Beckett was closing on seventy-five when I first met him in January of 1981. I had just turned thirty-three - ominous year to a lecteur du Dante - and I was spending a leave of absence in Paris. My first direct contact with Beckett was via telephone - he called me, unexpectedly. I had just moved myself into a studio apartment on the Ile Saint Louis and, jealous of my solitude, I had emphatically not given my telephone number to anyone. He knew the Polish bookshop (Librairie Libella) behind which I lived, and called the owner for my number. When the phone rang, I was frying potatoes for my dinner, and I assumed it was a wrong number, intended for the previous tenant. I answered rather brusquely in French, expecting to be off the line in seconds: ‘Allo?’ ‘Hello, Robert Scanlan?’ a very polite, somewhat high-pitched voice said at the other end. ‘Yes?’ I switched to English, puzzled. ‘This is Samuel Beckett’ … and I fumbled the phone and my spatula at the same time. Skillet a-sizzle, I had little choice over my first spoken words to Samuel Beckett: ‘… could you excuse me a minute … I have potatoes on the stove.’
At our first meeting, a few days later, I brought up a puzzle I encountered in close-reading Company. The heartbeat calculation on page 40 of the Grove Press hardback edition yielded an age for the protagonist of 2,220 years … what was I missing? ‘He’s in his twenties.’ Beckett answered. I protested this was incompatible with the ‘seventy American billion’ of the text, and he proposed we work it out. I pulled out the little pocket calculator I used to convert francs to dollar equivalents, and Beckett started dictating numbers to me … ‘My heart beats at roughly sixty per minute … times sixty, times twenty-four …’ I entered the figures in the calculator as he spoke. ‘Times 365, times twenty-two.’ I pressed the ‘equals’ key and my hand-held went berserk, flashing a long string ofcapital E’s, for ‘error’ presumably. We had a good laugh. Even this young age was too much for a modern calculator … if so few thumps exceeded the capacities of my pathetic little instrument, what were we to make of our respective thumps now? Then Beckett and I got serious over bits of paper, and - sure enough - the printed text was in error. It was to be the beginning of many subsequent discussions of numeration, and it was an invaluable first lesson in ‘doing the math’ - an injunction Beckett urged with wry irony each time I prepared to do another of his plays. When I staged A Piece of Monologue several years later, we pored over the numbers on that occasion, too. It became a habit I associated with Beckett: at his death, he had measured out (if you start counting only at his birth) exactly 30,568 nights and one more half day; 5,516 more days without Beckett have elapsed to the moment of this writing. In thumps, that’s a grand total for him of roughly two-and-a-half American billion - 2,641,118,400 heartbeats (not counting his gestation) and 476,582,400 more we’ve all laboured through without him to this moment of lifting the glass in remembrance … but who’s counting?
A middle meeting. We were at the Petit Café in springtime this time, and - after almost an hour of talk on many topics (chiefly my upcoming ‘Undone Beckett Done’ evening, as I closed on finishing a tutti Beckett sweep) - I asked Beckett what new work might be coming. He announced he was leaving next day to film Quadrat in a television studio in Stuttgart. It was a novel idea, and he sketched it on a café napkin. He showed the square he had drawn with crossing diagonals. Then he added arrows to explain the ‘ever leftwards’ path that he had envisioned as a trajectory for a ‘creature’ who would pace off all the sides and both diagonals (each diagonal in both directions) without once repeating any of the ‘legs,’ until a full ‘circuit’ had been exhaustively traced. It seemed odd to me to call the zig-zaggy trajectory a ‘circuit’ but I remember marvelling at the stark simplicity of its principle of generation. The whole geometry resulted from the single instruction ever to turn left whenever a corner was reached. From this one injunction - oh perfect Beckett pensum! - the endless tracing of the eight legs of an intricate circuit, a dogged duty-march leaving after each circuit no leg untravelled and no leg travelled twice (except each diagonal in opposite directions). Each time the full pattern is completed, the creature is in position for an identical repetition. O pointless geometric perfection! O heartbreaking wordless image! Once explained and drawn (with arrows) Beckett let me appreciate the plan, and I borrowed his pen to retrace on the napkin the eight sequential legs of one full circuit thus: side 1, diagonal A, side 2, diagonal B, side 3, diagonal A”, side 4, diagonal B’ - with the primes of A and B representing opposite directions along the same diagonal. It was ingenious as hell. I marvelled and Beckett remained impeccably still, quiet, contemplative, like a satisfied opponent at chess. Then he slowly crumpled the napkin and put it in the pocket of his jacket. ‘I’m not sure how it will work in practice.’ Again, silence. I was conscious of residing - we both were - in a hushed still point inside the very nature of our medium as theatre artists. We both remained silent for some time more. Finally, Beckett proposed a walk.
