S. E. Gontarski is a writer, scholar and director, at whose request Samuel Beckett wrote the short play “Ohio Impromptu” (1981). Gontarski is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University, where he specializes in twentieth-century Irish studies, in British, US and European modernism, and in performance theory.

On Beckett

Essays and Criticism

By S. E. Gontarski

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2012 S. E. Gontarski
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-663-5

Contents

The Essential Beckett: A Preface to the Second Edition S. E. Gontarski, xi,
A Beckett Chronology, xvii,
Acknowledgments, xxvii,
Introduction Crritics and Crriticism: “Getting Known” S. E. Gontarski, 1,
Preliminaries,
Beckett and Merlin Richard W. Seaver, 15,
Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts: The Embarrassment of Allegory Dougald McMillan, 23,
When is the End Not the End? The Idea of Fiction in Beckett Wolfgang Iser, 36,
The Page,
Murphy and the Uses of Repetition Rubin Rabinovitz, 53,
Watt Lawrence E. Harvey, 72,
Mercier and Camier: Narration, Dante, and the Couple Eric P. Levy, 92,
Molloy’s Silence Georges Bataille, 103,
Where Now? Who Now? Maurice Blanchot, 111,
The Voice and Its Words: How It Is J. E. Dearlove, 118,
The Unnamable’s First Voice? Chris Ackerley, 133,
Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New Poetry Marjorie Perloff, 138,
Worstward Ho Dougald McMillan, 152,
The Stage,
MacGowran on Beckett Interview by Richard Toscan, 157,
Blin on Beckett Interview by Tom Bishop, 167,
Working with Beckett Alan Schneider, 175,
Notes from the Underground: Waiting for Godot and Endgame Herbert Blau, 189,
Beckett Directs Godot Walter D. Asmus, 209,
Beckett Directs: Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape Ruby Cohn, 218,
Literary Allusions in Happy Days S. E. Gontarski, 232,
Counterpoint, Absence, and the Medium in Beckett’s Not I Paul Lawley, 245,
Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett’s That Time and Footfalls Walter D. Asmus, 253,
Footfalls James Knowlson, 265,
Samuel Beckett and the Art of Radio Martin Esslin, 273,
Light, Sound, Movement, and Action in Beckett’s Rockaby Enoch Brater, 292,
Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu: A View from the Isle of Swans Pierre Astier, 299,
Quad and Catastrophe S. E. Gontarski, 307,
Coda,
Burroughs with Beckett in Berlin Edited by Victor Bockris, 313,
Notes on Contributors, 318,

CHAPTER 1

BECKETT AND MERLIN

Richard W. Seaver

The early fifties found me in Paris, fresh out of college, in search of I’m not sure what gods or ghosts but convinced they could be discovered only in that magic city. I had found quarters, if that term can be applied to an abandoned warehouse, on the rue du Sabot, a tiny street directly behind St.-Germain-des-Prés. The owner was a Swiss dealer in primitive art. In return for my tending the shop a few hours a week, he gave me free lodging in an empty ground-floor warehouse at the end of the courtyard. I mention the geography because this dépôt — which, my Swiss landlord proudly informed me, had once been a banana-drying shed — was destined to become the headquarters of the magazine- and book-publishing enterprise known to history as Merlin and also because it was a scant fifty yards from the offices of the most daring and perceptive French publisher of the time, Les Editions de Minuit.

There were two routes from my warehouse-home to the bright cafés of St.-Germain-des-Prés, one by the rue du Dragon, the other by the rue Bernard-Palissy, and since I took at least two trips to St.-Germain every day and always tried to avoid taking the same route twice in a row, it happened, almost inevitably, that I passed number 7 of the latter street at least once a day. Number 7, a bordel until the puritanical wrath of a famous female Gallic zealot of the period, Marthe Robert, caused these dens of iniquity to close in 1948, now housed Les Editions de Minuit. The grilled peephole was still on the thick wooden door. To the right of the door was a tiny display window set into the wall, which in times past had housed God knows what bawdy come-ons. Now, in the winter of 1951–52, it housed two works, whose blue titles stared out at me each day as I passed: Molloy and Malone Meurt. closer scrutiny revealed the name of the author: Samuel Beckett. I passed that window several times before I made the connection. I was then very deeply into Joyce and remembered that it was Beckett who, twenty-odd years before, had contributed the opening essay to that collection of twelve odes to the master, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. it was Beckett, too, I recalled, who had, with French writer Alfred Péron, translated the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” episode of Finnegans Wake into French. What was this Irishman, whom I had also heard referred to as “Joyce’s secretary,” doing writing in French? Or were the Minuit books translations from novels Beckett had written in English? If so, I had never heard of them.

