. He had to embrace
a lack of knowledge. He decided his art would
be entirely about subtracting. I love this visual.
Think of literature as a massive block of marble.
James Joyce was this artist who was constantly
adding more and more clay to the top of it, trying
to build an infinitely complex towering monument
to human history. Yeah, a great way to picture
it. And Beckett realized his job was to take
a chisel to the stone and just keep chipping
away, stripping off the plot, stripping off the
omniscient narrator, chipping away until there
was almost nothing left. Just the barest, thinnest
sliver of existence. But as an artist, how on
earth do you sell impoverishment? I mean, people
buy books or theater tickets because they want
something. How do you make nothing compelling?
Well, you do it by being brutally, devastatingly
honest about the human condition. After the trauma
of the Second World War, Bickett realized that
mankind in the modern era is fundamentally A
non -Knower. A non -Knower. Yes. We do not have
the answers to why such horrific suffering exists.
So to write traditional flowery fiction with
an omniscient narrator who knows exactly how
the world works felt intellectually dishonest
to him. I see. To achieve this subtraction, he
even started writing primarily in French instead
of his native English. He said writing in French
made it easier for him to write without style.
Really? Yeah. He actively wanted to strip away
the beautiful melodic prose of his mother tongue
to get to the raw un - nerve of existence. And
that raw nerve is what birthed his absolute masterpiece.
Between 1948 and 1949 he writes a play called
Waiting for Godot. Originally written in French
as En attendant Godot and we really have to give
immense credit to Suzanne here. Oh absolutely.
She essentially acted as his agent fiercely shopping
this bizarre rule -breaking manuscript around
the theaters of Paris until she finally found
a director Roger Plym who understood its unconventional
vision. because it is entirely unconventional.
You have two ragged men, Vladimir and Estragon,
standing by a barren tree on an empty country
road, waiting for a man named Godot. They talk,
they argue, they complain about their boots,
and Godot never shows up. Never. The famous Irish
critic, Vivian Mercier, reviewed it and gave
what might be the greatest, most accurate summary
in the history of theater criticism. He wrote
that Beckett has written a play in which nothing
happens twice, because act two is basically just
a repeat of act one. Exactly. It dismantled every
foundational rule of dramatic storytelling. There
is no rising action, no character arcs, no clear
climax, and no resolution. And yet, defying all
logic, it became a massive, unprecedented global
success. It really did. It resonated deeply with
audiences everywhere, from intellectual circles
in Paris to prisoners in San Quentin. So what
does this all mean? Why did millions of people
fall in love with a play where literally nothing
happens? I want you to think about a time in
your life when you were stuck waiting for something
terrifying. Okay. Maybe you were sitting in a
sterile room waiting for a life -altering medical
test result. Oh. You were completely powerless.
The thing you were waiting for hasn't arrived.
How did you pass the time with the person next
to you? You probably made weird jokes. You argued
about trivial nonsense. You paced the room. You
did whatever you could to distract yourself from
the terrifying void of the unknown. That is exactly
what Vladimir and Estragon are doing. If we connect
this to the bigger picture, waiting for Godot
is often falsely labeled as strict existentialism.
But Beckett hated philosophical labels. He wasn't
trying to write an academic textbook for the
stage. The play resonates globally because it
is actually about the universal human will to
survive. It's about how we desperately rely on
each other through mundane habits and shared
humor to endure the passing of time in the face
of absolute despair. It is deeply bleak but because
of those survival mechanisms it is also incredibly
funny. And speaking of survival mechanisms, his
global fame from Godot brings us to what might
be my favorite juxtaposition in literary history.
By the 1950s, Beckett is this internationally
renowned intellectual, the definitive voice of
human isolation. He uses some of his earnings
to buy land and build a cottage about 60 kilometers
northeast of Paris. And what does the gaunt master
of the absurd do in his spare time? He drives
the local kids to school. He had a modified pickup
truck to move materials for his cottage, and
he would routinely offer rides to the neighborhood
children who had to walk a long way. One of those
children happened to be a boy named Andre Rusimoff.
Who the world would later know as the legendary
professional wrestler Andre the Giant. Yes. Because
Andre was already too massive to comfortably
fit on the local school bus, Samuel Beckett Nobel
Laureate would let the teenager ride in the back
of his truck, and the two of them bonded. This
raises an important question about how we perceive
artists versus who they actually are, because
what did the pioneer of the void and the future
heavyweight wrestler talk about on those drives?
