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SAMUEL BECKETT

He can’t think without his hat.—Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1952

Samuel Beckett’s unfussy elegance is testimony to the grace of steadfast unfashionability. If he were alive today, designers such

as Margaret Howell, A.P.C., and most probably Comme des Garçons would be trying to lure him their way for an ad campaign or a catwalk appearance. Of course, he would say no: he said no to everything. Even when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969, he didn’t turn up to receive it. The New York Times wrote that “Mr. Beckett could not be reached for comment on the prize. He was reported by his Paris publisher to be out of touch in Tunisia, and Nobel officials were unable to say whether he had received word of the award.” Even back in 1959, the prospect of attending a ceremony that would have awarded him an honorary degree from Trinity College Dublin was not enticing. He wrote in a letter to the Irish scholar Abraham Leventhal published in The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 3, 1957–1965: “I have no clothes but an old brown suit, if that’s not good enough, they can stick their Litt.D. up among their piles.” The writer and socialite Nancy Cunard, however, knew flair when she saw it, and in 1956 called Beckett “a magnificent Mexican sculpture.”

Opposite: Samuel Beckett, 1975.

LegendaryAuthors-3P_TH.indd 10-11 1/25/17 9:09 AM