Just Play: Beckett's Theater [Course Book ed.] 9781400853601

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Photographs
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
THROUGH VIEWS
2. At This Place
3. At This Moment in Time
4. All Mankind Is Us: Soliloquizers
5. All Mankind Is Us: Fictionalizers
6. The Churn of Stale Words: Repetitions
SINGULARS
7. The Play That Wasn’t Written: Human Wishes
8. The Play That Wasn’t Staged: Eleuthéria
9. The Play That Was Rewritten: Fin de partie
PERFORMANCE
10. Some Beckett Theatricians
11. Jumping Beckett's Genres
12. Beckett Directs
Notes
Bibliography of Works Cited
Appendices
APPENDIX A. Beckett as Playwright
APPENDIX B. Beckett as Stage Director
APPENDIX C. Human Wishes
Index

Citation preview

JUST PLAY

Just Flay: BECKETT'S THEATER

By Ruby Cohn

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1980 by Princeton University Press PuWished by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book This book has been composed in VIP Palatino Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

To Beckett-lovers here and elsewhere now and otherwise

Contents List of Photographs Acknowledgments 1. Introduction

viii ix 3

THROUGH VIEWS 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

At This Place At This Moment in Time All Mankind Is Us: Soliloquizers All Mankind Is Us: Fictionalizers The Churn of Stale Words: Repetitions

17 34

58 76 96

SINGULARS 7. The Play That Wasn't Written: Human Wishes 8. The Play That Wasn't Staged: Eleuthiria 9. The Play That Was Rewritten: Fin de partie

143

163 173

PERFORMANCE 10. Some Beckett Theatricians 11. Jumping Beckett's Genres 12. Beckett Directs Notes Bibliography Appendices Index

189 207 230 281 289 293 307

List of Photographs Following page 236.

A. Beckett, Bollman, and Schroder rehearsing Endgame

B. Beckett and Held rehearsing Krapp's Last Tape C. Beckett, Schmidt, and Schultz rehearsing Happy Days

D. Beckett, Bollman, and Wigger rehearsing Waiting for Godot

E. David Warrilow in the Mabou Mines Lost Ones F. Contemporary Painting by Unknown Artist, Presumed to be of Mrs. Anna Williams G. Beckett and Whitelaw rehearsing Happy Days

Acknowledgments Some of this material has been published in Journal of Beckett Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Drama, Yearbook of English Studies, and Samuel Beckett: The Art of Rhetoric. I thank the editors for permission to revise and reprint what was always intended as a book. I am grateful for University of California (Davis) research funds that aided my research. I thank Grove Press for permission to quote from Beckett's works in English, and I particularly thank that press for permission to quote unpublished ma­ terial. To Jerry Sherwood, Literature Editor of Princeton University Press, my gratitude grows and grows. To Samuel Beckett my debt defies calculation or expression.

JUST PLAY

1 Introduction Beckett's plays are just play for precise performance. They are play as opposed to unmediated reality, but play is its own mode of reality. Just play is a phrase in Beckett's Play, spoken twice within a moment of stage time, by a man in an eternal triangle: I know now, all that was just. . . play.1 All this, when will all this have been . . . just play? Sentence and question, rhythmically monosyllabic, point to past and future, the world and limbo. The sentence ac­ knowledges the acquisition of wisdom through experience; it is a stripped version of Aeschylean pathos-mathos, and yet the wisdom is undercut by the three dots that denote hesitation after the reductive "just." The question com­ bines past and future in that arresting tense, the future perfect; wisdom seems to dissolve in interrogation as these three dots convert "just play" into a postscript on a concern with the very possibility of "all this." What I propose to do in this book is play with Beckett's plays—devices of "all this" in his twenty-one complete plays ("Through Views") and enactment of "all that" ("Performance"). This examination is not an introduction to Beckett's drama; still less is it a summary, paraphrase, or substitute. Rather, it is an implicit appreciation through isolation of functional devices and theater aspects. Be­ tween these two critical approaches, I focus briefly on three abandoned or revised plays. Like Lucky in Waiting for Godot, I resume. Beckett has produced or published twenty plays—ten for theater, four for radio, three for television, two for mime, and one for

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cinema. Various abortive efforts and the three-act Eleutheria are unpublished or unproduced. Critics usually discuss Beckett's plays in chronological order, and my chapters in "Through Views" will follow custom, but I now glance at Beckett's drama achronologically, moving outward from the silence he cherishes. Breath (1966)2 lasts thirty-five seconds on the rare occa­ sions it reaches a theater. Between five-second periods of faint light at the end and beginning, we hear two faint human notes—birth-cry and death-rattle. Between these identical sounds, light and breath rise in ten seconds to maximum, hold for five seconds, fall away in another ten seconds. Beckett has called this briefest of plays "a farce in five acts,"3 and they form a symmetrical whole. Act I is re­ peated by Act V—the cry; Act II is repeated by Act IV— breath and light, but moving in opposite directions; only the apex Act III is unique. Metaphoric rather than metonymic, the play etches human life against infinity, a voice against the void, breath-light of classico-Christian tradition against expanding space of modern science. The brief play contains Beckett staples—symmetry, repetition, inversion, the wresting of sound from silence, a flicker of light against the dark, dying but no definable death. Not so stark, Acf WithoutWords I (1956) is "a mime for one player." As in playerless Breath, the mime concentrates a whole life. After birth into the bright world-stage, the "one player" performs during his breath-light maximum, which lasts somewhat longer than the five seconds' hold of Breath. The mute actor is tempted by tree, scissors, carafe of water, rope, and three maneuverable cubes. These ob­ jects defeat the player's ingenious efforts to bend them to his purpose. Exit from the world-stage proves impossible too, since the player is thrice flung back from the theater wings. By the end of the mime play the character learns to live without will; to all blandishments he reacts by not moving. Palliatives for the syndrome of living vanish from his reach until the actor stops reaching. Exploiting stage space—wings and flies—Beckett's first mime play illus-

INTRODUCTION

5

trates one of his favorite sayings, the Latin of seventeenth-century Arnold Geulincx: "Ubi nihil vales ibi nihil velis"—where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing, "where" and "there" being the worldstage. Act Without Words II (1956) is subtitled "a mime for two players," and Beckett might have added "of opposite tem­ peraments," since the play displays this opposition. The scenic directions specify that "A is slow, awkward . . . ab­ sent. B brisk, rapid, precise." Each in turn is goaded to his day's activities. A prays, takes pills, dresses, eats, labori­ ously carries two sacks, but mainly he broods. B exercises, grooms himself, eats, laboriously carries two sacks, but mainly he confirms his schedule by his watch. On our watches A's day lasts exactly as long as B's. Purpose is de­ voured by process as the cycle starts again to end the mime play. Although A and B do not communicate, they are the simplest of Beckett's contrapuntal couples, A reluctantly bound to this world and B eagerly participating in it. Different as they are, however, A and B wear the same clothes; they respond (differently) to the same goad. These wordless dramas are Beckett's morality plays, theatrical allegories. But unlike medieval moralities, they show us man from the outside, without penitential selfexamination.4 When Beckett admits words into drama, he admits self-awareness, but in the wordless movie Film (1963) he already contrasts an exterior with an interior view of man. (To be accurate, the script dwells on that contrast, which the camera realizes imperfectly.) Beckett is unusu­ ally explicit about the idea behind his movie script, whose point of departure is Berkeley's "Esse est percipi." (To be is to be perceived.) Beckett continues: "All extraneous per­ ception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-perception maintains in being. Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception." Non-being is the goal of O, Buster Keaton's main role, and the film traces several suppres­ sions of perception—not only the eyes mentioned in the

6

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script but eyelike shapes on a large envelope and on the headrest of a rocking-chair. After tearing up photographs from his past, Keaton as O feels his pulse, that testimony to being, from which he cannot retreat. Self-perception, meant to be rendered by blurred focus, maintains the Keaton-figure in being. As the film ends, O rocks back and forth, back and forth, head bowed in the defeat of selfperception. Film, Breath, and the two Acts Without Words are far less subtle than Beckett's verbal plays. Collectively, the word­ less plays imply Beckett's mistrust of language. In none of them do we find the hesitations, interrogations, fluctua­ tions, contradictions, and ambiguities of the plays with words. Gesture is apparently keener and cleaner than phrase. Since Beckett has written four radio plays, a converse generalization might be expected—that Beckett mistrusts the evidence of his eyes. However, the radio plays refer vividly to the visual—especially All That Fall and Embers. Confined so largely to words, these plays dramatize the difficulties of verbal composition, a metaphoric blind search. This is only an incidental aspect of All That Fall, since Dan Rooney's autobiographical story is a subterfuge to evade answering his wife's question about the delay of his train. In Embers Henry's story of Bolton and Holloway relates obliquely to his own predicament. The other radio plays center on the process of verbal creation, twice blend­ ing words with music. In his three television plays Beckett boldly writes against a medium that thrives on close examination of surfaces. Limited by the camera to exteriors, Beckett's scripts probe like X-rays through a language at the edge of image. Eh Joe anatomizes guilt in nine slow zoom moves of a camera, gradually distorting Joe's face in self-revelation. In Ghost Trio, named for Beethoven's Fifth Piano Sonata, a man in a monastic room expectantly waits for a woman; instead, a boy comes and twice shakes his head—as negative as Godot. . . .but the clouds . . . elevates a woman to muse or

INTRODUCTION

7

madonna; empty of grace, however, she is a still presence to the man's murmur of the final lines from Yeats' Tower. The zoom moves in Eh Joe give place to repetitive backand-forth motions in the recent television plays, describing different crosses for similar passions. Mime, radio, television, film are of course not the dra­ matic genres of Beckett's greatest impact. That remains theater—actors speaking words in stage space. Beckett's theater pieces pivot on death, and yet we witness no actual death on stage—"Outside of here it's death" (my italics). Beckett is agonizingly aware that when we begin to live, we begin to die, and he shades that awareness theatrically. In his shortest play with words, Come and Go (1965), death is not mentioned, but it is the invisible fulcrum for this mortal equilibrium. A Beckett blend, the three Graces coalesce with the three Fates in this alternation of tableau and ballet. These Fates are themselves doomed, and the grace is that they do not know it. Sentenced mysteriously, they still dream of love, imagining perfect circles—like us all. In Beckett's three full-evening plays—Waiting for Godot (1949), Endgame (1956), and Happy Days (1961)—death is variously beyond the horizon. For Vladimir and especially Estragon, death is the alternative to waiting for Godot. In the preplay past Estragon threw himself into the Rhone River, but Vladimir fished him out. In the present—the play—Estragon suggests that they hang themselves. In Act II, echoing Pozzo's Act I line about Lucky, Estragon ad­ vises Vladimir: "The best thing would be to kill me." Al­ though the play's logic prohibits death, Vladimir expands on the joys of hanging; he also hints at death when pon­ dering the two thieves who reviled the Savior, or when singing the round about the dog who was beaten to death. Both friends pitilessly converse about Lucky's possible death, and in Act II both evoke a Hamlet graveyard through bone images. Occasionally, we hear the words "dead" and "death" robbed of fatality; Estragon reacts to Vladimir's offstage urination: "He'll be the death of me," and he

8

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mock-warns Pozzo: "You'll catch your death." Vladimir sighs: "We're bored to death." Pozzo utters a nostalgic tribute to his lost watch "with deadbeat escapement." The play's most poignant image of death has been widely quoted—blind Pozzo's outburst: "They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." In Endgame the "instant" is almost over. The light out­ side has sunk, and Clov apparently watches his light dying offstage in the kitchen. Within and without is gray: "Light black. From pole to pole." Not quite yet the dark black of mourning for universal death, for which Clov holds Hamm responsible. The stage is a temporary shelter from death— at least for its human inhabitants. "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life . . . ?" asks Lear, and Hamm's pupil Clov tries to take life from a flea and a rat. Hamm announces the time for "it" to end, and yet he hesitates to end. That hesitation accommodates the asymp­ totic action of Endgame, approaching the night but not quite reaching it. Hamm will distribute just enough food to "keep . . . from dying," but he encourages Clov to kill him. Again and again, Hamm and Clov brood about death, but old Nagg and Nell recall death only verbally. Nell is "perished" with cold, and Nagg tries to convince his wife that she nearly died laughing at his story. Her stage death is, however, only probable: "Looks like it." Noting how quickly Nagg stops weeping for Nell, Hamm realizes: "The dead go fast." For Hamm and Clov, death is alternatively a menace and a consolation: "If I could kill him I'd die happy." Before Clov dresses to leave the shelter, he de­ scribes life as a lingering death: "What skilled attention they get, all those dying of their wounds." Hamm's de­ spair is deeper; for him life is more dreadful than death. Hamm's painter-engraver had a vision of universal death, but his story-protagonist implies a worse holocaust; offer­ ing the fictional father "a nice natural death," the pro­ tagonist then berates him: "[The child] doesn't realize, all he knows is hunger, and cold, and death to crown it all."

INTRODUCTION

9

The sentence leaves unspoken what adults realize— perhaps an impersonal infinity in which humanity will leave no trace. In Happy Days Beckett moves toward staging that infinity—an invariant hellish light (which many directors soften out of consideration for their audience). In this third play of waiting for a death that does not come, Beckett shifts his basic metaphor; life is still light, but it is also heat, with resonances of a Christian Hell. Winnie, like Vladimir and Estragon before her, alternates between the compul­ sion to wait and a desire to die—"wait for the day to come . . . the happy day to come when flesh melts at so many degrees and the night of the moon has so many hundred hours." (my italics) If the conjunction were "or" rather than "and," a long night would spare Winnie's flesh from melting under the scorching sun. "And" wishfully dis­ solves Winnie in a single day/night. Melting away and long nights are both fantasies of Win­ nie, and, for all her attention to her immediate surround­ ings, she lives largely in a fantasy which enables her to pronounce each day happy. The word "die" is an "old style" word in her endless days. She literally never says "die" about herself, but she sublimates death in narration. The woman who accompanies Mr. Shower or Cooker bursts out: "Drop" in Act I, and "Drop dead" in Act II. Winnie's fictional Mildred will have memories of the womb "before she dies." In Winnie's memory Willie pressed a gun upon her: "Take it away before I put myself out of my misery." By Act Π Winnie momentarily believes that Willie is dead, but already in Act I she plays the only song of her music-box—the Merry Widow Waltz. Given her situation, literally in her grave, a Merry Widower tune might seem more fitting, but it is Winnie who remains determinedly merry. Classical tragedy begins close to the death of the hero. Driving hard to a climax, tragic drama finally envelops the hero's death in harmonic resonance. In Beckett's three major dramas he also begins close to the death of his

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heroes, but they cannot attain death, and the plays arrive at no harmonic resolution. The other stage plays live at or beyond death's thresh­ old. Krapp's Last Tape (1958) and That Time (1975) lean on the convention that one's whole lifetime wells up into con­ sciousness at the moment of death. In Krapp's Last Tape as originally published, that moment is less clear than in Beckett's productions. "Last" may mean "most recent" or "final," and Beckett stresses the finality; Krapp finally faces the darkness at his left, which is death. The last tape he hears (as opposed to the one he records) dwells on the death of his mother. In his last words on the tape—"No, I wouldn't want them back."—Krapp rejects the years of his life, and on stage he accepts death's darkness and silence. That Time, written nearly two decades later, might be hap­ pening a few minutes later. The head of a nameless old man is canted upward, as though we look down on a deathbed while we hear incantations shading into dust's threnody. Hovering about death are Play (1962), Not I (1972), and Footfalls (1975). In a purgatorial ambience the suffering is distinctively cadenced. Each of the three urned characters oiPlay believes the other two are still alive. Although their urns touch, they are totally screened from one another. Only mildly inquisitive about the drama of their earthly lives—the Narration—they inquire deeply and vainly into the disembodied state we witness—the Meditation. They are precursors of Mouth of Not I. Although she does not permit herself use of the first person singular, Mouth nev­ ertheless seeks to pierce her own stream of words, their di­ rection and meaning. In Play the old metaphor of life as light is modified to light triggering an impression of pur­ gatorial afterlife. In Not I, at the traditional terminus of life—three score and ten years—a stream of words and a theater spotlight become a buzz and a beam, continuously pulsing. More evanescent is Footfalls, where a woman whose name may be May or its anagram Amy, paces back and forth on a stage board. Her invisible mother speaks to

INTRODUCTION

11

her and about her. Each of the women asks questions about suffering in a life from which they may have gradu­ ated. The daughter walks and broods. The real mother and fictional mother intone the same question: "Will you never have done . . . revolving it all?" Even after death, the mind circles round and round on suffering, and in a semblance of such circling, the feet walk back and forth—in fiction and in theater. I have been glancing at the content of Beckett's plays, which resonate, however, through form. Beckett's own sentence about Joyce's Work in Progress has often boomeranged against him: "Here form is content, content is form." However, to quote him again: "It is not." Against critical fashion, against a reductive biography, I persist in finding a deep and wide experiential wisdom in Beckett's works. The wisdom is indistinguishable from the form it takes, but it can be analyzed; it is not pure form, whatever that may be. Beckett's vision is tragic in its pain at human suffering, in its dismay at life's brevity, in its frustration at absurdity. He did not originate any of these Angsts, but he did find original forms for his feelings. The frugality of the forms heightens their evocative intensity. His precisely molded structures can convey a sense of cosmic chaos, even though the form orders that chaos. Beckett has re­ marked, "I simply produce an object,"5 but the dramatic ob­ ject is pregnant with performance by human skills. Beck­ ett's dramatic roles challenge the actor not only in his craft but in his secret identity. Beckett's plays urge director and designer to drown the ego in disciplined detail. Beckett is an important writer because he writes about important experiences in words that precisely convey their importance. If I underline this importance, it is to stress first things first. His wide appeal, however, rests uneasily upon his humor. Even scholars, embarrassed at profes­ sional gravity, have guffawed at the vaudeville gags of Godot—unbuttoned flies, insistent bladders, dropped trou­ sers, broken embraces, unexpected blows, speaking while chewing, juggling hats, manifest odors, and suicide feints.

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Underlying most of these lazzi is the recalcitrance of objects to mere human manipulation. Beckett extends the signifi­ cance of the Swiss clown Grock's famous phrase—"Nicht modoooglich." "Nothing to be done" is his best-known example of extensible significance; Estragon means that he can do nothing about taking off his boots, but Vladimir has been trying all his life to evade the conclusion that there is nothing to be done about life. Again and again in Godot and Endgame, we respond to a comic line with a double take because of its extensible significance. Through the years, however, Beckett's humor has grown grimmer un­ til, in the plays of the 1970s, its metallic gleam lies almost wholly in the irony of the situation—a disembodied mouth, a toothless smile, pacing tatters. No guffaws, no chuckles greet these late images, and the plays that contain them appeal deeply but not widely. Appeal has been of minor importance to Beckett all his writing life. His own sternest critic, he shapes each object to the best of his considerable ability, then sends it out into print or production. Most of Beckett's post-Endgame plays originate in English, which he has called "a good theatre language because of its concreteness, its close relationship between thing and vocable."6 Whether French or English in origin, most of his plays undergo his own translation into the other language, with minor revision. In directing, Beckett subjects the plays—in the English, French, or German version—to further revision, but he has not pub­ lished these final revisions.7 Beckett's plays are nourished on fundamental ten­ sions—words wrung from silence, words belied by ges­ tures, gestures wrested from inertia, darkness invaded by light, hope betrayed by habit, passion eroded by compas­ sion, mind divorced from feeling, mismatched couples straining to part. My words may read abstractly, but the tensions in the plays are excruciatingly concrete, and they are unique to each play. Too much critical shorthand has been written about a single Beckett hero changing name

INTRODUCTION

13

from work to work, but one has to be blind not to distin­ guish Hamm from Dan Rooney; deaf not to know Mouth from M. Vladimir and Estragon are not identical twins; the actor playing Estragon usually elicits higher praise, for Vladimir's is the harder role. On the rare occasions when Beckett speaks of his characters, he calls them "my peo­ ple." Not symbols, or objects, or fictions, but people. A quarter-century after Godot was first performed, it is common but perverse to maintain that Beckett's plays take place nowhere and at no time; that nobodies participate in a static action of repetitive activities. Although Beckett's plays would have brought small pleasure to Antoine (The bleeding flesh doesn't hang on hooks.), they emerge from Western theater traditions—a residue of tragedy and com­ edy in Godot and Endgame, marriage farce in Happy Days, melodrama in Play, folk drama in All That Fall. Beckett pil­ fers or parodies as he sees fit—whether it be Godot's mes­ senger who descends from Greek tragedy or Hamm's ruminations that recall Hamlet. Beckett's plays neverthe­ less remain greatly his own, hewn through the decades to their spare ineluctable shapes. The late George Devine of the Royal Court Theatre in London, speaking of the man Beckett, has expressed what many have felt about his plays: "This man seemed to have lived and suffered so that I could see, and he was generous enough to pass it on to me."8 Although Beckett has been confused with the philosoph­ ically existential, he has moved ever closer to the essential: events recede into tones, characters precipitate into a single inward-looking mind, imagery approaches nudity, questions remain unanswered, sentences shrink to ellipti­ cal phrases, and yet Beckett continues to compose new configurations with a few tenacious words. He was not born into this fierce verbal indigence. We have only to read his early verse, fiction, and especially criticism to be over­ whelmed by his erudition and prolixity. Beckett has claimed that he began truly to write "le jour ou j'ai pris conscience

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de ma betise."9 It is a paradoxical betise, redolent of West­ ern lore and learning, inspiring the very energies of thought. Beckett wishes not merely to reduce but to concentrate to the lowest common human denominator. In the theater particularly, in his theater more than his fiction, these low common human denominators have elicited a shock of recognition in many, many cultures. Beckett's plays are just play, but highly vital play about a dying species. The play provides roles for actors to exercise a diapason of skills, and we can recognize ourselves through their skills. Finally, the significance of Beckett's play lies in the preci­ sion of its wide human embrace. In Vladimir's sentence: "But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not."

