Pinter was writing about Beckett’s novels in this letter, for at the time Waiting for Godot had yet to be staged in England, and this is very relevant to what can now be seen as the dual nature of Beckett’s reputation: which reputation has, incidentally, grown from virtually nothing to its present eminence in the surprisingly short time of about fifteen years. The wider reputation, the public reputation it might be called, is based on the plays, particularly on Godot and Endgame, which have of course become classics of modern theatre: though it is salutary to be reminded by Harold Hobson in Beckett at 60 just how bad the notices of Godot were, his and Tynan’s excepted: and the first production of Endgame was very badly attended. Those who know Beckett by his plays tend to be only vaguely aware that he has written novels, and would perhaps be surprised to hear that those who do know them regard the plays as footnotes to the novels: interesting and worth while, certainly, but of far less importance nevertheless. John Calder’s introduction to Beckett at 60 mentions ‘members of a strange club, each with his favourite phrases of caustic humour or satisfying disgust’. The copies of Beckett’s novels belonging to members of this club are defiled or embellished (depending how you look at it) with notes, underscored favourite passages, exclamation marks, and perhaps the meanings of the recondite dictionary words he delighted to use freely in his earlier work, more parsimoniously in the later. [...] Most of us first knew Beckett’s work through Godot, but probably came across Molloy as though it were a dirty book in that beautifully-proportioned olive, turquoise and black Olympia Press edition. We it is who, reading him, feel the urge not for interpretation but for celebration, not exegesis but exultation that anyone can write so well.
No’s Knife (the title comes from the last of the thirteen Texts for Nothing, ‘the screaming silence of no’s knife in yes’s wound’) contains all the shorter prose that Beckett is willing to see republished, from the three nouvelles of 1945–6 to two short pieces (Imagination Dead Imagine and Ping) written within the last couple of years, both of which represent the distilled residue of a full-length novel.
The three nouvelles, Beckett’s first work to be written in French, provide an important link between his second novel Watt and his third Molloy, and have previously been (scarcely) available in England only in back numbers of Evergreen Review. The one called The Expelled is about a man who, after being thrown out of his home, spends the day in a horse-drawn cab driving about and looking for lodgings:
After a few drinks the cabman invited me to do his wife and him the honour of spending the night in their home. It was not far. Recollecting these emotions, with the celebrated advantage of tranquillity, it seems to me he did nothing else, all that day, but turn about his lodging. They lived above a stable, at the back of a yard. Ideal location, I could have done with it. Having presented me to his wife, extraordinarily full-bottomed, he left us. She was manifestly ill at ease, alone with me. I could understand her, I don’t stand on ceremony on these occasions. No reason for this to end or go on. Then let it end. I said I would go down to the stable and sleep there. The cabman protested. I insisted. He drew his wife’s attention to the pustule on top of my skull, for I had removed my hat out of civility. He should have that removed, she said. The cabman named a doctor he held in high esteem who had rid him of an induration of the seat. If he wants to sleep in the stable, said his wife, let him sleep in the stable.
It is impossible to appreciate Beckett’s later work without reference to the earlier, without following his development: like Joyce, he should be read in chronological order. Anyone who thinks they can tackle something like Ping as their first example of Beckett is very liable to end up sharing the opinions of modern literature held by Cheltenham colonels. The publication of No’s Knife makes it possible for the first time in England to follow Beckett completely chronologically, though it should be pointed out that there are two works earlier than Murphy, a novel called Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks (a volume of short stories) which must remain only bloody good titles to most readers since Beckett did not publish the first and will not allow the second to be reprinted.21 Calder & Boyars published a severely limited edition of More Pricks Than Kicks last year to save scholars the labour of doing their own version from the British Museum copy, and anyone who has read it will probably agree with Beckett that, apart from perhaps two or three stories, it does not show up well against the later work.
In Krapp’s Last Tape Beckett used the tape recorder for the first time in drama and exploited its functional qualities and possibilities as an object to such an extent that no one can write a play about a man and a tape recorder without covering at least some of the same ground. This exhaustive exploration of what is possible in each medium is characteristic: Beckett is interested in doing those things which can be done only in that particular medium. Works written for one medium do not translate into another, which is why he has not allowed either his plays or his novels to be filmed: they are simply not films, not conceived as such. But Beckett has recently written a film called Film, the script of which has just been published with the television play Eh Joe and a short mime entitled Act Without Words II. In Film Beckett uses the camera as a character in a beautifully stylized essay on the text esse est percipi. I have not seen the film (which has Buster Keaton in the main part, and was apparently shown here only at the London Film Festival a couple of years ago) but it reads marvellously. It is of course a paradox that Beckett should allow a film to be published when he does not allow his books to be filmed, but this script has unusual interest because of a series of notes in which Beckett explains some of his intentions, some of the why. Members recording those strange and as if meaningless elements which recur in the canon (the bicycle, names beginning with M, hats tethered by strings) will note with irrelevant and disproportionate pleasure that Murphy’s rocking chair is back and that a description of a photograph of a child at its mother’s knee exactly fits the earliest known photograph of the author printed in Beckett at 60.
