All That Fall
Samuel Beckett
 This is the first work by Beckett where a woman is the central character. In this case it is a gritty, “overwhelmingly capacious”, outspoken, Irish septuagenarian, Maddy Rooney, plagued by “rheumatism and childlessness”. “Beckett emphasized to Billie Whitelaw that Maddy had an Irish accent: : ‘I said, “Like yours,” and he said, “No, no, no, an Irish accent.” I realized he didn't know he had an Irish accent, and that was the music he heard in his head.’” The opening scene finds Maddy trudging down a country road towards the station, renamed “Boghill” in the play. It’s her husband’s birthday. She’s already given him a tie but decides to surprise him by meeting him off the 12:30 train. It is a fine June morning, a Saturday since her husband is leaving his office at noon rather than five. In the distance the sounds of rural animals are heard. She moves with difficulty. She hears chamber music coming from an old house, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”. She stops, listens to the recording and even murmurs along with it before proceeding. Her first of three encounters with men is with the dung carrier, Christy, who tries to sell her a “small load of … stydung”. She tells him she will consult her husband. The man’s cart is being pulled by a “cleg-tormented” hinny who shows some reluctance to move on and needs to be whipped. As she heads off Maddy’s thoughts return to “Minnie! Little Minnie!” The smell of laburnum distracts her. Suddenly old Mr Tyler is upon her ringing his cycle bell. Whilst relating how his daughter’s operation has rendered her unable to bear children, they are almost knocked down by Connolly’s van, which covers them “white with dust from head to foot”. Maddy again bemoans the loss of Minnie but refuses to be comforted by Tyler who rides off despite realising that his rear tyre is flat. Lastly an “old admirer”, Mr Slocum, a racecourse clerk, pulls up in his “limousine” to offer her a ride. She is too fat and awkward to climb in alone so Slocum pushes her in from behind and in doing so her frock gets caught in the door. He tries to start the car but it has died. After applying the choke he does manage to get going and, no sooner having done so, runs over and kills a hen, which Maddy feels the need to eulogise. At each stage of the journey the technology she encounters advances, but despite this each means of locomotion is beset by problems, foreshadowing the problem with the train: she finds walking difficult and is forced to sit down, Christy needs to whip his hinny to make her go, Tyler’s tire goes flat, and Slocum’s engine dies. All the relatives mentioned in this section are female and all the modes of transport are also referred to as females. At the station Slocum calls on the porter, Tommy, for assistance to extricate his passenger, after which he drives away, “crucifying his gearbox.” Beckett told Billie Whitelaw that Maddy “is in a state of abortive explosiveness”. This becomes apparent when she considers herself ignored. To the boy Tommy she says abrasively: “Don’t mind me. Don’t take any notice of me. I do not exist. The fact is well known.” As Ruby Cohn quips, “she endures volubly.” The stationmaster, Mr Barrell, asks after Mrs Rooney’s health. She confesses that she should really still be in bed. We hear of the demise of Mr Barrell’s father, who died shortly after retiring, a tale that reminds Maddy again of her own woes. She notes that the weather has taken a change the worse; the wind is picking up and rain is due. Miss Fitt approaches so immersed in humming a hymn she doesn’t see Maddy at first. Miss Fitt, as her name indicates, is a self-righteous misfit. After some discussion she condescends to help the old woman up the stairs to the platform, primarily because “it is the Protestant thing to do.” Unusually the train is late. The noise of the station builds to a crescendo but it is an anticlimax; it is the oft-mentioned up mail. Dan’s train comes in moments afterwards. Maddy panics. She can’t find her husband because he has been led to the gents by Jerry, the boy who normally helps him to the taxi. Tightfisted Dan chides her for not cancelling Jerry but still pays his penny fee. He refuses however to discuss the reason for the train’s lateness. Not without some difficulty – her husband is also not a well man – they descend the stairs and begin the trek home. On her journey to the station Maddy only had to compete with one person at a time, each an old man. Now she is faced with a crowd. Rather than the flat open countryside she has to contend with a mountainous climb; she refers to the stairs as a “cliff”, her husband calls them a “precipice” and Miss Fitt compares them to the “Matterhorn”, a mountain that for years inspired fear in climbers. Also, the means of transport that are mentioned here, the Titanic, the Lusitania and the train due are modes