I have a card of something that’s less than a square, a very narrow alley, a picture that Beckett sent me. It’s quite a wonderful picture. And it just so happened that it corresponds somewhat to this Irish theme that one could see through the pub window, and the pub door, and the pub wall, because there was no wall. And there was no real window either: there was a glass in a frame, so that when it rained, it rained only in that window and it rained only in the doorway. So every time Mercier and Camier, or Mercier himself wanted to step out, it would rain. Every time he’d come back in, the sun would come out.
But the main thing about the whole production was this enormous acreage of scrim [a sort of fabric] that enveloped the whole audience. And I wasn’t trying to be spooky or anything, but it was useful for me to use it as a screen, and also to have this tunnel effect … the black hole of the universe, if you like, that was represented right down stage-front, which was the door with the raindrops.
Philip Glass did the music again. It was called ‘The Train Music’, since they were also in the train, if you remember. And we had an actor with no legs; he pushed himself along. But there was a kind of fantasy of the text: I do not call it fiction, although it was somewhat fictionalized. I had people come in on bicycles, through revolving doors, from backstage, they would get up enough speed, or on roller-skates, which you could not see. They seemed to float: the bartender always came in with a tray … and the audience could not see that he was on a ramp, a long, slow ramp; first one direction and then the other. The waiter - he was called the Waiter, you know - could come through the revolving doors and glide across the whole stage without talking and you couldn’t see that he had skates on. They were hidden. All of that was meant to show this in some kind of fantasy time.
I remember the bog, which is another element that was particular to Ireland, and a place for more than just getting your feet wet! But we had a real bog on the other side of the canal, and the canal was water about six to eight inches deep. We used it to reflect light, in their drunken moments, talking about stars and things like that. And, wallowing in the bog, Bill Raymond was a Mabou Mines person, who did this with me. We wallowed in the bog while David Warrilow waxed. Fiction, if you like; wonderful poetic fiction that Sam had written. Then the bartender glided back and forth, and then the hills of Dublin were represented by a structure that had been built by a sculptor. She devised the hills of Dublin all around the audience, so that we could go all the way up, and carry on … and it was just a device not to use a microphone, a device to be able to speak into the thing close to all sections of the audience about things. I and Bill Raymond, we went all around the audience, and across the heads of the audience.
It was all in a world that was set just after the Second World War or maybe just before it. We had a very, very good photographer, who had devised and had done the 35mm stills of the various visions of France, the various things out of the windows of France, but various things that you would have seen during the Second World War. Things about … where all the bones are, in the North Sea, in France, and other images that changed the world. This was something that Sam and I had in common, talking about the war, the Second World War, and I think that was one of the things that was something of a bond, about my relationship to his work. His work spoke for me of the devastation that that war [had brought] and what had happened to Europe, and that such a great cultural centre of the world would so destroy itself.
So look into the black hole of the universe and on stage-centre, you have projecting on either side of the audience, on this scrim, going all the way back, six windows, all of them because they are being projected from the back foreshortened, so that the audience had the impression of being in a train. And the projections were historical. Pre-war, and afterwards. And you could see Hélène through the scrim, and the men with her … and there was a huge projection of her above the bar. And there were like two little men; the apples of her eye, because the projection was so big that we were the small people in her eye, and then when she opened her mouth to have us, we were in her throat, and she could just snap her mouth shut, and we would be … but we were live and she was live, but she was also a small person in her own image.
I said to Sam when I saw him, ‘I guess you must have received some reports of Mercier and Camier, and I have to apologize right away about it being over-produced. There was too much.’ (‘The simpler the better, Freddy’, he used to say, ‘the simpler the better.’) Anyway, he said ‘Yes, I’ve received good reports’ - and he held his finger up - ‘with reservations.’
Best of all, Beckett followed with the years, by allowing me to adapt Company for the stage, including a quartet by Philip Glass. To assist me with the trepidation I felt in asking to include music in that work, he said, ‘I think there are the proper interstices’. Then again, towards the end, regarding the adaptation of Worstward Ho (which was handed to me by Ruby Cohn in San Francisco, with Sam’s permission) ‘… with all due respect for Philip, no music for pity’s sake; it’s my last gasp.’
