Samuel Beckett's biographer reveals secrets of the writer's time as a French Resistance spy
The Belfast Telegraph
Samuel Beckett's biographer reveals secrets of the writer's time as a French Resistance spy
As this year's Samuel Beckett festival opens in Enniskillen, James Knowlson, recalls how the Irish writer risked his life for liberty and narrowly escaped capture by the Gestapo
BY JAMES KNOWLSON – 31 July 2014
"Nothing to be done" is the opening line of Samuel Beckett's best-known play, Waiting for Godot. Yet, when faced with the German occupation of France and confronted by what the Nazis were doing to his Jewish friends in 1941, Beckett himself joined a Paris-based cell of British SOE (Special Operations Executive) named "Gloria SMH". "You simply couldn't stand by with your arms folded," Beckett said firmly to me.
Gloria SMH was set up and led by a French chemist from the Institut Curie in Paris called Jacques Legrand (code name "SMH"
and the daughter of the Cubist painter Francis Picabia, Jeannine (code name "Gloria" . Yet, for three decades after the war, only a select few of Beckett's closest friends were aware of his dangerous activities as a liaison agent (and translator of secret reports) or that he had narrowly escaped arrest by the Gestapo in Paris in August 1942, when so many of his cell were betrayed and deported to concentration camps.
Many of them died there, like his French assistant friend at Trinity College, Dublin, tennis partner and fellow agent, Alfred Péron, who tragically survived until the march out of the camp at the end of the war. Even fewer knew that Beckett had received the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française from the French government after the war.
My own great advantage in writing about Beckett's work with the Resistance was that I could question him directly concerning his actions and motives in a series of weekly interviews over the summer and autumn of 1989. He was only too happy to clarify his wartime role and to explain exactly why, though Irish and in theory neutral during the war, he had joined the SOE....
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Time for a brain break. 