Almost a century later, towards the end of 2005, another launch was taking place in Beckett’s adopted city, Paris. The venue was the now re(tro)-fabricated Café de Flore, on the Boulevard St Germain, where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir used to sit for hours vous-vousing each other. Today, Café de Flore is a favourite watering hole of arts industry power brokers; in company, last November, were the upper echelons of Paris’s theatre directors, editors, administrators of the arts and academics. Others, like myself, were just watching from the sidelines as speakers did their best to out-Beckett the last with impassioned monologues heralding their project for Paris–Beckett/2006–2007. Not just a festival with confusing punctuation, this is the biggest cavalcade of events ever to be devoted to the Irishman and Nobel Prize-winning author. Croissants were smeared with exquisite jams and gulped down with bowls of coffee. Director followed actor followed academic in lavishing praise on Beckett’s memory. And yet something of a strange air presided over the entire meeting: while this was going on, in the impoverished suburbs on the outskirts of Paris, the most volatile of the city’s impoverished residents were in revolt. Hundreds of cars had been Molotoved the previous week, mostly just outside the inner-city walls (the ring road).

Initial indifference among Parisians had given way to disbelief as night after night they sat gingerly in front of their televisions, watching the vandalism and hearing reports of increasingly violent assaults. Was something really quite scary about to happen, or would it all blow over? Parisians were in factions, and Sarkozy (third-generation French of Hungarian descent), the French Minister for the Interior, stepped in with the delicacy of an SS toe-cap, proclaiming that, papers or no papers, any ‘immigrant’ implicated in rioting would be expelled from France. Less obvious is the racism that sizzles away beneath French culture and that caused the riots in the first place.

Since the heady days of 1968, when Left Bank bohème met with revolutionary zeal, the cobblestones around Café de Flore have sat securely in place. In recent months they were ripped up and hurled at police by young people during the clashes over the now defeated First Job Contract. In 2006 the same marginalised immigrants from the outer suburbs of Paris who rioted last November joined forces with the politicised student movement. The Sorbonne and its Left Bank environs remain symbolic ground, but the change in the shape of its guard reflects the evolution of modern France. While jobs were relatively plentiful in the 1960s, today there is far less ideology than sheer poverty, which takes people to the streets.

In post-World War II Paris, the experience of displacement and gaping social distances are precisely what Beckett closed in on when he wrote his famous theatre piece En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot, 1952). Two men are destitute; in an unknown wasteland, they wait for their saviour (we assume). The only arrivals to the stage are the sadistic and well-to-do Pozzo, with Lucky, his leashed and incoherent slave. Most people know the story: Godot never comes, not in Act 1 or 2; hence the critics’ cliché, ‘nothing happens, twice’.

Not everyone knows that Beckett voluntarily drove ambulances for the Red Cross after World War II, or that, after Paris was occupied by the Germans, and because of the treatment of his Jewish friends, Beckett joined the French Resistance. He worked undercover as a translator and frequently transported volatile documents through the streets, risking his life. His languages were invaluable to the Resistance (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin), but also his meticulous attention to detail. In 1942 his Resistance cell was infiltrated and when one of its members went missing, Beckett received a tip-off. He fled with his French partner, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil; two hours later, the Gestapo raided their apartment. Others, not so fortunate, met their ends – even those Beckett was able to call and warn. After a period on the run, Beckett and Suzanne ended up in Roussillon in the south of France, where they hid on a farm until after the war. What did he do during this time? Between farm duties he wrote the bulk of a comic masterpiece, the novel Watt (1953).

In postwar Paris, from May 1947 until January 1950, Beckett wrote his extraordinary trilogy of novels, first in French: Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (Malone Dies, 1951) and L’Innommable (The Unnamable, 1953). Beckett’s heroes, increasingly homeless, live in a precarious relationship to the world. Not only do they degenerate into bums, but their bodies gradually disappear, limb by limb. At once hilarious and troubling, by the end of the trilogy the narrator is actually bodiless: we are also expected to imagine that he is sealed in a jar of excrement abandoned across from a Parisian café, perhaps even, Café de Flore.

