Understanding Samuel Beckett in 90 Minutes with Paul Strathern (2005)

in 1946 Beckett found himself back in Ireland staying with his disapproving mother he had left Paris because he did not have enough money to continue living in his chosen City he was now approaching 40 and forced to confront the prospect of his utter failure all the hopes of his brilliant youth had come to nothing apart from a few scattered pieces mostly in small magazines he had published just one novel this had passed virtually unnoticed by the reading public the bulk of its copies being remaindered during the war he had written another novel and had at last felt that he was getting somewhere but this novel had recently been turned down by his publishers who had reacted to it with considerable bewilderment finding it wild and unintelligible in their opinion it stood no chance whatsoever of publication though deeply wounded by this rejection Beckett too was dissatisfied with his work he disagreed with his publishers rejection but he felt a nagging suspicion that he was somehow not on the right track something was missing something eluded him preventing him from achieving all of which he felt he was capable the great promise he had shown the promise that had been recognized by no less than James Joyce himself remained unfulfilled Beckett was at a loss over what to do and he began drinking heavily in the bars of Dublin at night he would wander the streets in a bemused State lost in his thoughts one night he found himself standing at the end of the stone pier of dun Laoghaire harbour years later he would recall this moment in an earlier version of his play Krapp's Last Tape where craps recorded voice this jointed Lee relates intellectually a year of profound gloom and indigence until that memorable night in March at the end of the pier in the howling wind never to be forgotten when suddenly I saw the whole thing the turning point at last this I imagine is what I have chiefly to set down this evening against the day when my work will be done and perhaps no place left in my memory and no thankfulness for the miracle that for the fire it set alight what I saw then was that the assumption I had been going on all my life namely clear to me at last that the dark I have been fighting off all this time is in reality my most unsatisfactory the world around him he should have been focusing on the inner world on the dark he had struggled to keep under Joyce had gone as far as it was possible to go in the direction of knowing more being in control of one's material but Becket realized that my own way was in impoverishment in lack of knowledge and in taking away in subtracting rather than adding his subject matter was not the great intellectual achievements of the human condition but its hopelessness and despair the grim farcical element of its inescapable failure all the things that he himself knew so well from this point on Becket would no longer care whether what he wrote appeared wild and unintelligible he would express the discontented nosov his own inner voice the voice that had accompanied him through the long voyage of his life so far beckett life and works samuel beckett was born on good friday April the 13th 1906 in Fox Rock a middle-class suburb between the Wicklow Mountains and the Irish Sea south of Dublin his family was descended from Hyuga nerves the Protestants who were forced to flee Catholic persecution in France during the late 18th century but the Beckett's had long since lost any awareness of themselves as anything other than Irish the family was part of the prosperous Protestant minority in Ireland which at the time was still part of Great Britain there is little evidence of creative inclination among Beckett's predecessors with the possible exception of his paternal grandmother Fanny whose unfulfilled sensitivity drove her to drink according to family myth ology she would lock herself in her room for days on end at other times she sported a parrot on her shoulder which would screech with jealous rage when anyone kissed Fanny William Beckett the writers father was a jovial Philistine who made a considerable fortune as a building contractor and property speculator Beckett retained affectionate memories of his father with whom he would go on long walks over the barren treeless countryside of the nearby wicklow mountains but the dominant parent in Beckett's life was his mother may a tall long faced difficult woman descended from an impecunious land owning family or who met her agree that there was something odd about her something that didn't quite fit in with the role of conventional suburban life she suffered from insomnia and had the carpets removed from the upstairs floors so that she could hear the footfall of any approaching ghosts despite this there was little overtly eccentric about her apart from her willfulness this appears to have met its match in her second son Samuel Beckett's older brother Frank took after his father but it soon became clear that Sam was psychologically much more complex a condition he appeared to find his irksome as everyone else as a result he was a solitary child both by circumstance and inclination surprisingly the reserved young Beckett did well at school being both intellectually gifted and accomplished at sports despite his bad eyesight from an early age he had been forced to wear round steel-rimmed spectacles which he would continue to wear all his life in 1920 at the age of 14 he became a boarder at Port Torah royal school a Protestant private schooled in the province of Ulster which was to become Northern Ireland in 1922 Ireland gained independence with Northern Ireland electing to remain part of Britain there followed a civil war in the Irish Free State between the two catholic factions the schoolboy Beckett would have been largely insulated from all this but would certainly have been aware of the upheavals that were taking place it is difficult to judge the precise effect of this traumatic historical background it would certainly leave a profound mark upon his Protestant Irish contemporary painter Francis Bacon the newly independent Ireland was a troubled desperately poor country heavily dominated by the Catholic Church which for bad contraception as a result large families contributed further to the poverty of the majority Catholic population out of ambition or necessity many emigrated to Britain and America leaving saddened abandoned families behind although Becket never lived in poverty in his homeland the hopeless downtrodden characters who inhabit much of his later fiction would have been recognizable on any Street in Dublin even if the background Beckett gave them was often more reminiscent of the Wicklow Mountains Beckett's unaccommodating man may have had a distant literary ancestor in the Poor Bear forked animal seen by Shakespeare's King Lear on the blasted Heath but the characters in Beckett's work also mirrored real people whose hopeless temperament and grim humour had been forged by real despair at the age of 17 Beckett went to Trinity College Dublin where he studied modern languages English French and Italian here he quickly acquired the seemingly obligatory pancha for vast quantities of Guinness and an equally unquenchable thirst for literature and philosophy in his final fourth year he won a place on the University cricket team which went on a short summer tour playing against English counties these matches are recorded in wisdom the cricketers Bible making him the only Nobel Prize winner to appear in its August pages in his final exams Beckett won the gold medal as the top scholar he emerged from university an awkward young man who in that scornful but telling Dublin phrase was educated beyond his intelligence like his philosophical hero Descartes he found it difficult to rise from his bed before noon this made him particularly unsuited to the employment he now gained as a schoolmaster at Campbell College Belfast a middle-class Ulster institution similar to portora as with many a brilliant student he quickly acquired a distaste for the amiable dullards who formed the staff and pupils to them he appeared a conceited and arrogant young man the final straw came when he was summoned yet again to appear before the exasperated headmaster who forcefully reminded him that the pupils he treated with such contempt were in fact the cream of ulster yes replied Beckett rich and thick he found himself on the next train to Dublin the only surprise was that he had lasted as long as two terms fortunately his linguistic success at Trinity College enabled him to qualify for an exchange post as nectar and the prestigious French Ecole Normale Superieure this would allow him to live for two years in Paris nothing could have suited Beckett better within months he had taken up residence in a small room on the left bank and was wearing a beret his fingers browned with nicotine stains from strong Gauloise tobacco drinking copious amounts of cheap red wine in the bars of the Latin Quarter although he duly carried out his light tutorial duties at the ecole he appears to have mixed little with the students among whom he might have encountered jean-paul sartre and Simone de Beauvoir who are currently the top philosophy students instead Becket met James Joyce who had published Ulysses just six years earlier and already had a reputation in some circles as Ireland's finest modern writer the brilliant and impressionable young Becket was overwhelmed by the brilliant and manipulative Joyce who soon had Becket running errands and doing secretarial chores in 1929 Becket contributed an essay to a book celebrating Joyce's work and embarked upon a translation into French of a section from Finnegan's Wake Joyce's work-in-progress beckett even assisted Joyce in the composition of this difficult modernistic work taking down the author's words as he dictated this task would result in a characteristic episode on one occasion when Becket read back to Joyce the passage he had just dictated the flow of densely elusive Joycean pros was fair to include the words come in which choice could not remember saying after some puzzled discussion Joyce recalled that at one point someone had knocked on the door and he must have replied come in this amused Joyce so much that he decided to leave Beckett's copy intact such accidents fell easily into the prose of Finnegan's Wake not a sound falling Lisbon no wind no word only a leaf just a leaf and the leaves the woods are fond always as were we there babes in and Robinson Crusoe it is for me Gould and wending unless away rise a man of the hoots you have slept so long or is it only so miss Lemes at the time this was the pinnacle of modernistic prose the young over intellectual beckett was entranced by its richness of literary illusion here was something he could not fail to admire something that perhaps one day he might seek to emulate despite his shyness beckett was by now an attractive young man joyce is emotionally unstable daughter Lucia soon fell in love with a tall taciturn figure who regularly called the Joyce apartment Beckett did his best to discourage her but this disturbing episode appears to have contributed to her eventual mental collapse some years later it also resulted in a brief estrangement with Joyce although his influence on Beckett's way of thinking remained as strong as ever Beckett now had ambitions to become a writer and began composing poetry it was highly elusive in a Joycean manner with obscure references to all manner of writers in various languages in 1930 the shipping heiress Nancy Cunard sponsored a prize for a poem of less than a hundred lines on the subject of time Beckett heard of this prize only on the evening before the deadline for entries whereupon he stayed up till 3:00 a.m. writing a poem called horoscope based very obliquely on the life of Descartes it opens what's that an egg by the brothers butit stinks fresh give it to Jill the pages of notes at the end of the poem explain how dare cart liked his omelet made from eggs hatched from eight to ten days that in 1640 the brothers boot refuted Aristotle in Dublin and how Descartes passed on the easier problems in analytical geometry to his valet Gio horoscope goes on like this 498 lines stuffed with reference yet empty of coherence meaningful to the point of meaninglessness this combination of conceit erudition obscurity and fashionable