48 Fun Facts About Samuel Beckett

Which phrase ends Beckett's much-quoted lines from Worstward Ho about trying again and failing again?

Fail better. The tennis champion Stan Wawrinka, who won Grand Slam titles after years of defeats, had the lines tattooed along his left forearm.

Who collected Beckett's 1969 Nobel Prize in his place?

His publisher, Jerome Lindon, went in his place. Beckett accepted the prize but would not face the ceremony and the speech it required, and he made no public statement.

Which Irish novelist did the young Beckett befriend in Paris and help with research?

James Joyce never employed him as a secretary, as is often said: Beckett was a friend and aide who ran research errands and read aloud to him as his eyesight worsened.

In which language did Beckett write most of his works after 1947, including his most famous play?

French, he said, made it easier to write 'without style'. He then translated most of the work into English himself.

In which Beckett play is Winnie buried up to her waist, then up to her neck, in a mound of earth?

Happy Days. Sinking into the earth, Winnie still brushes her teeth, puts on her hat and declares 'Oh this is a happy day' to a husband who barely answers.

What are the names of the two main characters in Beckett's most famous play?

Vladimir and Estragon call each other Didi and Gogo. Told that the pair talked as if they had PhDs, Beckett replied: 'How do you know they hadn't?'

In Beckett's most famous play, what is the name of the servant who is led about on a rope by Pozzo?

Lucky carries the bags in silence until ordered to 'Think!', when he pours out a torrent of scrambled scholarship that stops only when his hat is pulled off.

Who directed the 1953 Paris premiere of Beckett's most famous play at the Theatre de Babylone?

Roger Blin picked it over Beckett's other script partly because it needed fewer actors, then had to play Pozzo himself, a pillow padding his stomach, when his actor left.

Which Romantic painter's moonlit scene of two figures did Beckett call the source of his most famous play?

Caspar David Friedrich. Beckett saw his moon-watchers on a tour of German galleries in 1936-37 and, a dozen years on, wrote two men waiting by a tree; accounts differ on which twin canvas he meant.

A 1998 National Theatre poll voted Beckett's best-known work what, among plays in English?

The century's most significant play in English, ahead of Death of a Salesman. In 1955 London's daily critics had dismissed it, until Harold Hobson's Sunday Times review came to its rescue.

Which critic coined the term 'Theatre of the Absurd', with Beckett as its centrepiece?

Martin Esslin tied the plays to Albert Camus's idea of the absurd, one reason Beckett is so often labelled an existentialist.

At which Enniskillen institution, also attended by Oscar Wilde, was the teenage Beckett educated?

Portora Royal School lay in what became Northern Ireland: Beckett arrived around 1920, and partition in 1921 put a border between him and his family home near Dublin.

Uniquely among Nobel literature laureates, Beckett played which sport at the highest domestic level as a student?

Cricket earned him an obituary in Wisden: a left-handed batsman, he played two first-class matches for Dublin University against Northamptonshire.

At which Paris institution did Beckett work as an English lecteur from 1928 to 1930?

The Ecole Normale Superieure took him on a two-year exchange from Trinity College Dublin. The poet Thomas MacGreevy, already teaching English there, became his close friend and his way into literary Paris.

Beckett's prize-winning 1930 poem 'Whoroscope' draws on a biography of which philosopher?

Rene Descartes speaks the poem himself. Beckett, who happened to be reading a life of the philosopher, wrote it in a few hours for Nancy Cunard's contest for a poem about time, and won.

What was unusual about the poet Jean du Chas, subject of Beckett's 1930 Trinity lecture?

Beckett had invented him, along with his movement, le Concentrisme. The spoof paper mocked academic pedantry, and a year later he resigned his own lectureship.

What was Beckett's first novel, written in his twenties but not published until 1992?

Dream of Fair to Middling Women was turned down by publishers, so Beckett shelved it and quarried it for the stories of More Pricks Than Kicks.

What was Beckett's first published novel, from 1938, with chess and insanity among its themes?

Murphy was turned down by 42 publishers before Routledge took it. Its opening line runs: 'The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.'

Which psychoanalyst treated Beckett at London's Tavistock Clinic for two years after his father's death?

Wilfred Bion's patient was in the audience for one of Carl Jung's Tavistock Lectures in 1935, and traces of the analysis resurface in Beckett's later novels and plays.

In 1936 Beckett wrote to which Soviet film director offering himself as an apprentice?

Sergei Eisenstein never answered the letter of March 1936, in which Beckett asked to be taken on at the Moscow film school, and the would-be film-maker stayed a writer.

What happened to Beckett on a Paris street in January 1938?

He was stabbed by a pimp named Prudent, whose approaches he had refused. Asked afterwards why he had done it, the man could only say that he did not know and was sorry, and Beckett dropped the charges.

Which art collector had a brief affair with Beckett around 1937 and nicknamed him 'Oblomov'?

Peggy Guggenheim named him after Goncharov's hero, a man so overcome by apathy, she said, that he 'finally did not even have the willpower to get out of bed'.

With which artist did Beckett regularly play chess in Left Bank cafes?

Marcel Duchamp had all but swapped art for the board by then: he played for France in international tournaments, and a friend recalled that he 'only played chess'.

Beckett's Resistance network was betrayed to the Germans in 1942 by a double agent of which profession?

