About twenty years ago, a friend from Paris gave me a copy of Premier Amour (1945), one of Samuel Beckett’s very early works in French. This friend especially treasured this little-known short récit, but there was a word he did not understand. The protagonist does some kind of business with a “panais”. “Qu’est-ce que c’est qu’un panais?”, he asked. “It’s a parsnip.” “Yes, so the dictionary says. But what is a parsnip? The French don’t eat parsnips. They feed them to animals.” The appearance of the panais in Premier Amour is ruefully comic; it brings into play the cryptic, the abject and the theatrical. It hints, according to punning dream logic, at the proverb, “Fine words butter no parsnips”. Beckett was finding his way out of fine words.

Beckett’s decision to reject his mother tongue illuminates his particular music and his turn towards silence. It is interesting to think of Beckett’s precursors in relation to foreign languages: one of these, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, like Beckett a supreme artist of linguistic, syntactical music, translated and taught English, and was so involved in aesthetics and semantics that he composed three rare and eccentric works on the language. It is in one of these, Thèmes anglais (English Lessons) that Mallarmé offers, as a phrase that falls from the lips of any English speaker born and bred: “Who can shave an egg?”. I had never heard this before (but that is true of most of the sayings in Mallarmé’s weird and wonderful English phrase book), but it struck me as clownish, a little alarming, and a minimalist’s maxim. Mallarmé’s love of English was not rooted in fluency or familiarity, but rather in something literally other or alien in the language used by the writers he admired – William Beckford, Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, and some rather lesser-known authors, such as Mrs Elphinstone Hope, whose forgotten story, “The Star of the Fairies”, Mallarmé translated in 1880. (He also left unfinished a mammoth anthology of English Literature.)

When Beckett was asked why he wrote in French, he gave a celebrated answer: “Pour faire remarquer moi”. Like the word “panais”, this is a phrase that is not quite French but purposely askew; it draws attention to itself on purpose to say, “to make people take notice of me”. The turn of phrase is “pidgin”, Michael Edwards has commented, adding that this deliberate clumsiness establishes “a gap, a confusion, and we find ourselves conversing in Babel”. Beckett thus shares with Mallarmé a pleasure in unfamiliarity and also a sought-for dépaysement, an estrangement through the foreign tongue. For Beckett did not assume French identity in the trilogy of novels in which he first adopted the language: the man himself might have come back from Paris and shocked his parents in the respectable Dublin suburb of Foxrock by wearing a beret and smoking Gauloises, but his literary personae stick to Irish caps or vaudeville toques. They have names like Molloy, Moran or Malone. In En Attendant Godot, also first written in French, the cast names nod more to Grockian circus clowning (Vladimir and Estragon), the Italian commedia dell’arte tradition, and their American metamorphoses in the routines of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. The translation into a different language helps estrange the characters and their setting – strands them somewhere else, somewhere their speech and their own labels do not match exactly.

In philosophical terms, this draws attention to the made-up character of Beckett’s scenes and tales, and allows the artifice free development. He breaks with representation by this foundational severance of the word from the world. As Edwards comments, “a foreign language is already a kind of fiction”. The foreign word takes us to a different level, where its embodied character, its sound and shape, act more directly on our physical receptors because they are freed from intelligibility. The physicality of a word grows lighter and less substantial when we know what it means without having to think. How to avoid this attenuation, with its corresponding drying up of the aesthetic response, becomes the writer’s task.

Mallarmé once remarked that poetry should make air and silence hang around a word, and Beckett also likes to give a character a particular word to hold, with a pause, as it reverberates. He did this when he began to write again in English, for the radio, as if his characters were now acquiring English as a foreign tongue. Towards the beginning of All That Fall, broadcast by the BBC in 1957, Mrs Rooney says: “I use none but the simplest words, I hope and yet sometimes find my way of speaking very . . . bizarre”. Though her words are indeed simple, they are often rare or archaic: “weasand” for throat, and “pismire” for ant, and the lovely, precise designation “hinny”, with its oral echoes of the animal’s cry. Beckett sends us to the English dictionary, where “hinny” turns out to be “the offspring of a she-donkey and a stallion”. Beckett also sends his characters to the dictionary: in Krapp’s Last Tape, Krapp himself bundles a huge tome on to the stage to look up the word “viduity”, another unfamiliar usage and one that allows Krapp to linger and savour it, turning the syllables round his tongue, assaying their precise weight and the associations that arise, and then finding, with a surprise that perhaps takes us into Beckett’s own when he found this for the first time: “Also of an animal, especially a bird . . . the vidua or weaver-bird . . . . Black plumage of the male . . . . The vidua-bird!”. Krapp recognizes himself, names himself by another name and so edges towards becoming that little bit more present to himself. Making a detour through French, Beckett was refreshing language itself, including his native Irish English, and effectively sharpening its sensory powers of precise naming.

Beckett also switches tone by picking an exact, unfamiliar term and allowing it to bob like unidentifiable flotsam in the broken stream of his characters’ monologues or dialogues: the “hog’s setae”, for example, the authentic material of Winnie’s toothbrush in Happy Days, again needs to be explained – for most of us – by recourse to the dictionary. Another would be “emmett”, the unusual word for ant that Winnie chooses. Edwards remarks,

"Beckett . . . disengages himself from memory [and] signals the danger of familiarity. One can feel so much at home in one’s language and in the world which that language enters, illuminates, and sweetens, that one forgets one’s exile, and the writer in particular needs to mistrust the wontedness of words, and experience at times, or maybe on a particular occasion, the foreignness of his own tongue."

Estrangement, and through estrangement, reknotting of the threads between naming and the named: this is the first reason for Beckett’s writing in French. But he also famously remarked that he had made the decision “pour avoir moins de style” – or, in the English version reported, to write “without style”.

His first novel in French, Mercier et Camier, was finished in 1946 and only published in 1970; his first play in French, Eleuthéria, was written in 1947, and not performed or published until very recently. So after the great turning point in the wake of his father’s death and the ordeal of the Second World War, his first writings in the new tongue were experiments – apprentice works, he said. But En Attendant Godot followed, composed in a fugue of inspiration over a few months only (October 1948–January 1949); the manuscript, in a school exercise book, shows hardly a revision. The trilogy of novels – Molloy, Malone meurt and L’Innommable – was then completed in a frenzied burst of creativity, during a time of extreme hardship when Beckett was living in Paris, and published in 1951–53. He recognized that this new, French voice could offer him a precious way of slipping from the shadow of James Joyce. Compared to Murphy and Watt and the earliest poems in English, the earliest poems in French, too, are pared down, austere and plain.

Beckett’s French continued to cultivate surprise in its phrasing and lexicon, often picking an unfamiliar, even obsolete term. In Fin de partie (1958), for example, during the exchange between Hamm and Clov and Nagg about the last rat and the last sugar plum, they begin to pray but soon give up, and the failure of this sacred performative speech form leads them to expostulate:

Hamm: Bernique! (à Nagg ) Et toi?

Nagg: Attends (Un temps. Rouvrant les yeux.) Macache!

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