Paris pays homage to Beckett, the ultimate expat who became part and parcel of the French cultural heritage.

Best-known as author of the play in which “nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes” Samuel Beckett spent an eventful half-century in Paris.

Last April marked 100 years since his birth, and the centenary tributes continue for the Irish-born playwright who was to modern theatre what Albert Einstein was to theoretical physics: a force after which nothing is quite the same.

Beckett was born in Foxrock, Dublin, on Friday, April 13, a widely disputed date despite its irresistible congruence with his developed sense of doom. He attended Trinity College to study English, Italian and French, the latter being the language of a considerable chunk of his œuvre, claiming that his mother-tongue was too loaded with involuntary allusion for him to achieve the anorexic style he favoured.

After completing his B.A. and a short-lived teaching spell in Belfast, he accepted the post of lecteur d’anglais at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He was soon introduced to James Joyce, a fellow Irishman who had a profound affect on young Beckett’s aesthetic sensibilities. Although he became Joyce’s secretary, Beckett assisted the modernist author in ways less mundane than this title implies. Their friendship became strained, however, when Beckett refused the amorous advances of Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, a schizophrenic who developed a fixation with her father’s amanuensis.

Beckett fell in with the Parisian literati, and it was not long before his first short story, Assumption, was published in the avant-garde periodical, transition. Sylvia Beach, proprietor of Shakespeare and Company—the diminutive but historic bookshop in the Latin quarter—included Beckett’s first non-fiction essay in a critical volume about Joyce’s work. In two short years, Paris and its web of vanguard figures made an indelible mark on his career.

In 1937, after extensive travels through Europe, a brief period back in Ireland, and a tiff with his mother, Beckett returned to settle permanently in Paris, his chosen home for the next 52 years. He frequented Left Bank cafés, where he could often be seen poring over a chessboard opposite his chess partner, Marcel Duchamp, or drinking potent doses of espresso with Alberto Giocometti. At one point, he had a short affair with Peggy Guggenheim, whose mercurial spirit sparred with his wry and infinitely more reticent manner.

On a walk one fateful evening in January 1938, Beckett was approached by an unsavoury character called Prudent, in itself an irony of literary proportions. Beckett refused the solicitations of the panhandler-cum-pimp, who promptly stabbed him in the chest. The wound was nearly fatal. Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, a young piano student in convenient proximity, came to Beckett’s rescue. So began a lifelong companionship and they married in 1961.

During World War II, Beckett joined the French Resistance instead of returning to the safety of his native country. His most intense period of creativity came after the war. Over the course of his lifetime, he produced six full-length novels, four long plays and dozens of shorter ones.

In 1969, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, an event which Suzanne, fully aware of her husband’s aversion to public attention, dubbed a “catastrophe.” He did not attend the ceremony.

His apartment, adjoining Suzanne’s, was in a working-class district of Montparnasse and overlooked the exercise yard of the Santé prison, a detail that those familiar with the unforgiving themes of his work—meaningless repetition, the impossibility of escape from a bleak reality—will recognise as quintessentially Beckettian.

Once, after a prolonged absence from Paris, he is said to have remarked that his return was “like coming out of jail in April.” Beckett was buried with his wife in the Cimetière Montparnasse, where his tombstone conforms to his request that it be “any colour, as long as it’s grey.”

Beckett Parisian Tributes

• If your French is up to the challenge, you can catch several Beckett plays over the next three months. Full festival program at www.parisbeckett.com.

• The Centre Pompidou presents Pour Samuel Beckett, a unique musical tribute inspired by his texts. €10-14, March 29 at 8.30pm.
Also at the Centre Pompidou is an exhibition in which contemporary artists interpret main themes of his work. March 14 – June 25. Closed Tuesdays. €8-10.
Centre Pompidou, Place Georges Pompidou, Paris 4. 01 44 78 12 33. www.centrepompidou.fr

Win 40 free tickets to the Beckett exhibition at Pompidou! Log on to www.theparistimes.com and click on Beckett Special Offer