THROUGH VIEWS

2 At This Place Samuel Beckett's sense of direction is unusually fine. Through Paris diagonals, London mews, Berlin parks, and North African beaches he picks his unerring way. He lives and works in sparely furnished rooms where every object has its place. So it is quite natural for him to see his plays in space, and to increase his meticulous scenic directions for the decreasing materiality of that space. It is a cliche of Beckett commentary that all his places are alike and all his times at once repetitive and timeless. Like most cliches, this scans a surface truth. Beckett's fictional characters wander through fields, forests, and deserts; they climb mountains, cross rivers, and set out to sea. In drama, how­ ever, his characters are less adventurous, and their habita­ tions less varied. But his people are not identical; each per­ son acts in his own space; even his limbo is somewhere in a theater. Compared to Beckett's plays of the 1970s—total dark­ ness surrounding a spotlit Mouth is the most extreme example—Waiting for Godot is richly baroque, however shocking its bareness when first seen in 1953. That bare­ ness was a calculated contrast with the cluttered livingroom of many modern plays, including Beckett's first ex­ tant drama. Eleutheria, completed in 1947, about two years before Godot, resembles it only in being an intermission ac­ tivity between Beckett's novels.1 A three-act play set in Paris, its first two acts divide the stage between the hero Victor Krap's miserable hotel room and his family's furniture-filled salon. Predictably, poverty wins out, and the salon disappears from Act III. Although the main ac­ tion of Act I takes place in the salon, and Act II in the hotel room, a marginal action is mimed in the other set-

THROUGH VIEWS

18

ting. (Both settings are diagrammed in Beckett's manu­ script.) Beckett's scenic direction specifies: "A vrai dire moins une action qu'un site, souvent vide."a Vide or not, Beckett gives detailed attention to that action as site. More revealing in the light of subsequent Beckett plays is the contrast between the two simultaneous settings: "Π s'agit done d'un espace dualiste s'exprimant, sur Ie plan scenique, moins par des effets de transition que par Ie fait que la chambre de Victor absorbe Ies trois-quarts de la scene et par la desaccord flagrant entre Ies deux mobiliers, celui de la chambre de Victor un lit-cage sans plus, celui du salon Krap une table ronde ties elegante, quatre chaises d'epoque, un fauteuil, un lampadaire et une applique."" Except for the simultaneous decors, there is little to distin­ guish the salon from the setting of a hundred other Pari­ sian plays, but it is rare to find a hotel room that is bare except for a folding bed, especially when that room moves across the stage in successive acts, till it finally commands the whole stage. The bourgeois characters of Eleutheria comment unfa­ vorably on the Spartan room of Victor Krap, though the hotel owner affirms that the room is in demand. For all its bareness, the room might be realistic; people come and go through its single door, and the single window looks down on a city street. But the dual setting is ostentatious in sig­ nalling that realism is transcended. In the last act the fold­ ing bed is front and center, with the hero enthroned upon it. Victor looks long and hard at the audience before stretching out full-length on the bed and turning his thin 3

In fact, less an action than a site, often empty. We are therefore dealing with two spaces expressed scenically less by sharp transition than by the fact that Victor's room takes up three-fourths of the stage, and by the flagrant contrast between the furnishings—in Vic­ tor"s room nothing but a folding bed, in the Krap salon a very elegant round table, four period chairs, an armchair, wall-lamp and candelabra. b

AT THIS PLACE

19

back. Beckett's intention was to harmonize stage setting with soul setting. With Godot, Beckett moved outdoors into another world and into the best-known setting of modern drama: "A country road. A tree." The road has been rendered horizon­ tally, diagonally, curvilinearly; on flat or raked stage; against perspective backdrop or cyclorama. Most usually, the road is indistinguishable from the actual stage floor, to which the text archly refers: Pozzo: It isn't by any chance the place known as the Board? Much ingenuity has been expended on the tree in this arid place. In Roger Blin's original production, cardboard and coathangers were converted to twining trunks which diverged into slim branches at the top. Quite dark at twilight, the tree looked luminous after the moon's sudden rise. Short branches punctuated the trunk one-third and two-thirds of the way to the top, for the tree could be sepa­ rated into three parts, each fitting into the suit-case of an actor on Godot's first European tour. In the main, however, the trees of Godot retain full height even after the set is struck. Jan Kott saw a fig tree in a Tunisian Godot, and another friend saw an olive tree in Mexico. For a 1961 Paris revival, the sculptor Giacometti molded plaster on graceful wire; he or Beckett repositioned the branches before each evening's performance. For Beckett's 1975 Berlin produc­ tion, the designer Matias drew a three-curved semiabstraction. In Alan Simpson's Dublin production the real tree was human height, and in Stanford, California, Alan Schneider found a scrub oak that had dried to a glowing gold. Sometimes a circle of spikes tops a vertical pole, and all too often the tree is converted to a cross. The published Godot opposes vertical tree to horizontal road, but in Beck­ ett's Berlin production a low stone and a tall tree became opposite magnetic poles, the tree attracting Vladimir and the stone Estragon. During Godot the four main characters range over the

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THROUGH VIEWS

stage. Vladimir and Estragon pace, dance, stagger, and hop, Vladimir in curves, Estragon in straight lines. The four main characters look up at the sky and fall down on the ground. Vladimir and Estragon often come close to fall­ ing, but right themselves by feats of balance. During the course of the play Vladimir, Pozzo, and especially Estragon sit down, although Pozzo alone has a stool. One on each side of the stage, Vladimir and Estragon peer into the wings. Estragon runs to the back of the stage, to the front of the stage, and tries to hide behind the tree. Movement patterns of Act I are reversed in Act II, but the many movements give the actors possession of the stage in all its dimensions. As Fehsenfeld and McMillan point out: "The curves and circuits of 'Inspection of place,' the approaches to the tree, and the 'little turns' are all part of the endless circularity of life on earth."2 Although Vladimir and Estragon spend most of the play on stage, Vladimir twice leaves to urinate, and in Beckett's production both friends leave (separately) during Lucky's harangue, which refers to French places in the original French; English and Irish places in Beckett's English translation. Pozzo, who owns a manor, claims that the road runs through his land, and the friends never dispute this. That road usually looks like a stage, but road or stage is well-defined to us, so that we laugh at the friends who fail to recognize it. It is preposter­ ous that they don't know where they are since we know where they are. Loss of memory afflicts them, especially about such bas­ ics as space and time. In pre-Godot times the friends lived in the Vaucluse, might have climbed the Eiffel Tower. Wherever they may have met Godot in a preplay past, he apparently made an appointment for Saturday at twilight by a tree. Soon after the play opens, the friends' conversa­ tion focuses on the place—"Charming spot." Estragon in­ sinuates that they are at the wrong place because "We came here yesterday," and presumably the appointment was for another place. Not that Estragon recognizes this place. In Act II Vladimir does find the place familiar, but

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Estragon denies that they were here yesterday, and Vlad­ imir tries to bolster his argument with the circumstantial evidence of Estragon's boots and Lucky's hat. Reviewing the events that we have witnessed, Vladimir implores Estragon to recognize the locale, and Estragon, suddenly furious, explodes: "Recognize! What is there to recognize? All my lousy life I've crawled about in the mud! And you talk to me about scenery! (Looking wildly about him.) Look at this muckheap! I've never stirred from it!" Consistent with Estragon's volatile temperament, but extending signifi­ cance to all human imprisonment on this "muckheap," the outburst theatricalizes what Beckett wishes us to see in space at large: however one may move about, one doesn't stir. In no subsequent play does Beckett make such versatile capital of the place of action, though Act Without Words I exploits space comparably—up and down, in and out, back and forth; a human being sits, falls, stands, lies, and moves about. But the mute play cannot, like Godot, create tension between the characters' sense of place and our own. The tension is quite different in Endgame, where Beckett shifts mordantly to the box-set; we are boxed into the stage world with its claustrophobic boundaries. Front and center is Hamm's armchair on castors, and front left are twin ashbins. One high window faces an invisible earth, and one an invisible sea; a door on the right leads to Clov's thousand-cubic-foot kitchen. The exit to the external world is somewhere offstage, and how Hamm arrives at his cupboard—also offstage—is a mystery or an oversight. Calculatedly mysterious is the geographic location of Hamm's shelter. As in Godot specific places of Endgame are relegated to the past (or to fictional Kov): Nagg and Nell were engaged at Lake Como, and their legs were ampu­ tated in an accident on the road to Sedan. The more recent past, however, touches on present ambiguity. Hamm mentions his kingdom and his paupers, which Clov visited on horse or bicycle, but where is this kingdom? Hamm

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might declare with Shakespeare's Prospero: "This cell's my court; here have I few attendants, I And subjects none abroad." An earlier version of Endgame set a crumbling house in Picardy, but Beckett excised such local reference. Hamm guesses that they may be in a hole, and Clov twice sums up the outside world: "Zero." Although "There are no more ..." announces the disappearance of several objects, the shelter seems to be well stocked with the amenities of a Spartan life—food, clothes, catheter, sheets, insecticide, seeds, painting, telescope, tape, oil-can, toy dog, alarmclock, lozenges, perhaps boards for a raft stored in Clov's cubical kitchen. Nevertheless, the life is Spartan—Nagg and Nell trickling away in their corner ashbins, Hamm posed at stage center in his armchair (which becomes a bed by a fling of the sheet), and Clov attending to their needs as well as his own. The shelter is a residual living-room set at the edge of earth and sea in a depopulated world. At the same time it is itself a world. Hamm orders Clov to wheel him "round the world" so small that Clov literally retraces steps from Hamm to door or window or ashbin. In Godot the charac­ ters are lost in an immensity that the stage does not bound, but the characters of Endgame huddle in their cramped space. Though "There are no more coffins," the shelter it­ self becomes the family coffin, which designers have ren­ dered with some variety. The first designer, Jacques Noel, draped gray-green curtains semi-circularly, with two high porthole windows, and this arrangement was seen as the interior of a skull. No such impression was conveyed by Alan Schneider's first American production, which bared the brick wall of New York City's Cherry Lane Theater— "All that's hollow!" The English premiere, played like the French at London's Royal Court Theatre, displayed a rec­ tangular gray space designed by Jocelyn Herbert. Six years later, at the Aldwych Theatre again in London, the stage was narrowed and the perspective falsified so that we looked down into an underground shelter. Back at the

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Royal Court for Beckett's seventieth birthday season, End­ game's curved wall was disconcertingly modern in style and comfort. Other designers have converted the stage to play-pen, boxing-ring, wire cage, circumventing the spa­ tial stringency of Endgame that renders poignant remem­ bered forests and beaches. Tampering with the gray light of the bare interior robs performance of a sharp contrast with the setting of Hamm's story on a cold, bright, windy, dry December 24, for referential places gain power against a flat gray background. In All That Fall, Beckett's first radio play, place is refer­ ential, conjured by words and sounds. So suggestive was this Dublin suburb that Pierre Melese wrote of its setting as "Boghill, alias Foxrock" (Beckett's birthplace).3 The BBC recording evokes a turn-of-the-century Irish town, with its two-track railroad station, white-fenced racecourse, houses separated by fields, rare vehicles rattling down an unpaved road, local flora and fauna, the latter making pastoral sounds. Lest we forget that invisible setting, Mrs. Rooney conjures it midway through the play: The entire scene, the hills, the plain, the racecourse with its miles and miles of white rails and three red stands, the pretty little wayside station, even you yourselves, yes, I mean it, and over all the clouding blue, I see it all When the "world is feeding," background noises disap­ pear after a single echo of each. Dan Rooney describes a retrospective view of his "silent, backstreet, basement office." Stumbling homeward, Maddy Rooney informs her blind husband (and us) of a ditch that they narrowly avoid. In the last few minutes of All That Fall wind and rain sound through the couple's dialogue, and the play that began with warm cries of domestic animals ends in a tempest's cold sounds. Pat Magee played Mr. Slocum in All That Fall and read Beckett's poems on the BBC. His voice like an elevated whisper inspired Beckett's return to his native language

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THROUGH VIEWS

and to his native Ireland in Krapp's Last Tape. Although Krapp's den lacks an address, the overtones are Irish— from the Vespers service to the last visit of Fanny, a bony old ghost of a suitably named whore. Thirty years earlier Krapp's neighbor was Miss McGlome of Connaught; long before that he walked with his bitch on Croghan. The three main events of Krapp's life have taken place near waters that suggest Ireland—the death of his mother by a weir, the self-revelation on a jetty in a storm, and the renuncia­ tion of love on a breeze-swept lake. On stage, however, Beckett severely restricts Krapp's movements—at or around his table, to and from the offstage darkness. James Knowlson has analyzed the ideational base of Krapp's Last Tape,4 but most productions present an old man in credibly human circumstances, brooding about his lost love. That way lies the peril of sentimentality. Beckett avoided this peril by high stylization, but he cautioned himself in his Director's Notebook: "Attention exces de stylization." So meticulous was this "attention" that his production might look realistic to the imperceptive eye. Sharpening the contrast between light and dark, choreo­ graphing Krapp's every gesture in his small circle of light, enlarging his shadow when he is offstage—Beckett's di­ rectorial decisions also show his wariness about excess of realism. Embers, Beckett's second radio play, is his first step into a candidly unreal landscape, an invisible soulscape. Godot (1949) and Endgame (1956) convert stage terrain into a gen­ eralized human setting. All That Fall (1956) and Krapp's Last Tape (1958) retreat to a quasi-realistic Irish background. Embers (1959) is the first of several Beckett plays whose set­

ting is a mind. This seems a radical departure from drama as theatricalization of relationships in a given time and place, but Embers theatricalizes the embers of time, space, and relationships within the mind of the protagonist Henry. In the BBC recording (with the late Jack MacGowran as Henry, and Pat Magee in the small roles of Music Master

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and Riding Master of Henry's daughter Addie) Henry's steps are audible on the shingle, but other characters come and go without footsteps; mere voices, they exist only in Henry's mind. His wife Ada, gifted in geometry, suggests space, and his daughter Addie is bounded in time by her music and riding lessons. Like Endgame, Embers is set by the sea, but this sea is audible whenever voices pause. Most of Henry's scenes of memory are also set by the sea—making love with Ada, refusing to swim with his blind father, brooding on his drowned father. Henry's fic­ tion, in contrast, is landlocked in a frozen white world. Fic­ tion, memory, reality—all are invisible on radio. Henry's two fictional characters meet indoors by a dying fire, aware of a dead white world outside. Yet Henry him­ self is on a beach, the sucking sea a metronome for his ebb­ ing life, as Maddy Rooney's laborious footsteps beat out her ebbing life. Both radio plays are graveyards—of a little child in All That Fall, of a blind old man in Embers. In this second radio play Beckett has flung an imaginative gaunt­ let at his radio audience. Imagine the seaside setting for this man's remembered voices, and then imagine an icy background for what he imagines in a cold room with its dying embers. Frozen exterior, cold interior, are thus en­ visioned against an unfathomable aural background in this play titled for ashes. The sea is heard in the many pauses until it grows familiar to us, almost soothing (rather than terrifying) in this dramatization of residual relationships with perhaps dead people. Turning to a full and painfully visible stage with Happy Days (1961), Beckett achieved his happiest blend of re­ flected reality and distinctive non-realism. Sadistically lit, the parched landscape resembles places we have known, but none of us has been irrevocably buried. Though Beck­ ett does not change scene in any play after Eleutheria, scenic permanence is most oppressive in Happy Days. An open-air play like Godot, Happy Days is harsher in light and landscape. No tree relieves the trompe-l'oeil horizon; no moon softens the torrid sun at an invisible zenith. When

26

THROUGH VIEWS

Clov in Endgame announces: "There's no more nature," Hamm accuses him of exaggeration. In Happy Days, how­ ever, there is almost no more nature. Winnie's days have no nights, and gravity is not what it was. When incidents seem to occur, they do not occur naturally, and the natural functions of Winnie and Willie, like objects, are "running out." Winnie still perspires and needs spectacles to read. Willie's nose still collects mucus, his skin erupts in an­ thrax, his skull bleeds when struck, and he retains the gift of sleep. But these processes are residual, like the yellowed pages of Reynold's News. Our eyes are irritated by the un­ changing glare of Winnie's landscape, but we cannot see the emmet she greets or the hole in which Willie escapes from the sun. Like Winnie, we find it "strange" that a parasol can explode and return as good as new; that a mir­ ror can be shattered and return as good as new; that the earth has lost its atmosphere and is literally an "old extin­ guisher." Winnie seems to have memories, and events seem to have occurred, but she absorbs them into her immediate present, replete with a perhaps illusory past. Her recollec­ tions of past places fade between Acts I and II; in I Winnie speaks of a garden scene with Charlie Hunter, a toolshed with Mr. Johnson, and an unlocalized wedding toast; in II, these dwindle to "Charlie . . . kisses . . . the lake . . . the reeds" and the still unlocalized wedding toast. The physi­ cal landscape of Happy Days stretches out as far as Godot, but also contracts as suffocatingly as Endgame. Winnie asks no questions—or very few—about her loca­ tion. Unlike the doubters of Godot, or the diminuendo of Hamm and CIov, Winnie seems to know exactly where she is on the earth that engulfs her. Hers neither to reason why nor hope to die, but to talk through to an unimaginable end. And talking, she conjures a fiction of a house with rooms and stairs and table, a civilized realistic setting in contrast to her own near-wilderness. Beckett contrasts the stage world we see with this house of Winnie's fiction which resembles our own.

