100 years and waiting

Samuel Beckett: his multi-layered works are still the focus of
intense academic scrutiny.

Samuel Beckett: his multi-layered works are still the focus of intense academic scrutiny.
Photo: John Haynes

February 18, 2006

The centenary of Samuel Beckett's birth is being celebrated all over the world. Colin Duckworth looks at some of the reasons why.

'I'M NO GOOD AT talking about my work, you know," said Mr Samuel Beckett. "I can't be much help to you." These were the first words he spoke to me. Not very promising. It was a cold January morning in 1965, outside the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square, London. Eventually the words turned out to be untrue. His help enabled me to write a quite useful book-length introduction to the strange world of Didi, Gogo, Pozzo, Lucky, and the unreliable Mr Godot.

I think now that he must have taken pity on me, for I would have appeared clearly out of my depth. I had seen Peter Hall's first, flawed, English production 10 years before. I had found it intriguing but didn't understand it. The only other Beckett work I had read was his brief study of Proust.

Yes, I had seen the premiere of Fin de Partie at the Royal Court in 1957 (no Paris theatre would touch it), but disliked it as much as Kenneth Tynan did. In short, I was in a similar state of Beckettian ignorance as the publisher when he wrote to me at the end of 1964: "I don't know if you are interested in this kind of drivel, but if so, would you care to write an edition of the play?" I spent the next year climbing a steep learning precipice.

It is no longer necessary to plead the Beckettian cause: he is one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, like it or not. Without Beckett there would be no Pinter, Arrabal, Albee or Stoppard as we know them.

How to explain this phenomenon, given his unpromising start? That shy, melancholy Irishman, who died on December 22, 1989, would be astounded by the celebrations happening for the centenary of his birth - proof of the influence he has wielded and of the revolution that has taken place in theatrical sophistication in the last half-century.

In Paris, on December 27, 2005, Irishman Peter Mulligan singlehandedly opened the Beckett centenary in Montparnasse cemetery with a reading (from Cascando) in sub-zero temperature. How very Irish, celebrating the birth astride the grave, the tombstone of which is inscribed:

"Suzanne Beckett, nee Decheveux-Dumesnil, 1900 - 1989; Samuel Beckett, 1906-1989".

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, in Foxrock, County Dublin. The "awful event" is being celebrated by Grove Atlantic with the publication of a four-volume Centenary Edition of his works with celebrity editors (novels - Salman Rushdie; dramatic works - Edward Albee; poetry, short fiction, criticism - J. M. Coetzee).

A Beckett Centenary Festival will be held at the Barbican, London, throughout March, "Bringing together world-class artists to celebrate one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century".

The Chicago Museum of Modern Art has performances of some Beckett short plays and an exhibition of drawings inspired by Beckett. More conferences, exhibitions and performances are scheduled in (for instance) Atlanta, Washington DC, Aix-en-Provence, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Dublin, Hamburg, and in Reading, home of the Beckett International Foundation.

What are they talking about at these gatherings? The conference program at Florida State University gives us a good idea of why Beckett is considered worthy of such global attention:

"What are the most significant aspects of Beckett's work attracting recent and current research? What new insights are these affording? In what ways do current critical approaches and methodologies vary across time and space? In what respects are productions of Beckett's plays and audience responses to them open to innovative approaches? How significant are linguistic, cultural and political boundaries in opening or closing new avenues of inquiry? In what ways do Beckett's writings engage with the discourses of modernism and postmodernism and issues we might broadly call post-colonial?"

I am inclined to adapt Lord Chesterfield's advice about buying the Encyclopedie: sit on the program and read Beckett.

In Ireland centenary celebrations are being co-ordinated by the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism. Beckett (the only Nobel Literature Laureate to appear in Wisden's Cricketer's Almanack) would have some acerbic or ribald comment to make about this conjunction.

I doubt if even in his famous years he would have envisaged himself as a tourist attraction in the puritanical and oppressive homeland from which he had exiled himself and in which he had been excoriated, as James Joyce had been earlier.

David Hurley, a friend of mine who as a boy lived in Foxrock a few doors away from the Becketts in the war years, tells me that a typical remark in that well-heeled neighbourhood was: "There's that poor Mrs Beckett, with that useless son of hers, shacked up with a French filly in Paris."

