A ‘Head haught eyes light blue almost white silence within.’
Samuel Beckett: Ping, 1967
Next year will be marked by conferences, seminars, theatrical presentations and other celebrations of many sorts to honour the life and work of Samuel Beckett, whose centenary falls on 13 April. These celebrations will be worldwide, not just in Ireland and France, his native and adoptive countries respectively. His centenary is not the only notable Beckett anniversary – 29 October this year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Dublin production of Waiting for Godot, directed by the late Alan Simpson, at the tiny Pike Theatre on Herbert Lane (Fig 2).

At Beckett’s request, Simpson deferred the Dublin opening until after the play had already opened in London. At that time London producers still thought that the securing of British and Empire rights to a play closed out the possibility of a production in Ireland, or in Éire, to be more precise. It sometimes takes quite a while for political and historical realities to become manifest. The British and Empire connections had long been severed and the exit from the Commonwealth had taken place some years before.

Alan Simpson’s agreement to defer his production allowed for a curious divergence to arise between his and the London production. Beckett had completed his first version of the translation of his play (he called it ‘rushed’) by July 1954. Later that year he revised his translation and it was this version he sent to Barney Rosset of Grove Press in New York who had undertaken to publish it. The American edition appeared in September 1954 and a copy was sent to Simpson at the Pike. As the impoverished Pike had no access to photocopying the actual play-scripts for the actors were typed out again with carbons being taken. This meant that the players in the Dublin production delivered the script as published in New York. The situation in London was somewhat different in that the script used was the revised version without the changes that Beckett had introduced as he worked on the galleys and proofs of the Grove Press edition. At the Arts Club Theatre in London (and later at the Criterion theatre), what the audience heard when Pozzo arrives in the first act and Estragon and Vladimir are trying to conciliate him by making a show of trying to ‘place’ him, was Vladimir’s comic line: ‘I once knew a family called Gozzo. The mother had warts.’ In Dublin the audience heard the stronger or coarser line: ‘I once knew a family called Gozzo. The mother had the clap.’

Alan Simpson’s production ran for nineteen weeks at the Pike, transferred to the Gate Theatre for a week, went out on a seven-venue national tour and finished with another week at the Gas Company Theatre in Dun Laoghaire in June, 1956. The accounts of the Pike Theatre show that the production earned Beckett 172 pounds, 7 shillings and 3 pence in net royalties. It does not seem much now but at the time the sum would have been enough to buy a luxury saloon car, fill the tank and have a mad weekend away.

 
Beckett did not travel to Dublin to see the production but he did receive production photographs by Derrick Michelson from Simpson. In a letter to Simpson in late November he wrote: ‘I liked particularly that of Vladimir [Dermot Kelly] looking at the boot as if it were an early 17th century skull.’ In reply to Simpson’s request for an author photograph Beckett wrote: ‘I’m afraid I’m very bad about photographs. I’m not due another until 1960, when my identity card will have to be renewed.’ This was not strictly true, as is amply evidenced by the publication in 1997 of the Beckett volume in the series Portraits d’Auteurs by the French publisher Marval. This volume features some thirty photographic portraits of Beckett taken between 1951 and 1988 by nineteen photographers. After the success of Godot in Paris in 1953 Beckett may have been publicity-shy but he was never camera-shy (Figs 3 &4). Further evidence for this is, surely, the rich archive of ‘family snaps’ held by the Beckett Estate, some of which I gratefully drew upon for my Illustrated Lives: Samuel Beckett, published by Penguin in 2001.
Throughout his writing life Samuel Beckett inserted images of himself into his prose narratives. His character Belacqua Shuah who appears in both the first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and in the story collection More Pricks than Kicks, is closely modelled on the writer himself. Not only is he a diligent student of Dante but he is also ‘a low-down low church Protestant high-brow.’ Belacqua is even fitted with a black leather coat such as Beckett himself possessed at the time of writing both books. But Belacqua constitutes a withering and mocking portrait of the artist as a young man, a portrait deployed by Beckett for satirical purposes.

