Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Page 2
125 Ruby Cohn in the early 1960s. (Courtesy of Ruby Cohn)
131 Beckett in 1964. (Photograph by Lütfi Ozkük. Gift of Lütfi Ozkük)
133 Lawrence Harvey, 1968. (Courtesy of Sheila Harvey-Tanzer)
138 Aidan Higgins, 1986. (Photograph by Bill Swainson)
142 Beckett in the Luxembourg Gardens, 1956. (Courtesy of Syracuse University Library)
143 Avigdor Arikha. (Photograph by Gottfried Junker. Courtesy of Avigdor Arikha) 146 Martin Esslin. (Courtesy of Monica Esslin)
148 Beckett at Greystones, 1968. (Courtesy of Valerie Joynt)
152 Eileen O’Casey. (Photograph by Wolfgang Suschitzky. Gift of Wolfgang Suschitzky)
155 Shivaun O’Casey. (Photograph by AlbertMaysles. Gift of AlbertMaysles)
158 Beckett with his cousins, c. 1959. (Courtesy of the Samuel Beckett Estate)
159 Beckett on a seat at Sweetwater Cottage, c. 1959. (Courtesy of the Samuel Beckett Estate)
160 Beckett directing Klaus Herm and Carl Raddatz, 1975. (Photograph by Ilse Buhs/ Remmler. Courtesy of Ullstein Bild)
163 Brenda Bruce as Winnie in Happy Days, 1962. (Photograph by Zoü Dominic Photography)
165 Jocelyn Herbert. (Photograph by Sandra Lousada. Gift of Sandra Lousada)
168 Beckett rehearsing Billie Whitelaw in Footfalls, Royal CourtTheatre, London, 1976. (Photograph by John Haynes)
171 Billie Whitelaw in Footfalls, Royal CourtTheatre, London, 1976. (Photograph by John Haynes.)
173 Billie Whitelaw in Happy Days, Royal CourtTheatre, London, 1979. (Photograph by John Haynes.)
176 Beckett at the Schiller-Theater, Berlin, 1975. (Ilse Buhs/Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich)
177 Boleslaw Barlog. (Photograph by Heinz Küster. Courtesy of Ullstein Bild)
181 Beckett with Ernst Schröder and HorstBollmann, 1967. (Photograph by Heinz Küster. Courtesy of Ullstein Bild)
184 Beckett with Martin Held, 1969. (Photograph by Ilse Buhs. Courtesy of Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich)
187 Beckett with Eva-Katharina Schultz, 1971. (Photograph by Ilse Buhs. Courtesy of Ullstein Bild)
190 Walter Asmus. (Courtesy of Walter Asmus)
193 Klaus Herm in ThatTime. (Photograph by Ilse Buhs. Courtesy of Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich)
195 Rick Cluchey in Krapp’s LastTape, 1977. (Courtesy of Rick Cluchey)
198 Beckett with members of the San Quentin Drama Workshop, 1984. (Courtesy of Lawrence Held)
200 Alan Mandell. (Courtesy of Alan Mandell)
204 Lawrence Held as Estragon in Waiting for Godot, 1984. (Photograph by Daniel Fogel. Courtesy of Lawrence Held)
208 Bud Thorpe as Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, 1984. (Photograph by Daniel Fogel. Courtesy of Bud Thorpe)
212 Beckett in Berlin. (Photograph by Heinz Küster)
214 Duncan Scott. (Courtesy of Bernadette Scott)
220 Beckett with Gottfried Büttner. (Courtesy of Gottfried Büttner)
225 Beckett on the set of Film, New York, 1964. (Photograph by I.C. Rapoport)
226 Beckett in the 1960s. (Jay Levy)
227 Beckett with Alan Schneider, Paris, 1956. (Courtesy of Syracuse University Library)
229 Edward Albee. (Photograph by Jerry Speier. Courtesy of Edward Albee)
232 Paul Auster. (Courtesy of Paul Auster and Faber and Faber)
235 Jessica Tandy. (Courtesy of Susan Cooper-Cronyn)
238 Hume Cronyn. (Photograph byEditta Sherman. Courtesy of Susan Cooper-Cronyn)
242 Frederick Neumann in his adaptation of Worst ward Ho, 1986. (Photograph by Thomas Victor. Courtesy of Frederick Neumann)
247 Samuel Beckett at the Royal Court Theatre, London, 1973. (Photograph by John Haynes; gift of John Haynes)
249 James Knowlson. (Photograph by Rolf Kruger)
255 S.E. Gontarski. (Courtesy of S.E. Gontarski)
262 Charles Krance. (Courtesy of Charles Krance)
268 Michael Rudman. (Photograph by John Haynes. Courtesy of Michael Rudman)
272 Jan Jonson. (Photograph by Beppe Arvidsson. Gift of Beppe Arvidsson)
277 Spoon Jackson and Twin James in Waiting for Godot, San Quentin Prison. (Photograph by Beppe Arvidsson)
280 Anthony Minghella. (Photograph by Brigitte Lacombe. Courtesy of Anthony Minghella)
288 Jay Levy, Samuel Beckett, Stuart Levy. (Photograph courtesy of Jay Levy
292 Antoni Libera. (Courtesy of Antoni Libera)
