Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Read online

  * Nathalie Sarraute (1900-99), born in Ivanova in Russia as Nathalie Ilyanova Tcherniak. French novelist and critic. During the Nazi occupation, after she sheltered Beckett and Suzanne, she was denounced as being from a Jewish family and was forced to go into hiding under the name of Nicole Sauvage, posing as the governess of her own three daughters. Later in this recorded interview, in a passage not quoted here, she related in detail what happened to her and her family. Before the war, she had already published Tropismes, Paris, Denoël, 1939. Interview with JK

  † Claude Sarraute, telephone conversation with JK, 22 September 2004.

  ‡ Clearly the truth of this statement cannot be checked.

  * He certainly wrote several letters to Mania Péron in which he asked her questions concerning French usage or vocabulary, although he did not always accept her judgements. These letters still exist today.

  * Anna O’Meara de Vic Beamish, author of over twenty novels, wrote under the name of Noel de Vic Beamish or simply De Vic Beamish. She wrote two books on dogs and did quite a lot of research for her swashbuckling historical novels, especially on the Middle Ages, and was very knowledgeable about wine and the history of wine. She had acted earlier on the London stage and had translated two plays from the Italian, one the well-known The Mask and the Face by Luigi Chiarelli. After travelling widely in Europe, she lived for a long time in Cannes with her companion, Suzanne Allévy. She was a very picturesque figure in Roussillon, helping the local Resistance group by hiding arms in the garden of the house opposite Beckett.

  * Fernand Aude was the son of the farmer Albert Aude on whose farm Beckett worked. Interview with JK.

  * Yvonne Lob (OBE). Before the war, as a well-qualified agrégée in English, she was a teacher of English in Nice, where her husband held a university post. This is a brief extract from a much longer interview with JK.

  * A fuller account of Beckett’s reading in Roussillon and the echoes of this in his novel, Watt, partly written in the village, is given in Damned to Fame, pp. 326-7. There is also a lot to suggest that Beckett’s knowledge of rural life which appears in Mahne Dies derived from his stay in Roussillon.

  * Phyllis Gaffney, the daughter of Dr Jim Gaffney, the pathologist with the team, has written excellently about the Irish Hospital in Healing amid the Ruins, The Irish Hospital at Saint-Loo (1945-46), Dublin, A. and A. Farmar, 1999.

  * Simone Lefèvre married the Irish surgeon, Frederick McKee, and lived for many years in Dublin. Interview with JK.

  Part II

  Remembering Beckett

  4

  Post-war Success: The French Novels and

  En Attendant Godot

  The painter Henri Hayden and Samuel Beckett at dinner in the Haydens’ house at Reuil in the early 1960s

  Biography, 1945-55

  Returning to Paris from his work with the Irish Red Cross Hospital in Saint-Lo after the war, Beckett and Suzanne endured some of their most difficult years. To earn money in those inflationary times, he did many translations and taught English; she did dress-making and gave music lessons to children.

  From February 1946, Beckett wrote in a frenzy of activity - and now he wrote in French. After a short story, La Fin (The End), there followed a shortish novel, Mercier et Camier, and three more stories, L’Expulsé (The Expelled), Premier amour (First Love), and Le Calmant (The Calmative). A year later, he wrote a play which has still to be produced, Eleuthéria. Then he began a major novel trilogy in French: Molloy, Malone meurt (Malone Dies)and L’Innommable (The Un-namable), all of which took him over two and a half years to write.

  Eventually, after many rejections, Suzanne, to whom Beckett in his own words ‘owed everything’, found a young publisher named Jerome Lindon, who had taken over the former underground publishing house of the Resistance figure Vercors, Les Editions de Minuit. Lindon was prepared to publish all of Beckett’s novels and promptly offered him a contract. So began a close relationship between the two men which was based on mutual respect and trust. Lindon did far more for Beckett than most publishers ever would for their authors. But Beckett repaid that faithfulness and conscientious concern with personal friendship and total loyalty, as well as with practical help and financial support in difficult times.*

  Although the novels received a high level of critical acclaim, success of a more public nature eventually came to Beckett in his mid-forties in the shape of a play which many have seen as transforming twentieth-century theatre. This was of course En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), written between October 1948 and January 1949. It was published, as were all the later plays in French, by Jérôme Lindon. Two of the actors involved in the first productions, Jean Martin, who played Lucky in the French world première, and Peter Woodthorpe, who played Estragon in the English-language première, speak here about their experiences of working on the play and about their meetings with Beckett.