The television piece Eh Joe employs the camera in a way related to the technique of Film, but in this case the movement of tracking in on the face of an oldish man is controlled by a woman’s voice off-screen reminding him of the past: when the voice stops, the camera moves: when the voice resumes, the movement stops. The effect, as those who saw Jack MacGowran in the play may confirm, is an original experience even if the way in which it is specifically televisual is not particularly overt.
Recognition came late to Samuel Beckett (as indeed does the birthday volume: he’s been 61 for some months now) and of no one is it more true that he has had to create the taste by which he is enjoyed. Those of us who believe that he is the greatest prose stylist and the most original writer living perhaps cannot reasonably, but do hopefully, look forward to many more years for him as magnificently productive as the last fifteen: to have written as he has, and to be only 61, is remarkable to the point of near impossibility.
Introduction to The Evacuees22
It had never been necessary before, and there will not be time for it in a nuclear war: evacuation.
This singular misfortune of the Second World War was experienced by a large proportion of those born between 1924 and 1938. To children of this generation, the more general clonic sense of the word came at some later point in our lives as a surprise; evacuation had other associations for us, though the new one (as one contributor to this book sees and uses to make a point) was not wholly without relevance.
Our allegiances to place may sometimes be curiously divided as between city and village, town and country, even between country and country; our education may have set us differently by its variety or incompleteness in some way or another; we may have somewhat more sympathy for immigrants and other minority groups; for us certain foods, to others ordinary, may still seem luxuries (butter, bananas) because we cannot remember having had them before the war and our appetites for them could not be satisfied, let alone satiated, during the war; in us the tendency t
o expect the worst from any situation, to cut our losses and accept disappointment (indeed, to feel something near disappointment in any case when the worst does not happen) is perhaps more evident than in earlier or later generations.
It did of course affect everyone involved in a different way, and in an unassessable number of different ways: but all four million who were evacuated in Britain at some time or another during the Second World War must have been marked by the experience.
Anyone who wishes to read a full historical account of evacuation is referred to [...] Richard M. Titmuss’s exemplary treatment of the subject in his volume Problems of Social Policy in the official History of the Second World War. It does, however, seem appropriate to give a brief general outline, following Titmuss, here.
The evacuation of civilians from cities was seen first only as a counter-move to enemy bombing, to parry the attempt to demoralize the civilian population. This purely military consideration was reinforced by the conviction that there would in any case be a panic flight from bombed cities and that this would greatly multiply any chaos caused directly by the enemy.
In early 1931 the subject was considered important enough for the setting-up of an Evacuation Sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence. Its initial suggestion in relation to the two aspects of the problem was to enlarge the police force and, when bombing took place, to throw a cordon round London and the larger cities to prevent anyone leaving. But when its first report was completed in 1934, the Sub-committee proposed a different scheme. 3½ million people living in central London (fathers, mothers and children) were to be evacuated to billets within fifty miles of the city. Elaborate railway timetables were worked out to move this enormous number of people in the shortest possible time, but less attention was given to their reception: no local authorities were consulted. At no point in the report is the idea of evacuation queried: dispersal is taken as indisputably necessary.
The great increase in the size of the Luftwaffe during 1936–37 led to reconsideration and augmentation of the evacuation plans. By early 1938 they were to a certain extent out of date and in any case had never been fully completed in detail. A government committee, with Sir John Anderson as chairman, reviewed the position and with commendable promptness produced its report by 26 July 1938. The principles laid down, which were to become the basis of the plans actually put into operation in September 1939, were as follows:
1) Except in so far as it may be necessary for military or other special reasons to require persons to leave some limited area, evacuation should not be compulsory.
2) For the purpose of supporting the national war effort and supplying essential civilian needs, production in the large industrial towns must be maintained, but it is desirable to provide organized facilities for the evacuation of substantial numbers of people from certain industrial areas.
3) Arrangements for the reception of persons who become refugees should be mainly on the basis of accommodation in private houses under powers of compulsory billeting. These arrangements will require very detailed preparation in order to avoid unnecessary hardship either to the refugees or to the persons who receive them.
4) The initial cost of evacuation arrangements should be borne by the government, but that refugees who can afford to contribute towards the cost of their maintenance should be expected to do so.
5) To meet the needs of parents who wish to send their children away, but cannot make their own arrangements, special arrangements should be made for schoolchildren to move out in groups from their schools in charge of their teachers.
