Stabbed by a pimp...
- charlottehamel
- May 21, 2015
- 2 min read
Extract of a post by Stephen Ross, in The Oxonian Review (to read the entire article, click here)
On the night of 6 January 1938, Samuel Beckett was stabbed in the chest by a French pimp named Robert-Jules Prudent while walking home with friends. Narrowly missing his left lung and heart, the blow confined him to a Paris hospital for over two weeks. When Beckett later met the improbably named Prudent in court and asked why he had attacked, the Frenchman responded wryly: “Je ne sais pas, monsieur. Je m’excuse (I don’t know why, sir. I’m sorry).”
In hindsight, it all seems like an episode out of one of Beckett’s own plays, highlighting as it does the absurd contingency of life, the untoward and irrational behaviour of the down-and-out.
Amused by his assailant’s response and ever wary of guarding his privacy, Beckett chose not to press charges. In a gesture of qualified compassion, he had already written from the hospital to his friend Thomas McGreevy that he found his assailant “more cretinous than malicious”.
Had Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) not survived his stabbing, he would be largely forgotten today. His legacy would comprise a few poems, short stories and a novel, Murphy, the proofs of which he corrected while convalescing from his stabbing. Yet, as James Knowlson indicates in the title of his 1996 biography, Beckett was “damned to fame”, living to the age of 83 and writing some of the most important plays and novels of the 20th century, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. His wife, Suzanne, called the prize “a catastrophe” for the intensely private Beckett.
Comments