* As examples we mention the writers Edward Albee, David Mamet, Paul Auster; the artists Bruce Nauman, Jasper Johns and Tony Oursler; and the musicians Philip Glass, Morton Feldman, Earl Kim and Roger Reynolds.
* See, for example, Alan Schneider, Entrances. An American Director’s Journey, New York, Viking Penguin, 1986 and No Author Better Served. The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998 and an extensive conversation with David Warrilow in Jonathan Kalb, Beckett in Performance, Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 220-33.
* Letter from Alan Schneider to Samuel Beckett, 2 July 1972 in No Author Better Served. The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon, 1998, p. 272.
* This letter, which is alluded to, though not included, in the Beckett-Schneider correspondence, is part of Boston College’s collection, since Cronyn did indeed, as he says here, give it to Alan Schneider with the note ‘To Alan from H.C. with a touch of the forelock’.
† Hume Cronyn fails to mention here, as Deirdre Bair quotes in her Samuel Beckett: A Biography, that, after the question to Beckett, he did add: ‘This minuscule point is balls and rubbish, especially at this time.’ (Bair, Samuel Beckett, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 626.) Beckett wrote to Schneider that ‘he had an offensive letter from Cronyn dated Nov. 16 to which I replied briefly’. (No Author Better Served, p. 293.)
* Neumann spoke in this interview about his other adaptations of Beckett’s prose works. However, since this is not the place for a detailed analysis of such productions, we refer the curious reader to Jonathan Kalb’s excellent discussion in his Beckett in Performance, Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 117-43 and 206-11. We confine ourselves to The Lost Ones and Mercier and Camier.
9
The Last Twenty Years
Samuel Beckett at the Royal Court Theatre, 1973.
Biography, 1969-89
Beckett’s sixties and seventies were still highly productive years. He wrote several short, challenging plays for the stage in the 1970s and early 1980s, testing how far it was possible to go in the theatre (Not I, That Time, Footfalls, A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu and Catastrophe). He also wrote minimalist plays for television (Ghost Trio, … but the clouds … Quad and What Where) which have exercised a great influence on video and installation art. His prose works of that period (Company, Mal vu mal dit [Ill Seen Ill Said] and Worstward Ho) are powerful and thrillingly innovative.
Productions of his plays in London, Berlin and Paris kept Beckett actively involved in the theatre, in which some of his friends (e.g. Jocelyn Herbert, Billie Whitelaw, Donald McWhinnie, Pierre Cha-bert) worked. His support - both moral and financial - for members of his family and his friends was unwavering and he gave money away constantly to charities and institutions, as well as to numerous private individuals. Friendships with ‘Con’ Leventhal, his pu
blishers John Calder and Barney Rosset, Barbara Bray, Josette Hayden (whose husband, Henri, died in 1970) continued unswervingly. Always deeply humanitarian, he began, in a new development, to take much more public stances on political issues: apartheid in South Africa, greater freedoms in Communist Eastern Europe, and human rights cases throughout the world (e.g. the house arrest of Vaclav Havel).*
His fame made many other demands on his time and his appointment diaries of this period reveal that he met a quite extraordinary number of people whom he knew scarcely at all to discuss new productions and publications or musical and dance works inspired by his writing. Tribute volumes tend to publish contributions only from those who knew their subject well. But how did he appear to his occasional visitor, anxious to glean as much as possible from meeting him? We have selected two sets of memories to answer that question: Michael Rudman speaks of his meeting with Beckett to talk about a revival of Waiting for Godot that he was directing at the National Theatre in London; Charles Krance also writes of his conversation with the author about preparing a critical edition of his manuscripts. Then, as an example of someone who never met Beckett but who was profoundly influenced by him, we print the film director Anthony Minghella’s thoughts on Beckett and on filming his play Play.
Looking back at his work a hundred years after his birth in Foxrock, County Dublin, its impact on writers, artists and musicians, as well as on those who are none of these, seems likely to last for many generations to come.
