Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Page 14

  During the course of my research on Beckett, I listed what seemed to me errors in the Grove Press editions, but after reading Beckett’s novel Watt, I became unsure that these were printing errors, rather than authorial subversions. I therefore wrote to Grove Press with a list of eight errors in the novel, Watt, fourteen errors in Molloy, and a mere four errors in Malone Dies. I was informed that Grove Press would ask Mr Beckett, who soon replied that my list was virtually a compilation of errors. Only after I made Beckett’s acquaintance did I learn how punctilious he was about reading proofs, and perhaps I made Beckett’s acquaintance because I was punctilious about reading texts.

  Once my dissertation was complete, but not yet published, I summoned the courage to write to Beckett directly, c/o Les Editions de Minuit, his French publisher, but I wrote in English. I informed Beckett that I would be in Paris during the summer of 1962 and, although I knew that he never granted interviews, it would be a privilege to meet him, and I promised not to ask him to interpret his work. Beckett replied - in what I later learned to recognize as his company handwriting that was quite legible. He would call for me at my hotel at 8 p.m. on 23rd June, if I was free to dine with him. I was stupid enough not to save that first letter, but I well remember that my hotel was on the rue Casimir-Delavigne in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. At 8 o’clock I waited in the hotel lobby, for there was no telephone in my frugal room. At 8.15, I was still waiting in the lobby. By 8.30, I wondered whether Beckett had second thoughts about meeting a stranger, for I had read about his shyness. It was nearly 9 o’clock when Beckett rushed into the hotel lobby. I recognized him at once from his picture on the Grove Press editions, and I introduced myself - in English. He mumbled that he had mistakenly driven to the rue Casimir-Périer in the 7th arrondissement, instead of the rue Casimir-Delavigne in the 5th. Only later was I to learn how prompt he always was, and how rarely he found himself in the wrong place.

  In spite of that inauspicious start, I date my friendship with Samuel Beckett from that evening in June 1962. The evening began suitably with silence. He was shy, and I was intimidated. We got into his 2 Chevaux [Citroën] and drove the short distance to the Closerie des Lilas. He asked whether I would have a coupe, and, not knowing what it was, I replied, ‘If you’re having one.’ Only afterwards did I learn that he didn’t like champagne, but thought that was the drink for an American. After the third coupe, we both began to talk, and I could never remember about what. I think we may have also eaten something. What I do remember is Beckett telling me to be sure to write him whenever I was coming to Paris. I didn’t have to be told twice. Thereafter we met at least once a year, up to and including 1989, the year of his death. In the interim he sent me many letters, usually complaining about the translation or theatre work in which he was involved. They are now in the Beckett Archive at the University of Reading, founded by Jim Knowlson. Beckett also sent me signed copies of his French books as they were published by Les Editions de Minuit.

  Technically, I kept my promise of not asking him to interpret his work, but I gradually learned which questions would not irritate him. For instance, when I read the phrase ‘the great Cham’ in one of his letters, at our next meeting I asked who that was. Astonished at my ignorance, he explained that it was Dr Samuel Johnson, who had obsessed him for years. Beckett told me ruefully: ‘I bothered all my friends about Dr Johnson for a long time.’ The next morning, on 23 April 1966, to be exact, my Paris hotel concierge informed me that while I was out, a Monsieur had left a package for me. I recognized Beckett’s scrawl on the thick manila envelope, which I took to my room to open. It contained three notebooks full of quotations from and about the works of Dr Samuel Johnson, as well as Beckett’s abortive effort to translate the Dr Johnson-Mrs Thrale relationship to the stage. Even after a single rapid glance, I knew that such a treasure should not be in my private possession. I rushed to a post office to telephone Beckett - in the 1960s he could still be reached by telephone. I protested: ‘Sam, I shouldn’t have this; it should go to a library.’ Beckett snapped back: ‘I don’t want it in a library. If you don’t want it, return it to me.’ Again I protested: ‘Oh, I want it; I cherish it.’ Beckett added: ‘I’d rather you didn’t say anything about the wretched thing.’ I did not say anything about the Johnson material for a few years, but when I was writing my book Back to Beckett in the 1970s, I asked Beckett whether I might mention his Johnson research, and he responded: ‘Yes, of course; why not?’ I don’t think I answered that question. Then, in 1980, working on my third Beckett book, I asked Beckett whether I could print his Johnson scene entitled Human Wishes, in which Dr Johnson is awaited and does not appear. Beckett consented readily, without even rereading the material.