Cricket. Andre later recalled that the two of
them rarely talked about anything else. They
just endlessly discussed the intricacies of cricket
matches. It shows that even a man who dedicates
his life to exploring the meaninglessness of
the universe still just wants to enjoy a good
chat about sports. It perfectly captures the
tragicomedy of his own plays. But, you know,
as we move into the 1960s and 70s, what scholars
refer to as his late works period, that sense
of subtraction we discussed earlier became radically
extreme. The chisel was cutting dangerously close
to the bone. Yeah, in 1969, he writes a play
called Breath. There are no characters, no actors
on stage. The audience just sees a stage full
of rubbish. They hear the sound of a brief recorded
cry, a slow mechanical breath in, a breath out,
another cry, and the lights go black. The entire
play lasts exactly 35 seconds. And then you have
Not I, written in 1972. The mechanics of this
play are genuinely unsettling. The stage is plunged
into pitch blackness. Total darkness. Total darkness.
The audience cannot see the set. They cannot
see each other. The only thing illuminator is
a single human mouth floating about eight feet
in the air, illuminated by a tight spotlight.
The mouth speaks at a frantic, terrified, almost
incomprehensible speed. He worked on this specific
play with his muse, the brilliant actress, Billy
Whitelaw, for a quarter of a century. She gave
a chilling description of her collaboration with
him. She said, with all of Sam's work, the scream
was there. My task was to try to get it out.
Here's where it gets really interesting, because
it forces us to question the entire social contract
of art. I mean, if you got a ticket to a show,
got dressed up, sat down in the theater, and
all you saw was a floating mouth talking in the
dark, or a play that literally ended in 35 seconds,
would you feel cheated? Right. Would you ask
for your money back? Exactly. Is he just trolling
his audience at this point, or is there something
profoundly brave about an artist aggressively
stripping away the sets, the elaborate costumes,
the physical movement, and the plot until only
the raw panic human voices left? Well, he certainly
wasn't trolling. It was a deliberate psychological
confrontation. In these late works, Beckett was
obsessively focused on the entrapment of memory.
By blacking out the stage and isolating just
the mouth, he was simulating the experience of
the self, entirely confined and trapped inside
the skull. I hear that is intense. Very. He used
incredibly strict stage directions to control
every single breath, every blink, and every shadow.
In fact, his literary estate still fiercely protects
those directions today, shutting down productions
that try to alter the lighting or the set. Wow,
they don't m— No, because he wasn't trying to
entertain you in the traditional sense. By removing
all the comforting distractions of a normal play,
he was forcing you, the audience, to sit in the
dark and confront the inescapable, looping reality
of your own mind. You kick away all the noise.
Which brings a fascinating symmetry to how he
handled the end of his own life. In October 1969,
while on holiday in Tunis, Beckett receives the
news that he has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
And his fiercely protective wife, Suzanne, upon
hearing the news that her intensely private husband
is now going to be saddled with global fame,
endless media attention, and public adoration,
famously calls the award a catastrophe. It is
the ultimate Beckesian reaction to winning the
highest possible honor in literature. Total dread.
Right. Suzanne passed away in July 1989. Beckett,
who was confined to a nursing home and suffering
from emphysema, followed her just a few months
later. dying on December 26, 1989. They were
buried together in a cemetery in Paris. And even
in death, he gave a strict minimalist directorial
note. His gravestone is a simple block of granite
that follows his exact directive. Any color,
so long as it's gray. The final permanent subtraction.
Exactly. It leaves us with the profound final
thought to chew on today. We talked about Beckett's
great revelation in 1945 that his own stupidity,
his ignorance and his lack of knowledge were
actually his precious ally. We live right now
in an age of constant overwhelming information
overload. Oh, without a doubt. We are desperately
trying to know more, constantly scrolling, researching,
and adding data to our mental hard drives every
single second of the day, hoping it will make
the world make sense. What could you gain in
your own life if you actively chose to embrace
not knowing? What would happen if, just for one
day, you tried Samuel Beckett's method if you
focused on the art of subtracting the noise?
It is a terrifying prospect to admit our own
ignorance, but perhaps it is the only way to
find any real clarity. Sometimes the most honest
thing you can do when faced with a chaotic, incomprehensible
universe is just shrug, admit you don't have
the answers, and find someone to talk about sports
with while you wait for whatever comes next.
Thank you so much for joining us on this deep
dive. We'll see you next time.