A blank target

«KEN JORDAN: How did you first hear of Waiting for Godot?
BARNEY ROSSET: Sylvia Beach, who was Joyce's publisher in Paris and the owner of the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore, called me. She knew about Grove, one way or another, and she thought maybe we would like to publish Godot. I admired her very much; I was really struck by her effort, and she bolstered my involvement with the play a great deal. Beckett had already been turned down by Simon & Schuster. All of the established publishers would have had a much better chance of doing Beckett than Grove, right? They could have paid five times as much, but nobody wanted it. Nobody was interested.The same was true of Ionesco. The Bald Soprano was put on in Paris and got a lot of attention. Don Allen, who was important editor at Grove in the beginning, liked Ionesco very early. Beckett and Ionesco were on the scene together. They liked each other. I never heard one say anything bad about the other. At a much later date, I think Ionesco became jealous because he never achieved the same level of acclaim as Beckett … and he became a nasty son of a bitch, very reactionary as he got older. But they did admire each other. You have to remember that they both wrote in French, though neither one had French as his native language. Both were not young men when they started to get recognition. Both were struggling to make it in the theatre, blasting away at the existing structure.
KJ: Do you remember when you met Beckett?
BR: I remember the exact moment. It was in the bar of the Pont Royal Hotel, which is next door to Gallimard. And at that time Sartre hung out there, as did Camus, and so on. I was with Loly, my wife at the time, and we were to meet Beckett at six for a drink. This very handsome walked in wearing a raincoat and said, "Hi, nice to meet you. I've only got forty minutes." He was all set to get rid of us! At four that morning he was buying us champagne.
KJ: So you hit it off well.
BR: Right away. He was so gentle and charming. Kind.
KJ: Beckett was extremely loyal to Grove Press, and you became close friends. How did Beckett feel about the other books that Grove published - writers like the Beats, Henry Miller?
BR: I took him to lunch with Henry Miller after we won the Tropic of Cancer verdict in Chicago. They had known each other from the thirties; they did not like each other. Everything that you read about these two would tell you that they were not easy people to get along with. But when I brought them together, each of them told me afterwards, "Boy, has he changed! He's so nice now." I don't know what Beckett thought about Miller's writing. In one of his early letters he asked if I had read J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. He said he really liked it. William Burroughs was a writer he particularly didn't understand. There is a famous anecdote about a meeting between Burroughs and Beckett, which took place in Maurice Girodias's restaurant. I remember sitting next to Sam, while Burroughs, who worshipped Beckett, was explaining to him how you do cut-ups. Beckett said to Bill, "That's not writing, that's plumbing." Allen Ginsberg and Burroughs were very unusual in the sense that they understood that Beckett was very important at that time. They wanted him, almost desperately, to recognize them, and he just didn't seem to connect. It wasn't dislike, it was just … non-togetherness. He just didn't get it. If he had read anything of Burroughs before he started doing the cut-ups maybe he'd have gotten it But the Beats didn't impinge upon his consciousness. Trocchi did. Anything of Alex Trocchi's.
KJ: When you published Godot you couldn't have thought of it as a potentially popular title.
BR: We only printed something like a thousand copies, and the first year it sold about four hundred. It wasn't until the play was produced on Broadway a couple of years later - with Bert Lahr playing Estragon - that the book started to sell, though the production only lasted six weeks in New York. The audience walked out and Walter Winchell denounced it as the new Communist propaganda. But that production made it famous.
KJ: How many copies of Godot did Grove end up selling?
BR: Well over two million.»
From an interview with Barney Rosset, founder of Grove Press, by Ken Jordan in the Winter 1997-1998 issue of The Paris Review.

A Television Play

Eh Joe (1969)

«Joe, late fifties, grey hair, old dressing-gown, carpet slippers, in his room.
1. Joe seen from behind sitting on edge of bed, intent pose, getting up, going to window, opening window, looking out, closing window, drawing curtain, standing intent.
2. Joe do. (from behind) going from window to door, opening door, looking out, closing door, locking door, drawing hanging before door, standing intent.
3. Joe do. Going from door to cupboard, opening cupboard, looking in, closing cupboard, locking cupboard, drawing hanging before cupboard, standing intent.
4. Joe do. Going from cupboard to bed, kneeling down, looking under bed, getting up, sitting down on edge of bed as when discovered, beginning to relax.
5. Joe seen from front sitting on edge of bed, relaxed, eyes closed. Hold, then dolly slowly in to closeup of face. First word of text stops this movement.