  Let me back-track now from 1980 to the summer of 1968. Beckett had written no plays since he completed Play in 1964, and over a glass of wine in a Paris café, I asked whether he had nothing new for the stage. He answered almost angrily: ‘New? What could be new? Man is born - vagitus. Then he breathes for a few seconds, before the death rattle intervenes.’ I may not be quoting Beckett’s exact words, but I remember ‘vagitus’ because it was a new word for me - Latin for crying or squealing. Pushing aside our wine-glasses, Beckett noted on the paper table-cover the timing for his 35 -second play, Breath. I was so saddened by Beckett’s despondency that I never thought to retrieve the paper table-cover. Nor do I know whether that was Beckett’s first spontaneous rendition of his dramaticule, Breath, or whether he had already brooded about it. However, I do not think that he wrote it for Kenneth Tynan in 1969, as is sometimes claimed.

  Beckett’s bleak view of the human condition was expressed in the symmetrical form of Breath, but at other times he despaired of finding form for his sadness. In my appointment books over the years I noted very few of his spoken phrases, but one exception occurs in 1971, when he told me: ‘Being is not syntactical’. Then he remarked that his play, Not I, composed as it is of fragmentary phrases, was released too soon, and he brushed aside my stuttering admiration of that piece.

  My most sustained rapport with Beckett occurred in the winter of 1975, when he allowed me to attend Berlin rehearsals of his production of Warten auf Godot. Not only did I daily watch him in action, but we often walked around Berlin together after rehearsals. In the street, in a museum, in various buildings, he would sometimes stop stock still and listen to people’s footsteps; only the next year would I realize that his listening formed and informed his play, Footfalls. However, Beckett in Berlin could speak as well as listen. To my ears Beckett’s German sounded wonderful, and I once asked him: ‘Is your Italian as good as your German?’ ‘MUCH better,’ he replied. It is the only time I ever heard Beckett boast.

  Rehearsals for the German Godot had already begun when I arrived in Berlin in February 1975, and although I was relatively unfamiliar with the German text, I immediately noticed an addition to the dialogue of the last scene. In the French original and in Beckett’s English translation, Vladimir asks the Boy about the colour of Mr Godot’s beard: ‘Fair or … he hesitates … or black?’ In German Beckett added: ‘Or red?’ After the rehearsal, Beckett asked whether I knew why he had added the third possible colour for Mr Godot’s beard. At that time I still thought foolishly that he might pop out with a reason embedded in Descartes or Kant or Schopenhauer or even Dante, but of course the answer was obvious: ‘To balance the three colours of the whores’ hair in Estragon’s brothel joke.’ It was also Beckett who told me that joke, which I didn’t know.

  Unsolicited by me, Beckett offered the information about Mr Godot’s beard, so I dared to ask him why he had made Atlas the son of Jupiter in Pozzo’s mockery of Lucky: ‘Atlas, son of Jupiter!’ His eyebrows went up: ‘Isn’t he the son of Jupiter?’ Pedantically, like the academic I now was, I taught Beckett that Atlas and Jupiter were brothers, and not father and son in Greek mythology. When next rehearsed, Atlas had become the son of Iapetus. That’s my contribution to Godot, so I’ve come Beckettianly full circle.

 
; * Many instances of the friendship, close co-operation and mutual debt of Beckett and Lindon are described in Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett.

  * Richard Seaver, ‘Introduction’ I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader, New York, Grove Press, 1976, pp. ix-xlv.

  † Alexander Trocchi (1925-84). In Paris, in 1952, he founded Merlin with Richard Seaver, wrote several novels including Young Adam (1954), Cain’s Book (1961), a collection of stories, The Outsiders (1961), and a collection of poems, Man at Leisure (1972). He also wrote several erotic novels for Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press.

