Samuel Beckett: A Personal Memoir
John Calder, Samuel Beckett’s publisher for over thirty years, recounts their dynamic acquaintance.

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‘Remembering Samuel Beckett more than fifteen years after his death and separating the man from his work is not easy, because the man to a great extent is his work, and. the more one immerses oneself in the world of his novels and plays, not to speak of his poetry, the more one realises that the landscapes he describes, the characters he created, and the thinking from which the work emerges are all reflections of his personality. He was a straight-forward man and in essence a simple one with an extraordinary mind that had received an exceptionally wide-ranging education, ’which was only the start of what was to go into that mind, both in revelation about the intricacies of the human situation and realisations about the tragedy that must befall us all. As a writer he had the depth, the brilliance and the poetic intensity of William Shakespeare, the other literary figure with whom he is most often associated, we can identify ourselves and our private thoughts with his characters, even though they are, on the surface, very different from the ways we see ourselves, and for the most part, very uncongenial.

This personal memoir has to start with out first meeting. When Waiting For Godot was first performed in 1955 in London at the Arts Theatre in Peter Hall’s production I went to see it, largely because that small theatre club was where one expected quality productions of unusual and interesting new plays. I liked the evening, was undoubtedly rather puzzled by the work itself and might have forgotten about it, had not a friend from Cheshire come to London, and when I asked him what he wanted to see, he replied ‘Godot.’ !

On this second visit, the full force of the poetic lines, and the human tragedy they conveyed so originally, hit me firmly between the eyes and, being then a young independent publisher looking for authors, I decided to contact Samuel Beckett directly. I obtained the address of his French publisher, but it was the wrong address, and the letter took two weeks to arrive. It finally did, on the same day but one post later, than a similar letter from Faber and Faber. Editions de Minuit, the French publisher, then offered the play to Faber as their’s was the first letter that they opened.

In the meantime my efforts to reach the author directly had succeeded and I contacted him with another letter which brought an instant reply, inviting me to call on him in Paris. I telephoned, offered to come in a few days and Sam gave me a dinner appointment at a restaurant in Montparnasse. I did not then know the fate of my letter to Minuit, but was told at dinner. But Sam Beckett and I got on very well, found we had much in common to discuss and towards the end of the meal, he said to me, ‘I am sorry you are not going to publish me in a way, but in another way I’m quite pleased. One always quarrels with one’s publisher and I’d rather have you as a friend.’

I had no choice but accept the decision, but already had developed an immense liking for this erudite, friendly Irishman, able to switch from talking about current politics to the music we both liked, about books and authors we knew about to some general topics. Having finished dinner he suggested a drink somewhere else and we found a small bistro for a brandy, and then another one for a beer where we began to play chess. But the evening did not end there. Somewhere else I found myself playing ping-pong with Sam while more beers went slowly down, and dawn was well up when we had breakfast together somewhere on the Boulevard Montparnasse.

Shortly afterwards I found myself in New York and in the office of a new American publisher, Barney Rosset, who had acquired the American rights to Waiting for Godot. Sylvia Beach had told him about Beckett and he had followed her advice in taking up this one-time friend of her idol, James Joyce. Rosset was also very enthusiastic about-Beckett’s pre-war novel Murphy published in Britain in 1948, that had at the time had only one good review in an Oxford magazine from Iris Murdoch, then a student. She was to mention it in her first post-war novel, Under the Net. Practically the entire first edition of Murphy had been destroyed, in the London blitz. In 1957, Barney Rosset republished it, and I was selling the American edition in Britain until he eventually enabled me to bring out my own British one in a new series that I inaugurated in the sixties.

I was fairly frequently in Paris in those days and an evening with Sam became a routine part of every visit. We nearly always had dinner alone together and went on to cafes, continuing to talk, but also playing chess, ping-pong and sometimes billiards. Sam was a better player than myself at nearly everything, but occasionally when be had had more to drink than I had, I might win a game. It was the conversation that mattered, and it usually went on until we separated in the early morning. One evening in 196I when we met, the newspapers were full of Hemingway’s suicide and we never got off the topic. We agreed that suicide was the best way to die, but Sam’s problem was how not to leave a mess for others to clean up, while mine was how to do it quickly and painlessly.

What else did we discuss? All the problems of life, our thoughts about deeper meaning, philosophy and literature in general, and there was always much about music. We both particularly admired classics, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert in particular. Sam had some reservations about Mozart and much preferred Haydn, some of whose piano music was in his finger memory. I think his problem with Mozart was the man’s facility, the apparently light-hearted ability to write sublime without any effort at all. It was easier for him than breathing. We also discussed contemporary composers and there I knew as much, sometimes more than he did.

He associated art with pain and especially the great effort involved in breaking new ground. I knew that for Sam writing was torture, that every sentence went under intense scrutiny, and that he identified the effort of extreme concentration with mental pain. The same could be said of Beethoven whom he greatly admired. His love of Schubert lay not just in the sombre underlying feeling and poignant atmosphere of the late works in particular, but also in the tragedy of such genius cut off at thirty-three. It became obvious to me that he not only admired the early Romantics, but that emotionally he belonged to that feeling himself. In the same way he had a reverence for many German writers of the same period, such as Goethe, Claudius and Fontane.

Although there were so many dinners and all-night drinking and talking sessions – the drinking was slow and usually only beer after we had left the restaurant – I never made any effort to remember and certainly not to record our conversations in any way. I remember many anecdotes he told me about James Joyce and a few others from pre-war Paris, the general tenor of what philosophers had written and writers and poets had revealed to him through his reading, but above all the wash of a well-stocked mind that could on, occasion, quote long passages from Dante or other much-studied authors.

When we first met Samuel Beckett was forty-nine and I was twenty-eight. The twenty-one year seniority in age made little difference in what turned out to be a long friendship. Gradually our two circles came a little together and we found ourselves more in the company of other people. But before that I had already become his publisher, not of the plays, because Faber, having done extremely well out of Waiting For Godot, naturally took on the British rights of the plays that followed it, while Rosset had American rights. But they were not interested in the other work. This is what. happened.

I received a telephone call from Sam one day in 1957, or it may have been the previous year. It was to tell me that Faber, having been sent the French original volumes of Malone Dies and The Unnamable, had turned them down as possibly obscene under the law as it then existed. They had been obliged to expurgate Waiting For Godot, at the time subject to censorship by the Lord Chamberlain. Although the Arts was a theatre club and the cuts demanded, were lighter than when the play later transferred to the Criterion Theatre on Piccadilly Circus, Beckett felt that his work had been considerably emasculated and that the biblical cuts made it almost unworkable. He was of course unhappy that the printed version of the play included most of the Lord Chamberlain’s cuts, and now Faber had decided that the two French novels they had read were possibly prosecutable. Malone Dies and The Unnamable have always been considered as the second two parts of a trilogy that starts Molloy but the three novels had been published independently as different books in France, while the English language rights to the first one had already been sold to Olympia Press, best known for publishing English-language erotica in Paris. That may have played a part in Faber’s negative thinking at the time.

