Waiting for Beckett

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . past midnight, never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.

I'm constantly amazed by the man's sound, by the command of language, by the purity, by the simplicity, by the use of sound and silence, the comprehension of silence. Good, in the end, in appears. Are you free? Yes. Take him away and give him the works until he confesses. What must he confess? That he said what? Is that all? And where? Is that all? Yes. Then stop. Yes. Good. Yes, and another thing that struck me. You fade about. But suddenly, at one point, suddenly that they are. Is that deliberate? For example, in the end, game appears, and then suddenly there, I don't fade up. He's suddenly there. His increased work for television

is in fact an attempt to get to a kind of poetry that doesn't need words anymore. He said, you see, I think most writers waste people's time by writing a too great length. And I'm trying to reduce everything to the minimum length. And he said, well, at the end of the day, my last work will be a blank piece of paper. Samuel Beckett was born near the village of Fox Rock. Just outside Dublin, Ireland, in 1906. You first saw the light in the room

you most likely were conceived in. The big bow window looking west to the mountain. Mainly west. For being bow, it also looked a little south and a little north. Necessarily, a little south to Mar Mountain and a little north to Foothill and to Plain. I've always known Sam. Our families have always known each other. And we came from the same class, the same background. And the same social structure in Dublin. Maybach was a really, extraordinarily interesting woman in many ways. She was a very strong woman. She ruled the house. I think the boys were rather in awe of her. She was a rich loose. And she was a very moody woman, very moody.

But a very highly principled woman. Very, very deeply Protestant. He had an extraordinary. I can't describe to you a thing about his mother. It was not an infatuation. I don't know. It was if the umbilical cord had never been cut. And you know, he came back and knelt stuff when she was dying. Back on the year that has gone with what I hope is perhaps a glint of the old eye to come. It is, of course, the house on the canal where mother lay her dying in the late autumn after her long virty. And the bench by the wheel from where I could see her window. There I sat in the biting wind, wishing she were gone. I was there when...

The blind went down. One of those dirty brown roller affairs throwing a ball for a little white dog as chance would have it. I happened to look up and there it was, all over and done with at last. I sat on for a few moments with the ball in my hand, the dog yelping and pouring at me. Her moments, her moments, my moments, the dog's moments. In the end, I held it out to him and he took it in his mouth gently, gently. A small, old, black, hard, solid, rubber ball. I shall feel it in my hand until my dying day.

I might have kept it, but I gave it to the dog. I think it was an American critic who once asked Beckett, is your work religious in any way? And Beckett said, yeah, it's like religion, he says. In that it deals with distress, human distress. And then Beckett went on to say, I was at a party in London, he said, and an English intellectual so-called Asmi, if my work was a work of totally despair. And if I had had an unhappy childhood in Dublin, and I told him no, I'd had a very happy Protestant childhood in Fox Rock. And then he said the intellectual thought me more perverse than ever. Ah, my father and mother.

I think they are probably amthaladas, they were so good. Let me go to hell, that's all I asked. I'll go on cursing them there. And they look down and hear me. That might take some of the shine off their bliss. Ha ha ha, yet! I think it's fair to say that Beckett is deeply influenced by his origins. He's a middle class Dublin Protestant. Now in the Irish context, that's a very special thing. First of all, it means that he's a member of a 5% minority. And this consciousness, because Beckett is a superbly conscious man, obviously, never leaves him. Like Yates, he was part of the Irish Protestant tradition. Very much a minority. After applied itself, I'm being better educated than the Catholic majority. And up to possess the money and the political power.

And to possess certain virtues that go with respectability. His father maintained the family inconsiderable affluence by Irish standards. In a big house with push buttons and bells to summon servants who ran around. And this was all done out of an office where the business was quantity surveying. Father is still striding along in his old clothes with his dog. At night, when I can't sleep, I do the old walks again. And stand beside him once again, one ex-miss morning in the fields, near Glen Cullen, listening to the chapel bells. Yes, he enjoyed those walks very much. There was that bond. And his father desperately tried to understand him. He tried. And it was not in his nature. It was, well, it was just malagestment between them all.

In 1923, at the age of 17, Beckett entered Trinity College Dublin, where he was awarded a scholarship in modern languages. After graduating first in his class, he went to Paris where he taught English. Two years later, he returned to Dublin. It wasn't until Sam was going through his awfully unhappy period of Trinity that I really got to know him. The 30s, the early 30s, when he graduated, when he was a graduate student and had some kind of job at Trinity, but he loathed that he was terribly unhappy. That was the time he just took to his bed. I went out so little. Now and then I would go to the window, park the curtains and look out. But then I hastened back to the depths of the room where the bed was. I felt ill at ease with all this air about me.

