SAMUEL BECKETT AND FAILING BETTER
‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’.
These words are from ‘Worstword Ho’-- a prose piece written in 1983 by Samuel Beckett. An experiment in language, temporality and the limits of consciousness, it is both bleak and beautiful, desolate and hopeful.
It is perhaps the most exquisite evocation and expression of the nature of failure ever written, and arguably, no one was more qualified to write it than Samuel Beckett.
His success came late in life and at the age 44 he was still an unknown author living in obscurity in Paris. He’d completed five novels and two plays but almost all remained, at the time, unpublished and all he really had to show for himself was the occasional essay or poem accepted by minor literary magazines.
By the late 1940’s he was utterly drained and suffering from writer’s block. He wrote to his close friend the art historian Georges Duthuit: “I do not know where I am going…. something is coming to an end, and this time I see nothing starting in its place’.
He could’ve given up. He had a small private income and lived very modestly. But he persevered: to overcome his writer’s block he tried writing in French. It worked and in 1950 he was able to compose the play that would bring him international fame: ‘Waiting for Godot’.
Its themes of despair and the importance of hope chimed with audiences and caught the cold-war zeitgeist of the 1950’s perfectly. No one before had captured so well the existential quandary life presents us with.
More important works followed and in 1969 he was given the highest award in literature: the Nobel Prize. And today, ‘Waiting for Godot’ is the world’s most performed 20th Century play.
So what can we learn from Samuel Beckett’s journey?
Looking back on his life we can perceive it as charmed but at the time, in the thick and thin of it—embroiled in the twists and turns, the ironies, setbacks and good luck-- it must’ve seemed as though he was walking through fog. He didn’t know where things would lead him. He could never be sure of success.
But he never gave up. He persevered-- despite his path being strewn with rejection letters, ridicule, awful reviews and bewilderment he kept at it.
So, ultimately, his journey became a question of faith. Of putting one foot in front of the other. Of thinking ‘what is the next right thing to do?’ Sometimes that is doing something old like seeking the counsel of a wise and trusted friend. Sometimes it is trying something new like writing in French instead of English.
Perhaps we fall back on a set of guiding principles that can act as a beacon in the fog; we can look to the lives of people like Beckett and find inspiration there, just as he sought it in the works of James Joyce and Dante.
We must also contend with the fact that ultimately the success we seek might elude us. Then we might realize that the path has been the journey and that the attempt itself has been a triumph of sorts.
And remember that-- despite winning the Nobel Prize, despite having one of the most successful plays of all time, despite having an Irish yearly feast day named in his honour-- Beckett himself regarded his own work as, to one degree or another, a failure. If that is the case then few artists have ‘failed better’ than him.