In his telephone call, Sam went on to tell me that if I were still interested, I should ring Jerôme Lindon of Editions de Minuit and ask for the rights. I immediately did so, acquired both novels, and Malone Dies in Beckett’s own translation then appeared under my imprint in 1958. On the same day I published an Iranian novel by Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl, a weird and ghostly masterpiece by a poet who had committed suicide in Paris and had long been banned in his native country, and still is today.

The two books were reviewed together and not well. The crime reviewer of The Sunday Times had put them both in his column and had ended by saying; ‘Mescaline might help, but don’t count on it!’ Cyril Connelly some time later in the same newspaper used his column to advise his readers whether or not they should bother to read this man Beckett, who now in his fifties was attracting some attention, and wrote that although there appeared to be some talent there, the answer was No. Beckett was not worth the bother. In the publishing trade Samuel Beckett began to be talked about as ’Calder’s folly.’

One reason that I was so often in Paris in the late fifties was that my first marriage had come to an end and I was courting an opera singer who was working there. My mother had a Paris flat at the time, so it was easy to stay. Beckett met the lady I was seeing on occasion who I married in 1961. He would come to her concerts and have dinner with us afterwards. Barney Rosset, his American publisher, was also frequently in Paris and his ex-wife, the painter Joan Mitchell, was now living with another painter, the Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle. They were both friendly with Beckett as well. There were meetings and dinners with sometimes up to twenty people at long tables at the Coupole, then the most popular restaurant in Montparnasse for the artistic community, where I remember often sitting up until dawn in the company, not just of Beckett, but with friends such as Alberto Giacometti, the sculptor, who had on one occasion designed a tree for a French Godot at the Odéon Theatre, that was unfortunately thrown away at the end of the production, and many other Coupole regulars. These included Sol Steinberg, the American cartoonist, Avigdor Arikha and his wife, the poet Ann Arik, Henri and Josette Hayden, one or two Irish friends like Con Leventhal, who had taken Sam’s place at Trinity when he left, and the journalist Peter Lennon. Henri and Josette Hayden had shared Sam Beckett’s wartime experiences, hiding with him and Suzanne, his resistance partner, who only married him in the sixties, and later they were living not very far from him his little house in the ‘Marne mud’, as he liked to put it, near Ussy-sur-Marne where he did most of his writing during the sixties and later. Sam did not like eating at the Coupole much, but he often used the American bar area to meet friends early in the evening. If it was me, we would then go on to a favourite fish restaurant, frequently the Isles Marquises, and when that became less congenial or too full, to La Palette, which I realised, as it seldom had many customers, could not last for long. There were many bars we frequented in Montparnasse, the favourite being often the Falstaff just a few doors away from the Coupole. Although this had a restaurant, we used it principally to talk late at night. Another such was The Rosebud, named after the sledge in the famous Orson Welles film about the life of William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane. Sam in those days went seldom to the cinema and, like myself, much preferred the old pre-war films, many of which had been the inspiration of some of his work.

One memorable evening at the Falstaff occurred during the week that the Rosset-financed film from Sam, was shown in Paris at a private projection room. It was a short film, simply called that, Film, and was an illustration of Bishop Berkeley’s famous dictum that one had to be observed to be sure one exists. Sam rang me up to say that it was shown every night for a week, that during the first part of the week it was the commercial distributors who had been invited, and that the last performances were for friends. I decided to come on the very last night, a Saturday.

In the early evening we saw the film which Alan Schneider had directed, and in which Buster Keaton, a survival from the old silent cinema era, played a part that he could neither comprehend nor see any purpose in. Schneider had never directed a film before, but he had become Beckett’s favourite American director for his plays in the U.S. I found the film interesting like all Sam’s concepts, but the actual execution verging on the amateur. Afterwards, about thirty of us went back to the Falstaff. I had asked permission to bring Philippe Staib, an enthusiast who had helped to finance the English language Endgame that I shall mention. Philippe wanted to pay his own way, but the proprietor of the Falstaff told us that Beckett had paid for a large crowd every night for a week and he would lose a valuable customer if he allowed anyone to pay even a franc.

It was a strange evening and I knew more than half of those present. Food and drink were there in plenty and English and French were about evenly spoken. Patrick Magee, the original Krapp, having had the part written for him by Sam after he had heard his voice on the BBC reading the novel Molloy was in many ways Beckett’s favourite English language actor. But he could be very pugnacious with a drink or two inside him and it did not take long before he was having a quarrel with someone at the bar – Beckett had invited his own guests but there were many other customers at the Falstaff as well – and very soon fists were flying. It was Beckett himself who broke it up, restraining Pat and bringing him back to the table to calm down.

During the six nights of the screening, followed by a party every night, Sam himself must have consumed a great deal of wine and alcohol, not to speak of the expense which must have greatly exceeded whatever figure he had been paid to write the scenario in the first place. He was soon showing signs of having drunk too much though it was not often, in spite of our all-night bouts, that I had seen him the worse for wear. But he was being nagged by a lady with whom he had a long term relationship to stop drinking and go home with her. He ignored the pleas for a long time and then turned on her in exasperation, telling her that if she wanted to go home to do so. Tight-lipped, she left and the party went on. Not long after that I left myself, hoping to get on the last flight back to London, but the plane had left when I arrived at Orly and I spent the night uncomfortably sprawled across two airport chairs until the morning.

Airports occur many times in my memories. Once I met Sam at Heathrow coming in from Paris and I noticed immediately that he was in a strange mood. When I questioned him he looked pensive. It was a strange and worrying feeling, he told me. Once they had closed the doors the Captain’s voice came over the loudspeaker. ‘Votre Commandant Godot vous souhaite la bienvenue à bord.’ I wondered if my destiny had caught up with me at last.’ I toldthat anecdote at a conference at Reading university a little time later and it has been much repeated, but everyone else has forgotten the source.