Lost before the confusion of innumerable prospects. We didn't know what the hell was going on in this mind. Nothing. She knew nothing of that world. She was concerned about him. She was so concerned she'd call mother every day about him about how frightened she was about his condition and his behavior. Well, we must never forget that Beckett was Irish. The French claim him now as French and they're right to do so. It was a country with his adoption. But he left Ireland, obviously, because Ireland didn't treat him very well. And his family just thought he was sort of crazy eccentric and did not understand what he was trying to do. And he could never really be comfortable or be at home. It was a narrow society. It was a very narrow literary society dominated by the Yates, Lady Gregory, a few people. And he wasn't interested in playboys of the Western world and things like that.

And there must have been some inner compulsions going on to express himself, himself and his own way away. But he hadn't yet put it on paper. But like Joyce, Beckett took Ireland in his pocket. He took Dublin away with him in his pocket and he never really abandoned it. And while the French experience is of primary importance, it is filtered through the memories of his childhood, of his family, of his city and of his society. A road still carageable climbs over the Heimorland. It cuts across vast Torfbanks, a thousand feet above sea level, two thousand if you prefer. It leads to nothing anymore. It is here one would lay down in a hollow bedded with dry leather and fall asleep for the last time on an afternoon in the sun. To be in the streets of Paris is for me to feel how much I need Paris and the French way of life.

And how utterly impossible it would be for me to live in Ireland. In Paris Beckett began to concentrate on his writing, producing poetry, short stories and a few essays in criticism. He found himself accepted into the literary circle that surrounded James Joyce. I think Joyce is very important to him. I never heard him speak of Joyce except with awe and veneration. He regards Joyce as a heroic figure. Partly the endless battle with blindness and ill health, and yet the continual, dogged insistence and getting those big, impossible books finished. The utter independence of the man.

Beckett is reported to have said, I was never Joyce's secretary, but like all his friends, I helped him. He was greatly handicapped because of his eyes. Joyce acknowledged Beckett's talent in his last work, Finnegan's Wake. Sam knows Boyle's better than me how to work the miracle. And I see Boyle's diary old, he's dropping the stammer out of his soil and splather, and he can can tab as chipper as any oxen ever I moored with, at hip toesinger. He'll priskly soon hand tune your errands ear for you. I remember one thing he said about that. He said, Joyce used to say that he could justify every syllable. That he's one way to write, but it's not the only way. Proceeding from exactly opposite directions and that respect. Joyce's a master, a cartographer of huge fixin' or territories in which he had to know. He had to know everything in order to feel comfortable with the food selected parts that he rendered. And Beckett proceeding only from the act of writing at the moment and deliberately surrounding himself with a kind of darkness.

Well Beckett was actually extremely productive in these early years in the 1930s. He published this monograph on Proust in 1931, published his first collection of short stories called More Pricks Than Kicks in 1934. That work was immediately banned in Ireland, probably because of the suggestiveness of the title more than the content of the work itself. During these years Beckett was often penniless, surviving on a stipend from his mother. She begged him to take up a normal career, but the young writer, although periodically despondent, persevered. I'm horribly tired and stupid of that, but not yet tired and stupid of that enough to write his impossible, but not yet impossible enough. He threw himself into writing a novel, which he christened with the most common of Irish names, Murphy.

The sun shone having no alternative on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it as though he were free in a new in West Brompton. 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. Murphy was completed in 1937. Beckett in his play, Crap's Last Teap, recalls his frustration at this early publishing experience. Seventeen copies sold, of which he lived in a trade price to free circulating libraries beyond deceives. Getting known. The famous stabbing story, well, it was happened in the late 30s. I believe he was coming home from Joyce's apartment, and he passed a Paris dagger who asked him for money. Beckett made a gesture of refusal and kept down walking.

The next thing he knew, he had a knife between his ribs. And the upper log has Beckett, after his discharge from the hospital, visiting in the jail cell, a man who had stabbed him, and saying, why did you do that? And the answer was, sort of say, promise him, which is, I think in somewhere in Beckett's mind that's the ultimate answer to any question about human motivation. You don't really know why. Shortly before the stabbing incident, Beckett met Suzanne de Chavo de Manier, a talented young pianist. During his long convalescence, she took care of him and thus began a lifelong companionship. Suzanne would later play a significant role in getting Beckett's work published and performed. Saying again, if you do not teach me, I shall not learn. Saying again, there is a last even of last times. Last times of begging, last times of loving, of knowing, not knowing, pretending.

A last even of last times of saying, if you do not love me, I shall not be loved. If I do not love you, I shall not love. It's undoubtedly a very close marriage that has survived. And she played a very, very brave role in the resistance. No doubt about that. In the late 1930s, despite the outbreak of war with Germany, Beckett and Suzanne chose to continue living in Paris. Beckett stated that he preferred France in war to Ireland in peace. I heard Adolf the peacemaker on the wireless last night. I thought I heard the air escaping at slow puncture. But no matter how things go, I shall remain here on the seventh floor with my own handful of sand. All I have to lose is legs, arms, balls, etc.