James Knowlson
James Knowlson (1933-). Emeritus Professor of French Studies in the University of Reading, England. He is the author (with John Pilling) of Frescoes of the Skull. The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett’(John Calder and Grove Press), the general editor of the four-volume series The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett (Faber and Faber) and editor of two of the volumes. He wrote the authorized biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett (Bloomsbury and Grove Atlantic). Most recently, he wrote Images of Beckett with photographs by John Haynes. Contribution written especially for this volume.
According to a recently rediscovered old notebook, I wrote to Beckett for the first time in March 1970. He had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and my letter was to inform him that we hoped to mount an exhibition at the University of Reading in England to honour him and his work. At his request I met him in his Paris apartment in September. I remember we drank whiskey (which I actively dislike) as we skimmed hastily through the broad details of his life. Although reticent at first, he was very co-operative, providing me with the names of people who would help me as well as lots of factual information. Over the nineteen years that I knew him, he was in fact invariably helpful. In spite of his reputation to the contrary, I also found him happy to talk about his work - provided you knew what to ask him - but not to explicate it.
The May 1971 exhibition led directly to the foundation of what was eventually to become the Beckett International Foundation, a charitable trust, to which, for almost two decades, Beckett donated virtually all his recent manuscripts and theatrical notebooks, making Reading’s Beckett Archive into the richest collection in the world. I was regularly invited to Paris to collect his gifts and this led to a friendship which helps to explain why, after publishing a number of books on his work, I became his biographer.
Two things stand out clearly in my memory from our drinks or dinners at the Iles Marquises, the Closerie des Lilas, the Palette or, later, the PLM (Hôtel Saint-Jacques) on the boulevard of that name near his apartment. First, Beckett was not just an excellent listener, he also had a genuine talent for putting things into perspective. He could distinguish between a real problem (and offer help and support to solve it whenever possible) and something which, looked at in a different light or seen in a wider context, was relatively unimportant. For someone who was usually thought of as pessimistic, he was extremely positive and helpful when the problems were your own, although he was often anxious and despondent about his own concerns, especially when they were to do with his health or the lack of progress he was making on his work. He was not afraid of emotion either. I often recall him telling me about the illnesses or difficulties of friends, sometimes with tears in his eyes. It was only much later that one heard - from others - how ‘Sam’ had paid for their medical treatment or helped them out with gifts of money. His financial generosity is legendary. He gave so much away: settling the rent of a friend’s apartment; educating another friend’s children; sending regular cheques to members of his family and helping out many hard-up writers or painters. What has been commented on much less frequently was his willingness to be there whenever his friends needed his time and his moral support. Fortunately, I had to benefit from his offers of actual financial help only once. This was when, having taken leave of absence to edit his Theatrical Notebooks, I was left high and dry without any income for a year by the late withdrawal of the promised fees on the strength of which my leave had been taken. Beckett immediately made over his percentage of the royalties as author to me and the other two editors so that we lost less money. Like so many of his friends, however, I had many reasons to appreciate his compassion and human concern. Our eldest son, Gregory, was badly injured in 1979 in a motorcycle crash and was in intensive care following an emergency operation, his life hanging by a thread for some days. Beckett called me every single night after we came back from the hospital to see how Gregory was getting on. Fortunately Greg survived and made a full recovery. But subsequently Beckett never failed to ask after his health.
Second, contrary to popular belief, evenings with Beckett were often lively, fascinating occasions. This was partly because he was so witty and could laugh at himself, as well as at funny things that occurred. I once knocked my empty glass off the table in the American Bar at the Coupole and, to my acute embarrassment, it broke into a thousand pieces on the tiled floor. ‘It’s not serious. The glass was empty at the time,’ was Beckett’s speedy rejoinder. He even treated the adversities of old age with self-deprecating humour. One day, in the last two years of his life, I leapt up from my chair to leave: ‘Hang on a minute. Getting up isn’t as easy as that, you know.’ When he was living in a retirement home during the last few weeks of his life, the hospital he was taken into when he fell gave him a course of injections for vitamin deficiency, called ‘Avitaminosis’. As a result alcohol was strictly forbidden. The problem was that Beckett liked his whiskey regularly. ‘That must be a bit of a bitch, Sam’, I commented sympathetically. Long pause. ‘No Jim. It’s not a bit of a bitch. It is a bugger of a bastard of a bitch!’ - a distinctly ‘cool’ remark for any 83-year-old to make. He went on: ‘I’ll make up for it later’.
