Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Read online

  During those several (for me) edifying sessions, Beckett was often visibly suffering, for revisiting a text he had left behind some years before, and from which he had progressed to other levels and other considerations, was clearly painful. Finally, during one of our afternoon sessions, in response to a particularly long moment of despair on his part, I blurted: ‘But Mr Beckett, don’t you realize what an important writer you are? Why, you’re a thousand times more important than … than Albert Camus, for example!’ Grasping for superlatives, I had lighted on the contemporary French writer who at the time was world famous. At that youthfully enthusiastic but obviously outlandish declaration, Beckett gazed compassionately across at me, his hawk-like features mirroring a response halfway between disbelief and despair. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying, Dick,’ he said, shaking his head sadly. ‘No one’s interested in this … this rubbish,’ and he gestured contemptuously toward the untidy pile of manuscript pages on the table. ‘Camus,’ he laughed. ‘Why, Camus is known even on the moon!’

  Beckett’s sincere self-deprecation saddened me, for if there was one conviction I had held unfailingly since my initial encounter with Beckett’s work, it was that, sooner or later, the world would catch up with and give due recognition to this great man. Yet it was not as though his negative assessment of his work was based solely on his own predilection for pessimism. After all, the man had been writing incessantly since he was twenty-two, and here he was pushing fifty with no more than a handful of friends and fanatics like ourselves caring about his work.

  When we had finally finished ‘The End’ to his satisfaction, Beckett asked me - to my surprise but none the less pleasure, for a vote of confidence from him restored in large measure the humbling experience of our joint endeavour - if I would translate another story, ‘L’Expulsé’, ‘The Expelled’. I hesitated. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to do it yourself?’ I ventured. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t.… I simply couldn’t. No, it’s a great help, Dick, believe me.’ So I said I would, and did.

  What neither of us knew during those long - and for me privileged - autumn afternoons was that Beckett’s life was about to change, and change dramatically, for his second play, long kept from the boards by whims of fate and theatrical mishaps, was about to open early the following year, propelling him suddenly to the fame he deserved and changing his life, public and private, for ever. Aptly titled for a man who had waited so long, it was called first Waiting, then altered, finally, to Waiting for Godot.

  Patrick Bowles on Beckett in the Early 1950s

  Patrick Bowles (1927-95), seen here (seated reading) with Jane Lougee and Christopher Logue, Paris, c 1953. He lived in Paris in the early 1950s and published fiction and poetry mostly in Points, The Paris Review and Merlin. He translated a number of European writers, including Heinrich Boll and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, as well as Samuel Beckett. He worked intensively with Beckett for fifteen months on the translation into English of Beckett’s novel, Molloy.

  [We reprint here some of the most interesting extracts from the long essay which was originally published in PN Review, 96, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 24-38 and has been largely ignored in Beckett criticism. This fascinating memoir, which describes some of Bowles’ many meetings with Beckett and the subject of their conversations, reveals, along with the notes of Lawrence E. Harvey printed in the next chapter, how intently Beckett thought about his work and his role as a writer. Bowles’ own later additions to his notes made on his meetings with Beckett are marked with decorated brackets { }. Editorial explanations continue to appear between square brackets [ ].]

  TUESDAY. SEPT. 15, 1953

  He talks of his books as if they were written by someone else. He said that it was the voice to which he listened, the voice one should listen to. ‘There are many things I don’t understand in my books. “Rien n’est plus réel que le rien.” [Nothing is more real than nothing.] They are a positive statement of a negative thing’.

  He said he tried to get to the core of it, without all this superfluity, etc. He said he was horrified at the fact that one could not open one’s mouth without some falsity coming out. There was a continual protest at the things one’s voice, one’s mouth, said. Finally his books become no more than the mouth speaking, then the voices, coming from one cannot tell where.

  But the ‘summary’ of it is in this brief Democritan statement [i.e. ‘Nothing is more real than nothing’] which cannot be explained; it is an intuition one has and is, when one has it, as incontrovertible, I think he meant, as it is non-explicable. […]

  Suddenly realize that I began translating Molloy in July ‘53 and now it is January 26 1954, and the damned thing is only half finished.

  {One reason for the translation taking so much time was that it was not a translation as that term is usually understood. It was not a mere matter of swapping counters, of substituting one word for another. It was as far apart from machine translation as one could imagine. Time and again Beckett said that what we were trying to do was to write the book again in another language - that is to say, write a new book. When we were stuck for a word or a phrase he would ask, ‘what have you got there?’, and I would read out my draft. Then he would ask, ‘what does it say?’ Meaning the original, as if he had not written it himself. Until we produced a phrase that he found acceptable.} […]

  ‘My writing is pre-logical writing. I don’t ask people to understand it logically, only to accept it.’

  We often talked of what he could possibly do or say afterwards. {Because he seemed to have taken both his thought and his style so far, they were at a dead end. However, he did go on.}

  ‘Perhaps if I’d done it in English instead of French I’d have been able to take it more slowly, without missing so many of the details, leaving so many gaps. And yet in French, without all the old associations English has for me, I was able to get at it more clearly, the outlines were clearer.’