CAMERA:
Joe's opening movements followed by camera at constant remove, Joe full length in frame throughout. No need to record room as whole. After this opening pursuit, between first and final closeup of face, camera has nine slight moves in towards face, say four inches each time. Each move is stopped by voice resuming, never camera move and-voice together. This would give position of camera when dolly stopped by first word of text as one yard from maximum closeup of face, Camera does not move between paragraphs till clear that pause (say three seconds) longer than between phrases. Then four inches in say four seconds when movement stopped by voice resuming.

VOICE:
Low, distinct, remote, little colour, absolutely steady rhythm, slightly slower than normal. Between phrases a beat of one second at least. Between paragraphs about seven, i.e., three before camera starts to advance and four for advance before it is stopped by voice resuming.

FACE:
Practically motionless throughout, eyes unblinking during paragraphs, impassive except in so far as it reflects mounting tension of listening. Brief zones of relaxation between paragraphs when perhaps voice has relented for the evening and intentness may relax variously till restored by voice resuming.

...
WOMAN'S VOICE:
Joe ...
(Eyes open, resumption of intentness.)
Joe ...
(Full intentness.)
Thought of everything? ... Forgotten nothing? ... You're all right now, eh? ... No one can see you now ... No one can get at you now ... Why don't you put out that light? ... There might be a louse watching you ...Why don't you go to bed? ... What's wrong with that bed, Joe? ... You changed it, didn't you? ... Made no difference? ... Or is the heart already? ... Crumbles when you lie down in the dark ... Dry rotten at last ... Eh Joe?

[CAMERA MOVE 1]

The best's to come, you said, that last time . . . Hurrying me into my coat ... Last I was favoured with from you ... Say it you now, Joe, no one'll hear you ... Come on, Joe, no one can say it like you, say it again now and listen to yourself ... The best's to come ... You were right for once ... In the end.»

A+B=C

Do we suck? Do we rule? Tell us.

Lessnessless

«Lessness is a prose piece by Samuel Beckett in which he used random permutation to order sentences. Like interactive artworks, the piece is experienced as a process that depends upon the participant’s attempts to comprehend and create meaning. Although Lessness is linear prose, its orderly disorder sets up a non-linear reading process in which contradictory perspectives are viewed simultaneously. The piece comprises two of the approximately 8.3 x 1081 possible orderings of Beckett’s 60 sentences. The authors have developed a web site that generates versions of Lessness, exploring the effects of the capabilities of computing in the creation and exploration of art.»
from "Lessness: Randomness, Consciousness and Meaning" a paper written by Mads Haahr and Elizabeth Drew.

Damn it

«I am out on leave. Thrown out on leave.
Back to time, they said, for 24 hours.
Oh my God, I said, not that.
Slip into on this shroud, they said, lest you catch your death
of cold again.
Certainly not, I said.
This cap, they said, for your deaths head skull.
Definitely not, I said.
The New World outlet, they said, in the state of Ohio.
We cannot be more precise. Pause.
Proceed straight to Lima the nearest campus, they said,
and address them.
Address whom? I said.
The students, they said, and professors.
Oh my God, I said, not that.
Do not overstay your leave, they said,
if you do not wish it to be extended.
Pause.
What am I to say? I said.
Be yourself, they said, you're yourself.
Myself? I said. What are you insinuating?
Yourself before, they said.
Pause.
And after.
Pause.
Not during? I said.»
Early monologue of "Ohio Impromptu", a dramatic fragment that was later abandoned.

Synopsis

Ohio Impromptu

Two identical black clad characters with long grey hair (a Reader and a Listener) sit at a table. The Reader reads from a small book (described as "a sad tale"), and the listener, never speaking, prompts him to stop, start and repeat with knocking on the table. The play ends when the Reader finds that there is "no more to tell" from the book.

