Of course, that might have been because I fell asleep at the Paris opening of Endgame sitting beside her. I’d just flown in from New York and was half-dead of jet lag—I heard she never forgave me for that. Later, as I understand it, she became ill and increasingly difficult and withdrawn, and perhaps saw no one. Sam and she were in Tunisia when it was announced that he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Beckett had at least one other close woman friend I know of during his time with Suzanne. She was an English woman, Barbara Bray, a translator who had worked for the BBC in London. Previously married, with two children, Barbara was nearly thirty years younger than Beckett. She moved to France in the early 1960s and lived there ever since. Slim and dark-haired, as I remember, she was pretty in an English way. She was highly intelligent and quite similar to Beckett: laid-back and concerned with accuracy in translation. Barbara was very close to him, and she may well have been one of his strongest attachments during the period I knew him. I recall several instances when he and I had been out drinking and it was late, but not so late for us—only about three in the morning. I’d offer to walk him home, and he would say something like: “No, I’m going to stop by and see Barbara.”
During this period Beckett continued to live with Suzanne. When he finally married her in Folkestone, England, in 1961, he was 54, she 61.
Barbara’s close friendship with Beckett continued. I remember one evening in particular in 1965 when Harold Pinter was in Paris for the opening of the French production of his plays The Collection and The Lover. Barbara, Harold, Sam, my girlfriend at the time Nicole Tessier, and I were at a bar right off Boulevard du Montparnasse where Beckett liked to go. It was called the Falstaff and featured beer. To me, except for the name, it was as French as anyplace else.
We occupied a narrow table that butted up against a wall, Barbara and Harold seated opposite each other, then Sam and my girlfriend next to each other, with me at the end. I began to notice that Barbara and Harold were discussing Sam very admiringly but sort of as if he were a sacred object they were having an academic chat about, not involving him in the conversation at all. I could see that he was getting increasingly irritated, and finally Sam took his stein and banged it on the table hard enough to spill some beer. Then he got up and walked across the room in the ungainly gait he had before his cataract operation, which gave people the impression that he was drunk when he was just having difficulty seeing. I watched him slowly climb the narrow stairs to the men’s room and disappear. A hush fell over our table. When he reappeared and seemed to be making his way back to us, he stopped about twenty feet away and sat down at another table with two people whom I slowly realized were total strangers to him. He stared at us for a few minutes, then rejoined our party without comment or excuse. That was one of his rare shows of anger.
As I mentioned in The Grove Press Reader, similar moments of passion appear here and there in the emotional texture of Beckett’s work, sudden oases of piercingly romantic fulfillment and loss in which the prose becomes suffused with sensuality and then with tears. I felt this most in Krapp’s Last Tape, my favorite of Beckett’s plays, a monologue written in English in 1958. In it, a ruined old man plays and replays tapes from his younger days, trying to find some meaning in his life. One passage is excruciatingly passionate. The affair between Krapp and his lover has now been destroyed beyond retrieval.
We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause.) I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side …20
Then the previous tape is replayed.
Led to it by Beckett, I searched for the nineteenth-century German novelist Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest for clues to this passage. Finally Beckett revealed to me that it related to a summer with his cousin Peggy Sinclair in 1929 at a small resort on the Baltic Sea, where Peggy was engrossed in Fontane’s novel about a young girl’s calamitous life that ended with her death from tuberculosis. Although Beckett was only twenty-three at the time, his feeling for Peggy and the memory of their being together survived her engagement to another man and her death in 1933, coincidentally also of tuberculosis.