My last meeting with him was in 1989 - a month or so before what would turn out to be his 83rd and last birthday. I was planning (roughly for that date) one of my periodic ‘Beckett Evenings’ in Boston. Once I had arrived in Paris, he called me and gave me over the phone careful instructions for finding my way to his tiny room at his new quarters in the old-age home on rue Rémy-Dumoncel. He urged strict secrecy about his whereabouts. Whiskey - Bushmill’s - had already been poured for me by the time I arrived, and we started our (last) conversation by shuddering over the ghastly circumstances of Thomas Bernhard’s recently discovered death. The event we were planning for the Poets’ Theatre in Boston was to be built around David Warrilow, an actor Beckett and I both admired greatly. We also both knew Warrilow to be dying. Beckett showed me a typescript of Stirrings Still. After I had glanced over it, he asked me to take a copy across Paris to Warrilow. He was releasing it to us for a public reading, the finale of this evening of ours, that was to include several other pieces. We spoke in our usual way about the other pieces. The planned solo reading of Ohio Impromptu troubled Beckett, and he insisted we place Warrilow carefully, fretting that his reading light, if onstage, would create an image that would obviate the text. It was our usual go-around before production, the ostensible purpose of all my visits to his side.
I paused at parting at his threshold and for some reason called him Sam for the first time, ‘Sam, I don’t know when I’ll see you again …’ Then, on impulse, I crossed the room back to him - he looked very wistful and frail in his drab plaid housecoat - and I enveloped him - most uncharacteristically - in a farewell hug. He spoke distinctly and deliberately to me, his eagle eyes intently fixed on mine, as I backed away again to the door. ‘God bless you, Bob Scanlan.’ We stared at each other across the tiny room. It was clear what was at stake, and - indeed - as things worked out, that was our last sight of each other.
I read the four loose sheets of Stirrings Still carefully just minutes later, on the Métro. It was the first time I fully absorbed what was written there - his own imagination of the end, the final term of the wearying series. I started weeping at what I had been given, and at the thought of who I was taking it to. And then at the fact that we are all heading for the same rendezvous. Some of us have a few more circuits to perform, some less, some of us are done, excused finally from the ongoing. The thumps, the thumps. Here’s to you, Sam Beckett. God rest and bless your sweet and patient soul.
Raymond Federman: Sam’s Gift of Words
Raymond Federman (1928—). Raymond Federman is a bilingual novelist, poet and translator, who is also a critic and scholar. He has written eight novels in French and English including Double or Nothing, Amer Eldorado (written in French and nominated for the Prix Medicis), Take It or Leave It, The Voice in the Closet, The Twofold Vibration, Smiles on Washington Square (Winner of the 1985 American Book Award), To Whom It May Concern and La Fourrure de ma Tante Rachel. A friend of Samuel Beckett for many years, he also wrote Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction and was the co-author of the bibliography, Samuel Becket
t: His Works and His Critics. Contribution first published in Fiction International, 19:1, 1990. Copyright © Raymond Federman, 2005.
Those who knew Sam, as his friends called him - and I was privileged to be one of them - knew that in the last few months he was ill, and alone, by choice, in that barren room of the nursing home where he spent his last days. A collective sadness was circulating among his friends. There was little to say or do. In conversation, in letters, one simply said ‘Sam is ill’, that’s all. Finally, when the news of his death came, no one was surprised, but the sadness lingers. Yes, there is sadness now and a deep sense of loss. Sam is no longer in Paris, no longer writing another text for us. There will be no more books by Samuel Beckett.
But even though Samuel Beckett has now changed tense, as a friend wrote to me upon learning of his death, what remains is that immense oeuvre he has left behind. That incredible landscape of words. For this we are all deeply indebted to him. Personally, however, what Beckett left with me is the remembrance of a few phrases spoken or written each time we met or wrote to each other. Yes, each time I would leave him, holding on to the few precious words he had given me like a fragile gift.
Soon after we first met, more than forty years ago, I told Beckett that I too wanted to devote my life to writing fiction and poetry, and he said to me: ‘Raymond, whatever you write, never compromise your work, and if you plan to write for money or for fame, do something else.’ I have cherished these words, and hope that I have not betrayed them.
Years later, sitting in Sam’s study in Paris, he showed me a text he had just finished. I read it while he sat there in silence, the kind of silence only Beckett could make comfortable. It was a short text, only a few pages, as all his later texts were - short but precise, without any superfluity of words - and I commented on it, saying how beautiful, how powerful, how moving it was. It was called Company. Sam replied (in French, we always spoke French together): ‘Oui, c’est pas mal, mais c’est pas ça encore.’ [‘Yes, it’s not bad, but it’s not there yet.’] After all these years (Sam was in his seventies then), after the millions and millions of words he had scribbled, in English, in French, he was still not satisfied. ‘It’s not there yet’. I felt so humble that day as I wondered if he would ever be satisfied. Or tried to fail better.
Another time in Paris, again in his apartment on boulevard St Jacques. He had just finished the translation of Comment c’est into English. I read a dozen pages of How It Is while we both smoked cigarettes - Gitanes in those days - and then I marvelled at the music of his words, at the unusual syntax he had achieved in English, at the dislocation of the language, at this fantastic quaqua, this ‘rumour transmissible ad infinitum in either direction’, but Sam shook his head: ‘No, Raymond [he had a particular way of pronouncing my name, his voice dragging with affection on the first syllable], ‘I failed again. The English language resisted me’.