modernity one Nancy Q nards prize and was duly published in book form by her hours press despite this minor success Beckett remained a distinctly solitary individual beset by an increasingly profound a psychological bewilderment resulting in bouts of depression and deep suffering it was around this time that he discovered the misanthropic 19th century German philosopher Schopenhauer whose works are imbued with a deep pessimism according to Schopenhauer the world is merely representation an illusory veil of Maher sustained by an evil will beckett found himself drawn to what he called Schopenhauer's intellectual justification of unhappiness spiritual suffering was the lot of humanity it should be accepted as such not dismissed as some kind of psychological failing later beckett would write that the experience of discovering shop in her was like suddenly a window opened in a fog by 1930 Beckett's time as a lecturer at the Ecole Normale Superieure was over and he was forced to return to Dublin here he reluctantly took a post as a lecturer at his alma mater Trinity College by now friends had brought Beckett to the attention of a London publisher who had commissioned him to write another work on time this was to be a critical monologue on Proust the author of the vast seven volume novel remembrance of things past Beckett's monograph is pervaded by open Howie and bloom there is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us or being deformed by us yet amidst his displays of erudition and his attempts to come to terms with the great French writer Beckett manages to focus his language into a number of pithy epigrams reality whether approached imaginatively or empirically remains a surface hermetic for Proust as for the painter style is more a question of vision than of technique more pertinently if more obliquely Proust also evolved into an attempt by Beckett to set down his own ideas about writing tragedy is not concerned with human justice tragedy is the statement of an expiation but not the miserable expiation of a codified breach of a local arrangement organized by the knaves for the fools the tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin of the original and eternal sin the sin of having being born after just four terms of teaching at Trinity College Becket found that he was unable to go on despite his deep academic knowledge he knew that the world of academia was not for him to the consternation of his parents and his supportive colleagues he resigned he was now 26 years old increasingly beset by depression and virtually incapable of holding down any kind of job his mother nagged his father Bluff Lee tried to snap him out of it he began drinking heavily his parents gave him some money and he returned to Paris where he began writing a novel this would eventually become a dream of fair-to-middling women its protagonist is a character called bellaqua named after the character in Dante's Divine Comedy who is sent to purgatory for the sin of sloth the novel is loosely based on various incidents in Beckett's life and bellaqua is recognizably Beckett himself it consists of several episodes interspersed with occasional intellectual meanderings in the end Beckett himself was forced to admit that the novel was a failure although he would eventually salvage one section as a short story called Dante and the lobster in its depiction of bellick was physical decrepitude and mental inconsistency this story contains the first inkling of some of the themes that would come to fruition in Beckett's later work there is also the occasional glimpse of Beckett's grim farcical humor as for instance in his aunt was in the garden tending whatever flowers died at that time of year in 1933 Beckett's father died leaving him a small but regular income just enough for him to live on he began a period of several months wandering about Europe traveling through Germany and France living in cheap lodgings mooching about various cities and visiting art galleries in between times he wrote a number of short stories and poems his letters to his friends reveal him by turns depressed and abundantly defiant his comments on the literary world that rejected his works would always tend to the latter critics were referred to as Chartered Accountants the well-known London publisher chatto and windus became chaton and wind-up outwardly he became ever more withdrawn Beckett ended up in London where he settled in a cheap room in Chelsea in the district appropriately known as World's End here he embarked upon a period of psychoanalysis part of which involved attending along with his psychiatrist a lecture by Jung during the course of the lecture young explained how there is no unity to consciousness which is capable of splitting in two separate complexes each of which can develop its own ego to the point where they speak in voices which are like the voices of definite people at one stage young compared the mind to a series of spheres one within the other each becoming darker with the darkest at the very heart of the mind containing the personal and collective unconscious when the mind relinquished its conscious autonomy the unconscious grew in strength until it overcame the conscious mind then the individual became the victim of a new autonomous activity that does not start from his ego but starts from the dark sphere these interpretations would have a profound and lasting effect on Beckett but none more so than Jung's assertion that there are certain people who suffer from the fact that they have never been really born Beckett would continue to identify with this diagnosis until finally it became an integral element of his most profound work Beckett later remarked I hated London he felt alienated and alone his accent marked him out as an Irishman and consequent prejudice while he found himself unable to relate to English literary acquaintances eventually after two bad years he decided it was time to pull the plug on London he returned to Ireland to live with his mother who ironically had been one of the main reasons for him going into psychoanalysis their relationship was too close and too difficult her overbearing character and utter disregard for his ambitions to become a writer left him exhausted and bewildered yet unable finally to break free in between times Beckett continued writing poetry and short stories in 1933 his book of short stories entitled more pricks than kicks was accepted by a London publisher this book consisted of a number of linked stories featuring Belacqua of the hero of his abandoned novel by sometime friend Belacqua enlivened at the last phase of his solipsism before he told the line and began to relish the world with the belief that the best thing he had to do was to move constantly from place to place he did not know how this conclusion had been gained but that it was not thanks to his preferring one place to another he felt sure a year later a friend in Paris offered to publish his collection of poems echoes bones and other precipitates as long as Beckett contributed toward the cost the title poem in its entirety runs asylum under might read all this day there muffled revels as the flesh falls breaking without fear or favour wind the cantaloupe of sense and nonsense run taken by the maggots for what they are such poetry published in a small limited edition in English in Paris attracted little attention Beckett was now almost 30 and still having to live off his wits and his small private income he settled down to have another go at writing a novel between writing and rewriting this would take him three years to complete finally being accepted by a London publisher in 1937 this is recognizably Beckett's first accomplished post apprentice work the authors need to inflict his great erudition upon the reader is restrained to the point where the proceedings remain more or less comprehensible the Bleak self-defensive humour comes into its own and the result is a work by turns farcical and philosophical surely the work of a truly oblique and original mind beginning to express itself with a measure of confidence rather than arrogance its opening words set the tone the Sun Shan having no alternative on the nothing new Murphy sat out of it as though he were free in a Mew in West prompt in' here for what might have been six months he had eaten drunk slept and put his clothes on and off in a medium-sized cage of northwestern aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium sized cages of southeastern aspect Murphy is an impecunious Irish intellectual driven to misanthropic despairs he seeks some form of spiritual relief from the world around him we see him sitting in his room naked and bound to a rocking chair only the most local movements were possible sweat poured off him tightening the thongs the breath was not perceptible the eyes cold and unwavering as a gulls stared up Murphy subjected himself to this ordeal because it gave him pleasure first it gave his body pleasure it appeased his body then it set him free in his mind for it was not until his body was appeased that he could come alive in his mind Murphy has affinities with many of Beckett's favorite thinkers like Descartes think his proof to himself of his existence and his philosophy leads him to believe that his mind is separate from his body he is possessed by a Schopenhauer Ian pessimism and views the world as a veil of Mayer and besides witty echoes of various philosophers there are also direct references to young Murph his mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere hermetically closed to the universe without this was not an impoverishment for it excluded nothing that it did not itself contain nothing ever had been was or would be in the universe outside it but was already present as virtual or actual or virtual rising into actual or actual falling into virtual in the universe inside it despite his saw lips is dick inclination z' murphy cannot avoid becoming embroiled in the outside world in the course of the novel we meet the prostitute Celia who is Murphy's sole support until he ends up in an asylum called the Magdalene mental mercy seat here he continues his search for Nirvana rocking in his chair until someone inadvertently pulls the wrong chain in the lavatory releasing gas into his room where there is a lighted candle after the fatal explosion we learn of Murphy's will with regard to the disposal of these my body mind and soul I desire that they be burnt and placed in a paper bag his ashes are then to be taken to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin where they are to be tipped down the lavatory and I desire that the chain be there pulled upon them if possible during the performance unfortunately the man chosen to execute this task his friend Cooper gets drunk in a bar and ends up angrily throwing the paper bag containing Murphy's ashes at a man who had given him great offence the bag bursts scattering the ashes by closing time the body mind and soul of Murphy were freely distributed over the floor of the saloon and before another day spring gray and the earth had been swept away with the sand the beer the BOTS the glass the matches the spits the vomit unsurprisingly the publication of such an oddity passed all but unnoticed in literary London but the little attention it did eventually attract was significant Dylan Thomas wrote an unfavorable review but declared Murphy is the individual ostrich in the mass-produced desert characterizing Beckett's humor as Freudian Blarney Sodom and begorrah later the young Anglo Irish Iris Murdoch more than a decade before she became a writer found a deep rapport with Murphy's Irishness and originality later still an unread copy was borrowed from a public library by the penniless actor Harold Pinter who was so overwhelmed that he decided to steal it meanwhile Beckett's life in Ireland was going from bad to worse he was still living at home but spent the afternoons and evenings wandering the pubs of Dublin warnings consisted of hangovers and motherly reprimands he began to develop psychosomatic illnesses suffering particularly from scrofulous rashes anal cysts and boils by the autumn of 1937 illness inflicted abstinence allowed him to pay off his accumulated pub debts and he had enough money to travel again he set off for Paris determined that this time he would stay away as long as he could unfortunately he was called back