After I ascertained that the agent was very much for real and that the top price for a film property seemed to be $500,000, then a princely sum, I wrote to him and stipulated that amount. Josephson replied that the offer was $350,000, and it was absolutely firm and put in writing. The matter was dropped until I saw Beckett again on St. Patrick’s Day for dinner at the Ile des Marquises. Anxious to secure some money for Sam, I told him of the offer for the proposed film, playing up Steve McQueen and, for some reason, Brando. Beckett asked what this McQueen looked like and I, grasping at straws, summoned up an image of James Garner. “He’s a tall, husky, good-looking guy,” I winged it. And Marlon Brando? “Even bigger, a huge, heavy-set fellow.” Sam thought for a while and then said, “No. It will never work. My characters are shadows.”
Near the end, Beckett refused to go to his old haunts, and it all narrowed down to an ersatz bistro called Le Petit Café in a monstrosity of a new hotel near his apartment. Originally the hotel was called the PLM, later changed to Pullman St. Jacques. It had a garish, undersized, Vegas-like marquee, and I thought of its lobby as resembling a souped-up railway station at rush hour with busloads of German and Japanese tourists swarming up and down its long escalators. All it needed was a bank of slot machines. Visiting athletes were also a specialty, and I remember the Scottish rugby team, brawny men in tams and kilts, all drunk as lords, horsing around in the lobby to the astonishment of a tour group of early-teenage Japanese girls. I also recall a boxing ring being set up in the lobby and a loudspeaker announcing: “Will the Australian trampoline team please report to the fourth floor.” Beckett stayed oblivious to it, totally out of place and impassive in the midst of all this international action.
I, after intricate maneuvering, brought Beckett and photographer Richard Avedon together in April 1979 at Le Petit Café in one of the most awkward and enigmatic encounters of my life. The celebrated photographer said his technique of using a white sheet as a backdrop was philosophically derived from Beckett. He also had said to me that he had shot everybody he wanted to with the exception of Greta Garbo and Beckett. I made arrangements for Avedon and Beckett to meet, stressing to Avedon that there was no guarantee Beckett would actually agree to pose and it would not be an easy task to convince him.
Avedon came from Tokyo and I from New York with my fourth wife, Elisabeth Krug, known as Lisa, my daughter Tansey, and son Beckett who was then ten years old. Sam was his usual self, silent but listening. Lisa and my kids did the same, while Avedon, who seemed nervous, talked nonstop for about an hour until finally he said: “Okay, let’s take the pictures.” He asked both Samuel Beckett and my Beckett to go with him, and the three of them crossed the street and, for about half an hour, disappeared into a passageway through the Metro overpass. When they returned, nobody described what had happened, but I assumed the pictures had been taken.
I heard nothing further for a couple of months until one day I received two superb, very moving photos of my son with Samuel Beckett, beautifully mounted and framed and signed by Avedon. About a month later Sam himself, who had never before shown the slightest interest in such matters, asked what had happened to the photos. I wrote Avedon and received what I thought was a very peculiar response to the effect that Avedon had not taken any pictures of Samuel Beckett alone that day because the writer had seemed “unhappy,” but that, because I had gone to so much trouble, he had taken a few shots of the two Becketts together.
My son Beckett said that after crossing under the Metro overpass they had come to a wall where a white sheet had been tacked up and an assistant waited for them in a car. There was a large camera fastened to a tripod. He described Avedon setting up the shot, focusing his camera with a black cloth over his head, then stepping out and squeezing the bulb a few times for the two Becketts and then for Sam by himself. The missing Beckett photos supposedly appeared in the French magazine Egoïste. I have never seen them, but a portrait of Sam alone was in Avedon’s retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2002.