And I owe them no particular debt of gratitude, as far as I know. In June 1940, German troops occupied Paris and the resistance movement formed immediately. A poll by the murder of their Jewish friends by the Nazis, Beckett and Suzanne joined the resistance, gathering and passing on information which Beckett had translated and microfilmmed. In the summer of 1942, a key person in the movement was captured and tortured. Beckett and Suzanne fearing for their lives led Paris, bicycling and walking to the unoccupied zone in the south of France. Here, they settled in Rousseau, where they quietly continued their anti-Nazi activities. He had a little bit of safety that he was an Irish national and, therefore, was technically a neutral.

But he had worked for the resistance and the Germans had files on him. But they didn't connect him, of course, with this Irishman sitting in a little mountain village in the south of France. And to earn some money, they would go and work for a local farmer in the fields. And very often they got paid in produce, particularly in wine, I think. In fact, in the early versions of God, there is a reference to a farmer who made good wine. Is there any difference between the two of you who were in the German and the German? If there was no difference, the collaborators would come and kill each other.

There were many of you like that. And Beckett was like, why would they kill people? Because they didn't want any of that to happen. In an old house above the village of Rousseau, Beckett began to write the novel, What? He was saying a way to keep his hand in. In it, the destination of the main character is a lunatic asylum. Then at night, rest in the quiet house. There are no roads, no streets anymore. You lie down by a window opening and refuge. The little sounds come that demand nothing, or dainn nothing, explain nothing, propound nothing, and the shard necessary night is soon ended. And the sky blew again. Overall, the secret places where nobody ever comes. I think that was funny.

The backup that we know came together. The occupation experience was absolutely critical and he has never stopped going back to it and drawing on it. But then they're waiting for Godore itself. Once you realize that it's an occupation situation, it clears up an armacy. Here we have two people, away from home, meeting someone who may not only have to a code name. He doesn't show up. The drillers who repeat this in 24 hours. Meanwhile, we have to stay here and do nothing as inconspicuously as possible. You're a very high man to get on with. It'd be better if we parted. If you always stayed and you always come across. The best thing would be to kill me, like the others. One of them. One of them. Like visions of others. Whoever man is little broad, until he dies, he's forgotten. Any time that it's trying from where it's coming, since we are incapable of keeping silence.

We are inexhaustible. It's so we won't think. We have that excuse. It's so we won't hear. We have our reason for the dead voices. Say something! I'm trying! Say anything at all! What do we do now? Wait, forget all. We had a big tree here in Ossion. The night we spent on a wooden truck, which had nothing to do with it. There was a truck or a truck.

Who had what to do? I had a lot of contact with him to organize a meeting. He never refused. He always had responsibility. He was a good friend. He was a good friend. If he had one, it wouldn't have been too bad. From that time on, you get this obsessive concern with people undergoing interrogation. People talking when they don't want to talk. People wondering when it's safe to stop talking. People talking in order to satisfy some mysterious interrogative who will never tell you what will satisfy him. Well, nothing. He didn't say no. He didn't say what? No. He didn't say where?

No. You gave him the work? Yes. And he didn't say no. He went. Yes, scream. Yes, beg for mercy. Yes. But didn't say no. Then why stop? He clashed out. Well, I couldn't. It's a lie. He said it to you. Confess. He said it to you. You will be given the works until you confess. Of the original resistance group of 80, fewer than 20 survived the war. Although Beckett referred to his work as near-boys count stuff, Charles the Gold presented him with the quadigare for his actions. Characteristically, Beckett never spoke of the war experience. And he had this period of withdrawal from the world. And it was only after he came back to Paris after the war, when he had been hiding in the south of France, that the floodgates suddenly opened. At the age of 40, Beckett said, that the floodgates suddenly opened.

At the age of 40, Beckett had a breakthrough in his writing, which he attributed to a particular event in his life. Shortly after the war, he paid a visit to his mother in Ireland. Out by the sea on Dunlbury Pier, Beckett had an experience which he later confided to a friend was of revelation. And he spoke to the phone flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind gauge spinning like propeller, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my mood. Unshatterable association until my dissolution of storm and night with the light of the understanding of the fire. My face and her breasts and my hand on her will air there without moving,

but under us all moved and moved us gently up and down and from side to side. The past midnight never knew such silence Earth might be uninhabited. Crap is Beckett's most autobiographical play. In it, he depicts a man very like himself based on himself, puts in his own actual experiences. Crap is on his 69th birthday and he does not expect to live beyond the biblical 70, looking back over his life by listening to old tapes. He made when he was younger. He discovers the moment when he made the great decision that he was going to be a writer. This was going to be his priority in life and that he would accept his black vision

