Often recalled as the lonely genius of modernism, the Irish writer was also ‘Sam’, convivial friend and collaborator, who drank with Peter O’Toole, talked cricket with Harold Pinter and ‘wailed’ at Edna O’Brien’s piano

“I only had a minute.” Jane Bown, the Observer’s greatest postwar photographer, used to tell the story of the day she was sent to the Royal Court theatre to photograph Samuel Beckett, acclaimed author of Waiting For Godot. Bown was renowned for snatching photographs against the odds, but the shy, unsmiling, and nervously intense figure of Beckett, compared by one friend to an “Aztec eagle”, presented a rare challenge. “You can have a minute,” he announced, fiercely asserting the superiority of drama to journalism.

He was tall and remote; she was short but dauntless. In the half-lit alleyway outside the stage door, Bown positioned her reluctant celebrity against the wall, and fired off barely a dozen shots, later remembering the arctic blue intensity of Beckett’s eyes. After the prescribed minute of photographic concentration, she packed up her Leica, thanked him for his time, and fled, hoping that she’d got a usable frame. This is a story I heard from Jane Bown herself on a number of occasions. In the making of the radio programme on which this article is based, every other quotation either comes from the Beckett Foundation or was specially recorded for the BBC.

Sometimes, art and adversity click. When you examine the contact sheet today, all Bown’s frames are in focus, but there’s one that seems to capture her elusive subject perfectly, the face of the writer famous for “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jane Bown’s contact strip containing her celebrated portrait of Samuel Beckett leaving the Royal Court theatre, London. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer

Is a picture worth a thousand words? From that awkward and fleeting encounter Bown created, by chance, an indelible portrait of the inscrutable artist confronting the torments of existence. For my generation, this became the icon of “Beckettian”, the adjective that conjures the solitary artist, part seer, part hermit: ascetic, angular, and reclusive.

Writers often have three lives – public, private, and secret – and Bown’s photo, brilliant as it is, turns out to be slightly misleading. The shy, public Beckett of Godot was also the convivial writer cherished by a devoted circle of actors and friends in Dublin, Paris and London as Sam. The occluded “Sam” represents the complex private side of Samuel Barclay Beckett, an Irishman born in Dublin on Good Friday, 1906. His family, like Oscar Wilde’s, were middle-class Irish Protestants. As a young man, Sam was an excellent cricketer whose “gritty” batting appears in Wisden. Having studied at Trinity College, Dublin, he exiled himself, via London, to Paris. In the footsteps of James Joyce, it was his ambition to join the European avant garde.

Between the wars, he sat at Joyce’s feet during the torturous gestation of Finnegans Wake and developed his own gifts as a writer in the shadow of modernism. His first novel, Murphy, rejected many times, was finally published in 1938. Opening with a brilliantly alienated first line – “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new” – Murphy puzzled a lot of reviewers, was praised by Dylan Thomas, and sold badly.

Then the war came, and the Nazi Panzers rolled into Paris. Beckett joined a Resistance cell, which was betrayed by a priest, fled south to unoccupied France, and lived for much of the war as a near vagrant and Resistance foot soldier in and around Roussillon in the Vaucluse. Returning to Paris after the liberation in 1944, he embarked on “the siege in the room”, completing his trio of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) to establish a cult reputation as a writer’s writer, an avant gardist with a quirky wit. Possibly it was his experience of war and resistance that inspired En Attendant Godot. As he began to pick up the threads of his prewar life in Paris, it was this vision of existence – boredom, and waiting seasoned with a gallows humour – that he expressed in radical dramatic form.

Being the author of Godot, Beckett was certainly a member of the avant garde, but an unlikely theatrical innovator. As a writer uniquely troubled by man’s fate, Beckett’s earliest dramatic fragments had been experimental disappointments. Now, to break free from the oppressive influence of modernism, he wrote in French. After many vicissitudes, his “tragicomedy in two acts” received its premiere in Paris at the Théâtre de Babylone, on 5 January 1953. There’s a common view that it flopped. Actually, produced on a shoestring, it did quite well, with some favourable reviews. When the script of Waiting for Godot, in Beckett’s English translation, crossed the Channel it landed on the desk of a young director, Peter Hall, who, admitting that he hadn’t “the foggiest idea” what it meant, produced it at the Arts theatre, London in August 1955.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Beckett at rehearsals for Waiting for Godot at the Royal Court in the 1980s. Photograph: Donald Cooper/Rex/Shutterstock

Speaking to the BBC in 1994, Hall recalled a “lyrical masterpiece”, describing it as “a great tragic play about living: what is it like to be alive, waiting for death…? I also thought it was very funny, so I decided I’d have a go.”

Godot had already provoked sarcastic hostility as the play in which “nothing happens, twice”, but Hall’s production was a hit with the two most influential London critics, Ken Tynan (the Observer) and Harold Hobson (the Sunday Times), who both hailed this existential comedy as a masterpiece.