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After Happy Days with its desert and house of fiction, Beckett turns away from referential places. The radio plays—Words and Music, Cascando, two Roughs for Radio— treat verbal composition, but the work-space is not desig­ nated. The abandoned Roughs are indoor scenes: the first takes place in an undescribed room where a man panics because he fails to hear Voice and Music. Number II takes place in a Kafkaesque office, where Animator, Stenog­ rapher, and Whip cajole or threaten Fox into story. Cascando and Words and Music play the invisible neutrality of radio space against vivid evocations of fiction. As Clas Zilliacus has admirably analyzed,5 Words and Music suggests a medieval court, but Cascando suggests Beckett's fictional landscapes within an unlocalized scene. The Wordscharacter in both radio plays creates places. Words and Music is set in the dark, but Lord Croak has seen a face on the steps of a tower, itself a resonant struc­ ture from early times to Yeats. Unable to compose on the theme of Love, Words nevertheless composes two lyrics on love, though the nominal subjects are Age and Face. Both lyrics barely hint at places: a face that shines through ashes as once through starlight; a love scene that conjures a dark peace. Cascando is saturated in referential places. Opener speaks only of time—the month of May—but the Voice he opens conducts the fictional Woburn through places of Beckett's fiction—shed, shelter, hollow, cave, boreen, bilge, hills, sea, mud, sand, stones. At the play's end it is Opener who invents the spatial metaphor of "two outings . . . an image, like any other" for the Voice and Music we hear. With Play in 1962 Beckett approaches what I will call theatereality.6 The Board of Godot is still fictionalized as a country road, the proscenium-bound flats or curving drapes of Endgame as a shelter, and even the stage lights of Happy Days as the sun. But the provocative spotlight of Play is exactly that—a spotlight. Starting with Alain Robbe-Grillet's review of Godot,7 critics have said that Beckett's plays were neither more nor less than what

28

THROUGH VIEWS

greeted eye and ear, but Beckett's drama continues to be fictional: i.e., actors play roles. However, they play the post-Play roles in fictional places that may conform to ac­ tual theater space. In the pre-Play plays Beckett gains ten­ sion between a strange stage setting and verbal glimpses of other places; in the post-Play plays fictional and theater situation and place can converge—theatereality. In Play the light belongs to theatereality, but the three urns suggest fictional death and burial—fictional since the actual actors are fully alive, however impassively and tonelessly they act. Play may be partitioned into Chorus, Narra­ tion, Meditation,Λ the first is incomprehensible since the three characters speak together; in Narration the characters narrate the melodramatic events of their lovers' triangle, without revealing how they arrived in the state we see. Both Wl and W2 speak of large houses, Wl with a morning-room, W2 with a butler. In W2's house, when M confesses, both M and W2 hear a lawn-mower outside, and W2's house is finally closed down. In the more hesi­ tant Meditation the three characters meditate on the sur­ roundings we witness—a dark silence fractured only by lightcued speeches. Unlike us, the characters are unaware of one another's presence; each of them might be alone in a confrontation with the trigger-light. But even in this limbo, they imagine fictional places: M situates the two women "now in the one dear old place, now in the other." Wl wonders whether M and W2 are together in the sunshine, W2 by a window as in life. M has a fantasy of the three of them drifting in a boat. Despite such imagined scenes, each of the characters tries to make sense of actuality, physical and metaphysical. Film and Eh Joe, Beckett's first ventures into the cine­ matic and television media, return to the fiction of visual realism, and the returns are similar. Each protagonist flees perception, and the cameras trace the flights into a room and within a room, but the rooms differ. In Film the room is reached only after sequences in the street and on the stairs. Beckett's text specifies: "This obviously cannot be

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O's room"—presumably because it is so full of eyes, which O seeks to avoid. Though the room is "barely furnished," the furnishings are a plenitude in Beckett's universe—large cat, small dog, parrot in cage, goldfish in bowl, mirror, window and curtain, couch with rug, rocking-chair, and print of God on the wall. Finally, all items vanish when O and E confront one another—"self-perception maintains in being." Eh Joe also dramatizes self-perception. However, in con­ trast to the silence of Film, a woman's voice "like flintglass" drills her way into Joe's consciousness. Before we hear her, we see Joe's fear, reflected in place as he draws curtain over window, over door, over cupboard. He looks under the bed, and only then does he begin to relax, but that renders him the more vulnerable to the woman's stiletto-voice. Joe perceives his own past through another's voice. In each play for the visual media Beckett disdains the technical versatility of the medium. There are no flash­ backs to earlier scenes; instead, Beckett gains intensity through close focus. Film plays two camera angles against one another, and Eh Joe zooms in on Joe's face in nine moves of a single camera. In both plays the rooms fade away as the place of action transfers to a man's face, visible reflector of his mind. Between these pieces Beckett wrote Come and Go, which he subtitled with the neologism "dramaticule." Three women, seated on an invisible bench, recall sitting to­ gether as schoolgirls on a log. Surrounded by stage dark­ ness, the three women move and speak in stylized econ­ omy. Encircled in light, suspended as if in a void, they dream of rings. As in earlier Beckett plays, the briefly men­ tioned place is in tension with spare visible theater space. Not I is Beckett's most radical concentration of theater to the immediate perceptions of an audience. Seeing a mouth that hovers in darkness, hearing its whirling words, we are radically displaced—to use Porter Abbott's phrase.9 Given no fictional ground on stage, we hear of an April meadow, five times evoked by the mouth. Other locales are hinted

30

THROUGH VIEWS

by a word or two speeding through Mouth's story—birth into a "godforsaken hole," silence in a shopping center, crying in Croker's Acres, silence in a courtroom, loquacity in a lavatory. Although Croker's Acres is an actual place near Beckett's native Foxrock, the April meadow has no lo­ cation; it could be anywhere in the northern hemisphere on a bright lark-filled morning. Time and place tend to coalesce in this evocation; light and sound tend to coalesce in this evocation. Prompted, Mouth tries to place the buzz and especially the ray that recur in her discourse; the buzz is like a dull roar, the ray a moonbeam probing through clouds. But if our concentration flags in the thea­ ter, Mouth and her words become for us an actual buzz and ray, theatereality. That Time belongs to the same family as Not I, and Beck­ ett bars them from performance on the same program. It is theatereality that relates them. Less fragmentary than a disembodied mouth, the head of the old man might be a death mask glowing through the dark. Although the set­ ting is again total blackness (hard to obtain in most thea­ ters), the old man has memories that ramble through many places while we see only his ancient human head. Each of his three memory-streams flows around stone—a hiding place for an imaginative child, a bench for lovers to ex­ change vows, a support for an old man. The child's refuge is once again removed since it is sought in vain by the aged man; the love scene takes place at the edge of a wheatfield and a woods, or near a canal, or on a beach, and finally dissolves into a lonely setting by a window open to a bil­ lowing shroud; in old age a derelict seeks momentary shel­ ter from rain and cold in a portrait gallery, a post office, a public library where the dust speaks before it finally set­ tles. Like the life scenes of Not I, those of That Time are in­ choate memories; they flow from the one image— mouth—and toward the other—head—in theatereality. Footfalls is the last to date of Beckett's theatereality dramas.10 M, the daughter, walks back and forth on a brightly lit wooden board. Mother and daughter speak in

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three scenes about a daughter walking back and forth. Each of the first three scenes of Footfalls shows and tells of this pacing woman, with her rhythmic footfalls. The words of the first scene situate the aged mother in a sickbed, the middle-aged daughter tending her. The words of the sec­ ond scene situate mother and young daughter in a family home where the daughter first began to pace. The words of the third scene situate the perhaps dead daughter in a church transept where her pacing stamps on the arm of crucified Christ. Hospital, home, church, and cross-arm coalesce as soundingboard for the footfalls, in action and in reaction to human pain. In the fourth and last scene the light shines briefly on the board. This is "the place known as the Board," predicted by Pozzo in Godot nearly three decades earlier. In Beckett's theater plays of the 1970s, containing theatereality, tension grows between the spare invariant set­ ting and the memories of lived-in places. In his even more recent television plays Beckett comes close to painting still lives in movement, so visually are the works conceived. "He writes paintings," actress Billie Whitelaw has said.11 Produced as Shades, the two television plays trace a series of repetitive movements in a room, as opposed to Beckett's first television play Eh Joe which zooms from room to face. In Ghost Trio the room is a monastic gray cell, with door, window, and floor pallet of the same dimensions. How­ ever, these realistic objects become relentlessly rectangular shapes. Moreover, gray window and door almost fade into their respective gray walls. Whenever the camera closes in on window or door, it shows rectangularity in this play about a triangle. Unlike Joe, who searches his room for in­ truders, F of Ghost Trio starts suddenly in anticipation of a visit from a woman; he rises to look out of window or door, but both open into blackness or nowhere. Joe's fears are more easily allayed than F's hopes, and in the three movements of Ghost Trio F will await the woman with the identical abrupt gestures, a woman's even unimpassioned voice narrating his expectation. The awaited one never

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THROUGH VIEWS

comes, but Beethoven's music ceases on the arrival of a boy glistening with rain, who shakes his head, and returns to dark. Only after the boy's departure, with the man again seated, do we look directly at his face, eyes nearly closed as Beethoven's music swells to a crescendo. The camera slowly recedes, framing the man ever more fully, a seated crucifixion.12 . . .but the clouds . . . also crucifies, since the fixed camera traces the protagonist moving along the arms and vertical of a cross. As in Krapp and Come and Go, the dark sur­ rounds a strong circle of light. On the left is a door, on the right a closet, and between them at the apse of an imagi­ nary cross is the lone character's sanctum. The action de­ pends on this unrealistic paradigmatic location. The two doors and the sanctum are three corners of a cross, the man always coming in or going out at left in hat and great­ coat, always coming in or going out at right in gown and skullcap. Haunted by a woman's face, he prays in his sanctum for her to appear to him; most often she does not, but when, rarely, she does, her motionless face fills the screen in three-quarters profile, her lips silently moving. Abandoning dry description, the man addresses to this un­ realized face the final lines of Yeats' Tower. Then all goes dark. Rather than a memory of actual places, . . . but the clouds . . . crystallizes all places into three areas—door to the outer world, closet of the inner world, and sanctum for dreams—before all dissolve into "the deepening shades" of Yeats' poem. The years reveal a change for Beckett's settings, from the ostentatious symbolism of his jettisoned Eleutheria to the haunting stage emblems of human predicaments, and on to human fragments sparking against the dark. These graphic images are not mere ideograms to illustrate that life is static and/or repetitive. Even as stasis and/or repeti­ tion etch these images into our vision, we hear of other emotionally evocative places—lifesaving from the Rhone River, loss of limb at Sedan, expiration by a canal, a kiss in a toolshed, melody in an April field. These resonant recol-

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lections play against the stark images. In the last two stage plays, places are heavily freighted—a stony old face hear­ ing of stones impervious to aging, and a wooden board impervious to the pain it hosts. Within inflexible theater space Beckett enfolds words about humanized places. On the small television screen, in contrast, Beckett sternly re­ fuses humanization of space: in Ghost Trio a room is re­ duced to geometry, and its apertures reveal no vistas; in . . .but the clouds . . . door, closet, and sanctum are mere words for the darkness that devours the single figure, whatever the costume.

3 At This Moment in Time Samuel Beckett lives with clock and calendar. Good Friday fell on April 13 in 1906, the year of his birth, and on that day he annually "celebrates" the crucifixion.1 Other birth­ days, holidays, anniversaries do not slip by unnoticed. He punctiliously dates his letters, acknowledges letters by date written, and sends traditional good wishes to theater friends on opening nights. Though he walks to most of his appointments, he is never late. Even when his commit­ ments are closely scheduled in different countries, they never overlap. In 1930 his poem Whoroscope won the Hours Press prize for the best poem on time. His 1931 study of Proust analyzes 'Time creative and destructive." His 1931 Kid mocks time with two stage alarm-clocks, and clocks are a recurrent prop in later plays—Pozzo's grandfather gave him a watch, Clov and Hamm listen to an alarm-clock, B schedules activities by his watch in Acf Without Words II, Krapp has a silver watch. In more recent plays, sound ef­ fects are linked with time—the bells of Happy Days and the chimes of Footfalls. No one in his stage plays mentions the exact fictional hour, day, month, and year of action, but time is nevertheless the shadow protagonist of his plays. The basic time-convention of drama is that playing time equals played time. However many hours, years, or cen­ turies may elapse between acts, it is hard to stretch or con­ dense playing time. Not impossible, but hard. Franz Link analyzes various techniques for stretching the feeling of duration, such as talking about time or contrasting main action time with time in dreams, stories, memories.2 Not only does Beckett stretch the feeling of duration within his plays, but each play seems to open in a time without be­ ginning. Monique Borie observes:

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Les "encore" et Ies "enfin" qui jalonnent Ie debut des pieces de Beckett donnent au declenchement de la re­ presentation un caractere de temps sans commencement, qui ne devient en quelque sorte spectaculaire que par hasard, et non en vertu d'une radicale nouveaute ou du privilege de la "crise" (comme c'etait Ie cas dans la tradi­ tion classique). Toute ptece est la reprise d'une vieille histoire, d'une vieille histoire qui n'en finit pas de se repeter.33 Each repetition brings us closer to death, and I would therefore modify Borie's observation: Beckett does begin his plays near their crises, but whereas classical peripetias thrill through to a conclusion, Beckett's plays are unfinal. Rather than Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end, Beck­ ett's plays are endless continua; his protagonists are in the tradition of the Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, the Woman without a Shadow—cursed to endure through time. Richard Coe has pointed to the presiding deity: "If [Beckett's] novels are dominated by 'old Geulincx, dead young,' and the symbolic dreaming stance of Dante's Belacqua, the Grey Eminence of the plays is the Greek phi­ losopher Zeno."4 Zeno is a Gray Eminence, and Beckett is his semblable, his frere. In their world finite beings are in­ compatible with an infinite universe. But unlike Zeno, who propounds paradoxes, Beckett broods about his finite crea­ tures and inspires them with theatrical life. How dramatize infinity? "For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were some­ thing," Sam writes in Beckett's Watt, and, similarly, the only way to dramatize infinity, the other face of nothing, is to make it concrete. Milton's "darkness visible" fuses Beck­ ett's silence audible, threatening the finite stage beings a The "again"s and "at last"s that trail through the start of Beckett's plays open the performance in a time without beginning, which is ob­ served as though by chance, and not by virtue of radical novelty or the privileged position of "crisis" (as was the case in classical tradition). Every play is the resumption of an old story, of an old story that never finishes being repeated.

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THROUGH VIEWS

who live by words in time. In Beckett's work more than that of any previous playwright (comparable to that of Shakespeare's Sonnets) time becomes the subject of dra­ matic dialogue. Unlike space, it cannot be rendered visible. But as space looked different in successive Beckett plays, time sounds different. Beckett's people are finite beings, but in the successive plays they grope closer to infinity. Beckett's first, still unplayed play Eleutheria is subtitled "drame bourgeois," and its characters live in clock time. His most recent television plays are video paintings of phantom images. In the thirty years between these extremes Beckett has composed plays for several media, with time especially critical in the thea­ ter, that home of the present tense. Time marks even the titles of Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, That Time. Time looms large in Beckett's three full-length dramas, which yield different images of an unending present, and all three are a world away from his most re­ cent work, which plays against the present, toward past, future, or imagination. The very title Waiting for Godot implies duration, but it also posits a goal for waiting. However, the title hints at more than the performance fulfills. Beckett stretches the time of waiting—not measurable by clock or calendar—to cast doubt on the arrival of Godot. We expect a clock in a realistic room with fourth wall removed, but not on a coun­ try road. The expanse of space harmonizes with a con­ comitant expanse of time. We cannot even guess at a fic­ tional duration for the play. Does it obey the unity of time? (French concern with the unity of time begins with ChapeIain's "Lettre a Godeau sur la regie des vingt-quatre heures." [my italics]) The play is riddled with doubt about time. As nearly as Vladimir can remember, the two friends were to await Godot by a tree on a Saturday evening. They choose the stage tree because they see no others, but Saturday is more problematical. Insidiously, Estragon probes: "But what Saturday? And is it Saturday?" Maybe it is the long Satur-

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day between crucifixion and resurrection, which Christ spent in Hell. "All my life I've compared myself to him," Estragon affirms. However the vagabonds may spend their days (apparently apart) and their nights (apparently to­ gether), they meet by a tree at dusk on what may be Sat­ urday, hoping that Godot will come. Beyond this ren­ dezvous, Godot makes no demands on them—neither obedience nor morality. The specifics of the Godot who is nowhere and everywhere in the play are blurred by the vaguely designated time and place. Nevertheless, Vladimir comforts himself: "Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come. . . . We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment." Godot, in contrast, may be a saint, but he has apparently not kept his appointment. Time and place of play, the characters' concern with time and place of play, conspire to make us feel that it will be a long wait. (The actual playing time of Beckett's production was about seventy minutes for Act I, fifty minutes for Act II.) The light doesn't change (for most of each act), the landscape doesn't change (for each act), pauses are nu­ merous, and wayfarers are minimal. Life's pressures are low: Estragon eats and sleeps; Vladimir urinates and feels cold. Hats and shoes of civilization serve a little more gracefully than animal needs to pass the time until Godot arrives. The two vagabonds have to explore their own re­ sources to while away the wait for Godot. Vladimir phrases their situation accurately: "What's certain is that the hours are long, under these conditions, and constrain us to beguile them with proceedings which, how shall I say, which may at first sight seem reasonable until they become a habit." (my italics) These "proceedings" include games that require no props: start again, think, contradict, ques­ tion, thank, abuse, excuse, exercise. Each game is a swift little pastime from which the friends return to the basic slow continuum. Vladimir and Estragon keep their ap­ pointment, and they wait inventively for a Godot who does not.

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THROUGH VIEWS

Though Estragon and Pozzo both pay lip service to the appointment, it is Vladimir who is its main architect. We see the time of play through his eyes, feel it through his weariness. At the beginning it is Vladimir who empha­ sizes the repetitive nature of his meeting with Estragon: "again . . . back. . . . Together again. . . . The same lot as usual? . . . I'm tired telling you that." At the play's begin­ ning it is already a long wait. During the course of the play it is Vladimir who keeps reminding Estragon of their ap­ pointment. In Act II it is Vladimir who notices the leaves on the tree, denoting seasonal change. (In Beckett's pro­ duction he fingers a leaf to start the act.) In Act II, too, it is Vladimir who claims to have been there an hour, after some fifteen minutes of playing time. Most importantly, it is Vladimir who, while Estragon sleeps, watches the swift rise of the moon after the departure of Godot's boy. Like us all, Vladimir experiences time variously. "Time has stopped!" of Act I changes to: "Time flows already" in Act II. Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, and Beckett named the play for their wait. But Pozzo and Lucky do not wait, and they are not interested in Godot. Pozzo fumbles for Godot's name, and Lucky never mentions it. If, rather than basing the title on Vladimir's perception of time, Beckett had substituted Pozzo's view, he might have called the play Taking the Evening Air, or Rushing Around with Sand, or Come and Go. Pozzo and Lucky move through both acts, as Vladimir and Estragon—omnipresent—keep their appointment in both acts. Time elapses between the acts, as in many dramas, but the amount of time is undesignated and incalculable. Act II adorns the tree with leaves, so it must be spring. Act II shows shoes on the ground, so they may belong to Estra­ gon; a hat may have belonged to Lucky. However long the lapse of time between the acts, the time of the friends is essentially arrested by their wait for Godot. Although Vladimir states that no one ever recognizes them, we rec­ ognize them as unchanged. When Pozzo and Lucky arrive

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in Act II, however, they are changed. Perhaps the proc­ esses—wait and change—are unrelated, but it is tempting to link them; those who wait cannot change, but those who move "On." deteriorate. The two couples represent an­ tithetical attitudes to infinity—wait or wander. Waiting for Godot or nothingness or infinity, Vladimir and Estragon are ageless, with only the haziest past and a hazier future, tied to Godot. Ignorant of Godot, Pozzo and Lucky live in time. Pozzo's watch tells hours and years, but Pozzo loses his watch, and considers his heart a poor substitute. Changed and changeless, each couple lives by its own compulsions. Each couple has a long history of association. Estragon and Vladimir have been together for some fifty years; they have harvested grapes and might have climbed the Eiffel Tower when younger. Lucky has been Pozzo's "knook" for nearly sixty years, teaching him beauty, grace, truth. Each couple is faithful to its own habit, but, bored, each couple seizes on the other as a pastime. Each couple sees in the other the climactic possibilities of a dramatic relation­ ship—comedy, tragedy, request, refusal, recognition, and illumination of mystery. But each falls back into its own tedious continuum. Three solo insets (having nothing to do with waiting or wandering) stretch fictional time for us—recitations by Pozzo and Lucky, a song by Vladimir.5 Pozzo is "lyrical" about twilight, that time of waiting for Godot. Though Vladimir and Estragon respond appreciatively to Pozzo, they fail to realize that he prophesies their own experience of time—a deceptive "veil of gentleness and peace" sud­ denly suffused by night. "That's how it is on this bitch of an earth." Lucky's recitation parallels Pozzo's. Both are offered as entertainment, and both trace a darkening in three move­ ments. Pozzo begins with the pale twilight, flashes back to the day's light, and predicts the sudden night. Lucky be­ gins with a timeless God in a calm blue heaven, moves on to fading man, and continues with a stony earth in the

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THROUGH VIEWS

great cold and dark; a coda recapitulates fragments of the three parts, with the stones finally dominating the skull. Lucky promises four times that "time will tell," but that is what it does not do. Time passes without telling. Treating time more subtly than Pozzo, Lucky embraces cosmic time, reaching from a timeless creator to an abode of stones, with the life of man a momentary incident. Lucky's bravura piece has been applauded as an operatic aria, unlike the German round song with which Vladimir opens Act II. An old favorite of Beckett (who translated it from the original German), it exemplifies a Chinese-box structure through time and words: the dog's tombstone commemorates a dog who has been beaten to death and whose tombstone commemorates a dog who has been beaten to death and so on ad infinitum. Since Act II opens with this repetition, implying an endless graveyard, we are immediately mired in the slow pace verbalized through Act I. Repetition in Godot tends to expand our sense of long duration. The two acts imply an infinite number of such acts.6 The repetitive scenes within each act—the friends alone, with Pozzo and Lucky, alone, with Boy, alone— suggest that each day continues the long tedium. Activity, gesture, and phrase confirm the suggestion: questions about time and place, guesses about the kind of tree, Vlad­ imir's admonition for Estragon to calm himself, Estragon's need of food and sleep and Vladimir's of urination, various pleas for help, the search for new games, the desire to hang themselves. Phrasal repetition begins early with: "It hurts? Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts." Vladimir and Estragon alternate these phrases, as they do the phrases closing each act: "Well? Shall we go? Yes, let's go." An undercurrent of long duration tugs also through specific mention of time units: Estragon's "I imagined . . . for a second," Vladimir's "not for an instant," Pozzo's "hour ago," Vladimir's "in a single night," Lucky's "in the year of their Lord," Vladimir's "all those years." The prefix

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"re," meaning "again," is on everybody's lips, repetitively in Lucky's "I resume." Both Estragon and Pozzo ask for the time, and, looking at the sky, Vladimir hasards a guess at seven or eight o'clock. Time is further stressed by such words as "past" and "future," "yesterday" and "tomorrow," "autumn" and "spring," "before" and "after," "first" and "last," "beginning" and "end," as well as Lucky's last word "un­ finished." Time cliches sprinkle the dialogue: "happy days," "good old days," "time flies," "pass the time," "take your time," "time will tell," "for the time being," "in the fullness of time." The scenic direction "as before" translates French "meme jeu." The original French plays on time. A common questioninterjection approximating English "So what?" is "Et apres?" literally "And after?" Estragon muses, "Pendant Ie petit pendant et Ie bref apres," and suggests: "Soyez long, ce sera moins long." Though this word play disappears in translation, occasional aphorisms ricochet off English time: ESTRAGON: It might be better to strike the iron before it

freezes. Funny, the more you eat the worse it gets. It's never the same pus from one second to the next. We are all born mad. Some remain so. VLADIMIR: I get used to the muck as I go along. To every man his little cross . . . Till he dies . . . And is forgotten. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Pozzo undergoes an education in time. In Act I he lives by his watch, but by Act II the watch is lost, along with his sight and, if he is to be believed, his "notion of time." However, he explodes into a meaningful notion, sum-