Beckett’s hobo-heroes reflect much of his own wandering and his ambiguous nationality; he had well and truly left Ireland behind, but was not yet French. Such characters are more identifiable as the muttering and dishevelled shapes we pass on the street every day. These people are sometimes mad, they might be covered in bruises, often they stink or lie in their own urine. We hardly register their existence – compared with Paris, Sydney and Melbourne have comparatively few. Not that numbers make them more visible; it seems the reverse is true. But Beckett transplants us very close to their world.

The effect is not unlike that produced by a campaign for the homeless in Paris this year. When winter arrived, the homeless were given camping tents for shelter. Radiant little domes popped up overnight. The streets of Paris seemed quite surreal. I noticed some of these tents crawling like snails; little by little, they moved around parks and corners. Others stayed put, in the weirdest places, as in the middle of a busy footpath (though after a while I realised they were perched over the grates of the underground Métro, enjoying a warm updraft). There is one I pass daily that I still can’t work out: it hasn’t moved from the middle of a traffic triangle. After a long winter, I don’t really see those tents; they have faded into the scenery, along with the homeless people in them. For someone who doesn’t live in the grim suburbs of Paris, the recent riots no longer impinge on daily life; the defeat of the First Job Contract means that no government is going to touch contentious policy for a while. However, beyond the tether of our attention spans and our mundane observations on everyday life, Beckett endures.

If Beckett only gave us a social critique, or a metaphor for war, then he would not be the single most written-about author of the twentieth century. Last century, reputedly, more books and articles were devoted to Beckett than to any other literary author – more than to James Joyce or William Shakespeare. As the judges of the Nobel Prize recognised in 1969, Beckett had remarkable control across multiple genres – the novel, the poem, the short story, film, theatre, the radio play – and all of this in not just one but two languages.

This year, the ‘Beckett industry’ is geared up to full hilt. Major international conferences devoted to Beckett include those in Dublin, Paris, Florida, Atlanta, Tokyo and Reading (at England’s Beckett archive), and many more are planned. These occultish events are filled with specialists who have devoted the better parts of their lives to studying the work of one man. Trained in reading techniques more sensitive than an airport beagle’s, they furrow into Beckett’s work, probing drafts or the scattered lecture notes he took as a student. They hunt out allusions to other authors as exotic as Blaise Pascal or the Hindu Vedas; they find resonances with philosophical traditions from antiquity to Carl Jung; they might use the latest research in neurolinguistics to explain or compare features of Beckett’s prose style.

As the output on Beckett increases, scholars are delving into ever-darker reaches of Beckett’s oeuvre. Each work seems to be like an infinitely descending shaft into a mine of literary shadows and philosophical echoes. But as a young man, Beckett himself abandoned a brilliant and promising academic career. The reason, he privately confessed, was that he could neither represent, nor stand and deliver, on the truth of things in which he did not believe. It is something that might make a Beckett researcher like myself feel ill at ease. Sometimes the academic search seems too ephemeral a business. But in my own darker moments, I try to take Beckett’s lead and not be paralysed by doubt – The Unnamable finishes magnificently: ‘where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’

As a boy Beckett had been studious, precocious and aloof. He finished his formal education at Trinity College, Dublin, with brilliant results in French and Italian. In 1928–30 he won a coveted post teaching English at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. More and more enchanted by the French language and culture, at just twenty-five he published a monograph on Marcel Proust (1931) and was translating new and important French poets such as Rimbaud and the surrealists Eluard, Breton and Apollinaire.

In Paris, Beckett had a decisive encounter with his countryman, the formidable intellect and author, James Joyce. He fell under Joyce’s shadow and moved for a while in Joyce’s literary circle. Twenty-four years his senior, Joyce soon loomed in the imagination as a literary father. They had a habit of taking long walks by the Seine, and conversing, as was their want, in numerous languages, on topics such as Dante.

At the end of his stint at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Beckett had returned to Ireland and was offered a rare position lecturing in French literature at Trinity College, Dublin. To turn down the job was an almost unfathomable decision at the time, for anyone except Beckett. It is clear that he was an extremely ethical, and intense, individual. He placed the highest demands on himself and would topple into bouts of guilt when he did not live up to them. He gave himself no other option but the uncertain career of a writer; and as a writer, he was an artist. It was not exactly an Orwellian down and out in Paris; he did receive a modest stipend from his family, but it only got him fed and housed.