Ohio Impromptu is a short play by Samuel Beckectt. Written in English in 1980, it began as a favour to Stan Gontarski, who requested a dramatic piece to be performed at an academic symposium in Columbus, Ohio in honour of Beckett’s seventy-fifth birthday. Beckett hesitantly agreed and began work on the play at the end of March and the first week of April, 1980.

Wizard of us

An evening with endless power to irritate
Dominic Cavendish reviews Endgame at Barbican
«An accusation often levelled at Samuel Beckett is that he was too controlling. His stage directions are profuse and precise - glaring deviations from them were frowned on in his lifetime and, since his death, have sometimes met with a punitive response from his estate. But you come away from Charles Sturridge's grimly underwhelming revival of Endgame wondering whether Beckett wasn't exacting enough. Perhaps he should also have stipulated the optimum height for his actors.

I say this because Sturridge has cast a very short American actor, Peter Dinklage - with whom he worked on his recent film remake of Lassie - as Clov, the servant and sidekick of the blind, sedentary Hamm. The politically incorrect term would be "midget" - but, given that Sturridge exploits Dinklage's diminutive stature in order to enhance the play's tragi-comic effect, there is no reason to refrain from using it here.

While it is nice that showbiz-orientated dwarfs have more to look forward to these days than being fired out of cannons, the sad truth is that Dinklage isn't cut out for such a big role.

The comic gains are slight. Now the reason why Clov must amble back and forth with a ladder to survey the apocalyptic landscape outside the pair's joyless cell is not because the windows are too high up, but because he's too low down. Tee-hee.

Whenever he is mute, the actor does carry added pathos about his person, but Dinklage's approach to Beckett's badinage is so stilted that not only does all sense of familiarity between him and his cantankerous master evaporate, but also the lyricism of the writing dwindles before our ears.

Marooned on the other side of the double act, Kenneth Cranham's chair-bound, tramp-like Hamm doesn't distinguish himself much either, stuck in the rut of a rasping monotone. Two unmoving supporting performances from Tom Hickey and Georgina Hale as the spectral, dustbin-bound Nagg and Nell - the original "white trash", if you will - add to the evening's power to irritate.

Eileen Diss's deliberately flimsy-looking set stresses the theatrical in-jokery of the script, but the usual laughs prompted by lines such as "Will this never finish?" die in the throat here. The pain and despair of the quartet's terminal situation never bites, only the interminable ennui. Coming so soon after Michael Gambon and Lee Evans's stupendous account in the West End, this is a life-sapping disappointment.»
Published in the Telegraph - 24 Apr 2006

Beware the sky

«One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go. One night or day. For when his own light went out he was not left in the dark. Light of a kind came from the one high window. Under it still the stool on which till he could or would no more he used to mount to see the sky. Why he did not crane out to see what lay beneath was perhaps because the window was not made to open or because he could or would not open it. Perhaps he knew only too well what lay beneath and did not wish to see it again. So he would simply stand there high above the earth and see through the clouded pane the cloudless sky. Its faint unchanging light unlike any light he could remember from the days and nights when day followed hard on night and night on day. This outer light then when his own went out became his only light till it in its turn went out and left him in the dark. Till it in its turn went out.»
in "Stirrings Still" (1988)

Featuring across

Beckett Centenary Festival 2006 • Gate Theatre - Barbicanbite • Dublin / London

Killed by inches down by fire

«Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric. These lights, for instance (which I do not require to mean anything): what is there so strange about them, so wrong? Is it their irregularity, their instability, their shining strong one minute and weak the next, but never beyond the power of one or two candles? Malone appears and disappears with the punctuality of clockwork, always at the same remove, the same velocity, in the same direction, the same attitude. But the play of the lights is truly unpredictable. It is only fair to say that to eyes less knowing than mine they would probably pass unseen. But even to mine do they not sometimes do so? They are perhaps unwavering and fixed, and my fitful perceiving the cause of their inconstancy.»
in "The Unnamable" (1958)

Da Tagte Es

«redeem the surrogate goodbyes
the sheet astream in your hand
who have no more for the land
and the glass unmisted above your eyes»
in "Echo's Bones" (1935)