to Dublin to appear in a libel case which one of his drinking companions had taken against the writer Oliver sinjen Gogarty loyally Beckett returned but his public appearance in court proved traumatic squirming in the limelight of the witness-box Beckett was forced to endure a humiliating vilification of his character by gogit his counsel adopting an air of bluff puritanical Philistine ism the lawyer mercilessly played to the gallery Beckett was dismissed as a pretentious intellectual the writer of a pornographic poem by the title of horoscope with a capital W prefixed next day a report in the Irish Times referred to Beckett as the board and blasphemer from Paris he didn't dare go home and face his mother this time Beckett left swearing never to return back in Paris he found himself unable to concentrate on serious writing and was pleased to take on occasional literary hack work for extra funds word that he had now published a novel began to spread among his friends he made contact with James Joyce and through other friends was invited to one of the wild parties thrown by the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim who was in Paris buying up modern art for her London gallery Guggenheim described Becket as a tall lanky Irishman of about 30 with enormous green eyes that never looked at you he wore spectacles and always seemed to be far away solving some intellectual problem he spoke very seldom and never said anything stupid he was excessively polite but rather awkward he dressed badly in tight-fitting French clothes and had no vanity about his appearance Guggenheim soon fell in love with Becket and they began an on-and-off affair that would last many months but in the end the vivacious socialising Guggenheim who collected famous names as much as she collected paintings and the elusive misanthropic Becket proved incompatible and they went their separate ways decades later in her autobiography confessions of an art addict Peggy Guggenheim would claim that among the many famous figures she had encountered only three immediately struck her as geniuses the surrealist Max Ernst the sculptor Alberto Giacometti and Samuel Beckett this was apparently not hindsight in her own words when she had first met Becket he had been merely a frustrated writer a pure intellectual but despite their difficulties and their disparate attitudes she had detected in him an exceptional creative spark a spark that Beckett himself was far from sure he possessed at the time Joyce - claimed to see this others believed in Becket even when he did not believe in himself although it would still be many years before such faith was justified meanwhile the heavy drinking continued on belong huge drunk at the zinc counter of a small Paris cafe cost little more than a box of matches and Beckett would regularly end up making the rounds of the late-night cafes in Montparnasse where he now lived despite his hectic nightlife he still found time for exercise playing occasional games of tennis with expatriate friends who invited him to a private club on the outskirts of Paris for mixed doubles he was occasionally partnered by a talented French pianist called Suzanne de cheveux do menial it was also at this time that Beckett formed a close friendship with a Swiss Italian sculptor Alberto Giacometti who shared Beckett's solitariness fondness for late-night bars and sardonic view of the world the two insomnia acts would share long understanding silences at the bar pondering the evils of the world between draining their glasses Giacometti had an unabashed pour shawl for prostitutes and Beckett appears to have joined him in this pursuit as well as exploring the field on his own almost certainly as a result of this Beckett became involved in an incident in Montparnasse ingenuine 1938 in the course of an argument with a pimp who appeared to know him and wanted to borrow some money Beckett who was stabbed in the chest he fell to the ground and was quickly rushed to the hospital here it was found that the knife blade had barely missed his heart and lung he was lucky to be alive Beckett had long been prone to hypochondria but now that the affliction was both genuine and serious he behaved stoically when news of Beckett's injury reached Dublin his mother and brother immediately set off on the quickest route to Paris which in those days involved a grueling 24 hours of continuous travelling including to ferry crossings and three rail journeys Beckett was deeply moved by his mother's evident concern and they appear to have effected an awkward reconciliation the events had a deep effect upon Beckett and even broke his writer's block in his hospital bed he found himself writing poetry again another hospital visitor was Beckett's tennis partner Suzanne although she was 38 and thus six years older than Beckett it quickly became clear that she was attracted to him when Beckett left the hospital they began going out together they made an unlikely couple he drank she did not he lived a bohemian life she preferred lace-making but they quickly discovered a mutual interest in classical music and the arts in time they became lovers unlike Peggy Guggenheim however Suzanne appeared to have a more calming effect on Beckett as Peggy Guggenheim Cattleya remarked about Suzanne she made curtains while I made scenes in the summer of 1939 Beckett received the royalties he was due from the publication of Murphy and traveled to Ireland to see his mother during the visit Britain and France declared war on Germany plunging Europe into World War two Ireland remained neutral but to the consternation of his mother Beckett insisted upon returning to Paris telling her I promised so many friends that I would be back by now Beckett and Suzanne were living together in a small flat on the grew defeat a grim featureless Street south of Montparnasse in the spring of 1940 the Germans invaded France quickly approaching Paris Beckett and Suzanne fled with thousands of refugees who headed south but eventually made their way back to German occupied Paris Beckett had no wish to return to Ireland and Suzanne was equally reluctant to return to live with her parents in provincial try back in Paris Beckett soon joined a resistance Network with characteristic diffidence and more than a little truth he later characterized his actions as Boy Scout stuff but there's no doubting the fact that this involved real danger after the war Beckett would be awarded the Croix de Guerre for his efforts though he typically omitted to tell anyone of this for many years in 1942 the Germans penetrated the resistance cell with which Beckett was involved he and Suzanne immediately left the Rue de FEV elite and went on the run after being put up at various secret addresses in Paris they set off South with false papers for unoccupied Vichy France which was run by Patton's collaborationist government for days they tramped the roads sometimes in despair often bickering in their extremity elements of this dialogue would later surface in the absurd exchanges between Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett's Waiting for Godot Estragon I can't go on like this Vladimir that's what you think Vladimir well shall we go Estragon yes let's go they do not move eventually Beckett and Suzanne reached the remote village of Roussillon in the craggy Hills above their own Delta some 400 miles south of Paris here they hid out for the remainder of the war doing occasional farm work to help pay for their keep Beckett would sometimes join the local Maquis resistance on armed night patrols these were largely futile exercises involving 20 mile hikes across rugged heathland intended to bolster morale Beckett soon fell into deep dejection but attempted to keep up his spirits by beginning a novel which would eventually be called what his first sustained creative work in more than five years what would mark a break from Beckett's previous work gone is the self-conscious intellectualism the tendency to pretentious superiority in its place comes a distinctly neurotic sense of futility as Beckett attempts to explore and embody various philosophical questions in concrete form this is achieved by what would become a distinctly Beckett like form of reductionism which besides reducing the narrative to its bare bones also involves a reductio ad absurdum of the entire novelistic genre in one sense what marks a serious deepening of Beckett's psychological affinities previously Murphy had shown deep empathy with a schizophrenic sin the mercy-seat asylum in the case of what the eponymous hero unmistakably is schizophrenic both in his actions and in the obsessive way in which his story is recounted we are introduced to what in slapstick fashion what bumped into a porter wheeling a milk can what fell and his hat and bags were scattered the porter did not fall but he let go his kin which fell back with a thump on its tilted rim rocked rattling on its base and finally came to a stand this was a happy chance for had it fallen on its side in basic outline the story has a symbolic distinctly Kafka esque simplicity after a series of tragic farcical mishaps the bedraggled what turns up at the house of mist and not where he is to work as a servant after being subjected to a seemingly endless diatribe by the departing servant he is replacing what takes up his duties on the ground-floor performing his allotted menial tasks eventually he graduates to the top of the house where he looks after the bedroom taking the place of Erskine whose employment has come to an end during this time in the house what's life revolves around the mysterious but elusive mr. naught the master of the house mr. Nutt saw nobody heard from nobody as far as what could see but what was not so foolish as to draw any conclusion from this the latter observation is the key to what's overriding philosophical attitude toward the world what catches a few glimpses of mr. not the most notable being of him meditating in the garden otherwise mr. naught remains unknown seemingly defined only by negation the narrative of the story is characterized by neurotic obsession with detail and repetition this comes across as perverse psychotic or humorous a depending upon one's attitude toward the repetitive goings-on in which what becomes involved at first these appear trivial to the point of tediousness but they soon open up into a world of deeper meaning what distressed what in this incident and in subsequent similar incidents was not so much that he did not know what had happened for he did not care what had happened as that nothing had happened that a thing that was nothing had happened with the utmost formal distinctness and that he continued to happen in his mind he's a though he did not know exactly what that meant and though it seemed to be outside him before him about him and so on this may appear as a distinctly obsessive and oblique examination of the nature of existence but there is no doubting its philosophical penetration such passages do not make for easy reading and indeed there are times when it is almost impossible to continue without one's mind drifting into something akin to involuntary schizophrenia if there is no denying the depth of the philosophical insights achieved in such passages no other writer had entered into such territory in quite such a manner before this is the opposite of the Joycean manner which had previously so swamped Beckett instead of vast proliferation of meaning that is instead of stripping a way of experience to a basic bedrock of meaning what may have appeared like a form of madness just as Beckett himself may have been on the verge of complete breakdown but he knew what he was doing this was no inadvertent expression of human extremity and futility it was instead a conscious investigation of the futility of the human condition in its most fundamental aspects what it expressed was precisely how Beckett felt at the time and mirroring such mental disintegrate proved a feat of existential revelation what occupies the hinterland where art shades into philosophy the practice of one becomes the practice of the other the deeper resonances are left for us to ponder the surface ones are more easily discernible there are evident indications that mr. naught is intended as a negation not unravel ibly knotted a negative version of God what undergoes his quotidian and endlessly repetitive fate at first with extreme