The story struck an incredibly strong chord in me. It reopened my suffering of the loss of a young love, my Nancy Ashenhurst. I still grieve for Nancy, and have dreams about her. This bond of early bereavement led me to find other references to Peggy Sinclair in Beckett’s later works, particularly in Ohio Impromptu, a short play of extraordinary lyricism that was published by Grove in 1981 in a collection called Rockaby and Other Short Pieces. In Ohio Impromptu the protagonist seeks relief from the memory of “the dear face” by moving to an unfamiliar place, “back to where nothing ever shared.” However, there is no relief until a man sent by “the dear name” comes to comfort him by reading and rereading a “sad tale” from a “worn volume.” Finally the messenger says he has had word from “the dear name” that he (the messenger) shall not come again:
So the sad tale a last time told they sat on as though turned to stone. … What thoughts who knows. Thoughts, no, not thoughts. Profounds of mind. Buried in who knows what profounds of mind.21
Beckett often sat “as though turned to stone” during his long silences. I remember him “buried in who knows what profounds of mind.”
His friendship with Barbara Bray, I think, may well have given inspiration for a short, extremely bitter 1963 work called Play in which a husband, wife, and mistress, encased up to their necks in urns, are trapped in an eternal triangle, condemned endlessly to repeat the details of the husband and mistress’s affair under the glare of a harsh, inquisitorial spotlight.
Shortly after completing Play, which Alan Schneider directed at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, Beckett made his only trip to the United States. It was in the summer of 1964, and he came to be here for the shooting in New York of his motion picture Film, which I had commissioned him to write.
In 1962 I had started a new unit, Evergreen Theater, to produce films outside of Grove Press but with Grove people, specifically Fred Jordan and Dick Seaver, and one non-Grove person, Alan Schneider, a close friend I had come to know because of Sam.22
Very ambitiously, I made a list of writers—with the help of my associates—whom we asked to write scripts for us to produce. Those writers were, first and foremost, Samuel Beckett, as well as Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco, Marguerite Duras, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. They all said yes to our request and all of them wrote their scripts. Duras and Robbe-Grillet both wrote full-length scenarios for us. We envisaged the Beckett, Ionesco, and Pinter scripts as constituting a trilogy.
These five were all Grove Press authors. I invited three more to contribute, including another Grove author, Jean Genet. Fred Jordan and I went to London to make the request, but he said no. The last two authors we asked to write scripts for us were Ingeborg Bachmann and Günter Grass. I trailed Bachmann to Zurich (I think) to get her no, and I went to Berlin to see Grass. He lived in what I recall as being a sort of bombed-out area, in a precarious, small building. You reached its second floor, if he wanted you to, via a ladder that he extended down to you in lieu of a staircase. Grass was completely charming and friendly, but the outcome was the same as with Bachmann.
Out of the five scripts we did get, we were unfortunately able only to produce Samuel Beckett’s Film because of financial constraints.
I set out to create a production team to turn Beckett’s script into a motion picture. The most important member of that team was Sam himself. He wrote, he guided, and he kept the ship afloat. Alan Schneider had had no previous film experience but had done a great deal of successful theater directing, including plays by Pinter, Albee, and especially Beckett. There was no doubt in my mind that we could overcome that problem.
The other top two people on the production team were Sidney Meyers and Boris Kaufman. Sidney was an acclaimed veteran f
ilmmaker who in 1960 had been awarded the BAFTA Flaherty Documentary Award for The Savage Eye (which he shared with Joseph Strick and Ben Maddow). Meyers was nominated for both the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion Award in 1949 and for an Academy Award for The Quiet One in 1950. He was also a consummate musician, a self-effacing, literate, and intelligent man, and he got along beautifully with Sam. And, not incidentally, he had helped me in a very important and selfless way at the end of the production work on my earlier film project, Strange Victory.
Boris Kaufman was our cinematographer, with Haskell Wexler and Helen Levitt. Boris was the brother of the famous Soviet directors Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman. Unbeknownst to me, he had won the Academy Award in 1955 for On the Waterfront, but very important for me was that he had been the cinematographer on Jean Vigo’s great films À Propos de Nice (1930), Zéro de Conduite (1933), and L’Atalante (1934). These were perhaps my favorite films above all others. The filmmaker I had felt most akin to was Vigo. Our crew was now complete.
