“SAM PARIS NOV 1952”: RARE PRESENTATION/ASSOCIATION COPY OF EN ATTENDANT GODOT, INSCRIBED WITHIN WEEKS OF PUBLICATION BY BECKETT TO FRIENDS HENRI AND JOSETTE HAYDEN—WITH THE FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN BECKETT AND HENRI SAID TO INSPIRE ESTRAGON AND VLADIMIR IN GODOT

BECKETT, Samuel. En attendant Godot. Pièce en Deux Actes. (Paris): Éditions de Minuit, 1952. Small octavo, original white paper wrappers, uncut. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

First trade edition of Beckett’s masterpiece, an exceptional presentation/association copy inscribed on the half title within weeks of publication by Beckett to close friends Henri and Josette Hayden, “A Henri et Jossette affecteusement Sam Paris Nov 1952,” with Beckett’s inscription preceding the premiere of Godot in Paris in January 1953. Beckett and the Haydens met while hiding from the Gestapo in France, and the intimate decades-long friendship between artist Henri and Beckett is said to be a likely inspiration for Estragon and Vladimir in Beckett’s “epoch-making play.”

Hiding from the Gestapo during the Occupation, Samuel Beckett found refuge in the small French village of Roussillon in 1942, where he survived by working in the fields. Life improved “considerably with the arrival of two further refugees from Nazism: the Polish-born French painter Henri Hayden, and his much younger French wife, Josette.” Beckett quickly “warmed to the quiet elderly painter with his more voluble, lively companion… Soon Beckett was meeting Hayden fairly regularly in the café for a drink and it was not long before the two men found that they shared a love of chess as well as of painting… This marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship… Some of his purest pleasure came from art… [and] since Henri Hayden’s arrival, there was some contact at least with art… Often Hayden would paint close where Beckett was working, so that they could talk or share a picnic lunch of food and wine.” Many see, in Estragon and Vladimir of En Attendant Godot, traces of the friendship between Beckett and Hayden. If Estragon and Vladimir are constantly “contradicting each other simply to fill the time? Are they Beckett and Henri Hayden doing the same, as they meet regularly for chess? Common sense suggests that snatches of dialogue did emerge from similar little ‘canters… Beckett has conceded as much privately to friends” (Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 192-343).

This exceptionally rare presentation/association of En attendant Godot is testament to that extraordinary friendship in its inscription by Beckett to Henri and Josette Hayden, inscribed within weeks of publication and two months prior to the play’s Paris premiere. Godot would become “one of the most influential plays of the post-war period,” earning Beckett worldwide acclaim (Drabble, 1038). After World War II Beckett began to write in French, a language he felt was better suited than English to his vision of literature. Although he finished En attendant Godot in 1946, the play was rejected by six Paris publishers before its publication in this 1952 first edition of 2500 copies. “The date of its first [Paris] performance—Jan. 3, 1953—would be pricked out in gold in the annals of the stage…There is something of everyone in this play, and something of everywhere, too. That is why what it has to offer is a landmark in life” (New York Times). After the premiere of the play, “Josette Hayden remembered how at first numbers dropped off after the first night and how they felt they needed to drum up support for it among their friends. Josette and Henri went out to dinner with Sam and Suzanne to celebrate the 30th performance, but even then they did not foresee the extent of the success, which was gathering momentum… Godot changed everything for him… But, above all, Godot forced people, as Kenneth Tynan put it later, to ‘re-examine the rules which have hitherto governed the drama; and, having done so, to pronounce them not elastic enough” (Knowlson, 49). By the end of the decade, the play was seen in London and later New York in Beckett’s own translation as Waiting for Godot. The play revolutionized modern drama, abandoning “conventional structure and development in both plot and dialogue in order to present a dramatic vision of the human predicament in a world in which mankind seems to have no place. His two tramps, indecisive and incapable of action, wait hopefully for help which never comes. This epoch-making play is now regarded as one of the masterpieces of the Theatre of the Absurd” (Hartnoll, 66). “Beckett’s work invented an entirely new theatrical language, palpable and comprehensible images of the absurd, and unforgettable metaphors of the human condition” (Hollier, 1010).

Beckett’s friendship with Henri and Josette Hayden continued to be central to his life and work, and in many ways the friendship also led to Hayden’s artistic renaissance after the war. When Hayden suffered a heart attack in London in 1962, and Beckett was in France for the opening of Happy Days, he “phoned regularly to find out about his friend’s progress. He wrote to Hayden almost every other day… called for their mail, paid the rent on their flat, and posted packets of Gauloises cigarettes to England for Josette. When the Haydens returned home a month later, Beckett was waiting for them… he could not do enough to help” (Knowlson, 448-9). In 1970, Beckett grieved intensely at the death of Hayden, who died in Paris on May 12. When an abridged version of Godot was performed in the studio of the Club d’Essai de la Radio on February 17, 1952, Jérôme Lindon “agreed to publish the play at Les Editions de Minuit in October” (Knowles, 349). First trade edition; preceded by only 35, quite rare, numbered copies in wrappers. Without rarely found original glassine. Text in French. Federman and Fletcher 259. Mahaffey, 217. Lake, 126.

Text fresh and clean with only lightest toning to edges, almost no edge-wear to wrappers. An exceptional about-fine inscribed copy. A presentation/association copy such as this is extremely rare, with barely one at auction in the last 30 years.