Samuel Beckett is remarkable in that he produced masterpieces in practically every literary form, with the obvious exception of autobiography. He wrote great novels, short stories, plays, poetry, criticism - his little book on Proust is one of the most perceptive studies of the great rememberer ever written - works for radio and television and the cinema - Film may not be a masterpiece, but it is certainly a unique and haunting piece - treating each genre as if it were a wholly new form, an undiscovered country where no one before him had left even a footprint.
It is this almost autistic approach to the art of writing that makes Beckett such a revolutionary. Yet like all makers of the new in art, he kept an eye fixed firmly on his classical forebears - consider, for instance, the echoes of Racine in Waiting for Godot, or of Dante in the Trilogy of novels - and indeed, it might even be said of him that he was the last of the classically trained great masters of Modernism.
When the stories and novels and plays began to appear in the 1950s, they seemed utterly unlike anything that had gone before them, fiercer and more mysterious even than Joyce or Eliot, more genuinely iconoclastic than any of the posturings of the Surrealists. As time went on, however, it began to be apparent that what gives these writings their peculiar power is the solidity of form and the breadth of intellectual reference on which they are founded. Nor are they as remorselessly avant garde as they first seemed. For instance, Beckett was an enthusiastic reader of Serie Noire thrillers, and all his novels and plays end with a twist as in the final words of How It Is or Company, while Malone Dies closes in an extravaganza of comic violence worthy of Quentin Tarantino.
T.S. Eliot dreamed of writing for the music-hall, a form of popular entertainment which he loved, but Beckett went ahead and incorporated patter and slapstick and mime, all the "business" of low theatre and silent movies, into the very heart of his work. The story "The Expelled" opens with a typical Charlie Chaplin routine. The narrator first of all assures us that "There were not many steps":
The fall was therefore not serious. Even as I fell I heard the door slam, which brought me a little comfort, in the midst of my fall. For that meant they were not pursuing me down into the street, with a stick, to beat me in full view of the passers-by. For if that had been their intention they would not have shut the door, but left it open, so that the persons assembled in the vestibule might enjoy my chastisement and be edified. So, for once, they had confined themselves to throwing me out and no more about it. I had time, before coming to rest in the gutter, to conclude this piece of reasoning.
After this, while "I rested my elbow on the sidewalk . . . settled my ear in the cup of my hand and began to reflect on my situation", the door opens again to allow his hat - a bowler, no doubt - to be flung after him, "rotating as it came". Needless to say, we are not told what offence this expulsion is the punishment for. The four stories collected here - and surely they are stories, or long short stories, rather than novellas - as well as the novel Mercier et Camier, were written between February and December of 1946, in what Beckett himself called a "frenzy of writing", when he had returned to Paris after leaving his job at the Red Cross hospital in Saint-Lo.
They were his first fictions written directly in French. Beckett had been living in France and speaking the language for 10 years. He accounted for the shift to composition in French in various brief but telling ways; it was "pour ecrire sans style", he said, for he felt, as his biographer James Knowlson puts it, that "English was overloaded with associations and allusions".
Certainly the decision brought him to the most intense period of creativity he was ever to know: in the space of four years, during what he described as "the siege in the room", he produced these four stories, as well as four novels, two plays, and a number of poems and critical essays, all in French. The first story he wrote in French was called, typically for Beckett, "La Fin" (The End). Its original title was "Suite". As Knowlson informs us, Beckett began writing it in English, but after 29 handwritten pages he drew a line a third of the way down the page - surely one of the most significant dividing lines in 20th-century literature - and continued on in French.
The first half of the story, by now translated, was published in Sartre's and de Beauvoir's review Les Temps modernes, while Beckett was revising the second half. When the rest of the story was submitted, de Beauvoir rejected it; she claimed she had thought what had been published was the complete story, and she suspected Beckett of playing a low trick in an effort to get his work into two successive issues. Knowlson suggests that de Beauvoir also disapproved of the scatological humour of the story, which she felt would damage the high tone, "la bonne tenue", as Beckett said, of the magazine. Beckett wrote in protest to de Beauvoir, accusing her of allowing him "to speak only to cut me off before my voice has time to mean something". The Beaver, however, remained unmoved.
"The End", like its companions, "The Expelled", "The Calmative" and, finest of the four, "First Love", is wonderfully assured, shocking, mordantly funny, and deeply and mysteriously affecting. The voice as it begins to speak is unmistakable: "They clothed me and gave me money. I knew what the money was for, it was to get me started. When it was gone I would have to get more, if I wanted to go on." It is the voice of the Trilogy, and of the great set-piece speeches in Godot and Endgame; it is, in its mixture of grief and gaiety, disgust and celebration, horror and loveliness, one of the defining voices of the century that has just ended:
I heard faintly the cries of the gulls ravening about the mouth of the sewer near by. In a spew of yellow foam, if my memory serves me right, the filth gushed into the river and the slush of birds above screaming with hunger and fury. I heard the lapping of water against the slip and against the bank and the other sound, so different, of open wave, I heard it too. I too, when I moved, felt less boat than wave, or so it seemed to me, and my stillness was the stillness of eddies . . . The rain too, I often heard it, for it often rained . . . All that composed a rather liquid world. And then of course there was the voice of the wind or rather those, so various, of its playthings.
Who but Beckett could have made such plangent music in modulating from Swiftian repugnance to an almost Keatsian attentiveness to nature and the so-called inanimate world? These four stories, these enormous miniatures, are superb works of art, and it is good to have them collected in this handsome, inexpensive edition, immaculately edited and annotated by Gerry Dukes, whose introduction is a model of brevity, scholarship and humility before the text, and whose notes, mostly confined to comparisons between revisions to the stories as they were variously published, will be a delight to all Beckett enthusiasts.
John Banville is Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times.