attention and later with some vexation and the results on the whole were meagre he poses a question what by his very existence though it is worth noting here that he is not called why his function is epistemological rather than causal he examines and questions the world in which he finds himself about despite the obvious symbolic references in these names Beckett insists at the end no symbols were none intended we are given the pointers the rest we are left free to ponder upon work out for ourselves or simply ignore depending upon our temperament much is in life in this way what may be viewed as anything from a trite comedy to an inscrutable farce though the profundity of one's reaction should by no means be taken as a reflection of character in August 1944 Lucille was liberated by American troops but it was a full eight months before Beckett and Suzanne managed to get back to Paris they discovered much to their relief that the flat in rue de fav elite had not been ransacked in their absence a fate that had befallen many other such abandoned properties from here Beckett set out for Ireland passing through London he called in at his publishers to discover that Murphy had long since been forgotten and the accumulated royalties he had been hoping to collect were non-existent he handed over the manuscript of what on his return to Dublin Beckett found that his mother had aged considerably in the six years since he had last seen her the tall proud woman he had known and fought was now a bowed old lady who looked all of her 74 years Beckett for his part looked emaciated his face gaunt with suffering his teeth were in a rotten state and he was suffering once more from his perennial boils much of his time was spent visiting the dentist and consulting the family doctor in the midst of this a letter arrived from his publisher in which the editor gave his reaction to what expressing his very mixed feelings about it and considerable bit will durmand to be quite frank it is too wild and unintelligible for the most part to stand any chance of successful publication over here at the present time true originality is seldom acceptable but its rejection only added further to Beckett's gloom then a further blow struck to his consternation Beckett now found his way back to Paris blocked by post-war travel wrist after desperate inquiries he managed to find a position as an interpreter for the Irish Red Cross which was sending a mission to set up a hospital it's an loo in Normandy Becket arrived to find that the town had been reduced to rubble during the d-day landings a year previously and nothing had changed since as ever Beckett responded to the real suffering he encountered here with genuine dedication when his tour of duty was over he returned to Paris he was now coming up to 40 years old with failure staring him in the face he had no idea what to do since writing was the only thing he could do he began scribbling a few disconnected pieces by way of a change he tried writing them in French then the money ran out and he was forced to return to Dublin post war currency restrictions meant that his small private income could not be sent abroad once back in Dublin to the consternation of his mother and brother he began drinking heavily again wandering the night streets in a state of profound despair it was on one of these nights that he found himself standing on the end of the stone pier at dun Laoghaire harbor where he experienced his revelation amidst the howling of the wind and the breaking of the waves realizing the folly of all that he had previously attempted I became aware of my stupidity all the while he had striven to be knowing to impart knowledge of one kind or another his early writings had been swamped by this intellectual knowingness yet even his later writings had attempted to counter terms with the world imparting some philosophical apprehension of it but this had been his big mistake instead of trying to write about the outer world he should have been concentrating on what he really felt he should have been concentrating on what he alone knew his own feelings the darkness of his inner world filled with the uncertainty and hopelessness that constantly dogged him it was not knowledge he should have been striving to impart about ignorance this was his true material what he had been ignoring all along the darkness of his own realizing this and achieving it were not the same thing Beckett returned to Paris and began trying to put into practice what he had fleetingly understood he found that writing in French gave him a certain freedom allowing him to shed all the intellectual fluency that came so easily to him in English here he found a basic style a simple syntax and unadorned language which utterly suited his purpose but how to use this language he started into a novel about to knock about Irish characters called Murcia and kam yay Hugo no names like his own he described their inept blundering from inconsequential disaster to drunken farce with much hilarious deadpan dialogue in between here was the hopelessness he had been looking for but still something was not quite right now now began the period of Beckett's life which he referred to as the siege in the room this would last from 1946 until 1948 during which he would produce his finest work it was spent largely in his room isolated from the world coming face to face with his own demons attempting to explore the workings of his mind his routine was for the most part simple enough he would rise around the early hours of the afternoon make himself scrambled eggs and retire to his room for as many hours as he could bear he would then leave for his late-night perambulation of the bars of Montparnasse and drinking copious amounts of cheap red wine returning before dawn and long attempt to sleep his entire life revolved around his almost psychotic obsession to write the writing itself was psychologically painful in the extreme and to begin with did not go according to plan in despair he attempted to write a long complex three act play called le atheria the Greek for freedom the play recounted the attempts of a young man called Victor crap to break free from his middle-class family the hero's name was indicative of Beckett's self-esteem during this period the action of the play took place on a stage divided into a bourgeois living room and Victor's bare room and involved a variety of characters with names such as skunk puke puke and Meck Meck is French for pimp but this proved no good and he set it aside although he didn't realize it at the time both the names and the embryonic characters to which they were attached would continue to grow in his mind reappearing years later in all their mature idiosyncrasy next he tried a number of long short stories and in the course of these he discovered the solution to his problem to reach the truth of his inner experience he needed to write in monologue he started into a novel I am in my mother's room it's I who lived there now I don't know how I got there perhaps in an ambulance certainly a vehicle of some kind I was helped I'd never have got there alone there's this man who comes every week perhaps I got here thanks to him he says not Beckett had found his tone of voice and his situation a bereft character in isolation left the ramblings of his mind here was the human condition at its most fundamental Beckett had in fact already come very close to this in what way had been aware philosophically of what he was trying to achieve but had allowed the literary element to elude his grasp the voice had not been there but now that he had it he refused to let go of it here was the freedom to wander and explore the oddities and absurdities of a human mind the air burned flow of thought a sudden diversions of verbal consciousness here Malloy reflects on seeing an aimless character he seems to have known oh that inner space will never cease the brain and heart and other caverns were thought and feeling dance there Sabbath he looks old and it is a sorry sight to see him solitary after so many years so many days and nights unthinkingly given to that rumor rising at birth and even earlier what shall I do what shall I do now lo a murmur now precise as the head waiters and to follow and often rise into a scream and in the end are almost to be abroad alone by unknown ways in gathering night with a stick such pros may be difficult to follow but often gives up its meaning on a second reading if one Ponder's the context and jumps of Molloy's thought processes such as they are the voice has its own momentum following the breathing of the narrator in this voice Beckett had found the freedom to include meditation poetry philosophical musings all filtered through the Rye hard-bitten humor of his own vision there was no plot only the occasional rambling story or memory the reader like the writer was expected to immerse himself in the meandering voice of consciousness this was not easy but once achieved was immensely rewarding by turns entertaining hilarious insightful in this apparent absence of life all human life was there unexpectedly in the second half of the book Beckett reverts to the voice of a moor recognizably Orthodox consciousness this is Morin who impinges on the tail of Malloy from his own objective viewpoint Morin is all that Malloy is not though in many ways they are the opposite sides of the same coin between them they may be said to complete the circle of humanity unlike Malloy Morin believes in willpower action and reason he is a fanatic of habit a domestic tyrant obsessed with control in place of the anarchy of Malloy's mind we encounter paranoia sadism and fixation both Malloy and Morin are deranged but in their own separate ways to revert to Freudian terms Malloy is sinking into his unconscious while Morin is drawn toward his super-ego morons mission is to find Malloy his voice is a hilarious parody of ordered consciousness should I set out on my autocycle this was the question with which I began I had a methodical mind and never set out on a mission without prolonged reflection as to the best way of setting out it was the first problem to solve at the outset of each inquiry and I never moved until I had solved it to my satisfaction sometimes I took my Otto cycle time's the Train sometimes the motorcoach justice sometimes two I left on foot or on my bicycle silently in the night when Beckett completed Malloy he realized that his project somehow remained incomplete he had father to go more to say the second novel in what would eventually become a trilogy was called Malone dies this follows on from the previous two voices especially Malloy's taking another step into the darkness of the mind the central character Malone is further removed from everyday reality a fact that it is apparent from the novel's opening words I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all perhaps next month Malone is an aged impotent bedridden figure on the point of death and longing for death but on his own terms as far as this is possible the voice of the novel is a voice approaching its own death what matters now it is by turns tragic by turns hilarious as Malone contemplates his own impotent ending I could die today if I wished merely by making a little effort but it is just as well to let myself die quietly without rushing things something must have changed I would not weigh upon the balance anymore one way or the other I shall be neutral and inert no difficulty their throws are the only trouble I must be on guard against throws but am less given to them now since coming here of course I still have my little fits of impatience from time to time Malone has largely lost interest in his past and instead of remembering like Malloy he passes his time and overcomes his boredom by occasionally inventing stories typical of these is the pitiful pointless tale of Lambert and his family who live in misery on their squalid farm in a hollow slaughtered in winter and in summer burnt to a cinder the way to it leads through a fine meadow but this fine meadow did not belong to the Lambert's the only joy in life a Lambert is slaughtering pigs which he does on an itinerant basis another tale is the grotesque affair between Harry Mac and sake mall this even inspires Malone to poetry to the lifelong promise land of the nearest cemetery with his sake hand-in-hand love it is at last leads Harry Malone is