Beckett returned to France in 1945 as soon as he could. After a short interlude working in a field hospital in Saint-Lô, he went back to his apartment in the 15th arrondissement, to his papers and his books. There, for the next five years, in a remarkable burst of sustained creativity which kept him virtually isolated from friends and acquaintances, Beckett wrote a dozen major works, including the masterpieces Waiting for Godot and the Trilogy. Taking them chronologically—and recognizing that dating Beckett has always been somewhat difficult because the author himself was not always sure of precise dates of composition—the period from 1945 to 1950 produced:
Mercier and Camier, a novel—1945
“The Expelled,” “The Calmative,” “The End,” “First Love,” stories—1945
Molloy, a novel—1947
Eleuthéria, a play—1947-48
Malone Dies, a novel—1948
Waiting for Godot, a play—1948-49
The Unnamable, a novel—1949
Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, criticism—1949
Texts for Nothing, short prose works—1950
Even more remarkable is the fact that all the above were written not in Beckett’s native language, English, but in his adopted tongue, French. Many reasons have been advanced to explain why Beckett switched from English to French, and probably the truth will never be completely known. Perhaps a number of factors contributed: his despair at the continued indifference of the English publishers and public; his seemingly inalterable decision to make Paris his home; his translation of Murphy from English to French, which must have revealed to him both the possibilities of the new language and his ability to work within it; or, finally, the fact that with Watt Beckett had gone as far in one direction as he could, in English, and French offered new horizons, where style and content could truly become one. But one should listen to Beckett himself on the subject. To Niklaus Gess-ner, who in 1957 wrote the first thesis on Beckett’s work, the author said he wrote in French “parce qu’en français c’est plus facile d’écrire sans style,”* while to Israel Shenker he said he wrote in French because he “just felt like it. It was a different experience from writing in English. It was more exciting for me— writing in French.”
Twenty years before, in Our Exagmination . . ., Beckett wrote, in reference to Joyce’s Work in Progress: “Here form is content, content is form. . . . His writing is not about something; it is that something itself”† In his own quest, too, Beckett sought the fusion of form and content. It is a tenuous balance, and in English, I suspect, it was hard for the ex-Trinity scholar not to yield to the manifold temptations of that language. It was somehow easier in French to strip language bare; and, in truth, it is a more precise language, not a negligible factor in the Beckettian equation.
There was another factor, too, one suggested by Maria Jolas, that Beckett by now was quite aware that French critics, and readers too, were more sophisticated than their English counter-parts, especially for the kind of thing he was up to. In any case, the change was propitious: the enormous output of those early postwar years was matched by a maturity, an acuity of vision, and a mastery of language unrivaled in contemporary literature.
Three of the works cited above did not, in Beckett’s judgment, stand up—the play Eleuthéria, still unpublished and unperformed, though a few scholars have had a peek at it; Mercier and Camier, which he only reluctantly allowed into print twenty-four years after it was written; and “First Love,” a story which he kept in his desk drawer almost as long. The others—nine works in all, including three short stories—appeared over a ten-year span from July, 1946, when Les temps modernes published part of “The End” under the title “La Suite,” and 1955, when Les Editions de Minuit issued Stories and Texts for Nothing in a single volume.
The key year, however, is 1950. Two years before, in the summer of 1948, Suzanne Dumesnil had assumed the task vis-à-vis French publishers that George Reavey had been so heroically yet fruitlessly pursuing among the English and Americans, namely, that of circulating the growing backlog of unpublished Beckett manuscripts. For a while her efforts seemed doomed to the same results as Reavey’s, as Beckett reports, with typical irony, to the latter in a letter dated July 8, 1948:
I am now retyping for rejection by the publishers Malone Meurt. The last I hope of the series Murphy, Watt, Mercier and Camier, Molloy, not to mention four nouvelles and Eleuthéria. A young publisher here is interested. Editions K, I think, and I am preparing him for burial.