294 RobertScanlan. (Courtesy of Robert Scanlan)
300 Raymond Federman. (Courtesy of Raymond Federman)
305 Beckett in 1985. (Photograph by Hugo Jehle. Courtesy of the Historisches Archiv, Stuttgart)
307 Grace West. (Courtesy of Terence West)
Preface
Most tribute volumes necessarily focus on the later years of their subject’s life, especially when that life has been a long one and when the number of those who are still alive to remember the early years is very small. With this book, published to commemorate the centenary of Samuel Beckett’s birth in 1906, we have, however, been able to portray Beckett at many different periods of his life: as a child, a youth, a student, a reluctant teacher and lecturer, a struggling young writer, a member of a British Special Operations Executive cell in Paris during the Second World War, then working with a French Resistance group in the south of France.
In the post-war period, his contemporaries speak of Beckett as the author of the famous novel trilogy (Molloy, Mahne Dies, The Unnamable) and of the play, Waiting for Godot, which had worldwide success in the 1950s (all first written in French); and, finally, friends write of him in physical decline and old age. This wide range of reminiscences is made possible because interviews with members of Beckett’s family, his friends and his colleagues were recorded over ten years ago while I was preparing a biography of Beckett entitled Damned to Fame.* So, although many of the interviewees are now dead, their memories have not been lost with them and can now be included alongside the tributes of the living in the present book, a companion volume to that biography.
A biographer draws on reminiscences of his subject from such personal sources, along with much other written material, especially correspondence, but must necessarily select, filter, as well as reject so many of these memories. And, later, he or she may well come to regret, as I did on a number of occasions, not using a particular quotation or a telling detail. For things tend to come to light that throw into new prominence something which at the time appeared unimportant. None the less, I hesitated for several years before concluding that a book which offers the unmediated words of the speakers not only has a distinct fascination of its own but also adds new elements to what is already known about Beckett. Of course, the material still has to be selected, shaped and edited. Yet the personality of the speaker comes through very vividly when his or her words do not have to be paraphrased, summarized or integrated into a complex narrative. For that reason we have deliberately chosen to leave the interviews in their viva voce form.*
Quite different views of the man and the writer can be set alongside each other in an oral record in a way that is much more difficult to achieve in a biography. The widely divergent views of Beckett as a lecturer by his former students at Trinity College, Dublin are a case in point. Their opinions were solicited since the publication of my biography and are published here for the first time. Some regarded him as brilliant; others found him bored and boring. In other chapters, those interviewed stress the human traits of a man whom in many cases they knew long before he ever achieved any measure of success.
Alongside these earlier interviews, we also invited a number of Beckett’s friends and those who had worked with him over the years to set down their memories of him. Several writers (e.g. Edward Albee, Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, Aidan Higgins, Antoni Libera, Raymond Federman) also speak of his work and of the impact that it had on their own writing. We should stress that it would not have been possible to include the memories of all of Beckett’s surviving friends. This is necessarily a selection.
To take only the example of his publishers, Barney Rosset and John Calder have already spoken about him in their own writing or have given interviews concerning their friendship or collaboration. We also did not want to compete with another book of tributes, Beckett at 100, being prepared by John Calder.