  ‡ For the simple reason that, over the next five decades, those two novels, and indeed all of Beckett’s work, have been probed, dissected, analyzed, subjected to more academic scrutiny than perhaps any other contemporary writer, including Joyce. Often when we met in later years, as Beckett insisted we do whenever my wife and I were in Paris, he bemoaned the ‘ridiculous exegesis’, adding, ‘It’s a wonder, all the things they’re finding I never knew were there myself’(RS)

  * Beckett later changed the title of the first of these stories to ‘La Fin’, ‘The End’.

  * Beckett was the most punctual person I have ever met. He would arrive for an appointment on the dot, and if one was late you could feel the judgement, kind but firm. I erred once, but thereafter always arrived five or ten minutes early, to be on the safe side. (RS)

  * We have included a few of the anecdotes recounted by Woodthorpe about the first British production for the sheer exuberance and delight of his account. They complement Peter Bull’s reminiscences in his book I Know the Face, but …, London, Peter Davies, 1959.

  † ‘He [Beckett] particularly erupted when the Boy at the end of the second act pointed to the heavens when he was asked by Vladimir where Mr. Godot lived’. Alan Schneider, Entrances. An American Director’s Journey. New York, Viking Penguin, 1986, p. 225. In fact there is a problem with Schneider’s reading of the text here, although the gesture itself may have occurred, since Vladimir never puts this question to the boy - in either act. But, in the notes that Beckett sent to Peter Hall, he stressed that Vladimir should adopt a ‘dead numb tone’ at the end of the play, underlining that phrase. Notes reproduced in No Author Better Served. The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 5. It was Hugh Burden, not the original Vladimir, Paul Daneman, whom Beckett saw when he went with Schneider to the Criterion Theatre in London.

  5

  Growing Fame

  Beckett in 1964.

  Biography, 1955-69

  With the success of Waiting for Godot in so many countries and the publication of his novels and later plays in dozens of languages, Beckett’s fame spread fairly quickly. He was the recipient of a number of international awards, most notably the International Publishers’ Prize in 1961 (shared with Jorge Luis Borges), and then the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. This growth in literary celebrity did not, however, make him in the least complacent or satisfied with his achievements and his ways of seeking to express being in both his prose (e.g. Comment c’est [How It Is]) and his drama (e.g. Play [Comédie]) continued to be innovative and radical. (See in particular the notes on his conversations in the early 1960s with Lawrence E. Harvey on the following pages.) He also wrote plays for radio and, later, for television.

  He had taken up important friendships again after the war: with his old friends, the Irish writer and art historian, Tom MacGreevy, and the Trinity College, Dublin lecturer, ‘Con’ Leventhal; with the Dutch painter brothers Geer and Bram van Velde; with the French painter Henri Hayden and his wife, Josette, whom he had first met in Roussillon; and with Georges Belmont, his former student, previously Pelorson. New friendships were also initiated: with the painter Avigdor Arikha; with the composer Marcel Mihalovici and his wife, the concert pianist Monique Haas; with the theatre director Roger Blin, with whom he worked on several productions of his plays; with the script editor at the BBC in London, Barbara Bray, who encouraged him to write for the radio and became first a close friend then a lover, moving to Paris to be near to him; and with numerous actors and directors in Paris, Berlin and London. He also became friendly with a number of writers, broadcasters and thinkers: Robert Pinget; Harold Pinter; Edward Albee; Aidan Higgins; at the BBC, Donald McWhinnie and Martin Esslin; and the Romanian-born philosopher Emil Cioran. He had a remarkable gift for friendship. Some of these friends speak or write about him either in this chapter or later in the book.

  Lawrence E. Harvey on Beckett, 1961-2

  Lawrence E. Harvey (1925-88) was Professor of English at Dartmouth College. He became a very good friend of Beckett in the 1960s when he was preparing his book, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1970. At one time he was considering writing a biography of the writer. These conversations, which took place in Paris in 1961-2 are reproduced by kind permission of Sheila Harvey-Tanzer and the Library of Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, where Harvey’s notes are held. The notes were written down immediately after his meetings with Beckett.

