B. S. Johnson
A lot of the trouble [in understanding him] begins with a failure to place Samuel Beckett in his tradition: in spirit he belongs with Petronius, Rabelais, Cervantes, Nashe, Burton, and Sterne. As with the latter, admiration or loathing of him is an indication of whether the reader is really interested in the novel as a form, or merely in being told a story. Thus to try to understand Beckett in terms of ‘the great tradition’ or of a main contemporary one which would include Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, and Elias Canetti, for example, is as useless as to try to compare Tristam Shandy with Clarissa Harlowe. [The Spectator, 23 November 1962, quoted by Jonathan Coe in his outstanding biography, Like a Fiery Elephant. The Story of B.S. Johnson, London/Basingstoke/Oxford, Picador, 2004, p. 127.]
Robert Pinget
Generosity, humour, intelligence, superb erudition. It didn’t matter what came up, he knew it all. An elephant’s memory, he said of himself. I should stress too his horror of lies. As for his generosity, he shared the Nobel prize money out among his needy friends. With the cheque to Roger Blin he tucked in this note ‘Neither thanks nor “no”.’
He pursued his work right up to the end, trying to remove all trace of rhetoric, until he reached the threshold of silence with Stirrings Still [Beckett’s last prose work]. As for his despair, it was the very [main]spring of his art. ‘Hold tight to your despair and make it sing for us’, he wrote to me when we were just getting to be friends. His despair hid something which he wanted to keep for ever quiet and which had to do with his great compassion for human suffering. He expressed it in such a way that everyone can interpret it as he sees fit. Open revolt or humble submission. That paradox was and remains his noblest and best-kept secret. [From Eonta I, 1991, pp. 9-10.]
E. M. Cioran
9 September 1968. The other day I noticed Beckett along one of the footpaths in the Luxembourg Gardens, reading a newspaper in a way that reminded me of one of his characters. He was seated in a chair, lost in thought, as he usually is. He looked rather unwell. I didn’t dare approach him. What would I say? I like him so much but it’s better that we not speak. He is so discreet! Conversation is a form of play-acting that requires a certain lack of restraint. It’s a game which Beckett wasn’t made for. Everything about him bespeaks a silent monologue.
21 April 1969. Beckett wrote to me about my book, Démiurge, ‘In your ruins I find shelter’.
18 May 1970. At a rehearsal of La dernière bande, when I said to Mme. B [Beckett] that Sam was truly despairing and that I was surprised that he was able to continue, to ‘live’, etc., she replied, ‘There’s another side to him.’ This answer applies, on a lesser scale to be sure, to myself as well.
21 August 1970. Last night, Suzanne B. told me that Sam wasted a ridiculous amount of time with second-rate people, whom he helped with their problems. When I asked where this peculiar solicitude could have come from, she told me that it was from his mother, who loved to comfort the sick and to care for hopeless wretches, but who turned away from them when they had recovered or were out of trouble. [Three entries from Cioran’s Cahiers 1957-1972, translated by Thomas Cousineau. First appeared in The Beckett Circle, Spring 2005, vol. 28, no. 1, p. 5.)
Even if he were like his heroes, even if he had never known success, he would still have been exactly the same. He gives the impression of never wanting to assert himself at all, of being equally estranged from notions of success and failure … Amenity does not exclude exasperation. At dinner with some friends, while they showered him with futilely erudite questions about himself and his work, he took refuge in complete silence. The dinner was not yet over when he rose and left, preoccupied and gloomy … What he cannot tolerate are questions like: do you think this or that work is destined to last? That this or that one deserves its reputation? Of X and Y, which one will survive, which is the greater? All evaluations of this sort tax his patience and depress him. ‘What’s the point of all that?’ he said to me after a particularly unpleasant evening, when the discussion at dinner had resembled a grotesque version of the Last Judgment. [From Partisan Review, 43, 2, 1976.]