Our criterion was rather to seek out those who could speak about him at different points in his life or who could illuminate different elements of his personality. It seemed important for instance to reflect his hypersensitivity to pain and suffering and to point to the significance of this in his writing. We also needed to reflect the depth and intensity of his thinking about life, art and language and the relations that exist between them. The remarkable notes of Patrick Bowles and Lawrence E. Harvey on their own conversations with Beckett satisfy these demands better than most.
In the specially commissioned pieces, contributors were given the freedom to write whatever they wanted but, in order to focus the mind, were asked to limit themselves to about 2,000 words. The only one to whom this rule did not apply was Beckett himself. For the writer gave so few interviews during his lifetime that to possess a whole set of verbatim talks with him, especially ones in which he is speaking about his personal life, is unusual, perhaps even unique. In Part I of this volume, we publish then much fuller, more coherent versions of interviews which were quoted only partially in my biography of Beckett. In the interviews, he speaks interestingly about his family, his early youth, his friendship with James Joyce and the Joyces, his psychotherapy in the 1930s, his work as a liaison officer in the Resistance, his escape from the Gestapo and his life in hiding throughout the rest of the war in Roussillon in the Vaucluse. Sadly, he died before we could progress very far beyond the war in our conversations. Parts of different interviews are merged but never altered. The practice followed with all the interviews is simply to remove the interviewer’s questions and to allow the interviewee to speak uninterrupted. Whenever something appears unclear, the editors add the necessary information in square brackets.
For this commemorative volume we have also sought out new or unusual photographs not just of Beckett himself but of family or friends who played a significant part in his life. We thank here the descendants of such friends and colleagues who have hunted through their trunks and boxes for surviving photographic records, occasionally coming up with some surprises, even a few treasures.
Finally, a few years ago, I was contacted by Mrs. Grace West (née McKinley), one of Beckett’s former students at Trinity College, Dublin in 1930-1, who had kept all her notes on his university lectures on the plays of Jean Racine. With the kind agreement of her son, Terence West, it seemed appropriate to end this book with the thoughts of the 24-year-old lecturer Samuel Beckett on a dramatist who mattered a lot to him at the time and whose own later theatrical development was to be influenced by his meditations on the theatre of that dramatist. Here, as elsewhere in the book, our main object has been to give more substance and significance than is usual in a tribute volume.
James Knowlson, May 2005
* James Knowlson Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett (London, Blooms-bury Publishing and New York, Simon and Schuster, 1996, reissued by Grove Atlantic, 2004.)
*All of the interviews recorded in French are translated by the editors.
Part I
Beckett Remembering
1
The Young Samuel Beckett
Family photograph. Left to right Molly Roe (cousin); Samuel Beckett on his aunt’s knee; Frank Beckett (brother); Aunt Rubina Roe; Sheila Roe (cousin); Annie Roe (grandmother), c. 1910.
Biography, 1906-27
Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-89) was born on Good Friday, 13 April 1906 in the prosperous Irish village of Foxrock, County Dublin.
His mother was Maria (known as May) Beckett née Roe (1871-1950), the daughter of a once-wealthy mill-owner in New bridge, County Kildare. His father, William Frank Beckett (1871-1933) was a quantity surveyor in the Dublin firm of Beckett and Medcalf and the son of a prosperous firm of master builders. His brother, who was almost four years older than Samuel, was Frank Edward.
The family was descended on both sides from solid middle-class, Protestant, Anglo-Irish stock with, on his father’s side, a distinct musical and artistic strain: grandmother Beckett and an aunt and an uncle were musical, Aunt Cissie also being a painter. But neither of Beckett’s parents was in the least intellectual or artistic.
Sam Beckett was a fearless, adventurous boy who showed as much prowess for sport at school and university as he did for literature and foreign languages. He went to private schools; first to a prep school, Earlsfort House, in Dublin, then to Portora Royal School, Oscar Wilde’s old school, in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, where Beckett’s brother, Frank, was already a boarder and where Sam swam, boxed and played cricket and rugby for the school teams.
Beckett entered Trinity College, Dublin in 1923 and read French and Italian in the Modern European Literature course, also studying English literature during his first two years at university. He was deeply influenced by the presence, the lectures and the writings of his professor, Thomas Brown Rudmose-Brown, who inspired in him a love of the poetry of Ronsard, Scève, Petrarch and the theatre of Racine and introduced him to the work of many modern French poets. He also took Italian lessons from a private tutor, Bianca Esposito, with whom he studied Dante’s Divina Commedia.
