It was in the ordinary decencies–drink, food, conversation–that Samuel Beckett believed,
and in little else, apart from Art, his one true religion. In this personal
church he was a staunch conservative. His saints were Dante, Racine, Rembrandt,
Schubert, Schopenhauer, and that other melancholy Samuel, Dr. Johnson, who
obsessed him all his life (interestingly, pre-Godot, he wrote part of a play about Dr. Johnson in which the great
man is awaited but never appears). Lesser saints were Vico, Haydn, Proust, and
James Joyce–and thereby hangs a tale, for it was, in a convoluted way, via
Joyce that Beckett met his greatest supporter and fellow-congregant in the
Church of Art, his future wife Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil. Actually, they met
eight years before they really met, so to speak, as opponents in a tennis match
(yes! Beckett in tennis whites), and only got together again eight years later,
in 1938, after a notorious incident in which Beckett was attacked and nearly
murdered by a pimp in the street. In hospital, he was tended to by the Joyce
family, including the great man himself, for whom Beckett had been working on
and off as a kind of secretary, transcriber of notes, and general dogsbody.
Joyce paid for the hospital room and took care of the medical bills. Suzanne read
about the stabbing incident in the papers and contacted Joyce, who communicated
Beckett's whereabouts. Suzanne came to visit the Irish patient, and the rest is
history; they stayed together for life, marrying in 1961.
And
thank God or Godot for that, because without her we would almost certainly never have heard of him. Beckett's indifference to the world
and its opinions was such that–especially after about 1945–he couldn't even be
bothered to submit his own works to publishers, and detested having to make use
of such contacts as he had, whom he preferred, very Irishly, to think of as
pals to share a story or a drink with, not as part of a business
"network." Anyway: "Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me,"
he averred. "In fact, I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed
deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years."
Mind
you, he had been rejected by over 40
publishers when he sent out Murphy,
his first accomplished novel; and 35 producers and directors had laughed Waiting for Godot out of town, so some disillusionment is
understandable. Over to Suzanne, then, who'd come to know her man well during
their years on the run in the French Resistance: gnomic, down-to-earth,
fascinated by the everyday, adept at colloquial French speech–clearly a genius in ovo, but useless at self-promotion,
paralyzed by the possibilities, socially inept. Not so Suzanne, who was a
typical Left Bank intellectual of her time, acquainted with everybody who was
anybody in the 5th and 6th arrondissments.
Crucially, she was a dynamo compared to Sam (whom Peggy Guggenheim, the
American socialite with whom he'd had a fling, called "Oblomov,"
after the iconic Russian layabout), and she never let up in her determination
to bring success to them both. Undeterred by the mountain of rejections, she
found Sam a publisher, Editions de Minuit, and a
producer, Roger Blin, who presented the world premiere of ''Waiting for Godot,''
and ignited the mighty machine of fame that took shy Sam all the way to the
Nobel Prize in 1969.