of the world and of human destiny as a way he should be writing and not trying to simply put a positive, optimistic view of life that might be easier for readers. I'm working with impotence and ignorance. My little exploration is that little zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable, as something by definition incomparable with art. He believed at the time that he didn't have very long to live. He really thought he was going to die because he had a tumor in his cheek. He thought it was probably cancerous and he put off going to a doctor as long as he possibly could. But in the meantime, he felt he had to write something important and leave it behind. There followed for Beckett one of the most productive periods of his career. In 1946, he began to write in French

and by 1950, he had produced four of his major novels, Mercedes Camille, Maloi, Malone Mure, and Linneau Mobles. I must say words as long as all are ready until they find me, until they say me, strange things, strange things. I must go on, perhaps it's done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story before the door that opens on my story. That would surprise me if it opens. It'll be I or 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. Well, he began to write in French partly because he was much more easy in French at the end of the war. He'd been speaking it right through the war. But mainly because he always found the English language, especially as used by an Irishman, was a great block to getting a simple hone-down kind of writing.

There is something in my English writing that infuriates me, and I can't get rid of it. It's a kind of lack of breaks. That period, 1945, 1950, where you can recall the siege in a room for five years back at the core of this work. But he asked two novels published, and nobody's read. They sold 200 or 300 copies. He's close to 40, and he may be a little bitter. What was rejected by 47 publishers? I am now retyping for rejection by publishers. Malone, the last, I hope, of the series, Murphy, Wat, Mercier, and Camille, and Maloy. The bucket novels, particularly, are full of people who seem to have no reason for whatever for doing what they're doing. And of course, that subverts the whole tradition

of Rome made 19th century fiction, in which absolutely everything is a matter of reason followed by deed. I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in the store of sucking stone. So there were peppers, but I call them stone. Yes, in this occasion, I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets and sucked them, turned and turned about. Now, this raised a problem, which I first solved in the following way. I had, say, 16 stones fall on each of my four pockets, those being the two pockets of my trousers, and the two pockets of my grade code, taking stone from the righte-pog of my grade code and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the righte-pog of my grade code by a stone from the righte-pog of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left-pog of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left-pog of my grade code, which I replaced by a stone that was in my mouth

as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus, there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stone. He's done something there that hasn't been done beforehand. before had. Mainly in his choice of hero. Instead of taking a good looking young man, falling in love with the girl and all that, he takes specimens of humanity who are, um, bumms, you know, who really are unhappy people who don't really belong to the real world and who are looked down on by everybody else. Personally, I think the fiction is far ahead superior in terms of quality and what he does in the place. There are some good plays. Back it was far enough as theater, but I think deep inside it was the fiction. The need to wash the waste rose and fell all of a sudden. Above washed the sky fell and rose. It was rooted to the spot and sometimes what understood all and sometimes he understood

much and sometimes he understood little and sometimes he understood nothing. As now. Hello, I'm Bonnie Rossett, publisher of Rogue Press and Evergreen Books. I'm proud to be the American publisher of Samuel Beckett who's play Waiting for Gadole you're about to see. Waiting for Gadole first opened in a tiny theater in Paris in the winter of 1952. Since then it has become a classic of the modern theater. You think God sees me now you must close your eyes. God have pity on me. And me. And me. And me. And me. And me. And me. And me. Is it Gadole at last reinforcements alive?

Is it Gadole? We would be getting the weekend and hour's sure to see the evening hour. You hear? We are no longer alone. Waiting for the night. Waiting for the Gadole waiting for Even we've fuggled and assisted, and now it's over. It's all ready tomorrow for a far soul. I knew it was him. Who? Kado. It's not Kado. It's not Kado. My Kado. And who is it? Far soul. No. Let's go. We can. Why not? We're waiting for Kado. Oh. I began to write God-o as a relaxation to get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time. And the wildness and ruthlessness of the novels. A marvellous, liberating devotion. It did not take back it long for right-waiting for Kado. Once complete, his wife Suzanne undertook the difficult task

of getting the play produced. In 1950, Roger Blaya, a young avant-garde theater director, took on the project. Finally, in January 1953, it opened up the tiny theater above it all, reading about the opening of waiting for Kado in Paris. And that got me very curious. And I went to a literary agent in New York. And I got the manuscript. I read it. I liked it. And made up my mind that I really wanted to get it. And I bought the rights for Grove Press to publish it. June 25, 1953, dear Mr. Rossett. With regard to my work in general, I hope you realize what you're letting yourself in for. I do not mean the heart of the matter, which is unlikely to disturb anybody, but certain obscenities of form, which

may not have struck you in French as they will in English. And which, frankly, it is better you should know before we get going. I am not at all disposed to mitigate. And I went to Paris and had a date, made a date with Beckett, the Paul Royale Hotel bar. And we were to meet him at, I don't know, let's say, six o'clock. And he came into this fairly famous bar, which was next door to Gallymar in the basement. And he was in a raincoat, I remember, and he seemed in a hurry. And he said, well, I only have a few minutes or whatever. I was about 6'30. I think about 4'o'clock the next morning, he was buying his champagne. In January 1956, the first American production of Waiting for Gado opened at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Florida. It was billed as the laugh of two continents and starred Bert Law and Tom Yule. Expecting a lighthearted comedy,

