Giving Birth "Astride of a Grave"

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The most evident social trend of the 20th century has been consolidation -- multinationalized businesses, globalized politics, homogenized cultures. Amid this bustling bigness and togetherness has been heard a persistent cry of smallness and aloneness, a sense that comforting certainties are being stripped away and each individual left isolated with nameless terrors, deterioration and death. Painters and composers, philosophers and poets have struggled to express this sensibility by reducing their art forms to the essential, scaling ambition down from the eternal to the minimal. Where once creators held that truth was beauty, in these despondent works truth is achingly ugly, beauty a mirage of the memory.

Many of the century's most imaginative artists, from Jackson Pollock to John Cage to Sartre to Camus, poured their beings into this exploration of nothingness. None did so more persistently and penetratingly than Samuel Beckett, the Irish-born writer whose death was revealed last week in his adopted city, Paris, where for decades he lived in an apartment overlooking the exercise yard of a prison. In such plays as Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape; in novels, including Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable; in verse and essays and the script for a wordless Buster Keaton film, Beckett distilled despair.

His works were often funny -- the two battered tramps of Godot might have been written for Laurel and Hardy and were in fact played by Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell, Robin Williams and Steve Martin -- but the humor intensified the sadness. In the play's most vivid and haunting image, one character cries out about all mankind, "They give birth astride of a grave." Beckett regarded himself as a sort of historian, a chronicler of misbegotten times. "I didn't invent this buzzing confusion," he said. "It's all around us, and . . . the only chance of renewal is to open our eyes and see the mess." Yet he had nothing of the reformer, no impulse toward public life. He rarely granted interviews, resolutely declined to discuss his works, rebuffed would-be biographers by saying his life was "devoid of interest." He even refused to show up to collect his 1969 Nobel Prize in literature -- an award he had lobbied the Swedish Academy not to give him. Characteristically, his death on Dec. 22 was kept secret until after a private funeral four days later.

Born on a disputed date in spring 1906, Beckett claimed to remember being a fetus in the womb, a place he recalled not as a haven but as a dark ocean of agony. The son of a surveyor and a nurse, he had a conventional Dublin Protestant upbringing, studied classics in high school and romance languages at Trinity College. At 21 he went to Paris and fell in with literary expatriates including James Joyce, who became a friend and an inspiration -- although, as Beckett noted, Joyce tended toward omniscience and omnipresence in his narrative voice, "whereas I work with impotence and ignorance." Three years later Beckett returned to Dublin, but he soon grew disenchanted with the conservatism of Irish life and, yearning for the Continental avant-garde, emigrated in 1932.

When Paris was invaded by the Nazis, Beckett and his future wife fled to the south of France, hiding by day and journeying by night. That harrowing experience, especially the footsore conversation along the way, probably inspired the futile wandering in Godot, according to its first Broadway director, Alan Schneider.

An even deeper real-life influence on Beckett's work, scholars have suggested, came in 1938. As Beckett walked along a Paris street, a panhandler stabbed him in the chest, perforating a lung and narrowly missing his heart. When Beckett later asked why the attack happened, the assailant replied, "I don't know, sir." That glimpse of the random perils of existence may have confirmed Beckett's dark vision but did not initiate it. His novel Murphy, published the same year, depicts a destitute Irishman, living in London, who daydreams away his days in a rocking chair until a gas plant explodes and shreds him. At his instruction, his ashes are flushed down the toilet of Dublin's Abbey Theater.

Through the '40s, Beckett kept writing, shifting, for reasons he never explained, from English to French as the language in which he created. He remained obscure until a spectacular burst from 1951 to 1953, in which Godot and three novels appeared to acclaim. The plays Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days followed by 1960. Thereafter he produced fewer and fewer, shorter and shorter, bleaker and bleaker pieces but never quite lapsed into the ultimate despair of artistic silence. His last work, Stirrings Still, a fiction of less than 2,000 words, was published in March 1989 in an edition limited to 200 copies.

Beckett's images have transfixed countless theatergoers, who watched the tramps in Godot wait for a savior who never comes, or heard the old man in Krapp's Last Tape review recorded fragments of his life as he murmurs, over and over, "Spool," or shared the haplessness of the elderly couple in Endgame as they face the end of the world while encased in trash cans. Beyond his own art, Beckett shaped the vision of countless others. They emulated, if never equaled, his simplicity of means, philosophical daring and ability to engage vast ideas in tiny trickles of closely guarded language. Above all, Beckett's life and work taught others the lesson he said he learned from Joyce: the meaning of artistic integrity. His vision never yielded. Even on a sunny day in London, as he strolled through a park in evident pleasure, when a friend remarked that it was a day that made one glad to be alive, Beckett turned and said, "I wouldn't go that far."