Edna O’Brien
He has the reputation of being austere and hermetic, but those who have met him always attest to the mildness and courtesy of the man. On his face, though, you see evidence that must have wrestled for every second of its waking life with the cruelty, crassness and barbarity of mankind. His body by comparison is young, lithe, as if by some happy chance it was freed from the torments of the upstairs department. He is as straight and unassuming as an ash plant and the blue eyes have the particular gaze of an eagle in that they convey both hurt and fury. His searching disposition unwittingly cautions you not to talk cant, not to humiliate him or yourself with intemperate drivel, in fact not to talk at all unless you have something of import to say. But he cannot be called austere, having that particular charm and receptivity that makes you recognize that here at last is a born listener. [From the Sunday Times Magazine, 6 April 1986.]
John Montague
[Montague writes of Beckett’s silences in his early meetings with him, yet his capacity in the right company for wild enjoyment.] I remember very little of what we said, except our seemingly mutual embarrassment. Mr Beckett was painfully shy, shy as an adolescent, twitching, touching things, rearranging objects on the table, a nervous habit of my own, so that it began to look like a game of phantom chess … Since I was not involved in the theatre, I had little or no Green Room gossip. Besides, I stammered, so we found ourselves in the absurd situation of someone who found it hard to speak engaging someone who did not believe in conversation, and certainly not in small talk. Sometimes there were long silences between us, as though we were gazing together down some deep well. [Then, speaking of the transformation effected in Beckett by the presence in Paris of his old Dublin friend A. J. ‘Con’ Leventhal and other Irish friends, Montague writes] … This was a different Beckett, the cockatoo hairdo flaring as he ran excited hands over or through it, the brandy or whiskey flowing (you could not pay for a drink in his company), the severe face crinkling with laughter … There was also his uneasiness at his increasing fame: after the Formentor prize that he shared with Borges, loomed the Nobel, and in some weird way he wanted to be reassured that the home ground was still there, and liked the fellow feeling that our little Irish group [Leventhal, Montague, Peter Lennon, Beckett] provided, where local references did not have to be explained. [From John Montague’s memoirs, Company, A Chosen Life, London, Duckworth, 2001, pp. 127-8 and 130-1.]
Peter Brook
Beckett at his finest seems to have the power of casting a stage picture, a stage relationship, a stage machine from his most intense experiences that in a flash, inspired, exists, stands there complete in itself, not telling, not dictating, symbolic without symbolism. For Beckett’s symbols are powerful just because we cannot quite grasp them: they are not signposts, they are not textbooks nor blueprints - they are literally creations …
Can we define a work of art as something that brings a new ‘thing’ into the world - something we may like or reject, but which annoyingly continues to be, and so for better or for worse becomes part of our field of reference? If so, this brings us back to Beckett. He did just this with two tramps under a tree. The whole world found something vague made visible in that absurd and awful picture. And those parents in the dustbin. [Peter Brook, The Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical Exploration 1946-1987, London, Methuen, 1988, p. 31.]
Jay Levy (left), Samuel Beckett (centre), Stuart Levy (right).
Jay Levy*
Stuart [Jay’s brother, also a scientist] asks Beckett how he decided to write: ‘When there was nothing else left for me to do … I had no money, so I started to write’ is his reply. He does not regard himself as a professional writer, but as a French ‘homme de lettres [a man of letters]’; ‘I write comme ça,’ he says. Stuart gives him several articles on science, but Beckett doesn’t have his glasses with him so it is difficult for him to read th
em. Nevertheless, showing a lot of charm and humility, he inquires about experiments in the laboratory. They are both amused by the interchange of their interests in science and the theatre. Beckett offers an explanation for this. The laboratory, he says, is like the theatre. The scientist is the director and the test-tubes are the players: ‘you may predict what will happen, but you do not know exactly how it is going to turn out.’
From time to time, over the years, he would engross me in conversations about my research in France or in the United States. When I first met him in 1961, I was working with Professor Lender at the Faculté de Sciences in Orsay on the regeneration of planaria. When this freshwater flatworm is cut in half, it regenerates its tail or its head, whichever is missing. I kept thinking that Beckett might use this biologic event as some theme for a future literary piece of the ‘absurd’ - but he never surprised me with that. Our discussions on cancer, and later on AIDS, always reflected his great interest in the subjects and his concern for finding solutions to these human diseases. But, most of all, I appreciated him remembering certain details of my scientific work that I had discussed with him even years before. He was able to conceptualize areas of scientific study and to ask provocative questions. [Revised version of an extract from Jay Levy, ‘Conversations with Beckett’, The American Scholar, Winter 1992, pp. 124-31.]
