We visited him there again in February 1975. The porter had said, as we came in at four o’clock, that Beckett was not there and they didn’t know where he had gone. No answer on the ‘phone. As we had arranged to meet between four and five, we waited for an hour, then I asked if I could go upstairs. There was Beckett sitting and waiting for us. The telephone had rung but by the time he got to the ‘phone it had stopped ringing (in the room there is a staircase with twenty steps). The telephone is upstairs and the desk and a small writing table (everything made simply out of wood and to be folded together) are downstairs in the atelier area. During the conversation, the ‘phone went twice, Beckett jumped up on both occasions and ran upstairs hanging on to the handrail all the time, which looked very funny but of course was necessary because of his poor eyesight. ‘Quite a sporting achievement!’ he commented, and smiled.
Beckett with Gottfried Büttner, in Berlin at the Akademie der Künste.
Beckett and the Cleaning Lady
Walter Asmus Maria Wimmer, the actress, interviewed Beckett’s cleaning lady at the Akademie der Künste and the headline was ‘What Beckett’s cleaning lady told me at the Akademie der Künste’! When he first came there, Beckett was always very serious and silent and he didn’t talk to anybody and Miss Pietz, the cleaning lady, said [to Maria Wimmer], ‘He doesn’t talk to anybody, you must be careful. One day I cleaned his atelier and he came up to me and I said to him, “Now listen, Mr Beckett, do you believe in God?” “No,” he said. “But you have a soul?” “No,” he said. “But, when you’re dead, what then? What’s going to happen then?” “Nothing,” he said. “That’s not true”, said I, “but you have a soul, you are a good human being.” “I am not good,” he said, “I wear a mask.” “No, no, you are such a fine man, but so serious. And all your plays,” I said to him, “why do you write all these gruesome plays? Men and daft things?” “Ja, that’s my most vicious play.” But, after all, he is such a fine man. When my mother was still alive, she was very old then, about eighty and ill, then he brought a bottle of wine for me every Saturday to give to her, or he always brought me something to give to her. And I talked to him about my mother and said, “But I have another mother, a second mother, the Virgin Mary. I always light a candle for her.” And I talked to him about my parrot, about my dog and at that time I also had a canary, you know, and he always enquired about him. And when he came the next time my mother had died. One day he brought a beautiful bunch of flowers and he gave it to me and I said that I would put it by the picture of the Virgin Mary and the picture of my mother, next to it, and in church light three candles, one for the Holy Lady, one for my mother and one for him because he was ill. He was sick with toothache and bronchitis and he wasn’t well at all. And he looked at me very seriously and said, “I hope it helps.” And then he had to leave and I asked, “When do you return?” “I don’t return”, he said, “I don’t want to return”. After he had left and I cleaned his room, I found a cigar box on the window seat behind the curtain. It was very heavy and I opened it and there were lots of io-pfennig pieces in it and a sheet of paper on top of it on which was written, “For the Mother of God and the other mother”.’
Art, Music and Chess
Ruby Cohn He knew what was in every gallery in Berlin. He made me go and see the Caspar David Friedrich [Two Men Observing the Moon] which he told me was the origin of Waiting for Godot and I’d never heard of it. And I always send a postcard -he and I would send a joint postcard to Kay [the novelist, Kay Boyle] - and I remember once getting a Manet vase of flowers and he said, ‘Ah, yes’ and told me which room it was in!
Gottfried Büttner I asked about his favourite composer. ‘Haydn at the moment’, he said. And Bach? No. He is too violent, too large for him. Wagner? No, that seemed even more impossible to Beckett - too pompous. And which modern composers? To my great pleasure he immediately said, ‘Webern’ (Anton von Webern), which I found matched exactly my own sort of comparison between Beckett’s work and the music of Webern.