the opening night audience was not prepared for the depth of Beckett's work. Mean cloud audience disappointed in Waiting for Gado, Jack Anderson, Miami Herald, indecent, immoral, a great bore, the most baffling play of all time, Walter Winchell. There isn't the slightest quality about this play to recommend it to my readers. Paul Brun, Miami Beach Sun. I mean, I remember my reaction. And somehow, both Beckett and I had great sympathy for the director, for Alan Schneider, who was fired right thereafter. And somehow, both of us, for whatever our separate reasons, felt a great loyalty to Alan Schneider. Dear Alan, success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me. In fact, I feel much more at home at the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years. This Miami fiasco does not distress me in the smallest degree, or only in so far as it distresses you.

Due to the poor reception of waiting for Godot in Miami, Schneider was not asked to direct the first Broadway production. However, he went on to become the major interpreter of Beckett's work in the United States, directing many critically acclaimed productions. What's the play about, which is what I'm after? Now, the concept is to see if I can get a sense of waiting, of the eternal stalemate. Constant, unredeemed, unfulfilled, waiting on as many human levels as possible. What do you do when you fall far from hell? We can get up, and we go on. Before you go, will you tell him the same lucky thing? Yes, or two, or the same for the rest of life.

But he's dumb. Wow. Dumb. God even grown. Since when? If you're not down for minting, will you recurse at time? When, when, one day, that's not enough for you? One day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day he will go deaf, one day we are born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second. He said, I'm enough for you. He's both a stride of a grave, a light gleams an instant, and it's night once more. In terms of America, he has trusted me with his plays. That's basically all, because he knows that I'm not going to destroy them consciously, intentionally. I'm going to do his play, I'm going to serve his play. The Broadway production of God-O certainly created the interest

in Beckett. I mean, it made him, you know, overnight famous, certainly in New York and through New York, the rest of the country. And we had practically not sold the book up to that point. It had been out for a while. A few hundred copies, and suddenly, you know, we were selling thousands. In the mid-1950s, Beckett's work first came to the attention of the academic world in the United States. It went on to create a tremendous impact on American theatre, with over 1.5 million copies of Waiting for Godot sold by Grove Press. Every once in a while somebody comes along that is so right on target in moving the theatre forward on, is so precise, so accurate, so spare, and that there's nothing to be done except admire. God knows, you know, back in late 1950s in this country,

whole new generation of us playwrights. We're suddenly hit with a five-year period by UNESCO, by Beckett and Janay, and that was a triple knockout punch, not a knockout punch, a wake-up punch. And it changed the face of American theatre enormously importantly. And of those three, though I still admire some of UNESCO's and Janay's plays, Beckett rather quickly emerged as the towering figure of the three, and the one who had the most profound effect on serious American drama. Beckett had this very unusual voice, certainly in English, and it got into my brain, and I wrote two or three things that were so stained by his voice, and it was so difficult to break out of that.

So I recited a four-line poem that was something like, how easily our only smiles are forget it. But it ended with, we'll live our life within this space of a door that opens and closes, I think was the image. It wasn't very good. And he paused when it was over, and he said, oh, it's very nice, very nice. And I said, oh, shit, he said, what's the matter? I said, I stole it from you. And he said, oh, yes. Oh, shit. I said, what's the matter? He said, I stole it from Dante, myself. Are you sharing this? Let's see it. Oh, Mark. Carry on. After you. I interrupt you. On the contrary.

There I'm only as a punctilist pig. Finish your phrase. I tell you. Finish your poem. More on. That's the idea. What's up, youth each other? More on, vermin, abortion, morphine, sewer rat, churret, crittin, crittin. Well, I remember once one piece I wrote about him, I used the expression. And I scarcely remember what I made it up or not, because it seemed very much like Beckett. But I spoke of his abarorious pessimism, perhaps the major underappreciated side. This is humor, which is quite Irish. And could be quite, could enter the worlds of clowning in Burlesque and Vordville for all that.

It must have been a very fine hat. Yeah. What? I personally regard these artists, the Marx brothers and chaplain, and Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon, and the Laurel and Hardy, as probably the greatest American artist or any country in the world in the century. And the two trams in Waiting for Godot had directly taken from that. How did you sit? How would I know? How did I look? It is. When I read the play, when Mike first suggested that we might do this, and I went back and read the play, I realized, I mean, I saw it as a comedy. I mean, I thought there were great, smart, high and low laughs in the play. And they must be served almost first, because the language of the play takes care of itself,

the structure of the play takes care of itself. But the comedy won't take care of itself unless it's delivered. But what do we do now? While waiting. While waiting. We could do our exercises, our movements, our elevations, our relaxation, our elongation, our relaxation. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Who wants that? Who wants that? We go. Oh, that's enough for that. I'm tired. We're not informed. What about a little deep reading? I'm tired, breathing. You're right. Let's just do the tree for the bounce. The tree? You're tired. You think God saves me? You must close your eyes. God, have a video on me and me.