The filly was Suzanne, who shared his years of danger, isolation, refuge and maquis activities during the German occupation of France, and but for whom Godot would probably not have been staged at all; it was she who hawked it for four years round theatres and directors in Paris, just as she hawked round dozens of unimpressed publishers typescripts of his novels (the great French trilogy Molloy, Malone meurt, and L'Innommable, as well as Mercier et Camier, out of which grew Godot).

In Australia a small belated Beckett event is being organised by Anthony Uhllman as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival in May, at which Beckettian actor Larry Held will perform First Love, directed by Walter Asmus.

Worldwide celebrations took place in 2003 for the 50th birthday of Mr Godot, the man who makes people wait interminably, and now even more attention is being given to the 100th birthday of Godot's creator, who spent the first 50 years of his life waiting to be recognised.

One might have thought that even dedicated Becketteers would have been satiated by the 2003 Godot conferences and performances (especially the kerfuffle over the Sydney production), but not a bit of it. The present all-embracing happenings might redress the balance, for Godot has (and had during Beckett's lifetime) tended to overshadow his oeuvre, much as Madame Bovary has with Flaubert and Candide with Voltaire.

Nevertheless, it is not possible to ignore the Godot phenomenon in an overview such as this, for Godot is Beckett's faun, and his firebird. Just as Debussy's Prelude l'apres-midi d'un Faune changed the direction of music away from Wagnerian post-Romanticism in 1894, so Godot enabled drama to return to the long view of Man, as classical tragedy had done, and transcend the short view of political drama, the well-made plays of Rattigan, the social realism of Brecht and Sartre, and the attractive fantasies of Anouilh and Giraudoux.

And just as The Firebird dragged Stravinsky from obscurity in 1910, so Godot (when it flew after a shaky take-off) raised Beckett from unknown poet and novelist to worldwide celebrity writing with equal facility in French and English.

Not that Beckett brought about this change alone. Absurdism was already in the air in the late 1940s. Since as early as 1947 Jean Tardieu and Eugene Ionesco had already been having their disquieting short plays staged in little Left Bank theatres. But there is an essential difference: whereas Tardieu and Ionesco set their scenes in a realistic social setting in which everything gradually goes crazy, Beckett's plays begin with very striking, unusual and alien visual images: two down-and-out clowns and a skeletal tree in the middle of nowhere; a blind man in a wheelchair and his old parents in dustbins; a woman half-buried in a mound of earth; a solitary suspended mouth talking incessantly; or three heads sticking out of funerary urns, coming to life only when a light is turned on them.

What all three playwrights have in common is the ability to extract comedy from dire situations - hitherto the prerogative of farce. With Beckett, additionally, there are many unsuspected layers of meaning and thoroughly digested philosophical, literary and mythical references, which are still being excavated by scholars the world over. With Ionesco we have metaphysical farce. Beckett gives us metaphysical tragicomedy of a Pascalian quality, but with the surface levity of music hall and the silent films of Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy.

Beckett's writing changed radically as a result of the harrowing war years he chose to spend as a technically "neutral" Irishman in France. He had narrowly escaped arrest by the Gestapo in Paris and escaped to unoccupied France where he (with Suzanne) led a peasant existence and involved himself again in resistance activities (for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Reconnaissance Francaise).

With liberation, Beckett was able to think and act like a full-time writer again. He threw off the ghost of Joyce, reined in his previous arch playing with words, and found his own voice. Increasingly his writing revealed deep concern about human injustice and cruelty, profound but well-disguised philosophical erudition, and subtle exploitation of Freudian and especially Jungian psychology, all couched in humorous and very Irish eccentricity.

The decision to write drama was an important one: it loosened up his style, made him write in the context of human and emotional interaction, and brought him the warm pleasure and confidence of working, not in isolation as all writers do, but with great actors such as Jack MacGowran, Patrick Magee, Billie Whitelaw, and Buster Keaton (in film).

When I asked him why changed in 1947 (with Eleutheria, which he withdrew when En attendant Godot was put on), he replied, "Playwriting was a relief from the terrible kind of prose I was writing at that time. I just thought I would try it out."