Can't get there from here

«WORSTWARD HO, by Samuel Beckett (Grove; $8.95). These forty-one small pages of very large type extend Beckett's wrestle with the void to the point where less would be nothing. A personless voice, uttering words of mostly one syllable in sentences of rarely more than five words, urges itself onward in a dim but resistant realm where humanoid apparitions fragmentarily loom and then fade. "So leastward on. So long as dim still. Dim undimmed. Or dimmed to dimmer still. To dimmost dim. Leastmost in dimmost dim. Unworsenable worst." The dim shapes in this environment most minimal are called shades, and we probably would not be entirely wrong to think of it as an old-fashioned Hades that ends in new-style entropy. ("Vast apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther.") A sterile, dreadful exercise, it might be said, and one does not, as Dr. Johnson remarked of "Paradise Lost", wish it's longer than it is. And yet, the words—"How almost true they sometimes almost ring! How wanting in inanity!"
Review in The New Yorker, March 1984

Shoulder blades

«"Damned to Fame" is not the first life of Beckett, of course. Notably, there was Deirdre Bair's 1978 biography, which drew on many letters she had discovered from Beckett to his friend Tom MacGreevy. They dispel the notion of Beckett as a philosophical recluse and show him as a man whose troubles shaped his writing. Mr. Knowlson has had full access to the MacGreevy letters, unlike Ms. Bair, and to six notebooks reporting Beckett's mind-altering trip through Germany in 1936-37. He added dozens of other sources. Beckett died six months after Mr. Knowlson began his work (he retired as a professor of French at the University of Reading in England to take it on). For five months, in brief visits, they discussed his life. Mr. Knowlson's presentation of these materials is academically invaluable. Much more important, he has composed a remarkable portrait of an impressive man. "Damned to Fame" is a magnificent biography.

Beckett's writings hold their audience because they are emotionally intense and disturbing. They are also richly allusive, evocative of literature, art, music, philosophy and psychology. Mr. Knowlson speaks authoritatively about these matters, without ostentation. He gives credit unstintingly; he even mentions me once.

The biography, though sadly shortened from the manuscript, is enlivened by suggestive details. Examples: Beckett's maternal grandmother rebuked a granddaughter who loved chocolates. "You shouldn't love something to eat, my dear. You should only love God." His uncle Gerald Beckett, rather different, called life "a disease of matter." When Beckett's father died, Gerald comforted the widow: "Well, May, he's got it over. What is it all about, in the end, for us all, from the cry go, but get it over?"

Such anecdotes bring alive decades of Beckett's public accomplishments and private doubts, regrets and illness. Mr. Knowlson modestly claims to have found new materials in three areas: "music and art", Beckett's political activities and Beckett's character. Readers will find much more.

Beckett's lifelong absorption in classical music (he was a competent pianist) and his concern for the verbal music of his own writings are matched by his knowledge of art: "He could spend as much as an hour in front of a single painting (...) savoring its forms and its colors, reading it, absorbing its minutest detail." Mr. Knowlson also shows how Beckett's dramatic scenes, figures, gestures and lighting echo these artworks.

The German diaries record Beckett's many meetings with painters, and discussions of paintings. They also convey his distaste for Germany's increasing anti-Semitism and censorship and Hitler's long, shrill speeches.

That topic prepares us for Beckett's activities with a French Resistance group and with the Irish Red Cross in France after World War II. In this grim work he displayed "astonishing powers of concentration, a meticulous attention to detail", Mr. Knowlson says; he could "organize, reduce and sift very diffuse material so as to make it succinct and intelligible." Those qualities recur in his writings. Additionally, "sheer obstinacy (...) was, he commented himself, a constant trait in his character."

That difficult, variable character is Mr. Knowlson's major theme. He describes a model of upper-class Protestant gentility: the 4-year-old praying; the youth playing golf, tennis, rugby and cricket, swimming, boxing, running track and racing motorcycles; and the college student who neither smoked nor drank.

But higher education puts at risk conventional faiths and values: "On the key issue of pain, suffering and death (...) Beckett's religious faith faltered and quickly foundered." A sermon in which a Canon Dobbs said that the only thing he could tell the suffering, dying and bereaved was, "The Crucifixion was only the beginning. You must contribute to the kitty", shook Beckett. So did Dobbs's advice to the unhappy: "When it's morning, wish for evening. When it's evening, wish for morning." Adding Baudelaire, Beckett sharpened that idea in "Endgame": "You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness."