  Being and Form

  Beckett thinks that ‘being’ is constantly putting form into danger. He aspires, he said, to what he recognizes is the impossible task of eliminating form - not just breaking it down or working against it but eliminating it. He said that an ejaculation would perhaps be the most perfect expression of being. In a sense Beckett made clear that he is anti-form, if form is considered to be order. He spoke of having come to feel the need for a disordered form, a broken form. The great task of the artist is to express being and he sees being as a collection of meaningless ‘movements’. Being is chaotic - the opposite of ordered form. He thinks in the antinomy ‘being-form’. He is aware of the paradox of trying to eliminate form when language itself is form, but this viewpoint lies behind his breaking down of the traditional forms of language.

  His vision of man is of inadequacy. Form expresses adequacy; so it must be broken. He realizes that there are techniques of expression but he brushes these aside as being mere trucs [gimmicks], as forms. He mentioned how much greater the unfinished sculptures of Michelangelo are than the completed works like the David. The accent thus falls on the creative act as unfinished, as portraying man’s inadequacy and his flawed nature. I mentioned the themes of exile and Eden in his work. But he felt that these were simply stereotyped literary ideas and over-simplifications. Instead he preferred to speak of just a series of ‘movements’. However, we agreed completely on the idea of man in exile as being inadequate, suffering and disordered.

  Art and Being

  Beckett feels that until now art has sought forms and excluded all aspects of being that there were no forms to fit. ‘If anything new and exciting is going on today, it the attempt to let being into art’, he said, ‘to let in chaos and what is not ordered’.

  He then spoke of depths of being where all is mystery and enigma. ‘We don’t know what our own personality is or what our being is’, he said. (The nostalgia for knowing remains, of course, even in the midst of the despair of ever knowing.)

  The function of the critic - all he can do - is to say ‘There is a poor devil in this situation’. And even if this particular artist in this particular situation is the only one, ‘yet it is still a human situation’. He himself makes no claims to universality and senses the isolation of each individual and the precarious nature of communication. ‘We can’t say this is truth. We can’t even say that this is what is happening in the twentieth century. We don’t know.’ The logic of his position, he appreciates, leads to silence (to anti-form). But he feels none the less a real necessity and an inner urge to write. He must write. He yearns to achieve the freedom so that he has just a ‘white page’ in front of him so that he can write. Instead, as I speak to him, self-translation confronts him.

  He mentioned the tremendous desire to write ‘I’ and yet the impossibility of doing so. He is an artist who yearns to really
portray ‘being’; but he believes that he has merely scratched the surface. However, he believes that someone will someday find a way. He thinks that his best effort to date is Comment c’est (How It Is). He doesn’t think that the theatre is the best medium to do what he is attempting. There are too many conventions (i.e. forms) that must be accepted and that restrict. He thinks that painting being does not lead to doctrine and form but that [Alain] Robbe-Grillet’s negative stand does.*

  [The name of Robbe-Grillet came up again at another time in conversation.] I spoke to him about the Robbe-Grillet/Resnais film Last Year at Marienbad. Beckett feels that Robbe-Grillet has a doctrine; i.e. he has a form [so] that his anti-plot, his anti-character and so on quickly becomes a convention. He felt that the love-story in this film was traditional and banal. It was merely expressed differently. He objected especially to actually seeing the two people on the screen. There is being but individual personality remains a mystery.

  Art = strength, creation, ego, form.

  Man = weakness, surface illusions, words, accumulation/accretion from outside chaos, le néant [nothingness], abortive being.

  But how can these two then be combined? Solution; sometimes it seems like le néant and sometimes it seems like abortive being (Freud). But abortive being is at least something. One should try therefore to discover ‘a syntax of weakness’. The problem is that he feels that he has tried everything. So what now?

  Note; the double sense of le néant [nothingness] and a hard core self (abortive) is well expressed in this passage from The Unnam-able cited by Blanchot, where he is, on the one hand only ‘poussière de verbe’ [dust of words] and, on the other, ‘une chose muette, dans un endroit dur …’ [a wordless thing, … in a hard … place] (‘une cage de bêtes’) [a caged beast … born in a cage].