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THROUGH VIEWS

marizing the situation of finite man in an infinite universe: "They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an in­ stant, then it's night once more." Later, Vladimir repeats Pozzo's key words—astride, grave, birth—with a new nuance, that of time become habit. Much of the play dramatizes habitual routines, repeti­ tions that stretch and flatten time to an eventless con­ tinuum. Day and night, fall and spring, coming and going, and all the little games are easily absorbed into this con­ tinuum. Human time is usually said to consist of past, present, and future, but in Waiting for Godot tense becomes tension. The present is thick and ubiquitous. Infinity threatens with its darkness and silence. Brave little inci­ dents glisten briefly, but they are soon absorbed into the long gray wait. Zeno, the Grey Eminence of Richard Coe's commentary, presides more implacably over Endgame than Godot.7 In Godot one act was like another; one day was like another in the long wait for Godot. Endgame plays through each tedi­ ous minute of part of a single day (eighty-five mintues in Beckett's production) without respite, without goal.8 Mo­ ments of time cannot add up to infinity; they can only stretch on and on in finity. Like Godot, Endgame contains Beckett's strategies to stretch time beyond playing time. As indicated in the pre­ vious chapter, the gray shelter of Endgame is a spatial metaphor for a box in time; though the shelter is the family living room, it cannot be confused with the living rooms of bourgeois drama. The shrouded furniture and reversed pictures are signs of mourning—the hint of an end. But the hint becomes statement with Clov's opening word: "Finished." From Clov's "Finished, nearly finished" to Hamm's "You remain," the play describes an asymptote toward infinity. From "Finished" to "remain" (both time-words) stage life still has its basic needs—food, sleep, and urination. But offstage all is "Corpsed." Like Godot the ground of Endgame is its time continuum, now concentrated to a single act. Logically, two acts sepa-

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rated by an interval should suggest a longer time than one act does. In fact, however, the one unbroken act proves more relentless. "This is slow work," sighs Hamm. More frequently than in Godot, time is stretched through opposi­ tions—morning-evening, light-dark, first-last, end-begin­ ning. Rather than wait for an ambiguous Godot, Hamm has himself to decide continuation or annihilation: "It's time it ended," he realizes in his opening speech, "and yet I hesitate to—he yawns—to end." His choice is between a slow death and a quick one—for flea, rat, and the few re­ maining human beings. When Vladimir in Act I of Godot declares that time has stopped, Pozzo protests. In Endgame no one actually makes that declaration, but all four characters feel it. There is no discrepancy of perspective, no argument about longueur. Hamm asks Clov for the time and weather, and the answer is: "The same as usual." Hamm is "tired," and Clov is "tired of our goings on, very tired." Hamm yawns through his first soliloquy—an infectious action; having just gotten up, he is ready for bed. Everyone seems older than in Godot; the word "old" tolls heavily. Sight and hearing are dim for Nagg and Nell; the latter loses her pulse and "looks like" dead. Hamm implies that his heart is dead. Clov has shrunk, and his legs ache. There is no life outside the shelter; the very waves are lead, and the sun is zero, whatever that may mean. Hamm asks Clov: "Do you not think this has gone on long enough?" And the answer is a resounding: "Yes!" Insets in the main dwindling action still recall specific times. Nell reminisces about an April afternoon on Lake Como. Nagg's story about the Englishman and the tailor begins before New Year and ends three months later. Hamm's chronicle takes place on Christmas Eve, after the suppliant has spent three days to reach the protagonist. The latter consults thermometer, heliometer, anemometer, hygrometer, but no clock. Hamm tells a lugubrious anec­ dote that is at once memory and prophecy—of a painter/ engraver who thought he was witness to the end of the

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world. It is nevertheless in the main action that Hamm "last night" saw a sore within his breast. As in Godot the couples of Endgame have a long history of association. When Hamm cried as a baby, Nagg and Nell removed him from their hearing. Clov came to Hamm when he was very small. These few incidents have been salvaged from the past, as if from another world. Lacking the verve of Vladimir and Estragon, the charac­ ters of Endgame are uninventive in passing time. After Clov unveils him, Hamm initiates almost all the activity—cir­ cling the room, praying to God, playing with a toy dog, commanding Clov to look out the windows or get the gaff or have an idea. Clov's only enterprises are obeying Hamm's orders and threatening to leave him. Clov's flea is an accident. More insistently and repetitively than in Godot, time is the subject of conversation. Endgame begins with Clov's "Finished," spoken four times in his first sentence, and many times thereafter. Clov in his kitchen will watch his light dying while he waits for Hamm's whistle. Hamm de­ lays screwing down the ashbin lids and urinating into a catheter with: "Time enough." Hamm calls his story a chronicle—a record in time. When Nagg stops crying at Nell's apparent death, Hamm comments: "The dead go fast," but the point of the play is that they go slowly, for their lives are a death in life, a "last million last moments." Hamm's three soliloquies pivot on time, and in the sec­ ond one he affirms: "The end is in the beginning and yet you go on." A little later he uses the imagery of the Eleatic philosophers: "Moment upon moment, pattering down, like the millet grains of . . . he hesitates . . . that old Greek, and all life long you wait for that to mount up to a life." By Zeno's paradox neither grains nor moments can make a whole; life can only approach an end. Hamm and Clov at once fear and desire that end. Clov maintains that he is "winding up." After Clov sights the small boy, Hamm announces: "It's the end, Clov, we've come to the end." In Hamm's last soliloquy, just before

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embracing silence, he paints finite man in an infinite uni­ verse: "Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended." More complex and abstract than Pozzo's gravedigger/ midwife image, Hamm's human moment is briefer and vainer. And yet that moment stretches through stage time. To that purpose Beckett again deploys repetitions, hammer­ ing both word and gesture. The play begins and ends with a soliloquy addressed directly to the audience. During the course of the play Clov climbs similarly to each window in turn. He looks similarly into each ashbin in turn. Twice he wheels Hamm part way around the room. But it is mainly through verbal repetition that Beckett conveys the inter­ minable length of time: "Something is taking its course." Part of that "course" is the announcement, successively, of "no more" bicycle-wheels, pap, nature, sugarplums, tide, coffins, and pain-killer. Hamm has asked five times: "Is it not time for my pain-killer?" Pain-killer and story-time punctuate Hamm's routines. Hamm and Clov mention the same old questions and answers. In Godot Vladimir asks a blind Pozzo the time question, "Since when?" and Pozzo explodes into a defini­ tion of human life that pulses to his repetition of the phrase "one day"—"one day we were born, one day we'll die, the same day." Similarly in Endgame Hamm curses Clov through repetitions of "one day." "One day you'll be blind, like me," Hamm begins, proceeds to prophesy Clov's progressive loss of energy until he is a speck in in­ finite emptiness; Hamm concludes: "Yes, one day you'll know what it is, you'll be like me. . . ." Clov repeats the phrase "one day" in surprising acceptance of Hamm's curse. Admonishing himself to suffer better if he hopes to escape—one day—Clov acknowledges that he is too old and weary to change: "Then one day, suddenly, it ends, it changes." He envisions a departure that is too late to free him from his fate: "When I fall, I'll weep for happiness." In both plays "one day" throbs through the present long day.

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THROUGH VIEWS

Happy Days was completed in 1961, five years after End­ game, twelve years after Waiting for Godot. Each successive

Beckett play moves further from conventional stage illu­ sion. Derby-topped wanderers are not usual on country roads, but a legless old couple in ashbins demands sym­ bolic interpretation. Frankly fantastic is a half-buried woman who is nevertheless worried about social niceties. Like Godot, Happy Days is set in open air and open time, but the situation is much more grave. By comparison with Winnie, Vladimir and Estragon live in a delirium of radiant anticipation. By comparison with Winnie, Hamm and Clov enjoy the security of routine days and times of rest. Re­ sembling Nagg and Nell in immobility, Winnie is more painfully afflicted—scorched—with the over-bright light of life. Though she speaks of a bell for waking and a bell for sleep, only her waking is staged. By Act II of Happy Days the bell sounds every time she closes her eyes—a torture of forced awareness. Since Winnie is alone on stage for most of the play, hers is the time-consciousness we share. Like Vladimir and Hamm, she lives in an unending present, and like them she devises routines to pass the time. More often than her predecessors, she glimpses past moments in which she cannot believe, and she envisions future moments in which she tries to believe. Hers is the future perfect tense. Another finite being incompatible with an infinite uni­ verse, Winnie differs from her predecessors because infin­ ity at once threatens and magnetizes her. She fights its si­ lence with her brave flow of words; she imagines herself being "sucked up" into the azure though she actually sinks deeper into the earth. As in the two earlier plays, time stretches obscenely on in Happy Days. (Actual playing time in Beckett's production was one hour for Act I, over half an hour for Act II.) The play opens with the phrase: "Another heavenly day" (My italics stress the continuum.) Winnie's last words (before the Merry Widow lyrics) confirm continuation: "Oh this is a happy day, this will have been another happy day! ( Pause.)

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After all. (Pause.) So far." The day is her life—resolutely happy by virtue of her temperament and training. Her day is also a tiny mote in infinite light—"holy light. . . hellish light"—so bright that black nothingness would be relief. Stage space extends stage time more cruelly than in Godot. As we saw in the last chapter, the light is invariant, and no tree rises from the scorched grass. Between the acts fictional time brings deeper burial instead of a new season. In both acts of Happy Days harsh bells sound, but clocks and calendars are beyond memory. An invisible Willie spends much of his time sleeping, but visible Winnie alertly attempts to fill time. Like Pozzo, she urges herself "On." Her most dependable strategies involve her hus­ band Willie, the contents of the sack he gave her, associa­ tive memories, sporadic quotations, and composition of her story. The last three procedures are set into the main action, but unlike the insets of Godot or Endgame, they are innocent of clock or calendar. Winnie's memories are sentimen­ tal—her first ball, her second ball, her first kiss, a lake ro­ mance, Willie's proposal, her wedding, and, jarringly, Wil­ lie's suicide threats. She quotes lines of English poetry that treat of woe and death rather than time—except for her last telegraphic reference to Herrick's "And this same flower that smiles today I Tomorrow will be dying." A faint re­ sidual mention of time enters her story—or both her stories, since it is uncertain whether the Cooker/Shower couple actually is the "last human kind—to stray this way." In Winnie's self-styled story the protagonist Milly is four or five years old, and she is frightened early one day. "The sun was not well up," though it is always "well up" in Winnie's days. Story, quotation, memory—the dates are as uncertain as those in the main action. More than in Godot or Endgame, Winnie's time is change­ less and colorless. Phenomena are "running out," and Winnie applies the adjective "old" to things, eyes, prayer, wits, and especially style. Quite formally, Winnie com­ mands herself to begin her day, but again and again she

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THROUGH VIEWS

delays singing the song that should end her day. Her inter­ rupted reading of the toothbrush handle shows how she seizes on any expedient to pass time. In both acts she en­ courages herself: "The day is now well advanced." Be­ cause Winnie's days do not advance, however, she often qualifies the very word "day" as "old style." With this phrase she also rationalizes the words "daily," "night," "die," and "time," endowing them with the memory of another world. Once she amplifies to"sweet old style" (my italics), when time was measurable and terminable, in­ stead of an endless continuum. By Act II Winnie asks herself: "May one still speak of time?" Before she propounds that question, however, she does "speak of time" in several ways. First and foremost, she reiterates that a happy day is actually in process. Then, in everyday phrases, she utters the word "time" matterof-factly: "There are times," "the time will come," "for the time being," "torrid times and temperate times." Other everyday phrases imply time—"comes and goes," "before and after," "first and last," "then and now." She often uses time-adverbs like "sometimes," "often," "again," "always," and the phrase "all day long." More desperate are her repetitions in Act I of "What now?" and in Act II "Not now." Less aphoristic than Vladimir or Estragon, less philosophical than Hamm, Winnie nevertheless gen­ eralizes about time. She alludes to times she cannot put on her hat, to times she cannot take it off, and to times when words fail her. She groups days when Willie hears nothing and days when he answers her, so that she may appreciate him "at all times." She generalizes, too, about the fear on certain days of running out of things to say and do. Winnie only occasionally admits the changelessness of her situation. At the beginning of the play, the bell sum­ mons her to a prayer which ends "World without end Amen," predicting her world without end. One of her re­ frains is "no better, no worse, no change." She later rhymes: "Never any change. And more and more strange."

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In her changeless and eternal present Winnie grows in­ creasingly doubtful of her memories of the past. In Act I after her most extended recollection of her wedding day, she brings herself up short: "What day?" By Act II a fleet­ ing scene is immediately undermined: "What day? What reeds?" And, returning to her wedding reception, she queries, "What day? What look?" Doubt grows, too, about her habitual activities. Shortly before the end of Act I she begins to tidy up for the night, musing, "I used to think—I say I used to think—that all these things—put back into the bag. . . ." Punctilious, Winnie cannot be sure that she ac­ tually used to think, but only that she is now saying that she once used to think. In Act II she twice makes the same self-correction about thought, and she also applies it to prayer and speech. The last self-correction—"I say I used to say, Winnie, you are changeless"—is a subtle tautology. Since she sees herself in a changeless present, she cannot have a past in which she said that she is changeless; she can only say in the present that she said in the past that there is only a changeless present. She also affirms: "Then . . . now . . . what difficulties here, for the mind. . . . But it does not trouble mine." Winnie does not allow it to trouble her mind because she has resolved to accept her present as her happy day, however endless. Words and Willie figure in Winnie's fantasy about her future. Worried, she prophesies a time when she will need Willie to hear every word before she can utter another; or even worse, a time when she will have only herself to talk to. The latter fear is almost realized in Act II. Less accurate is her guess that when words fail, she will be able to use the bag as a resource. In actual Act II the bag does not serve her, but words still do. In Act I, too, Winnie muses that the earth might cover her breasts, and by Act II it does. In Act I Winnie confesses to Willie her dream (rather than prophecy) that he will "come round and live this side where I could see you." In the spectacular climax of Act II Willie does indeed "come round" to Winnie's side of the mound, but Beckett leaves it deliberately ambiguous

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whether he will live, die, or kill. Winnie's happy day closes on an unspoken question that undermines the Merry Widow words: "You love me so." How will husband and wife face this time of reunion? Winnie's phrase—"old style"—describes habitual hu­ man time in the light of an unending present.The phrase is also applicable to Western drama from Aeschylus to Ibsen in the light of Beckett's stage immediacy torn from a dark infinity. The three plays for which Beckett is widely known are waiting plays; a character waits for an unimag­ inable end, whether the end is Godot, annihilation, or full burial. As the locales of his plays contrast poignantly with memories of emotion-laden places, so these waits contrast poignantly with memories of emotion-laden moments of time. Other Beckett plays rely on the tradition that one re­ views a whole life at the moment of death; the action then becomes a retrospective action. Three television plays and two stage plays are such death's threshold dramas. As suggested in my Introduction, the two stage plays were composed almost two decades apart, but That Time (1974) might have happened a few minutes after Krapp's Last Tape (1958). Old Krapp has recorded forty-five birthday tapes but listens to a single one onstage. The nameless old man listens to three intercut memory-strands, conveyed in the theater through three separated loudspeakers. The ratio of reaction to memory diminishes sharply from the earlier to the later play. Krapp is one of Beckett's two birthday children (the other is Dan Rooney in the radio play All That Fall), and perhaps his most realistic stage character. We know that Krapp went to church as a boy, that he had parents and love relationships, that he has been a writer. We know that he is exactly sixty-nine years old at the indefinite time in the future in which the play is set. It is through tapes that Beckett conveys Krapp's long life and its repetitive quality—escaping love and enslaved by habit. The play marks time visually and verbally. Visually, we

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see Krapp's large silver pocket-watch. Krapp looks three times at his watch, once at the play's opening, once after mention of "a girl in a shabby green coat," and the last time after the second playing of the lyrical boat scene. Al­ though Krapp is quite different from A in Act Without Words II, he also is tied to his schedule—not only the ritualistic taping on each birthday, but the limitation of al­ cohol consumption in any given period. Sentimental recol­ lection inspires a desire for alcoholic oblivion, but he checks with the watch before he slakes his thirst offstage. We do not know whether these quick gulps infringe upon his self-imposed discipline. What we do know is that sixty-nine-year-old Krapp re­ sembles thirty-nine-year-old Krapp in his consciousness of time. Thirty-nine-year-old Krapp records that his mother died in late autumn and that his memorable equinox took place on a March night. Sixty-nine-year-old Krapp speaks of summer outings, of reading Effi Briest a page a day. Even in ordering himself to conjure memories, Krapp locates them in time—gathering holly on Christmas Eve and listen­ ing to Sunday morning church bells. Not only is Krapp sensitive to clock and calendar time, but he is also exquisitely vulnerable to time's duration. Though he marks each year ceremoniously, it is their weight that he perceives at thirty-nine as at sixty-nine, through repetition of the word "moments." On tape he describes the simultaneity of his mother's death and a dog's yelping: "Moments. Her moments, my moments. (Pause.) The dog's moments." The mother's moments have completed a life, but Krapp's moments continue. And both times are beyond a dog's grasp, yelping for play to resume. Moments brush by the boat scene too: "I asked her to look at me and after a few moments—(pause)—after a few mo­ ments she did." The delay understates the woman's reac­ tion to Krapp's termination of their love relationship. So the small unit of time enters two shattering experiences— death and love's end. In contrast, Krapp mocks himself when he records: "Revelled in the word spool. (With rel-

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ish.) Spooool! Happiest moment of the past half million." Or moments of a life dribbling down to trivia. Playing the "Farewell to Love" a last time, Krapp again listens to the repeated "after a few moments." Finally, all those mo­ ments add up to the years at the end of the last tape: "Perhaps my best years are gone. . . . No, I wouldn't want them back." Every action and reaction of the stage Krapp give him the lie during forty-five minutes of playing time in Beckett's production. Three periods are intercalated in That Time, hovering un­ certainly in time and space. An old man's head barely moves; his eyes open briefly when words stop, but they close when we hear the susurrant verbal stream. The voice converges on the head from three directions in time as well as space, as already summarized. The first recalls a return visit to a childhood refuge, a stone among nettles. The sec­ ond depicts two lovers side by side in an outdoor scene, not touching but exchanging vows. The third paints an old Beckettian derelict sheltering himself from winter in public buildings. The three voices address the old man's head as "you." They ask about time, and they designate "that time" indefinitely. The play is short—some twenty minutes in the the­ ater—and yet it conveys duration. The thirty-six para­ graphs or verses divide into three parts, each part faltering to a halt during which the eyes of the head open, the light brightens, and the breath pants heavily. Scenes are etched incisively from three directions—the search for a lost childhood paradise, the incredibility of a perhaps imagined love scene, and the sardonic backward glance over efforts to make a life cohere. The three voices speak in the same repetitive asyntactical idiom, and through their different directions the words accumulate into a long life lived. Words of time help localize time: the childhood imagina­ tion is exercised "well on into the night," but the return to reality takes place in the morning. The time of day no longer concerns the old man, but he is always aware of a rainy winter. Only at maturity is there change of time; the

AT THIS MOMENT IN TIME

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lovers look into the sun, but the lone lover is trapped in sunset. Counterpointed against these few specific times are the many words suggesting continual time: the child is first ten or eleven, then eleven or twelve "making yourself all up again for the millionth time." Although the location of the love scene changes, vows are always exchanged "every now and then"; the old man is most conscious of time—portraits blackened with age, habits continuing year after year, closing of public buildings and of calendar years, trauma of birth, and poignancy of coevals awaiting death. Finally the dust speaks, crumbling human time: "come and gone no one come and gone in no time gone in no time." Through the dust the dying old man discerns in­ finity, which evokes his final smile (a derisive last-breath laugh in Beckett's production). Krapp and the old man both disappear into the dark­ ness, which also envelops Beckett's post-death plays, Play, Not I, and Footfalls. Yet the plays emanate from worlds that distil ours. Purgatorial in the compulsion to rehearse lives again and again, the characters of these worlds are impeni­ tent and unredeemed. As was noted in my Introduction, Play contains Narration and Meditation. What is extraordi­ nary about the Narration is the lack of chronology in the maudlin events of a lovers' triangle. A rough sequence of events can be outlined, but it is rough, so that we are star­ tled when W2 mentions a November bonfire. None of the three characters asks questions or casts doubt on narrated time, but Beckett deliberately generalizes the time through such indefinite phrases as "one morning," "one night," "for the time being," "for months," "for weeks," "then," "as before," "again." W2's morning room introduces time into place, and one traditional time symbol is under­ mined—Father Time with his scythe becomes a lawnmower. Time is no more specific in the Meditation. "One morn­ ing" is replaced by "some day," but W2 declares: "there are endurable moments." She builds on the lawnmower image to a great roller on a scorching day. M is more time-

