Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett

by James Knowlson

  I went home and wrote the letter, and three days later I received a reply from Beckett informing me to meet him at La Closerie des Lilas the following week.

  I can’t remember what year it was. It might have been as early as 1972 - or as late as 1974. Let’s split the difference and call it 1973.

  I saw him only once after that - on a subsequent visit to Paris in 1979 - and over the years we exchanged a couple of dozen notes and letters. It could hardly be classified as a friendship, but given my admiration for his work (which bordered on idolatry when I was a young man), our personal encounters and fitful correspondence were exceedingly precious to me. Among a horde of memories, I would cite the generous help he gave me while I was putting together my Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (to which he contributed translations of Apollinaire, Breton and Eluard); the moving speech he delivered one afternoon in a Paris café about his love for France and how lucky he felt to have spent his adult life there; the kind and encouraging letters he wrote whenever I sent him something I had published: books, translations, articles about his work. There were funny moments as well: a deadpan account of his one and only stay in New York (‘It was so damn hot, I was hanging onto the rails’), not to speak of the unforgettable line from our first meeting when, gesturing with his arm and failing to attract the waiter’s attention, he turned to me and said, in that soft Irish brogue of his, ‘There are no eyes in the world harder to catch than a barman’s.’

  All that, yes, but one remark from that afternoon at La Closerie des Lilas stands out from the others, and not only does it reveal much about Beckett the man, it speaks to the dilemma all writers must live with: eternal doubt, the inability to judge the worth of what one has created.

  During the conversation, he told me that he had just finished translating Mercier and Camier, his first French novel, which had been written in the mid-forties. I had read the book in French and had liked it very much. ‘A wonderful book’, I said. I was just a kid, after all, and I couldn’t suppress my enthusiasm. But Beckett shook his head and said, ‘Oh no, no, not very good. In fact, I’ve cut out about twenty-five per cent of the original. The English version is going to be quite a bit shorter than the French.’ And I said, ‘Why would you do such a thing. It’s a wonderful book. You shouldn’t have taken anything out.’ Again, Beckett shook his head. ‘No, no, not very good, not very good.’

  After that, we started talking about other things. Then, out of the blue, five or ten minutes later, he leant across the table and said, ‘You really liked it, huh? You really thought it was good?’

  This was Samuel Beckett, remember, and not even he had any grasp of the value of his work. No writer ever knows, not even the best ones.

  ‘Yes,’ I said to him. ‘I really thought it was good.’

  Jessica Tandy

  Jessica Tandy (1909—94). British-born actress, who married the American actor Hume Cronyn, and lived in the United States from 1942 until her death. She won critical acclaim for her creation of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and appeared in many films, earning an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for her performance (at the age of eighty) in Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Interview with JK.

  [Jessica Tandy acted the part of Mouth in the world première of Beckett’s short play Not I at the Forum of the Lincoln Center in New York in 1972. She met the author in Paris prior to this production.]

  I was going to do Happy Days, Hume [Cronyn, her husband] was going to do Krapp’s Last Tape and we were also going to do an Act without Words I. But we were missing another play. So Alan Schneider, Barney Rosset and I flew over to Paris to talk it over with Beckett.

  It was extraordinary because we came there thinking that what we needed was not a long play, but something short to balance the programme. ‘Could it possibly be that you have something new?’ we asked him. [In fact, Alan Schneider had written to Beckett a few weeks earlier saying ‘And I’d love to get something of yours for her (i.e. Jessica Tandy) to do on the bill with Krapp; perhaps you have a small piece or could write one.’*] And it was so funny because he said: ‘Well, yes, I do as a matter of fact’. And he pulled out these few pages of closely typed script which we passed around. We all three read it and we all thought, ‘Wow!’ I read in the stage directions that there was just light on Mouth and nothing else. Then he said ‘It is …’ - he didn’t use the word ‘vomited out’ - but it is as though there is no control, the mouth is not controlling anything, the sound is just pouring out: ‘spewed out’. If you look at one of those stone lions in a fountain; the water gushes out of its mouth. And it was a wonderful thing to keep in my head. I found that you must not think what you are saying; it just has to come out. The difference was that instead of, say, an exclamation mark, there would be nothing - or else there would be four dots. But it all makes perfectly good sense, musically.