In 1971, Sam took my wife and I to the dress rehearsal of the revival of En attendant Godot, almost twenty years after the original production in Paris. Roger Blin was again the director, and except for the actor who played Lucky [Jean Martin, who had another commitment], the same actors who had created the roles of Gogo, Didi and Pozzo were there too, but of course all of them now twenty years older, and that made them even more tragicomic. I thought it was an interesting performance. Blin had deliberately slowed down the movement of the actors and the delivery of their lines, which made for a kind of play in slow motion, but as a result the symbolism became too obvious, even though, perhaps, there were no symbols where none intended. Later, in a restaurant with the cast, Roger Blin and Sam, I asked him what he thought of this new production. ‘It’s good, it’s good. Unusual’, Sam said. Then he hesitated a moment and added, quickly and softly: ‘I only wish they would stop making me say more than I want to say’.
On the occasion of his seventieth birthday, I tried to convince Sam by letter to come and visit us in Buffalo, incognito, and even offered to take him to see Niagara Falls, only twenty minutes by car from my house. (Beckett once told me, half-jokingly, that he had almost won a literary prize which was an all-expenses-paid trip to Niagara Falls.) He wrote back: “Cher Raymond, merde, j'en ai marre de toujours dire non, mais ces jours-ci je ne suis pas sortable …’ [‘Dear Raymond, Damn it, I’m tired of always having to say no. But these days I’m not fit to be seen’]. (This was written at the time when Sam was about to undergo cataract surgery, and he was wearing thick glasses as he groped his way.) The letter went on with a sentence which for me contains Beckett’s endless and relentless struggle with words: ‘Et puis tant à faire encore et si peu de quoi.’ [‘And then so much still to do and so little to do it with.’]
One day, George Plimpton, the editor of The Paris Review in New York, approached me to do an interview with Beckett for the series ‘Writers at Work’. He offered to send me to Paris. I told Plimpton that Beckett never gave interviews, and besides I would not want to impose on him with such a request. But the next day I wrote to Sam saying that even though I knew he would say no, I could not resist asking him since The Paris Review would pay all my expenses for one week in Paris, this way we could have a couple of good expensive meals with excellent wine at his favourite restaurant, and pretend to do an interview. Sam’s answer was only one line: ‘Dear Raymond, Sorry, I have no views to inter’.
In 1974, I published a novel in Paris entitled Amer Eldorado. The book carried this dedication: Pour Sam … When Beckett received the copy I sent him he wrote back: ‘Si la dédicace est bien pour celui à qui je pense il te remercie de tout coeur.’ [‘If the dedication is for the one I think it is, he thanks you from the bottom of his heart.’] All of Beckett is contained in that sentence - his generosity, his humility, his humour. Of course, he knew that the book was dedicated to him, but the next time I saw him he suggested that perhaps the dedication was for Uncle Sam, or else for my Dalmatian whose name was Samuel Beckett. Sam knew that.
The last time I saw Sam, two or three months before he changed tense, we were having lunch together in a café across the street from his apartment building. Sam had already moved to Le Tiers Temps (a medical retirement home not far from where he lived) but when he felt well he would go out for a walk or to check his mail. I was sitting by the window when I saw him walk across the street. He looked frail, and seemed to limp slightly. He held my hand a long time as he greeted me. We sat in silence for a while. Then he asked about Erica (my wife), about Simone (my daughter), who had met him when she was twenty, who now directs Beckettian plays in New York, about my stepson, Steve, the photographer, who took photos of Sam that appear on book covers. I asked him if he was writing anything. He answered that he was trying to translate Worstward Ho into French, but that he was stuck. ‘I don’t seem to be able to translate the title’, he said. ‘Why don’t you skip the title and go on with the text?’ I suggested. Sam smiled, the kind of smile that showed both hesitation and affection. ‘That would be cheating’, he replied. Though Worstward Ho was not translated by Sam, I am convinced that he invented the French title, Cap au pire.* It’s too good not to be by Sam.
We finished lunch, and as I was walking with Sam to the nursing home, he suddenly stopped, placed his hand on my shoulder and asked: ‘Do you remember that poem by Mallarmé,’Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui …?’ I nodded. And then, right there in the middle of the street, Sam recited the entire poem to me. I didn’t say anything, but it became clear at last, as I had suspected all along, that each day he faced the sheet of paper Beckett endured the same blanche agonie [white agony] Mallarmé reveals in that poem:
Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublie que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui!
Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n’avoir pas chanté la re
gion oui vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l’ennui.
Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie
Par l’espace infligée à l’oiseau qui le nie,
Mais non l’horreur du sol où le plumage est pris.
Fantôme qu’à ce lieu son pur eclat assigne,
Il s’immobilise au songe froid de mepris
Que vet parmi l’exil inutile le Cygne.
I shall never forget Sam standing there in the middle of the street reciting these lines to me, and pausing imperceptibly on the blanche agonie. The greatest gift I have ever received. And then as we parted he said: ‘Parfois tu sais, Raymond, c’est pire de ne pas écrire que d’écrire’ [‘Sometimes you know, Raymond, it is worse not to write than to write’].
Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Page 29