Above all, he decided to change language. He had written poetry in French before the war but all his major works of fiction and drama from this period of frenetic creativity (1946-53) were written first in French. A strange decision on the face of it, since most of his subject-matter (and humour) is patently Irish.

His experience of getting published in French had not been a happy one: the French translation of his 1938 comic surrealist novel Murphy came out in 1947 and sold less than a dozen copies in its first year, only 100 in five years. So why write in French? The answer is complex, but briefly, he was already fairly fluent in French (and Italian) when he graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1927; he had been living in France since 1938 right through to the end of the war, and for lengthy periods had spoken nothing but French; and he found it "more exciting" and easier to write "without style" in French, to "cut away the excess, to strip away the colour" - and above all to escape the influence of Joyce.

Fortunately neither writing in French nor prolonged immersion in Jung, Dante and Schopenhauer could dent his essential Irishness. "I'm not British. On the contrary."

Prolonged acquaintance with Beckett's works (and, sporadically, with the man himself) has moulded my own philosophy of life. Not only by his writings, but by his contempt for cant and mistrust of ready-made dogma. He always refused allegiance to any religious, political, or philosophical system but was not apolitical, as his active support for Vaclav Havel in communist Czechoslovakia and for Fernando Arrabal in fascist Spain shows.

He had in his writing lightness of touch coupled with great seriousness of purpose. His pithy one-liners and deformed cliches often come to mind: "Let's do nothing, it's safer"; "There's man all over, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet"; "When you cease to seek you start to find"; "Let us strike the iron before it freezes"; "Fail again, fail better".

To admire Beckett, one does not have to approve of all the parts. I have clashed with fellow-Becketteers over some of his directorial decisions and re-writes of Godot. He was highly critical of his own writing and sometimes agreed to publication only under extreme pressure. But if he can have so much influence, what does he teach us? Nothing. Not even nihilism and despair, as has so often been claimed? Certainly not - rather, one can be impressed, if one is so inclined, by the Sisyphean resilience and determination to go on, exhibited by characters such as Didi, Gogo, Winnie and even the monstrous blind Pozzo and Hamm.

The last words uttered by the eponymous hero of The Unnamable, after the sheer monotonous torture and disintegration he endures, are "you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on". Beckett's method is interrogatory, not didactic. The measure of what the reader or spectator has got out of Beckett lies in the questions one asks oneself afterwards. Is Endgame taking place inside a skull, or in a nuclear bomb shelter at the end of time?

Who or what is Godot? (Whatever you are waiting and hoping for, be it liberation from an oppressor, a redeemer or saviour, or a job, or . . .) This enriching uncertainty is the reward of non-specific polyvalent ambiguity. His main works of the middle period can be seen as symbolic representations of our mortal condition, as human beings subjected to the involuntary process of creation.

They are catalysts, often of mythical dimensions, causing many different reactions without being changed themselves.

The move from epic novel to chamber theatre ushered in some profound changes: endless and unsuccessful questing was replaced by inability to move from a particular spot, which resulted in concentration of physical action and sparseness of means.

However, one cannot make a firm distinction between Beckett's fiction and theatre, since his novellas, short stories, and novels have proved to be highly effective, entertaining and popular performance pieces. The converse, however, is not true: Beckett's plays have to be seen to be appreciated, for all depends on visual impact, physical business, pratfalls, cadence and rhythm.

However, we cannot judge here in Australia, for Beckett's later works have never, or very rarely, been staged or shown on TV.

This lack of interest, when compared with what happens throughout Europe, the US, Japan and Britain, is reflected in the few Australian scholars and university departments of French and English Literature involved in Beckett studies. I can't explain it. Neither can I explain or excuse the failure of Melbourne academics and arts organisations to do anything (so far as I am aware) to commemorate the centenary of one of the greatest of writers of our time.

Colin Duckworth is emeritus professor of modern French literature at Melbourne University, has written books, articles and reviews on Beckett and directed several of his plays. His latest novel, Summer Symphony, is published by Black Pepper, and his adaptation of Camus' The Plague will be staged in May.

Subscribe to The Age and save up to 35%*