On me, on me. Pity on me. Of course, I see the play having done the role of Lucky. I see the play from the Lucky Point of Views. The speech, I'm sure, somewhere, the whole thing is somewhere in my memory. We'll just see how much I can remember. Given the existence as uttered fourth in the public works of Puncher and Watman, of a personal God, Kwak, Kwak, Kwak, with a white beard, Kwak, Kwak, Kwak. Outside time, without extension, who from the heights of divine, apathia, divine, and ethambia, divine ephesia, loves us dearly, with some exceptions for reasons unknown, but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda. With those who for reasons unknown, but time will tell, are plunged in torment, plunged in fire, whose fire flames, if that continues, and who can doubt it, will fire the firmament. That is to say, blast hell to heaven, so blue still and calm,

so calm with a calm, which even though intermittent is better than nothing, but not so fast, and considering what it is. It was more than the result of the labor's left unfinished. Growns as if you can't, can't, can't, can't give me, avancers, that. Beautiful, the lucky speeches is a monstrous collage of everything. I think it's a beautiful poem. It's a beautiful piece of language of these articulations, not art, it's a man, it's like a tape recorder, I want crazy. And it has accumulated all this garbage from our culture. But that first chunk, I have a feeling, will be with me for the rest of my life, because there's an attempt to delineate a sentence, and then it goes, it's really, it's beautifully written, like a non-sequitur comic monologue, and yet it's something other at the same time. You don't have to dig very deeply to kill people with this play, because the events are the things that are shocking,

not so much the playing of the events. So I always felt that the comedy, that what we could do best, is serve the comedy. Beety, beety, beety, beety, beety, beety, beety, beety, beety, beety, beety, beety, beety, beety, beety, beety, beety, beety, beety, beety. What?! Oh, let's make it up now. Go, go, beety, beety. Your hand takes it. Come to my arms. Your arms? My breath. Off we go. He himself regards himself as primarily a humorist, a comic writer. And in fact his plays are extremely funny. But of course it's a special kind of funniness, I mean as somebody says in endgame, the funniest thing in the world is human and happiness.

Oh she knew it was me, by my smell, a shunk and fair hairy old face lit up. She was happy to smell me. She jabbled away with a rat and a dentures and most of the time didn't realize what she was saying. Anyone but myself would have been lost in this clathling gavel which can only have stopped during a brief instance of unconsciousness. In that case I didn't come to listen to her. I got into communication with her by knocking on her skull. One knock, then yes, two, no, three, I don't know, four, money, five, the goodbye.

I was hard put around this cold into a ruined and frantic understanding, but I did it in the end that she should confuse, yes, no, I don't own, but by or all the same to me, I confused myself with that she should associate the four knocks without a thing but money was something to be avoided at all costs. The clathler is very philosophical, it is what disturbs the system, it creates disorder and Beckett puts that lathler just at the moment when things are beginning to be organized. He breaks it with that lathler. The bitter lath laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical lath. The hollow lath laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual lath. Not the merciless lath is the doyonetic lath, down this note, so it is the lath of laths, the resource purest, the lath laughing at the lath, the beholding, saluting at the

hoist joke in a world the lath that laughs at that which is unhappy. Tiny little thing, before it's time, God for a second hall, no love, spare that, speechless all her days, practically speechless, how she survived, that time in court, what did she just say for her as a filthy or not guilty, stand up woman, speak up woman, stood there staring into space, mouth half open as usual, waiting to be let away. What's amazing about Beckett is that he is probably the only male playwright who focuses on women not as figures related to men. If you think of Nath Eye and you think of footfalls in Rockabye, there are no males in those works, but women's experiences forefronted. It starts with happy days, and in the later works, the main characters are women.

Something tells me, do not overdo the bag, Winnie. Let it help you along, of course, by all means, when stuck, but cast your mind forward, Winnie. Something tells me, cast your mind forward to the time when words must fail. And do not overdo the bag, perhaps just one quick dip, you again. Madeline Renault said that in Beckett's case, love and lucidity are on the same level. That is why she said Beckett understands women so well, that he understands the mind of a woman from within.

