Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil

Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil (1900 - 17 July .

In the 1930s, Beckett, an avid tennis fan his whole life, chose Dechevaux-Dumesnil as his lover over the heiress Peggy Guggenheim. Six years older than Beckett, Dechevaux-Demesnil was an austere woman known for avante-garde tastes and left-wing politics.

During the Second World War, Beckett joined the French Resistance. For over two years, he and Dechevaux-Dumesnil hid from the Germans in a village in the South of France. [http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/happydays/context.html Context] of "Happy Days" at sparknotes.com]

Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" has been called "a metaphor for the long walk into Roussillon, when Beckett and Suzanne slept in haystacks... during the day and walked by night..." [Bair, Deirdre, "Samuel Beckett: A Biography" (London: Vintage, 1990), pp 409, 410]

During the relationship between Beckett and Dechevaux-Dumesnil, which lasted more than fifty-years, she maintained a private circle of friends and is credited with having influenced Beckett to produce more work.

During the late 1950s, Beckett often stayed in London, where he met Barbara Bray, a BBC script-editor, a widow in her thirties. James Knowlson writes of them: "Beckett seems to have been immediately attracted to her and she to him. Their encounter was highly significant for them both, for it represented the beginning of a relationship that was to last, in parallel with that with Suzanne, for the rest of his life." [Knowlson, James, "Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett" (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp. 458, 459] Soon, their association became "a very intimate and personal one". [Cronin, Anthony, "Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist" (London: Flamingo, 1997), p. 495] In a visit to Paris in January of 1961, Bray told Beckett she had decided to move there.Knowlson, "op. cit", p. 480] His response was unusual. In March, 1961, he married Dechevaux-Dumesnil in a civil ceremony in Folkestone. On the face of it, this was to make sure that if he died before her Dechevaux-Dumesnil would inherit the rights to his work, since there was no common-law marriage under French law. He may also have wanted to affirm his loyalty to her. In June, 1961, Bray moved to Paris, and despite his recent marriage Beckett spent much of his time with her. [Cronin, "op. cit.", p. 500] This side of his life was not well known, as Beckett’s reserve was "allied to his fear of giving offence to Suzanne". [Cronin, "op. cit.", pp. 517-518] Beckett's play "Play" (1963) seems to be inspired by these events.

Dechevaux-Dumesnil died in July 1989, five months before Beckett, and she is buried at the Cimetière de Montparnasse in Paris.

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