Beckett discovered Dante and recent French writers at Trinity College, Dublin. He won an appointment to the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, met James Joyce and published a monograph on Proust. His career was under way. But this flawed summary evades the harshness of his writings.

Here Mr. Knowlson is especially valuable, providing persuasive detail. The young Beckett was an arrogant and withdrawn brat: "He confessed later to feelings of superiority and contempt, which led to a depression that came to seem (...) 'morbid.'" Teaching at Trinity, he met his like among colleagues. "Scholarly wit and sarcasm", Mr. Knowlson says, "sounded all too often like exhibitionism, bitchiness and character assassination." As for creativity: "How can one write here", Beckett complained, "when every day vulgarizes one's hostility and turns anger into irritation and petulance?"

Those perceptions, and psychosomatic illnesses, led to painful psychological insight. Beckett abandoned teaching and entered therapy after his father's death in 1933. Mr. Knowlson is eloquent about the effects of that death. The therapy lasted about six months, Beckett told him. (He once told me three.) "In reality his treatment lasted nearly two years", Mr. Knowlson says.

What Beckett would not tell him he had written to MacGreevy. In March 1935, after some 150 sessions, he wrote an amazing letter. With bitterness and detachment he summarized what he now knew about his illness. Mr. Knowlson specifies its causes: "the intensity of his mother's attachment to him and his powerful love-hate bond with her." Later, fleeing his mother and Ireland after a dreadful quarrel, Beckett offered MacGreevy a memorable phrase: "I am what her savage loving has made me."

Accurate analysis is not therapy. The relationship and its effects continued. Even in his last months, Mr. Knowlson says, "Beckett's feelings of love for his mother and remorse at having, as he saw it, let her down so frequently, struck me as still intense, almost volcanic." About his remarkable wife, Suzanne, who died some months earlier than he, he suffered similar guilt and remorse.

But that hard-won knowledge of his psyche had altered him. Mr. Knowlson describes his letter of self-analysis as "the first convincing explanation of how the arrogant, disturbed, narcissistic young man (...) evolved into someone who was noted later for his extraordinary kindness, courtesy, concern, generosity and almost saintly 'good works.'"

Beckett's outer world is not neglected, although space limitations restrict discussion of the trilogy of novels, "almost certainly the most enduring works that Beckett wrote." Mr. Knowlson is insightful about the plays and detailed about their performances. A playwright gives hostages to fortune. We hear of many misfortunes and some near misses, especially with "Godot." Imagine Buster Keaton as Vladimir and Marlon Brando as Estragon.

The inner world persists. Beckett remains painfully aware of his faults, unable to mend them and struggling to compensate for them, as Mr. Knowlson guides us through the powerful writings in which he dramatized the blackness in his psyche.

Beckett becomes his own finest character. Mr. Knowlson is with him to the final curtain, unblinking: "Beckett became frailer and thinner. His hands were now noticeably distorted. (...) Greeting him with a fond embrace, you noticed how prominent his shoulder blades felt (...) and how thin his wrists and forearms had become.'' Born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, he died on Friday, Dec. 22, 1989.

What is the meaning of this complicated life? Mr. Knowlson reports discussing with Beckett his brief autobiographical novel "Company": "We laughed uproariously at the idea of reaching 'truth' in so shifty an area as a human life." Weeks before he died, William Butler Yeats wrote: "When I try to put it all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.' I must embody it in the completion of my life." "Damned to Fame" splendidly preserves the truths embodied in Beckett's life.»
published in The New York Times, Aug. 3, 1997.

Upon the shores of plenitude

"Hear no more", he said. "Hear no more".
And as far as he was walking the flood of noise came to a dim of light. An empty box full of motionless. Silent waves approach him as subtle as a distant shore. And in the end. The end of all his steps. He could not manage himself to hear anything. There was a black vow of silence inside his soft machine. The ears were sealed by propelling desire. By an instant blink of his brain. And then. Only then. He could live along. Peacefully.

Afterwards he placed all the words together on the way to a poem. Words he didn't noticed before. Now they were just in front of his eyes, dripping as a flag.

The Lobule, the Scalpha, the Tragus. The Helix and the Anti-Helix. The Concha and the Anti-Tragus. And finally, mute as a dead flower, the Fossa Triangularis.

