The only Nobel laureate who played first-class cricket
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) transformed modern theatre with Waiting for Godot, won the 1969 Nobel Prize, and remains the sole literature laureate listed in Wisden for first-class cricket. Between Joyce's Paris circle and the French Resistance, he pared language to the bone.
Samuel Barclay Beckett was born 13 April 1906 in Foxrock, Dublin, to a Huguenot-descended surveyor and an Irish nurse, and raised Anglican before turning agnostic. Cooldrinagh's tennis lawn, Leopardstown, and Harcourt Street stations later haunt his prose. Portora Royal School—Oscar Wilde's old school—led to Trinity College Dublin (1923–27), where he read modern literature and Romance languages, won a 1926 Scholarship, and bowled left-arm for Dublin University in two first-class matches against Northamptonshire. After a brief Belfast teaching post he became lecteur d'anglais at the École Normale Supérieure (1928–30). Thomas MacGreevy introduced him to James Joyce; Beckett helped research what became Finnegans Wake and published the 1929 defence "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce."
A 1930 return as Trinity lecturer ended when he resigned at 1931's close, marking it with the poem "Gnome." Proust (1931) and the rejected Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written 1932, published 1992) fed More Pricks Than Kicks (1933). After his father's death he underwent two years with Tavistock psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. Echo's Bones (1935) and Murphy (finished 1936, published 1938)—translated into French the next year—preceded German travels that filled notebooks with art lists and disgust at Nazi brutality. Settling in Paris after falling out with his mother, he preferred "France at war to Ireland at peace," played chess with Duchamp, and briefly dated Peggy Guggenheim, who nicknamed him Oblomov.
In January 1938 a pimp named Prudent stabbed him in the chest; Joyce secured a hospital room, and Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil began a lifelong partnership. Beckett asked Prudent why; the reply—"I do not know, sir. I apologise"—stayed with him, and he dropped charges. Wartime membership in Resistance network Gloria SMH earned the Croix de Guerre in 1945. Waiting for Godot (1953) made him world-famous; London's Royal National Theatre poll in 1998 voted it the century's most significant English-language play. He shared the 1961 Prix International with Borges, became Aosdána's first Saoi in 1984, and died 22 December 1989, buried at Montparnasse—still the absurdist who also appears in Wisden.
Source: Samuel Beckett
