Beckett/Beckett: The Classic Study of a Modern Genius

271 Pages·1990·19.836 MB·English

by  Vivian Mercier

BECKETT
BECKETT
VIVIAN MERCIER
New York / OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS / 1977
BECKETT / BECKETT
A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.
OSCAR WILDE
Copyright © 1977 by Vivian Mercier
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-42658
Permission to use copyright material is hereby gratefully acknowledgcd:
To Les Editions de Minuit for the quotations in French from En attendant Godot, copy
right 1952 by Les Editions de Minuit; L'Expulse, copyright 1955 by Les Editions de
Minuit; Molloy, copyright 1951 by Les Editions de Minuit; Poemes, © 1968 by Les Edi
tions de Minuit.
To Faber and Faber, Ltd., for extracts from All That Fall, Eh Joe, Embers, Film, Footfalls,
Happy Days, Krapp's Last Tape, Play, That Time, Waiting for Godot, Words and Music,
all by Samuel Beckett; and from Our Exagmination . . . by Samuel Beckett and others.
To John Calder (Publishers) Ltd. for extracts from Malone Dies, Molloy, Poems in Eng
lish, Proust, Still, The Expelled, Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, The Unnamable,
Watt.
To Calder and Boyars, Ltd., for extracts from Enough and Ping (published in No's
Knife), First Love, HolV It Is, Lessness, The Lost Ones, Mercier and Camier, More Pricks
Than Kicks, Murphy.
To Grove Press, Inc., for extracts from Krapp's Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces, copy
right © 1957 by Samuel Beckett, copyright © 1958, 1959, 1960 by Grove Press, Inc.; More
Pricks Than Kicks (The Collected Works of Samuel Beckett), all rights reserved (first pub
lished by Chatto and Windus, London, 1934); Happy Days, copyright © 1961 by Grove
Press, Inc.; Proust, all rights reserved, first published 1931; HolV It Is, copyright © 1964 by
Grove Press, Inc.; Ends and Odds, copyright © 1974, 1975, 1976 by Samuel Beckett; Film,
copyright © 1969 by Grove Press, Inc., Film (script) copyright © 1967 by Samuel Beckett;
Words and Music (from Cascando and Other Short Dramatic Pieces), copyright 1962 by
Samuel Beckett; Eh Joe, copyright © 1967 by Samuel Beckett; Play, copyright © 1964 by
Samuel Beckett; Murphy, first published 1938; Watt, all rights reserved; Poems in English,
copyright © 1961 by Samuel Beckett; Waiting for Godot, copyright © 1954 by Grove Press,
Inc.; Molloy, Malone Dies and The Un namable (from Three Novels), copyright © 1955,
1956, 1958 by Grove Press, Inc.; Endgame, copyright © 1958 by Grove Press, Inc.; The Lost
Ones, copyright© this translation, Samuel Beckett, 1972, copyright © Les Editions de
Minuit, 1970, originally published in French as Le Depeupleur by Les Editions de Minuit,
Paris, 1971; First Love and Other Shorts, copyright © this collection by Grove Press, Inc.,
1974, all rights reserved; Stories and Texts for Nothing, copyright © 1967 by Samuel
Beckett; Mercier and Camier, copyright © this translation, Samuel Beckett, 1974, copy
right © Les Editions -de Minuit, 1970, all rights reserved.
To New Directions Publishing Corp., New York, for quotations from James Joyce, Finne
gans Wake: A Symposium. Copyright Sylvia Beach 1929. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of Anlerica
To Eilis
PROLOGUE
(Spoken by the Author in his Own Person)
The second New York production of Waiting for Godot,
imported from Los Angeles, had an all-black cast: an early
proof of the universality of the play. On Friday nights dur
ing the run, the theater was turned into a seminar room
after the final curtain. A panel of "experts" - a psycho
analyst, an actor, an English professor, and so on - sat on
stage and conducted a dialogue with those in the auditorium;
admission was free. The night I attended this symposium,
the ITlOSt effective contribution was made by a member of
the audience who asked the panel the rhetorical question,
"lsn' t Waiting for Godot a sort of living Rorschach [ink
blot] test?" He was clapped and cheered by most of those
present, who clearly felt as I still do that most interpreta
e
tions of that play - indeed qf Samuel Beckett's work ..a s .. \..
whole - reveal more about the psyches of the people who
offer them than about the work itself or the psyche of its
author.
To this rule, if it is one, I don't profess to be an excep-
..
Vll
Vlll PROLOGUE
tion: on the contrary, the book that follows will be seen to
offer a rather personal view of its subject - though not, I
hope, a wildly idiosyncratic one. Not that I can claim any
special intimacy with Beckett the ·man: I have met him
only three times and, out of respect for his privacy, made
very few notes after these meetings. I have also received
about a dozen letters from him1 one or two of which might
