Ian Herbert, another
friend from King’s, was working for Pitman’s. He commissioned a book on French
theatre. I decided I would try to interview Samuel Beckett, intending a whole
chapter just on him. I wrote to ask if I could see him and gave him some dates
I could be in Paris. For six months I kept this up and received eight tiny
letters scribbled almost illegibly in a right-slanting hand on flimsy tissue
paper saying he was never there when I was there.
It must have been rather like God that Harold
Hobson interceded on my behalf, for after these very polite but ‘sorry-to-disappoint-you’
evasions, Beckett, in much bolder ink, and with fluctuating pen strokes and
stronger legibility, wrote ‘I could meet you for a drink May 28 in the bar of
the “Closerie des Lilas”, 171 Bld du Montparnasse. If this suits you do not
trouble to confirm.’ I had found the combination to access the inaccessible.
I arrive at the Closerie full of excitement. He
was waiting but I had been forewarned, ‘I hope you do not expect me to talk
about myself or my work, there’s not a squeak left in me on that sore subject!’
There were two faces of Beckett confronting me over glasses of whisky. One was
upright and severe, that of a lean but august figure dressed in baggy clothes,
a tweed jacket which had very padded shoulders just like a superior working man
from an O’Casey early play. The hands weren’t those of a Dublin labourer, but
very long, very fine – aristocratic. He could have been an ascetic Irish
priest, even a mystic, a saint – or a pope.
The other face was warm but animated, etiolated
and linear like that of a racehorse – again Irish. Its fluidity and mobility
reminded me of Jackie McGowran whom I’d seen in Endgame (was I thinking of Lucien Freud’s male faces, which look
similar to those of horses?).
He talks very quietly, but he is not at all dry
in manner. I had translated some of Céline’s work for the RSC, and hear that
the famously denounced collaborator, lauded for his Voyage au bout de la nuit, ‘went to Germany where he sided with
Laval, and then to Norway. After the war they left him alone [as they did
Maurice Chevalier]. He lived in Boulogne with his wife, and Gallimard [his
publisher] tried to screw the most out of him!’
He left London because he couldn’t find a
publisher. A certain resentment for publishers and exploiters, or neglecters,
of Beckett’s talent, can be detected. Dare one call it paranoiac? He decries
the ‘nakedness of his own self-pity’ in the true and steeply paranoid decline
of Ionesco in his last plays.
‘What do you think of Jean Genet?’ I ask.
‘Genet?’ he says a second time, with a frown as
if I am obscurely trying to confuse him.
‘Jean Genet,’ I repeat so there should be no
doubt.
‘Oh, Jean Genet,’ he says at last with a
surrendering flicker of recognition.
‘Genet doesn’t want anyone to do his plays
anymore.’
He isn’t altogether happy with Genet’s plays.
We were edging into personal areas. I don’t push it. I had the sense, in the
way between us the time passed, that he likes spending time for its own sake – this
is quite mystical – that time for him passes very slowly, in contrast to people
who are diffuse, through whose hands time passes quickly.
He talks so quietly that I have to keep asking
him a second time, or in silence wait till I feel I can complete his sentence.
He looks away frequently, as if he is extremely shy. I leave long silences,
which he breaks about fifty-fifty. He will sometimes resume with the same
subject.
‘I spent two miserable years in London, in
[Chelsea’s] World’s End, in a bedsit for thirty shillings a week. I regretted
it…. I don’t want to go back to Ireland, I had lots of relations and children
[not his, for he was childless] in Wicklow. Last time I was in Ireland was in 1968
for two weeks.’
The Irish poor mouth! Oh God, not shades of…Marlowe’s,
‘I have run up and down this world with a case of rapiers, wounding myself when
I had none to fight withal.’ Marlowe could well have been Irish.