I did fly to Paris with him on one or two occasions and I remember one in particular. Sam was once again in a rather strange mood and as we drove up to the airport, he suddenly said, ‘Why don’t we go first class and drink free brandy on the way?’ Being the kind of publisher I was, always careful of expenditure, it did not suit me at all to go first class, but anything Sam wanted I would go along with,

so I agreed. But once we were at the ticket desk, it turned out that the first class was full, so we went economy and paid for our brandies. As we approached Orly Sam suddenly said, ‘Suzanne is going to meet us. I think we might have dinner at the Orly airport restaurant. The food’s quite good.’

Suzanne was there as we emerged from customs and we went to the restaurant. We had hardly ordered before she was raising domestic issues. Madame Ionesco had telephoned her to ask her advice, about something. She had not known what to say because Sam kept all his professional problems to himself.

‘Madame Ionesco est une emmerdeuses,’ he responded, shrugging the issue off.

’But she helps her husband,’ Suzanne went on. ’Why will you never let me help you?’

I wished passionately not to be there, but anywhere else. It was not so much a domestic row as what was obviously an everyday scene, a persistent nagging countered by ever sharper retorts and a refusal to let her

get involved in his correspondence and dealings, professional or otherwise, with others. Why did I have to be there, listening to all this? I knew Suzanne could only hold it against me in future.

Sam, of course, as l knew well, did do everything himself. He had no secretary or amanuensis. When Con Leventhal retired from Trinity, he moved to Paris and it was understood that Sam would pay him something to act as an assistant, but this never came to any more than forwarding letters to Ussy, Sam’s country home, when Sam went there to work; or accompanying him during his lunch engagements with academics or theatre producers. As Suzanne continued her recriminations and I tried to be as invisible as possible, Sam’s mood was getting worse and I realised that he had anticipated this on the plane. I also remembered that just as the aircraft was descending he had said to me: ‘You know, Suzanne is the only French woman I have ever known who will not touch a drop of wine or any alcohol.’ She was indeed drinking water while Sam and I got fairly quickly through a bottle of Sancerre.

Sam then ordered another "bottle. Suzanne put a hand on his arm.

‘Please don’t drink so much,’ she said. ‘It’s bad for you.’

‘John likes wine,’ was his response, and the other bottle came. It was eventually followed by a third and when I went on to Paris on my own it was with deep regret at having witnessed a scene that I would have given much to have missed.

There were of course other pleasanter occasions, but always with something a little wrong. Once I was invited to dinner with the Becketts by Jerôme Lindon and his wife, who lived not very far from Sam and Suzanne’s apartments on the Boulevard St. Jacques. It was a nice evening of which I cannot even remember the conversation, which was of course in French. We all left together and were walking towards Sam’s street, still talking French. ‘Why don’t we talk English?’ suggested Sam, which had the effect of excluding Suzanne from the conversation, and I then noticed that she was no longer walking with us, but had dropped a pace or two behind.

’What about stopping for a beer?’ proposed Sam and we sat down at a small outdoor cafe.

Suzanne was obviously uncomfortable and as soon as the beer arrived – she had ordered nothing – she said she was tired and left us. On that, an earlier occasion, I had also felt that I was an intruder on their relationship.

On the very few occasions that I stayed in Sam’s apartment it was either because I had missed the last ’plane or the hotels were full. I slept on a couch where the windows overlooked the Santé prison. He was always fascinated by prisons and it is no accident that his plays are often performed by prisoners in them. They know well about the states of mind of his characters, brought down to the barest essentials of living, enclosed without hope, deprived of everything that can make life endurable, trapped in a misery they had mainly brought down on themselves. Sam knew the exact geography of the Santé, where the guillotine stood, when the executions took place. Capital punishment was only abolished in France in 1981, considerably later than Britain.

His fascination with suffering and empathy with all that knew pain, extended to animal life as well. His early short story, Dante and the Lobster, attests to his shock at the discovery that lobsters are still alive when boiled. He did not like to sit near a fish tank in a fish restaurant, although fish was his favourite food. I did not know, until Sam told me, that trout are often thrown alive into a frying pan.

Once when I was staying with him at Ussy we went for a walk on a fine morning and when I asked him why he preferred to go one way rather than another, his reply was that the slaughterhouse lay on the other side. Like every well-known writer in France he was constantly asked to put his name on manifestos and declarations for political, human rights and other causes. Feeling that with his Irish passport he was really only a guest in Prance he usually politely declined, but he did sign a manifesto for more humane slaughtering of animals for food.

Sam could be unexpected in his attitudes at times. His courage at facing unpleasant reality applied more to himself than others. I attended, a dinner party given for Roger Vailland, author of La Loi, at which various friends tried to reassure Vailland, who had only a few days to live after a cancer operation, that he was on the way to recovery. At dinner with Sam the next day I related the incident, remarking that I thought it a shame to hide a reality that was only too obvious. A man of such intelligence deserved honesty at least.

Sam looked at me with his laser eyes. ’Another f***ing moralist,’ was his terse comment.

His eyes were indeed lasers at times. On one occasion, in order not to waste time on a long and pointless explanation, I told him a harmless white lie. Then he looked at me. ‘Alright, Sam,’ I said. ’I’ll have to tell you the whole story,’ and I did.

Sam knew a great many people, but he seldom discussed his friends or acquaintances with each other. It was at Les Iles Marquises that I met, because they were at the next table, Louis Aragon, the great surrealist poet and novelist and others of the same group, some of whose work I was later to publish, and it was obvious that they all knew Sam well and had done for many years. I did know, of course, that before the war Sam had translated much surrealist literature into English for little magazines, Transition for example, and Edward Titus’ This Quarter. I had even asked Con Leventhal on one occasion to put together for publication a collection of those translations and Con duly did so. But Sam stopped it. It was hack work, he said, done in a hurry to earn a little money and not up to a good enough standard for republication. Con took back the manuscript and I reluctantly abandoned the project. It was a pity, because having looked through it, I found the standard very high indeed.

But there were problems with republishing even his pre-war other work. A new edition of Murphy he accepted, but when the work of fiction that preceded it, More Pricks Than Kicks, came up for discussion, Sam was not happy. Rosset, through his New York firm Grove Press, was anxious to bring out an American edition and by the end of the fifties we were working on it together, collaborating on typesetting, but each publishing a separate edition for his own market, mine being the British Commonwealth with a free market in Europe and South America. Rosset was accustomed to getting his own way and he kept up a constant pressure on Sam, whereas I tended to accept his decisions without argument. But eventually he did agree to our publishing in a cyclo-styled typescript form, one hundred copies of More Pricks Than Kicks, hors commerce, for the benefit of scholars, that is to say academics who were now studying his work as there was little more they could say or discover about Joyce. The hundred, copies went fast enough and a i few months later he reluctantly agreed to another hundred being produced and sold.