* Dr Jay A. Levy (1938-) Professor in the Department of Medicine and Research Associate at the Cancer Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco, and a leading AIDS researcher.
11
And Finally
In this chapter, three people whom Beckett knew fairly well - his Polish translator Antoni Libera, the American director and academic Robert Scanlan, and the bilingual writer Raymond Federman - write about the impact that Beckett’s death in 1989 (after a lengthy period of ill health with emphysema) had upon them.
Antoni Libera: Beckett’s Blessing
Antoni Libera (1949—). Literary critic, translator and theatre director. He translated many of Beckett’s plays and prose works into Polish. He also directed many of the plays in Poland, England and the USA. His novel, Madame, published in Polish in 1998, which he refers to here had a great critical success when it was published in 2000 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Beckett’s many kindnesses to him during the political upheavals in Poland in the late 1970s and early 1980s are described in Damned to Fame, pp. 639— 41. He still lives and works in Warsaw. Contribution written especially for this volume.
It was early May 1986, in Paris. I had gone there for a literary symposium organized to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Samuel Beckett, for me the most important modern writer, whose work I have translated, annotated and staged in the theatre for many years and with whom I had been in regular contact since the mid-1970s.
According to established tradition, we arranged to meet after the symposium. As usual, Beckett suggested the Café Français at the Hotel PLM, which stood opposite his home on the boulevard St Jacques. I arrived slightly early and sat down at the table we had occupied the last time we’d met there, a few years before. Beckett arrived with his typical punctuality, at 12.00 on the dot, not a second later. To a meeting that wasn’t connected with any creative plans or projects he usually came ‘empty-handed’, as he liked to put it. This time he was holding a small book, which turned out to be an old, very well-thumbed copy of Effi Briest by Teodor Fontane.
Beckett’s close friends and those who are experts on his work will know that it was one of his favourite novels, which he often went back to and which he also referred to in his writing. ‘Let us hasten home’, says Mr Rooney to his old wife in the radio play All That Fall, ‘and sit before the fire. We shall draw the blinds. You will read to me. I think Effi is going to commit adultery with the Major.’ And in Krapp’s Last Tape, as he’s making his recording, old Krapp muses: ‘Effi … Could have been happy with her, up there on the Baltic, and the pines, and the dunes’ - because the action of the novel takes place near Stettin - a city which now, as Szczecin, belongs to Poland.
I too was aware of all these references, and so towards the end of the conversation, when the legendary silence, which anyone who ever met the writer may well have encountered, had descended on the little café table, I asked timidly:
‘Are you reading Effi again?’
Paraphrasing a line of Krapp’s he answered:
‘Yes … a page a day, scalding the eyes out of me.’
‘With tears again?’ I said, picking up the thread of the quotation.
He gave a wan smile.
‘No, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.’
I plucked up the courage to ask the vital question:
‘Why do you like that novel so much?’
There was a long pause before I got an answer.
‘I used to dream of writing something like it. And I still have a bit of that dream left. But I never did. I never did write it …’ He broke off.
‘You never did write it …’ I brazenly tried to drag the words out of him.
Another wan smile, and then, unfolding his hands, he said:
‘For … I was born too late. No one writes like that nowadays. Nowadays one writes much worse.’ He glanced at me and added jokingly: ‘But don’t worry. The world is changing. Perhaps you’ll manage it.’
That was my last meeting with Beckett. After that we only spoke on the phone. He died in December 1989.
When a few years later I decided to write my own novel, I never planned to follow in the footsteps of my master. My aspirations were far more modest than that. However, I did want him to appear in some way within my book (like Hitchcock in his own films), and I already had a few ideas on how to create such a phantom appearance. And then suddenly I remembered that final meeting in Paris and the words he’d spoken towards the end. But of course! I thought. That’s exactly how I should start!