Judith Schmidt, my invaluable assistant, retyped the script after conferences held and audiotaped in East Hampton. We had flown Beckett in to stay there when he first arrived from Paris. He arrived at night at the little East Hampton airport where there was a very dramatic landing—they had thrown on some searchlights and it all reminded me of Casablanca. Several days later, we went back to New York City to shoot Film.
Alan Schneider had suggested Buster Keaton for the lead role in Film and Sam liked the idea. So Alan flew out to Hollywood to attempt to sign up Buster. There he found the great silent star living in extremely modest circumstances. On arrival, Alan had to wait in a separate room while Keaton finished up an imaginary (perhaps drunk) poker game with, among others, the legendary but long-dead Hollywood moguls Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg. Keaton took the job.
Sometime after Film was finished and being shown, Kevin Brownlow, a Keaton/Chaplin scholar, interviewed Beckett about working with Keaton. Beckett said,
Buster Keaton was inaccessible. He had a poker mind as well as a poker face. I doubt if he ever read the text—I don’t think he approved of it or liked it. But he agreed to do it and he was very competent. He was not our first choice. … It was Schneider’s idea to use Keaton, who was available. … He had great endurance, he was very tough, and, yes, reliable. And when you saw that face at the end—oh. At last.23
When Brownlow asked Beckett if he had ever told Keaton what the film was about, Sam said,
I never did, no. I had very little to do with him. He sat in his dressing room, playing cards … until he was needed. The only time he came alive was when he described what happened when they were making films in the old days. That was very enjoyable. I remember him saying that they started with a beginning and an end and improvised the rest as they went along. Of course, he tried to suggest gags of his own. … His movement was excellent—covering up the mirror, putting out the animals—all that was very well done. To cover the mirror, he took his big coat off and he asked me what he was wearing underneath. I hadn’t thought of that. I said, “The same coat.” He liked that. The only gag he approved of was the scene where he tries to get rid of the animals—he put out the cat and the dog comes back, and he puts out the dog and the cat comes back—that was really the only scene he enjoyed doing.
Brownlow asked Sam what the film meant, what it was about, and Sam replied, “It’s about a man trying to escape from perception of all kinds—from all perceivers, even divine perceivers. There is a picture which he pulls down. But he can’t escape from self-perception. It is an idea from Bishop Berkeley, the Irish philosopher and idealist, ‘To be is to be perceived’—‘Esse est percipi.’ The man who desires to cease to be must cease to be perceived. If being is being perceived, to cease being is to cease to be perceived.”
Beckett went on to say that distinguishing between the modes of being perceived was a major technical roadblock:
There was one big problem we couldn’t solve—the two perceptions—the extraneous perception and his own acute perception. The eye that follows that sees him and his own hazy, reluctant perception of various objects. Boris Kaufman devised a way of distinguishing between them. The extraneous perception was all right, but we didn’t solve his own. He tried to use a filter—his view being hazy and ill defined. This worked at a certain distance but for close-ups it was no good. Otherwise it was a good job.
Besides the problem of capturing the two perceptions there was another technical problem. It was when we attempted to use “deep focus” in the film. Originally, Film was meant to run nearly thirty minutes. Eight of those minutes were to have been used in one very long shot in which a number of actors would make their only appearance. The shot was based on a technique developed by Samuel Goldwyn and his great cameraman, Gregg Toland. (It had been used to stunning effect by Orson Welles, with Toland as cameraman, in Citizen Kane.) Even when panning their camera, “deep focus” allowed objects from as close as a few feet to as far as several hundred feet to be seen in the same shot with equal clarity. Toland’s work was so important to Welles that he gave his cameraman equal billing. Sad to say, our “deep focus” work in Film was unsuccessful. Despite the abundant expertise of our group, the extremely difficult shot was ruined by a stroboscopic effect that caused the images to jump around.
We went on without that shot. Beckett averted this incipient disaster by removing the scene from the script.