Boleslaw Barlog Sam loved chamber music, and he listened to music here [in Barlog’s house] - he was sitting here and there is my gramophone and we used to play records together after dinner: Beethoven and Schubert quartets, which he loved. He came to this house many times. He always came when he was in Berlin for his plays … I wanted to invite him to concerts, but he said no; he didn’t want to go out when he was at the Akademie. We wanted to invite him to hear Fischer-Dieskau, since he loved Fischer-Dieskau so much.
My relationship with Beckett was that of friendship - from my side great warmth. We were able to laugh about the same things and that is very important.
Horst Bollmann He came to our house, too. He admired the pictures we had, but, in order to see them, he had to go right up close to the paintings [on account of the cataracts on his eyes in the late 1960s]. I know he was well acquainted with painting and so on and he asked me: ‘Do you have a Schmidt-Rottluff?’ and I replied: ‘Oh, I can’t afford a Schmidt-Rottluff’. Beckett also played the piano when he came to see me, Haydn especially, and he played on a piano in his apartment. There was one time I remember when he said: ‘What remains is music’. Two years later, when he was here again at our home, I reminded him of this sentence and he said: ‘Habe ich das gesagt?’ [‘Did I say that?’] and I said ‘Ja, ja’ and he thought again and then said: ‘Yes, well I think that’s right’.
Klaus Herm Every time Beckett was here in Berlin I used to meet him. I played chess with him as well. I met Beckett one day walking back from the Schiller-Theater and I said to him, ‘May I accompany you? What are you doing tonight?’ It was a Saturday or something. And Beckett said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe I’ll play chess with myself’. And I said, ‘Oh, I play also.’ So we arranged to play. I don’t remember exactly when that was; maybe after the second Godot.I don’t know exactly. I played him once in the Akademie and neither of us was a winner. This bothered us at first, but finally we both started to laugh.
Compassion: A Disagreement
Walter Asmus I was sitting at the dentist’s and Sam was sitting with me. It was before the opening hours of his practice, and we were sitting there and there was an old man sitting over there like this [he gestures - making his hand twitch]. I didn’t say anything; Sam had toothache and we didn’t speak. He was looking at this man for several minutes, like this. [He stares fixedly.] You know his look when he got interested in something; he was watching him, watching him - and you felt that something was going on in his head. Then he turned to me and in a whisper he said: ‘You know my mother had Parkinson’s disease.’ He was so captivated by it, you know. That was his way of looking at the world. He always connected it to something to do with his compassion for people and always connected it to himself, to his own experience, his own life.
Rosemarie Koch As far as I observed Beckett, I think it was always the cold interest of someone who has to write about human beings - the cold interest of the writer.
Walter Asmus But that was just a way of protecting himself, I think.
Rosemarie Koch There was a man in charge of the props at the Schiller-Theater, you know - the stage-manager - and he had eye trouble. And he had forgotten to do something and he said to Beckett: ‘Oh, I’m sorry but I have trouble with my eyes; perhaps I’m going blind’, and Beckett’s answer was: ‘Such is life’. That was his only response.
Walter Asmus I think it was not vicious, not cynical; it was just a dry remark, not to get involved at that particular moment.*
Rosemary Koch It was at the same time a literary remark if you compare it… to his writing. ‘Such is life’ [Comment c’est (How It Is)].
* These notes were made at the request of James Knowlson when he was writing his biography of Beckett. Only two anecdotes, however, were used there. See Damned to Fame,p. 627. These are omitted from this collection of revealing notes, which is published for the first time with the agreement of Duncan’s widow, Bernadette Scott.
* This ‘happy sentence’ then beca
me the opening line of a short play, A Piece of Monologue.
* There is, of course, another possible explanation for Beckett’s off-hand, perhaps even callous reaction which could be his concern for the state of his own eyes and his own fear of blindness. He may well have considered that he was in a worse state than his complainant.
8
Beckett in the USA:
Tributes and Memories
Beckett on the set of Film, New York, 1964.