  So we left that meeting in Paris with great exhilaration, because we all three thought it was a wonderful piece. But I must tell you also that, when we played the Beckett Festival, before I had to go on for that one, I would be dressed and walking in the corridor, saying ‘God, could you just hurt me in some way? Can I lose my voice or break a leg, so I don’t have to do it?’ It was an experience that stayed with you. The production was in the Lincoln Center - a beautiful little theatre, not the main stage but the one downstairs [The Forum]. And God heard me one night because, as they wheeled this contraption that I was in across the stage, it went across some electric cables and disconnected the whole system. So there was no light and we couldn’t do it!

  But I thought it was a wonderful challenge; the nature of the piece was so compelling. I found the less I thought about it and the more the mouth was working on its own, the righter it was. I found the challenge exhilarating. But I didn’t ever find it fun to do. I was terrified and didn’t enjoy it.

  With any play I do, I struggle to play what the author wrote and not give it a little twitch here and a little twitch there. Beckett doesn’t mess around. He tells you exactly what he wants. And that’s very good for actors. I know it’s very unpopular with actors. They need to express themselves. But if you started in the theatre, as I did, by doing Shakespeare, you learned that you don’t mess around, because he really knows what he is doing. So if he puts a comma there, he means a comma there. And Beckett puts his four dots in when you need to take a breath.

  Hume Cronyn

  Hume Cronyn (1911—2003), Canadian-born actor, who married in 1942 the British actress Jessica Tandy. Then, after her death in 1994, he married the writer Susan Cooper, in 1996. Often teamed with Jessica Tandy, he starred on Broadway (The four-Poster, A Delicate Balance, The Gin Game, Foxfire) in a TV series (The Marriage, 1954) and in a series of Old-codger’ roles in Cocoon (1985), and Batteries Not Included(1987). In 1994, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy won the first Tony Award for lifetime theatrical achievement. Interview with JK.

  During the Beckett Festival, Jessica and I were staying in a small hotel, ‘The Mayflower’, which at the time was rather shabby. It was filled with elderly people with different ailments, so that the lobby had more than its fair share of wheelchairs and walkers and crutches. It was really quite depressing. But we came in one night, after struggling with a ‘matinée day’. We had done two Becketts in the matinee and a different two in the evening.

  I have to digress just a little to say that Beckett’s belief in the resilience of the human spirit (‘I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on’ [The Unnamable]) is very marked. However, the particular mountain top from which he views the world is pretty bleak. But, despite the defeats and the defeats and the defeats, the character still picks himself up and says ‘I can, I can, I will’ - the subject, by the way, of Act without Words I, which I acted in the Beckett Festival.

  Anyway, Jessie and I came back to the hotel exhausted. We went to the elevator and pressed the button and there was a long delay. And we became conscious of two old ladies sitting on a bench right outs
ide the elevator. The bench was there for a very good reason. The old people would come and press the button of the elevator and they would sit down while they waited. And we picked up this snatch of conversation. One old lady was saying to the other: ‘But darling, what does one do?’ And the reply from the other lady was: ‘Dearest, there is nothing one can do - except, of course, to die young’! Well, after a day of Beckett, I expected to go upstairs, open the window and jump out!