inspired to ponder on the aged impotent and incompetent Harry Mac and one can only speculate on what he might have achieved if he had become acquainted with true sexuality at a less advanced age I am lost not a word the novel ends with Malone's voice in mid story stuttering into the final inarticulate murmurings and silence of death or light light I mean never there he will never never anything there anymore the final novel of the trilogy is the unnameable there is no denying that this is the most difficult of all to read indeed one unkind critic christened it the unreadable in keeping with the gradual denuding of humanity that afflicts the voices in Beckett's trilogy the voice of the unnameable who may be called ma hood is that of someone who appears to exist in a limbo after death and before the full extinction of consciousness here Beckett takes his philosophical quest to discover what it is that we are and how to justify the state to ourselves to its ultimate conclusion in Finnegan's Wake Joyce had split the atom of the word releasing a vast energy of illusion Beckett set about dealing with the remnants by this stage language itself had fallen apart we're now who now when now I'm questioning I say I unbelieving questions hypotheses call them that keep going going on call that going call that on can it be that one day off it goes on that one day I simply stayed in in where instead of going out in the old way out to spend day and night as far away as well it wasn't far perhaps that is how it began thus begins one of the most sustained assaults on the foundations of our existential awareness ever written this opening passage of the unnameable is arguably among the finest philosophical explorations of the 20th century much as the voice of the unnameable hovers between existence and non-existence this passage may be understood as hovering between philosophy and literature it is neither one nor the other to unaesthetic and fragment it to be literature to personal even in this reduced state to be philosophy it Beckett is telling us that this is the state to which all of philosophy all literature can be reduced this is the earth out of which these separate specializations have flowered from such fragmented essentials we build the entire edifice of human thought and expression founded on such quicksands rests the structure of all our humanity as in the previous two novels of the trilogy and the voice mentions previous characters in Beckett's era but here it is not simply to refer to them as if to some past point of navigation on the journey but to dismiss them all these Murphy's Malloy's and Malone's do not fool me they have made me waste my time suffer for nothing speak of them when in order to stop speaking I should have spoken of me and of me alone these previous attempts have been mayor evasions of what it means to be himself they have been voices smothering the voice which should have spoken of me yet the implication remains that this final unexpressed voices ultimately silence the voice of the unnameable is also it would appear an evasion even so this voice reaches further toward that inexpressible voice than any before it how could I know I can't know if I've spoken of him I can only speak of me no I can't speak of anything and yet I speak perhaps it's of him I'll never know how could I know who could know and on it goes in one long unbroken flow of words for more than 100 paragraph less pages this is Beckett greatest achievement yet there is no denying it's utter Berenice as art this is arid territory in the extreme it may have been necessary for Beckett to cross this territory call this going call this on but is it necessary for us the put-upon readers do we have to endure all this if we wish to partake in Beckett's profound divinations the answer is yes but many turn to agree with a a álvarez one of Beckett's most penetrating critics who declared the unnameable appears flaxseed and redundant it seems to me a classic case of a work which is necessary but not sufficient that is to say personally necessary to Beckett in his exploration of his own limitless negation but artistically insufficient because of its length repetitiveness and private claustrophobia Beckett delighted in such philosophical distinctions between necessary and sufficient reason which hark back to rationalist philosophers such as Descartes and lighten its if Beckett's trilogy is seen as an extended examination of Descartes famous cogito ergo sum I think therefore I am then the unnameable is undoubtedly as close as scrutiny of the qualities inherent in some being as one is likely to find but any answer to set against Alvarez's objection must confront the question is the experience evoked in the unnameable purely subjective or does it have universal resonance the answer here would appear to be that such depictions belong to Beckett's crisis-ridden psychology most if not all of us do not spend our time as nameless beings in a limbo on the verge of non-existence yet by the same count most of us never see a starry night as depicted by Van Gogh the psychological disintegration is in the end irrelevant to the work whether it be art literature philosophy or quasi religious experience entering into the world of the unnameable we are led to a heightened philosophical awareness of our existence this may appear to be no wondrous experience as it is when we enter into the vision of Van Gogh's a starry night the operative word here is appear for Becket's the unnameable is indeed a wondrous world filled with insight into what at its most reduced is the nature of our condition as Plato said philosophy begins in wonder the unnameable is also a work of wonder in its own way as wondrous as rangos so very different vision where van Gogh visualizes Beckett wanders he wanders in all senses of the word he questions and he marvels just because his latter awareness is filled with a sense of the absurdity of existence does not in any way reduce its power so they build up hypotheses which collapse on top of one another it's human a lobster couldn't do it nice mess we're in the whole pack of us is it possible we're all in the same boat no we're in a nice mess each in his own peculiar way I myself have been scandalously bungled they must be beginning to realize it until the voice of the unnameable finally fades away amidst the murmurs having come to no conclusion other than the fact that there is no conclusion in any sense except ultimate silence it will be I it will be the silence where I am I don't know I'll never know in the silence you don't know you must go on I can't go on I'll go on surprising though it may seem make it's precision of this final point and others in the unnameable leaves much open to the reader these are the final words the ultimate gasp of consciousness read them as a slow finally diminishing murmurous gasping as they fade before death and they become an acquiescence to the silence to nothingness read them as the last desperate ravening attempt of the voice to finally grasp itself and arrive at some form of understanding and they become altogether something else they may contain all the human fear of death they may become a final defiance a gesture against inevitable oblivion even a final absurdity or an ultimate agony it might be difficult to read the unnameable in more than limited doses but it is open to the acclimatization of any mind each passage can be the nomic prose poem of our own experience beckett worked in pared down language a reductionist vocabulary that he made very much his own he insisted upon extreme control of his words his phrases even to the extent of controlling how we breathe them how we absorb them there is an on would flow made up of phrased breaths lulling us into the rhythm of his voice his thoughts but curiously it is this very control of his words which gives us such a great freedom in experiencing them precision in this one aspect allows us freedom in many others a passage that we may read as tragedy one day can easily appear hilarious the next time we read it Beckett may have been unable to grasp the impossible but he knew very well what he was leaving open to the possible the trilogy consists of monologues with no directors instructions on how they should be read we are the directors we each learn from Beckett in our own way the voices are enlivened by what each one of us puts into them when Beckett had finished the second work of his trilogy Malone dies he found himself at loose ends to take his mind off things before facing up to the psychological rigors of the unnameable he began writing the plate it eventually became Waiting for Godot as Beckett himself put it he began to write Godot as a relaxation to get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time awful in this context refers to the experience of writing the trilogy rather than making a qualitative judgment on its style Beckett was certainly aware of what he was achieving though like any artist moving into new territory he had to live with the prospect that the critics might indeed to dismiss his efforts as awful it was ironic that this diversion which Beckett now began writing should eventually prove to be his best known work Waiting for Godot is at present the most frequently performed 20th century play throughout the world yet the entire drama centers on two derelict characters who do little other than fritter away their time Waiting for Godot accounting for the plays popularity is thus no easy matter with some justice this two act drama has been described as a play where nothing happens twice others claim that it captures in essence the nihilistic philosophy that best characterizes the 20th century still others insist that it expresses a particular state of human mental evolution one which civilized humanity has evolved to come to terms with the rigors and uncertainties horrors and transformations that continue to underlie the comforts and apparent certainties of modern life at the same time there is no denying that had Waiting for Godot been staged as a medieval mystery play its medieval audience would probably have recognized and understood many of its themes a peasant audience of the era that experienced the black death would have empathized with to suffering tramps in a blighted landscape their endless waiting for the arrival of Godot their preoccupation with redemption and the futility of a world in which Godot was absent to say nothing of their absurd philosophical bickering and the broad slapstick humor of their situation Waiting for Godot is both archetypically 20th century and as timeless as its reduced characters in their empty landscape humanity of all ages has found itself at least momentarily in a world where Godot appears to be absent a world just as impossible to understand as that which Beckett portrays here it would appear is the ultimate much ado about nothing yet it surely must be about something so what exactly is Waiting for Godot about to put the obvious question in its most blatant form is Godot God are the two main characters Vladimir and Estragon waiting for some kind of divine revelation Beckett always strongly denied that Godot was God one of the few points on which he was uncharacteristically explicit and adamant regarding his work but the fact remains that Godot at least to English audiences does contain the word God on the other hand to a German audience it would appear to contain an illusion of God and Todd God and death as perhaps in God is dead the latter would appear to be a more likely explanation for those who require such crass simplicity's Beckett certainly detested this type of narrowing down of his work not wishing it to be blighted by literalist interpretations we should not search for a key to the inherent enigma this is precisely what his work is not about the puzzle has no correct answer the situation cannot be resolved if answer we need we should seek it within ourselves and keep it there the purpose of the play if purpose it can be called is to remind us of the essential situation in which we find ourselves waiting for Godot is a tragic comedy about mas fear situation and condition much more than it is about meaning its meaning could well be explained as the absence of meaning its action is the response of the characters to the futile situation in which they find themselves this response is both heart-rending and hilarious Vladimir