Samuel Beckett left Dublin in 1937 and spent the rest of his life in Paris. He did not go back to Ireland, except briefly, for the rest of his eighty-three years. He had not left because he was exiled. He had left because he found Dublin suffocating — the small literary politics, the Catholic conservatism, the sense that to remain was to be slowly reduced.
In Paris during the Second World War, he joined the French Resistance. He spent the occupation years passing messages, sheltering agents, doing the work that needed to be done with the quiet matter-of-fact courage that he applied to everything. When his network was compromised in 1942, he fled to the south of France with his companion Suzanne and waited out the rest of the war in a small village in the Vaucluse, working as a farm labourer.
After the war, he wrote the plays that made him famous — or more precisely, famously ignored and then, some years later, famously recognised. Waiting for Godot was rejected by every publisher Beckett submitted it to. When it finally reached the stage in Paris in 1953, the reviews were divided. When it reached London and New York it became, unexpectedly, the most discussed play of its decade.
Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. He did not travel to Stockholm to collect it. He sent a message.
He died in Paris in December 1989, six months after Suzanne. He had been with her for more than fifty years.
His most famous line is also his truest: ever tried, ever failed, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better. He lived it.