And that indeed is the origin of the first line of my novel.
When in 1999 the novel was being translated into English, I added one more touch.
Beckett had an extraordinary ear for music and poetry, and retained in his memory all sorts of phrases and entire poems that were notable for their special beauty and metre. One of these quotations was the famous line from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (an extract of which he had translated into French in his youth), describing the circular Vico Road in Dalkey, south of Dublin.* It is written in iambic metre and goes like this: ‘The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.’
I told my English translator about this, quoted the line from Joyce and asked her to try to render the first line of my novel in the same metre. And so she did. The first line reads: ‘For many years I used to think I had been born too late.’
I am sure, when I think about it now, that I owe Madame’s success to a large extent to Beckett’s ‘blessing’ and to his spirit, which was watching over everything.
Robert Scanlan: Indeflectible Courtesy
Robert Scanlan (1943—) is currently Professor of the Practice of Theatre at Harvard University. He has specialized throughout his directing career in the work of Samuel Beckett. In 1995, he won the Boston Theatre Award for Outstanding Director for his production of three Beckett plays at the American Repertory Theatre, where for many years he was the Literary Director and where he headed the Dramaturgy and the Playwriting Programs for the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training. He is a past president of both the Samuel Beckett Society and the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a current member of its board of directors. Contribution written especially for this volume.
It was Samuel Beckett who first clued me in about Bushmill’s. It is not typical in Paris to drink hard liquor, but he cared for the ceremony of offering whiskey, and he knew I enjoyed it. Beckett also pointed out to me that Bushmill’s - in contradistinction to Jameson’s - was ‘protestant whiskey’ - neither here nor there in any of our subsequent discussions, but a fact that he must have figured might account for my unfamiliarity with
the mark. ‘Orange in the bottle, you see.’ I gathered he distinctly preferred it, and I drink it still in memoriam. I am raising a glass to him here, in spirit, for what I am writing is nothing but a wistful gesture of salutation anticipating the occasion that would have been his hundredth birthday … hundredth birthday! ‘Spared that’, ‘tender mercies’, und so weiter…
Reaching eighty-three was a long enough journey for him. By the time I met him, he had long since come to terms with Arnold Geulincx’s second ethical obligation ‘Not to go - leave one’s station - until bidden’, and he was a profound adept of the difficult precept of the seventh: ‘To accept being here.’ This last requires - in anyone - a certain kind of humility: contemptus negativus sui ipsius, according to Geulincx. Beckett led a lot of us to pay a lot more attention to the obscure (and forgotten) seventeenth-century theologian (and disciple of Descartes) than he probably meant to. But the whole latter half of the twentieth century has been following assiduously one or another of Beckett’s ingenious leads into the contemptus negativus, in innumerable fields. The precept is not as bad as it sounds. Factoring down to essentials is a survival skill of our times, when authenticity and truthful courage are everywhere under siege. You don’t have to throw rocks at yourself to achieve the leverage the precept delivers, and it is a necessary attribute for enduring ‘it all’. Astonishing ambition, really - to endure it all to the last. Beckett’s late work is all constructed around this patient outlasting, eyes wide open. Many have sensed (and said aloud) that Beckett’s serenity towards the end resembled the patience of a saint. He certainly grew infallible in striking off masterpieces, and those are still with us and will outlast us, as they have him. Yet as I recall and revisit my precious face-to-face sessions with Samuel Beckett - fewer than one a year during the abbreviated decade of the 1980s - I perceive how vastly I learned in his presence (the Swedenborgian term ‘vastations’ comes to mind … the visitation of vasts). The essence of that learning was in the ineffable aura of his calm, his patient, persistent leads, his shared silences and his infinite kindness. How he cared that we get the plays right! And how he loved the persistent, systematic work of getting things firmly understood. But it seems strange to recall how I felt, above all, vastly at peace near him. We were focused and discoursed freely, even volubly at times (he could be charmingly funny), but his indeflectible courtesy carries the day in my recollections now.
Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Page 28