A later, thornier encounter at Le Petit Café involved Beckett and Peter Getty, son of the famously wealthy Ann Getty, who, with Lord George Weidenfeld, had bought Grove, in a sad story to come, from me in 1985. (After Getty and Weidenfeld promised to keep me as CEO, they would wind up ousting me without ceremony the following year.) Smart and young, Peter Getty, who often borrowed subway fare from Grove employees to get uptown to his Fifth Avenue apartment, had learned I was meeting Beckett in Paris soon after my ouster, and asked to be introduced. I agreed, and Getty flew over, checked into a suite at the Ritz, and taxied out to Beckett’s unlikely hangout, Le Petit Café, with a book he wanted autographed.
This was the only time Sam was not friendly to someone I introduced him to. It was a short, tense meeting. After autographing the book, he glared at Peter and asked, “How could you do this to Barney, and what do you plan to do about it?” Peter was very embarrassed, and mumbled something about consulting with his mother. Later, I heard that Beckett had told another suppliant from Grove, “You will get no more blood out of this stone,” and he never allowed them to publish anything new of his again.
To me and a group of others assembled in his honor at La Coupole he said, “There is only one thing an author can do for his publisher and that is write something for him.” And he did exactly that. It was the little book called Stirrings Still. It was to be his last prose work, and he dedicated it to me.
Stirrings Still is the meditations of an old man contemplating death. It brought back to me an ether dream I’d had as a little boy. I had an out-of-body experience, seeing myself as an object rocketing into space, zooming through a black void until I was transformed into a “knob of blackness.” I knew I was experiencing the terror of my own death. Still, now, unable to sleep in a totally darkened room, I am hounded by that dream. When he wrote Stirrings Still, I don’t know how much Sam was actually thinking of me, but I think I know why he wrote it. He was facing his own dream of death, which was fast approaching, and which, possibly, he finally made bearable by acceptance of that approaching darkness.
Such and much more such the hubbub in his mind so-called till nothing left from deep within but only ever fainter oh to end. No matter how no matter where. Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end.25
In the mid-1980s, Beckett’s health was clearly failing, although I couldn’t admit this to myself. We now met exclusively at Le Petit Café, which had become his “club,” and where he was totally ignored by outsiders. I took to staying at the Pullman St. Jacques in order to be near him, and sometimes I ate meals alone in the fast-food café off the hotel’s lobby. At breakfast they gave you a set of plastic-coated photographs, not unlike a deck of cards. One card had an egg on it, another card two eggs, another card a strip of bacon, and so on. To order, you went to the cashier and handed her the cards you’d selected.
In a funny way, it was pure Beckett. They had done away with the menu entirely, eliminating the need for words or translations of words; you could choose a meal in total silence. In the same vein, Beckett had made increasing use of the stage directions “pause” and “silence” in his work, and had pared down his vocabulary to fewer and fewer words.
At some point, Sam began having dizzy spells and falling in his apartment; apparently not enough blood was circulating to his brain. After brief stays in several hospitals he was moved to a nursing home only a few blocks from where he lived. The desire to go on had lessened even more. He was unsteady on his feet and even thinner, if that were possible, and therefore seemed taller and more and more like a figure done by his friend, the Italian artist Alberto Giacometti, who once had given Sam a drawing of a thin, striding man, a drawing Sam in turn gave to Cristina and me as a wedding present which we later used on the cover of Sam’s Worstward Ho. Now he was just a ghost of even that drawing.
The nursing home was on a side street. It looked like the other small buildings on the block, with only a discreet plaque announcing its institutional
function. You entered a sparsely furnished sitting room in which a number of old women, some with walkers, watched a couple of ancient TV sets. Then you went through a little dining room out into a tiny courtyard with a walkway and some grass. There were a few rooms looking out onto it. Beckett was in the first room, a cubicle with space enough only for a bed, a table, and two wooden chairs, with a small bath off it.
I visited Sam there a number of times. I found it cell-like and depressing and, together with his British publisher John Calder, tried to devise ways to move him to more comfortable quarters. But it was never easy to do Beckett a favor.
He also seemed to resist attempts to make his life more pleasant. In his perverse fashion he managed to get a phone on which he could not make overseas calls, declined to have a TV set or stereo equipment (although he loved music) or a bookcase or even a typewriter. He wrote things down in a little notebook in his small, intricate handwriting, kept his engagement records meticulously, and did always seem to have a bottle of Irish whiskey handy.
