I met Beckett in the mid ’60s. I’d started to read him in the mid ’50s and I wanted to meet the man. I didn’t often want to meet playwrights, but I did want to meet Beckett, and it was difficult. I had a friend who was a close friend of Beckett’s, a man named Georges Belmont, and Georges said he would get us together. But it kept on not happening, and one day another friend, a French poet named Alain Bosquet said, “I will get you to have lunch with Beckett.”

And so he arranged for lunch at the Closerie des Lilas. Bosquet spoke to me beforehand at great length about all the things I mustn’t do: Don’t talk to him about his work, don’t ask him anything, just sit there. I was terrified. We met, had a drink. Beckett didn’t say much, I said nothing. And Alain Bosquet talked. And then we crossed the Boulevard de Montparnasse to the Coupole, where we had lunch, and during that whole time, Bosquet talked about nothing but his recent trip to the Yucatán.

The next day, though, I had lunch with my friend Georges Belmont, who said, “Ah, I hear you met Sam yesterday.”

I said, “Yes, yes.”

“Well, Sam asked me to tell you when you get back to Paris next time, give him a call or drop him a note because he’d like to see you some more; neither of you had a chance to say anything at the lunch.”

So that’s how a friendship began, a friendship that lasted many, many years, until his death. I had occasion over the years, beginning in 1978, to organize some Beckett festivals, two of them in New York, two in Paris, one to mark nothing except for the fact that I wanted to do it, others to mark his seventy-fifth birthday and his eightieth. I naturally wanted Beckett to be in agreement, to allow me to do it, simply from a point of view of friendship. I knew he wouldn’t like the idea because he didn’t like people talking about him, but he said okay. The first one in Paris, he told me, “I won’t be there.” And he wasn’t there. He took a plane, he went to Tangiers. That was going very far to hide from the festival.

The next time, in 1986, three years before he died, he was not capable of leaving Paris. Many of his friends were there, taking part either in plays or in conferences and readings—and he actually met them all at the Coupole for a drink, which was an extraordinary event.

I’d love to tell a story that is particularly dear to me. It has to do with my son, whom I talked to Beckett about many times, and Beckett knew that he was a chess freak. When he was about fifteen, I brought him to Paris to meet Beckett. And I did to my son what Alain Bosquet had done to me. I told him: Don’t do this, don’t do that, and above all, don’t ask about his work.

Beckett put him very much at ease by talking about chess, and so my son Geoffrey felt emboldened, and finally said, “Oh, I have a question to ask you, Mr. Beckett.” I was beginning to worry. And he said, “Which of your plays do you like best?”

I thought I would just open a hole in the ground and disappear in it, but Beckett was kind and laughed and said, “Well, I guess the one I dislike least is Endgame.” And that was an important piece of information.

A last personal story has to do with my dog. My wife and I had a series of dogs, Lakeland terriers. The first one was called Godot, naturally, but Godot didn’t live very long. We decided to call the next one Beckett; it was really out of friendship, not sacrilege, and we would talk about our dog to Beckett when we met him in Paris, but we would never refer to him by name. Beckett the dog lived quite a long time, and the secret weighed more and more, until one day my wife went to see Beckett and confessed.

“You know our dog? Well, we’ve named him after you.”

And Beckett broke out laughing and said, “Oh, I knew that.”

And Helen said, “You don’t mind, then?”

And Beckett said a great Beckett line: “If he doesn’t mind, I don’t mind.”

I’d like to read the last thing Beckett ever wrote, a poem called “Comment Dire.” He wrote the poem in French and then translated it into English, as “What is the word.” This is typical Beckett text in the sense that it expresses the anguish that Beckett had about writing, about the need to say, and the impossibility of saying. The impotence of language.

COMMENT DIRE

folie—
folie que de—
que de—
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vu—
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quoi—
comment dire—

comment dire

WHAT IS THE WORD

folly—
folly for to—
for to—
what is the word—
folly from this—
all this—
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given—
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seeing—
folly seeing all this—
this— ¬
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this this—
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for to—
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see—
glimpse—
seem to glimpse—
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folly for to need to seem to glimpse—
what—
what is the word—
and where—
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there—
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seeing all this—
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afaint afar away over there what—
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what—
what is the word—

what is the word