Conversations with Samuel Beckett

"This is like waiting for Godot," my friend said to me as we patiently waited at the Hartford airport for the arrival of my date for the big spring weekend. With each hour that passed, her plane continued to be delayed. That comment, in 1959, led to my studies of Samuel Beckett and his famous play. At Wesleyan University, I was a junior premedical student pursuing a dual major in French and biology. I had dedicated a great deal of time to studying the theater of the absurd as reflected by Camus, Sartre, Genet, and Cocteau. Reading Waiting for Godot by Beckett, which was published only seven years earlier, initiated my longtime interest in this Irish playwright who was writing in Paris. It led to my senior thesis, "Waiting for Godot, Waiting for God?" From today's perspective, the title seems very simplistic. At the time, however, relatively little had been written about Beckett's play, and the idea that Godot stood for God, while suggested, was not well substantiated. Beckett make no allusion to it. A careful look through anthologies of the Bible and the Bible itself revealed what appeared to be direct analogies to biblical events in the play. In my opinion, the hypothesis of Godot as God was a plausible interpretation of this literary piece. When I received Fulbright and French government fellowships to conduct biological research in Paris in 1960-61, my French professor at Wesleyan, Alex Szogyi, encouraged me to find Professor Mayou, head of French Studies at the Sorbonne, to show him my thesis. "Why not let him read your thoughts on Beckett?" he insisted. I waited eight months to do