Biography
Beckett came to the United States only once, in the summer of 1964, to help Alan Schneider to film his script of Film, with Buster Keaton playing the main character. He already had a close knowledge of early American cinema from his youth: Chaplin, Keaton, Ben Turpin, Harry Langdon, as well as the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy. And he read far more American fiction than has often thought to be the case, including Faulkner, Salinger and Bellow.
Beckett himself has always had a large and faithful following in the USA. Many American writers, artists and musicians have been inspired by his prose or by his drama.* Since its disastrous opening at the Cocoanut Grove Playhouse in Miami in January 1956, Waiting for Godot has rarely been absent for long from the stage of some large US city, with a number of prestigious productions. Endgame, Happy Days and Krapp’s Last Tape too have all received notable revivals, some with distinguished actors playing the main roles (among them Alvin Epstein, Irene Worth, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy and David Warrilow).
Beckett in the 1960s.
Beckett with Alan Schneider, Paris, 1956.
As well as directing the American premières of these four main plays, Alan Schneider also premiered several of Beckett’s other shorter plays, mostly at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York or at Arena Stage in Washington DC, but also in several university venues, usually conferring closely by letter or by telephone with Beckett prior to and during rehearsals. Then there have been many experimental and highly innovative productions such as those put on by Mabou Mines, described here by one of the company’s artistic directors and a good friend of Beckett, Frederick Neumann, and some controversial ones such as JoAnne Akalaitis’ Endgame with the American Repertory Theatre in Boston and André Gregory’s earlier production of the same play.
It is worth stressing that (mostly through Alan Schneider) Beckett took a lively interest in what was happening to his plays in the USA. His New York publisher, Barney Rosset - who acted as his dramatic agent for many years in the USA - and Schneider kept him fully informed by sending him first-hand reports of the productions they had seen or copies of the plays’ notices. It is not surprising then that a number of our tributes and memories should come from actors and writers in the United States. We have excluded major players such as Rosset, Schneider and the actor David Warrilow (who, though British, often acted in Beckett’s plays in the USA and for whom Beckett wrote A Piece of Monologue) only because their correspondence or memories have appeared elsewhere.*
Edward Albee
Edward Albee (1928—). American playwright. Among his best-known plays are The Zoo Story (1958), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1961—2), A Delicate Balance (1966), Three Tall Women (1991) and The Goat, Or Who is Sylvia (2000). Interview with JK.
I think there are perhaps four playwrights of the twentieth century that we could not have done without: Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht and Beckett. I think if you’ve got those four, you’ve got the century covered.
I don’t remember which of Sam Beckett’s plays I experienced first. I don’t know whether I saw Godot before I saw Krapp’s Last Tape performed, which was on a double bill with my Zoo Story, first in Berlin and then in New York. It was done first at the Schiller [-Theater] Werkstatt, because there was no off-Broadway theatre at the time. You know, it must have been my first experience of Sam’s work then, because I remember seeing that my play, Die Zoogeschichte as it was called in German, was being performed on a double-bill with a play that was called Das letzte Band by Samuel Beckett. Maybe this was the first experience. What I found so interesting about that production -1 forget who was playing Krapp [it was Walter Franck] - there was a huge loudspeaker on stage: stage right. And what this guy did, and I knew it was not in the text to do it, but when he started listening to the stories about two-thirds of the way through the play (reeds, woman’s eyes open), this actor playing Krapp got up from behind his desk, took his chair, went and sat by this huge loudspeaker, and put his arms around it. It was beautiful, totally beautiful. So that may well have been my first visual experience of Sam’s work.
Why I get so confused is around that time in New York we were beginning to see productions, not only of Sam’s work, but of Ionesco’s and Genet’s; it was all happening in the late ‘fifties and the early ‘sixties, so I get very muddled as to what I saw when … But, anyway, once I became aware of Sam’s work and the power, it was great. You don’t find revelations like that every day. The only terrible thing about being influenced by extraordinary people like Sam, like Genet, like other people, is that you have to try and keep your own voice. There is the danger that you can end up sounding like a carbon copy of somebody else, and I think you can’t consciously fight it, but you’ve got to absorb the influence, take what is nutritious from it, and at the same time realize that this person did it that way but I must use, I must absorb and use it in my own way, in my own voice. It’s something that I think a writer of any sensitivity would just do naturally.