And he does this brilliantly, in, of course, in several of the works, that he can surrender in a way that very few men can surrender to the intricacies, the emotional intricacies, the labyrinthine intricacies of a womanly sensibility. Probably the best icon for Beckett's women is this gushing orifice, the mouth in not eye. Imagine not suffering, indeed, could not remember offhand when she had suffered less, unless, of course, she was meant to be suffering, ha, thought to be suffering. Just as the odd time in her life, when clearly intended to be having pleasure, she was in fact having none, not the slightest, in which case, of course, that notion of punishment for some sin or other, or for the lot, or no particular reason for its own sake, things she understood perfectly, that notion of punishment, which had first occurred to her, brought up as she had been to be leave with the other waves in a merciful, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,

and watched that mouth struggling to find words that make sense of her experience as an eye, and yet she's constantly thrown back to the third person, she. What? Who? No! She! Realized words were coming, imagine words were coming, a voice, and she did not recognize at first so long since it had sounded, then finally had to admit, could be none other than her own certain vowel sound, she had never heard elsewhere, so that people would stare the rare occasions once or twice a year, stare at her uncomprehending, and now this stream, steady stream, she who I've never. Beckett obviously uses women in traditional ways, they become the muse, they fill certain stereotypic images, I don't deny that, in age you have the woman who is the voice of conscience. Warm summer night, all sleeping, sitting on the edge of her bed in her lavender slip,

you know the one, she knew you heavenly powers, faint lap of sea through open window, get up in the end and slips out as she is, moon, stock, down the garden and under the viaduct, seas from the seaweed the tide is flowing, goes on down the edge and lies down with her face in the wash, cut along story short, doesn't work, get up in the end, sobbing wet and back up to the house, gets up the gillette, the make you recommended for her body hair. It's my contention that Beckett is very sensitive to gender. This is going to be another happy day, we are positive, my day, yes, later on, we'll

actually be thankful for it later on, yes, my hat on, I cannot take it off now. And that in fact Beckett's works are gender specific in the same way that his media plays are related to exactly the medium for which he's writing the plays, for instance, think about happy days, here you have a woman stuck up to her waist in the sand in the earth, second act stuck up to her neck in the earth, with her husband standing, sitting behind her, reading his newspaper, imagine, if you will, those roles reversed, I don't think they can be reversed, so that rather than when they, for instance, being a stereotype, I think Beckett's really commenting on the stereotypic roles of women, and in that way I think Beckett's a social critic, and that way I'd go so far as to say Beckett's a feminist because he's calling into question, why we are stuck in the roles we're stuck in.

Oh, this is a happy day, this will have been another happy day, after all, say bye. Shake these feelings away from each other, you're talking about me... Every touch of fear tells me one day, says for me, it's true, it's true, it's true, it's true, it's true, it's true, it's true.

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I think it was in 1934 he applied to study under Eisenstein in Moscow in his film school and he is very very interested in the cinema and of course his main thrust is a visual one. When Barney Rosset decided to make three short films with writers that he was publishing in the States back it came over here he made a film that was just called film directed by Alan Schneider who would never be able to film beforehand. Bustekita had no idea what he was doing and didn't think very much of it but he was out of fashion and he had a job and he was paid so he did it and it is a remarkable film. This was an idea of mine that would be nice to make films. I had done that before at Grove Press and we went and commissioned it in Esco, Dora and Robriet and of them the only one we were able to make was film

because we spent all the money on it. He was on the set he was vitally interested in anything to do with film. He was very interested in the use of lenses we examine one lens after another to try to get this effect that he wanted of the eye, the other and whatever. He was very, very interested in all that. The grips fixed a perch for him on the top of the set. They got a 12 foot ladder and nailed it in place and Sam climbed up on the ladder and watched the proceedings from up there. He starts off the script of film with a quotation from the Irish philosopher Bishop Barclay which is to be is to be perceived but this character doesn't want to be.

So he has a character who is desperately trying not to be perceived. That's why Draper is round on all the windows and he even puts something over the goldfish balls and the goldfish won't see him. The thing he wrote in film, the little bit of business which apparently made Keaton light up because he could get a hold of it, he could identify it with the dog out and the cat comes in. You put the cat out and the dog comes in. That's a classic piece of silent comedy but it's maybe a little bit more in chaplains milieu than in Keaton's. And when he finally removes everything he sits in the chair thinking,

now I'm no longer, I won't be there anymore but he's still there and he looks out and in the corner of the room is somebody looking at him and that's himself. And so what Becket is saying is the experience of being is the experience of being perceived by oneself. He said, I think most writers waste people's time by writing a two-grader length and I'm trying to reduce everything to the minimum length and he said, well at the end of the day my last work will be a blank piece of paper. Much of Becket's later dramatic work in the 70s and early 80s was written specifically for television.

And I think his increased work for television is in fact an attempt to get to a kind of poetry that doesn't need words anymore. And his latest television plays from Ghostrear onwards to Quad and Nachton-Troymer which is another late television play which is neither of those two last ones has any text at all. In Becket's work and he said that many times in the past what I'm after is shape. Quad for me is a perfect shape, no language, pure poetry, dance, geometry, mathematics and it is a pure piece of work that he has done I think.

During the first taping of Quad for German television in 1982, Becket noticed a technician playing the footage back in black and white. He liked it so much that he wrote a ghostly monochromatic sequel called Quad 2. This is BAM. We are the last five. In the present as will we still it is spring time passes. So we try.