Home
Samuel Beckett* We lived in a very chic kind of suburban setting. My father built the house [‘Cooldrinagh’]. There were other houses there already, but it never became particularly populated: a very few big houses. It had a back entrance from a lane. The main entrance was, I remember, an iron gate that we opened to let the car [a Delage] through. There was a big comfortable kitchen with a pantry, a scullery and a larder. It had a red floor, a big range, and, outside it, a big yard, with a coal hole where the coal was kept and, a bit beyond it, a henhouse, for bantam hens. A little further on, outside, was the greenhouse where my father grew tomatoes. We knew all our neighbours.
Beckett’s family home, ‘Cooldrinagh’.
There were two servants. They slept at the top of the house. Frank and I had a room on the same floor as the two maids. I don’t know much about them. They mostly stayed in the kitchen. Every night they climbed the steep stair to their little room.* One of them was called Mary Farren. She stayed with my mother after my father’s death. My mother later moved into ‘New Place’. I think Mary moved and stayed with her. Frank and I had one room which we shared - in the attic. There was a place with the water tank, where the water supply was stored and went through. Frank turned this into a workshop. He used to shut himself up there and make things: you know, wood and so on.
Sheila Page (cousin)† We lived on the first floor and the boys were on the top floor. We had rooms on the same floor as Aunt and Nunc (I used to call him ‘Nunc’). We just fooled about as young people would. We played a lot of tennis and were on bicycles all the time. They had a funny little spinney and we made tents there of branches and leaves that covered them. And we put a rug on it and used to read stories out there. And we used to play bridge - a sort of children’s version of bridge, of course. Sam’s bridge as an older man was incredible by the way. My sister Molly, my husband, Donald, and Sam and I used to play. We all played bridge. You’d deal out the cards, and normally you’d sort them out. But Sam would shuffle them, not put them in order. Yet he still knew where all the cards were. It was extraordinary.
Samuel Beckett as a boy, c.1910.
Frank Beckett, Sam’s older brother, c.1910.
I think he taught me to play chess, too, as I recall. We used to do those sorts of things. He played chess a lot with Frank. And we used to do jigsaws. We had a playroom, a sort of nursery, at ‘Cooldrinagh’. I remember Aunt used to read us stories. Not necessarily at bedtime but, you know, sitting around. Oh yes, the most tear-jerking things. One was called ‘Froggy’s Little Brother’, I remember. I always wept solemn tears over that. You
know, they were soppy sort of yarns.
Family
Samuel Beckett They were born in the same year, my father and mother, in 1870 [in fact it was 1871]. My father died in 1933 and my mother died seventeen years later. She was seventeen years a widow. In fact, she hardly left off mourning for the whole time, in the little house, ‘New Place’, when she left ‘Cooldrinagh’.
She was very fond of dogs. The first dog I remember we had at home was a Collie. That was when I was very small. My father couldn’t bear cats. He couldn’t be in the same room as a cat. So we never had a cat. But he loved dogs and we had a whole series of Kerry Blue terriers. They were terrible fighters. They were used for so-called sports in the west coast of Ireland. ‘Drawing the badger’, they called it. The badger was put in the closed end of a tunnel or big pipe and they’d send the dog in to draw the badger out. They were both ferocious beasts. And as often as not the dog was defeated in this horrible concern.
One of Beckett’s dogs.
The Kerry Blues were beautiful animals. But you’d go out for a walk with one and he’d see another dog and attack it. There was the bitch and the dam and the grannie. I’ve remembered their names. Bumble was the first, the bitch, then there was Badger, Wolf and Mac: all Kerry Blues. I remember going on long walks with Badger. I’ll tell you an anecdote about my mother and dogs. My father was alive at that time. He was sleeping. She was awake. And there was the sound of a dog barking in the distance, barking, barking, barking. She got up in the middle of the night and went out and tracked down where the dog was by the bark; she followed the bark. It was in the garden of a family called Goode about five hundred yards from the house. She got into the garden somehow and found this unfortunate dog in a trap, trapped. And she released the dog.