Information and Guide to Anglo-Irish writer Samuel Beckett created and maintained in Dublin, Ireland
Beckett, Samuel. (1906 - 1989)
Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Critic, Irishman
A Samuel Beckett Resources website related to the life and literature of Samuel Beckett with listings of Beckett plays, poems and prose online in order to commemorate the centenary of Samuel Beckett's birth. It will have a specific interest in the Dublin aspect of the Irish playwright.
Mon Jour Chez Sam: A Visit with Beckett
by David Gullette
First of all: this is not going to read like an interview because when Asher and I went to see Backett it was to pay homage, not to pick his brain clean for the delectation of the nation. It was a conversation, not an interrogation.
And second: The three of us drank most of a bottle of Johnny Walker (Black) in the space of about two hours. In our elation afterwards Asher and I drove south as far as Chailly-en-Biere and blew 50 F. each (wildly extravagant for us at that epoch) on cocks grilled at an open fireplace and three bottles of wine, and then stumbled through a wheat field, fell on our backs crushing the wheat gaping at the revolving stars, and trudged on to the fair where we filled our ears for an hour with the din of target rifles, and then past midnight in a burst of penance decided to sleep on the ground in the Fontainebleau Woods, which we did, myself in only a soiled madras jacket for warmth, and waking at alba to spew scotch, cock, and wine all over the forest through both nose and mouth of my split-open head. So by the time we lay flat on our backs the next noon on the rocks of the emaciated river at Pouilly-sur-Loire, and decided that for the sake of our grandchildren or some such rot we'd better write down what Sam had said, our skulls did not entirely cooperate. This by way of explanation for the erratic drivel that follows.
Groundwork: John Asher, a shaggy medical Ithacan, had directed Endgame at Harvard; I, "The Shedding Fox," had played Clov. In the spring of 1962, we wrote Beckett saying we admired his work, were coming to Paris, and would we see him. Two quite illegible postcards arrived; our optimistic hermeneutics led us to suppose he meant we might be welcome. Paris: we wrote again; no answer. We planned to leave for Nice on a Monday; the Saturday before, we received a pneu at our dive on rue de la Harpe, asking us to come on Sunday to the Blvd. St. Jacques. We were terrified. I went out to the Mistral Bookshop and bought from old goatbeard Whitman (to whom, pace) a copy of that very strange collection of essays Beckett got together to break the ice for Joyce's Work in Progress in 1929, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. We arranged to meet in front of Beckett's place at the appointed hour.
Entree: We knocked at one door and Beckett appeared in another. (Pause.) He told us to come in. The man has an astoundingly beautiful face, much more like a gouged volcanic landscape that you might guess from his photos. The eyes are a bright interior blue, deepset and watchful. The large ears end in little points far back on his head. The voice is musical but clipped, and if you felt the need to define his accent, "exiled Irish" would do. He was dressed in grey slacks and a blue polo shirt, neat but unimpeded. He tried to make us feel at ease, but I saw that his hand trembled slightly as he lit his cigarette. He must have been as scared as we were: two strange foreigners bursting in upon his shelter.
The apartment was on the fifth floor of a new building, and from the study we could see a lot of Paris, but more of La Sante Prison, where Salan had been kept and where, Beckett told us, there had been riots shortly after he (B.) moved in, the inmates beating madly on the bars with tin plates and cups, the residential backyards adjoining the prison full of tear gas. I said Paris depressed me; B. seemed surprised. He had lived there on and off for thirty years or so. I looked around the room while he was hunting for the scotch and mumbled, as I so often did in those days, some appropriate lines from Endgame: "`nice dimensions, nice proportions."' A slight pause, perhaps a double-take, then a quick truncated laugh from B.
I studied the bookshelves which covered one wall and part of another. The books that stick in my memory include a Boswell, a nice set of Johnson, a battered NRF Proust, plenty of Joyce, including a first edition Finnegans Wake and a first edition Exagmination, Brecht, Goethe, and (I recall feeling its appropriateness for Beckett's world) a book of Barlach prints.
Myself: "Great!"
B: "A rotten collection."
I made some sort of gaffey remark about how surprised I was to find Boswell and Johnson in B.'s library. His praise for the two men was warm, and I managed to ungauche myself by commenting that I had once written a paper treating Johnson and Beckett. Now it was his turn to be surprised, and he pressed me for details. I went over my bit about Johnson' desperate, involuntary, gloom-laden laughter out at Streatham when, Fanny Burney suggesting she might write a play called Streatham, Johnson replied "Yes. Streatham-A Farce," and how this sort of reaction had its parallel in Beckett's use of laughter as the vehicle of a bathetic but disturbing revelation. B. seemed satisfied with my analysis, and our initial mutual uneasiness seemed to subside. He told us that when he was younger he had memorized Johnson's letter to Chesterfield, and remembered in particular a line that went (and here he started pacing in front of the big picture window): "The Shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a Native of the Rocks." (Pause.) We talked about how Johnson's personality is reflected, sometimes unconsciously, in his minor writing. B. singled out the Prayers and Meditations, especially the passages where Johnson recalls his dead wife.
Then we got into a streak of author-hopping; the following opinions were delivered casually, and should not be taken too heavily.
Camus: he wrote only one really good book, thought B., and that was L'Etranger, but nothing to get excited about after that.
