Dear Mr. Rosset
… In raising the question of the obscenities I simply wished to make it clear from the outset that the only modifications of them that I am prepared to accept are of a kind with those which hold for the text as a whole, i.e. made necessary by the change fro[m] one language to another. The problem therefore is no more complicat[ed] than this: Are you prepared to print the result? I am convinced you will agree with me that a clear understanding on this matter before we set to work is equally indispensable for you, the translato[r] and myself.
Herewith Transition with my translation of fragments from Molloy and Malone.
Yours sincerely
Samuel Beckett
July 31, 1953
New York
Dear Mr. Beckett,
Your translation of Godot did finally arrive. … I like it very much, and it seems to me that you have done a fine job. The long speech by Lucky is particularly good and the whole play reads extremely well.
If I were to make any criticism it would be that one can tell that the translation was done by a person more used to “English” speech than American. Thus the use of words such as bloody—and a few others—might lead an audience to think the play was originally done by an Englishman in English. This is a small point, but in a few places a neutralization of the speech away from the specifically English flavor might have the result of enhancing the French origins for an American reader. Beyond that technical point I have little to say, excepting that I am now extremely desirous of seeing the play on a stage—in any language. …
I read the fragments by you in transition and again I must say that I liked them very much—leading to the continuance of my belief that you would be the best possible translator [for the novels]. I really do not see how anybody else can get the sound quality, to name one thing, but I am willing to be convinced.
By all means, the translation should be done with only those modifications required by the change from one language to another. If an insurmountable obstacle is to appear, let it first appear.
I will look forward to hearing about progress towards a translation.
Yours sincerely,
Barney Rosset
August 4, 1953
New York
Dear Mr. Beckett,
I am putting aside Watt, which I received this morning, to write this letter. Fifty pages poured over me and I will inundate myself again as soon as possible. …
After the sample of Godot went back to you, the first part of Molloy arrived and I was most favorably impressed with it. I remember Bowles’ story in the second issue of Merlin and it does seem that he has a real sympathy for your writing. If you feel satisfied, and find it convenient to work with him, then my opinion would be to tell you to go ahead. Short of your doing the work yourself the best would be to be able to really guide someone else along—and that situation you seem to have found.
Again a mention of words. Those such as skivvy and cutty are unknown here, and when used they give the writing a most definite British stamp. That is perfectly all right if it is the effect you desire. If you are desirous of a little more vagueness as to where the scene is set it would be better to use substitutes which are of common usage both here and in Britain.
I am happy to be reading Watt and I hope to see more of Molloy soon
With best regards,
Barney Rosset
September 1, 1953
6 rue des Favorites
Paris 15me
Dear Mr. Rosset
Thank you for your letters of August 4th and July 31st both received yesterday only and also for the translation from Godot. …
It is good news that my translation of Godot meets with your approval. It was done in great haste to facilitate the negotiations of Mr. Oram and I do not myself regard it as very satisfactory. But I have not yet had the courage to revise it. … I understand your point about the Anglicisms and shall be glad to consider whatever suggestions you have to make in this connexion. But the problem involved here is a far-reaching one. Bowles’s text as revised by me is bound to be quite unamerican in rhythm and atmosphere and the mere substitution here and there of the American for the English term is hardly likely to improve matters, on the contrary. We can of course avoid those words which are incomprehensible to the American reader, such as skivvy and cutty, and it will be a help to have them pointed out to us. In Godot I tried to retain the French atmosphere as much as possible and you may have noticed the use of English and American place-names is confined to Lucky whose own name might seem to justify them.
Yours sincerely
Samuel Beckett
Shortly after this exchange of letters,16 my wife Loly and I went to Paris for the first of many meetings with Sam Beckett. We embarked for Europe on the small but elegant French liner SS Flandre, aboard which I was seasick before we got out of New York Harbor.
As I wrote in an essay published in S. E. Gontarski’s A Companion to Samuel Beckett, my first meeting with Beckett took place at the bar of Le Pont Royale Hotel on Rue Montalembert, almost next door to Gallimard, France’s largest literary publisher: “Beckett came in, tall, taciturn and wearing a trench-coat. He was on his way to another appointment, he announced, and had time only for a single quick drink. ‘He arrived late,’ Loly remembered, ‘looked most uncomfortable, and never said a word except that he had to leave soon. I was pained by his shyness, which matched Barney’s. In desperation, I told him how much I had enjoyed reading Godot. At that, we clicked, and he became warm and fun.’”17
The other appointment forgotten, the three of us went to dinner and to various bars, ending up at Sam’s old hangout, La Coupole, on Boulevard du Montparnasse at three in the morning, with Beckett ordering champagne.
14/12/1953
6 rue des Favorites
Paris 15me
Dear Barney and Loly
Sorry for the no to design you seem to like. It was good of you to consult me. Don’t think of me as a nietman. The idea is all right. But I think the variety of symbols is a bad mistake. They make a hideous column and destroy the cohesion of the page. And I don’t like the suggestion and the attempt to express it of a hierarchy of characters. A la rigueur, if you wish, simple capitals, E. for Estragon, V. for Vladimir, etc., since no confusion is possible, and perhaps no heavier in type than those of the text. But I prefer the full name. Their repetition, even when corresponding speech amounts to no more than a syllable, has its function in the sense that it reinforces the repetitive text. The symbols are variety and the whole affair is monotony. Another possibility is to set the names in the middle of the page and text beneath, thus:
ESTRAGON
I’d rather he’d dance, it’d be more fun.