The years that followed Beckett’s decision to forsake an academic career involved much soul-searching. Not only did his body plague him with a panicky ‘racing ticker’, cysts and skin irritations, but he lapsed into severe depression. He was treated with experimental techniques in psychoanalysis. In general, we do not know a huge amount about this period – he wandered between Ireland, London, France and Germany – though the forthcoming publication of his German Diaries and the Collected Letters will fill in some gaps. What is clear is that Beckett transformed himself into the model of a European artist. He developed friendships with painters and musicians, deepening his intimacy with their techniques, influences that permeate his stage, dialogue and prose.

In 1937 he returned to Paris and tenaciously sought success as a writer. In the early 1930s he had written a novel called Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which was rejected by publishers. Published in 1992, it is not particularly enjoyable to read: the prose is dense, obscure and overly imitative of Joyce. The mentor’s presence persists in the volume of short stories More Pricks than Kicks (1934), and the first-published novel Murphy, though by now Beckett is wielding his razor-sharp irony.

Perhaps it helped that during this period Joyce had severed contact with Beckett. This happened when it became clear that Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, was in love with Beckett. He had taken her out a few times, according to him, just as a friend; clearly, he was more enamoured of her father. Beckett was a good-looking man, with intense blue eyes and a natural confidence that was in stride with his intellect. If he was sometimes superior, he could at other times be kind and charming. Not that they were necessarily mismatched; Lucia was free-spirited and highly creative, with a promising career as a dancer ahead of her. When Beckett rejected her advances, Lucia was distraught. Joyce’s wife, Nora, believed – most at the time thought unfairly – that Beckett had strung Lucia along.

Not long after, Lucia suffered increasingly severe delusional attacks; soon she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. This may explain the fact that several years later, Joyce renewed his friendship with Beckett. By then Joyce was going blind and needed people to read to him and to take notes. Beckett became one of Joyce’s scribes. It is the stuff of legends: the myopic author of Ulysses is now orally composing his most difficult work, the verbal basilica, Finnegans Wake. He recites sentence after sentence of his invented polyglot language, while the apprentice faithfully and silently copies them down, word for word.

This situation might well inform Beckett’s last and strangest novel, Comment c’est (How It Is, 1961). Here the story is narrated entirely by a voice which claims to be both reciting and copying down that of another person, the mysterious ‘ancient voice’ he hears in its head. It is an odd premise for a book, and the predicament preoccupies the narrator throughout the novel. Perhaps Beckett is voicing a sense of his belatedness, coming as he does in the wake of his two colossal modern heroes, Joyce and Proust. Or maybe, after a decade of experience in working with the theatre following the phenomenal success of Waiting for Godot and Endgame, he began to hear his own voice as if it might be issuing from the mouth of an actor. We know also that Beckett wrote How It Is at the end of the 1950s, after a decade of translating into English his famous French works from the late 1940s. Perhaps, given that the work was first written in French as Comment c’est, it is the narrator’s own voice echoing inside his head, but in another language.

Written while Beckett was in hiding during World War II, Watt was the last novel Beckett wrote first in English (J.M. Coetzee wrote his PhD dissertation on it). Apart from the sheer oddity of its eponymous hero – a part-time genius and stiff-limbed numskull with a penchant for walking backwards – much of the humour springs from Watt’s speech, but behind Watt’s linguistic contortions is an author frustrated with the English language. Watt even lapses into riddle-speak, as here: ‘Dis yb dis, nem owt. Yad la, tin fo trap. Skin, skin, skin. Od su did ned taw.’ If we do a Wattish reverse reading, we make some sense of it, with a pinch of German and French, ‘Wat den did us do? Nicht, nicht, nicht. Part oftin al day. Two men dis (=say) by dis (=say).’ Read: ‘one man is split, I/you say by I/you say. What does this mean?’ Even before abandoning English, Beckett seems to be contemplating the creative possibility of thinking in mixed language: writing one way, then reading himself backwards; translating himself into the other language. Systematically torturing a phrase or an idea, Watt often pushes English to the limits of sense. Stuck on the farm during the war, maybe Beckett was simply bored. But then, he never managed to get words to do what he wanted them to do.