Dinners over the years were also lively affairs because his knowledge of literature, art, music and sport was so extensive and so discerning. He would quote W. B. Yeats, Joyce, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chamfort, even Heredia at the drop of a hat, and always in context. We talked of French authors he admired (Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Fernando Arrabal) and of those he preferred to others: Camus in preference to Sartre, for example. We often spoke of the books he was reading. ‘As you see, I am in the middle of Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde. It is good - but not as good as his James Joyce.’ But he went on to say that he thought Ellmann was wrong to publish Joyce’s ‘dirty knickers’ letters later. One day he confided to me, ‘I didn’t like Ernest Hemingway, you know, when I met him. He was very rude about Finnegans Wake.’ On another occasion he advised ‘You have to bring Yeats’ “cold eye” to bear on anything you write’. ‘Goethe and Yeats were old men when they produced their finest work’, he judged. And in art it was the late work of his old friend Henri Hayden, that he admired the most, ‘the paintings of the Mont-Moyens [in the Marne] in the ‘sixties’. He offered precise memories when we talked about painting, such as ‘I remember there is a wonderful Poussin hanging in the National Gallery [of Ireland]: The Holy Family.’ In music, he judged that ‘Schubert’s music is the closest thing to pure
spirit you could ever find’.
He liked to talk about the actors with whom he was working, often in personal terms, offering a striking verbal portrait of the French actress, Delphine Seyrig, arriving for rehearsals of Pas (Footfalls) on her motor scooter, her newly Afro-styled hair flowing in the wind: ‘she is lovely’, he commented. (Delphine later told me how intensely intimidated she had been by Beckett.) He positively glowed with pleasure as he described how ‘wonderful’ Billie White-law was. He frequently confided information about his latest plays: ‘That Time is on the very edge of what is possible in the theatre’; ‘there is some [John Millington] Synge too in [the television play] … but the clouds …’. And he spoke at length about the difficulties he was encountering in staging them: lighting the Auditor in Not I, for example in London, finally abandoning the figure altogether in Paris; Madeleine Renaud’s problem in speaking quickly enough in the same play; and so on.
In the quite different field of sport, Beckett asked me whether I had seen David Gower cover-driving that summer or Ian Botham (‘Beefy’ as, laughing, he referred to the famous England all-rounder) hammering the Australians at cricket. Harking back to his childhood, he said ‘my great hero at cricket was Frank Woolley, the Kent player’.* We also spoke of the latest rugby matches between France and England or Ireland when he used to listen to the radio commentaries or when, in the last years of his life, he watched the games on television.
There were a few curious incidents at these meetings. I remember one evening during the early years of what I would then describe as our acquaintance rather than our friendship, we were having dinner at the PLM hotel when a lightbulb suddenly flashed close by. Beckett reacted with horror. ‘What was that? What was that?’ he asked with real panic in his voice. I realized with dismay that he might think that I had set up a clandestine ‘photo-call’. So I hastily reassured him, commenting: ‘You know I would not do that to you.’ ‘But they do, you know, Jim, they do’, he replied. The sight of a waiter advancing with an enormous pair of steps to change a broken lightbulb on the high ceiling answered Beckett’s question. But it made me realize how intensely he loathed and feared that kind of intrusion into his privacy. Much later on, when he was living in an old people’s home, he used to go for a walk around the streets of the neighbourhood. One day, a photographer approached him and, thrusting a camera in front of him, took several flash pictures. As Beckett saw the camera raised and registered the flash, his arms went across his chest in a gesture of recoil, a reflex response to protect himself, just as he had done in 1938 on another Paris street when he had been stabbed in the chest by a local pimp. Memories of such intensity die hard.
Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Page 24