Finally, curiosity won out over avarice: One morning, on my trek to St. Germain-des-Prés, I went into number 7 and bought both books. Later that day I opened Molloy and began to read: “Je suis dans la chambre de ma mère. C’est moi qui y vis maintenant. Je ne sais pas comment j’y suis arrivé….” Before nightfall I had finished Molloy. I will not say I understood all I had read, but if there is such a thing as a shock of discovery, I experienced it that day. The simplicity, the beauty, yes, and the terror of the words shook me as little had before or has since. And the man’s vision of the world, his painfully honest portrayal thereof, his anti-illusionist stance. And the humor; God, the humor. … I waited a day or two, then reread Molloy, tempted to plunge into Malone but resisting the temptation, as one resists the seductive sweet. The second reading was more exciting than the first. I went on to Malone. Full worthy of the first. Two stunning works. Miracles.

The following morning I walked over again to number 7 and asked an employee if Minuit had published any more works by Beckett. “Who?” was the answer. “Samuel Beckett,” I said. “The man who wrote Molloy and Malone Dies.” I motioned to the back of the display case in which the two masterpieces were still standing. The man shrugged and gestured me upstairs.

In a second-floor office I repeated my question to a lady at a typewriter. “I don’t think so,” she said, “but let me check.” she picked up an antiquated telephone and dialed. The person she called, I later learned, was Jérôme Lindon, owner and editor of Minuit, a man I would soon meet and come to admire beyond measure. “No,” the secretary informed me, “although another work is in preparation. But,” she went on, “there is another Beckett novel available from another publisher, Bordas, which I believe is still in print. It is called Murphy.” Murphy, Molloy, Malone. … decidedly, Beckett had a thing about M’s.

I thanked her, went outside, and bicycled directly over to Bordas, a stone’s throw away on the rue de Tournon. Not only was Murphy still in print (it had been published in French, in Beckett’s own translation, five years before, in 1947), but by the look of the stock in the back of the shop (Bordas was primarily a bookseller who published occasional works himself), the original printing was all but intact. (According to A. Alvarez ninety-five copies had been sold by 1951.) I presume, from the delighted reaction of the clerk to my request, that my copy was ninety-six. I took my new treasure home and read it that same night. the comedy was fully as strong as in Molloy and Malone, the sense of the grotesque, the unfailing gift for dialogue, but the magic fusion of comedy and tragedy, of form and content, had not, I felt, yet wholly occurred. It would await L’lnnommable.

While waiting, I was informed by a Parisian actress friend that the French radio was scheduled to record part of an as yet unproduced Beckett play. I went to the taping. Rumor had it that Beckett would be present. In all, there were about a dozen of us in the studio, including the actors; like Godot, however, Beckett did not come. Instead he sent a note of apology, which roger Blin, who was not only to direct but to perform in the original stage production of Waiting for Godot the following year, read prior to the taping. I do not know whether that note still exists in any form, but I remember the gist of it clearly: after apologizing for his absence, Beckett went on to say that since he knew little or nothing about the theater anyway, he could not see how his presence would add anything to the occasion. Blin, a remarkable actor, was plagued offstage with a pronounced stutter and had considerable difficulty reading Beckett’s note. Thus it was with a certain trepidation that the hardy handful of Beckett fans and friends gathered in the RTF studios watched as the taping began. For Blin was playing lucky, and though I do not think any of us present had read the as yet unpublished play, we had heard that Lucky’s part contained a tongue-twisting monologue that would tax the talent of the most accomplished actor. When Blin, for the first time anywhere in the world, at least publicly, launched into the French original of these lines:

Given the existence as uttered forth in the public
works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal
God quaquaquaqua with white beard
quaquaquaqua outside time without extension …

There was incredible tension in the room. But on-mike, as on stage, Blin was a professional, and as such he delivered the monologue beautifully, without the least hitch.

Over the next month or so I uncovered two other Beckett pieces, both short stories or, to be more exact, one complete story and a portion of another. The latter, called “Suite,” had appeared in Sartre’s Les temps modernes half a dozen years before, in 1946. Not unusual for France in those days, the offices of the magazine still had copies of the issue. I read it with the same pleasure with which I had consumed Molloy. and yet it seemed strangely incomplete. still, with Beckett, I reasoned, his ideas of “complete” or “incomplete” doubtless had little to do with those with which I had been inculcated. It was only later that I learned, from Beckett himself, that my first reaction had not been all that wrong: “Suite” represented only the first part of the story “La Fin.” in sending it to Les temps modernes, Beckett rightly or wrongly assumed that at some later date the magazine would publish the rest of the work. But when he sent it on, Simone de Beauvoir returned it with a note indicating it was not the magazine’s policy to publish sequels. She, or Sartre, had presumably thought that what Beckett had sent them first was the complete work. Or perhaps they thought Beckett was putting them on, testing their ability to tell a part from a whole. I’m not sure Beckett ever forgave the pair for their myopia. In any event, the story was not published in its entirety till the following year, in Merlin, in my translation. Well, sort of my translation. About which more later.

The second story, also extraordinary, was called “L’Expulsé,” which had been published in Fontaine, an influential literary periodical of the time, in 1947.