  {I have often been asked why Beckett did not translate Molloy into English himself, and I also once asked him if he would not have preferred to do it alone - our method of work was extremely taxing, to put it mildly - and he replied that not having spoken or worked in English for seventeen years he felt out of touch with the language and wanted to work with an English writer for a while so as to feel his way back into the language. Beckett’s way of speaking French was very French (unlike Joseph Conrad’s English, for example).} […]

  On the importance of spirit

  NOVEMBER 10, 1955

  Talking of the ‘contemporary malaise’, ‘It has been the malaise of all time,’ Beckett said. ‘People are not in touch with their spirit. What counts is the spirit,’ he said with great emphasis. ‘I cannot see it historically,’ he said, differing in a way from myself.

  I had said that philosophy had to be seen as the development of ideas, from one man to the next. We changed subjects, of course, and were talking at cross-purposes for a moment, but that does not matter. What is important is the point raised.

  ‘Ninety-nine per cent of people are out of touch with their spirit,’ he said. ‘History, for me, it’s a black-out.’ And he added, ‘All the rest is frills.’

  Then: ‘It’s the extreme that’s important. Only at the extreme can you get to grips with the real problem.’

  He mentioned a scenario written on request (of someone called, I think, Derek Mendel) for ‘a dumb white clown’. [This was the mime, Acte sans paroles I (Act without Words I), written for Deryk Mendel.]

  ‘It’s quite a good idea: when words fail you, you can fall back on silence!’

  The dancer mimes it.

  On language, meaning and meaninglessness

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1955

  Meeting with Beckett. He told me that he once went to hear a lecture by Jung, with a psycho-analyst friend [his own therapist, Wilfred R. Bion]. Jung was describing a young girl he had been treating, when, improvising, he suddenly stopped, thought, then said, ‘Her trouble was, she had never been born.’ She f
elt herself outside life, Beckett explained.

  I had been describing that mysterious point where one seems between the moments of willing to do something, and doing it. Picking up an object, for example. Are the two moments in reality synonymous? Is there in fact no between?

  Yet there often is a ‘between’. ‘I will get out of bed.’ One doesn’t. ‘I will get out of bed.’ And then one does, as if by magic. By magic being what we don’t understand. I told him, one says to someone in a catatonic stupor apparently, ‘Make an effort of will.’ Ridiculous. ‘Make an effort of will.’ Still nothing. One talks, exhorts. Even shakes them. There is no response. When they begin talking lucidly as if their earlier rigidity had never happened, one can never know what made them break the circle, within which they circled. One moment they were in it, then not. Beckett said, ‘It is as if there were a little animal inside one’s head, for which one tried to find a voice; to which one tries to give a voice. That is the real thing. The rest is a game.’

  For Beckett had begun, when we sat down, by saying to me ‘I have been thinking about that phrase of Blanchot you quoted to me, last week.’ (I had said, Blanchot is given to reasoning like this, and cited, ‘Toute philosophie de la non-signification reste sur une contradiction, dès qu’elle s’exprime.’ [‘Every philosophy of non-meaning rests on a contradiction as soon as it expresses itself.’] I had maintained that this was a fallacy; that it confused two levels which should be kept separate, and that, if each were allotted the level proper to it, there was no contradiction involved. On one level, there was the world, futile, ‘meaningless’, a gratuitous confusion. On another level, the level of language, this ‘meaningless’ world of fact could be very clearly described, using the means of language at our disposal so long as we did not lose sight of what our language meant. In fact, two levels, one the world, the other the language of description.)

  Beckett disagreed. There are not two levels, he said. There is only one level. In this sense: for the traditional artist (and here he added that in his opinion painting in the Renaissance tradition was for these reasons a fake) there has been one thing, the world, and the second, language. However, the world, meaningless, cannot be rendered truly in a meaningful language for the very reason that the artist himself is a part of the world, is he not? And for him to render a meaningful account of the world - the conclusion is obvious. There is the contradiction. If he is in the world, as he is, is he not, and if the world is meaningless, or whatever more embracing word you choose (as it is, is it not), then to render the world truly a man must represent himself as a part of this process, this movement of the unmeaningful, in whatever direction it seems to be moving, if any. The point is, he cannot represent himself as outside it, for that is to say at the same time, the world is meaningless (use this word) and at the same time it is not, since I give an account of it.

  I asked him, at this point, if it is meaningless, then it must be so in terms of something else that is meaningful. In terms of what is it meaningless? It cannot be an absolute and universal meaningless-ness, for in that case our judgement that it was meaningless would itself have no meaning; it would be like applying another universal name under which everything was subsumed. And if everything were meaningless, then ‘meaningless’ became a word which, having unrestricted application, was itself (as I understand language) meaningless.