Rosset was often in Paris and we spent many nights out together, but Rosset’s interests were different from ours, more inclined to night clubs than discussions on literature, philosophy and classical music, about which he knew nothing. ‘Isn’t that rather old-fashioned,’ he would say when we talked about opera, as if anything new in fashion was all that could be interesting, Sam felt grateful to him for taking him on for American publication when no one else was interested, and all his life he remained loyal to Barney, even after he sold his firm in 1986 to Weidenfeld and the Getty oil interests. Whereas Sam was often impatient with me, especially if traffic made me late for an appointment, he was always indulgent with Barney. ‘Barney’s always late,’ he said one day when we had waited more than half an hour, whereas he had been very angry with me, ten minutes late the week before, having been caught in heavy traffic.

When I asked for permission to do a third hundred copies hors commerce of the short stories, and this was when Barney Rosset was also putting on the pressure, Sam finally caved in and agreed to a commercially viable edition. There were problems with Routledge who had published the original edition in 1934, who now claimed that if there was a reprint that they still had the rights. But when it was clear that the author would only give permission to his post-war publishers or not at all, they too acceded to Sam’s wishes. The edition went into production, but Barney made a great mistake; he sent proofs to Sam to be corrected. (when was this?

I arrived in Paris on a fine summer morning and went straight to the Closerie des Lilas, not far from Sam’s apartment where we were to meet for lunch. A film crew was making a film outside the restaurant and when I went into the bar I saw Peter O’Toole, who was obviously in the film, talking to Sam. Having spotted, him sitting there, he was taking advantage of the occasion to try to talk him into letting him (O’Toole) make a film of Waiting For Godot. Many others had wanted to do the same, but so far permission had always been refused, Sam feeling that a stage play only belonged on the stage. I joined them and after a few minutes Peter O’Toole had to return to filming.

Sam turned to me with a heavy face. ‘I am sorry, John, he said. ‘I just can’t let this old shit come out again. I’ve already written to Barney to tell him. I’m sorry, but the book’s just too bad.’ And he handed over the proofs which he had started to correct. Hiding my disappointment, I tried to enjoy our lunch and moved to other topics. The limited, hors commerce, editions had appeared in 1966 and 1967. It was in 1969 that Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was on holiday in Morocco at the time and whatever his feelings about the honour of ’winning the world’s most prestigious literary award, it is certain that he did not welcome the international publicity that it brought him. Because of the press attention, publishers everywhere clamoured to publish what was out of print or had never been translated, and certainly some of the pressure came from Editions de Minuit, now inundated with demands for contracts. Sam simply gave way, not for those very early works that he found most embarrassing, but for much else, and permission was finally given to proceed with More Pricks Than Kicks. It appeared in I970 and has since proved to be one of his most popular fiction works to readers.

Other suppressed works followed, most notably First Love, written in French and then reluctantly translated by the author, Mercier and Camier, written just after it and also translated. Eleutheria, a play written not long before Godot, which has much in common with First Love in that it gives Beckett’s self-portrait of himself based largely on how his family saw him before his success with Godot, had to wait until several very bad posthumous translations were published by Rosset, to be eventually replaced by a literary one by Barbara Wright. But as the Beckett centenary year gets under way, no theatrical. production has yet been authorised.

By the time of the Nobel Prize, Beckett had advanced from his siege years of the late forties, years that had brought him fame and success, and removed the worry that the growing lump in his cheek was cancerous and would bring an early death. From the time I first knew him he was producing new prose, new plays, new poetry, often showing it to me straight off the typewriter. But I had to negotiate with others to obtain rights that I could not get directly from Sam, or from Editions de Minuit.

This brings Maurice Girodias into the story. He was a man I liked, who liked me, but I have never known anyone quite so complicated and in many ways perverse in his dealings with others. He has been badly treated in the memoirs of many others, but unfairly or for the wrong reasons. At the same time he brought nearly all his troubles on himself.

His father, Jack Kahane, had been an Englishman who moved to France in the twenties, and set up a publishing house in Paris to publish literature outside the narrow limits of what was permissible in English. He had published Henry Miller, Laurence Durrell, his own novels and a wide range of erotic literature, much of it of high merit, and had even commissioned a translation from Beckett, of Sade’s One Hundred Days of Sodom. This had been lost during the war. Girodias started Olympia Press to follow in his father’s footsteps, commissioned both erotica and serious literature and poetry from the large group of literary hopefuls who had moved to Paris in the late forties and early fifties from English-speaking countries. Many of them were in the group that published Merlin, a literary journal that Olympia subsidised, and he agreed, to bring out as Collection Merlin a number of titles that included Beckett’s novels Murphy and Molloy.

The first was acquired after Richard Seaver, who later became Rosset’s senior editor, had taken an interest in Beckett’s French novels and had asked to see the manuscript of the unpublished English one. When Beckett delivered it in person during a Merlin editorial meeting and they read it aloud to each other, they found it enormously entertaining. The second was subsequently contracted from Editions de Minuit to be translated by one of themselves, but which Beckett himself found, it necessary to revise. The reason I started with Malone Dies and not its predecessor Molloy in 1958 was that the latter was already in. print in English in Paris.

Although I became very friendly with Maurice Girodias, he was not willing to subcontract rights to Molloy until I came up with the idea, to satisfy all parties, of doing three separate editions of the trilogy that Beckett had always wanted. Rosset and I had the English language rights to Malone Dies and The Unnamable. We would allow Olympia Press to publish the trilogy in their Traveller’s Companion series and we would do separate editions in our own markets, leaving Europe to Girodias. This happened in 1959. It is possibly, the most important idea I ever had, where publishing is concerned at least. The Trilogy is considered by many to be the greatest fictional achievement of the twentieth century, even taking Proust, Joyce and Kafka, into account.

Beckett knew Girodias and the Merlin group well, was grateful to them for making some of his work available in English when it was available nowhere else, but he soon lost patience with the slipshod editoriaI standards of young men whose eyes were mainly on their own careers and with Girodias who was always in trouble with creditors and the French police, whom the British ’Home Office urged to close him down.

Nevertheless, Girodias was a centre for English-speak ing residents of literary Paris, and whenever he had some financial success he indulged in some folly, the biggest of which was a building he acquired on the Rue St. Severin, where at different time he had three quite separate restaurants, a night club, a theatre and his publishing offices.

