Word: beckett
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...Laurel and Hardy and were in fact played by Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell, Robin Williams and Steve Martin -- but the humor intensified the sadness. In the play's most vivid and haunting image, one character cries out about all mankind, "They give birth astride of a grave." Beckett regarded himself as a sort of historian, a chronicler of misbegotten times. "I didn't invent this buzzing confusion," he said. "It's all around us, and . . . the only chance of renewal is to open our eyes and see the mess." Yet he had nothing of the reformer, no impulse toward...
Born on a disputed date in spring 1906, Beckett claimed to remember being a fetus in the womb, a place he recalled not as a haven but as a dark ocean of agony. The son of a surveyor and a nurse, he had a conventional Dublin Protestant upbringing, studied classics in high school and romance languages at Trinity College. At 21 he went to Paris and fell in with literary expatriates including James Joyce, who became a friend and an inspiration -- although, as Beckett noted, Joyce tended toward omniscience and omnipresence in his narrative voice, "whereas I work with impotence...
When Paris was invaded by the Nazis, Beckett and his future wife fled to the south of France, hiding by day and journeying by night. That harrowing experience, especially the footsore conversation along the way, probably inspired the futile wandering in Godot, according to its first Broadway director, Alan Schneider...
...even deeper real-life influence on Beckett's work, scholars have suggested, came in 1938. As Beckett walked along a Paris street, a panhandler stabbed him in the chest, perforating a lung and narrowly missing his heart. When Beckett later asked why the attack happened, the assailant replied, "I don't know, sir." That glimpse of the random perils of existence may have confirmed Beckett's dark vision but did not initiate it. His novel Murphy, published the same year, depicts a destitute Irishman, living in London, who daydreams away his days in a rocking chair until a gas plant...
Through the '40s, Beckett kept writing, shifting, for reasons he never explained, from English to French as the language in which he created. He remained obscure until a spectacular burst from 1951 to 1953, in which Godot and three novels appeared to acclaim. The plays Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days followed by 1960. Thereafter he produced fewer and fewer, shorter and shorter, bleaker and bleaker pieces but never quite lapsed into the ultimate despair of artistic silence. His last work, Stirrings Still, a fiction of less than 2,000 words, was published in March...