  May Beckett, 1948-9.

  Having become distanced from his native language throughout the war, Beckett at first opted to collaborate with others in translating his French stories and the first of his published French novels, Molloy. We publish the fascinating first-hand accounts of Richard Seaver, who translated ‘The Expelled’ and ‘The End’, and Patrick Bowles, who worked intensively with Beckett on the English translation of Molloy and had numerous fascinating and profound conversations with him.

  Two personal events marked Beckett very intensely at this period of his life. In 1950, his mother, May, became critically ill with advanced Parkinson’s disease and dementia. She died in August 1950, Beckett staying in Dublin to care for her during the final few months of her life. With the money from the sale of her property after her death, he had a modest little house built in the country village of Ussy in the Seine et Marne region. He used to love to go there to write. At the beginning, Suzanne accompanied him, but later she took against the house as being too quiet and remote from all the things that she enjoyed in Paris: friends, music, theatre, bustle.

  Almost as traumatic was the death of his brother, Frank, in September 1954. Again Beckett devoted several months to caring for him, and this experience seems to have had a major impact on several of his later plays, most notably Endgame and the 1956 radio play All That Fall.

  Beckett’s ‘modest little house’ in Ussy sur Marne with (from left to right) Donald Page, Suzanne, Beckett.

  Richard Seaver on Translating Beckett

  Richard Seaver, seen here in the 1950s, editor in chief of Arcade Publishing in New York, was an old friend of Samuel Beckett’s from the 1950s. In 1952 he first brought Beckett, then virtually unknown, to the attention of the English-language public in a laudatory essay in Merlin. Seaver has been a distinguished publisher in New York for over forty years, during which time he has translated over fifty books from the French, including works by Marguerite Duras, Francoise Sagan, Andre Breton, Eugene Ionesco and Beckett himself. Contribution especially written for this volume.

  Paris, 1950s

  Some people make their own luck, others have it thrust upon them, by timing, by geography, or the gods. In my case, it was a combination of timing and geography, for in the fall of 1951 I moved from my eighth-floor aerie (read: maid’s room) in an abominable pension de famille on the rue Jacob to a much larger lodging at 8, rue du Sabot, hard behind St-Germain des Pres.

  To reach St-Germain, with its throng of welcoming cafés, I had almost inevitably to traverse the rue Bernard Palissy, a tiny cobblestoned street that housed a baker, a greengrocer, a launderer, a joiner, and, of all things, a fledgling publisher, Les Editions de Minuit. Until recently, the premises occupied by Minuit had been the local bordello, shut down three years before by a band of anti-sex crusaders, in a vain attempt to cleanse the Gallic soul, and with it hopefully the body as well. But a key point in that exchange of professions was that the premises at 7, rue Bernard Palissy were equipped with two display windows, one on either side of the door, formerly filled with the images of enticing young female bodies, now with freshly m
inted books. As I passed Number Seven almost daily on my way to my hangouts at the Deux Magots and Royale cafés, I could not help but check the titles, especially two set cheek by jowl, Molloy and Malone meurt, bearing a name that rang a more than faint bell: Samuel Beckett. I was deeply into Joyce at the time, for me the blessed saint of modern literature, and the Beckett name had appeared frequently in the Joycean context. All I knew of him was that he too was Irish, he had come to Paris from Trinity College, Dublin as a lecteur at the Ecole Normale Supérieure - a signal honour - that he and a French friend, Alfred Péron, had translated the ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ episode of Finnegans Wake into French, and that he had contributed the opening essay to the collection of twelve odes to the Master, appropriately entitled Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. I also seemed to recall that he had published a novel or two in England, to little or no success. But what, my mind kept asking, was he, an Irish writer, doing in the window of Minuit, a French publisher? Ah, I decided: it must be a translation. So I hurried off first to the English bookshop on the rue de Seine, where the proprietor Gait Frogé said she had never heard of either Molloy or Malone in English, then on to George Whitman’s Librairie Mistral, where the response was the same. So, I semi-concluded, the books must have been written in French. Bizarre …