A Catholic priest, the abbé Robert Alesch, betrayed the Gloria network to the Germans. Warned by telegram, Beckett and his partner left their Paris flat at once and went into hiding.

How did Beckett later describe his Resistance work?

"Boy scout stuff" was his own shrugging verdict on it. France thought otherwise and awarded him the Croix de Guerre in 1945.

Which novel did Beckett write while hiding in the village of Roussillon during the war?

Watt kept him going: by day he worked as a farm labourer, and at night he wrote the novel, as he put it, 'to stay sane'. It was not published until 1953.

After the war Beckett worked at an Irish Red Cross hospital in which devastated Normandy town?

Saint-Lo had been left in ruins by the 1944 fighting, which is why Beckett called the radio script he wrote about the hospital 'The Capital of the Ruins'.

Where did Beckett have the post-war 'revelation' that set the direction of his later work?

His mother's room in Dublin, not the storm-swept pier where a later play of his sets the scene. He saw that his way lay in 'impoverishment', in taking away rather than adding.

Which one-man Beckett play fictionalises his post-war revelation, as an old man revisits his younger self's words?

Krapp's Last Tape. Krapp winds the reel on before the audience can hear the vital words, which Beckett later said were 'precious ally'.

Which co-editor of Sartre's magazine Les Temps modernes refused to print the second half of Beckett's story 'Suite'?

Simone de Beauvoir had run the first half in 1946, taking it for the complete story, and then refused to print the rest. It later appeared in full as 'The End'.

Which small Paris press, founded in secret under the Occupation, published Beckett's novels in the early 1950s?

Les Editions de Minuit said yes to Molloy after many other houses had refused it, and its young director Jerome Lindon went on publishing Beckett in France for the rest of his life.

Which novel follows Molloy and Malone Dies in the sequence called a trilogy against Beckett's wishes?

The Unnamable ends on the words 'you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on', and it left Beckett at an impasse: for years afterwards he struggled to write another long prose work.

In Endgame, the characters Nagg and Nell live inside what?

Ashbins hold the legless parents of Hamm, the blind master of the house. They lift their lids now and then to speak, Nell to remark that 'Nothing is funnier than unhappiness'.

About how long does Beckett's 1969 stage piece Breath last?

35 seconds, by the script's timings: a cry, one breath in and out over a stage of scattered rubbish, a second cry. Its first staging added naked bodies that Beckett never wrote, to open the revue Oh! Calcutta!

In Beckett's Play (1962), the three characters are immersed up to their necks in what?

Funeral urns hold a man, his wife and his mistress, each speaking only when the spotlight picks them out. At the end the script orders the whole play to be repeated.

Beckett's 1972 play Not I consists almost solely of what on stage?

A moving mouth, picked out by one beam of light, pours out a woman's broken story. To play it, Billie Whitelaw was strapped into a chair high above the darkened stage.

To which imprisoned dissident, later a president, did Beckett dedicate his 1982 play Catastrophe?

Vaclav Havel answered in kind once he was out of prison: he wrote a short play of his own, Mistake, as a reply to Beckett's.

Which future wrestling star was among the village children Beckett sometimes gave lifts to school in the 1950s?

Andre the Giant grew up a few hundred yards from Beckett's country house in France. The legend has outgrown the facts: Beckett simply let any children he passed hop into the back of his truck.

With whom did Beckett share the first International Publishers' Prize, awarded at Formentor in 1961?

Jorge Luis Borges wrote that, as a consequence of that prize, his books 'mushroomed overnight' throughout the western world.

Which silent-comedy star played the lead in Film, the 1965 short written by Beckett?

Buster Keaton was not the first choice: Beckett and the director Alan Schneider had wanted Charlie Chaplin. It was shot in New York in 1964, on Beckett's only visit to America.

What instruction did Beckett give about the look of his gravestone?

"Any colour, so long as it's grey" was the directive, and the plain granite slab obeys it. He shares it with his wife, whose burial he left his nursing home to attend five months before his own death.

In which Paris cemetery is Beckett buried?

Montparnasse was home: he had lived in the district for decades, latterly in a flat on the Boulevard Saint-Jacques that overlooked the exercise yard of the Santé prison.

In 1957 Waiting for Godot was staged for an audience of inmates at which California prison?

San Quentin's inmates were so stirred that they started a drama group of their own, and one of them, Rick Cluchey, was later directed by Beckett himself.

Which relative took charge of Beckett's estate, known for refusing stagings that ignore his stage directions?

His nephew Edward guards the texts closely, but not always with success: in 2006 a Rome court let an Italian company cast women as the two tramps despite the estate's injunction.

Critic Vivian Mercier famously summed up Waiting for Godot as a play in which what happens?

Nothing, twice: the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, which made the play, Mercier wrote, 'a theoretical impossibility' that still kept audiences glued to their seats.

In which Dublin suburb was Samuel Beckett born in 1906?

Foxrock stayed with him: the family house, the nearby racecourse and the local railway station all turn up again in his prose and plays.

Which American artist illustrated Fizzles, Beckett's 1976 collection of short prose texts?

Jasper Johns was given free rein over the book: he chose five of the texts, printed each in both of Beckett's languages and made a suite of etchings for them in Paris.

Why did Beckett marry his longtime partner in a secret ceremony in England in 1961?

So she could inherit his rights, at least on the face of it: the law in France gave an unmarried partner no claim on a writer's work. The two wed quietly at Folkestone, on the English coast.