On one occasion during the middle sixties, an unusual encounter took place there. It was immediately after the annual Frankfurt Book Pair, and Girodias, having like Barney and myself, just come back to Paris from Germany, must have been somewhere in one of his swings from poverty to affluence or vice-versa. When money was coming in he was very generous with advances to authors and with general hospitality. But whether things were going well or badly, he was always optimistic that wealth lay just around the corner and behaved accordingly. He was, at bottom, a romantic who became involved in causes, took enthusiasms and lived the dreams that luck or opportunity occasionally brought his way. But he had so often, lost out to unscrupulous rivals, whether in publishing, catering or generaI business, that he had become overly suspicious and would cheat on a contract before the other party could do the same to him, which is what he always suspected.

On this occasion he gave a big dinner in a large underground space that had been or was about to be a theatre or another restaurant, because he was always changing or redecorating according to some new enthusiasm. There may have been about twenty of us seated along both sides of a long refectory table with Girodias at the top and with two metisse or mixed race sisters on each side of him, Barney next to them and diverse Olympia Press authors filling the middle of the table. Facing each other at the end were Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs who had never met before. I was next to Burroughs and I remember no one at the very end.

Rich or poor, Girodias always had fine wines, and the mea was good. Suddenly Beckett leaned across towards Burroughs, who was also my author, one who I had succeeded in publishing in Britain in spite of many hostile reviews and a very controversial fourteen-week correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement, but without any legal prosecution, which I had known was on the cards.

‘Tell me, Mr Burroughs,’ Sam said politely, about this cut-up method of yours. I don’t think I quite understand what you do.’

‘Well, Mr Beckett,’ drawled Burroughs in a voice that sometimes sounded southern and at other times Harvard, ‘what I do is this. I take a copy of the New York Times or some other paper and I cut a column in half down the middle or sometimes I fold it. Then I find another text, perhaps one of mine or perhaps a page of your Molloy and I do the same thing.’ Beckett was listening in rapt attention. He opened his mouth, to speak and then closed, it again.

‘Then,’ continued Bill Burroughs, ‘I read across the lines of the two and copy out what I see, so that each line has half of one text and half the other. Later I edit the new version until a whole new text emerges. Then, depending on how it looks, I may cut that up into a third text. And of course I add a word or two where it’s necessary.’

Beckett could contain himself no longer, ’but you can’t’ do that,’he said.

‘Oh, I do, Mr Beckett, I assure you,’ said Burroughs in an even voice.

Both had been drinking heavily. No one else was listening. Rosset was interested in the two girls who were obviously both girl friends of Girodias who was very much a ladies man, always in love and with a string of simultaneous mistresses. Anything a little kinky fascinated Barney Rosset. The writers were talking among themselves about their own affairs. The argument went on between my two authors, the classically-trained Dublin gentleman from a good middle-class family who had become a Parisian bohemian artist, and the quintessential American from the under-culture of drug addiction and Hollywood-glamourised gangster crime, Wild West and hoboism, totally unable to understand the point of view of the other until they both, quite drunk, slipped under the table at the same time and had to be taken home by taxi.

They only met twice and I was present on both occasions. The second was in Berlin in the early eighties, again almost certainly after the Frankfurt Book Fair, which was normally in October, sometimes a little earlier. Beckett was staying at the Akademie der Künste, a subsidised Arts Centre with lecture halls and stages where artists were allowed to say in some comfort. Beckett was rehearsing one of his plays, working with German actors that he already knew well. He was always very preoccupied on such occasions. His eyes were bad and he had trouble reading the taxi in the dim rehearsal lights of a theatre and would go to the trouble of memorising the lines to be able to recite them to actors. And this was the German translation he was memorising!

He had a drink with a German writer and myself, a quick dinner with me and went to his room to prepare for the next day. Immediately afterwards I ran into Alien Ginsberg, Susan Sontag and Fred Jordan, an American editor and agreed to have lunch with them the next day. At the end of the meal, knowing Beckett was in town, they asked me to arrange a meeting. When I rang him – it was Sunday afternoon – Beckett agreed to see everyone ‘for a short time only’ and politely welcomed us in his Akademie der Künste flat. But the three Americans brought a bottle of whisky and wanted a long session with Beckett who was quite obviously anxious to get back to preparing for the next day’s rehearsal and politely asked us, after half an hour, to leave. Burroughs afterwards complained, above all to his biographers, about what a rude man Beckett was for not giving them all the time they wanted to chat and gossip.

During the sixties, and to a lesser extent during the seventies, Beckett would often stay with me in my London flat, then on Wimpole Street. He would stay reading or working in his room most of the morning, emerge for meals or occasionally to go out in the evening and occasionally have others in to talk about his work, such as his theatrical agent, actors he knew or friends. He frequently used the piano, seldom looking at music. He was very fond of my black Labrador, Shuna, would go for walks with us both and sometimes, as he put it, have the dog take him for a walk. On occasion we would walk as far as Hyde Park where he would look for places he remembered such as the ‘cockpit’(??) which plays a part in Murphy.

Once, on a Sunday, we went to listen to the orators at Hyde Park Corner and I thought he might be interested in hearing some of the Irish speakers using their right of free speech to run down British government policy and suchlike, but no, I suddenly saw him looking intently at a little huddled man, his body hunchbacked and twisted, his face like a Quasimodo, his head tilted, who was staring rapturously up at one of the speakers.

‘What is it, Sam?’ I asked.

Look at that,’ he answered. ‘What a beautiful sight!’ It was indeed like one of his own stage pictures, a crumpled and misshapen piece of humanity, carried out of itself.

All his old love of sport never left him and he would settle himself in front of the television set for Wimbledon or cricket or sometimes for other sports. When we went out the dog usually came too – in those days many restaurants still allowed dogs provided they were well-behaved and made themselves invisible. Shuna, like all Labradors, was greedy and Sam small eater. His hand was constantly slipping under the table to feed. her. No wonder she loved him!

Sam’s visits to London were mostly to supervise productions of his plays. One such occasion was the premiere of Endgame. There had been some difficulty in finding a theatre in Paris and Sam lost no time in making an English version. A few enthusiasts financed the English production which was given in Paris at the Studio des Champs Elysées, then an experimental theatre in a smart district of the city. They were led by Victor Herbert, an American, who had made much money as a super-salesman for Bernie Cornfeld’s Investors Overseas Services, one of those flash in the pan enterprises that attract many investors, grow quickly to great heights and then collapse through mismanagement. Philippe Staib, previously mentioned, was also one of the investors.

Patrick Magee and Jack Magowran were cast in the major parts and a young director was found to produce it. Sam came to London for the rehearsals which were over a pub and I went with him to some of them. Soon the actors were only listening to Sam and not the young director. It then opened in Paris, was a considerable success and the same theatre then agreed to mount the original French version, while George Devine at London’s Royal Court Theatre revived it in English, a production that, with minor changes, later entered the repertory of the Royal Shakespeare Company. This was one of the many productions that brought Sam to London where he usually stayed with me, and, although he never received the credit for directing his own plays, he usually achieved the result he wanted There was on, occasion, some conflict, not so much with the titular director as with an actor who had his own ideas and was reluctant to tone down his usual delivery.