I’m sure Beckett and I also saw each other in Paris and had a beer together. I think Alan Schneider put us in touch. Because I’m a very shy person and I wouldn’t have done it without an introduction. Both of us rather shy, I think. I went to Paris a fair amount. But I don’t think we saw each other more than two or three times in Paris though. It was all very casual. We also wrote to each other [over the years Albee sent Beckett copies of his plays]. I don’t recall if he commented much beyond generally encouraging enthusiasm: I liked this very much; I was very moved by this.’ I’ve got the letters somewhere. Then when he came to New York in 1964 for Film with Buster Keaton, I thought that Alan Schneider brought him out to Montauk [to Albee’s house there]. I can’t remember whether he came out; I know a lot of people did. Then I remember an extraordinary evening when the New York production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was put on in London. The company moved to London. There was Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill and George Grizzard and Melinda Dillon. After a rehearsal of one of Sam’s plays [which Albee attended], Sam was with Harold Pinter and Patrick Magee. Everybody sat around and discussed the Marquis de Sade. And I was very interested to sit there listening to people who knew a great deal more about de Sade than I did. I was very quiet: I was a mouse in that conversation, pretty much.
Beckett and Chekhov taught me two things, something that I had known, I suspect, but maybe hadn’t been quite able to articulate: the relationship between music and drama. I wanted to be a composer when I was young, and writing a play is very much like composing a string quartet; the psychological structures are the same: sound, silence, duration, all these are so terribly important. Beckett taught me that, if nothing else, when you write a play, see it and hear it as a staged piece, as a performed piece as you write it. Then when I end up after I’ve directed both my own plays and other peoples’, after a certain point, I can just close my eyes and conduct, if the rhythms are precise. It’s all sound and silence … relations, rhythms. Technically - from a technical point of view - I’m sure he probably taught me that more than anything else. The precision of language also, although I think I’m a bit more voluble in some of my plays. In Beckett everything is down to essence. Nothing beyond what is needed.
I wrote a line in a play, which I think I cut from a play of mine; it was in the text originally, and one of the characters says: ‘The least dishonourable defeat is the only honourable goal’. And I think that’s what Sam was writing about. It’s the same thing as ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’.
I’ve never felt Sam to be a pessimistic playwright
. A pessimist does not try to write. The true pessimist wouldn’t take the trouble of writing. Writing is an attempt to communicate, and if you’re a pessimist you say communication is impossible: you wouldn’t do it.
Paul Auster
Paul Auster (1947—). After attending Columbia University, he lived in France for four years. Since returning to America in 1974, he has published poems, essays, novels, film scripts and translations. He is best known perhaps for The New York Trilogy. He wrote a brief essay about Beckett’s novel Mercier and Camier, and refers to Beckett or his work several times in his own writing. Based on a telephone interview with JK, this contribution was heavily revised by Paul Auster in 2005.
I moved to Paris in February 1971, a few weeks after my twenty-fourth birthday. I had been writing poetry for some time by then, and the road to my initial meeting with Beckett began with Jacques Dupin, a poet whose work I had been translating since my undergraduate days in New York. He and I became close friends in Paris, and because Jacques worked as director of publications at the Galerie Maeght, I met Jean-Paul Riopelle, the French-Canadian painter who was one of the artists of the gallery. Because of JeanPaul, I met Joan Mitchell, the American painter he lived with in a house once owned by Monet in the town of Vétheuil. Years earlier, Joan had been married to Barney Rosset, the founder and publisher of Grove Press, and she and Beckett knew each other well. One evening, she and I happened to be discussing his work, and when she found out how important it was to me, she looked up and said, ‘Would you like to meet him?’ ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Of course I would.’ ‘Well, just write him a letter’, she announced, ‘and tell him I said so.’
Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Page 22