Indeed, just after the war, Beckett more or less ditched his mother tongue. In a burst of creative energy the likes of which most authors can only dream about, he wrote a suite of works that earned him a place in the French canon of letters. Not bad for someone who had not written any creative work of length in the language before. The reader or theatregoer is often not aware that Waiting for Godot or Endgame are translations from the French. The same goes for his most famous novels which form the trilogy: Molloy, Molone Dies and The Unnamable. French readers may know that Beckett is Irish, but they still consider him a French author. Some French students, taught En attendant Godot at high school, might think it boring rubbish, but others get it: a play about the boredom of waiting for things to happen, to gain freedom. Isn’t that what school feels like?

Actually, translation seemed to be a kind of a chore for Beckett. All of the comments about it scattered through Knowlson’s prodigious biography are complaints about getting lost in ‘the wastes and wilds of self-translation’, and how it took him away from his real work. If he derived no real kicks from the business at all, it seems that Beckett nonetheless sacrificed himself to long months of suffering for his art. Whatever his motivations really were, we know that when Beckett saw Patrick Bowles’s draft for the beginning of the English translation of his first French novel Molloy, he felt the need to work closely with its translator. After this, he apparently knew that the job would be much better served if he did it himself.

Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable are undisputed classics of twentieth-century fiction, though not all readers will have the patience to stay with them. Some find them excessively morbid, existentialist, nihilistic or puzzlingly absurd. Beckett won’t even give you a clear sense of the plot, and he won’t hold your hand. How can he when his narrator might forget how to end his sentence, or if he is losing a limb while telling the story? For some readers, this is exactly not what they search for when they escape from life into a novel. The rest of us are in stitches. The absurdity, the verbal tangles, the hopelessly solipsistic thinking. Why wouldn’t our limbs fall off! It’s a bit like watching Charlie Chaplin: some think him hilarious, while for others he is just dull.

Beckett’s plays may seem deceptively simple, but it is the way they teeter between the farcical and the deadly serious that directors have found most difficult to control. When he was involved with directing Godot, Beckett was himself painfully fastidious not only towards the mise en scène; he would torture actors by making them repeat, sometimes for an entire rehearsal, a single line until it was exactly as he intended. The stage directions to his scripts are incredibly precise. He insisted on agonising silences between the delivery of lines, the famous ‘Beckettian pause’.

But how does a director balance this with Vladimir and Estragon, the duo of tragic clowns who occupy the stage of Godot and whose very movements were in part inspired by the slapstick humour of Laurel and Hardy? When it’s done well, the play strips away the facile business of our life to its metaphysical skeleton.

This is a delicate operation: we know how Beckett wanted it done. It poses some problems for directors today. Should they wish to reinterpret the plays beyond what is permitted by the script, they must obtain approval from the Beckett estate.

The situation exploded into a front-page scandal when Beckett’s nephew, and literary executor of the Beckett estate, Edward Beckett, earned himself some unwanted notoriety when he landed on the cover of the Sydney Morning Herald in January 2003. He was cast as Beckett’s menacing ‘literary guard dog’, or even worse, the ‘autocratic literary bulldog’, after he presented himself before Neil Armfield, the director of Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre, whose Godot was about to open. Beckett threatened to sue the Belvoir (that is, potentially ruin it) if Armfield didn’t remove certain musical arrangements that he had added to the play.

Armfield hadn’t offered the Beckett estate any prior justification for the changes, and so earned its censure. The Beckett estate defended itself by claiming that its stance is a response to a history of seeing changes made to the plays inflicted by ‘directors’ egos’. Such transgressions include women playing the roles of Vladimir and Estragon, and characters escaping from the bins to which Beckett had condemned them in Endgame, or, in the case of Play, from their urns. It is lucky that Edward didn’t hear about the Victorian arts students who, a few years back, staged the inaugural sock-puppet Godot.

The estate argues that even if changes weren’t directly ruled out by Beckett, they nevertheless disrespect the play and have no right to claim to be presenting works by him or to profit from his oeuvre. If a director can justify a change on aesthetic grounds, and many have done so, then the estate may be amenable. But an Italian all-female production of Waiting for Godot was recently denied permission. The producers took the matter to an Italian court, and won. The Guardian, in England, championed the case as a victory for civil rights.