Until En attendant Godot was published later in 1952, these comprised the Beckett oeuvres complètes on which I could lay my hands. While I talked, apparently obsessively, about it to all who would listen, I also decided that I would try to write a critical essay imparting my “discovery” to the world. A magazine called Points, published sporadically by Sinbad Vail, the son of Peggy Guggenheim, operated out of a top-floor sublet in the same building that housed Les Editions de Minuit. It was for this magazine, for want of a better outlet, that I decided to write the piece. But before I had finished it, a new English-language magazine had sprung up, as literary mushrooms had been doing for decades in the fertile Paris soil: Merlin, run by an impressively serious, craggy-featured young Scotsman, Alexander Trocchi. I met Trocchi, liked him, and talked to him at length about Beckett. “Stop talking, mon, and put it on paper!” he said at last. “There’s a deadline next Thursday!” Within a week I had put my notes into shape and written the piece, which appeared in the second issue of Merlin.

I sent a copy of the magazine to Mr. Beckett, whose address on the rue des Favorites I had managed to pilfer. Silence. But then one day Jérôme Lindon, to whom I had also sent the issue, let it slip that Beckett had in hiding a work, in English, written during the war and never published: Watt. By then I was an editor of Merlin, and wrote Beckett asking if we could see the work with a view toward publishing an extract in the magazine. More silence. But I had rather expected that.

We had all but given up, when one rainy afternoon, at the rue du Sabot banana-drying dépôt, a knock came at the door and a tall, gaunt figure in a raincoat handed in a manuscript in a black imitation-leather binding and left almost without a word. That night, half a dozen of us — Trocchi; Jane Lougee, Merlin’s publisher; English poet Christopher Logue and South African Patrick Bowles; a Canadian writer, Charles Hatcher; and I — sat up half the night and read Watt aloud, taking turns till our voices gave out. If it took many more hours than it should have, it was because we kept pausing to wait for the laughter to subside.

We never had a real editorial discussion about which section we would use in the issue: Beckett had seen to that. He had specified which section we could use: Mr. Knott’s inventory of the possibilities of his attire (“As for his feet, sometimes he wore on each a sock, or on the one a sock and on the other a stocking, or a boot, or a shoe, or a slipper, or a sock and boot, or a sock and shoe, or a sock and slipper … or nothing at all …”) and the possible stations of the furniture in his room (“Thus it was not rare to find, on the Sunday, the tallboy on its feet by the fire, and the dressing-table on its head by the bed, and the night-stool on its face by the door, and the washstand on its back by the window; and, on the Monday, the tallboy on its back by the bed …” etc.). I suspect Beckett was testing the artistic fiber of Merlin in so specifying, for, taken out of context, that passage might well have been considered boring or pedantic, waggish or wearily experimental-for-experimental’s-sake, by any literary review less dedicated to berating and attacking the Philistines without mercy. When, years later, I confronted Beckett with this accusation, he responded with a broad, bad-boy grin.

At any rate, we published the designated extract of Watt in our next issue. I will not say the reaction was worldwide, but we received several angry letters and cancellation of five percent of our subscribers (i.e., five cancellations). Avant garde, all right, the letters said, but let’s keep some sense of proportion, let’s draw the line somewhere! We knew we were on the right track. Thereafter, virtually every issue of Merlin contained something by Beckett. And when, in the autumn of 1953, having lost relatively little money on the magazine, we determined we would expand and see if we could lose more money more quickly by publishing books. The first book we chose to publish was, of course, Watt.

In July 1953, Beckett wrote to his old friend and former literary agent, George Reavey, who since the war had been living in New York, to bring him up-to-date on his literary activities. After detailing those works which by then were out in French, he went on:

… Also, (tiens-toi bien) our old misery, Watt, with the Merlin juveniles here in Paris who are beginning a publishing business.

Earlier that year an agreement — I do not recall whether there was ever an actual formal contract — was reached with Mr. Beckett, an advance of 50,000 francs ($100) duly paid, and we were ready to go into production. As is always the case with Beckett manuscripts, Watt was in impeccable condition. Although we proofread it, we found virtually nothing even to query, much less change. Two months later, Beckett would write again to Reavey noting that “Watt is just out in an awful magenta cover from the Merlin Press.” A full-page ad for the book appeared on the back cover of the Spring–Summer 1953 issue of Merlin, although I suspect the book had not then appeared. The fall issue ran a further ad, detailing the printing:

Watt (a novel) by SAMUEL BECKETT
Ordinary edition (1100 numbered copies) 850 fr.
Special Edition (25 signed copies of a de luxe paper) 2,500 fr.

As to the awful color of the cover page, I can only assume there was a special on magenta. The book was typeset and printed at the Imprimerie Richard in Paris, and despite all the author’s care in typescript, the “Printer Richard,” who was touted to us as especially good because of his knowledge of English, managed to infiltrate so many typos that no matter how carefully we tried, we could never eliminate them all. If Beckett despaired of the garish color of the cover, I can only guess at the depths of his depression as he perused page after page of his printed work, replete with misspellings such as “scatch” for “scratch” (page 50), “nenomena” for “phenomena” (page 79), and several dozen more. Not to mention a dropped word here and there, and a line set half a paragraph beyond where it appeared in manuscript. His only consolation, perhaps, was the memory that Joyce, too, had suffered the same indignity at the hands of French printers with Ulysses, and survived.

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