be described as self-revelatory, but I have quoted only pas
sages that are factual and neutral in tone, and very few even
of those.'
What makes my view of Beckett personal is chiefly the
fact that, having attended the same boarding-school and
university as he did, I was constantly aware of him as some
not very much older than myself (thirteen years), from
on~
the same rather philistine Irish Protestant background, who.
had become the sort of avant-garde artist and critic that I
longed to be.
"
A brief chronicle of this long-distance relationship with
Beckett TIlay not be entirely without interest. Born in April
1919, I entered Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, in Sep
tember 1928, just over five years after Beckett's departure.
It was not until 1934, however, that I first heard of him;
the news must have made a great impression, for I have
kept its source ever since - a leaflet entitled "Old Portora
Union: Terminal Letter No. 35." The then Headmaster,
Rev. E. G. Seale, distributed his "letter" (dated July 1934)
to all present members of the school as well as ttold boys."
J.
Having mentioned a book by another alumnus, Chartres
Molony, Seale continued:
But Old Portorans seem to be going strong in the lit
erary world. S. B. Becket [sic] has now brought out a vol-
·
PROLOGUE IX
ume entitled "More Pricks than Kicks." It is described
as "A piece of literature rnen10rable, exceptional, the
utterance of a very modern voice." The Spectator
de~
voted a column of criticism, mostly favourable, to this
book. We must heartily congratulate its author on such a
reception to his first "vork of fiction. His "Proust" was
published a couple of years earlier.
Although is in Northern Ireland, so that the
~nniskillen
subsequent banning of More Pricks than Kicks in the Irish
Free State had no legal effect I noticed that the book
there~
did not turn up in the school library: Portora in those years
was just beginning to admit that it had been the alma
mater of Oscar \\Tilde and wanted no fresh notoriety. All I
could do was to look up the Spectator review and try to dis
cover what this strangely named book \vas about. (Any
Portora boy of that vintage would have recognized, as I did,
the allusion to the conversion of St. Paul: in the King
James Bible, the voice from Heaven says, ttl t is hard for
thee to kick against the pricks.") I also identified Beckett,
wrongly, as the captain in an old photograph of a cricket
first eleven. Our senior French master, S. B. Wynburne,
had been an exact contemporary and close academic rival
of Beckett at Trinity College, Dublin.
I myself entered Trinity in 1936 at the same age as
Beckett had done and was accepted by the same Dr.
tutor~
A ...A . Luce. Like Beckett, I read Honors French with Pro
fessor T. B. Rudmose-Brown; my other lIonors subject was
English;> which Beckett had also read for a time before giv
ing it up to concentrate on Italian. Facts like these explain
the emphasis on Beckett as a member of a
particular_soci:~tl
class and ethnic grouping, with a particular type of educa-
X PROLOGUE
tion, especially in Chapters 3 and 4 below. Beckett is
2,
unique, as we all are, but he has not descended from an
other planet. Irvin Ehrenpreis, in his exemplary life of
Swift, anxious like me to present his subject as neither a
deity nor a monster, has drawn a number of parallels be
tween the future Dean and his contemporaries, including
of course some of his fellow-undergraduates.
After the Trinity B.A., Beckett's and my paths in life
soon diverged sharply, but I remained constantly aware of
him. In '1938, while still an undergraduate, I read Kate
O'Brien's enthusiastic review of Murphy; when she men
tioned the novel again later in the year, I decided to spend
a quarter of my weekly allowance on the single copy of it
that had languished on Hodges Figgis's shelves for several
months. I fell in love with the book at once and reread it
every year until it was lost or stolen about 1945. By then I
had also read Proust, the essay on Joyce's Work in Progress,
•
and, under the watchful eye of a Trinity librarian, the
banned More Pricks than Kicks. Quite possibly my Ph.D.
thesis, for which I received a Trinity doctorate in Decem
ber 1945, was the first to pay serious attention, however
briefly, to Beckett's fiction. I had already praised Murphy
in print, in the Jan uary-March 1943 issue of the Dublin
Magazine, while reviewing Eric Cross's The Tailor and
Ansty;
... Irish literature for the past twenty years has re
mained in the backwater of dialect reportage. Joyce at
least mingled inlagination with his realisnl, but his suc
cessors have largely ignored the fantastic side of Ulysses.
Only during the last three or four years have two books
appeared which contain both Joyce's ingredients-Sam-