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conscious: "When first this change. . . ." In his new state, he declares: "There is no future in this." Like Winnie, he contrasts "Then. And now. ..." Most critically, he asks, "All this, when will all this have been . . . just play?" Un­ able to answer, he fantasizes about the happy threesome they might have been, waking together on a May morning, then drifting together down a river—an old metaphor for time. When the play plays around to its beginning, M re­ peats his first comprehensible words: "We were not long together—." In retrospect, we understand that there is no chronology because they were not long together. While on earth, people live through chronological events, but from the viewpoint of timelessness, finite moments crowd to­ gether, and only the emotional memories linger a while. Beckett built such achronology into the very performance of Play (twenty-four minutes in his production). In the repetition, each actor spoke his own part as learned, but the order of the actors might be decided at the caprice of the spotlight manipulator.10 No such leeway is allowed, given the fixed spot of Not I, another drama situated at death's threshold or beyond. The play's fifteen-minute rush of words jumbles four kinds of time. The easiest to hear is biographical time, though the biography lacks middle years. The narrative "she" was born prematurely and was coming up to sixty—no, seventy—years of age when she was struck with speech. The time between those two dates divides between single events and continuous periods. The Mouth claims that "she" is speechless "all her days" and walking "all her days," but both statements are exaggeration. Continuous silence is interrupted, for "once or twice a year . . . always winter" she would break into speech. Marketing seems to be a con­ tinuous activity that she performs in silence. While she is speaking, she is several times reminded of "all the time the buzzing." As in other Beckett plays, continuity is main­ tained through words like "back," "again," "every," but strikingly different from his pause-marked dialogue is this

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word stream that "couldn't pause a second"—another exaggeration. Against the background of continue the Mouth narrates a few single events—"that time in court," "the odd time she was supposed to be having pleasure," "or that time she cried . . . the one time she could remember." An inci­ dent of grief balances an incident of pleasure. Her April speech affliction, however, poses a temporal problem; it seems to be a single occurrence, and yet, five times evoked, it gives the impression of continuity, especially since Not I ends on continuous speech of its final evoca­ tion. This suggests a fourth kind of time that is at once a unique and a continuous event. Over half dozen times a thought occurs to the heroine "oh long after . . . sudden flash." The "sudden flash" should be unique, but since there are eight such flashes they become the most repeti­ tive event of the discourse, rivaling the April morning evo­ cation. Less often we find the juxtaposition of "suddenly . . . gradually"—a paradoxical juxtaposition, and yet repe­ tition elides "suddenly" into "gradually." Play flouted chronology, but Not I, bounded by a biblical span of three score and ten years, plays the time of single against con­ tinuous events, only to blur the distinction in the swift rush of the stage discourse—itself a spurt of human time. In contrast, Beckett's third post-death play Footfalls rests on measured steps in time. A bare half-hour in the theater, the four scenes of Footfalls are separated by successively fainter chimes. It will be recalled that the first three scenes show the daughter May pacing back and forth on a narrow strip of board, a different number of steps and a different number of lengths in each scene. In the fourth scene the board is lit for fifteen seconds; there is "no trace of May." Not only is May's presence impermeable to normal time conventions; they finally seem impertinent to her experi­ ence. It is from pacing, from literal steps in time, that the first three scenes grow, and yet they gradually depart from

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time. The first scene is almost definite as to ages; the mother is eighty-nine or ninety, and the daughter in her forties. Theirs is a long relationship, and the mother suffers a long illness. (Beckett underlined this in revision by paus­ ing before, or adding the word "again" to the ministrations offered to the mother by the daughter.) The mother accepts each alleviation: "Yes, but it is too soon." Her own suffer­ ing must take its course, but she seeks a terminus for the daughter's suffering: "Will you never have done . . . re­ volving it all. . . . In your poor mind." In the second scene the invisible mother recalls the daughter as a girl. Pacing at home on the carpeting, the daughter May "one night while still little more than a child" expressed her need "to hear the feet, however faint they fall." In the third scene the daughter designates the divisions of her discourse: "Sequel" and "Semblance," the one redo­ lent of time and the other of imitation. Sequel begins, "A little later, when she was quite forgotten," but is immedi­ ately corrected to, "A little later, when as though she had never been, it never been, she began to walk." On the one hand, "she" is gone and forgotten; on the other, she be­ gins the walk that already usurped her girlhood. No longer in the "old home," she paces in a locked church "during Vespers. Necessarily." Her words evoke evening and a time long past. To these is added a dying year as the daughter narrates a dialogue between old Mrs. Winter and her daughter on an autumn Sunday evening after vespers. Together at the dinner table, fictional mother and daughter inhabit different worlds or times, for the daughter says that she was absent from evening prayer, and yet Mrs. Winter asserts that she heard her "Amen." This fictional daugh­ ter, Amy, resembles the perhaps actual daughter, May, in that she is both in and out of the world, in and out of time. In Footfalls human time crumbles not to the dust of That Time but to a lighted board on which human feet once fell, in theater fact and fiction. The fourth scene lights the bare board briefly, before darkness and silence obliterate all

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human traces—it all. Shelley's dome of many-colored glass stained the white radiance of eternity; Beckett's two women—the mother invisible, the daughter tattered and gray—give radiance to the darkness of eternity. In this fugue of mother-daughter dialogues Beckett dramatizes the transience that has obsessed him for a very long time. In 1948 he expressed it: where to be lasts but an instant where every instant spills in the void the ignorance of having been Time and space, those perpendicular coordinates, emerge dependently but distinctly in Beckett's dramas. The way resonant memories or fictions are counterpointed against immediate stage presence is vivid. Physical spe­ cificity is invariant within each of Beckett's dramas—lit­ erally "at this place," but time can be static, liquid, and sal­ tatory. Vladimir's phrases describe Beckett's playwriting practice—"At this place, at this moment in time." Beckett's dramas play through continuous moments in the waiting plays; a hovering moment in the death's threshold plays; a blend of moment and continuum in the plays wrested from the void.

4 All Mankind Is Us: Soliloquizers In Beckett's production of Godot Vladimir poses selfmockingly as he pontificates: "At this place, at this mo­ ment of time, all mankind is us. . . ." But self-mockery does not erase the truth of his statement, and Beckett dramatizes that truth in two main ways: 1) His dramas gradually embrace soliloquy, the traditional device to "explore the speaker's 'inner life,' [whose] deepest feelings emerge even as they take shape in his own consciousness. The effect on the audience is that of greater knowledge of the speaker and, at the same time, of a more intense emo­ tional relationship with him."12) Several of Beckett's plays dramatize authors in search of characters, a process that becomes a metaphor for everyman's search for identity. In this chapter I trace Beckett's changing rendition of solilo­ quy, and in the next chapter I compare his composers of fiction. Waiting for Godot, Beckett's most celebrated play, tries to avoid soliloquy and almost succeeds. What was new and is still theatrically engaging in this "tragicomedy" is Beckett's groundwork of music-hall or vaudeville for a play that poses eschatological questions. The primary question— salvation or damnation—is filtered through structural, ges­ tural, and especially verbal symmetries, which recall vaudeville routines, and like vaudeville, Godot also fea­ tures solo numbers—Lucky's manic monologue, Pozzo's elocution piece, Vladimir's round song about a dog's life that reflects on that of man. Estragon never manages a solo, for Vladimir squelches his attempts to tell a dream, a joke, a nightmare, which might lead to soliloquy. But more

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numerous and telling than the three solo numbers are the vaudeville duets of Vladimir and Estragon, the basic dialogue of two lives spent waiting for Godot. Unlike John Osborne's Entertainer or Neil Simon's Sunshine Boys, Vladimir and Estragon live their act. As long as they can volley words, they stave off soliloquy, which may engulf a man in solitude. Only toward the end of Godot does Vladimir lapse into a single soliloquy, and that lapse is carefully prepared. Vlad­ imir's very first speech verges upon a brief soliloquy: "I'm beginning to come round to that opinion." Toward the end of Act I Beckett specifies that it is to himself that Vladimir says: "Unless they're [Pozzo and Lucky] not the same." In Act II, just after the entrance of Pozzo and Lucky, Vladimir delivers his longest speech, even longer than his one solil­ oquy. Addressed to Estragon, it resembles Pozzo's Act I rhetoric. As the latter luxuriates in seven synonymous sen­ tences to explain the reason that Lucky doesn't put down his bags, Vladimir luxuriates in eleven statements (and a brief question) to explain the advisability of helping the fallen master and servant. Pozzo's rhetoric is a series of pompous paraphrases, whereas Vladimir moves from exhortation to a rumination that closes on an echo of the most famous of all English soliloquies: "What are we doing here, that is the question." And he ends in a pentameter approximation of the play's main echoic line: "We are wait­ ing for Godot to come—. ..." These hints of soliloquy lead to its actuality, soon after the Act II exit of Pozzo and Lucky. Estragon dozes off, and Vladimir begins the play's only soliloquy, for he is effec­ tively alone: "Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?" It is Estragon who sleeps while Vladimir registers his own suffering in a time-honored convention for expressing such emotion—soliloquy. Vladimir's speech flows associatively rather than logically: 1) He summarizes the play's events and wonders whether they have actually hap­ pened. He views what we have viewed and questions its "truth." This section, the longest, contains six questions

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and only one statement—"Probably." 2) Watching Estragon sleep, Vladimir predicts how little his friend will re­ member. 3) Echoing the key words of Pozzo's outburst— astride, grave, birth—Vladimir modifies his picture of human life: "Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the for­ ceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries." Pozzo's speech begins personally—". . . one day he went dumb, one day I went blind . . ."—and then generalizes about the brief birth-death interval: "They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." Vladimir, too, generalizes, but he then returns to the first person, with more inclusive pronouns: "We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries." (My italics throughout.) 4) Again observing the sleeping Estragon, Vladimir conceives of himself as a sleeping ignorant figure in someone else's sight. 5) Perhaps it is this ignorance that Vladimir finds intolerable. Or perhaps it is the accumula­ tion of the play's events and the continued wait, which drive him to the staccato end of his soliloquy: "I can't go on! (Pause.) What have I said?" That four-syllable question, over which he broods, reverberates back on Vladimir's whole soliloquy, and that soliloquy reinforces the fearful twilight that is so unsuitable for performances attuned to limelight. Dusk's doubt envelops each word: "What" un­ dermines substance; "I" becomes a mere postulate because "have . . . said" defies corroboration. In Bert States' per­ ceptive summary: "Here the important themes of the play (sleep, blindness, suffering, night, waiting, death, time) are drawn into an interrogative suspension."2 Despite solos and soliloquy, the basic rhythm of Godot is the vaudeville give-and-take of Didi and Gogo. Endgame sometimes recalls vaudeville in the Hamm-Clov duets or Nagg's story of the Englishman and the tailor, but Endgame also displays the techniques of formal drama. Hamm specifically refers to the dialogue, an underplot, an aside, a soliloquy. Early in Endgame Hamm asks: "Can there be misery—(he yawns)—loftier than mine?" The yawn under-

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cuts the tragic tone, but the tragic tone is there to be under­ cut. In traditional tragedy lofty misery distinguishes the hero, and his eloquent suffering commands center stage. So Hamm demands to be "right in the center," but he undercuts that demand by literalizing it into picayune irri­ tation at four directional possibilities of being off-center. And he continually undercuts his long and vehement speeches, the tirades of traditional tragedy. The three men of Endgame, three generations, indulge in such tirades—Hamm four, Nagg two, and Clov one. In traditional tragedy the report is a form of tirade, particu­ larly a messenger's report of offstage disaster. Of the three men in Endgame Clov alone is a messenger, but all the tirades imply disaster. Nagg tells a joke that depreciates the world, and he prophesies a dark fate for his son Hamm. Clov imagines a weary woeful departure from the shelter. Hamm's four tirades are diversely dark; like Vlad­ imir, he envisions the reactions of a detached superior be­ ing; he prophesies Clov's fate in "infinite emptiness"; he recalls the madman who viewed the earth's plenty as ashes; he narrates an endless story of desolation. For all the similarity of tone, however, the three men never en­ gage in the same discourse—unlike the situation in Godot, where three characters often converse. In the main, both plays progress through duologues, but the resonance of Hamm and Clov is damped if Hamm is not recognized as the remains of a tragic hero, and Clov of a comic servant. Though Beckett's play is not traditional, it leans on the two most traditional genres of Western drama, tragedy and comedy. In those genres soliloquy is an obviously artificial con­ vention: an actor plays a character who externalizes his inmost thoughts as though no one can hear them, in a theater full of auditors. Beckett's Hamm announces the ar­ tifice of his three soliloquies with the wrenched and strik­ ing phrase: "Me to play." Hamm's first soliloquy estab­ lishes him as a tragic hero; he refers to the loftiness of his misery, the superiority of his suffering, his fullness turned

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to emptiness, the vastness of his dreams. Imperiously, he decrees an end. But then he hesitates, appropriately after the word "hesitate." As the tragic hero Hamlet unheroically delays, the tragic hero Hamm unheroically hesitates. And as Hamlet's delay probes the ethic of revenge, Hamm's hesitation probes the ethic of universal annihila­ tion to avoid suffering. Like Hamlet in his soliloquy, Hamm moves from question to hesitation, and he under­ cuts even the hesitation with a yawn. Near the end of Endgame Hamm announces his second and longest soliloquy with a repetition of "Me to play." He conveys grief without using the first person pronoun but shifts to that person for self-blame: "All those I might have helped." More associatively than in the first soliloquy, Hamm subsides from anger at those who wish to enjoy liife on earth to reflection on his own limited possibilities on stage—narrating his story, imagining a crawl on the floor, or a vain call to father and son, peopling his fantasies, echoing an Eleatic paradox—"all life long you wait for that to mount up to a life." However, Hamm will wait no longer for his life to "mount up to a life." He terminates his anti-life soliloquy by whistling for Clov. In their last duologue Hamm announces to Clov: "I'm warming up for my last soliloquy," and he is "warm" after Clov reports a small boy outside. Hamm speaks in solilo­ quy because he is unaware that Clov, dressed for a jour­ ney, is listening. Monosyllabic at the start, the speech be­ comes incantatory with a binary rhythm: "Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended." The word "story" sends Hamm to his own narrative, incorporating into his soliloquy his narrator's anger at the pleading father. True to his own prediction in his second soliloquy, he now calls on his father, then on Clov. When he hears no answer, blind Hamm unfolds his handkerchief and summons si­ lence: "speak no more." And yet he does speak more. He emerges from his last soliloquy to personify his handker­ chief, calling it "Old stancher!" as at the play's beginning.

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And he addresses the object directly: "You . . . remain." Clov has remained through most of the play to supply the dialogue, and Endgame ends, not on soliloquy, but on the handkerchief's impermeability to dialogue. However, the handkerchief can staunch the flow of blood, which is life. In Endgame the old doctor is "naturally" dead, Mother Pegg is "extinguished," Nell "looks like" she's dead, and Hamm's lifeblood may be staunched. Soliloquies are wrenching in Endgame, and tirades only less so. Both are in tension with duologues, in which Clov's function is often to supply repartee. Beckett de­ lineates this explicitly in the French text; Hamm's reply to Clov's "A quoi est-ce que je sers?" is "A me donner la replique." Adept as Clov is at repartee, however, his first speech is soliloquy. Unlike Hamm, he delivers his single soliloquy with no sense of theater. He speaks tonelessly, gaze fixed, and he repeats a few words—finished, grain, one, heap—to indicate that an action is beginning very close to its end, as in classical tragedy. Only then does he assume the first person to describe his role in this ending action—to be punished while he waits for the whistle. Many of his subsequent words are prompted by Hamm's whistle or commands, even his final tirade—"A few words . . . from your heart." The few words expand to a few hundred, and Clov speaks them as he spoke his opening soliloquy, tonelessly, with fixed gaze. As in his opening so­ liloquy, so in his closing tirade; Clov starts with the general situation before adumbrating his own role. He concludes: "When I fall I'll weep for happiness." It will be a fall differ­ ent from the traditional pratfalls of the comic servant, which he also is. It will be a fall that circles back to his opening soliloquy, which began Endgame with the word "finished." Since Clov speaks one soliloquy to Hamm's three, we obtain less "knowledge of the speaker" and a less "intense emotional relationship with him."3 Hamm is almost always "bang in the center" of Endgame, but the so­ liloquies of both men, like that of Vladimir, limn a dying world as much as a doubting mind. Beckett's two major

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French plays increase the number of soliloquies from Vlad­ imir's one to the four of Hamm and Clov combined. English, the original language of Beckett's subsequent stage plays, carried him more fully into soliloquy. His first English play was originally called "the Magee mon­ ologue," since it was written for actor Pat Magee in 1958, but monologue need not mean soliloquy. Krapp's Last Tape raises the question of whether a tape is a solo or a soliloquy—a solo's purpose being performance for an au­ dience, and soliloquy's purpose being expression of feeling ostensibly for oneself. Andrew Kennedy skirts this distinc­ tion when he writes, "Krapp's Last Tape, Embers and Happy Days are subtle transformations of an interior monologue into the semblance of dialogue."4 Interior monologue is a term for fiction that is not readily transferable to the stage, where monologue is necessarily exterior. Both Krapp and Winnie seem to speak soliloquy much of the time, but close analysis of the texts—a necessity for the actor—exposes varied textures. Krapp's reaction to his tape, the juxtaposition of taped voice with the full body of the actor, conveys the "sem­ blance of dialogue" cited by Kennedy. Tapes are usually intended for auditors other than their speakers, but Krapp's tapes are birthday greetings from himself to him­ self—monologues. Though the play theatricalizes Krapp's reactions to a single tape, forty-five ghostly selves (in nine boxes of five spools each) hover in the background. The tape to which Krapp listens was recorded on his thirtyninth birthday; it is not a soliloquy but a deliberate per­ formance for future listening. Well over half the play's words belong to the taped Krapp, but it is the living Krapp who converts them into a "semblance of dialogue," and it is only the living Krapp who can brood in soliloquy. His opening remarks in search of the particular tape are stac­ cato perceptions, or personifications of the spools—no nearer soliloquy than Hamm's "Old stancher." This is the extent of his utterance until he records, and that recording

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begins as performance for the future audience of himself. However, the living Krapp soon glides from conscious re­ cording to associational brooding. Moreover, he will never listen to what the play's title informs us is his last tape; there will be no more birthday post mortems. By the time of his last tape, he has sunk into a self crystallized in the soliloquy that his recording gradually becomes. Like Hamlet's "Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I," Krapp begins with self-condemnation: "Just been lis­ tening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago.. .."The phrase "I took myself for" is curious, widen­ ing the distance between taping and taped Krapp. "The stupid bastard I was" would acknowledge continuity of the self, but the actual phrase implies that the taped Krapp was assuming a persona, even playing a role. Krapp interrupts soliloquy to consult the note on an en­ velope, but he throws the envelope away and allows his thoughts to drift. Instead of events to complement those of earlier years, he mouths the word "spool" and reels off statistics. Instead of adding specific incidents to those on the earlier tape, he generalizes about such repetitive ac­ tions as shivering in the park, reading Effi Briest day by day, occasionally having Fanny in. He recalls an incident of attending vespers and falling off a pew, but then he re­ turns to a recurrent meditative activity: "Sometimes won­ dered in the night if a last effort mightn't—" (my italics). We never learn the subject of his occasional wondering—to renew feeling or to reaffirm his dark vision. Incomplete wondering yields to recollection—scenes of his boyhood, associated with nature. As in the tape, he re­ fers to such happy moments as "misery." Earlier, he spoke of himself witheringly in the third person, but now he shifts to the second: "Once wasn't enough for you." (my italics) Once is literally not enough for him, and he there­ fore plays his tapes. He has chosen to relive rather than live. Tapes are at once Krapp's emotional sin and Beckett's scenic strategy. The tape marks the desiccated wreck on

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stage as a man who has chosen his personal darkness over eyes that admitted him with the light. The last tape mean­ ders into a last soliloquy before Krapp yields to death. "Lie down across her" are the living Krapp's last words, a self-command, but a "long pause" separates these words from the last playback of the boat scene, the last tape heard from the stage. In Beckett's production he has Krapp look long into darkness before the last playback, as before the first playback. Krapp's soliloquy finally enables him to play the old tape through to the end. The implication is that his life will end in silence. Paradoxically, Beckett has relied upon a modern technological device to exploit soliloquy traditionally, giving us "greater knowledge of the speaker and, at the same time, . . . a more intense emotional rela­ tionship with him."5 As already noted, Andrew Kennedy grouped Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days (along with the radio play Embers) as "subtle transformations of an interior monologue into the semblance of dialogue."6 However, the two stage plays contrast, centered as they are on contrasting characters. Krapp has deliberately chosen solitude, and his dialogue is conducted with another self. Although Beckett's first title for Happy Days was "Female Solo," Winnie fears solitude, and her dialogue is conducted with her husband—her wit­ ness, no matter how minimal his response. During Act II of Happy Days she addresses him repeatedly in spite of his silence: "I say I used to think that I would learn to talk alone. (Pause.) By that I mean to myself, the wilderness. (Smile.) But no. (Smile broader.) No no. (Smile off.) Ergo you are there." She virtually rephrases Descartes: "I talk to you, therefore you are there." To arrive at that Cartesian Stoicism, Winnie schools her discourse through Act I of Happy Days.

