Why did Samuel Beckett not kill himself?
Why did Samuel Beckett not kill himself?
When accosted by a literary critic one evening at a party in Paris sometime during the 1970s, Beckett decided to leave abruptly rather than justify the pessimism that pervaded his work. Upon going outside, he hailed a taxi; upon getting in he was confronted with two illustrated posters sellotaped to the plastic partition separating him from the driver. One sought donations on behalf of a homeless shelter, the other comprised a list of instructions of what to do in the event of rape.
The quotidian reality of suffering is total and inescapable. Happiness is transient and fleeting; pain is certain and inevitable. When I immerse myself in the transcendental world of Radiohead’s Kid A, go for a run at night to the tune of J.S. Bach, or devote an evening to Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre, I do so as a subconscious act of escape. I allow these pieces of art to carry me away, temporarily, to somewhere else; a higher plane just above the mundane, where possibility becomes real and my anxieties irrelevant. It is a form of sensory deprivation – hence why I prefer to listen to music or watch a film in total darkness, to prevent the world from intruding; allowing me to forget the fact that I constitute a body, a person, with pressing obligations and things to stress about. When the film ends or when I take off my headphones, the enveloping darkness reveals itself, accompanied by a deafening silence. Here, it’s only you – unless you’re staring into your phone, as another means of subsuming yourself, of forgetting yourself. This ‘self’ is not on your side, apparently; and where ‘you’ stand in this equation is far from explicable. I despise myself for not being able to make friends; for wasting my youth by spending every evening in my room, reading; and for not knowing how to fix this, how to properly live in this social word. Where does the ‘I’ – whatever this is; ‘me’, supposedly at least - stand in this dynamic? I feel as thought I’m forever locked in a state of war with myself, and I’m quite unsure of which side I stand on, or which side I’m supposed to stand on. The boundaries are blurry.
Beckett and all the great pessimistic writers and philosophers of nineteenth and twentieth centuries were engaged in similar duels with the self, and all against conditional backdrops. In Beckett’s case, this was characterised by the destruction of faith, certainty, and tradition occasioned by the tumults of the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s. In living through this period of unparalleled destruction, inhumanity, and misery, the engaged ‘intellectual’ could only arrive at one perspective; one that prefigured the existentialist movement in post-war France and which led Beckett to compose his three great novels, Molly, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, as well as the two-act play with which he will forever be associated, Waiting for Godot. At the heart of each lies the conviction that life is nothing to celebrate, and if anything something to be regretted. There is no beauty or ‘truth’ to be revealed and represented; ‘all there is is the mess’, Beckett said. Shit, blood, and tears.
Why, then, did Beckett and other avowed pessimists and antinatalists not just kill themselves, if they thought the world so intolerable? If they regarded ‘non-being’ as preferable to ‘being’ then why didn’t they follow their conclusion?
Some did, and it is probable that Beckett contemplated suicide on several occasions; and the concept of ‘death’ was a constant preoccupation in his thinking – his novel Malone Dies has been read as a translation of Heidegger’s philosophy (‘living towards death’) to literature. It was only in the 1970s, in the wake of a friend’s suicide by hanging, that Beckett aired his thoughts on the matter. He reportedly stayed up all night with a mutual friend, smoking cigarette after cigarette, speechless. After a while, near dawn, he called it ‘the easy way out.’ In this, he condenses a tradition of life philosophy that extends back to Søren Kierkegaard in the early nineteenth century and forms the central tenant of existentialism: suffering is unavoidable; happiness and love are both illusory; life does not make sense and is a constant, indeterminable battle – mostly with yourself. This is ‘life’, fundamentally, and it was into this that you were thrown at birth. The fact of life is to be regretted, according to Beckett, but there’s not much one can do about it. This is the challenge. One must struggle in order to live, for there is no alternative. The fact of meaninglessness must be embraced, and in this act one finds oneself.
I have a photo of Beckett as the wallpaper on my iPhone. It shows him, immaculately dressed, sitting amidst piles of overflowing rubbish down some Parisian backstreet. Out of the dirt, it would seem, there always emerges something human.