Actually, Beckett would have to wait another two years before finding a publisher for Molloy and Malone Dies. But it was worth the wait. A remarkable young Frenchman named Jérôme Lindon had recently taken over a small publishing house started as a clandestine press during the Occupation, Les Editions de Minuit. A man of taste and discernment, he saw immediately what the advisers and reading committees of the larger houses had failed to detect—six French publishers had already declined Molloy —that here was a new, exciting voice. Whether the world was ready to hear it mattered not; all Lindon knew was that he was ready for it. Far from “burying” his new publisher-to-be, Beckett was laying the cornerstone of what was to become the most innovative new publishing venture in France during the 1950s. In his contribution to the Festschrift published in celebration of Beckett’s sixtieth birthday in 1966, Lindon relates how he had wanted originally to contract for Molloy alone, doubtless aware of the precarious com-merciality of the entire trilogy and wanting to spread the risk, but Beckett insisted he take all three or none at all. Lindon acquiesced. On December 11, 1950, Beckett wrote once again to Reavey announcing the good news:
I have signed a contract with the Editions de Minuit for all work. They contracted specifically for the three novels already written. The first, Molloy, should be out in January. Bordas, on the brink of bankruptcy (not entirely my fault), have released me.
It was the beginning of a new era for Samuel Beckett. Molloy, the first of the masterpieces, appeared, not in January but on March 15, 1951, in a first printing of 3000 copies. Malone meurt followed seven months later, also in a printing of 3000 copies. It was those two “first editions” that had haunted me from their niche in the window on the rue Bernard-Palissy several months later, on my daily treks to St.-Germain-des-Prés.
If 1950 has to be considered a crucial year for Beckett’s “career” (he would cringe at the term), 1953 was the “annus mirabilis,” or, as he puts it, “annix terribilis”: on January 4, 1953, his second play— Eleuthéria being his first, if one excepts the Johnson experiment, as Beckett does— En attendant Godot, opened at the Théâtre de Babylone on the rue de Rennes, in Roger Blin’s direction. Three days later the first review appeared, in La Libération, which said, in part: “Paris has just recognized in Samuel Beckett one of today’s best playwrights.” The critical acclaim may not have been unanimous, but within a short time Godot became the most discussed new play of Paris. Two leading French playwrights soon joined the chorus: “An author has appeared,” wrote Armand Salacrou, “who has taken us by the hand to lead us into his universe.” And Jean Anouilh: “Waiting for Godot is Pascal’s Pensées as played by the Fratellini clowns.”
The original title of Godot had been, simply, En attendant— “waiting”—which was not only an apt title for the work itself but for so much of Beckett’s life up to then. Even the production of this play, which seemed imminent in 1950, entailed a long, painful wait. Beckett finished the play—which he told Colin Duckworth he had written “as a relaxation, to get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time”—in 1949. Later that same year he saw Roger Blin’s production of Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata at the Gaieté-Montparnasse, liked what he saw, and decided that Blin was the man to direct Godot. But reluctant producers, recalcitrant theater owners, and Blins other commitments kept Godot off the boards for another four years. Once it did appear, however, Beckett’s life would never be quite the same. In its essence it would not change; no person, in my experience, has ever been more fai
thful to himself, and to his art. But the quarter-century of near-poverty and almost complete lack of recognition was at an end. Foreign productions followed in quick succession, and within a few years Waiting for Godot had been performed in dozens of countries around the world, with the sale of the play’s text also in the ascendant. Perhaps he was not yet famous on the moon, as I had rashly predicted a year or two before, but he soon would be.