  Then, if I may quote myself, a passage written thirty-plus years ago:

  ‘Finally, curiosity won out over avarice: one morning, on my trek to St-Germain des Prés, I went into Number 7 and bought both books. Later that day I opened Molloy and began to read: ‘Je suis dans la chambre de ma mère. C’est moi qui y vis maintenant. Je ne sais comment j’y suis arrivé … Before nightfall, I had finished Molloy. I will not say I understood all I had read, but if there is such a thing as a shock of discovery, I experienced it that day. The simplicity, the beauty, yes, and the terror of the words shook me as little had before or has since. And the man’s vision of the world, his painfully honest portrayal thereof, his anti-illusionist stance. And the humour; God, the humour. … I waited a day or two, then reread Molloy, tempted to plunge into Malone but resisting the temptation as one resists the seductive sweet. The second reading was more exciting than the first. I went on to Malone. Full worthy of the first. Two stunning works. Miracles.’*

  Shortly thereafter I became involved in a new literary magazine published in Paris, Merlin, whose first issue appeared in the spring of 1952, edited by a talented, charismatic Scotsman, Alex Trocchi.† When we met I overwhelmed him with my exuberant, long-winded description of Beckett’s work. ‘I’ve never read anyone like him,’ I insisted. ‘Totally new, totally different. Maybe more important than Joyce.’ Finally, probably to stem the flow, Trocchi said: ‘Well, if this man is so wonderful, why don’t you write a piece about him?’ Which I did, in the second issue. Entitled ‘Samuel Beckett: An Introduction’, it began:

  ‘Samuel Beckett, an Irish writer long established in France, has recently published two novels which, if they defy all commentary, merit the attention of anyone interested in this century’s literature …’

  If one excepts the phrase ‘if they defy all commentary’, that opening sentence is one I still stand by.‡

  When the issue appeared in the fall, I took a copy over to Minuit with a note to the publisher, Jérôme Lindon, asking if he would kindly forward it to Beckett. When Lindon’s secretary told him the purpose of my visit, he apparently told her to send me right up, for what I did not then know was that his opinion of his Irish discovery more than matched mine. A tall, ascetic-looking man with an already receding hairline - he was still in his twenties - and a gaze as intense as I had ever seen, he was impeccably clothed in a dark suit and matching tie. In my Army-surplus khaki fatigues, I felt more than a little uncomfortable and out-of-place, but he soon put me at ease. He assured me he would forward it to Beckett, then let drop that, while he was now writing exclusively in French, Beckett had during the war written a still-unpublished novel in English, entitled Watt. I must have half-risen from my chair. Could we see it, with a view towards publishing an excerpt in the magazine? He did not know the status of the work, he believed it was circulating in England, but would enquire. I left elated at the news.

  Weeks went by with no response from Beckett. Either he had disliked my piece, I decided, or was uninterested in showing us Watt. By that time, late fall, my rue du Sabot lodgings had become the world headquarters for Merlin, where all involved would meet two or three times a week to discuss the magazine, the state of the world, and the seductive merits of Paris. We had all but given up hope about Beckett when, one late afternoon in early November, during a not untypical Paris downpour, a knock came at the door. I opened it to confront a tall, gaunt figure in a dripping raincoat, from beneath whose folds he produced a rain-soaked package. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘I understand you asked for this,’ turned, and disappeared into the night. Opening the package, it was indeed the long-awaited Watt, delivered in person by the mysterious Mr Beckett. Most of the Merlin crew was there that day, and I have recounted elsewhere how we stayed up most of the night, reading pages in turn until our voices gave out, or until our tears or laughter stilled our lips.