I never had a bicycle

«CLOV: Why do you keep me?
HAMM: There's no one else.
CLOV: There's nowhere else. (Pause.)
HAMM: You're leaving me all the same.
CLOV: I'm trying.
HAMM: You don't love me.
CLOV: No.
HAMM: You loved me once.
CLOV: Once!
HAMM: I've made you suffer too much. (Pause.) Haven't I?
CLOV: It's not that.
HAMM: I haven't made you suffer too much?
CLOV: Yes!»
in "End Game" a play in one act

Poor eyesight

Feldman meets Beckett
by James Knowlson

This extract is taken from 'Damned to Fame'. The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson, published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing plc, London, at £25.00 hardback and £8.99 in paperback and by Simon and Schuster in New York at $35 hardback and $20 in Touchstone paperback. The extract recounts the 1976 meeting between Feldman and Beckett in Berlin where Beckett was rehearsing his plays Footfalls and That Time. (The numbers in brackets refer to the notes in Knowlson's book, reproduced here at the end of the text.)

«Around noon on 20 September, during a rehearsal at the Schiller-Theater, the American composer and Professor of Music at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Morton Feldman came to meet Beckett in the small Werkstatt theatre. Feldman, who wore thick horn-rimmed glasses because his eyesight was so poor, related how he met Beckett and their subsequent conversation:

I was led from daylight into a dark theatre, on stage, where I was presented to an invisible Beckett. He shook hands with my thumb and I fell softly down a huge black curtain to the ground. The boy [who had escorted him] giggled. There were murmurs. I was led down steps to a seat in the front aisles... [96]

After this unpropitious start, Feldman invited Beckett to lunch at a nearby restaurant, where Beckett only drank a beer.

He [Beckett] was very embarassed - he said to me, after a while: 'Mr. Feldman, I don't like opera.' I said to him, 'I don't blame you!' Then he said to me 'I don't like my words being set to music,' and I said, 'I'm in complete agreement. In fact it's very seldom that I've used words. I've written a lot of pieces with voice, and they're wordless.' Then he looked at me again and said, 'But what do you want?' And I said 'I have no idea!' He also asked me why I didn't use existing material ... I said that I had read them all, that they were pregnable, they didn't need music. I said that I was looking for the quintessence, something that just hovered. [97]

Feldman then showed Beckett the score of some music that he had written on some lines from Beckett's script for Film. Showing keen interest in the score, Beckett said that there was only one theme in his life. Then he spelled out this theme.

'May I write it down?' [asked Feldman]. (Beckett himself takes Feldman's music paper and writes down the theme ... It reads 'To and fro in shadow, from outer shadow to inner shadow. To and fro, between unattainable self and unattainable non-self.') ... 'It would need a bit of work, wouldn't it? Well, if I get any further ideas on it, I'll send them on to you.' [98]

At the end of the month, still in Berlin, Beckett mailed to Morton Feldman in Buffalo a card with a note 'Dear Morton Feldman. Verso the piece I promised. It was good meeting you. Best. Samuel Beckett.' [99] On the back of the card was the handwritten text (Beckett never called it a poem) entitled 'Neither', beginning 'to and fro in shadow/ from inner to outer shadow/ from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself/ by way of neither'. The text compares the self and the unself to 'two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close' and owes one striking image to the play on which he was working so intently: 'unheard footfalls only sound'.

Beckett did not know Feldman's work at all when he wrote the text for him. But, by a strange coincidence, only a few days after posting 'Neither', and in London by this time, he was listening to Patrick Magee reading his own For To End Yet Again on BBC Radio 3, when he noticed that, in the second part of the 'Musica Nova' concert that followed the reading, there was an orchestral piece by Morton Feldman. He listened to it and found he liked it very much. [100]»

Notes:
96. John Dwyer, 'In the Shadows with Feldman and Beckett', Lively Arts, Buffalo News, 27 Nov. 1976.
97. Howard Skempton, interview with Morton Feldman in Music and Musicians, May 1977, p. 5.
98. John Dwyer, 'In the Shadows with Feldman and Beckett', 27 Nov. 1976.
99. Samuel Beckett to Morton Feldman, 31 Sept. [must be an error for 1 Oct.] 1976 sent by Feldman with an explanatory letter to James Knowlson, 6 Sept. 1977. MS 3033 (Archive of the Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading).
100. Samuel Beckett to John Beckett, 18 Oct. 1976 (John Beckett). The Feldman work Beckett listened to was Orchestra (1976). This had been commissioned by the Glasgow new music festival Musica Nova 1976 and was first performed on 18th Sept. by the Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Elgar Howarth. BBC Radio 3 broadcast a recording of this first performance on 4th Oct. immediately following the reading of Beckett's text (BBC Radio Times, 4th Oct. 1976).