With Beckett it was a mistake to suppose that problems readily leant themselves to solutions, or that one thing necessarily led to another. Sam had started to go for walks, and sort of boasted to me—if you could ever say that Beckett boasted about anything—that he could walk farther than where his own apartment was, five blocks away. One day he told me he needed some papers from his apartment, so I asked why didn’t he go home and pick them up and I would go with him?
Beckett threw up his hands. First roadblock: there was too much traffic on his boulevard; it made him dizzy. Well, let’s go in a car, I said, pressing on. Beckett replied that he didn’t have a car. Not to worry, I said, I’ll get the car. Let’s drive there. I was greeted with stony silence, and that was the end of that.
Perhaps a major factor was that Suzanne was still at the apartment and Beckett was ambivalent about the idea of seeing her. This was such an archetypical Beckett situation. It was Endgame again. Now they were Nagg and Nell in their garbage cans, unable to reach each other. She was ill, dying actually, although I didn’t know that, and he, too, was ill. They were separated by only five blocks, yet they couldn’t see each other. He needed papers from his apartment, yet he couldn’t go there—all the entrances and exits were blocked.
The last time I visited Beckett I brought along an American TV set I had kept in Paris just for possible use with Sam, and a videotape of Godot being performed by the inmates of San Quentin State Prison. I had previously carted all this heavy equipment—the set, a transformer, and a VCR—in a huge shopping bag through customs to the Pullman St. Jacques, where Beckett used to come to my room. Now I lugged all the equipment to his nursing home.
Sam was visibly moved by the tape; the inmates had understood his play. So I thought, now I’ve got something going that he can enjoy in this arid place—we can have a correspondence utilizing videotapes. As I left, I casually asked Beckett if he would keep the set for future viewings. “Oh no, no, no,” Sam answered, “I have no use for it.” The subject was closed.
As I struggled out with my shopping bag, he said, “Oh Barney, that’s too heavy for you. You shouldn’t carry that.” Then he walked over, lifted it, turned to me, and said, “No, it’s all right. You can.”
Again: You can’t go on, you’ll go on.
It was clear that the prospect of the introduction of ease or entertainment into his life distracted Beckett from the larger endgame already embarked on in his mind. A few months later he was Not I, as in the title of one of his plays. There was, at last, an Act Without Words.
Sam died on December 22, 1989. He was buried next to Suzanne, who died five months earlier, in the famous Cimetière du Montparnasse.
I was told that Barbara Bray was one of the few mourners at the secretive funeral. I received a letter from her that began: “Dear Barney, What can I say? We are all huddled together in our loss.”
9
Grove Theater: Harold Pinter and Other Playwrights
Once we had published Samuel Beckett, Grove continued to build a formidable list in the field of modern drama. We brought out most of the plays and other writings of Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Brendan Behan, David Mamet, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Antonin Artaud, Jack Gelber, Rolf Hochhuth, Ronald Harwood,
Bernard Pomerance, William Inge, John Arden, Václav Havel, Alfred Jarry, Shelagh Delaney, and Slawomir Mrożek, and we republished Bertolt Brecht.
By the late 1950s, no other company was really competing with Grove in the publication of works for the theater. Many of the playwrights we published were not yet known widely in this country but their work would have a major impact on theater here and around the world.
What was more, we did something that many publishers didn’t do—we kept an author’s books in print and available. Grove had more than twenty-five volumes of Beckett in print and more than ten volumes of Pinter, Stoppard, and Ionesco, as well as many volumes of Mamet.
All was not smooth sailing, though. Brecht is an example. He had broken the US copyright laws in various ways, and we wanted to publish him in paperback. After being questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Brecht decided to move to East Germany where he established the Berliner Ensemble theater company. Random House had been publishing his work in hardcover and Jason Epstein, who had come to Random House after making a tremendous success developing the Anchor Books trade paperback line at Doubleday, was adamantly opposed to Grove publishing Brecht in paperback. So Bennett Cerf took Jason and me to lunch and suggested that a compromise was possible. At a certain point during the meeting, Jason got up and said, “Why don’t you give him Faulkner too!”—and left. Somehow we eventually reached an amiable solution to the problem without taking that drastic course.