It was also a theatrical revolution. From the moment Vladimir and Estragon step onto an empty stage with “Nothing to be done” the audience is pitched into a strangely entertaining world in which the idea of boredom becomes a prolonged metaphor for the nature of existence, sustained by two tramps in vaudeville costume, trapped in exhilarating cross-talk, killing time in anticipation of “Mr Godot”.Once Beckett had discovered his vocation, the plays that followed Godot (Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy Days) saw the myth of “Beckett” eclipse the identity of “Sam”. In 1965, when he wrote Eh Joe, his first play for television, starring Jack MacGowran, he rehearsed a young leading lady from the West End named Siân Phillips, then married to Peter O’Toole. She was to play the Voice, a viperish whisper in Joe’s ear.

Phillips, who had seen Godot as a student, had no idea what to expect, and turned up for rehearsals “probably sporting a bit of Dior to boost my confidence”, hot from the West End. “I had a marvellous hairdo,” she remembers, “and a little hat.” Then Beckett arrived. “This vision came in. He was so beautifully dressed with the most exquisite sweater I’d ever seen – a silk polo-neck I think – with the softest cashmere jacket. He had these wonderful blue eyes (like O’Toole). There’s a picture taken of us at that moment. I look like a frightened rabbit. He looks like a beautiful bird of prey, incredibly handsome, a merciless god. I knew I was in the presence of a great man.”

Quite soon, Phillips discovered that while “working with Sam was one of the best things that ever happened to me”, it was also “the most exhausting thing I’ve ever done.” She smiles at the memory. “I’ve never known anything like it. He was nothing but courteous, and he wasn’t a bully, but he wanted to get it done his way, which was ‘the only way’.” This, she discovered, was to treat the text like music. She imitates the beat. “He metronomed it for me.”

Some years later, Phillips encountered another version of Beckett’s private side. She recalls that O’Toole wanted to make a film of Godot, but “Sam wouldn’t allow it”. When the two men quarrelled at a dinner in Manchester Square in London, Phillips witnessed Beckett’s artistic intransigence at first hand. “He said Godot would never be filmed, the only actor he cared about in movies was Buster Keaton, a film could not equal the theatre. It went on and on, very convivial, but quite aggressive. They seemed to become more Irish the more they drank.”

Beckett was often in London in the mid-60s, but was also at home in Paris with a circle of artistic friends that included the French-Israeli painter Avigdor Arikha whose eldest child, Alba, was Beckett’s goddaughter. Alba, now a novelist, was just a child, but she remembers “blue eyes like the sea”. As a small girl, she remembers “somebody very tall picking me up. His cheekbones were like a Giacometti sculpture.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Billie Whitelaw at the Royal Court theatre in 1976, rehearsing Happy Days, the same day as Jane Bown’s Beckett portrait was shot. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer

Alba’s memory echoes the Bown portrait, but she recalls a gentleness to his angularity. “He had a raspy kind of cigarillo voice, and he could be very quiet. His silences mattered as much as his words. He had an aura, but he was easy to talk to. We used to play Mozart and Schubert together, a very intimate experience. He came for dinner once a month, would recite poetry – a Shakespeare sonnet, Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale – and listen to classical music.”

Beckett’s visits to the Avigdor household were partly an escape from his fame. “He was a solitary man,” says Arikha. “People used to pester him, and he did not like celebrity.” As “Sam”, she says, he nurtured a circle of “about five close friends”. These included stage designer Jocelyn Herbert, literary critic AJ “Con” Leventhal, actors Billie Whitelaw, Patrick Magee and Jack MacGowran, director Alan Schneider, and the translator Barbara Bray.

In his prime (from 1950 to 1969), Beckett was peripatetic: flitting from Paris or Berlin to New York, Ireland and London. In the late 60s, Jack MacGowran’s friendship with a young journalist from Bristol named Tom Stoppard led to a tantalising non-encounter at a party in Portland Place, near the BBC. Stoppard confides: “I was at that time in a strange state of [Beckett] worship, and it hadn’t occurred to me that you could actually meet him. To me, he was a kind of spiritual presence. So I was incapacitated. I was at this party, feeling like a yokel from Bristol… Someone said ‘Would you like to meet Sam?’ ‘Sam?’ ‘Samuel Beckett.’ Apparently, ‘Sam’ was in the kitchen. So I was led off and introduced to ‘Sam’. Of course I hadn’t the faintest equipment to exploit this meeting. I have no idea what I should have said, and what he might have said in reply, and after a few minutes I backed away…”

In the company of Irish compatriots, Beckett was more convivially Sam. Edna O’Brien remembers the party that followed the first night of Krapp’s Last Tape, starring Patrick Magee. “Sam wasn’t happy, and told me he was going to go. I said, ‘I’ll come with you,’ and offered him supper at home. As I was putting my key in the door, Sam said, ‘Now, Edna, no wailing.’ (I think he’d heard about the Irish songs sung at my parties.) ‘Please, no wailing’. But then what does he do? – he sits down at my piano and starts to ‘wail’ himself, singing the songs of Schubert.”

O’Brien remembers that “he stayed hours talking. I think he missed Ireland in a very particular way.” Beckett’s unique presence has stayed with her. “He had a remarkable innocence, the innocence of childhood, overlapped with an excavating intelligence – drunk or sober – and the bluest eyes like a wide-eyed bird. Those eyes were cold in their colour, but when he was moved by something, they were not cold.”