Soliloquy is hard to isolate in Happy Days. Neither Win­ nie's remarks to Willie nor her personification of the re­ volver is soliloquy. Foreign to soliloquy, too, are her com­ ments sparked by her surroundings—heat, light, emmet, and above all props. Though she does not carry on a

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dialogue with the props (except for the revolver), she con­ trives to use them as she uses Willie—as a bulwark against the "wilderness" of her self. Soliloquy invades when bul­ warks weaken, and since Winnie is vigilant, her soliloquies are few and unusually brief. Her first soliloquy is inspired by Willie's first words—his reading a news item from a yellowed newspaper, about the death of the Reverend Carolus Hunter. Winnie closes her eyes in "fervent reminiscence" of her youth. Ignoring Willie, she thinks of her first ball,her second ball, and the surroundings of her first kiss. Willie's reading interrupts her. The deciphering of the writing on her toothbrush handle inspires Winnie's generalization about how wonderful such added knowledge is, "however trifling, the addition I mean, provided one takes the pains." "Pains" glide into soliloquy, briefly: "when flesh melts at so many degrees and the night of the moon has so many hundred hours." Since Winnie's flesh aches but does not melt, and her moon has zero hours, this second swift soliloquy envisions an end to her endless present. Half of Act I elapses before Winnie again slips into solil­ oquy. When Willie retreats, she opens and twirls her parasol, ruminating about how little there is to do or say before the bell for sleep. Yet she goes on to say that it is difficult to do anything to keep the parasol up. After the parasol "goes on fire," she asks in brief soliloquy whether she herself will not blaze away similarly. Her meditative mood suits soliloquy, and she wonders whether condi­ tions could ever be different from the present, but she shakes off soliloquy with a double "like you" to Willie, as though he were listening. She even assigns him an at­ titude: "You are quite right, Willie." Then, after Willie's burst of song, she expounds on song. A long pause pre­ cedes her confession to a feeling of being watched. In her fright she curtails soliloquy with two simultaneous de­ fenses—filing her nails and telling herself about the Shower/Cooker couple.

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After another long pause, Winnie begins to tidy up and to reflect at some length on tidying up; the long day may not be over, even though all is ready for the night. She used to think that she could tidy up and untidy again and tidy up again indefinitely, until the bell signaled the arrival of night. Knowing now that this is not so, she resumes tidying and talking—speaking the word "strange" five times to underline her own condition. Tortured less by sun and solitude than by the totality of her situation, she is mercifully delivered from herself by a disturbance from Willie. By Act II Winnie is reduced to her own frail voice, her face her only prop. Still trying to avoid soliloquy, she ad­ dresses most of her remarks to Willie. When he does not reply, she blends her Act I reminiscence of a phrase from Keats with her present pain: "Ah yes . .. then . .. now . . . beechen green . .. this .. . Charlie . .. kisses . . . this . . . all that . . . deep trouble for the mind." Even as she protests that her mind is not troubled, Winnie conjures eyes that can close peacefully, unlike hers, jangled open by the bell. She calls again on Willie, whose very name seems to steady her. Toward the end of the act, having indulged in three screams in the story of Mildred, having coaxed no re­ sponse from Willie, she fantasizes about a bell for sleep. She reflects on changelessness and the compulsion to speak on. She importunes, "And now, Willie?" When there is still no reply, she sinks into a last brief soliloquy about her wedding day. But then she doubts that it ever happened: "What day? (Long pause.) What look?" She cur­ tails soliloquy by a self-command to sing. In her own brave way Winnie achieves counter-solilo­ quy as successfully as do the characters of Godot, and against greater odds. She is rewarded by the most climactic confrontation in Beckett's drama. If Willie didn't exist, Winnie would have to invent him, and for most of Act II she does invent him. In addition, she relies on her props,

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quotations, stories to protect her from the wilderness she acknowledges only in her few short lapses into soliloquy. In his several plays Beckett stretches the convention of soliloquy. In Godot Vladimir muses while Estragon sleeps, and his musing embraces the human condition as his own. The two soliloquists of Endgame are tonal contrasts; Clov unemotionally delivers his words, whereas Hamm drama­ tizes and undercuts his three soliloquies. But both so­ liloquists stress ending play for their world as well as themselves. More personal are Krapp's inadvertent solilo­ quy and Winnie's little regressions into soliloquy. Play in­ tercalates three separate soliloquies, that inquire into the meaning and direction of life and afterlife. Each of the three urned figures of Play—M, Wl, W2— believes him/herself alone. Each speaks as if alone, but the triggering spotlight moves capriciously from one to the other. On reading the text, or on rehearing in the theater, we realize that the first part of the play interweaves ex­ pository soliloquies, whereas the second part blends more expressive soliloquies. In the second part the spotlight behaves erratically, eliciting interrupted or repetitive phrases. Yet each individual actor is a more rigorous so­ liloquist than Krapp or Winnie, however each drama may sound like a "semblance of dialogue." In the dialogic so­ liloquies of the Narration of Play we gain "greater knowl­ edge of the speaker," and in the Meditation we may enter "a more intense emotional relationship" with each speaker.7 The laughable, pitiable personal accounts ac­ cumulate into a common haunted situation, whose facets resemble those of our own. Not I of 1972 is so new a form of soliloquy that we may question whether it is soliloquy, with the presence of an on-stage auditor and the absence of the first-person pro­ noun. Mouth pays no more attention to the auditor than blind Hamm does to Clov at the end of Endgame. In the first Paris production director Samuel Beckett eliminated the auditor. Moreover, Mouth adheres to one criterion for so-

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liloquy: "... believing himself to be alone, [the character] talks aloud under the stress of strong emotion."8 In the darkened theater, at a height of eight feet, an illuminated human mouth rushes through some fifteen minutes of asyntactical discourse. Unlike Play, Not I offers no second chance to arrange these breathless phrases into coherence, but the word stream divides into a comparable trilogy. Play: Chorus, Narration, Meditation. Not I: Mainly Medita­ tion, Mainly Sensation, Present and Imperative Situation. By denial of the first person—not I—autobiography is converted to biography in five fleeting scenes. After a love­ less conception and birth, a life emerges from walking, shopping, and silence. Occasional winter speech gives way to the sudden April onslaught, five times evoked. The first four descriptions of that April morning precede Mouth's insistence on "she." The final insistence is fol­ lowed by the final return to the April scene, upon which the curtain falls. Although the voice is adamant in its five refusals of the first person, it is receptive to other modifications. Some­ thing reminds Mouth of a constant buzz, or imposes con­ tours on the "she" of the discourse—sex, age, body posi­ tion, tongue activity. Or rejects explanations for the stream of speech. The buzzing words are questioned by a probing brain, the incessant voice pierced by an uncontrollable mind. Mouth's first explanation for speech is that it punishes sin, but punishment means suffering, and Mouth denies that she is suffering. Perhaps—and this is the second thought—she is considered to be suffering and should therefore pretend that she is. However, the voice says that she is incapable of pretense, and yet we hear the pretense of a third-person account—not I. Her next thought, even though she has denied suffering, is that such distress can­ not continue; and this soon graduates to a prayer for cessa­ tion of speech. She then wonders whether there is some­ thing she should tell, something she should think, in order to be rewarded with silence. She prays again for cessa-

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tion—of words, buzz, and ray of light, which have gradu­ ally coalesced. All three continue until the soliloquy ends in a last evocation of the spring scene that gave them birth. Mouth has framed a quiet life, occasionally bursting into winter speech. Nearing the biblical three score and ten, the woman of the discourse, almost insentient, suddenly finds herself full of spring speech that the stage words have evoked and do evoke, as Beckett's verbs glide toward the present tense: "she who but a moment before . . . but a moment!. . . could not make a sound . . . no sound of any kind . . . now can't stop." Mouth keeps forming the words that keep pouring out, and the brain keeps trying to make sense of what Mouth shapes, but that sense is expressible only in words— ". . . hit on it in the end . . . then back . . . God is love . . . tender mercies . . . new every morning . . . back in the field . . . April morning . . . face in the grass. . . [Beckett's French translation inserts seule au monde] nothing but the larks . . . pick it up"—and "voice continues behind curtain, unintelligible." The soliloquy terminates in a blend of divine love and spring rebirth, though the voice has thrice reiterated "spared that" about love, has twice laughed at the idea of a merciful God, has associated speech with winter and lack of mercy. The first two April descriptions trace a childlike search for cowslips, but the last three repeat "nothing but the larks"—wordless song­ sters of morning in this nervously worded soliloquy at life's evening. A mouth has spouted an intimate alogical stream of words, whose meaning resonates outward from an unac­ knowledged self, and forward from pale past events into actual theater presence. In Enoch Brater's perceptive summary: "Beckett creates for his audience a visual and aural stimulus closely approximating the 'matter' of the monologue itself. The 'buzzing' in the ear is... the strange buzzing in our ears; the spotlight on Mouth becomes the 'ray or beam' we ourselves see."9 We see and hear, we think through the voice-brain conflict. Our minds "pick it up," seeking sense through the segmented syntax, stac-

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cato rhythms, and few swiftly sketched events. Beckett has conceived a whole play as soliloquy, in which he with­ holds knowledge of its protagonist only to immerse us all the more deeply in an emotional relationship with her. That Time of 1975 develops several earlier Beckett motifs. Visible on stage is a head, as in Act II of Happy Days, but it is placed high in the darkness, like the mouth of Not I. As­ pects of a single voice are audible, as in Krapp's Last Tape. Three soliloquies are intercalated to form a dialogue and even a story, as in Play. Not 1 actually keyed That Time, the pulsating mouth coming to rest in a white-haired head. As frenetically as in Not I a soliloquizing voice avoids the first person—"did you ever say I to yourself in your life come on now could you ever say I to yourself in your life." Asyntactical phrases are the building-blocks of both plays, set off by dots in the printed text of Not I, but run into thirty-six versets in That Time. Both plays thrive on incantatory repetition, and in both plays Beckett balances audi­ ence eye against ear. The mouth is hypnotically moving in whirls of words, whereas the old man's head remains quite still; his eyes close three times, open three times, and at the end he smiles for five seconds. Except in that smile, his lips do not move; he and we hear a recording, of a voice "com­ ing to him from both sides and above."

Since the old man's lips do not move, this is not tradi­ tional stage soliloquy but the expression of unspoken thoughts, as soliloquy is sometimes rendered in films. Beckett first wrote continuous prose for each of the three voice-aspects, then intercalated them into thirty-six verse paragraphs, but he wished no break"in general flow" of the recorded speech, heard through three separated loud­ speakers. It will be recalled that the Α-voice narrates a re­ turn visit to a childhood refuge, a stone among nettles; the B-voice dwells on a scene with two lovers not touching but exchanging vows on a stone; the C-voice depicts an old Beckettian character in a greatcoat, huddling on a stone slab in a public building. Chronologically , the biography's order is B, C, A, but A dissolves into a second childhood. In the three periods the speaker refers to "that time" of an

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incident or situation, a time that remains indefinite. Since the three accounts are intercut into the one verbal flow, since the three accounts are distanced into the past, "that time" blurs into any time, as the three voice-aspects blur into the one recorded voice, yielding a cumulative effect of continuous soliloquy. Traditional soliloquy offers an audience intimate knowl­ edge of a speaker, leading to an intense emotional relation­ ship with him.10 In Not I Beckett withholds knowledge of the speaker but involves us all the more emotionally, forc­ ing each of us to assume the unspoken "I." In That Time the speaker narrates uncertain or irreconcilable events, but we are certain of three ages whose different solitudes we experience vicariously: the child and old man are islands in a sea of strangers, but the lover is alone with, then with­ out, his loved one. The first words of That Time are "that time," spoken by the Α-voice, whose recollections ramble around a solitary childhood that he peopled in his imagination. The last words of That Time are "gone in no time," spoken by the C-voice, whose recollections ramble around a solitary old age, "eyes passing over you and through you." Although both these voices exclaim: "was your mother ah for God's sake," only the B-voice conjures up a love relationship. By the second part of the discourse, however, between the first and second pauses, the three voices dwell on solitude, and in solitude they end. Through the last three verses, one for each voice, the stream of consciousness dries to dust. A lifetime ends in a five-second smile till "fade out and curtain." That Time resembles Not 1 in conveying the totality of a life before "fade out and curtain," and the emotional content of each life overlooks its factual content. In Beckett's pro­ duction of That Time the last three verses were spoken more slowly than the others, the B-voice replacing human love with an owl and perhaps his shrew, the Α-voice cut­ ting off his own questions: "to hell out of it all and never come back," and the C-voice repeating the words of the dust: "no one come and gone in no time." Through the

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verbal flow that approximates the life flow, we terminate on Hamlet's "quintessence of dust." That Time is not a realistic drama, but the advent of death offers a realistic "explanation" of the soliloquist's retro­ spective. Footfalls resists any realism, moving to the other side of mortality. A visible daughter and an invisible mother are both together and apart in some limbo. As orig­ inally conceived, the whole play might be a soliloquy by the daughter, since the mother announced: "My voice is in her mind." However, Beckett eliminated this sentence in revision, and in directing he distinguished the two women's voices. His most recent stage play thus becomes an example of processes ascribed to his characters: ". . . like the solitary child who turns himself into children ..." of Endgame, or ". . . making up talk breaking up two or more talking to himself . . ." of That Time. SolUoquy disin­ tegrates into fiction in Footfalls, where the pacing daughter ". . . fancies she is alone . . . fancies none can hear . . ." Like Mouth of Not I, like the old man of That Time, M of Footfalls magnetizes an audience through fiction, but that subterfuge for avoiding soliloquy is the subject of my next chapter. Beckett's soliloquists "explore the speaker's inner life" so that the audience "achieves a more intense emotional relationship" with him/her.11 And through him/her, we reach out to one another, from Vladimir's "At me too someone is looking . . ." to the old man's ". . . old tales to keep the void from pouring in on top of you the shroud . . ." or an "Amen" uttered in absentia. Through the years Beckett has divested his people of character and even of characteristics, so that they may resemble us more and more closely. The soliloquies of Waiting for Godot and Endgame yield in­ creased knowledge and a closer relationship with their speakers, but the characters diverge from the tragic tradi­ tion; their rhythmic utterances probe beyond individual in­ tensities to the whole human plight. As Victor Krap of Eleutheria perceives: "Mais ils sont solidaires." Krapp and

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Winnie, each waging a brave failed battle against solilo­ quy, retreat differently into themselves. The first part of Play intercuts expository soliloquies, and the second part hesitates through more subjective soliloquies, so that we feel the similar and general fate of people finally urned. Not 1, That Time, and Footfalls move into new dimensions of soliloquy. Rhythmic incantations, visual synecdoches, these plays cut deeply into stage illusion in order to bare our single mortal heart. Tightly structured, finely imaged, the soliloquies give the sensation of fluid meandering. Gently, they float the individual on their wide human tide.

5 All Mankind Is Us: Fictionalizers Hamm, Winnie, Mouth, the pacing woman of Footfalls sub­ limate soliloquy in fiction; both devices, soliloquy and fic­ tion, are theater costumes for an indefinite, undefinable self. Through the years Beckett's soliloquists pare away ac­ cidental attributes of the self to bare a common human base. Through the years his composers of fiction pare away accidental attributes of narrative to bare a common human pain. It is through pain that his dramatic authors try to endow their characters with incisive contour. And it is through their pain that we empathize with these authors. Not fictionalized autobiographers, Beckett's dramatized authors are metaphors for Everyman seeking definition through words.1 Pirandello originated this metaphor for the modern thea­ ter in his Six Characters in Search of an Author. Distinguish­ ing between art and life, between fictional characters and actual people, the Father in Pirandello's play lays the groundwork for the Beckettian author: "Un personaggio, signore, puo sempre domandare a un uomo chi e. Perque un personaggio ha veramente una vita sua, segnata di caratteri suoi per cui e sempre 'qualcuno.' Mentre un uomo . . . un uomo cosi in genere, puo non esser 'nessuno.' "a Beckett's authorial nobodies feel their evanescence, and they therefore try to ground themselves through fiction; they tell stories, at once a penance and compulsion, a sura

A character, sir, can always ask a man who he is. Because a character truly has his own life, marked by its own features, by which he is always "somebody." But a man . . . a man in general can be "nobody."

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face lie and a search for truth. Pirandello's Theater Trilogy juxtaposes fictional characters with the actors who play the roles of these characters. Beckett's authorial plays jux­ tapose characters with their authors. Pirandello dramatizes actors, viable stage roles from the Renaissance to the pres­ ent; Beckett dramatizes authors, thankless stage roles even when they bear such names as Shakespeare, Moliere, Tasso, Chatterton. Beckett's play authors tell themselves stories, which an actvial audience overhears; in this re­ spect, dramatized fictions resemble soliloquies. In a deeper respect, however, fiction is a strategy to circumvent solilo­ quy on the part of Hamm, Henry, Winnie, Mouth, the old man, the pacing daughter, and the radio writers.2 Hamm is the first of this lineage. Added in a late draft of Endgame, his "story" or "chronicle" occupies three of the sixteen rehearsal scenes into which Beckett divided the play.3 Hamm starts his story after the play is half over; he then summarizes the contents for Clov, and finally he in­ trudes a fragment of the story into his last soliloquy. As though to show us how it's done, he also begins a story of Clov's parting words. For his first and most extended narration, Hamm se­ cures a stage audience only by bribing his father with a sugar-plum. The narrative begins as a continuation, a sequel of a story that Clov designates as "The one you've been telling yourself all your . . . days." Hamm's first sen­ tence summarizes his whole plot: "The man came crawling towards me, on his belly." The colloquial "belly" predicts the subject of the scene between two men, one possessing food and the other begging it. The suppliant begs not for himself, however, but "Bread for his brat." Or corn. When offered a job, the fictional father begs to have his child with him. By alternating dialogue with description, by slightly varying the pleas of the suppliant, Hamm prolongs this single scene. Unlike Prospero's "chronicle of day by day," Hamm's chronicle prolongs one scene of one day—before Christmas. Will Hamm's first-person narrator feed a dis-

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tant starving child? Although Hamm will later say he knows "more or less" how his story continues, he never shares that information with us. In the story we hear, the narrator-protagonist describes the weather, questions the suppliant about his journey, expresses rage about hope, but avoids a direct answer to the beggar's plea. While Hamm's protagonist hesitates, Beckett's protagonist arouses suspense by anaphoric di­ gressions about the climate: "It was a . . . day, I remem­ ber." On Christmas Eve four instruments record the weather, measuring 0, 50, 100, 0. The narrator recapitu­ lates his privileged position with respect to the im­ poverished outsider. Posture, background, and dialogue vivify the encounter of the two men. Hamm relishes his smooth syntactical flow; he rarely hesitates, and he cor­ rects himself only once: "the sun was sinking down into the . . . down among the dead." In the main, he approves of his narration: "Nicely put, that. . . . There's English for you. . . . A bit feeble, that. . . . That should do it." With the suppliant on his knees, the narrator still not answering his request, Hamm seeks other characters: "But where would I find them? Pause. Where would I look for them?" The au­ thor's need of a character leads to his command for prayer. Having played the almighty through his chronicle, Hamm himself becomes a suppliant to the Almighty. Petitions go ungranted in and out of fiction, but we in the audience re­ tain a double image of petitioners. After Hamm announces that his bribe was a lie—"There are no more sugar-plums"—Nagg curses his son. When Nell does not answer Nagg's knock on her bin, Hamm pronounces the Shakespearean "Our revels now are ended," and calls for his toy dog, who begs like the fic­ tional suppliant. Hamm then summarizes his story for Clov, who has refused to listen to the actual narration. New to us who did listen is the protagonist's offer of a job "as gardener." New, too, is Hamm's critical reaction: "The whole thing is comical, I grant you that." Perhaps he in-

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herits his mother's sense of humor: "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that." Toward the end of the play, Hamm is unaware of Clov's stealthy presence. Believing himself alone, Hamm reverts briefly to his story. As author-bard he prefers an audience, but he can do without it if he must. So he tells himself his story, but he makes no progress. The suppliant still pleads for his child, and the narrator-protagonist still avoids an answer. Finally, Hamm cuts off his story—a parabolic lady or tiger. Except that the choice is tiger or tiger—death by starving or death by living. Hamm's chronicle mirrors his situation. He is lord of his shelter, and he has apparently delivered a death sentence on everyone outside the shelter—the old doctor is dead "naturally," Mother Pegg died of darkness, there are no more navigators, and Clov has been taught to kill. How­ ever, Hamm does not carry out a program of universal euthanasia. As he declares in his first soliloquy, ". . . it's time it ended and yet I hesitate to—he yawns—to end." Hesitating, he feeds his family just enough to keep them alive, and he does not hasten his own death. Rationally, he is convinced of the desirability of non-being, and he has indoctrinated Clov with that bleak view so that the latter exclaims: "Better than nothing. Is it possible?" It is not possible, and yet Hamm does not act on his conviction. In­ stead of ending with a bang, he allows things to whimper toward non-being. When Endgame stops, Nell is almost surely dead, Nagg may be dead, Clov is dressed to leave, and Hamm retires behind his stancher-curtain. Hamm has placed the fictional father before his responsibilities, but he retreats from his own responsibilities. Hamm's chronicle reflects his deepest ambivalence. Lord of a dying universe, committed to annihilation, he nevertheless delays the end. So the protagonist of Hamm's story finds the suppliant "wonderfully pale and thin" (my italics) and the child "deep in what sleep already?" As God saw His creation "that it was good," Hamm's protagonist

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repeats his own de-creative "Good." The story father pleads for life, and the first-person narrator pauses indefi­ nitely before a death sentence. However the protagonist may put the suppliant "before his responsibilities," Hamm-author cannot end his story as Hamm-hero cannot end his world. Hamm is not only Beckett's first stage author; he is the most self-assured and the most conventional. He alone de­ sires a live audience for his composition, and he alone fic­ tionalizes an ethical problem that few of us face. After Hamm, Beckett's dramatized authors live more largely in the mind. If we follow them chronologically through the canon, we perceive a family resemblance amidst some variety. On radio and stage, nameless and named, they continue aloud a narrative process begun long ago but still unending. Their stories may be first- or third-person, dia­ logic or descriptive, grammatical or fragmentary, as they grope toward delineation of character. Some two years after completing Endgame, at about the time Beckett was translating it into English, he abandoned a short French play, but later retrieved and translated it, publishing it as Theatre II of Ends and Odds. A blend of Kafka, Pinter, and Beckett's own lugubrious humor, the play focuses on a story about a silent author C. A and B, seated at identical tables, are agents of judgment upon C, who stands center-stage before an open window, back to the audience. B reads from documents that sketch a por­ trait of C—homeless, improvident, unhealthy, literary. A and B circle back to B's initial verdict on C: "Let him jump." At the play's end (or stopping-point) A wipes a tear from silent C's invisible face. Recalling Molloy, the agent's report as narrative is a dramatic path that Beckett did not pursue. He did pursue dramatic, unsilent au­ thors—notably in Happy Days. Though reduced in length, the format of Winnie's story resembles Hamm's, but the themes are diametrically op­ posed. Hamm is obsessed with a Janus-faced death as both pain and pain-killer. Winnie, however, is not ambivalent.