Most of the time Sam was the real director, knowing just what he wanted and bringing a precision to the plays that was more like music than drama and lifted them well above the usual commercial standard. I sat throgh many of the rehearsals and witnessed how, although often resistant at first, actors gradually bonded with Sam and learned to trust him absolutely.

He stayed with me during the rehearsals of the 1964 Godot at the Royal Court, coming back every evening in a gloomy mood. He did not like Vladimir who was Nicol Williamson. Nick had previously played a London barrister in a John Osborne play and he still sounded like a London barrister, quite unsuitable for a tramp on a lonely country road, not knowing where the next meal is coming from. But one evening his face was wreathed in smiles and he told me why. When he asked Nicol if he was talking with his natural voice and where he had come from, he was told that the actor was a Scot from Dundee.

‘But that can’t be your natural accent,’ exclaimed Sam.

‘No. I used to have a Scottish accent,’ he was told.

‘Why can’t you use that?’ suggested Beckett, and when Williamson did the effect on the play was dramatic and credible. Two days later, Sam was still smiling. ‘A touch of genius there,’ he said to me.

Through Sam and by going to rehearsals quite often, I got to know Nick quite well. The production was directed by Anthony Page, but the actors spent more time listening to Sam’s line readings, and when the play opened to a new generation of London theatre-goers it was very successful and usually sold out. Williamson, whose personality was as flamboyant as any actor I have met, revelled in the part. When he came to Vladimir’s great speech at the end, his ‘I can’t go on’ was a scream of agony that echoed through the theatre like a trumpet, followed seconds later by a very quiet ‘What have I said?’

I went several times, noticed how many of the audience were in their early twenties, and remember one young girl at the exit saying to her boy friend in tones of awe, ’But it’s obscene. But really obscene!’

Some time after that I was invited to give an evening of readings of Beckett’s work at Stratford-on-Avon in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre on a Sunday night, which turned out to be in their smaller studio space. I asked

Nicol Williamson if he would like to take part and he agreed if he could go over the texts first with Beckett himself, who at this point he revered. The other actor who agreed to read was Pat Magee, who together with Jack Magowran, actors who now were very conversant with Beckett’s work, I saw frequently.

Williamson had now gone back into a revival of Inadmissable Evidence, the Osbome play where he was once again a London barrister, and we had arranged to go to Paris together early one Sunday morning to work with Sam. We arranged to meet at a restaurant a few doors away from the Garrick Theatre where he had a Saturday afternoon matinée. Over lunch we discussed, the reading, while Nick enthused over Sam’s genius and our trip the next day. Two o’clock arrived and looking at my watch, I suggested that he go to get ready.

’I don’t feel like it,’ he said and going to the telephone arranged for his understudy to take the matinée instead.

Lunch went on until four o’clock, after which Nick insisted on coming home with me and then telephoned his understudy to go on again that evening, a Saturday night that would have a full house expecting to see the star actor in the part. He stayed with me for dinner, where I had other guests and insisted on calling his dresser to join us. He left with him after eleven o’clock for a night club, saying he would be ready for me to pick him up at six-thirty the next morning.

He was not ready of course, and we only just made the flight with our taxi. Now on wake-up pills, Nick was quite outrageous on the plane, striding up and down the aisle, playing a part and enormously embarrassing me as he brought me into his act.

In Paris we hired a car, picked up some food and wine and. drove to Ussy, an hour or so away, where Sam was waiting for us. During the long morning Sam. read out the texts I had chosen, making some changes while Nick repeated them. It was a warm summer day and I fell asleep on the grass. Then we had lunch, but what we had brought was quite unnecessary. Sam had food and wine enough; it was all ready, and he gave us a. little lesson on the French cheeses he had placed on the cheese board. Then the rehearsal went on, after which Sam announced that he had arranged for us to spend the night with the Haydens, and we were going there for dinner.

We drove in. two cars, Nick in Sam’s, with me following. I could see Nick gesticulating for Sam to stop for a drink every time they passed a village bistro, but Sam drove doggedly on until we reached the Haydens house at La Ferté-sous-Jarre. It was a large pleasant house with a big garden full of shady trees. We were given a tour of the studio and Henri Hayden’s canvasses. He explained to us that he liked the flat look of the Marne countryside and now painted only landscapes. Then we had drinks while Fal, the big old English sheepdog that had ’been adopted in the Falstaff, jumped all over Sam in delight while he fondled her.

Then another drink in the garden. Through all this Nick kept up a constant vaudeville act, quoting Shakespeare and other speeches, playing different personalities, crooning popular songs, hogging all the attention. Henri was obviously tired and bored with the non-stop entertainment and Sam did not know how to stop it. ‘Can you never be serious, Nick?’ came out with some irritation, but Nick couldn’t. The flow went on through dinner, the actor going from the table to the piano, imitating the voices of Frank Sinatra and Perry Como, very well of course, but it was not the occasion for it.

As soon. as we had finished dinner, Sam drove off in his little Deux Chevaux and Henri immediately went to bed. Left with an audience of two, Nicol slowed down, had another drink, then went to his room. I stayed on a, little longer to talk to Josette, who had quite a lot to say about her life, centred in many ways on Sam, still vital and active, while Henri was now very old and depressed.

The next morning we had breakfast and left, hut Nicol did not want to return to London. He wanted to be left in any small nearby hotel, ‘just to be near him’, he said. He did not have one franc of French money and had a performance that night in London. With considerable difficulty I drove him into Paris where I had a parcel to pick up and although I was only three minutes out of the car, Nick had disappeared when I got back. It took me more than. an hour to find him in a bar, then get to the airport, but I did deliver him at his flat on Cadogan Street at four o’ clock, and with relief I went back to my office where I soon had a telephone call from his worried agent, saying he was lost again.

He was not seen. for the whole week, missed every performance, and when Pat Magee turned up at my flat on Saturday morning to rehearse for the next day, I told him what had happened and that we would have

to do the Stratford evening without Nick. Just then the door bell rang and Nick walked in. He refused any explanation. ‘We have a performance tomorrow night,’ he said. ‘Let’s get on with it,’ and he began to read his prepared texts. Pat looked, at me in amazement. ‘That’s a perfect Dublin, accent,’ he exclaimed. Nick was imitating Sam exactly.