  While we were rehearsing Krapp’s Last Tape, we came to a point in the script when one of Beckett’s stage directions is ‘Krapp curses’; then a few lines later it says ‘Krapp curses louder’. And I got Alan [Schneider, the director] and I said, ‘What do you suggest he says when he curses?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. What do you think is appropriate? I think it is a mutter anyway.’ And I said, ‘I think he is saying “Rubbish. Rubbish”; only it wouldn’t be “Rubbish”. I think it would be “Balls”. He is a quite a randy old man. Then later on I don’t know what he says there. He could repeat it, or he could say “great hairy clusters”.’ And Alan said, ‘That’s fine, that’s fine.’ Now we are playing in a four-, five-hundred seat house and it is a thrust stage, so the audience is all around you. And the first row is very close to the apron of the stage and one evening I was muttering ‘balls’ and ‘those great hairy clusters’. Some weeks later - we were still playing - a letter arrived for Alan [from Beckett]. He didn’t write to me. He wrote to Alan. And Alan was unwise enough to read me the letter over the telephone, which said: ‘I understand from Harold [Pinter] that Cronyn is saying such and such and I object to that and please tell him to desist.’ I said, ‘OK, Alan, then what do you want me to say instead?’ But Alan said, ‘I don’t want to change anything. You just keep it that way.’ He was upset. I was upset. I thought I can’t go on saying something that Beckett, who was very meticulous, objects to.

  So I sat down and wrote to Beckett. I had written to him a number of times before. ‘This is what we are doing; this is where we are in rehearsal; this piece appeared in the New York Times; this piece appeared in the Post; here’s a copy of the photographs.’ I didn’t know the man but I thought I had been extremely attentive. And then suddenly this contretemps came up and I wrote to him and said, ‘Very well, sir, I know what you don’t want; now please tell me what you do want?’ It was short and to the point and rather brusque. That is the one letter I have from him. He wrote back and he said ‘Dear Mr Cronyn’ - or something to this effect, so you cannot take this as gospel - ‘any suggestions that I have in regard to the text will be made to the director of the production, Mr Alan Schneider. Sincerely. Samuel Beckett’* - which really put me in my place.

  So the whole thing was never resolved. As I say, it was a very minor point. But obviously I had stepped out of line. It would not be like me to be directly rude, but my note to him may have had about it a brusqueness.† I felt that I had been responsible for getting the whole damn thing on, and we had received extremely good reviews. But it really put Beckett off me because I heard from some other source later on that, talking about the American production (which he never saw), Beckett said something to the effect that ‘Tandy was probably OK, but that fellow Cronyn …’. I thought, ‘Christ, he never saw it, he doesn’t know.’ Krapp was a wonderful part for me and the other part was also a wonderful part for me [Act without Words I]. And we had brought it off. It was a smashing success. Now that is Beckett. That is not the Cronyns. That’s Beckett. It was a world première. Anyway years passed. And I knew about Alan’s collection of Beckett’s correspondence. So I wrote to him and I said, ‘I have this priceless letter from Samuel Beckett and I don’t think I am going to keep it, so let me send it to you.’

  Frederick Neumann

  Frederick Neumann (1926—), director and actor, seen here in Worstward Ho, 1986. One of the founder members of the theatre company Mabou Mines. Adapted and directed several of Beckett’s prose works for the stage: Mercier and Camier (1979), Company (1980) — with original music by Philip Glass —and Worstward Ho (1981). He also acted in JoAnne Akalaitis’s adaptation of Cascando (1976) and with Julian Beck and George Bartenieff in Theatre I and Theatre II at La Mama, New York. Interview with JK, added to by Frederick Neumann in 2005.

  [It is widely believed that Beckett clamped down very firmly on adaptations of his work or on freer versions of his plays. We print this interview with Fred Neumann to show how, when he was dealing with people whom he liked and whose work he respected, he could accept some freely imaginative transpositions.*]

  I think the first time Beckett and I really talked was in Berlin in 1976. We all met up in Berlin. In fact, Ruth Maleczech and Lee Breuer [fellow members of the Mabou Mines theatre company] never met Beckett; they had hoped to meet him there, but they were somewhere else at the time. But David [Warrilow, the actor] was there and yes, JoAnne Akalaitis was there. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, it was JoAnne Akalaitis who slipped a note under his door at the Akademie der Künste and he responded rather quickly saying ‘Let’s meet downstairs in the coffee-house’. We were putting on two pieces of his at the time, Cascando and The Lost Ones, and we were also doing a piece by Lee Breuer called B-Beaver Animation. Then, of course, later we met in Paris. I would go to Paris, and we would have very long talks at the PLM [Hôtel Saint-Jacques].