goes towards Estragon contemplates him a moment then shakes him awake Estragon wild gestures incoherent words finally whoa will you never let me sleep Vladimir I felt lonely Estragon I was dreaming I was happy of that Amir that passed the time Estragon well I was dreaming that Vladimir violently don't tell me one must always bear in mind that Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot as a devout tease more from the awful confrontation of his prose the comedy is often farcical in the manner of early Chaplin elements especially in the like appearance of Vladimir and Estragon are purposely Chaplin esque their actions likewise with dropping trousers and other ludicrous incidents at the same time the relationship between these two main characters has many similarities to that of Laurel and Hardy they are both fond of each other and exasperated with each other despite their differences they are in their different ways utterly dependent upon each other they could not survive alone their exchanges both goad and encourage they enable them to pass the time to avoid facing up to their situation their endless conversation contains much affectionate well-honed repartee according to Beckett's friends his wrangling conversations with Suzanne often took on this same conscious music-hall quality of ritual and repartee but this appears to have first developed during their long trek south through war-torn France as a means of overcoming the tedium and suffering of their journey of Vladimir sententious who every man his little cross he sighs till he dies after thought and is forgotten Estragon in the meantime let us try calmly since we are incapable of keeping silent Vladimir he alright we're inexhaustible Estragon it's so we won't think Vladimir we have that excuse Estragon it's so we won't hear of laddie Mir we have our reasons the scenery or lack of it a country road a tree would seem to depict some featureless rural spot somewhere in France though it could almost as easily be some barren spot in the Wicklow Mountains where Beckett had spent so much time on lonely walks listening to the voices of his own mind arguing with himself Vladimir is the tall thin intellectual figure who has seen better times Estragon is short and fat with occasional female undertones to his character Vladimir do you remember the Gospels Estragon I remember the maps of the Holy Land Khaled they were very pretty the Dead Sea was pale blue though any look of it made me thirsty that's where we'll go i used to say that's where we'll go for our honeymoon will swim we'll be happy Vladimir you should have been a poet Estragon or was gesture towards his rags isn't that obvious silence Vladimir where was I how's your foot Estragon swelling visibly along with the misery there is of course the tedium as Estragon puts it nothing happens nobody comes nobody goes it's awful at one point on their blasted Heath however Vladimir and Estragon encounter another strange couple pot sole and lucky the self-important pot so carries a whip and leads his servant lucky by a rope around his neck lucky is weighed down carrying his master's various possessions including a picnic basket and a stool pot so and lucky appear as a parody of the master-servant relationship but there are also elements of psychological metaphor here with pot so is the ego or even commanding super-ego and lucky as the unconscious mind before they take their leave what so makes lucky give up performance in which he thinks aloud whereupon lucky simply opens his mouth and delivers a torrent of words an uninterrupted jumble of nonsense and cliche continuing in a flow of Association lucky Fulham Clapham in a word that dead loss per capita since the death of Bishop Berkeley being to the tune of one inch for ounce per capita approximately by and large more or less to the nearest decimal good measure round figures stark naked in stockinged feet in Connemara hotso and lucky proceed on their way but are encountered again in the second act this time pop so is blind and lucky is dumb lucky is still carrying pots of possessions but he is now leading pot so who follows him by hanging on to the rope around Lucky's neck despite this pot so is still very much in charge again their relationship is open to political or psychological interpretation but is best appreciated as the farcical personal situation it purports to be here is Laurel and Hardy taken one step further instead of a loose knock about personal relationship as with a flatty mayor and Estragon we now have an inflexible power relationship as Pato prepares to leave Estragon asks him where do you go from here hot so reply simply on such purposeless endurance is a theme that runs throughout the play the first act ends silence Estragon well shall we go Vladimir yes let's go they do not move the second act finally ends in identical fashion the bemused chastened or entertained audience eventually breaks the ensuing silence with sporadic and then mounting applause frequently interspersed with cheers boos and catcalls Waiting for Godot had a mixed reception from the beginning and there is something about it's challenging informality and apparent formlessness that seems to release an audience from its inhibitions if you leave the theater without their own very definite opinions having been provoked no one wishes to feel that he or she has been made a fool of either in the theatre or in real life and like or drama in Beckett Ian's form can easily be seen as a load of rubbish or alternatively as refreshingly free from comforting preconceptions stoic indifference among audiences of Beckett's plays is rare when Beckett finally completed both Waiting for Godot and his trilogy he lapsed into a pathetic exhaustion the psychological toll involved in the intense introspection of the trilogy had been immense in the midst of this his mother fell seriously ill and it became clear that she had not long to live Beckett returned to Dublin where all the guilt and angst he had experienced with regard to his mother surfaced once more as he attended her deathbed watching her die after the funeral he returned to Paris where his constant state of despair was punctuated by nights of drinking his failure as a human being and as an artist now seemed all but complete a photograph from this period shows a skeletally thin figure with a bemused or but defeated expression yet he had done what he had felt impelled to do the artist in him had fulfilled himself in his own willful way in his perversity he had undeniably achieved uniqueness but the self lacerating human being in him was aware that what he had produced was all but incomprehensible to anyone else no one would ever want to read such unreadable prose let alone put on such undramatic drama although Beckett appeared no longer to believe in himself one person at least still retained faith in his baffling work this was Suzanne she reproached Beckett for not sending out his manuscripts he merely shrugged telling her to do whatever you want with them so she decided she would do just that if Beckett wouldn't attempt to have his work published or performed she would tenaciously she lugged his manuscripts from one small Parisian publisher to another leaving the manuscript of Waiting for Godot at the door of a succession of small avant-garde theaters it was only through her persistence in the face of any number of puzzled or dismissive rejections that Beckett's work ever saw the light of day in 1951 Suzanne's efforts finally came to fruition of a kind a French editor with a soft spot for Ireland and all things Celtic imagined he had come across a typical example of classic Irish humour a rarity which was all but unknown in French translation as a result Malloy and then Malone dies were eventually published in French in a limited edition by Edison de minuit midnight editions the former clandestine resistance publishes the appearance of these two difficult novels attracted a few favourable mentions in avant-garde literary magazines but little widespread recognition or commercial success causing the publishers to abandon the idea of bringing out the unnameable instead they issued the script of Waiting for Godot which appeared in 1952 some months later the owner of the tiny Taillefer des Babylon on the left bank agreed to stage the play although neither Becket no Suzanne realized it he had already given up on the theater I am going to close up shop and I may as well close up on a beauty he told Beckett's friend Roger Blin the avant-garde director who had agreed to see the play through production so rehearsals began despite Beckett's shyness he soon began taking an increasingly interfering and dominant role in these sessions as one of the actors remarked Beckett does not want his actors to act he wants them to do what he tells them when they try to act he becomes very angry Beckett knew precisely what he wanted there is nothing more grotesque than tragedy he explained cryptically his plays were not intended to be naturalistic more ritualistic the parts required an interpretation that was stylized rather than psychological yet despite his increasing involvement he refused to give any hint to the actors of the meaning of what was taking place on the stage Beckett would always insist upon taking such a leading role in the production of his plays this can in part be explained by his origins as a novelist where the medium is simply words of which the writer remains in complete control also there is no doubt that Beckett's plays did at least initially required a certain manner to production in order to achieve their own conviction after all audiences had simply never seen anything like this before later however Beckett's mania for control would have a cramping effect on his dramatic works and even today his trustees who hold the performance rights retain a severely restrictive control over productions of his work Beckett's plays will surely take on a new unforeseen lease of life when this control is relaxed the first performance of Waiting for Godot was staged on January 5th 1953 Beckett's stayed away unable to face the ordeal of witnessing his own first night the audience seated on 230 folding chairs in a cramped space was bewildered but a number of perceptive critics immediately recognized the play's originality and worth Beckett was acclaimed as one of today's best playwrights and it was predicted that his play would be spoken of for a long time Waiting for Godot struck a chord with post-war nihilism existentialist Paris where jean-paul Sartre was the philosopher king and Juliet Greco's fatalistic songs were all the rage in the cafes of the Latin Quarter the audience is at Waiting for Godot remained baffled but continued to fill the tiny theatre night after night soon all Paris knew that something special was taking place at the tiara de Babylon the tide had finally turned and Becket was on his way to achieving the recognition of which he had so long secretly dreamt productions of Waiting for Godot was soon opening in London 1955 the United States 1956 and then throughout the world International reactions were remarkably similar packed audiences were bewildered and often the theaters were more than half empty after intermission but many critics recognized that this was the play that somehow seemed appropriate to our age the drama of the two tramps who did nothing twice over was more than a reflection of fashionable Parisian angst it touched something in the very soul of modern humanity night after night audiences filled the theatres to be bewildered and or have their eyes opened and applaud controversy rather than acceptance with the initial ingredient that contributed to Beckett's success and soon Waiting for Godot was being performed on avant-garde stages and small theaters from Santiago to Stockholm in the process of becoming an underground hit it gradually established itself as a permanent classic of the world's theater repertoire Beckett meanwhile returned to his desk following the completion of his trilogy he produced 13 brief texts for nothing which he referred to as an after birth of the trilogy the monologist prose is similar as well as being similarly difficult and rewarding to that of the unnameable the voice questions its condition attempting to grasp the ever elusive truth of its being the philosophical quest resembles a snake attempting to swallow its own tail no