Ahhh right, well that's ok Ed, I may just leave it out then. Anyway, I doubt my mother would approve, she seems to be raising an eyebrow at everything I've been reading of late.

...or, if you prefer, "Je suis dans la chambre de ma mere".

Beckett must be almost unique in his conscious decision to write in a language not his own (French) and then self-translate his own work back into his native tongue (English). The Trilogy was written first in French.

Sure, Conrad was Polish, but the motivation here is entirely different. Beckett:

"En francais, c'est plus facile d'ecrire sans style" (In French, it's much easier to write without "style"..."

Beckett apparently wanted to dispense with the clever-clever Anglo-Irish flayboyance of his earlier prose work in English: a conscious act of self-alienation in order to help him reach the inner recesses of his psyche? That could only be achieved, he apparently felt, by writing the first versions of these works in a foreign language.

I once knew an academic madman who was convinced that the key to Beckett's work was the idea of Reincarnation. Thus:

"I am in my mother's room" is only a heartbeat away from "I am in my mother's womb". The morphing of Molloy into Malone into the fetus-like voice of "The Unnnamable" in the course of The Trilogy is simply- in my loony acquaintance's view of things- simply a series of reincarnations.

As I recall, he'd somhow connected this wild notion with the lyrics of "Every Grain of Sand" on Dylan's SHOT OF LOVE album. Don't ask me why.

But Beckett is like that: his work is a kind of Rorschach test of your own psyche.

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mews in West Brompton..."
(First sentence of "Murphy")

If you read James Knowlson's biography of Beckett "Damned to Fame" , you'll discover that Sam underwent psychoanalysis in London as a young man, residing at the time (hilariously!) in World's End.

"It helped me, I think", he told the author.

When the Resistance cell he was working with was betrayed, Sam and his wife-to-be Suzanne fled south to Roussillon near the French Pyrenees where he worked as an agriculutural labourer and wrote his novel "Watt".

After the war was over, he briefly visited Ireland then returned to France to drive an ambulance with the Irish Red Cross. His poem "St Malo" in the collection "Echo's Bones" is set in the city bombed to ruins by Allied planes.

Back in Paris, Beckett was stabbed in the street by a pimp who was later arrested and tried for the crime. Under the French judicial system, victim and accused must confront one another in court. Beckett asked the pimp why he had stabbed him. The reply:

"Je ne sais pas, monsieur".

I mention these biographical details to illustrate how a world view characterised by bleakness, absurdity and despair might have developed.

But, back to the womb for a minute...

Beckett claimed to have a pre-natal memory of being in his mother's womb, under the table at a dinner-party she was attending, listening to the conversation.

The claim defies belief: anatomically and physiologically impossible. He must have been testing the limits of his friends' credulity for some reason.

Beckett had a very difficult relationship with his mother, a stong-willed and eccentric woman who drove around in a trap pulled by a donkey and kept Pomeranian dogs. There are numerous references in his work to the destructivness of parent-child relationships, I've already referenced one or two, but the most savage probably comes in The Trilogy when (I think) Malone is descibing his birth:

"...through the hole in her arse, if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit."

And it's remarkable how many of Beckett's actors complain of being confined/imprisoned (in wheelchairs, rocking-chairs, funerary urns, ash-cans, strapped down to a board, in a mound of earth, etc) and obliged to speak their lines. It's the fetus-like Unnnamable all over again.

Despite his psychological problems- you don't end up with a face as lined as his without suffering from unusual mental conflicts- Beckett had a reputation for kindness and acts of sometimes saint-like generosity:

1. The actor Jack MacGowan admired a painting by Jack B Yeats hanging on SB's wall. Beckett promptly gave it to him, his only stipulation being that McGowan should try to hang on to it, rather than sell it (for drink).

2. Beckett stayed at a colleague's New York appartment for the shooting of his short film ("Film", with Buster Keaton). When the work was over, his colleague promised to call Sam early the following day so that he could catch his flight back to Europe.

Next morning, his colleague woke late, horrified to discover that his alarm-clock had failed to go off. Rushing from his bedroom, he discovered Sam sitting in a chair in the corridor outside his bedroom, fully dressed, suitcases packed, fast asleep, clutching a newspaper. Too shy and inhibited to knock on his colleague's door, Sam had been sitting there for hours RUSTLING A NEWSPAPER in order to attract his friend's attention.

My favourite Beckett story, that one.

Beckett and a friend are walking down a boulevard in Paris on a beautiful Summer day.

FRIEND: God, Sam! What a beautiful day! Doesn't it make you glad to alive!

BECKETT: I wouldn't go as far as all that.

If genius is "An infinite capacity for taking pains", Beckett's meticulous approach to his work bears the marks of genius:

1. Commissioned by UNESCO to translate into English poems from the Spanish originals (a language with which he was not familiar), he worked with a Spanish-English dictionary and produced a translation so accurate that only one tiny, insignificant error could be discovered in the work.

2. Billie Whitelaw recounts taking a rehearsal break from her role as Winnie in "Happy Days". She returned briefly to the stage set to collect something she'd forgotten and discovered Sam- "There isn't an ounce of flesh on him"- crawling over the mound in which her character is imprisoned, testing the exact manner in which her character's husband Willy should emerge from his hole in the back of the mound.