  The Lost Ones

  [This text, first written in French, largely in 1966, as Le dépeupleur, has many ‘lost bodies’ confined to a cylinder ‘each searching for its lost one’. These figures climb up ladders in order to reach niches or alcoves or to find an egress. Frederick Neumann describes how these scenes in the cylinder were rendered in stage images with the British actor David Warrilow manipulating tiny, plastic creatures who represented the ‘lost ones’.]

  The adaptation of Beckett’s prose text The Lost Ones was the first to be done by Mabou Mines. It wasn’t I who asked for his permission to do that. It was Lee Breuer. Or at least I think JoAnne Akalaitis asked permission for Mabou Mines, and Lee Breuer did the directing, and it was not supposed to be anything more than a reading. So [when he saw the set in Berlin] Beckett said, ‘My, you have adapted it, haven’t you?’ Lee Breuer directed it, and turned it into a rather brilliant stage production - which was far more than a reading, of course.

  Everyone had to take off their shoes and pick up the binoculars as they went into the theatre, so that they could look at ‘The Lost Ones’, who were represented by tiny plastic human beings, naked, sunburned. David Warrilow narrated the story of The Lost Ones and used these little creatures, little plastic things, stage people. And David was functioning himself as a ‘lost one’, if you like, in the larger cylinder which was the theatre. And then there was this miniature replica of the cylinder in which he was located, of people not much larger than grains of sand, and which we were to represent, which you could rub in your hand, and they would … you could hear the dry crisp sound of the skin, you know that sound. And Philip Glass did this tinkling music, that Time Magazine said was music down in the molecules, or something equivalent. All this tiny, tiny, tiny percussion of … I think The Lost Ones established some kind of reputation for Mabou Mines.

  I can’t remember now whether I asked Beckett when we met in 1976 if I could do More Pricks than Kicks as a stage version. It took him four months to respond, and I can’t find that correspondence. Four months later, Sam wrote to me and said, ‘Dear Fred, Please leave the poor little thing alone’. Then I wrote back and said, ‘But, you know, the piece I really wanted to do, but I didn’t dare ask you, is Mercier and Camier. I would like to stage that.’ And it took him a good, maybe four months again, to respond. And he finally said ‘OK’, and we talked about it, and I was going back and forth at the time, constantly going back and forth, from New York to Paris and back, and was able to talk a little bit about it.

  Mercier and Camier

  [Mercier and Camier, first written in French in 1946, concerns two characters, rather like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, who are travellin
g with their bicycles on a journey in a hybrid countryside, part Ireland, part France. The novel looks forward to Waiting for Godot written two years later. Neumann describes the highly inventive, exuberant production that was put on by Mabou Mines - and Beckett’s own reaction to it.]

  Mercier and Camier is a kind of road play. ‘It’s a picaresque work, therefore you can move the text around, as you will’, Beckett said. I must say, I was just amazed. And it seemed to walk through time, not just down a road, but through time, and through different spaces. Or time spaces. That of the First World War: a time of bicycles. In fact, I once used that as a kind of subtitle for it: ‘A Time of Bicycles’. And there was a kind of slow, wheeling movement by human beings that seemed to allow for conversation and gaff between two buddies. There was a pub, which was like the main place, which was located in an Irish village, or it could have been a French village, and there was a prostitute, who was upstairs in this pub. And, though it was not written in the text, I designed the pub to have a TV above the bar on which David Warrilow was a TV person who spoke a lot of the text from that piece. So I had everything sort of moving. There was a canal: as you know, in the text, there is the road, the canal, the pub, the house of prostitutes, and there were these allusions to the terrible things that happened in the First World War … and after the First World War, ‘la belle Hélène’, I think …