POZZO
Not necessarily.
ESTRAGON
Wouldn’t it, Didi, be more fun?
VLADIMIR
I’d like well to hear him think.
ESTRAGON
Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards, if it isn’t too much to ask him.18
But personally I prefer the Minuit composition. The same is used by Gallimard for Adamov’s theatre (1st vol. just out). But if you prefer the simple capitals it will be all right with me.
Could you possibly postpone setting of galleys until 1st week in January, by which time you will have received the definitive text? I have made a fair number of changes, particularly in Lucky’s tirade, and a lot of correcting would be avoided if you could delay things for a few weeks. …
The tour of Babylone Godot mostly in Germany (including the Gründgens theatre in Düsseldorf), but also as far as the Milan Piccolo, seems to have been successful. … Marvellous photos, unposed, much superior to the French, were taken in Krefeld during actual performance. One in particular is fantastic (end of Act 1, Vladimir drawing Estragon towards wings, with moon and tree). It is the play and would make a remarkable cover for your book. I shall call at the theatre this afternoon before posting this and add address of photographer in case you are inte
rested in purchasing the set.
Best wishes for Xmas and the New Year.
Sam
That was the same Beckett who a year later would write me: “It’s hard to go on with everything loathed and repudiated as soon as formulated, and in the act of formulation, and before formulation … I’m horribly tired and stupefied, but not yet tired and stupefied enough. To write is impossible but not yet impossible enough.” It was the same lovely, courtly Beckett who had written:
ESTRAGON: I can’t go on.
VLADIMIR: That’s what you think.
The problem of who was going to translate Godot into English was a thorny one. Perhaps when Beckett wrote in French, no one looked over his shoulder, and he could achieve a more dispassionate purity. Perhaps he was also angry at the British for failing him as publishers. His novel Murphy and a short story collection, More Pricks Than Kicks, had achieved little notice in England. Perhaps Beckett felt he was too lyrical in English. He was always striving to strip away as many of his writer’s tools as possible before finally ceasing to write altogether—taking away tools as you would take away a shovel from a person who wants to dig.
Because Beckett was never satisfied with any of his English translators, I kept trying to persuade him to do the job himself. It’s my belief he always wanted to go back to writing in English, and he did, for the most part, from then on. But I felt he needed to be encouraged. Sam finally came to the only possible conclusion. He did the translation of Godot himself. The novels trailed behind.
“It’s so nice where we are—snowed-in, quiet, and sootless, that I think you might like it,” I wrote my new author in January 1954 from our East Hampton bunkerlike Quonset-hut home. The letter concerned the page proofs of Waiting for Godot, the work that would change the course of modern theater.
Formal at first, our correspondence quickly warmed. Sometimes Beckett typed, at my rather brash request, and sometimes letters were written in his almost indecipherable tiny script. In a world where writers switch publishers at the first shake of a martini pitcher, our transatlantic communications seemed to float on a sea of tranquility and trust.
Grove published Waiting for Godot in 1954, as well as Jean Genet’s
The Maids and Deathwatch.
I introduced Beckett to Joan Mitchell in 1956. They hit it off at once, the craggy droll writer and the attractive young painter. Joan loved writing, poetry especially (she would illustrate books of poems by Gary Snyder, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, and many more). Beckett was fascinated by art and had many artist friends. Both were heavy drinkers.
Joan had spent many off-hours at the Cedar Street Tavern, where talk, drunkenness, and occasional physical violence punctuated the evening. De Kooning would yell insults at O’Hara as he came in with Joan—the artists were macho, and few women, all of them highly competitive, were part of the club. Joan held her own, she could out drink and out talk most of the men. Joan had developed as an artist, moving onto larger canvases and finding her own style as an Abstract Expressionist. Her painting was becoming unique, and before she was thirty she had achieved her own style, fluid and violent, characterized by a wild flow of paint.
We had kept in touch, our friendship growing stronger since our divorce. She had begun spending part of the year in Paris, probably for self-protection and also to get away from the intrusive atmosphere of the New York art world. In Paris she met painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, with whom she would maintain a relationship for over twenty years. By 1959 she decided to move to France permanently, but still kept her apartment on St. Mark’s Place in New York City. She took a studio at 10 rue Frémicourt and began a new creative thrust into dark disintegrating nature and into her inner moods. She had major battles with Riopelle, which might include the slashing of each other’s paintings.
At Le Dôme, Beckett would get together with Joan, Riopelle, Bram van Velde, and Alberto Giacometti. He also became a regular visitor to Joan’s studio, where he spent hours, and they would frequently go off drinking together at local bistros. Joan told me that she and Beckett were discussing an illustrated edition of his radio play Embers. She painted a few watercolors for the book but then abandoned the idea, feeling that the play was perfect on its own. Beckett grew to depend on Joan for companionship and talk, and the talk often dwelled on loneliness and death, with glimmers of humor in the darkness.