  Within the universe, we perceive divisions, which we name. Within a universe called meaningless, I continue to perceive divisions of the relatively meaningful. What is the meaning of the word, meaningful, under such conditions? Final ends, being unknowable, are undiscussable, their existence is a matter of fancy, we are all free to fancy anything. Passons. No first causes, pas d’horlogerie [no watchmaking]. The significant is reduced to a matter of what can be described, within the limits of our understanding, according to the structure of our language. What then do I feel myself to be? A matter of chance, among other things. There we are, back again, with this difference, that the meaningless is reduced to matters of chance which I describe to the best of my uncertain ability. This is no joke.

  But yes, Beckett says, I know, that is all very well for scientists, and for those who make a game of writing, but if you want to render the world truly, call it chance if you like, you cannot represent yourself as being outside it, you are not, you and I are part of chance and must represent ourselves as blindly immersed in it, for no reason, with no object, by no intention.

  Beckett mentioned that self-immersion going by the name of schizophrenia. When that little far-away inner self and voice that alone is the real, for him, when it is abandoned, forgotten, when the catatonic leaves his stupor and redirects his attention to the outer world of frills and customs and the conventions of verbal clarity, then he has left what is for him the most profound fact of his existence.

  I understand that very well. I said to him it was a kind of eternal malady.

  The one that counts, one of us said, or I thought.

  Why? Because it is there that all the values of the world break down, as they should and must, if one is to see it honestly. The rest is convention. Necessary no doubt but not necessary in reality, only for society. There is no logical necessity about it and furthermore a consciousness of what is unchanging in the human condition can dispense with it. What, particularly, is unchanging? Consciousness, by which I mean the consciousness of consciousness. Not merely the consciousness of some object, but the awareness of being awake, if you like. Leave that for the moment. Rests: where all values are reduced to this arbitrary choice depending only on each man’s particular aims in life for which he can never give more than wistful, ‘persuasive’ reasons, then any thinking man must only see an immense confusion. This confusion, this chaos, is one of his own conduct. It does not seem to me to be connected in any necessary way with the vast movements of the galaxies which, being beyond our control at least for the moment, can only terrify us, or console us, whether or not we think we understand them, and do not concern us so intimately as what we ourselves are personally, inwardly aware of as our own particular dilemma. Between what do we choose, in daily life? No, for that depends on a more primary dilemma. Where is the world? You’re in it. In what world? And what do we mean by world? The world of the personal, inward spirit, perhaps. What do we mean by spirit? Precisely, that consciousness within ourselves of the movement of thought whose subject can be said to be that energy … No, No, No! […]

  NOVEMBER 18, 1955

  Meeting with Beckett. He said: ‘This kind of writing can even kill a man. There are men who have been killed by it.’

  {Some forty years later I can still remember clearly this particular series of meetings and talks, mostly in the evenings at the Café Sélect, Montparnasse, with Beckett attired in his usual grey clothes - grey sports jacket and trousers, grey roll-neck jersey - quiet, lean and thoughtful but by no means humourless.}

  We had concluded that our last talk had ended not in disagreement but misunderstanding. The departure was the phrase of Blanchot - all philosophy of non-meaning rests on a contradiction as soon as it is expressed. I had objected that the contradiction was only apparent. I had understood Beckett to believe that it was real. We had been using these words in different ways. The ‘spiritual dilemma’, in his own words, seems essentially simple. This writing is the only way of living, for those who understand it. What writing? The writing that becomes a part of living. That point at which words break down because, in life, there are wordless situations, that words shatter, or where ‘words fail you’, then, once you admit and understand how it is possible for words to fail you, then you must admit that words are not omnipotent, that there are times when they can be employed with success, and times when their very employment is inappropriate, out of the question; if you like, a ‘contradiction’. But not a contradiction in logic: merely a contradiction of the situation. And therefore here the word contradiction means not contradiction, but denial, disavowal.

  I said, there are times when speech i
s not significant in the sense that the words mean something, merely significant as any other human noise or act is significant. The words then become not symbolic. They are themselves an act, a part of life, as the breaking of a bough from a tree is an act. Beckett agreed.

  Speech must always be contrasted with silence.

  It must always be thought of in relation to silence.

  Scientific language has no relation to silence, in this sense, for the reason that scientific language is essentially concerned with meaning something. The noise the language of a scientist makes when spoken is an irrelevance, it might just as well not be, it could be any other collection of symbols whose only standard and raison d’être is the collection of ‘facts’ to which they refer. Our language, the language of life, on the other hand, very often has as its only function the particular and sometimes very subtle relation it bears to silence.

  When the chaos of the world is apprehended as chaos, we may none the less give expression to it in more or less lucid language. There are many situations which are not susceptible of lucid explanation or description. These can only be suggested, felt after, in obscure and apparently confused language.

  (Beckett was interested in Joyce’s experiments with this so-called language of the night.)

  Jean Martin on the World Première of En attendant Godot

  Jean Martin (1922-), seen here as Lucky (left) with Roger Blin as Pozzo (right) in En attendant Godot, Theatre de Babylone, January 1953. French stage and film actor and a close friend of Beckett and Suzanne, Martin played the roles of Lucky and Clov respectively in the world premieres of En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) and Fin de partie (Endgame) and was directed by Beckett in La dernière bande (Krapp’s Last Tape). Extracts from two interviews with JK.