Status Updates From Samuel Beckett: A Biography

Beckett was inordinately fond of MacGowran...when MacGowran made a number of obvious hints that his consuming passion was to own something by Jack B. Yeats, Beckett gave away his beloved painting, purchased with such difficulty many years before. Why, his friends asked, had Beckett so easily given up one of the few possessions that had any real meaning for him?
“He asked me for it. He wanted it. I gave it to him.”

The telephone rang sharply on October 23, 1969... She (Suzanne) listened quietly for a moment, said a few words to the caller and hung up. She turned to face Beckett... and whispered "Quel catastrophe". She had just been told that the Swedish Academy had awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature to Samuel Beckett...

Actors, writers, old friends, casual acquaintances—all were recipients of Beckett’s generosity. Few had to ask for help, for he offered it if he even sensed the slightest need. Each gesture was performed with the exquisite courtesy and tact that governed all Beckett’s personal actions; no one was made to feel even a hint embarrassed...

..the wife of a prominent Dublin cultural figure began to harangue him for writing what she called “mud and slime and filthy creatures.” Why, she demanded, did he “waste his obvious abilities on the lowest forms of humanity?” Why was he “obsessed with all that is wrong with life?” Beckett stood grimly silent, eyes cast down at the floor, while the woman continued...When it was over, Beckett made no reference to it.

...he confessed that he “was doomed to spend the rest of my days digging up the detritus of my life and vomiting it out over and over again.” He
continued in a more positive mood, saying, “optimism is not my way. I shall always be depressed, but what comforts me is the realization that I can now accept this dark side as the commanding side of my personality. In accepting it, I will make it work for me.”

"The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have
told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the
courage to end or the strength to go on."

I didn't know Beckett was awarded Croix de Guerre with a gold star on March 30, 1945
"Beckett, Sam: A man of great courage, who over the course of two years, demonstrated his effectiveness as an information source in an important intelligence network. He continued this work well past the limit of personal security. Betrayed to the Germans, from 1943 he was forced to live clandestinely and with great difficulty."

...Beckett turned to a companion and said listlessly, “Sunshine is an overrated virtue .” It was the sort of pronouncement, or café philosophy, in which he indulged himself, punctuated frequently with languid sighs of boredom.

He was in complete accord with painters who chose to portray human beings as blobs of color and form because he thought this intensified the dehumanization of mankind, emphasizing how hermetic and alone he really was. People, he thought, were totally alone... Each was as alien to all others as to a protoplast or God, incapable of loving or hating anyone but himself, or of being loved or hated by anyone but himself.

Beckett on Joyce's style of writing:
Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read, or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something: it is that something itself... When the sense is sleep the words go to sleep. When the sense is dancing, the words dance.

In Geulincx’s words: ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis— where you are worth nothing, you should want nothing. The reasonable, sensible man, if he follows Geulincx, does not act against passion, but is indifferent to it. Geulincx’s philosophy had the most powerful and lasting effect on Beckett of anything he had read to date. So impressive was it that he made it the key of his novel Murphy written in 1935.

Quite independently of any exposure to literature he received in school, Beckett developed respect for writers as well as their writings. Neatly placed on the shelf beside his books was a small bust of Shakespeare. Later he acquired a larger bust of Dante, which he kept on the windowsill because he liked the way the light changed as the sun moved across the crags and crannies of Dante’s hawklike visage.

Beckett was a naughty boy. 😉

When he left Dublin in 1937 to live permanently in Paris, Beckett reversed the migration which had brought his ancestors to Ireland in the late seventeenth century. Originally named “Becquet,” they were French Hugenots who moved to Ireland for economic and religious freedom.