As I wrote in Gontarski’s Beckett anthology, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, who would not become Sam’s wife until 1961, had been his strongest supporter for many years. She was his manager and practical organizer, tending to his every need, protecting him from the world, and vigorously promoting his career. Tall, handsome, and austere, she was even more reclusive than he, never, as far as I know, learning English, and walling herself off from his friends. I remembered her making an attempt to study English at Berlitz when we first met, but it seemed to go against her grain, and I never actually heard her speak anything but French.
During the German occupation of Paris, Sam and Suzanne, who were part of the Resistance and were in danger of arrest by the Gestapo, went to the South of France and hid out on an isolated farm near Roussillon, in the Vaucluse, to which Beckett specifically refers in Godot as well as mentioning one of the local farmers by name. There in the Vaucluse the emptiness and monotony of the days stretched on until it must have seemed like an eternity to Beckett.
For three years, Beckett and Suzanne were mostly alone, and I get the feeling of their being bored with each other, not knowing how to pass the time, and wondering what they were doing there and when the hell they were going to get out, and not wanting ever to see each other again, and yet not being able to leave one another. The heart of Godot must be inextricably intertwined with all of this. In one exchange between the protagonists Estragon has gone off and is beaten up. Upon his return there is this exchange:
VLADIMIR: You again! … Come here till I embrace you … Where did you spend the night?
ESTRAGON: Don’t touch me! Don’t question me! Don’t speak to me! Stay with me!
VLADIMIR: Did I ever leave you?
ESTRAGON: You let me go.
While Beckett clearly indicates an all-male cast for Godot (he even refused permission to two top American actresses, Estelle Parsons and Shelley Winters, to perform it in 1973), I believe he had taken that very real situation—he and Suzanne on an isolated farm, waiting—and converted it into an eternal predicament, a universal myth. I thought the latent sexuality became much clearer in the New York 1988 Lincoln Center production of Godot with Robin Williams as Estragon and Steve Martin as Vladimir. They accentuated the male/female sides of their characters in important ways.
Beckett’s life with Suzanne seemed to have had the despairing yet persevering, separate yet joined, quality in many of his other plays as well. In Endgame:
HAMM: … Why do you stay with me?
CLOV: Why do you keep me?
HAMM: There’s no one else.
CLOV: There’s nowhere else.19
Beckett was very precise about his stage directions, including the look and size of the sets, and I believe that the configuration of his and Suzanne’s two Paris apartments reflected their deepening impasse as graphically as did his instructions for the settings of his plays.
Their first apartment, at 6 rue des Favorites, was in a fairly lively neighborhood. A tiny duplex, it had two small rooms, one above the other, the lower one sparsely furnished with just enough chairs for a few people to sit down, and a couple of paintings. There was a claustrophobic feeling to it, but at least the place was close to friendly restaurants and bars once you got outside. I never saw the upstairs bedroom, but cannot imagine it to have been particularly sybaritic. When Sam and Suzanne fled Paris to escape from the Nazis, the latter did them an accidental favor. Their apartment was locked up and left that way so that after the war they were able to reoccupy it without anything having been changed.
One night when they still lived there, Sam and I spent an evening together. I was drivin
g and I remember that the dawn was just lighting the skies as we got to ue Frémicourt. Then something happened. All the streetlights went out, but not because dawn was breaking. An electricity strike had just started. In Paris, at least at that time, you got into your house by pushing a button, on the outside, to open your door. Without this minuterie functioning you could not enter or even warn somebody inside that you were there.
So Sam and I drove to my hotel, Le Pont Royal. There the front door was open but the elevator wasn’t working. We trudged up seven floors to my isolated room at the top, briefly looked at the sun rising over Paris, and then climbed into bed, a nice big double one. Now I could say that I had been to bed with Samuel Beckett.
When Sam and Suzanne moved, it was to an even more appropriate setting for Beckett. It was right across from La Santé Prison, with a view down into the exercise yard. Sam had a deep identification with prisoners, so this flat was made to order. The neighborhood, near the outskirts of Paris where the Metro emerges from the underground to run down the middle of Boulevard St. Jacques (he lived at No. 38), was grim, impersonal, as bleak as any Beckett setting. It’s hard to find a place like that in Paris, a banlieu where there are hardly any bars or restaurants or little shops or people in the streets. The building in which Beckett lived had several floors, a cramped entryway, and the usual tiny French elevator. On his landing, small in itself, were two doors leading to two separate apartments. To reach Sam’s, you turned right, and he let you in. To the left you would find Suzanne. There were two rooms in Sam’s part, a small study with a lot of books and papers very neatly arranged, and a bedroom with a skinny cot and an ordinary bureau. Then there was a narrow little kitchen placed horizontally in the rear, rather like a corridor that connected the two apartments. So the living spaces were connected but you could close them off with the doors placed at each end of the kitchen. Her friends could come and go to her place, and his friends could visit him, but they didn’t have to see one another if they didn’t feel like it. It was a unique, chilly arrangement, and I never saw Suzanne again after the move.
Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 12