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Hamm hesitates to end, but Winnie would like nothing better. Hamm's fictional alter ego seems as old as the ages, but Winnie's fictional alter ego is only at the beginning of her long life. Narrated in a claustrophobic shelter, Hamm's story resonates with nature; narrated in the endless open, Winnie's story is set in a middle-class house. In the asymp­ totic ending process Hamm arbitrarily declares, "time for my story." Story-telling is an activity like any other, which reassures him that each day is "like any other day." Win­ nie's story is a last resort: "There is my story of course, when all else fails." "All" fails only in Act II of Happy Days, when Winnie no longer has arms to reach her sack of properties, when her husband Willie is unresponsive to her calls, when the momentum of her monologue runs down. Only in that desperate condition does Winnie turn twice to her story, without thought of an audience. The narrative begins where life begins—in the womb. Within a sentence, how­ ever, the protagonist is four or five years old, embodying the daughter that Winnie and Willie never had—with his blue eyes, straw hat, reading matter, backwards crawl, and rhyming name—Willie-Milly; with her pearly necklace, scolding fussiness, and tendency to fear. Winnie's story contains a single brief scene; her heroine Mildre(a)d awak­ ens to fright. Once downstairs with her doll, Mildred has cause for fright since a mouse runs up her thigh. Milly screams, and her whole family gather to see what is the matter. Winnie narrates in two segments, the first about four times the length of the second. A few minutes elapse be­ tween the two segments, but Winnie picks up her narra­ tive tone and the story thread exactly where she snipped it short: "Suddenly a mouse—" Unlike Hamm, who alter­ nates between dialogue and description, Winnie describes Milly with nouns and noun phrases, but avoids dialogue. She adopts a narrative tone only for the incident, which is recounted in complete sentences. Though the scene is brief, she corrects herself with three amplifications of detail in

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the first segment. In the second segment Winnie screams three times in Milly's fear. But Winnie's screams ring out unheard, whereas Milly's screams attract immediate con­ cerned attention. Despite their fictional impact, the screams are judged futile by author-Winnie, who breaks her story off: "Too late. (Pause.) Too late." The words link Milly to her creator, for whom it is patently too late. Heard or unheard, cherished or ignored, author-Winnie and character-Milly are on a sun-scorched earth; when dawn breaks, it is already too late to remedy the affliction of liv­ ing, which is a slow burial process. Five years separate Endgame from Happy Days, but in both plays the authors create characters who concretize aspects of themselves. Hamm's protagonist clearly mirrors his own hesitation, but the suppliant too derives from him. Milly resembles Willie physically, but she embodies the dread that Winnie tries to hide on her "happy" days. Both authors seek and find characters who are "somebody"—a somebody who is a bulwark against the encroaching void. Though both authors prolong a single scene, unable to finish a story, they nevertheless succeed in creating charac­ ters to delineate their own uncertainties. Beckett's other dramatic authors create more equivo­ cally. On stage or on radio, authors abandon landscape for soulscape, and it is by way of radio that Beckett's late plays reach soulscape. Breaking chronology, I find it illuminat­ ing to group Beckett's radio plays, with Clas Zilliacus as invaluable guide: "All That Fall tells a story; Embers por­ trays a storyteller; Words and Music . . . still has remnants of character and milieu; these are discarded in Cascando which, instead of focussing on a story, focusses on the storytelling condition."4 Radio I and Radio II are also ger­ mane to authorship; I agree with Martin Esslin that they are probably "in the nature of preliminary sketches" for Words and Music and Cascando.5 "All That Fall tells a story," but it also presents a story­ teller, Dan Rooney. To his wife's question about what de-

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layed the train, he first replies by digressions. Then, clear­ ing his throat and adopting a "narrative tone," he gives a very full account of his presence on the brief train-ride— his "composition"—but he gives no hint of why the train stopped. Despite Dan's efforts to prevent it, the boy Jerry reveals the reason to his wife (and us): "It was a little child fell out of the carriage, On to the line, Ma'am. (Pause.) Under the wheels, Ma'am." Dan Rooney's autobiographi­ cal narrative carefully conceals the crucial event of the play. Dan's autobiographical narrative is fiction in that it camouflages truth; it preserves mystery. Three years later (1959) Beckett's second radio play Em­ bers plays mysterious ambiguities. Following soon after Krapp's Last Tape, the radio play has a protagonist who might be Krapp's foil. Krapp is so obsessed with himself that he annually tapes a "retrospect," whereas Henry of Embers tries to escape from himself and the incessant sound of the sea. Krapp leads a lonely life, rejecting all re­ lationships; Henry turns to people. He talks to strangers, then needs "someone who . . . knew me, in the old days." He tells himself stories—out loud. Krapp listens to himself on tape, but Henry walks around with a gramophone, which he (incredibly) forgot in the play we hear. Since Krapp makes his last tape, death is imminent, whereas Henry is serving a life sentence of hearing the sea. In Embers Henry deploys ghosts and a story against seasounds. Henry begins his story near the beginning of Beckett's radio play; he continues after a brief self-inter­ ruption. After a long interlude, he returns to it briefly. Henry's story fills about one-quarter of the air-time. Though the story is "about an old fellow called Bolton," it presents a single scene between two men, one a suppliant and the other a possible dispenser of goods, as in Endgame. Henry launches into his story as soon as he mentions it to his silent father; or rather, to the silent ghost of his drowned father. Henry supplies details of surface real­ ism—outdoors, indoors—until his two tall characters stand

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face to face. As the fire dies down, Bolton pleads with an irritated Holloway in a silent room, the world outside fro­ zen. The silence in Henry's story does not seep through it; though Henry specifies "Not a sound," the sea-noise is in­ cessant. Discouraged but valiant, Henry tries to recast the scene in a rush of nervous phrases, and the viewpoint shifts from Bolton to Holloway, though the narration con­ tinues in the third person. Henry reacts to his father's judgment—"Washout."—by projecting an imaginary con­ versation with his wife Ada; this dialogue lasts over half the play. When Ada leaves Henry's mind, he tries to weave a story about her encounter with his father, but Ada "takes tram home," and Henry drops her. Exclaiming: "Christ!" Henry reverts abruptly and finally to his story, plunging into dialogue: "If it's an injection you want, Bolton, let down your trousers and I'll give you one, I have a panhysterectomy at nine." After Bolton plays with the window-hanging, after he lights a candle to look Hol­ loway in the eye, the would-be healer reiterates, "If you want a shot say so and let me get to hell out of here." Throughout the scene Bolton implores: "Please." Narrator Henry comments tersely: "Begging. (Pause.) Of the poor." Calling upon his trinity—Ada, Father, Christ—Henry con­ tinues his story with a reminiscence of the Merchant of Ven­ ice, where "a good deed [shines like a candle] in a naughty world." But Bolton's candle seeks a good deed, authorHenry comments on the naughty world, and Holloway hides his face. Author-Henry pronounces: "ghastly scene" —a summary value judgment. The subject of Hamm's story is a man's plea for his child, but what is the subject of Henry's story? Bolton pleads more pathetically than Hamm's nameless beggar, but for what? Euthanasia is the suggestion of Clas Zilliacus;6 sal­ vation is the suggestion of Hersh Zeifman.7 Though there are hints of both, Beckett (and perhaps Henry) leaves the question open. Author-Henry composes a scene in which Bolton-pleading-with-Holloway apparently fictionalizes

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Henry-pleading-with-his father. Henry's father is silent, but Holloway is loquacious. Arriving after midnight, showing concern about Bolton's unnamed affliction, Holloway offers an injection. Like T. S. Eliot's "wounded sur­ geon" Christ, Henry's Dr. Holloway is sufferer rather than redeemer. Beckett names his play for an image within the story of his dramatized author. Embers are absent from Henry's seaside, but they die away in the story room where two old men stand eye to eye. The men too are embers, once strong as tall, once full of faith and friendship, but now unable to articulate or alleviate pain. As Hersh Zeifman has argued, they are also embers of the Christian faith, with an implied equation between Henry-Bolton-victim Christ and father-Holloway-savior Christ. More pointedly than in any other Beckett play, Henry's story is spliced to his extrafictional world: Ada twice mentions Holloway; fic­ tional Holloway has a panhysterectomy at nine, and near the end of Embers Henry reads from his notebook "... plumber at nine"—the hour of Christ's death in the synop­ tic gospels. Euthanasia and salvation merge in Embers, whose mel­ ody is compounded of more than the sum of these two themes. In a play where the sucking sea intrudes upon the silence of the grave, the only salvation is not to be born; the only euthanasia is a panhysterectomy. And yet this is to undo life, light, fire, whose residue flickers in embers. Author-Henry transfers his yearning for silence to his character Bolton, who subsumes all possible pleas in his "Please." Both supplicant and would-be healer are "old men" in this time of "great trouble," in this "ghastly scene." Toward the end of the scene, author-Henry slips once from his habitual third person: "... the glim shaking in your fist, saying, Please! Please!" (my italics) Perhaps author-Henry is talking to himself or to his character, Bol­ ton, but "your" is also yours and mine. Listening, we have all pleaded for "a good deed" in a naughty world, before the candle gutters out.

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Henry's last narrative phrase "no good" embraces narra­ tion and narrator. The doctor character cannot heal his friend, and the patient author cannot heal himself. "And God saw every thing that he had made, and behold, it was very good." Hamm ironically echoed "Good" in and out of his fiction, but for Henry it is all "no good." Embers is a paradigm of most of Beckett's subsequent author-character combinations. Set in a human mind, spare of referential content, dramatic stories condense to­ ward incantation. Radio II is, however, like Theatre II, a throwback to Kafka's world. Of the three speaking charac­ ters, Animator and Stenographer coerce author Fox into narration. The three characters are under duress to per­ form their roles in order to be "free"—Fox to dictate a "set of words," Animator to animate Fox's sluggish voice, and Stenographer to note Fox's every word, but only his words. To these must be added a silent character, Dick the Whip, an instrument at Animator's disposal. In this radio sketch Beckett exhibits the parodic skill of his earlier works. In Theatre II, where he also showed such skill, author C's "account" is part of the parody, mocking the circumstantial detail of the realistic novel. In Radio II, however, the officialese of Animator and Stenographer is quite different from Fox's incantatory prose, which so re­ sembles Beckett's own fiction that it may not be parody. When Fox is not animated into composition, he is gagged, hooded, blindfolded, earplugged. These stiflers are removed to start each day's dictation, but Fox is evidently tied down during dictation, "same old team" serving si­ multaneously as goad and immediate audience. An absent judgmental audience, "we the undersigned," sends a writ­ ten critique of each day's dictation. Their anonymous dis­ pleasure is translated into Animator's pressure on Fox. Fol­ lowing a principle of reducing pressure, Animator has Dick whip Fox three times with decreasing severity, up­ braiding him all the time. When Animator orders Stenog­ rapher to kiss Fox twice, the author faints and speaks no more.

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Against this cruel comedy, Beckett pits the rambling dicta of Fox—a first person, asyntactical discontinuity. Animator derides the discourse as "the same old themes," but we hear images rather than themes—everlasting wilds, micaceous schists, burrowing rodents. Little though we learn about Fox the man, the discourse seems to express his obsessions. Like his predecessors, Fox apparently commits to story his most cherished feelings. Bound and tortured himself, Fox sends his protagonist through nature's vast landscapes. Aspiring to "darling sol­ itudes," treated like a cruelly domesticated animal, the "I" of the story has a twin brother within him, perhaps an alter ego. Fox terminates his story: "Have yourself opened, Maud would say, opened up, it's nothing, I'll give him suck if he's still alive, ah but no, no no. (Pause.) No no." This sentence ignites a conflagration of speculation on the part of Animator and Stenographer—the first proper name, the mystery of fecundated Maud, the monstrosity of a pregnant man, Fox's accompanying tear. Animator goads Fox to continue, first with Dick's whip and then with Stenographer's kisses. When the latter cause Fox to faint away, Animator takes on the authorial function. Strictly against the injunction to record Fox's words, and nothing but his words, Animator orders Stenographer to amend the key sentence: "Have yourself opened, Maud would say, between two kisses, opened up, it's nothing, I'll give him suck if he's still alive, ah but no, no no." (my em­ phasis) Fox has perhaps fictionalized his own experience, and Animator finally fictionalizes the experience of an inert Fox. Martin Esslin interprets Radio II as "a monodrama about the artistic process in which each of the characters represents one aspect of the artist's mind."81 disagree only with his assumption that the mind belongs to Beckett, for it seems to me to be any mind endeavoring to apply an or­ ganizing critical intelligence to words coaxed up from the depths. Though the exact date of Radio II is uncertain, it seems to be an allegorical version of themes dramatized more

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suggestively in Words and Music and Cascando, written in English and French, respectively, at the end of 1961. In Words and Music the authorial character Words progresses from composition on set themes to lyrical tales accom­ panied by Music. Words and Music, both characters, are employed in a troubador capacity by Croak, and yet their final harmony develops in spite of Croak's protests. Hav­ ing set the themes, Croak is distressed by the intensity of their expression. Words and Music wrestle with three themes—Love, Age, Face, but the whole play is haunted by a face. "Love" is rendered as a fiasco of unfeeling scholastic cliches and over-expressive music. For "Age," however, Words and Music do manage to compose a short-lined, sonnet-length lyric; an old man shivers over a dying hearth, and he sees in the ashes the face of an impossible love, radiant as once in starlight. It is unclear whether Croak's next set theme— "The Face"—is suggested by this lyric or by a face he has glimpsed on tower stairs. Over Croak's protests, author Words then strays into a story, which is summarized by Zilliacus: "The scene is a field of rye, the action of the scene is postcoital recupera­ tion as reflected in the face of the woman, and the hero, we may assume, is Croak."9 Whoever the hero, the scene im­ plies that a man is bent over his beloved. Omniscient nar­ rator Words builds the scene through amplification of de­ tails of the woman's body and face, as seen from above. When her facial features return to normal, Words pauses twice after the word "eyes." Words' final lyric is inspired by what is phrased in The Lost Ones: "Once devoured the face thus laid bare the eyes. ..." Words does not use the word "eyes" in either lyric, but the postcoital scene, whose climax is eyes searching eyes, joins the two lyrics on the blind medium of radio. In the first poem an old man has a vision of a starlit face in the ashes, and in the second poem a man catches a glimpse through fleshly "trash" and "scum," of a dark wellhead. The eye-to-eye scene that re­ curs in several Beckett works—Hamm protested against it

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in his story, and Henry dwelt on it in his—becomes in Words and Music more climactic than sexual climax.

Words' poem is a romantic anomaly for Beckett. Begin­ ning with a conventional memory of unfulfilled love, the verse moves to a love that reaches down to a meaning deeper than itself. Perhaps Croak finds Words' story un­ bearable because it objectifies his yearning. However, the story is told not by Croak but by Words, an author who seems obedient to Croak's behests. Initially resisting a marriage to Music, Words finally implores Music to play and then reacts with an ambiguous sigh. A quite literal "nobody," Words has created a translucent somebody—a beloved woman who points beyond human love. Again, the characters may be viewed as aspects of artistic compo­ sition—theme, words, and melody which can create a whole wider than the sum of their parts, and wider than any individual experience. It is probable that between Words and Music and Cascando, Beckett began another radio script in French, aban­ doned it, then retrieved it for publication, and translated it as Radio I. Radio II seems to be a realistic precursor of Words and Music, Radio I of Cascando.10 It dramatizes the plight of an unnamed man in a room, fearing that words and music—"a need"—are ending. So Cascando dramatizes the plight of Opener, who summons words and music at will, finally declaring that they are "Good." As Croak is the au­ dience for author-Words and accompanying Music, as the man in Radio I is the audience for words and music left blank in Beckett's script, Opener is the audience for Voice and Music of Cascando. Words and Music evidently play continuously as in the abandoned sketch, but we do not hear them continuously. In Radio I we hear them when, as in radio, a knob is turned. In Caseando Opener decides what we will hear. The title Caseando is a musical term for diminishing tempo and volume. Zilliacus, in tracing the manuscript stages of the radio play, shows that the term was at first applicable to all three audible strands—Opener, Voice,

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Music.11 In the text as published and produced, however, Opener alone shows the "cascando" tendency. When the play begins, Opener commands a musical composition in this month of May, named for Maia, god­ dess of plenty. Soon, however, he begins to quote his critics, to fear opening and long for closing. Voice and Music, in contrast, apparently continue to perform their functions, without noticeable diminuendo. Like Words in Words and Music, Voice creates fiction—a story that must be told before Voice can rest. Opener therefore triggers the fiction that voice composes. Opener is not only a creator but a critic, and a critic of critics. Wittily, Beckett incorpo­ rates into Opener's monologue a parody of actual com­ ment on his work—"It's in his head."—as well as his at­ titude toward such comment—"But I don't answer any more." Opener speaks in clear, correct sentences, which incorporate a dialogue between the creating "I" and the critical "they." Voice speaks a more difficult discourse, having two separate subjects but a single frenetic style—in Zilliacus' words "palpitating wordshed, monotonous, rapid, and panted."12 The early stages of Beckett's manuscript sepa­ rate two strands of Voice's speech, that of story and that of self who yearns to bring the story to an end. Although they are less distinct in the final Cascando, they are distinguish­ able. Each strand is allotted eight disconnected verbal fragments; in two sections the strands blend. The story as­ pect has double the air time, but music accompanies only the self strand. The story tells the picaresque adventures of a pro­ tagonist Woburn, who subsumes Beckett's fictional pro­ tagonists. With a typically Beckettian old coat, hat, and stick, Woburn leaves a dwelling at night, stumbles through several landscapes, falls in cruciform position, rises to seek some concave shelter, falls again in mud, sand, stones; he finds a boat, and, prone on its boards, heads out to sea "seeking elsewhere . . . always elsewhere," clinging to the gun wales as Voice and Music cheer him on. Even Opener

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loses critical distance at one point, and echoes the words of the self strand of Voice: "Come on! Come on!" It is not quite clear whether he is encouraging Woburn or Voice— character or author. Opener has provoked different interpretations. Martin Esslin suggests a perceiving part of the self; Jean-Jacques Mayoux finds a tormented part-self; Michael Robinson and George Hensel equate Opener with Beckett, and German radio critics tend to see him as the double of the actual radio listener.13 Whoever Opener may be, he is absorbed by esthetics, explicitly rejecting a connection between his life and his art: "No resemblance." And yet, he explains, in opening, "It's my life, I live on that." Mainly preoccupied with opening, closing, quoting, and answering his critics, he once propounds an image of two separate outings and a common return to a village inn. These outings have been interpreted as Voice and Music, Voice's self and story, but they seem to me any blend of sound and sense. If that is allowed, Beckett's last radio play ascribes, through an im­ age, a general meaning to the process of fictionalizing. Sound and sense are separate when one listens to them separately, but the imaginative writer transmits both. Cascando may be Beckett's subtlest dramatization of a creative process that is also the thinking process of man, the verbal animal. What is striking on radio is the contrast between Opener's syntactical sobriety and Voice's staccato anxiety. Opener makes narration possible; he opens by compulsion rather than caprice, for he lives his creation. And yet he is no more an actual author than are Croak or Animator. The only author we hear is nervous Voice, who schizophrenically tells and tells about the Woburn story. Author-Voice has a complex relationship with his charac­ ter Woburn; Voice affirms with decreasing faith that finish­ ing his story will enable him to rest, that fictional contour will help define the self. Voice rushes his character through mud, sand, stones, and bilge; he has Woburn fall and rise again and again, only to abandon him at sea. But even then Voice clings to Woburn as that character clings