Moby Dick: B. thought there was too much symbol-chasing going on in the states, but that Melville "still has a lot to say to us."
Asher: "What's your favorite American book?"
B.: "Well, one of the best I ever read was Hergesheimer's Java Head. What's your opinion of the book?"
Asher: "Well, ah. . .I haven't exactly. . .er, Gullette?"
Myself: "Ah, no. . .but I have heard of it. Yes, yes, of course, Hergesheimer."
(Pause.)
I saw B.'s first book of stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, on the shelf and asked with obvious admiration why it hadn't been republished since 1929.
B: "Because I won't let them."
Myself: "You mean you don't like the book?"
B.: "Nope."
We had sent him a copy of Arthur Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad which he had read with much pleasure.
(At this point Asher related a strange adventure of the previous day: standing on a street corner on the Blvd. St. Germain, an exquisite girl in a flashy sports car had pulled up to the curb and asked him if he wanted to go for a ride; thinking her perhaps some nymphomaniac debutante [or whatever the Parisian equivalent might be to the North American species] he accepted; they drove for a while until he suggested they have a drink someplace; true to some fantastic script she insisted that they sip a dram chez elle; and it was not until they were into their second drink at her place that she realized he had completely misunderstood the nature of their meeting, whereupon she explained — apparently with some impatience — that the continuation of their seance depended upon his placing 200F [ forty bucks!] on the table by the bed. B. followed this little tale with extraordinary attention, and roared with laughter at the moment of truth. He allowed as how the profession had changed somewhat since his first days in Paris.)
I told B. that during our production of Endgame we had planned to "scrape together a little money and ship you over for the opening." He was rather startled, and my face went red, until my qualifications and apologies had amused him enough to return us to an equilibrium. Asher fared scarcely better; we had been discussing Happy Days and B. wanted to know if A. had seen the New York production, to which A. replied, "Well, I wanted to, but I didn't get there in time." An excruciating pause, followed by a general guffaw. "Yes," said B., "It didn't last long, did it?"
I asked him what he thought of Kenner's book on him; he replied that he thought Kenner wrote beautifully but went off on a tangent somewhat with his extensive application of the Cartesian template to everything B. wrote. "But then," he added, "You can't really judge your own work."
Then we got on to Joyce. We were discussing Joyce's dramatic intentions, and B. opined that Exiles was not really a bad play, just too Ibsenite, and that the individual stories in Dubliners were inherently more stageworthy, especially "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." Not that he had anything against Ibsen — he considered An Enemy of the People a truly great play — it was simply that Joyce wasn't Ibsen, as much as he might have liked to be.
I asked — rather sheepishly, because it made me sound like a snoopy journalist — for verification of two Joyce/Beckett stories I had heard. Had B. been Joyce's private secretary? Not really, said B. Because of his eyes, many of Joyce's literary friends assisted him in chores like transcription and proofreading; "Mr. Joyce was a great one for getting work out of his friends." The second question was about an episode in which B. was supposed to have been taking dictation from Joyce for some part of Finnegans Wake when there came a knock on the door; whereupon B., who had been writing with extreme concentration said, "Well, what follows `Come in'?" And Joyce was supposed to have been so amused that he left the phrase in the manuscript. B. acknowledged that this was all true.
A French attempt to translate parts of Finnegans Wake had just come out, but it was B.'s opinion that the work leant itself more readily to translation into German than to French or Italian: "The French just won't take it." On the question of his own translations of himself: he had just finished the English translation of Comment C'est, and expressed his relief at being through with it. In the first place, he doesn't like to translate, it's just so much drudgery, or as he put it in a very Becketty phrase: "It's just going over the same old road again." He said he'd be glad to turn the work over to somebody else if there were only somebody else he could trust. I asked what it meant when he "supervised" a translation; he replied that he simply re-wrote the translation, as much work as starting from scratch.
As the time passed, and we were into our third and fourth large scotch, Asher and I began enthusiastic pleas for B. to visit the states. He was quiet but firm: he hardly ever goes out (we had asked earlier if he had seen Bergman, Fellini, or Antonioni; he answered that he had seen none of them, but that there was a Buster Keaton film in town worth seeing) and when he does leave Paris, it is to visit his farm, some 40 miles up the Marne, where he goes "whenever I can."
Our (by now) voluble chattering, liberally sprinkled with quotes from B.'s work, was finally interrupted by his polite announcement that he was half an hour late for a dinner engagement (we later flattered ourselves that it was because he found us so charming). He made a phone call that began "Hallo? Ici Sam," and moved on in a quick. fluent, musical French.
Then we asked him to inscribe a few of his books for us, and as he worked on a couple for Asher, one for Arthur Kopit, one for Gaynor Bradish, and one for me, he excused himself for writing the same inscription in each book. "I'm really not very original at these things," he said with what can only be described as a boyish grin. We told him we'd send him a copy of Gaynor's book when it came out.
Then we drank up and the three of us ambled to the door where he dispatched us with pleasant farewells, while we returned copious thanks.
Elevators usually make for silence and vacant stares, but after a spell, as we descended, I looked at Asher and said with honest amazement: "Do you realize that we have just spent the afternoon getting bombed with Samuel Beckett?"
Copyright © David Gullette
Copyright © 2006 Ploughshares