First the body

Made by Litten Design with excerpts from "Worstward Ho"

Lehen Ekitaldia

«VLADIMIR (mindurik, hozki): Jakin ote daiteke non igaro duen berorrek gaua?
ESTRAGON: Hobi batean.
VLADIMIR (txunditurik): Hobi batean! Non hola?
ESTRAGON (keinurik gabe): Hor barrena.
VLADIMIR: Eta ez haute egurtu?
ESTRAGON: Bai... Ez gehiegi ere.
VLADIMIR: Lehengo berak al ziren?
ESTRAGON: Lehengoak? Ez zakiat.»
in "Godoten esperoan" - Basque version of "Waiting for Godot"

[TRANSLATION]
«VLADIMIR (hurt, coldly): May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?
ESTRAGON: In a ditch.
VLADIMIR (admiringly): A ditch! Where?
ESTRAGON (without gesture): Over there.
VLADIMIR: And they didn't beat you?
ESTRAGON: Beat me? Certainly they beat me.
VLADIMIR: The same lot as usual?
ESTRAGON: The same? I don't know.»

Wild inside the grass

«He was found lying on the ground. No one had missed him. No one was looking for him. An old woman found him. To put it vaguely. It happened so long ago. She was straying in search of wild flowers. Yellow only. With no eyes but for these she stumbled on him lying there. He lay face downward and arms outspread. He wore a greatcoat in spite of the time of year. Hidden by the body a long row of buttons fastened it all the way down. Buttons of all shapes and sizes. Worn upright the skirts swept the ground. That seems to hang together. Near the head a hat lay askew on the ground. At once on its brim and crown. He lay inconspicuous in the greenish coat. To catch an eye searching from afar there was only the white head. May she have seen him somewhere before? Somewhere on his feet before? Not too fast. She was all in black. The hem of her long black skirt trailed in the grass. It was close of day. Should she now move away into the east her shadow would go before. A long black shadow. It was lambing time. But there were no lambs. She could see none. Were a third party to chance that way theirs were the only bodies he would see. First that of the old woman standing. Then on drawing near it lying on the ground. That seems to hang together. The deserted fields. The old woman all in black stockstill. The body stockstill on the ground. Yellow at the end of the black arm. The white hair in the grass. The east foundering in night. Not too fast. The weather. Sky overcast all day till evening. In the west-north-west near the verge already the sun came out at last. Rain? A few drops if you will. A few drops in the morning if you will. In the present to conclude. It happened so long ago. Cooped indoors all day she comes out with the sun. She makes haste to gain the fields. Surprised to have seen no one on the way she strays feverishly in search of the wild flowers. Feverishly seeing the imminence of night. She remarks with surprise the absence of lambs in great numbers here at this time of year. She is wearing the black she took on when widowed young. It is to reflower the grave she strays in search of the flowers he had loved. But for the need of yellow at the end of the black arm there would be none. There are therefore only as few as possible. This is for her the third surprise since she came out. For they grow in plenty here at this time of year. Her old friend her shadow irks her. So much so that she turns to face the sun. Any flower wide of her course she reaches sidelong. She craves for sundown to end and to stray freely again in the long afterglow. Further to her distress the familiar rustle of her long black skirt in the grass. She moves with half-closed eyes as if drawn on into the glare. She may say to herself it is too much strangeness for a single March or April evening. No one abroad. Not a single lamb. Scarcely a flower. Shadow and rustle irksome. And to crown all the shock of her foot against a body. Chance. No one had missed him. No one was looking for him. Black and green of the garments touching now. Near the white head the yellow of the few plucked flowers. The old sunlit face. Tableau vivant if you will. In its way. All is silent from now on. For as long as she cannot move. The sun disappears at last and with it all shadow. All shadow here. Slow fade of afterglow. Night without moon or stars. All that seems to hang together. But no more about it.»
in "One Evening"

Last living soul

Samuel Beckett, Birthday Boy
For the great writer's centennial, a lot of high-grade hoopla and an edition of his work that finally does him justice.