of mass transport and the level of danger shifts from the inconvenient to the potentially lethal. All the relatives mentioned in this section are now male. The weather is worsening. The thought of getting home spurs them on. Dan imagines sitting by the fire in his dressing gown with his wife reading aloud from Effi Briest. The Lynch twins jeer at them from a distance. Dan shakes his stick and chases them off. Previously they have pelted the old couple with mud. “Did you ever wish to kill a child?” Dan asks her then admits to having to resist the impulse within himself. This makes his comment shortly after about being alone in his compartment – “I made no attempt to restrain myself.” – all the more suspicious. This also focuses attention on his remarks about the pros and cons of retirement: one of the negatives he brings up has to do with enduring their neighbour’s children. Dan is as laconic as Maddy is loquacious. His refusal to explain why the train was delayed forces her to pester him with questions which he does his best to avoid answering. He prevaricates and digresses, anything to throw her off track. Eventually he maintains that he honestly has no clue what the cause was. Being blind and on his own he had simply assumed the train had stopped at a station. Something Dan says reminds Maddy of a visit she once made to hear “a lecture by one of these new mind doctors. What she heard there was the story of a patient the doctor had failed to cure, a young girl who was dying, and “did in fact die, shortly after he had washed his hands of her.” The reason the doctor gave for the girl’s death, as if the revelation had just come to him there and then, was: “The trouble with her was that she had never really been born!” As they near the house Maddy passed earlier, Schubert’s music is still playing. Dan starts to cry. To stop her asking questions he asks about the text of Sunday’s sermon. “The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down,” she tells him, and then they both burst out laughing. Mr Slocum and Miss Fitt had both passed comment on Maddy’s bent posture. Perhaps, this is partly why they laugh: it is the best reaction to a life of unending misery in a world devoid of any God. In Happy Days, Winnie asks “How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones”. It is worthy of mention too that “it is Mr Tyler, rather than the Lord, who saved the preacher’s life when they were climbing together”. It would be fair to assume that Maddy doesn’t really believe in a god anymore. When she says, “We are alone. There is no one to ask.” She is certainly not talking about there being no one to ask about her husband’s age. Jerry catches them up to return something Mr Rooney has dropped. Learning that it is some kind of ball he demands the boy hand it to him. When pressed by his wife all he will say is that: “It is a thing I carry about with me,” and becomes angry when pressed on the subject. They have no small change so promise to give Jerry a penny on Monday to compensate him for his trouble. Just as the boy starts back Maddy calls him to see if he has learned what delayed the train. He has. Dan doesn’t want to know – “Leave the boy alone, he knows nothing! Come on!” – but his wife insists. Jerry tells her that it was a child at which point her husband groans. When pushed for details the boy goes on: “It was a little child fell out of the carriage, Ma’am … Onto the line, Ma’am … Under the wheels, Ma’am.” We assume the child is a girl – all the foreshadowing in the play has been pointing to that – but, crucially, Beckett never actually says. (See his comment to Kay Boyle below however). With that Jerry exits. We hear his steps die away and the couple head off in silence. Maddy must realise the death happened while she was making her way to the station but she is – for once – speechless. All we are left with is the wind and the rain and to wonder what, if anything, Mr Rooney actually had to do with the death of the child. The third section of the play returns Maddy to the relative calm of the walk home. They encounter a further three people only this time they are all children. The laburnum also serves as an important benchmark. In the opening scene Maddy admires it, now its condition has deteriorated. The weather has also continued to worsen until, at the end, they are in the middle of a “[t]empest of wind and rain”. In 1961 Kay Boyle asked Beckett if, at the end of Happy Days, Willie is reaching for the gun, or for his wife. Beckett replied: : “The question as to which Willie is ‘after’ – Winnie or the revolver – is like the question in All That Fall as to whether Mr Rooney threw the little girl out of the railway-carriage or not. And the answer is the same in both cases – we don’t know, at least I don’t … I know creatures are supposed to have no secrets for their authors, but I’m afraid mine for me have little else.”