In his book Entrances Alan Schneider recalls,
Sidney [Meyers] proceeded to do a very quick, very rough cut for Sam to look at before taking off for Paris. And that first cut turned out to be not too far off from what we finally had. The editing was painstaking—and painful. Sidney always gently trying to break the mold we had set in the shooting, and Sam and I in our different ways always gently holding him to it. There was no question of sparring over who had the legal first cut or final cut or whatever. We talked, argued, tried various ways, from Moviola to screen and back again, to make it come out as much the film that Sam had first envisioned as we could.24
In New York, Sam and Alan stayed with me and my new wife, Cristina Agnini, in our house on Houston Street in Greenwich Village. When the shooting stopped, all Beckett wanted to do was get back to France as soon as possible so we booked an early morning flight, set our alarm, and I promised to wake him at 7:30, in time to get to the airport. At 9:00 a.m. Cristina and I woke up, horrified to find that we had overslept, and we were appalled to stumble over Beckett sitting outside our bedroom door, wearing his overcoat even though it was July. He had his packed bag on the floor next to him and was sound asleep. It never occurred to him to knock on our door. I made another airline reservation for 5:00 p.m., and the three of us spent the day at the New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, wandering among the exhibits. We somehow managed to lose our homesick writer along the way. After a frantic search we found him, on a bench, sound asleep again. We revived him enough for him to buy two knitted Greek purses—one for Cristina and one for Suzanne—whereupon we escorted him to an air- conditioned bar at what was then Idlewild Airport for drinks until departure time. “This is somehow not the right country for me,” Sam told us at the bar. “The people are too strange.” Then he said, “God bless,” got on the plane, and was gone, never to return to the United States again.
Once Sam was back in Paris, things went on as before—I continued to visit him there. Since both he and I had been deeply involved in school athletic competition, I as co-captain of my high school football team and he the leader of his school cricket squad, sports provided us with another common ground. I tried my hand at Beckett’s favorite pastimes, chess and billiards, but found them too maddeningly demanding of precision. Beckett, for his part, enjoyed playing my more slapdash table tennis. As a spectator sport we settled on tennis, which we both had once played, and now we often attended matches at Roland Garros stadium on the outskirts of Paris. I remember one time in particular, a match between the great American Pancho Gonzales and Lew H
oad, the Australian champion of the time. The referee was a Basque and an admirer of Beckett’s. As he mounted his tall chair courtside, he waved enthusiastically at Sam. A couple of sets later, before a booing crowd, the referee was ejected at Gonzales’ request after making a number of quite legitimate calls against him. Remarkably, he paused to chat for a moment in the midst of his forced exit.
Usually, however, Sam the writer and I the publisher just went out to eat and drink and talk. Beckett always had very set ideas about where to go and what to eat. At first his tastes were quite broad, but as the years went by they narrowed down, exactly like his writing, and the choices got fewer and fewer. In the beginning Beckett favored La Closerie des Lilas on Boulevard du Montparnasse, where Hemingway had liked to go, and where names of famous writers were embossed on the tables. There was also the grandiose La Coupole, a small bar called Rosebud, and the allegedly English pub Falstaff. But especially congenial was a seafood brasserie in a tough, nightlife neighborhood nearby, Ile des Marquises, where le patron revered Beckett and had a photograph of him on the wall along with huge glossies of Marcel Cerdan (the Algerian boxer and world middleweight champion killed in a transatlantic crash), the great American boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, and other assorted personalities. Beckett’s photo hung between the two fighters.
One New Year’s Eve, sometime in the early 1970s, Cristina, her mother, and our children—my daughter Tansey and son Beckett, Sam’s namesake—were in Paris with me. Beckett was vacationing in Morocco with Suzanne. That night the phone rang in our hotel room. It was Marvin Josephson, the famed Hollywood agent, calling to say he was representing Steve McQueen, who desperately wanted to make a film of Waiting for Godot. Money was no object, Beckett could have complete control and any other actors he chose: Laurence Olivier, Peter O’Toole, and Marlon Brando were mentioned.
Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 13
