John Fletcher obituary

The Guardian

23-05-2025

My father, John Fletcher, who has died aged 87, was an academic and literary critic best known for his work on Samuel Beckett. He helped demystify the Irish playwright to generations of scholars with A Student's Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett, which he co-wrote with his wife and literary collaborator, my mother, Beryl.
John discovered Beckett as an undergraduate, after his brother gave him a copy of his novel Molloy. John found it heavy going at first but persevered and ultimately decided to study Beckett for his master's thesis at Toulouse University.
His studies moved him closer to Beckett's orbit in Paris and an opportunity to meet the playwright came in 1960, when the wife of a theatre director who had staged Waiting for Godot for the first time in France offered to introduce him.
Beckett invited John to his flat on the understanding that 'I can't discuss my work, and I never do …' and got on so well with him that at the end of the meeting Beckett lent him a typescript of his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. It was the start of a long friendship and correspondence lasting until Beckett's death. John collaborated with Raymond Federman to produce the first Beckett bibliography, Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics (1970), which became a landmark in Beckett studies.
John was born in Barking, Essex (now east London), to Roy Fletcher, who worked at the Ford plant in Dagenham, and Eileen (nee Beane), who had been a telephonist before marriage. When Roy, who had been a technical civil servant in the Aeronautical Inspection Directorate during the second world war, was seconded to the Control Commission for Germany in 1945, John boarded at King Alfred school, in Plön, in Schleswig-Holstein.
After the family returned to Roy's home town of Yeovil, John attended the grammar school there. He won an exhibition to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he graduated in languages and philosophy in 1959. He had fallen in love with France as a sixth former, and returned there to do a master's and doctorate (written in French) at Toulouse. It was there that he met Beryl, who was studying in Montpellier on a year abroad, and they married in 1961.
They stayed in France while John completed his PhD, then returned to the UK in 1964 for him to take up a lectureship at Durham University. In 1966 he moved to the newly founded University of East Anglia as a senior lecturer and soon after professor, where he established the French department and worked until early retirement in 1998, when he and Beryl moved to Canterbury, Kent.
From the mid-1980s, John and Beryl had started doing literary translation work together. Their translation of The Georgics, by Claude Simon, won the 1990 Scott Moncrieff prize. In retirement, John continued to work on translations, his last major work being Voltaire: A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary, which he translated for an Oxford World's Classics edition (2011).
Beryl died in 2021. John is survived by two sons, Edmund and me, a daughter, Harriet, and six grandchildren.