It seems that if in fact war had been declared at the time of Munich (28 September 1938) the arrangements for evacuation would have been far from satisfactory. The London County Council did evacuate some 4,300 nursery and physically defective schoolchildren as a precaution, but the signal for general evacuation was never given. As a result of the scare, responsibility for evacuation was transferred from the Home Office to a new unit drawn from the Ministry of Health and the Board of Education.
One of the first tasks was to decide into which of three zones each part of the country fell: evacuation, reception, and neutral. It is interesting that not one single area asked to be scheduled for reception, and no local authority declared an evacuation area disputed the decision. Thirteen million people were in evacuation areas, eighteen million in reception, and fourteen million in neutral areas.
The size of such totals made an initial thinning-out essential, and the following were declared priority classes:
1) Schoolchildren evacuated as school units with their teachers.
2) Younger children accompanied by mothers or guardians.
3) Expectant mothers.
4) Blind adults and cripples who could be moved.
The preparation and execution of evacuation plans was greatly complicated by the fact that evacuation was to be basically voluntary, since this made the numbers involved a variable and unknown factor. In the words of Richard M. Titmuss:
Assumptions had to be made about the probable mental reactions of over 10,000,000 individuals living in, and conditioned by, widely differing environments who, historically, had shown a marked affection for individuality.
Various forms of government propaganda exhorted parents to send their children to safety, and there were other pressures operating: it was, for instance, enough for many workingclass mothers that there would be no school for their children to attend during the working day if they stayed behind.
Billeting was the only practical answer to finding accommodation for the four million people falling into the priority classes: such alternatives as camps or specially-built quarters were impossible to arrange in the time available or with the scale of priorities dictated by rearmament. The billeting yardstick used was one person per habitable room, and a survey was carried out which, given deduction for rooms unusable for various reasons, provided potential accommodation for 4.8 million people in the reception areas. But by February 1939 one-sixth of this accommodation had been ‘privately reserved’ by the householders for their relatives and friends.
The Civil Defence Bill of July 1939 provided that any additional expense caused by evacuation would be repaid to local authorities by the Exchequer. It also gave compulsory billeting powers and defined the extent to which evacuees should be fed and looked after. Allowances to be made to householders were:
For unaccompanied children (full board and lodging):
10/6d per week for the first child
8/6d per week for each additional child taken
For mothers with children (lodging only):
5/- per week for adults
3/- per week for children
For teachers and helpers (lodging only):
5/- per week
A revised scale, somewhat higher and based on children’s ages, was introduced in May 1940.
As the threat of war grew, so the emphasis of evacuation (once of the whole non-essential civilian population) fell more and more on seeing that the children, and mothers with young children, would be sent to safety.
From about January 1939 a tremendous sense of urgency made itself felt in the Ministry of Health and those responsible in the evacuation areas, particularly in London, and the detailed plans for dispatching the evacuees by train were brought to as near perfection as possible in the time. This sense of urgency did not, however, extend in all cases to the reception and billeting arrangements being prepared by the local authorities of the destinations at which the evacuees were due to arrive.
It is important to realize that the prior assumption was that the war would start with immediate air attack by the Germans, certainly on London and possibly on other large cities as well. This did not in fact occur, but it is the reason why the actual declaration of war was anticipated by more than two days in giving the order for the by now carefully-worked-out plans for evacuation to be put into effect.
The first evacuees moved out of the cities on the morning of Friday 1 Septemb
er 1939: by the evening of the 3rd, a few hours after war had been officially declared, 1,473,391 people had been placed in the reception areas. Most of these were children, with some mothers, teachers, and WVS23 and other escorts. This was the official government evacuation scheme: in the three months previous to and in the first weeks of the war itself at least two million other people had privately evacuated themselves to friends, relatives, or other accommodation.
Not all the children went. Slightly more than half of London’s school population stayed, while in Manchester, Salford, Newcastle, Gateshead, Liverpool and Bootle more than 60% went. Other places were very much less enthusiastic: in Sheffield, only 15% availed themselves of the opportunity to go to safety. In all, the average figure for England was 47%, and for Scotland 38%. These differing responses to the government scheme probably reflect the local conditions and the confidence in the efficiency of their evacuation arrangements conveyed to parents by the various local authorities. In fact, the smaller response (the government had expected to move about three-and-a-half million people) meant that the arrangements in the under-prepared reception areas were not in many cases overloaded; and in all but a few areas the accommodation available was adequate.
The smaller number of evacuees than expected certainly helped the transport arrangements, too, but in any case they were well planned and efficiently executed: there was not a single accident or casualty during the whole three-day operation. Rehearsals of the evacuation movement had been carried out (schoolteachers had been recalled early from their summer holidays on 24 August) and there was an unexpectedly large number of voluntary helpers: the WVS report of 1963 says that many members who took part still regard evacuation as their most arduous task.
Well Done God! Page 36