Samuel Beckett had little good to say about London when he lived there in the 1930s but the city will honour him on Wednesday when Downton Abbey actor Penelope Wilton unveils a blue plaque at his house in Chelsea. Turned down by publishers with "glib cockney regrets", he was suffering from a number of physical and mental ailments throughout his stay, including boils, pelvic pains, panic attacks and insomnia.
"Staying in this town gives me little pleasure. Except for the pictures, which because of their shop-window glass meet the eye for the most part only drop by drop, there is nothing that one is allowed to look at," he wrote to his cousin Morris Sinclair in May 1934.
Grieving the death of his father the previous year, Beckett moved to London in 1934 to undergo psychoanalysis, visiting Wilfred Bion at the Tavistock Clinic three times a week. The plaque will be unveiled at 48 Paulton's Square, the first house he lived in during his three years on and off in London.
A handsome, three-storey terraced house dating from 1840, Beckett did not enjoy it and he complained later about the cost of “extras” he had to pay for on top of his rent.
“In the evenings I walk for hours, in the hope of tiring myself out in order to sleep. And enjoying it all the more since motion itself is a kind of anaesthesia. A soft Velazquez light in my room this morning. But in the afternoon it will be an oven,” he wrote to Sinclair in August 1934.
Despite his unhappiness, Beckett’s time in London was fruitful and it was during those years that he wrote much of his first novel “Murphy” and saw his stories More Pricks than Kicks published by Chatto and Windus - or, as he referred to them in correspondence, “Shatupon and Windup”.
Another Nobel laureate, physicist Patrick Blackett, who undertook ground-breaking research into cosmic rays, moved into 48 Paulton's Square in 1953 and lived there until 1969. A second plaque will be unveiled to him at the house today, making it one of only a handful of London buildings with double plaques. Others include a house in Mayfair lived in by both George Frederick Handel and Jimi Hendrix and 29 Fitzroy Square, which was home to both George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf.