He offers me a cigar, before lighting one. He
says that he is worried about his eyes: he’s had two cataract operations which
have succeeded, so why does he worry? I haven’t asked personal questions, or
about his work, and I can sense this is a relief. Unprompted he starts to tell
me in awe that Joyce, his friend and mentor for whom he worked as secretary,
spent seventeen years on Finnegans Wake, while ‘even the Sistine Chapel took
Michelangelo only four!’ He receives letters from ‘a lunatic asylum’ from Joyce’s
daughter, Lucia, to whom, long ago, in the early 1930s, he had become
attracted. Joyce’s son Mario is in ‘Germany, married to a rich American; his
grandson, Stephen, lives in Paris and works in an office.’ He says his own work
is quite paltry and unimportant compared to that of Joyce. Chesterton’s
definition of a saint is someone who is always in the presence of one greater
than himself, so here the description fits.
We’ve drunk several rounds by now. I have been
with him for over an hour and a half so my audience is almost over. He plays
obsessively with something from his pocket, rolling it on the table, then with
an almost compulsive movement puts it away. His body and movements are tense:
of someone who has eliminated most forms of emotion or spiritual despair from
his mind, I guess, but not from his physical being, where the tension is still
manifest.
It’s not so hard to believe that here is
someone who suffered considerable if not continual rejection all his life until
Peter Hall’s production of Waiting for
Godot at the Arts Theatre came along. But one mustn’t forget he didn’t
really like how Peter Hall had made Godot
into a burlesque, with hilarious comic routines, drawing out audience
laughter he hadn’t intended.
He had written up all those reflexes of being
rejected, but fashioned fastidiously and with exquisite workmanship, into
literary art. Where from? Was it in the first instance from his middle-class
family, in the second by the literary world? He destroys all letters, he tells
me. Rejection, resentment, and bitterness can indeed by very funny, and
wonderful for actors to explore. […]
When we part he seems regretful of leaving,
saying very lightly ‘Enjoy yourself!’ He has a profound twinkle in his eye. I
gently tease him with ‘Did you vote in the last election?’ to which he replies,
‘No, no – I don’t do anything like that!’
Dislocation of consciousness is the name of
Beckett’s game, life through a lens giving it distinctive distortions. It
reminds me of some work done by Johnny my brother: curious, anamorphic
paintings of intricate detail which require a glass cylinder to be placed on
top to reveal the full image. Given that Beckett destroys all letters, I can’t
understand why he is so keen to have my address which he asks for.
I won’t forget the eight tiny missives. The
first few were tentative, spidery, evasive in the handwriting, almost
unreadable. As he decided to see me they grew bolder and stronger in pressure
and use of ink on the flimsy paper until he splashed out an assent. Beckett was
master of forging a merciless no out
of a longing for yes, showing a world
constantly on the edge of disintegration.
Jean-Paul Sartre – much less likeable but an
interesting playwright – had one answer to why Beckett was so popular. He
dismissed ‘the solitude, the despair, the commonplaces of non-communication’ as
being ‘profoundly and essentially bourgeois’. He scorned Godot, ‘by far Beckett’s best play’ for being ‘pessimistic,
expressionist’, yet he pointed out that it was ‘the kind of thing which appeals
to the middle class’. […]
I fail to understand the quasi-religious
obeisance to those increasingly hermetic late plays, which are hallowed like
relics, variations of focus on a vanishing point of faith, hope, and love,
playing the game of hunt the thimble, man’s reduced soul. The endgames of
Beckett and Pinter would have us believe that Nature has forgotten us and is no
more.
hamm
Nature has forgotten us.
clov
There’s no more nature.
About the author
Garry
O’Connor has worked as daily theatre critic for the Financial Times, and as a director for the RSC, before he became a
fulltime writer. As novelist, biographer and playwright Garry has published
many books on actors, literary figures, religious and political leaders,
including Pope John Paul II and the Blairs. He has had plays performed at
Edinburgh, Oxford, Ipswich, London and on Radio 4, and contributed dramatised
documentaries to Radio 3, scripts and interviews for BBC 1, as well as having
his work adapted for a three-part mini-series. The Vagabond Lover, his father-son memoir, is an incisive probe
into the life and career of his father, Cavan O’Connor, famous as a popular
tenor and active throughout most of the twentieth century, and into his own
life and career as a writer. It is published by CentreHouse Press, and is
available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1902086155/
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