I wanted us to drive together to Stratford-on-Avon, but Nick refused, saying he was going with friends. As eight o" clock approached, Pat and. I were sitting on the stage with no sign of Williamson. At two minutes to the hour he walked in and the performance began, going very well with a full house. At the end, Nick strode to the front and gave his familiar rendition, of Vladimir’s speech, trumpet-call scream and all. Pat turned to me. ‘Never, but never,’ he said, ’will I ever appear on a stage with that man again.’

I promoted many readings of Beckett works to help sell the novels and the poetry, and Sam was always willing to direct the actors in the way he wanted the lines to come over if he could. When I published the novel How It Is, a difficult one even for Beckett fans, I took the Criterion Theatre on a Sunday afternoon, had a panel chaired by Martin Esslin to discuss the work in general and that one in particular, interwoven with readings from How It Is and other works by Pat Magee and Jack Magowran. That was in in 1964 and Sam came over to work with the actors and to lunch with the panel, but he would not attend the performance. At it, I took a recording of Magee reading a passage that Beckett had selected for him, a very vivid one, and sent a small disc of it to every reviewer with the book. That disc is now priceless.

I attended many rehearsals, both in London and Paris. And was present when Sam was rehearsing Play and Not I with Billie Whitelaw, saw the strong bond between them grow, and witnessed Kenneth Tynan breaking in on an rehearsal of the former at the Old Vic to tell Sam that ‘Sir Larry does not approve of this way of doing things.’ George Devine, a rather passive figure during the rehearsal, quietly told him that Olivier was not the author and the author knew best.

Although by the Sixties, Samuel Beckett would no longer sit through any of his own plays with an audience present, he would frequently go with me to others and we saw many of the Royal Shakespeare’s productions during their golden period at the Aldwych and, among others, Max Frisch’s Andorra at the Old Vic, where on this occasion it was Frisch who stayed away and met us for supper afterwards.

There was one memorable Sunday afternoon when four of us, Beckett, Frisch, the cartoonist Vicky Weiss and I played simultaneous games of chess with fascinating relaxed conversation, each playing the other three in turn. Not long after that, Harold Wilson’s labour Party came to power to the great delight of Vicky, but when, as he saw it, the government failed to come up to its promise, he killed himself in a deep depression.

Little in life is as sad and depressing as the deaths of old friends. Since before the war, Sam had developed a cavalier attitude to danger, seldom going out of his way to void it, and he had once described his wartime activities in the Resistance and the Maquis as ‘boyscount stuff’, never going into details of actions that had earned him the Croix de Guerre from De Gaulle. When friends died, Same would keep his grief to himself and carry on normally.

Con Leventhal, one of his oldest friends, developed cancer, thought he was cured, and when it returned met his end in terror. Although Sam must have been greatly affected, he never showed. it. His and most trusted American director, Alan Schneider was killed in London ’by a motorcycle Jumping the lights too quickly. He had been rehearsing a play in London and. was on his way back to the theatre after posting a letter to Sam, who I saw in Paris the following week. ‘I hope it was not the only letter he was posting,’ Sam said resignedly, but of course it was. His attitude to his own death smacked, of indifference:

No matter where

No matter when

he says in a late poem. Although accident-prone, some special providence always seemed to be protecting him from the worst. His wartime survival seemed miraculous, and his post-war growth in the cheek, although it gave him much discomfort, was not malignant and was removed. A serious fall into a garage pit cracked all his ribs and made him. feel like a fool, but he got over it. He was knifed by a clochard before the war, but the knife missed every vital part. Sam. was a careless driver and I once had a hair-raising drive with him from Paris to London, that I was certain would end in a serious accident, but in spite of bad eyesight and carelessness about other cars and the rules of the road, there was no mishap.

I have talked about going to the theatre with Sam. This sometimes led to my publishing other playwrights; he also wrote me about plays he had liked, such as Marguerite Duras’ The Square, which led to her joining my list. I also went on many occasions to the opera with him. He knew a great deal about opera and in many ways his plays are constructed rather like operas with memorable speeches that are really arias. One can say the same about Shakespeare. As with Verdi, for instance, there are set passages that can be thought of as duets or ensembles, and character parts where he voice itself suggests the goodness or badness of what is going on inside the mind of the character. Some of the plays have been set to music, but Beckett resisted permission for the full-length major ones and for good reason: the music is already there. This is true of the poems as well. Many composers have tried to set them, but there is so much of the essence of music in the cadences that every attempt to add another dimension seems superfluous and wrong.

On one occasion I took Sara to Glyndbourne, a place where much of the audience goes more for the glamour and party atmosphere than. for the music. At the last moment I remembered that one was expected to wear dinner jackets and Sam, staying with me in London, had nothing like that, nor had he in Paris. I suggested hiring a suit at Moss Bros, but Sam would not hear of it and said he preferred not to go. Faced with a dilemma, I telephoned a friend, Michael Geliot, then on the Glyndebourne staff, and asked his advice, saying that Sam only had a spots jacket and I myself could hardly dress differently. ‘Don’t worry,’ Michael told me. ‘Come as you are. It will be alright.’

When we arrived, three men were waiting for us at the door in sports jackets. They were John Pritchard, that night’s conductor, Gunther Rennert, resident producer and artistic director of Glyndebourne and Geliot. They took us into the tea room, made us feel at home, chatted for half an hour, then excused themselves to act on with their duties.

Some have said that Beckett did not care for opera, but I know from experience that not only did he enjoy it, but he knew a great dead about it. This is true even of Wagner, whose themes and music may have been very different from his own outlook, but who was well within his field of knowledge: Wagnerian references make the occasional appearance in some of his writing. On this occasion, it was a rather lightweight Rossini opera, not even one of the deeper masterpieces of the repertoire.

Remembering Sam Beckett, for someone whose relationship with him was always more personal than professional, in the sense that he needed no editor because his work was meticulously revised and corrected and always beautifully typed, means to me to recall incidents and anecdotes in the main.

Long nights in cafes in the early days, quiet dinners and sometimes lunches in later ones, many walks, and sometimes meetings with others. His one-liners are of course famous and often repeated. He and Harold Hobson had developed a close friendship, not just because Hobson went to great pains to understand his work, much which, because of Hobson’s Christian Science faith would always be emotionally closed to him, but largely because Sam always had a great empathy to anyone seriously handicapped or disadvantaged, especially if they had the intelligence and the courage to deal with it in a positive way, as Hobson did. It was at the Lords Cricket Ground that Hobson remarked that on such a beautiful day one was glad to be alive and Beckett responded, ’I wouldn’t go as far as that!’ Once in Paris, walking in. the street, I mentioned that it was a very fine morning, which it was, and after a glance at the sky, answered, ‘So far.’ Understatements on my part were often followed by, ‘To put it mildly.’