After the extraordinary burst of creative activity ending in 1950, Beckett spent several relatively frustrating years in which he felt it difficult if not impossible to work. Five months after Godot opened in Paris he wrote to Reavey that “since 1950 I have succeeded only in writing a dozen very short abortive texts in French, and there is nothing in sight.” The “abortive texts” to which he refers were actually a baker’s dozen,* the Texts for Nothing, some of which appeared in 1953 (numbers 3, 6, 10, and 11) and two others in 1955 (numbers 1 and 12) before being collected in book form later that year, together with the three stories written ten years before, under the title Nouvelles et textes pour rien. Compared to the Trilogy these are indeed minor works—Beckett considered them “failures,” but if they are it is only in terms of his impossible standards—ranging in length from 700 to 1700 words. They are, really, stunning prose poems, musical both in structure and in sound. (Fletcher says that Beckett got the title from mesure pour rien, a rest bar in music, though of course the sense of “minor” or “meaningless” is also implicit.) They are a clear continuation of the Trilogy, but here the disembodied voice, in search of its own identity or the knowledge that the Self truly exists, is even more tentative and disconnected, groping, stabbing, memory faint and all but gone. Here one notes the increasing dominance of the negative, the intruding “no’s” that jab and constantly cut at the affirmative (“Ah, if no were content to cut yes’s throat and never cut its own”), which undoubtedly reflects accurately Beckett’s state of mind at the time. To Vladimir’s almost hearty “We always find something, eh, Didi? ...” is juxtaposed the Texts’ “Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t any more. I couldn’t go on. ...”
But if during the balance of that “sterile” decade Beckett was finding it increasingly difficult to produce any prose that satisfied him, he found nonetheless an outlet in the theater. Late in 1955 he wrote to his American director, Alan Schneider, that he was holed up at his tiny country place in the “Marne mud . . . struggling with a play.” Six months later he made a progress report, on June 21, 1956:
Have at last written another, one act, longish, hour and a quarter I fancy. Rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw, more inhuman than Godot. My feeling, strong at the moment, is to leave it in French for a year at least. . . .
By mid-October he had begun to work on the play with Roger Blin and Jean Martin, both of whom had collaborated on the production of Godot, and he now described it in more detail:
A very long one act, over an hour and a half I should think. ... I am panting to see the realization and know if I am on some kind of road and can stumble on, or in a swamp.
He was on a road all right: the play, of course, was Fin de partie (Endgame), which many critics feel is an achievement even superior to Godot. That same year, 1956, also produced two mimes, Acte sans paroles I & ll (Act Without Words I & II), and a radio play, All That Fall, Beckett’s first full work written directly in English since Watt.* Thereafter, he would alternate between French and English, his choice apparently depending on the circumstances of the original impulse or inspiration.
Another major play, Krapp’s Last Tape, which Michael Robinson has called “the most remarkable monologue in the language,” followed in 1958, this again written directly in English, with Beckett’s translation of the work into French, under the title La dernière bande, coming a year later. The working title of this play had been The Magee Monologue, for the author got the idea for it after he had heard one of his favorite actors, Patrick Magee, reading a selection of his fiction on the radio. The double première of the British production of Krapp and Endgame took place—the latter play, being considered somewhat too short to stand by itself, had been made part of a double bill—at the Royal Court Theatre on October 28, 1958, with Patrick Magee as Krapp.
Actually, Endgame had had an earlier London première, also at the Royal Court, the year before, but in French. When Blin and company, who had begun rehearsing the play in October, 1956, found neither producer nor theater willing to back or book it, they finally moved it in desperation to London, where it opened on April 3, 1957. Given the language barrier, it was “rather grim,” as Beckett describes it, “like playing to mahogany, or rather teak.” French amour-propre was properly picqued, however, and the owner of the Studio des Champs-Elysées in Paris offered to put it on. It moved back across the channel and opened there on April 27, 1957, where the audience’s reaction was much less teaklike. In Paris, Beckett wrote, “the hooks went in.”*
Despite all this activity, admittedly mostly in the area of drama, Beckett still felt that the “stony ground” of his mind was growing ever less productive, or capable of producing. “I am finding it more and more difficult to write, but keep trying,” he wrote to H. O. White at Trinity College early in 1959. “I never felt less literary in my life, which is saying a great deal. ...” Such sentiments are fully understandable, given the nature of the enterprise. As far back as 1952, after reading only Molloy and Ma-lone Dies, I remember wondering how Beckett could carry his experiment any further. “Is it possible,” I wrote in Merlin, “for Mr. Beckett to progress further without succumbing to the complete incoherence of inarticulate sound, or to . . . silence?” Part of the answer, for more than a decade after the Texts for Nothing, was silence, at least in the realm of prose. The other part was drama, for in the theater, in its broadest sense—stage, radio, television, even film—language, that demon with which Beckett had been wrestling for thirty years, was not the only factor: mime, action, silence, setting all contribute to the communication, between actor and audience on the one hand, and among the actors themselves on the other. If Man-as-Clown is present in Beckett’s prose in various forms, the stage is a logical extension, and performance an ideal way to give those clowns the physical presence they necessarily lack on the printed page, or within the confines of a single head.