In the third of his post-war novels, Malone meurt/Malone dies, Beckett has his narrator Malone plan to engage himself with telling a few stories as he is dying. One of these stories features a boy called Saposcat. The name neatly conjoins mind and body, wisdom and dung, that typically Beckettian take on the Cartesian ‘ghost in the machine’ conundrum. The boy is described thus:

‘But the most striking thing about him was his big round head horrid with flaxen hair as stiff and straight as the bristles of a brush. Even his teachers could not help thinking he had a remarkable head and they were all the more irked by their failure to get anything into it.’
This passage (originally written in French) pre-dates Beckett’s unexpected celebrity by some five years but its accuracy as a description of the author is undoubted. Beckett wore his unruly hair en brosse for most of his life (Fig 5). It is a feature of Beckett’s appearance that is admirably caught in John Minihan’s Paris portraits. A little later the self-portrait is augmented:
‘Sapo’s phlegm, his silent ways, were not of a nature to please. In the midst of tumult, at school and at home, he remained motionless in his place, often standing, and gazed straight before him with eyes as pale and unwavering as a gull’s.’

This not only captures Beckett’s essential shyness, his capacity to be withdrawn in the face of clamour, it also registers his remarkable eyes, the bluest I have ever seen. Monochrome photographic portraits cannot capture this feature, nor, strangely, do the colour portraits taken by Hugo Jehle in Germany in the 1980s. When Beckett looked at you, with or without his spectacles, you felt seen, even seen through.

 From 1953 onwards images of Beckett’s face were available on book jackets, theatre programmes and newspapers in Europe and further afield. During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s – the period of his most intense involvement in productions of his own plays in England, France and Germany – he willingly agreed to let scholars, critics and photographers attend his rehearsals so that these events could be fully documented. Bruce Davidson was allowed on the set during the shooting of Beckett’s Film in New York in 1964 and his photo-portraits of Beckett at work have achieved wide circulation. John Minihan was granted similar access while Beckett was working, for the last time, at the Riverside Studios in London (Fig 6). The photograph of Beckett in the theatre bar shows him in a more relaxed mode (Fig 7).
But Beckett’s commitment to documentation went even further; he arranged for his meticulously detailed production notebooks to be lodged in university archives so that succeeding generations of scholars and theatre practitioners would have access to the minutiae of his stagings of his plays. Other photographers, most notably Lutfi Özkök and Henri Cartier-Bresson, were admitted to his study in Paris to photograph him. There is even an unattributed shot of him leaning against his work-table in that gaunt little cottage at Ussy where much of his later writings were composed.

I find John Minihan’s shots of Beckett in Paris very moving because this was the man I knew, having met him for the first time on ‘the awful occasion’ (Krapp’s phrase, from Krapp’s Last Tape) of his eightieth birthday (Fig 8). It is just about possible that my first meeting with Beckett took place at the very table in the PLM hotel where Minihan photographed him (Fig 1). The full ashtray on the table looks familiar. Meeting Beckett was always a pleasure because of his unfailing courtesy and punctuality. He was always affable and would willingly respond to queries on points of detail about his work. He never dealt with general questions and always welcomed gossip about the theatre and the visual arts ‘over there’ in Dublin. He once told me that when he had difficulty sleeping he would mentally play the back nine at Carrickmines golf club and then walk up to Ballyedmonduff to see the stone-cutters at work and listen to the ringing of the hammers. The noise levels in south county Dublin are not so mellifluous now. But Beckett’s strong imagination could conjure consolations from his store of memories:

 ‘Nowhere in particular on the way from A to Z. Or say for verisimilitude the Ballyogan Road. That dear old back road. Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road in lieu of nowhere in particular.’ Company, 1980. John Minihan’s shot of Beckett, toting his ‘pilgrim’s scrip’ walking away from the camera along a London street (Fig 9), is amongst the most enduring and moving of valedictory images.

Gerry Dukes lectures in literature at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick.
All photographs of Samuel Beckett © John Minihan

John Minihan’s portraits of Becket are included in the current exhibition, Samuel Beckett, at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 8 January 2006.

Portraits of Irish Writers by John Minihan at the Princess Grace Library, Monte Carlo, Monaco, from 17 March, 2006.
Centenary Shadows, a photographic essay of Samuel Beckett by John Minihan, forthcoming, March 2006, Hale.
Portraits of Samuel Beckett by John Minihan at the National Photographic Archive, Dublin, April 2006.