By David Gates / Newsweek / April 13, 2006
«One of Samuel Beckett's favorite things about himself—and this depression-prone man probably didn't have many—was that he'd been born on a Good Friday that was also Friday the 13th. That was in 1906, and Thursday is his centennial. (He died in 1989.)

His very name was a byword for bleakness. Of course most people who've actually read Beckett also find his work deeply emotional and wildly funny—but that's never added up to a lot of people, if you leave aside those who got assigned "Waiting for Godot" in high school. Beckett was a marginal, expatriate Irish writer who'd given up on English and wrote in French, and that play transformed him virtually overnight into a celebrity, from a no-hoper struggling with what may have seemed to him a long, unpublishable manuscript. This was his trilogy of novels—"Molloy," "Malone Dies" and "The Unnamable"—his greatest achievement. (He wrote "Godot" to give himself some R&R before "The Unnamable," the 20th century's most relentless novel.) Beckett called this period, from 1946 to 1950, "the siege in the room." It's a wonder that this black hole of energy didn't cause power blackouts all over Paris.

As you'd expect, his centennial is the occasion for festschrifts, festivals ("Beckett festival" no longer sounds oxymoronic) and reminscences from friends and acquaintances who hadn't already weighed in, and from some who had. New productions of the plays. Scholarly conferences. Why run it all down when you're going to skip it anyway? If you care, Google "Beckett centennial" and I'm sure some of the 171,000 hits will fill you in.

But one tribute is indispensable: Grove Press's hardbound, four-volume set of Beckett's work—novels, plays, poems and essays—with an additional volume devoted to a bilingual "Godot" (the original French and Beckett's own English translation). The editor, novelist Paul Auster, left out a couple of long pieces Beckett chose not to publish during his lifetime—when he could have published his grocery lists if he'd wanted. You can argue this decision convincingly either way, but I'm with Auster: keep it canonical. Anyhow, the novel, "A Dream of Fair to Middling Women," and the play "Eleutheria" were still in print the last time I looked. Auster had the sense to put "First Love" with the three similar and contemporaneous short stories which had always been published separately. And he's assigned introductory essays to Salman Rushdie, Edward Albee, Colm Toibin and J. M. Coetzee. They may be useful (some more than others), but I think this was a bad call: such an enterprise should be a monument, not an opportunity for other writers' self-display, however reverent. Still, you're perfectly free to skip them. (If you're going to read Rushdie's piece, by the way, start a few pages in, when he's done talking about himself.)

Perhaps the best thing Auster did was to let a decent copy editor—if he didn't spit on his hands and do it himself—clean up the annoying and depressing misprints that have persisted through edition after edition of the trilogy. It shouldn't have taken Beckett's publisher all these years to start taking proper care of him. I'm hardcore when it comes to Beckett, and I was disappointed to see that a punctuation decision in "Molloy" that's always bothered me remains as it was; but there may simply not have been enough justification (in the manuscript, say) for making what seems like a logical change. On the other hand, I still prefer the old hypermodern covers Grove used for the '60s paperbacks—those stark, almost violent, typefaces and broken abstract images. The new books look more conventional, less scary, with silhouettes of "Godot"'s leafless tree, the wheel of Molloy's bicycle and, thankfully, a variant of the broken circle on the old cover of "Watt." Still, the black spines and endpapers help give the impression that you're entering a dark and special country.

If you haven't read many—or any—of the pieces in these handsome, sober volumes, I can't take you by the collar and march you into a bookstore. It's 24 bucks a volume, and $22 for the bilingual "Godot," which, if your French is as shot as mine, is just going to sit there. You could buy a fancy meal with a good bottle of wine for that kind of money. So, up to you. Auster calls reading Beckett "an experience unequaled anywhere in the universe of words." I say, Beckett's the man. Don't you want to check it out, if only so you can write in and say we're both crazy?»