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When Paris was invaded by the Nazis, Beckett and his future wife fled to the south of France, hiding by day and journeying by night. That harrowing experience, especially the footsore conversation along the way, probably inspired the futile wandering in Godot, according to its first Broadway director, Alan Schneider.
An even deeper real-life influence on Beckett's work, scholars have suggested, came in 1938. As Beckett walked along a Paris street, a panhandler stabbed him in the chest, perforating a lung and narrowly missing his heart. When Beckett later asked why the attack happened, the assailant replied, "I don't know, sir." That glimpse of the random perils of existence may have confirmed Beckett's dark vision but did not initiate it. His novel Murphy, published the same year, depicts a destitute Irishman, living in London, who daydreams away his days in a rocking chair until a gas plant explodes and shreds him. At his instruction, his ashes are flushed down the toilet of Dublin's Abbey Theater.
Through the '40s, Beckett kept writing, shifting, for reasons he never explained, from English to French as the language in which he created. He remained obscure until a spectacular burst from 1951 to 1953, in which Godot and three novels appeared to acclaim. The plays Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days followed by 1960. Thereafter he produced fewer and fewer, shorter and shorter, bleaker and bleaker pieces but never quite lapsed into the ultimate despair of artistic silence. His last work, Stirrings Still, a fiction of less than 2,000 words, was published in March 1989 in an edition limited to 200 copies.
Beckett's images have transfixed countless theatergoers, who watched the tramps in Godot wait for a savior who never comes, or heard the old man in Krapp's Last Tape review recorded fragments of his life as he murmurs, over and over, "Spool," or shared the haplessness of the elderly couple in Endgame as they face the end of the world while encased in trash cans. Beyond his own art, Beckett shaped the vision of countless others. They emulated, if never equaled, his simplicity of means, philosophical daring and ability to engage vast ideas in tiny trickles of closely guarded language. Above all, Beckett's life and work taught others the lesson he said he learned from Joyce: the meaning of artistic integrity. His vision never yielded. Even on a sunny day in London, as he strolled through a park in evident pleasure, when a friend remarked that it was a day that made one glad to be alive, Beckett turned and said, "I wouldn't go that far."