When we signed up Pinter, I remember very well that we had not yet seen one of his plays performed, but his scripts clearly showed his writing was brilliant. The way he used silence was reminiscent, to me, of Beckett—but different. There was an all-pervading sense of menace. The Dumb Waiter was a good example. Pure menace, terrifying, brilliant theater charged with a silent danger.
Pinter’s agent was Jimmy Wax. He and Harold were close friends. In New York they premiered The Homecoming on Broadway, but opening night was less than triumphant with many in the audience hating it. I remember asking Jimmy, “Who the hell did you invite to this opening?” I mean, at an opening when an author is already very well known, you can pick and choose who you’re inviting—and you’re giving away many tickets. At least you ought to get people who might like the play. But on that first night one woman in the audience stood up and shouted in the middle of the first act: “Let’s get out of here, this is terrible!”
Pinter always talked and even acted as if he were a character in one of his plays. During the New York blackout of 1965, Cristina and I were in a Greenwich Village restaurant with Harold and my wife’s sister. Initially, when the lights went out, we thought that the blackout was confined to the restaurant and its immediate vicinity. I got my car from our nearby house, parked it facing the restaurant, and turned on the headlights so we could see to eat. The restaurant staff did not object. We slowly realized there was a total blackout extending as far as we could see uptown. Harold sat there silently for a long time, then suddenly said, “Does this happen very often here?” I waited for about three minutes before answering, as if we were in one of his plays, and then said, “Not often. Every twenty years or so.” Finally, Harold asked us to go back with him to his room at the luxurious, blacked-out Carlyle Hotel. We did and a city police officer carrying a flashlight escorted us up a back stairway. Back in his room, Harold read to us by candlelight a poem he had recently written. It was a memorable evening.
Pinter asked Beckett to critique everything he wrote, and Beckett liked Pinter both as a friend and as a writer, and paid him and his work close attention. The reverse was equally true.
On December 6 of that year I wrote to
Pinter, saying, “I saw Sam and [he] seemed better than one might have hoped for. He told me that Barbara Bray had informed him that you had seen the New York Godot and liked it—but that you doubted that Sam would feel likewise. I am not so sure of that—No Godot can be all things to all people, but any given one—maybe this one especially could give a great deal of pleasure—and even insight—to many, including Sam. Why don’t you tell him directly what you felt. I think that that would please him.”
Harold was commissioned to do a screenplay of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past for a Rothschild family member, Nicole Stéphane. Barbara Bray and Joseph Losey worked with Pinter for a year to get it done. Then the Rothschild relative rejected it and, moreover, refused to let Harold produce it. She claimed all rights. Harold came with Wax to New York and called me. Pinter was very upset. He said he felt as if a part of him had been amputated. I assured him, “Well, at least Grove will publish it.”
All this reminded me of growing up in Chicago, doing something when taking action was vital, no matter what the prospects of success might be, even if it was only symbolic. Bennett Cerf at Random, which had the American rights to all Proust publications, said they wouldn’t stand in our way. The last Lafayette in France, an attorney in Paris on the Champs-Élysées who represented Proust’s niece, also gave her approval for the publication of the screenplay. And so did Gallimard, the French publisher of Proust’s work. So I cut the Gordian knot and we published Pinter’s screenplay at Grove even if we could not make the film.
After all that, Harold later let me down with Beckett’s play Eleuthéria, which Sam had initially told me I could publish in the wake of the disaster with Ann Getty and Lord Weidenfeld’s acquisition of Grove. I asked Harold to write an introduction to our projected publication. He wrote back with two words, “I can’t.” I was crushed and felt betrayed. I took a passage out of Proust and sent it to him. It was where Swann says, “Good night, Albertine,” and in the morning, he asks the maid, “Where is Albertine?” And the maid said, “Oh, didn’t you know? She left last night.”
Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 14
