The head of the silent man, emerged from the black turtleneck sweater, craggy face, gray-white hair swept back—gull wings. Piercing eyes.
Recluse extraordinaire. Not here not there. Shadow man. Bare-boned. Stripped to what is, remains.
“To and fro in shadow, from outer shadow to inner shadow. To and fro, between unattainable self and unattainable non-self”—Beckett’s own life, as he perceived it.
Beingless. Placeless. Nameless.
Dead faith. Dead language. Dead fiction.
Man (characters, chronologically) alone, stuck in the earth, in urns, in trash cans, (the womb?) disembodied…reduced to whispers, animal sounds, silence… The beginning end.
Nothing to say. Everything to say about nothing. ‘Read my lips.’
Stage in darkness but for Mouth, upstage audience right, about 8’ above stage level, faintly lit from close-up and below, rest of face in shadow…As house lights down Mouth’s voice unintelligible behind curtain fully up and attention sufficient into:
Unconscious postures—stage, street, against a wall, seated in a Parisian café. A study in hovering... in place, terra firma. Vulture-ous.
The Vulture
dragging his hunger through the sky of my skull shell of sky and earth
stooping to the prone who must soon take up their life and walk
mocked by a tissue that may not serve till hunger earth and sky be offal (from ECHO’S BONES)
Tramp in a black bowler …(in tramp-time.)
A country road. A tree
Evening
Act II
Next day. Same time.
Same place
WAITING FOR GODOT
Estragon: I can’t go on like this. Vladimir: That’s what you think.
Beckett-Black.
Black…but for his cold-blue eyes, focused to look, write, outside-inside the same time.
Rooted in Ireland. (Which he hated so much, some say, that he wrote in French.) But a Celtic heritage--storytelling, music, drinking, fellowman-ship, impossible to dismiss. Listen to the bloke, go on, now will you... Not unlike Joyce (for whom he served as secretary, once upon a time…translating parts of FINNIGAN’S WAKE into French).
Joyce: singer with more lyrical language than a mouth could hold. Beckett: gasping in the darkness to himself.
“James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.”
Joyce: unending song. Beckett: silent ecstasy. “I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.”
Joyce’s “Bloom” Becket’s…Krapp, Hamm, Watt, Valdimir and Estragon. Lucky and Pozzo. Murphy, Malloy, Malone, The Unnamable…Beckett.
“All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.”
Beckett coming down the street, straight on, a bold exclamation mark. Sideways, standing still, a hovering question mark.
Vladimir: DON’T TELL ME! Estragon: (gestures toward the universe). This one is enough for you? (Silence) It’s not nice of you Didi. Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can’t tell them to you?
Singular. Solace. Solitary. Sparse, Spare prose. Bare bones.
Becket Black
Fact:
1906…Born outside Dublin 1927…B.A. French/Italian, Trinity College 1930…Whoroscope, (poems of Descartes) 1931…Proust published in London 1937…Settles in Paris (hanging out with Joyce, Sarte, et. al.) 1938…Stabbed, almost killed by a notorious Paris pimp 1940…Joins the French Resistance (Awarded the Croix de Guerre) 1947-49…Writes the trilogy of novels: MOLLOY, MALONE DIES, THE UNNAMABLE and his first play, “Waiting for Godot” 1953…First production of “Waiting for Godot” in Paris 1958…”Krapps’s Last Tape” and “Endgame,“ open in London 1969…Nobel Prize for Literature 1989…Dies in Paris
Fancy: myth, mystery, irony
…The Paris pimp who stabbed Beckett in the street in l938 was named Prudent. Beckett was rescued by a woman, Suzanne Descheveaux-Dumesnil, a pianist, which led to a life-long relationship. (He married her in 1961. A mother figure?) She dies in July, Beckett in December of 1989.They are buried in the same grave in Montparnasse, Paris, covered by a large slab of polished black granite.
…He smoked too much, drank too much, suffered from insomnia, experienced at least one nervous breakdown (became fascinated with psychoanalysis), never learned to drive, hated his possessive, puritanical mother, and flew a kite the day his father died.
--He loved women and Irish whiskey. He loved Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplain, Laurel and Hardy…(ah, the black bowler!…the comic actor upon the dark Beckett stage)…and THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. There is no remembrance of him ever drunk. No women attracted to him shed any light, broke the Beckett silence. But for the ‘fact’ he was once bedded down by Peggy Guggenheim (who had a penchant for bedding down artists) who called him ‘Oblomov’ (from Russian lit), suggesting ‘inertia.’
--Beckett in love?
I would like my love to die and the rain to be falling on the graveyard and on me walking the streets mourning the first and last to love me
maybe as close as he came to expressing it, in a Beckett black way.
--His first novel, MURPHY, published in 1938, went unread.
--He visited the United State only once, briefly, in 1964. Barney Rosset (Grove Press) was his American publisher.
--Readers would seek him out in Paris, ring his doorbell, and when he appeared, snap his picture and run. (He hated being photographed.) Once, spotted in a favorite Parisian café, a photographer continued shooting photos of him. Beckett approached him, inquired how much he expected to be paid for those photographs… doubled the amount and walked away with the film.
--Kindness, generosity, loyalty. He was known as a soft touch. Even when he knew he was being had, he opened his wallet. Wider. Money, too, had a certain nothingness about it.
--Marcel Duchamp (surrealist, lover of chess) was a friend and inspired Beckett’s famous play, “Endgame.”
--Being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in l969--was “a catastrophe,” he said. Fled the honor and ceremony. Deeper into the darkness. While the committee (sans Beckett) spoke of his having “transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation.”
Yes, he was one of those: a writer’s writer. Personally penned and crafted in a language of his own: Beckett to you out there, nowhere. ‘You” being like him, identifying with him--life and art…his hour upon the stage.
A writer’s writer says the right things with the right words in a way only he can tell what must be said. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” (Grove Press buys the initial rights to “Waiting for Godot” in l953 for $150.)
“To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail.”
Reward, for eyes than can see it, ears that can hear it, is reception, however small, from one reader to a handful, to a group in a small theater, to perchance a movement, a following that just might break out---or remain forever parochial, interior. “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Destined to fail, “Go on failing. Go on” which he knows from the beginning, even if he be so lucky to emerge ‘someone’ near the end of his own lifetime. Which, in Beckett’s case, what he was waiting and writing for anyway. “Birth was the death of him.”
“I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.”
Every writer comes to realize this. Beginning and end. The sooner the better.
“My characters have nothing. I’m working with impotence, ignorance…that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable—something by definition incompatible with art.”
Clowns, misfits, derelicts, failures—Beckett’s people. “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”
He called his stories “miseries.”
The Irish poet, John Montague arranges to visit Beckett in Paris shortly before his death. Beckett replies with a note saying he is in “an old crock’s home.”
“And how are you?” he asks Beckett, who sits alone in a stark room, facing the inevitable.
“I’m done.” Beckett replies…”I’m done…But it takes such a long time.”
Words for writers to live by and die for: Beckett said them all. Sparingly.
“Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile…a stain upon the silence.”
Solitary strangers pause before the slab of black granite in the Cimetie’re du Montparnasse in Paris, read the name and time inscribed upon the gravestone: Samuel Beckett—1906-1989.
A woman rests a rose upon his stone.
A man places a black bowler above his name.
“Words are all we have.”
Norbert Blei 4/25/2006 Posted: 4/25/2006 3:08:20 PM
