G.E. zum Gedachtnis

BC MS 1396/4/12

1973

Samuel Beckett was born in Foxrock, County Dublin on Good Friday, 13 April 1906. Although throughout his life he had the reputation of being sombre, mysterious and reclusive, this popular myth hid a very private, yet immensely generous, gracious and caring person. On entering Trinity College, Dublin, Beckett developed his interest in art, music and literature. He was a gifted linguist who also enjoyed vaudeville theatre and the films of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers. An academic career seemed to be the obvious option on graduating but, after spells teaching in Paris and Dublin, Beckett realised he was more suited to the artistic lifestyle he had encountered in Paris in the company of James Joyce. Having witnessed the intolerance of the Nazi regime towards writers and artists in Germany in 1936, Beckett famously decided that he preferred France at war to Ireland in peace, opting to live in France for the rest of his life. However, this bold decision was more than a mere gesture. Beckett was forced to spend much of the war on the run from the Nazis in the South of France working with the French Resistance, for which he was later awarded the Croix de Guerre. The end of the war marked a burst of literary activity for Beckett, who began writing, in French, a dense prose trilogy comprising Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. As a relaxation from this project, between October 1948 and January 1949, Beckett worked on a play entitled En attendant Godot - the work which brought him international fame and recognition and which redefined modern theatre. Further literary success ensued, culminating in him being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. As the years progressed, Beckett's prose and drama decreased in length, as he found increasingly successful ways to express the inexpressible. Yet throughout his career, he remained a bilingual author, creating French and English versions of almost all his work. During the 1970s Beckett directed his major stage plays in Berlin in German, exhibiting another side of his character. His success in this field led him to direct his own plays created specifically for television - a medium which seemed perfect for the stark, imposing images of these later, minimalist pieces. Samuel Beckett died on 22 December 1989 and was buried in a private ceremony in the Cimetière de Montparnasse in Paris.

Holograph with handwritten alterations by the author.Inscribed: "G.E. zum Gedächtnis" and "Paris, 3.8.73" at top of first leaf and "Paris, 4.8.73" at foot of second leaf.Published with revisions as: As the story was told in: Günter Eich zum Gedachtnis / hrsg. von Siegfried Unseld, Frankfurt am Main : Suhrkamp, 1973.Former reference number: BECKETT COLLECTION--MSS PROSE/AST 01Short prose piece written in English in 1973. Original autograph manuscript of As the Story was Told; untitled but with ‘G. E. Zum Gedächtnis’ (in memoriam Günter Eich) written at the head. The manuscript is dated at the head Paris, 3 August 1973, and, at the foot, Paris, 4 August 1973. 27 x 21 cm. 2 leaves. This item contains many deletions of words, phrases and lines by Beckett. The first leaf is heavily corrected, the opening lines being completely deleted and the piece begun again immediately beneath. Some corrections are made and then reversed: in the opening phrase, ‘sessions’ is altered to ‘proceedings’ and then altered back to the original, which survives to the published text. The closing section bears a strong resemblance to the published text, and the description of the summer-house is corrected here to a form very close to that published.

2 leaves ; 27 cm.

English

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The copying of any of Beckett’s handwriting and sketches, or any unpublished letters, typescripts, manuscripts or draft versions of his work that differ from the final published version is not permitted.

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