voice ever but in my life it says if speaking of me one can speak of life and it can as ever even at his most impenetrable Beckett's words are seldom devoid of graveyard humor did I try everything fair it in every hold secretly silently patiently listening I'm in earnest as so often I'd like to be sure I left no stone unturned before reporting me missing and giving up the attempt remains as ambitious as ever and the Clark and the scribe at the hearings of what cause I know not well I want it to be mine I don't want it or where would I go if I could go who would I be if I could be what would I say if I had a voice who says this saying it's me after these texts Beckett returned once more to the theater eventually producing his second major drama endgame this features the dying ham in black glasses confined to his wheelchair he is attended by his servant the recalcitrant clove also present our hams mother and father nag and Nell who inhabit dust bins having apparently lost their legs many years previously in a bicycle accident the characters roles are indicated by their names ham hammer glove clue is French for nail nag Nagle is German for nail and now Irish accent nail there are of course many other allusions ham as in ham actor nag to nag even Nell as in the tolling of the death now all the action takes place in a claustrophobic spherical structure with two high windows resembling the inside of a skull the outside of the skull appears to be a landscape after a nuclear holocaust thus the characters may also be seen as the elements of a mind as it faces death and final extinction so far so bad the title endgame refers to the last moves in a chess game with ham as the King desperately trying to avoid the checkmate of death this is all very unrelentingly grim and although the play certainly has its humorous moments the atmosphere remains persistently oppressive not to say depressive unlike Waiting for Godot there is no looseness either of action or inaction resonance or repartee the author is more in control and yet the words have none of the Bleak memorable nests of Godot but it's said the play is not without its moments glove despairingly ham something from your heart glove my heart ham a few words from your heart paws clove fixed gaze tonelessly towards auditorium they said to me that's love yes yes no doubt now you see how ham articulate clove as before how easy it is they said to me that's friendship yes yes no question you found it they said to me here's the place stop raise your head and look at all that beauty that order they said to me come now you're not a brute beasts think upon these things and you'll see how all becomes clear and simple they said to me what skilled attention they get all these dying of their wounds ham enough the unremitting bleakness of endgame was not so well received but it is now generally regarded as a masterpiece of its kind second though a long way second to waiting for godot as if to show that he was not entirely lost in depression Beckett now turned to another devotee small a brief dramatic work entitled Krapp's Last Tape when this was written in English and Bek it's easy familiarity with his mother tongue enabled his imagination to take wing Krapp's Last Tape is too short to be considered a major masterpiece the entire script including copious stage directions covers just 9 pages but in other aspects it may well be compared to Waiting for Godot it is also the most accessible and most obviously personal in the literal realistic sense of his later works the central and only appearing character is crap an echo of the name given by Beckett to the autobiographical character in his earlier failed play at atheria but here crap takes on a life of his own no longer derisively autobiographical he becomes intensely so and in doing so transcends his particularity 'he's to become one of the great archetypal characters of the modern stage he is my turns funny pathetic farcical and deeply touching all in the space of such a brief stage life the curtain goes up to reveal crap in his sparse and decrepit den he is an old man playing over and again the tapes that he has recorded during his life these tapes are a form of journal in which he describes what has happened to him and also summarizes his current attitude to life we hear his resolutions his criticisms of his former self his regrets we witnessed the older crap listening to the younger man recounting his most poignant memories the death of his mother his love his great moments of inspiration these minutes on stage imply volumes evoking an entire life as well as the feeling of it son fulfillment and irretrievable 'ti the older crap and the younger crap both speak they are two different people the one unheard by the other the one a stranger to the other we hear their separate voices but there is no dialogue they can never speak to each other the past can never be repaired crap playing and rewinding the spools of his ancient recording machine meditatively munching on his bananas occasionally disappearing into the darkness for a swig of hooch is one of the most moving figures of the modern stage despite his brief stage life which remains in the mind long after his witnessed at the end we leave the age at crap with his sour Cod and iron stool are listening bitterly to the callow judgment and hope of his younger voice on the tape tape perhaps my best years are gone when there was a chance of happiness but I wouldn't want them back not with a fire in me now no I wouldn't want them back crap motionless staring before him the tape runs on in silence curtain in 1960 beckett began another novel which was eventually called kamal say in English this is translated as how it is which loses the resonances of the French title Kemal say to begin and comb all say how one knows here Beckett faced an apparently insurmountable problem how was he to progress beyond the apparent dead end of the unnameable how was he to go any further than that expiring monologue without going back on himself how was he to create a novel when he had to all intents and purposes killed off this genre to his own set faction taking a cue from his plays Beckett gave the central voice a setting low in keeping with his plays this was bleak in the extreme the initially unnamed narrator is crawling through a sea of mud in the course of which he encounters various similar figures behind them they all dragged their few miserable possessions tied up in sacks during the second part of the novel the narrator encounters Pym in the course of which he reveals that his own name is bomb this encounter is a grotesque parody of human intercourse in all senses as the two figures grapple and entwined in the mud before going on their separate ways Baum characterizes himself as hanging on by the fingernails to ones condition and this is certainly no exaggeration during the course of his progress through the mud he has occasional vivid memories of a more realistic life some of these are distinctly autobiographical though the suicide of balms wife appears to be a male ah of quasi autobiographical guilt and wish fulfillment things were not going well with Suzanne this novel if such it can be called consists entirely of brief unpunctuality R to incorporate their own breath like rhythm if not meaning this voice these voices no knowing not meaning a choir no no only one but Quaqua meaning on all sides megaphones possible technique something wrong here wrong for never twice the same unless time vast tracts aged out of recognition no for often fresher stronger after than before unless sickness sorrow they sometimes pass one feels better less wretched after than before unlike so similarly unreadable unnameable how it is has meager rewards for those who persist with the narrator across this mod literary bog land from it I learn from it I learned what little remained learn what little remains of how it was before PIM with him after PIM and how it is for that too it found words and so on four pages on end without relief the critics were baffled and even some of Beckett's most dedicated aficionados confessed the sells at a loss in destroying the novel this time Beckett appeared to have destroyed his own writing by now Beckett's life with Suzanne had descended into a characteristic farce his general behavior and attitude toward the world to say nothing of his heavy drinking and occasional Affairs made him impossible to live with after all he too found it all but impossible to live with himself he and Suzanne still shared an apartment but had come to a unique arrangement inside the front door the apartment had two doors one leading to his separate quarters the other leading to hers when Beckett wanted to communicate with Suzanne he called her on the telephone despite this apparent alienation their bond remained deep they shared too much ever to part fully Beckett never forgot all that Suzanne had done for him the tireless efforts she had made to unload his manuscripts on uninterested readers she was also the one who had lived with him and stood by him during his times of greatest travail she alone had witnessed and shared his deepest miseries in 1961 Beckett decided to marry Suzanne as a show of good faith as a recognition of what she had done and to ensure that if he died she would inherit the considerable fortune that was accumulating from the worldwide royalties earned by his works typically they travel in secret to England where they were married without fuss or friends in the anonymous coastal town of Folkston Beckett's only indication of where he was or what he was doing was a typically oblique postcard to a friend in Paris blood flows more calmly in the town of Harvey William Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood was born in Folkestone in 1578 from now on Beckett increasingly visit himself with translations of his own work from French into English as well as overseeing productions of his own plays in English French and German in which he was also fluent in between he wrote a number of more or less successful dramatic eul's and short prose pieces among these was a brief film script entitled simply film this was to star the great silent movie actor Buster Keaton whose expressionless stone face had become his nickname and stock-in-trade Beckett was a great admirer of Keaton and in 1964 travelled to New York to assist in the production of film the aging Keaton agreed to emerge from his full-time poker-playing retirement only because he needed the money his initial reaction was to declare that the apparently simple but philosophically profound script was quite beyond him after a few contra tours he moodily went through the motions in front of the camera with no attempt to act Beckett was delighted this was precisely what he required alas off screen Keaton continued simply to go through the motions and there was no meeting of minds between these two great stone faces of the 20th century Beckett's shorter prose pieces are another acquired taste they are by turn elusive and elusive despite such difficulty they are well worth the effort readers will discover their own favorites among these more or less impenetrable texts one of the more success well is the 1963 peace imagination dead imagine in which the central voice attempts to do just that coming to the realization no life ends and no there is nothing as swear and no question now of ever finding again that white speck lost in whiteness in October 1969 Beckett learned that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the time he was holidaying at a remote coastal resort in Tunisia to his horror the world's press descended upon his hotel and he was besieged in his room the pathologically shy and retiring Beckett was eventually persuaded to present himself to the press where he faced a barrage of cameras he was too overcome to reply to their questions and simply sat there with his head bowed as if in shame his health frail at the best of times took some time to recover from the shock on his return to Paris Beckett took up his translations again occasionally producing another short prose piece or dramatic you'll these latter are for the most part boldly experimental for instance breath consists of just a page of instructions its setting is an empty stage littered with rubbish no verticals all scattered and lying and the action such as it is consists of a cry later repeated and