In 1969, when Beckett was awarded the Nobel prize, a young professor of French literature at Reading University named James (Jim) Knowlson, who had been collecting rare editions of Beckett’s work, approached the writer in Paris, with a rather cheeky proposal. Many of Beckett’s typescripts had been sold to American archives, and Beckett himself always intended to deposit En Attendant Godot in the French national archive (where it is today). But there were still many letters, drafts, lesser works, theatrical memorabilia: Knowlson suggested, and Beckett agreed, that these should be preserved at Reading University.

Today, Beckett’s English-language archive is housed in one of the most surreal research centres in Britain, the university’s Museum of English Rural Life, a converted late-Victorian red brick mansion popular with school parties and mums with toddlers. To step into the world of Godot, Krapp, and Pozzo, the visitor must pass haywains, pitchforks and china roosters. There’s a consensus at MERL that Beckett, the outsider, would have enjoyed the absurdity of finding his archives next to dairy farming data and vintage combine-harvester models.

Perhaps this is not as disjointed as it seems. Less than a mile from MERL is the sinister Victorian facade of HM Prison Reading, the scene of Oscar Wilde’s degrading incarceration in 1896, two years of penal servitude with hard labour that effectively killed him. So the Beckett who began as a disciple of one great Irish writer finds his life’s work stored for posterity in the town known for The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

In 1971, having failed to persuade the reclusive Beckett to visit an exhibition of his collected papers, Knowlson invited Harold Pinter to the Beckett Foundation. This was a request Pinter could hardly refuse. He had been obsessed with Beckett’s work ever since, as an impressionable teenager, he had stolen a copy of Murphy from Hackney library; his own plays owed an important debt to the wit, clarity, and precision of Beckett’s example. Writing as a young man, he had expressed something of the spell that Beckett’s work held over his imagination in the 1950s:

The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him…. His work is beautiful.

Pinter had invited Beckett to the first French production of The Caretaker, and had struck up a close friendship on the basis of a rare kind of conviviality involving alcohol, theatre – and cricket. (Both playwrights were fanatical followers of the English team’s performance.) On their first meeting in Paris in the early 60s Beckett had insisted on showing Pinter the nightlife of Paris, and had driven his guest at high speed in a battered Citroën from bar to bar until, at about four in the morning, they had ended up having onion soup in Les Halles. Pinter’s account of this moment opens another window on to “Sam’s” private life.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Beckett in a Paris cafe. Photograph: Ian Dryden/Rex/Shutterstock

“I was overcome,” Pinter remembers, “through alcohol and tobacco, with indigestion and heartburn, so I lay down on the table, and when I looked up, he [Beckett] was gone. I had no idea where he’d gone, and he remained away so I thought perhaps that this had all been a dream… I think I went to sleep on the table, and about 45 minutes later I looked up, and there he was, and he had a package. He said: ‘I’ve been over the whole of damn Paris to find this, and finally I found it.’ And he gave me a tin of bicarbonate of soda, which did indeed work wonders.”

Pinter (according to his widow, Lady Antonia Fraser) used to love discussing vital cricketing issues such as England’s Ashes prospects with “Sam”. He would also send Beckett copies of his plays, and visited him on his deathbed. Alba Arikha describes her own farewell at the nursing home in which her godfather ended his days.

Samuel Beckett rejected as unsuitable for the Nobel prize in 1968 Read more

“He was lying in bed, and looked as majestic as ever. His main concern, I think, was that he could get his cigarettes and his whisky. He lay in bed, and held my hand. He murmured ‘Je suis fatigué. Je suis fatigué.’ I said goodbye, and left. I never saw him again. I think of him as someone who always went further than anyone else.”

In recollection of Beckett’s end-game, Edna O’Brien honours his unremitting candour, and tenacity. “I said to him, ‘Are you writing?’ ‘I’m not,’ he said, ‘and what use would it be anyhow…?’ And he meant it.”

It was then, perhaps, that Beckett’s true feelings about Ireland – so complex, and so long buried – came to light. O’Brien continues: “I said, ‘Where are you going to be buried?’ He said: ‘Here in Paris.’ I said: ‘Not Ireland? Your works are strewn with Irish graves.’ He said: ‘No, no. I’m not going back.’ He was very determined. I said: ‘I am. I own a grave, a lovely grave.’ He was most puzzled and almost disapproving: ‘So you’re going back for an eternal dose of disgust?’ Even though Ireland was in his blood and his bones, he was full of little vengeances.”

O’Brien pauses in memory. “Anyway, we got through that, and I could see he was tired. I said: ‘I should let you go now.’ ‘Not yet, not yet,’ he said. ‘Stay a bit longer.’”

So she stayed. “Absolutely nothing more was said,” she tells me, her voice low and almost faltering with emotion. “And it was just as happy and natural as the night of the Kerry dances.”

Archive on 4: Beckett’s Last Tapes, presented by Robert McCrum, will be on Radio 4, Saturday 10 August, 8pm