Thus, through the 1960s, the Mallarméan effort gave birth to a series of plays, full-length and short, for stage, radio, and television, plus Beckett’s only foray into the cinema, Film. On the cover of a notebook which contains an early draft of Krapp’s Last Tape there is a notation, dated August 10, 1960, “Willie-Winnie notes.” The play, later entitled Happy Days, was finished early the following year, and received its world première at the Cherry Lane Theater on September 17, 1961, directed by Alan Schneider. The “old” plays, constantly being translated into foreign languages, were being performed throughout the world. And meanwhile, a fairly steady stream of new dramatic works was being written and presented:
—Words and Music: a radio play, with music by John Beckett, written in 1962, in English, and performed for the first time on the BBC Third Programme on November 13, 1962.
—Play: a short, three-character play for the stage, also written in 1962, in English. Its world première took place at the Ulmer Theater in Ulm-Donau, on June 13, 1963, in Elmer Tophoven’s German version, entitled Spiel.
—Cascando: a radio play, written in French in 1963. It had its initial performance on French National Radio on October 13, 1963, with music by Marcel Mihalovici.
—Film: in 1963, Grove Press, Beckett’s American publisher, encouraged him to write a film script, which it agreed to produce. The result, Beckett’s only foray into the medium of film, was shot during the summer of 1964, in New York City. Beckett made his only trip to the United States to be present for the filming. The work was presented at the 1965 New York Film Festival, where it was sandwiched between two “standard” Buster Keaton films, and was roundly booed. It has since be
come a classic.
—Come and Go: a three-character stage playlet or, as Beckett termed it, “dramaticule,” written in 1965 and first published in 1967.
—Eh Joe: a two-character television play (or, more accurately, a play for one female voice and one male body). Written in 1966, it was first televised in July of that year by the BBC.
—Breath: a thirty-second stage piece, written in 1966. He later sent it to Kenneth Tynan, who mis-staged it as part of Oh! Calcutta! in 1967.
—Not I: a stage play for two characters, written in 1972, Not I was given its world première at the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center on December 7, 1972, with Alan Schneider directing.
—That Time: a stage play, written in 1975, directly in English. A haunting work for one character and three voices—all his— That Time is published here for the first time anywhere in the world.
Thus we can see that, although admittedly all these plays are relatively brief, there had nonetheless been a regular succession of dramatic works for over two decades. But what of fiction during that same period?
As noted, apart from an abandoned fragment written in 1956, six years after Texts for Nothing, Beckett had found it impossible to bring forth further fiction. By 1960, it was presumed by many that he had abandoned fiction. At one time, when asked about it, he replied, specifically in relation to the one fragment that had survived, From an Abandoned Work: “There was just no more to be said.” He meant that he had had no more to say in that work, but the remark seemed equally to apply to his fiction in general. Then, in 1961 he confounded critics who had already come to the conclusion he would never write fiction again, or at most fragments—those “gasps” culled from the void—by publishing, in French, a major “novel,” Comment c’est. Four years later, in his own English version— translation is hardly the proper term when Beckett renders his works from one language to another, for each is literally a recreation—the book appeared as How It Is.
I can’t go on, I’ll go on Page 4