  We published a long excerpt of Watt in our next issue - Beckett had dictated which passage we could use: Mr Knott’s inventory of the possibilities of his attire (‘As for his feet, sometimes he wore on each a sock, or on the one a sock and on the other a stocking, or a boot, or a shoe, or a slipper, or a sock and a boot, or a sock and a shoe, or a sock and a slipper, or nothing at all …’) and the various permutations of the furniture in his room (‘Thus it was not rare to find, on the Sunday, the tallboy on its feet by the fire, and the dressing-table on its head by the bed, and the night-stool on its face by the door, and the wash-stand on its back by the window; and on the Monday, the tallboy on its head by the bed…’ etc.). I suspected then, and later confirmed, that in so specifying that passage, Beckett was testing the literary fibre of the magazine, for taken out of context it could have been judged pedantic or wearily over-experimental, which indeed, according to some of our readers’ letters, it was. But we didn’t care: we had a mission, and Beckett was our leading man. In fact, in virtually every issue thereafter something by Beckett graced our pages. What was more, having lost minor but painful sums on the magazine itself, the next year we decided to expand and see if we could compound our losses by publishing books. And, of course, the first book we chose was Watt.

  In my research for my article on Beckett, I discovered that he had earlier published two longish short stories written in French, one called ‘Suite’ in Sartre’s Les Temps modernes and the other ‘L’Expulsé’ inFontaine.* Both were superb, and I asked Beckett if we could publish one or the other. ‘The only problem,’ he said, ‘they need to be translated, and I’ve neither the time nor inclination to do so.’ Then he brightened. ‘Why don’t you try your hand at one?’ I hesitated. ‘When you’ve finished I can go over it with you,’ he assured. In the folly of my youth, I said yes. Folly because here I was sitting with a man whose mastery of English was extraordinary, perhaps unique - I had stated so in print - and I was to recreate, in his native language, his own words. Still, I set to work, sure I could finish the task in a couple of weeks, urged on by Trocchi, who wanted the story for the next issue. Two months later I was still hard at it, revising, thinking: how would Beckett say that? Finally I could do no more and dropped the pages in the mail.

  A few days later he dropped me a postcard, saying what a fine job I had done and suggesting we meet at the Dôme to ‘give it a glance’. We met promptly at 4:00 p.m., an hour when clients were scarce, in the back, where we were alone.* Beckett had my pages and the French edition opened side by side, ready to begin. Our beer orders before us, we looked at my opening lines:

  ‘They dressed me and gave me some money. I knew what the money was to be used for, it was for my travelling expenses. When it was gone, they said, I would have to get some more, if I wanted to go on trav
elling.’

  Beckett studied first the English, then the French, then back and forth another time, his wire-framed glasses pushed back into the thick shock of graying hair, squinting, then shaking his head. My heart, to coin a phrase, sank. Clearly my rendition was inadequate. But I was wrong; it was the original that displeased him. ‘You can’t translate that,’ he said, referring to a passage further along, ‘it makes no sense.’ More squinting and cross-checking produced a more optimistic report. ‘That’s good,’ he murmured. ‘Those first few sentences read very nicely indeed. But what would you think if we used the word ‘clothed’ instead of ‘dressed’? They clothed me and gave me money.’ Do you like the ring of that better?’

  Yes, clearly, ‘clothed’ was the better word.

  ‘In the next sentence,’ he said, ‘you’re literally correct. In French I spelled it out, said “travelling expenses” alright. But maybe we can make it a bit tighter here, just say something like “it was to get me going”, or “it was to get me started”. Do you like either of them at all?’ On we went, phrase by phrase, Beckett praising my translation as a prelude to shaping it to what he really wanted, reworking here a word, there an entire sentence, chipping away, tightening, shortening, always finding not only le mot juste but the phrase juste as well, exchanging the ordinary for the poetic, until the prose sang. Never, I am sure, to his satisfaction, but certainly to my ear. Under Beckett’s tireless wand, that opening passage became:

  ‘They clothed me and gave me money. I knew what that money was for, it was to get me started. When it was gone I would have to get more, if I wanted to go on.’