the amplified recording of a deep breath which inhales and then exhales inspiration expiration in the words of the stage directions while a dim light slowly increases and then decreases the entire drama takes less than a minute it in the right circumstances it can produce a striking effect giving pause for thought our breath is our very life our inspiration and our expiration what could be more simple this basically is all we are some of these dramatic eul's work others are strangely unsatisfactory being both slight and profound at the same time but even in this form Beckett was able to produce the occasional masterpiece one among these is not I it is a game reductionist in the extreme at the stage is in darkness with a spotlight focused on her mouth which speaks through a hole in the black back cloth downstage is a dark listening figure the female mouth speaks in a torrent of disjointed orbit meaningless words gradually the effect of the naked isolated mouth and it's jumble of words and phrases takes on a mesmerizing and powerful meaning of its own so disconnected never got the message or powerless to respond like numbed couldn't make the sound not any sound no sound of any kind no screaming for help for example should she feel so inclined scream screams then listen silenced scream again screams again then listen again silence no spared that the effect is both horrific and tragic and appears to express the being of humanity on a deeply fundamental level it is primitive inarticulate yet seems to be groping towards some extreme of articular see no idea what she was saying imagine no idea what she was saying till she began trying to delude herself it was not hers at all not her voice at all and no doubt would have vital she should after 15 minutes of this the audience is aware that it is undergoing a profound and primal experience the precise nature of the experience remains elusive causing us to ponder on it long after the event in some performances not I is repeated after an interval curiously this does not always work the piece is best seen and heard on its own and then left at that the sight of that almost obscene isolated mouth giving voice to the words takes on a chthonic life of its own now can't stop imagine can't stop the stream and the whole brain begging something begging in the brain begging the mouth to stop this is the stream the scream the unstoppable unbearable torrent of consciousness the unending unstoppable voice in the head that goes on regardless of sense of meaning of suffering how our life is comprised of this unending gossip which goes on and on in our brain yet in a way ultimately this is all we have the short prose pieces that Beckett continue to write were for the most part less successful but they too contained occasional flashes of genius such as could not have been produced by anyone else Beckett was determined to go on no matter what as he put it encouraging Lee fail again fail better among the more successful of these pieces are less Ness enough and Old Earth the last of which begins with the memorable Old Earth no more lies these pieces attempt to reach the very heart of the human experience to grasp our essential being to gain Inklings into what ultimately experience is this is literature so close to philosophy as to be indistinguishable it is a form of creative philosophy and as such harks back to Descartes I think therefore I am one of de cartes best-known works is his meditations and this is precisely what he was doing when he was philosophizing meditating upon what he called the first or ultimate philosophy these later pieces of Beckett's short prose may also be seen as meditations on the process of living and thinking attempts to come to terms with and understand the full import of Descartes famous conclusion Beckett's meditations include both more and less of our humanity than de cartes they discard the rational calm of Descartes this civilized vision of the Enlightenment Beckett's voices his beings express all our irrational fears yet always retain an element of their rationality even when reason is lost it is eventually regained so that its absence can be rationally assessed and the endurance can continue the endurance itself I must go on is a persistence far deeper than rationality it is the persistence of life itself this is how our being evolved this is how we emerged from a primeval slime to become what we are Beckett's vision remains open to all manner of irrationality we are all born mad some remain so yet at the same time it is focused by its reductionism they give birth a stride a grave the light gleams an instant then it's night once more Beckett concentrates upon that gleaming instant like no other in his late 70s Beckett's years of ill health and heavy drinking began to tell in 1986 he became prey to recurrent bouts of giddiness which caused him to have several serious Falls but at home and in the street by now Suzanne was in her mid 80s and ailing to age had caused a deterioration in her normally stoic character as a result she suffered from bouts of anger much of which she directed at Beckett for his part Beckett was deeply upset by this turn of events in 1987 he moved into an old people's home this was a modest establishment and Beckett lived in a sparse room with just a few books and his bottle of Irish whiskey in the cupboard outside was a bleak garden with a single Godot like tree friends who called were shocked at Beckett's impoverished quarters but he refused to spend his considerable fortune on anything better he had all that he needed in July 1989 Suzanne died and the 83 year old Beckett followed her five months later December the 22nd 1989 afterward to add an afterword after such ultimate words as Beckett's would seem more than presumptuous still it is worth briefly considering the afterlife of his words Beckett's works continue to divide their readers and audiences and the feelings evoked are seldom less than impassionate Sam is either a great personal favorite subject to much hero worship or Beckett is reviled as a load of pretentious nonsense as filled with rubbish as the stages of his plays in the eyes of his admirers Beckett has attained the Canon of great literature such status is extremely difficult to achieve but once achieved is all but impossible to lose it is doubtful that Beckett's detractors even the most learner to common sensical or prestigious will succeed in dethroning him while each new generation of young readers find such rapport with his works pessimism such as Beckett's always has its appeal it mocks experienced Authority and achievement all that stand in the way of the young yet the appeal of Beckett's perversely determined brand of pessimism is not limited to the young it has an ability to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to which youth may be particularly prone but which in old age become a permanent condition the philosophy of such pessimism bursts the Rainbows soap bubbles of illusion leaving us blinking with stinging eyes at unremitting reality yet such defeatism is no soft option Beckett had iron in his soul his was a rhymer of those with fortitude those who withstand all misfortune his voices may be those of the defeated of the truly hopeless in their various guises but the fact is that they never admitted final defeat in the Silence you don't know you must go on I can't go on I'll go on Becket's chief works in English Beckett translated almost all of his own later works from French into English these translations are often slightly different from the originals and unlike so many translations are literary works in their own right quite the equal of their originals horoscope 1930 more pricks than kicks 1934 echoes bones and other precipitates 1935 Murphy 1938 Waiting for Godot 1953 what 1953 malai 1955 Malone dies 1956 the unnameable 1958 endgame 1958 Krapp's Last Tape 1958 embers 1959 how it is 1964 film 1964 imagination dead imagine 1965 texts for nothing 1967 breath 1969 not AI 1972 Mel C a and Cammy a 1974 old earth 1974 all that fall 1979 chronology of Beckett's life and times 1906 Samuel Beckett born on Good Friday April the 13th second son of William and May Beckett at Fox Rock South Dublin Ireland 1914 to 1918 World War one 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin by Irish Patriots against British rule 1922 Ireland gains independence from Britain with Ulster Northern Ireland remaining British 1922 to 1923 Irish Civil War 1920 to 1923 Beckett becomes border at portora royal school in Ulster 1923 to 1927 studies modern languages English French Italian at Trinity College Dublin 1927 wins gold medal for best scholar in final exams 1927 to 1928 Beckett's teaches for two terms at Campbell College Belfast 1928 goes to Paris as reader at Ecole Normale Superieure meets James Joyce 1929 Wall Street Crash signals worldwide Great Depression Beckett's first publication essay the Dante Bruno Vico Joyce 1930 Beckett sperm horoscope wins Kuhn odd prize in Paris 1932 1932 becomes lecturer in French at Trinity College Dublin resigns after four terms 1931 publishes Proust in London 1932 beginning of Beckett's 5 years of wandering in Germany France England and Ireland 1933 Hitler comes to power in Germany Beckett's father dies leaving him small private income begins to year stay in Chelsea London 1934 Beckett undergoes period of psychoanalysis publishes collection of short stories more pricks than kicks in London 1935 breaks off psychoanalysis publishes collection of poems echoes bones and other precipitates in Paris 1937 settles permanently in Paris 1938 seriously wounded in stabbing incident in momart lives together with Suzanne de cheveux de Menil first novel Murphy published in London 1939 outbreak of World War two in which Ireland remains neutral 1940 German invasion and occupation of France Beckett registers as neutral national living in Paris 1941 joins sale of underground French resistance 1942 resistance cell in which Beckett is involved penetrated by Germans Beckett and Suzanne flee Paris for South of France eventually settled at Russia on in unoccupied Vichy France a Beckett supports himself as farm laborer and begins writing what 1944 Paris liberated by Allied troops Beckett and Suzanne returned to Paris 1945 end of World War 2 a Beckett returns to Ireland finishes writing watt returns to France working for Irish Red Cross in Normandy awarded quite a gear for his work in French Resistance begins writing in French 1946 to 1947 highly creative period of writing in French produces novels stories and a play none of which are published 1947 beginning of siege in the room writes Molloy 1947 to 1948 writes Malone Milt Malone dies 1948 to 1949 right on a Tom dole Gordo Waiting for Godot 1949 to 1950 writes Linamar blur the unnameable 1950 Beckett's mother dies 1950 to 1952 writes text poll via texts for nothing 1951 Molloy and Malone Milt first two novels of the trilogy published in Paris 1952 on a tone donkey doll published in Paris 1953 first staging of honour Tandang Godot at Tejada Babylon on left bank in Paris 1955 to 1956 right founder party endgame 1958 rights p'raps Last Tape 1960 right como se how it is 1961 marries Suzanne de cheveux do menial at Folkston in England 1964 flies to New York for making of film with Buster Keaton 1969 awarded Nobel Prize for Literature 1972 first production of not I 1974 writes old earth 1989 death of Beckett at age 83 this concludes the reading of Beckett in 90 minutes by Paul Strathearn copyright 2005 by Paul Strathearn this book was read by Robert Whitfield this unabridged recording was published by arrangement with ivan rd and was produced in 2009 by Blackstone audio Inc which holds the copyright neither this recording nor any portion of it may be reproduced or used for any purpose without prior written authorization from Blackstone Audio Inc if you would like to obtain a complete catalogue of our titles or our monthly update telling you about new releases and our new collection of books on CD and mp3 CD call 1-800 say book that's one eight hundred seven two nine two six six five you may also obtain the same information from our award-winning website our address or one word is wwl a keystone audio com thank you

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Published: Mon Nov 13 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/raquwu]

Where/when has Anna talked about Beckett?