It was Sam’s tendency to like people who were open and unpretentious and he was only uncomfortable with those who simply wanted to take advantage of him or to impress him with their self-importance. But even there he was un-judgemental. Academics were always difficult to cope with, but he gave them a certain limited time, usually half an hour, and was as helpful as he could be within his own limits. Much thought, some recycled from other sources of literature, theology or philosophy is always hidden in his work and he was never very happy when it was discovered. Some of my own spottings did not please him and when he felt he could not deny a reference, he would say he had forgotten.

Of course, although the mind remained as creative and sharp as ever during his last years when he retired to a nursing home to live alone in a simple room with a few books and even fewer comforts, the memory did decline and he had difficulty in finding some words and sometimes of remembering the names even of old friends. He knew exactly who they were, but the name suddenly vanished. His very final work, which could be viewed as a poem or a piece of prose, is about just that, the loss off a word.

While still at the Boulevard St. Jacques, he would meet those he had agreed to see outside his flat. It was too difficult to ask someone to leave when he was tired or wanted to get on with something else so he would make his appointments, usually for half an hour only, either at a bar in Montparnasse or increasingly at the PLM Hotel, immediately opposite his flat, walking in precisely on time and leaving exactly when he had resolved to do so. Once he had moved into Le Tiers Temps, the nursing home, this was no longer possible. He was vulnerable to anyone who knew he was there who could simply walk in on him at any time. It was there that I would go to see him during his last three years, always by appointment, and asking him to tell me when to leave. Every visitor brought him whisky, but after he asked me how to spell a word – a sign of the failing memory – I realised that he had no dictionary and went to get him a two-language one, thereafter always bringing books. On one occasion I brought a mutual friend, but left her in the waiting room. When Sam asked after her, I mentioned that she was waiting for me outside. He immediately asked to see her and we all had a glass of whisky, but Sheila Colvin who was with me had, to use his tooth mug, tasting of toothpaste.

It was much earlier than this that she and I had dinner with Sam one night at La Palette. I had a delicate financial matter to settle with him and asked Sheila, to arrive late. The matter resolved, we had a pleasant dinner, and at the end I asked him if there was anything new in the pipeline. Reaching into his briefcase he brought out a slim manuscript in a plastic folder and, handed it over to me. ‘You probably won’t like it,’ he said, ’and you don’t have to publish it.’ I put it away and we finished dinner and separated. It was still early and Sheila, and I went to the Falstaff where we met Josette Hayden, a widow now, and Marion Leigh, who had lived with Con Leventhal during his last years. We had a drink together, the two ladies left, and a little later so did we. Back at the hotel I realized that I no longer had the plastic folder. I telephoned the Falstaff who said they had found nothing. Rushing back to the still-open bar I went to the back and looked. through the rubbish bins. There, finally, I found the folder, cleaned it off and took it back to the hotel where, at four in the morning, I first read Worstward Ho, his second last substantial prose work. It was only followed by Stirrings Still, written for Barney Rosset, who, after having sold his publishing firm and been dismissed by the new owners, then asked Sam for something to publish to keep the connection.

Sam’s favourite restaurants and meeting places would change from tine to time, either because the proprietor who knew him had sold to a less welcoming management or because the congenial atmosphere became different. La Closerie des Lilas was one of the haunts of the pre-war surrealists, but then somewhere in the late seventies it became a fashionable tourist restaurant and the one-time regulars, mostly all artists, disappeared. On one occasion, John Drummond, then director of the Edinburgh Festival, and Sheila Colvin, his deputy at the time, were in Paris to see him to discuss a big series of Beckett programmes the following year. I had, of course, been lobbying for this for a long time and at last it was going to happen. We all met at the Coupole Bar and then decided, as Sam was in good form, to have dinner together, and we walked dawn the Boulevard Montparnasse towards the Colserie where we found a table. But the buzz of business people and tourists, who had found the place because it was in the fashionable guides, was not the kind of related atmosphere that Sam liked and he began to look increasingly distressed as he looked around at unfamiliar faces and a very different world from his. Drummond recognised the signals instantly, folded his napkin, called the head waiter, said that one of us was not feeling well and we had to leave. A few minutes away we passed very simple Chinese restaurant not very full, and went in. ‘That’s better,’ smiled Sam as we unfolded our napkins.

Drummond had left the festival by aha next year, but his successor continued the Beckett programing, and half a dozen Beckett plays, several other events and a conference made it a real success. There was no way, of course, that Beckett could be persuaded to come, but through Schneider’s posthumous productions and actors like David Warrilow, who had worked directly with Sam, his influence was very present, and some of the productions went on to London and other countries. I had planned, through an abortive attempt to start a new theatre in Soho, by own Beckett Festivals in the past and Sam had always supported me in these, especially when I was also combatting censorship about which he had always felt strongly. At one point when I was being prosecuted for obscenity in an American novel, a long battle that I only won after two years in the courts, Sam held back a play for me for a long time. It was Come and Go which had its British premiere at the Royal Festival Hall at a fund-raising theatrical and musical evening to support civil liberties and our anti-censorship campaign.

It was not possible to know Samuel Beckett without being aware of his concern for the suffering in the world and his extreme kindness to anyone he was able to help, encourage or relieve from some burden.

There were students who went to interview him. for their student magazines who, after admitting that they were having difficulties paying for their studies, found later that he had paid for them secretly and anonymously. He once encountered two Irish labourers in Paris on holiday, not knowing where to go or what to do, to whom he gave the best. evening of their lives at a good restaurant and then at a night club. He once handed all the money in his pocket to an Irish tourist who had been mugged and had not eaten since the previous day, whom he encountered when waiting for his passport to be renewed at the Consulate. Then Sam was unable to pay for it and had to walk home, not having enough to pay his bus fare.

Such tales abound and all the considerable amounts that came with the Nobel Prize went to help others, often struggling writers and artists. He lived simply and a word that he used frequently in his last years was ‘Discard’ as he gave away possessions, manuscripts and favourite old books. He abandoned the faith he grew up in, but remained ‘God-haunted’, intensely spiritual but with a mystical quality that held no hope. But accepted what could not be avoided like the stoics of antiquity. Knowing him was an extraordinary privilege. In spite of the bleakness of his view of the human condition, he has paradoxically convinced many that personal contentment can only come from unselfishness and helping others, that such virtue is not only its own reward but the key to living comfortably with oneself.’

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