As it turned out, Armfield’s contract was not so binding, and his show went ahead. Nevertheless, addressing an audience, comprised mostly of scholars, at the International Beckett Symposium, to which his Godot was affiliated, Armfield criticised the Beckett estate: ‘In coming here with its narrow prescriptions, its dead controlling hand, its list of “not alloweds”, the Beckett estate seems to me to be the enemy of art ... If there is something to hope for at this watershed fiftieth anniversary of the play ... it is that Edward gives his uncle’s work back to artists to work with it. Let it go. Because if he doesn’t, he’s consigning it to a slow death by a thousand hacks.’

Not all literary executors exercise such vigilance in carrying out their author’s wishes. There is Kafka’s notoriously opportunistic friend and biographer, Max Brod, who ignored Kafka’s wish that all unpublished material be destroyed upon his death. Brod churned out a veritable industry with what he was entrusted. History is littered with similar anecdotes. It is not rare for author’s wishes to be sacrificed when profiteering heirs and literary executors are in cahoots, or are one and the same person.

Executors might also consider that they know better than the author. Such was the case with Austrian author and playwright, Thomas Bernhard. Having come to despise his homeland, Bernhard left testamentary instructions that none of his plays should be performed in Austria during the period of their copyright. Yet a mere ten years after his death, the Bernhard estate exercised their better judgment on exactly this point.

We know how Beckett wanted his plays to be performed. So the test comes when a director does lend a bit more indulgence to their own interpretation. In the case of Armfield’s Godot, we can even leave aside the question of his addition of occasional pieces of ‘music’. It was part of a general attitude to the play. There is no doubt that Armfield’s Godot was too raucous and noisy to have been to Beckett’s taste. In terms of its transgressions, the greatest crime wasn’t the inclusion of the occasional whiz-bang orchestration or the vaudevillian pops and whistles that prompted the executor’s ire. What Armfield had done was contract the sparse and empty Beckettian universe into one where silence had lost its force. Beckett wanted just the self-mocking hint of vaudeville. Placing this at the centre of the production did a greater disservice to the play than the introduction of anything external to the text. Humour in Beckett is a relief, sometimes a grimace, but here the audience was delighted and amused by what seemed at times to be a circus sideshow. Ultimately, Armfield’s Godot ran out of puff. We can laugh at silliness for only so long.

Executors can’t always protect their property from violations of taste. This may be why, back in Café de Flore, while each enthusiastic director launched into how he or she was going to interpret Beckett in a ‘new’ way, at the end of the main table Edward Beckett held himself conspicuously quiet, and still.

This year and next in Paris will be the first time that all of Beckett’s nineteen theatre pieces (not including translations) will be performed in the one city – the least of which will be the exhilarating minute-and-a-half where one actor stands on stage and exhales: the work is titled Breath. The International Visual Theatre will interpret Act without Words 2 and Footfalls in sign-language and movement. Finland’s Turku Arts Academy will have a marionette inhabit centre-stage of the one-man show Krapp’s Last Tape. There is a Turkish-language production of Endgame, Happy Days in German and Waiting for Godot in Italian. The prestigious Comédie-Française has staged Oh les beaux jours (Happy Days). Radio France will broadcast original plays for radio written by Beckett, as well as classic theatre recordings from his day featuring Roger Blin and Delphine Seyrig. The Beckett radio archives will be restored and new recordings commissioned. Sharing space with one of the world’s finest collections of modern art in Pompidou Centre will be a formidable International Symposium devoted to Beckett. Its focus is on practitioners of the theatre and arts, with special appearances and interpretations by legends of the Beckett stage such as Billie Whitelaw. Between Paris’s labyrinthine medieval streets and its austere nineteenth-century boulevards will be a scattering of photographic exhibitions, recitals of music and multimedia installations.

If the French haven’t brought their famous good taste to bear on Paris–Beckett/2006–2007, we can be sure that at least the canny eye of Edward Beckett will stare down any dissidents. It isn’t exactly state repression, or the artistic confinement of hiding out in time of war, and the estate’s fetters won’t be tight enough to deliver us a Solzhenitsyn, or be so restrictive as to inspire a Proust. Nor can we say that Beckett’s work is so straightforward as protest theatre, and many are devoted to having its memory last longer than the passions that flare when streets become the stage of protest. Nonetheless, we will watch attentively, during the upcoming Beckett celebrations, to see if any new type of Molotov will be cast in the direction of authority, in the way that Beckett attacked the conventions of every art form he ever touched.