I am not any spring time passes. For the first, for the first, for the end, for the end, for the end. In 1987 Becket collaborated on an American television version of his last play, What Where. He reviewed the evolving production periodically on videotape and in a departure from his usual camera shyness allowed these sessions to be taped with a camcorder. The resulting footage provides a rare opportunity to see the playwright at work.

The idea was brilliant to work it out to get him to look at the play and make some sort of final adjustments since those adjustments had to be made anyway for a video production. The kind of direct input, which was by this time 1987 or so, is really the last theatre work that he ever did. So historically, his work is extraordinarily important. Are you free? Yes. Take him away and give him the works until he confesses. What must he confess? And he said what? Is that all? And where? And another thing that struck me. You fade out. But suddenly, at one point, suddenly that there, is that deliberate? For example, in the end, him appears. And he didn't suddenly there. I just didn't fade out. He suddenly there. And should he fade out? Well, he should be all fades. I don't know why, sometimes in stages and sometimes not. You can we look at that?

What do you mean? Well, nothing. He didn't say it? No. He didn't say what? No. He didn't say where? Beckett had written what were in 1983. But almost immediately after it premiered on stage, he began rewriting it for German television. Actually, what were written for the television plays? It's much more on the television plays. It's very powerful on television. But you originally wrote it for the theatre. Yes. And you thought the actual characters would enter and leave. And all the problems would make up costume and so on. And we went to this text to Stuttgart, the Marbleberg. I had monopilies. But he worked in Stuttgart, convinced that he was getting rid of every superficial, more and more. He really got to come to the bar bowl.

He knew he was dissatisfied for several reasons, but he didn't have a complete plan for how to work it out. He went over to Germany to Stuttgart and worked with his favorite cameraman over there, Jim Lewis, who had worked on numerous productions. And they worked out together how to turn this stage play into a video production. Well, one of the really important things that Sam knew is that the voice out of the past, the voice of BAM, which on stage was a sort of hanging megaphone, was completely inappropriate. It was confusing anyway. And they settled on this very distorted image of BAM that Beckett kept calling a death mask. One of the interesting things about Beckett, even in approaching his 80th birthday, he was an incurable tinkerer with his own work.

The phase, both out and in as far as possible, I get to go always. The first, the early ones were right. And many of the later ones were right. It was just there on the appearance, the entries, like in 8 or 2 parts. The phase up, 2 parts. And if you could reduce the spectrum BAM. Good. I am alone. In the present, as well as I still, it is winter. Without journey, time passes. That is all. That makes sense for me. I switch off.

He was in that place. But when I arrived at the place, it was a typical Parisian old age home. It was people really of another time. They were in a front, a walk through the door, and there were 25 very old people watching television, watching a kind of a grotesque variety show with a volume up absolute full because they couldn't hear anything.

They didn't know who he was when I asked where he was. They didn't know who he was. And there was a radiation, a kind of radio, a blind, half cracked. And there he was at a bridge table, struggling with some work. And I can remember at one point thinking, if you pick him up and run out the door with him, it's going to be a hell of a mess. But there was definitely an impulse to just grab him and run with him out of that place. Seeing always from behind, with or so ever he went, same hats and coat as of old when he walked the roads, the back roads, now as one in a strange place seeking the way out in the dark, in a strange place blindly in the dark of night or day seeking the way out, our way out to the roads, the back roads. Back it had finished. He could maybe have written another little thing, but he finished his work, the work is there.

Death didn't put an end to it. You see, that's the difference where somebody are going to think, ah, this is the final test because death stopped him. No, the work was finished. And so in a way, I was not sad because the work was interrupted. I was sad because a great man, a friend, someone I really respected, to whom I had a good, no longer was present. Amongst those that I published, he certainly towers above any of the others. And that's not to say, ah, there aren't others who are very good. And others very, very good who were influenced by him and went on to do their own, very original work like Harold Pinter and David Mammott. But to me, I mean, he towered above the others and it's sort of self-serving to say what I think about him in the general, the general climate or atmosphere or history of modern literature. But I think that he is one of the very few original voices of the century.

What did he mean to you personally? Well, I identified with him. I don't know. I just told you, I identified with him very strongly and yet at the same time it was like seeing the, let's say, if you know Freud, being with somebody who was very understanding and who had shared some kind of an experience in common. We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The weather went down the side before the stem. I lay down across there with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving but under us all moved and moved us gently up and down and from side to side.

Last midnight, never knew such silence. Earth might be uninhabited. Here I end this real box, three, spool, five. Perhaps my best years are gone when there was a chance of happening but I wouldn't want them back. If only I had known before the breathing began what I know now and if only I knew now what I knew then perhaps when the breathing is over.

Right now. . . . .

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Major funding for the Beckett project has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. This program was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. . . . .

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