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to his boat "heading nowhere . .. heading anywhere." The rest-starved author keeps his character in perpetual mo­ tion. In Beckett's verbal counterpoint a defensive OpenI Closer admits by fits and starts to a never-ending tale about a synoptic character, as panted forth manically by a schizoid author. And the whole coheres, to illuminate man's never-ending quest for self-understanding. Beckett variously modifies the theatrum mundi topos, a story within his plays. Hamm and Winnie might have used PirandeUo as a primer, anchoring their own fear of being "nobody" in the "somebody" of their fiction. Beckett's radio authors, however, are figuratively and literally in the dark. Blind Dan Rooney of All That Fall adopts a narrative tone, takes a fictional stance, for an autobiographical story that stops short of its crucial revelation. Henry of Embers endows his characters with names, physical traits, and a concrete meeting-place; yet the whole crumbles to ashes. Beckett's later radio authors merely sketch their characters, whom they can barely sustain through a whole scene. As Beckett's stage characters gradually concentrate to a single distinctive voice uttering our common experience, the characters of his radio authors gradually concentrate to a few fleeting phrases that embrace our common human predicament. The three stage plays of the 1970s theatricalize authorial complexities suggested in the radio plays. As Dan Rooney converts his Saturday morning activities into an unfin­ ished story, so Mouth of Not I converts her life into an un­ finished story, even while she denies that she is speaking about herself, she, SHE. However, it is no longer possible to distinguish story from autobiography through such conventional devices as "narrative tone." Mouth propels her nameless old woman through breathless asyntactical fragments, as Voice propelled Woburn; neither story ends, but both authors keep muttering. The three voice-strands of That Time refine or extend the two voice-strands of Voice of Cascando; they might be labeled Childhood, Maturity, Old Age, each one blending

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self and story. Each strand gradually accumulates modifi­ cations, even as Winnie and Henry corrected their narra­ tives. However, the earlier authors revise stylistically, whereas the voice-strands re-imagine time, place, or actual event. The three voice-strands refer repeatedly to "making it up," and finally that is the only durable certainty of the long life imaged by the head on stage. Details shift or dis­ solve; memoiy is unsure or untrustworthy; but from child­ hood to old age, the voice sustains stories: "muttering away now one voice now another there was childhood for you," "making it up from there as best you could always together somewhere in the sun," "just another of those old tales to keep the void from pouring in on top of you the shroud." All of That Time may be "another of those old tales," and the accumulation of these tales sounds like an autobiography. The obverse of Not I, which veils autobiog­ raphy as fiction, That Time veils as autobiography a com­ posite of fictions. Of Beckett's three stage plays of the 1970s, Footfalls theatricalizes his most complex version of an author creat­ ing a character who is in no way allegorical, but who seems precipitated to her human essence. It may be recalled that blackouts divide Footfalls into four parts, the first three dramatizing mother-daughter relationships. They might be entitled: 1) Dialogue, 2) Mother's flashback exposition for dialogue, 3) Daughter's sequel and semblance of dialogue. In the first two scenes the mother is exquisitely sensitive to the daughter's presence, but in Scenes 2 and 3 the daughter shows no awareness of her mother, who is invisible to us. Fiction begins perhaps in Scene 2, as the invisible mother tells the tale of her daughter's pacing. Twice the mother posits an audience for her account—"it may be asked." Although the mother ostensibly narrates truth, fic­ tional notes intrude: as M faces us, V speaks of "her face to the wall." Although we see a strip of board in a theater, V claims that M is "in the old home." The mother's voice speaks in the third person of "her mother."

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In Scene 3 the daughter emerges as a full-fledged author of fiction. Opening on the word "Sequel," the daughter's story of a woman pacing in a church is a skewed sequel to the mother's story of her daughter pacing in their home, both women fictionalizing the actual stage setting. So, too, the daughter's "No sound," belies Beckett's stage direction that the steps be "clearly audible." And yet "The sem­ blance" is a striking likeness of the tattered daughter. About one-third through M's soliloquy she joins Sequel to Semblance, translating them into frank fiction. The invis­ ible mother's repeated "it may be asked" of Scene 2 is bal­ anced in Scene 3 by the visible daughter's repeated "as the reader will remember." The daughter's name May is anagramized to Amy, and the mother acquires a name—Mrs. Winter. "One late autumn Sunday evening" after wor­ ship, mother and daughter are at supper. Like Hamm's protagonist and supplicant, like Henry's two old fictional characters, M's fictional mother and daughter look at each other "full in the eye"—as actual mother and daughter never do on stage. Like Dan Rooney's narrative in All That Fall, like Mouth's narrative in Not 1, M's story turns on ab­ sence. Repeating Winnie's word "strange," M has her mother and daughter Winter disagree about the presence of the daughter Amy at evening service, but the two women implicitly agree about a need for prayer in this world where footsteps and dialogues keep revolving the pain of "it all," long after the specific sufferers are forgot­ ten. As Footfalls progresses, the mother-daughter relation­ ship is eroded. In Scene 1 we hear a mother-daughter dialogue, but do not see the mother. In Scene 2 we hear the mother alone speak of a mother and daughter. In Scene 3 we hear the daughter alone speak of a mother and daughter. But both tales pivot on the absence of the daughter—in Scene 2 from lacrosse, in Scene 3 from prayer—whereas the mother continues to be absent to our eyes. Fiction may camouflage and contradict so as to reach a deeper truth. In Beckett's stage world one can be absent

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from prayer and yet respond "Amen" to the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost. Mouth of Not I narrates autobiography in the third per­ son of fiction. The three voice-strands of That Time weave a composite biography, however the details fluctuate. Three scenes of Footfalls are rhythmed by M's steps as the play progresses from direct dialogue to a perhaps fictional dia­ logue within a monologue to a certainly fictional dialogue within a monologue. Christian Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are fictionalized to Mother and Daughter, who are ghosts. In Not I fiction veils a narrative compulsion; in That Time a life-story is camouflaged behind cross-cut verses that may be fiction; in Footfalls the most mannered fiction uncovers a void. Through their stories the dramatized au­ thors bare and bear the pain of "it all."

6 The Churn of Stale Words: Repetitions In the preceding four "Through Views" of Beckett's plays, I have traced dramatic tensions in time and place, and characters' expression in soliloquy and fiction. As a final "Through View" I propose to examine avatars of Beckett's most pervasive verbal device, repetition. In his verse and fiction of the 1930s he anchors an order in repetition, but from 1949 to 1976 he seems to erode order through the relentlessness of his repetition, which is one of his ways "to find a form that accommodates the mess."1 Moreover, verbal repetition can enhance or counterpoint gestural repetition in drama, but my comments concentrate on what Beckett has called the "wordshed" (in his poem "Cascando"). The nuances of his verbal repetition must be grounded on the most thorough "Through View" of the plays, risking tedium, but I hope that this "churn of stale words" yields new precipitates. My research begins with counting. "Not count!" exclaims Dan Rooney in All That Fall, "One of the few satisfactions in life?" I confess that counting has not been a satisfaction in my life or my analysis, but it seemed to me necessary. I would have preferred to ponder repetition as discussed by Deleuze, Freud, Frye, or Kierkegaard, but I find them too distant from Beckett's basic verbal prac­ tice—the repetition of sound, word, phrase, sentence, or dialogue segment for quite varied effects. John Pilling has written trenchantly about Beckett's repetition of event and image, mainly in the fiction, but he does not analyze verbal repetition.2 Elizabeth Segre has studied verbal repetition in Watt, The Unnamable, and Bing,3 and I am grateful for her

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illuminations, but they are not transferable to drama, where echoes must be received by the ear. Bruce Kawin discusses repetition in performance, and I am grateful to him for spurring me to probe the specifics of dramatic rep­ etition, but his distinction seems to me too subjective: REPETITIOUS: when a word, percept, or experience is re­ REPETITIVE:

peated with less impact at each recurrence. when a word, percept, or experience is re­ peated with equal or greater force at each occurrence.4

Who is to measure "force" or "impact?" Repetition—whether repetitious or repetitive—occurs early in Beckett's verse and fiction, but he consciously chose that device for his drama. Eleutheria of 1947 does not call attention to its repetitions; Waiting for Godot of 1949 does—at several levels. Act II nearly duplicates Act I; characters appear in couples, and one friend often echoes the other; gestures are repetitive—pacing, sitting, waiting, and especially falling; props are repetitive—derbies, high shoes, ropes, swiftly rising moons. Above all, words are repetitive, so that the inattentive actor may miss a cue and omit or repeat a whole scene; the inattentive spectator, lulled by echoes, may miss their deepening force. Beckett means these repetitions to be experienced in the theater, where the audience can neither skip dull pages nor feed a computer for a quick concordance. In this long chapter I accord what may seem a dispropor­ tionate amount of attention to Waitingfor Godot. I do so not only because this play illustrates Beckett's versatile range of dramatic repetition, but also because I have had to in­ vent terms for verbal repetitions, and they are best exemplified in Beckett's best-known play. Like counting, such invention gave me small satisfaction, but I had no choice, since linguists did not prepare my terrain. (Paul Fortier's useful concordance to the French text of Godot re­ veals the frequency but not the techniques of verbal repeti­ tion.)

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A large preponderance of Godot's repetitions occur in the form of simple doublets, where a word or phrase is heard again immediately or very soon after first mention. Though Godot's Boy speaks no simple doublets, the four main characters do. A simple doublet may be a single word: VLADIMIR: Relieved and at the same time . . . (he searches for the word) appalled. (With empha­ sis.) AP-PALLED. LUCKY: . . . alas alas . . .

Or a phrase: ESTRAGON: What'll we do, what'll we do!

Or a longer sentence: Pozzo:

Does that name mean nothing to you? (Si­ lence.) I say does that name mean nothing to you?

Emphasis is the intention of these repetitions, as abundant as in everyday speech. But emphasis may blend with emo­ tion; in the quotations, Vladimir is horrified, Lucky grieved, Estragon despairing, and Pozzo threatening. Oc­ casionally, simple doublets seem merely mechanical: ESTRAGON: Come come, take a seat I beseech you. VLADIMIR: SO much the better, so much the better.

Simple doublets, especially when interrogative, may sow doubt: VLADIMIR: But to whom? By whom?

But doubt itself can be emphatic: Pozzo:

What was I saying? (Pause. Louder.) What was I saying?

Related to simple doublets of doubt are those expressing hesitation:

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VLADIMIR: Tell him . . . (he hesitates) . . . tell him you

Pozzo:

saw us. Thank you, gentlemen, and let me . . . (he fumbles irt his pockets). . . let me wish you . . . (fumbles). . . wish you. . . .

In the simple doublet the speaker repeats his own words. In the interrupted doublet another speaker interrupts the original speaker, who then utters his repetition. Early in Act I of Godot Estragon repeats after Vladimir's correc­ tion: ESTRAGON: Looks to me more like a bush. VLADIMIR: A shrub. ESTRAGON: A bush.

In the verselike sequences of Act II Estragon repeats, "Like leaves" and "They rustle."5 In the distanced doublet repetition is delayed too long to be readily recognizable in the theater, as in the following example where the repetition is separated by eighty pages in the Grove Press edition: ESTRAGON: What is it? Yes, but what kind? VLADIMIR: I don't know. A willow. I don't know. A

willow. Despite its many simple doublets, the dominant rhythm of Waiting for Godot is set in the duologues of Vladimir and Estragon, a variant of the vaudeville pair of astute and ob­ tuse comedian—a variant because Vladimir is not always astute, nor Estragon obtuse. As in vaudeville, one friend often echoes the other's words, changing the tone, in echo doublets.6 Whereas simple doublets tend to slow stage time, echo doublets usually propel the dialogue forward: ESTRAGON: VLADIMIR: VLADIMIR: ESTRAGON:

In a ditch. (admiringly). A ditch!

It'd give us an erection. (highly excited). An erection!

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Beckett's scenic directions indicate emotional shifts within the echo doublets. Doubt and hesitation may riddle echo doublets, as they do simple doublets: VLADIMIR: Did you ever read the Bible? ESTRAGON: The Bible . . . (He reflects.) VLADIMIR: The tree! ESTRAGON: The tree?

Echo doublets are often more sardonic than simple dou­ blets, as in the following example, where the two friends mock Pozzo and undercut his suffering: Pozzo:

VLADIMIR: ESTRAGON: VLADIMIR: ESTRAGON:

(groaning, clutching his head). I can't bear it . . . any longer . . . the way he goes on . . . you've no idea . . . it's terrible . . . he must go . . . (he waves his arms) . . . I'm going mad . . . (he collapses, his head in his hands) . . . I can't bear it. . . any longer . . . He can't bear it. Any longer. He's going mad. It's terrible.

Decidedly less often than doublets, Beckett resorts to triplets, whether simple or echo. A simple triplet may be sar­

castic: ESTRAGON: That would be too bad, really too bad. (Pause.) Wouldn't it, Didi, be really too bad?

Toward the end of Act II a triplet enhances Vladimir's doubt about whether Pozzo is Godot: "Not at all! (Less sure.) Not at all! (Still less sure.) Not at all!" This triplet at­ tains a climax impossible in a doublet. So, too, in Pozzo's anaphoric triplet: "Let us not then speak ill of our genera­ tion . . . (Pause.) Let us not speak well of it either. (Pause.) Let us not speak of it at all." In echo triplets the same words bounce between two characters:

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VLADIMIR: DO you not recognize the place? ESTRAGON: (suddenly furious). Recognize! What is there

to recognize? Or three: VLADIMIR: Damn it haven't you already told us?

Pozzo:

I've already told you?

ESTRAGON: He's already told us?

Early in the play an important echo triplet is repeated, with speakers reversed: It hurts? Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts. The basic building-blocks of dialogue repetition are sim­ ple or echo doublets, which can be extended to triplets, quadruplets, and multiplets; larger units tend to break rhythmically into doublets and triplets, as in the exchange about Lucky's dumbness or Pozzo's blindness. At times, however, multiplets pile up into a pounder, spoken by a single character. Lucky's speech is the bravura example, pounding several phrases, most notably "I resume" and "alas." Multiplets may be echoed by one or more speakers in a volley. An example occurs early in Godot, when Vlad­ imir and Estragon volley the words "two thieves," "the Savior," and "saved." A little later, they volley "tied." After these new terms, it may be a relief to consider a traditional device of verbal repetition, the refrain. The only problem is how to define that familiar device. Though re­ frains are as old as poetry, they have not been explored in drama. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, for example, begins its discussion of Refrain. "A line, or lines, or part of a line, repeated at intervals throughout a poem." Problems bristle. Is a single word a valid "part of a line?" How far should "intervals" be spaced? How many repeti­ tions add up to "throughout?" On the other hand, refrains are not even mentioned in Van Laan's Idiom of Drama or Larthomas' Langage dramatique. To be applicable to drama, the Princeton Encyclopedia definition should be modified to

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include awareness of an audience: "A meaningful word or words often repeated during the course of a play, so that the audience grows aware of that repetition."7 Doublets, triplets, volleys, and pounders account for the large quantity of repetitions in Waiting for Godot, but the dense qualitative feeling rests on refrains. Six times (two in Act I, four in Act II) we hear: ESTRAGON: VLADIMIR: ESTRAGON: VLADIMIR: ESTRAGON:

Let's go. We can't. Why not? We're waiting for Godot. Ah!

By now this exchange is the best-known refrain in modern drama. Not only do we hear the whole sequence six times, but each phrase of the sequence (including "Ah!") occurs in other word groups, reinforcing our familiarity. Estragon himself utters an abridged version: "Let's go. We can't. Ah!" A final repetition is a variant on the refrain, climactically increasing the desperation of the friends' situation: ESTRAGON: VLADIMIR: ESTRAGON: VLADIMIR: ESTRAGON: VLADIMIR: ESTRAGON:

O yes, let's go far away from here. We can't. Why not? We have to come back to-morrow. What for? TO wait for Godot. Ah!

Even outside this sequence, "Godot" rings out as a refrain-word. Vladimir and Estragon twice mention their wait for Godot; each declares "I'm waiting for Godot" or "I waited for Godot." Vladimir's conversations with Godot's Boy contain ten references to Mr. Godot, and Pozzo twice distorts the name. Inscrutable and invisible, Godot is ubiquitous through his refrain-name. While waiting for Godot, the friends keep asking what to do, and interrogatives are repetitive in the play. Fortier's French concordance lists hundreds of repeated interroga-

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tives, which rise even more sharply in English monosyl­ lables—who, how, why, when, where. These words, however, are too common to be heard as refrains. Lucky inspires two refrain-questions, "Why doesn't he put down his bags?" initiated by Estragon, and, addressed to Pozzo but initiated by Vladimir, "You want to get rid of him?" A polysemic refrain turns on the friends' question of "what we do." Seven times Estragon asks "What'll we do?" or "What do we do?" His repetitions may be para­ phrased as: "What activity can we initiate?" After Estragon casts doubt on the time and place of meeting Godot, Vladimir exclaims, "What'll we do?" meaning: "How can we know the right time and place?" After their discussion of hanging, Vladimir asks anxiously, "What do we do?" Understood though unspoken is "about hanging our­ selves." When Estragon next repeats the question, it may be shadowed with the anxieties of Vladimir, who pro­ nounces the last repetition. In Act II he looks at the three men who have fallen to the ground, and he comments, "A diversion comes along and what do we do?" The meaning has shifted to "How do we react?" My definition of refrain stipulated audience awareness of these periodic repetitions. Less noticeable than interrogatives are repeated negatives. The French concordance counts 513 recurrences of the particle ne, usually translated by English "not" or "n't." Though the English disyllable "nothing" is innocuous, it commands attention by virtue of the thirty-odd repetitions in Godot. Both Vladimir and Estragon repeat the play's opening line: "Nothing to be done." Vladimir varies it with "Nothing you can do about it," and Estragon with "Nothing we can do about it." Vlad­ imir sustains that sentiment in such phrases as "We've nothing more to do here," "There's nothing we can do," "There's nothing to do." Estragon sees and hears "noth­ ing" and has "nothing" to show. Vladimir insists he has "nothing" to say to his friend. Each of the friends com­ ments, "It's not certain," but Estragon declares more am­ biguously, "Nothing is certain." This can be paraphrased

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in two ways: "One can be certain of nothing at all" or "The only certainty is nothingness." "Nothing" is probably noticeable as a refrain, but proba­ bly unnoticeable is a comparable refrain repeated by all but Lucky—"I don't know." Vladimir with his half-dozen dec­ larations of ignorance is outdone by Estragon with his dozen. The latter utters a climactic variant: "I don't know why I don't know." These several refrains—waiting, doing, Godot, noth­ ing—serve as a warp for the measured woof of doublets and triplets. Two adjectives in thematic tension with the waiting refrain are probably unnoticeable as refrain. The words "true" and "happy" often recur, though the play theatricalizes the unattainability of truth and happiness, and it does so in part by reiterating those very words. Vladimir, Estragon, and Pozzo most often mean "Yes" when they say "True." Vladimir is the first to speak the word, agreeing to button his fly, and Estragon speaks it last, agreeing to pull up his trousers. These key "true"s trivialize truth. In contrast to "true," whose meaning is mechanized, "happy" retains meaning but is unrealizable. Toward the beginning of Act I Estragon recalls a vision of a happy hon­ eymoon. Toward the middle of Act I Pozzo toasts "Happy days" and analyzes his own happiness. Toward the end of the act Estragon cries out: "I'm unhappy." When Estragon is asleep, Vladimir asks whether the Boy is unhappy. The latter doesn't know, and neither does Vladimir. By Act II, however, Vladimir declares that he was happy when alone, then retracts: "Perhaps it's not quite the right word." In Act I Vladimir was "glad" to be back with Estra­ gon again, but by Act II he enacts a happiness he cannot feel. It is an empty exercise, and happiness soon dwindles to a vanishing point: "Wait. . . we embraced . . . we were happy . . . happy . . . what do we do now that we're happy . . . go on waiting . . . waiting . . . let me think . . . it's coming . . . go on waiting . . . now that we're happy . . . let me see . . . ah!" And yet, when Vladimir wakes Estragon,

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the latter still recalls the word's meaning: "I was dreaming I was happy." Other refrain-words are nouns—boot, hat, bone, carrot, turnip, tree, rope, whip, pipe and its synonyms, watch and its parts—concretely present on stage but metaphori­ cally extended through repetition. Less frequent refrains are Savior, thieves, and Christ with their sacramental asso­ ciations. The number "one" becomes surprisingly signifi­ cant through repetition as do the several cries for help and the references to beating, though only an alert spectator will recognize them as refrains. The very theme of repeti­ tion is repeated in the innocuous word "again," spoken some dozen times by the two friends and Pozzo. Though the word is too common to function as a refrain, Vladimir performs the rare feat of stressing it in a doublet: "There you are again again!" Waiting for Godot is woven with repetition. Acts and ac­ tions repeat; props, lightings, and settings repeat; words repeat—doublets, triplets, multiplets, in a single voice or two voices; less often, three voices, and almost never four. Only the refrain "nothing" sounds in five timbres. Although Beckett uses the same building-blocks of repe­ tition for all five characters, the emotional effect is quite different. Vladimir and Estragon repeat to fill their endless wait. Pozzo repeats in mechanical commands to Lucky or faltering explanations to the friends, and the cliche com­ parison of Lucky to a broken record merely emphasizes the mechanical surface of his speech. This variety of repetition is rarely noticed on a first viewing of Godot, but Vladimir's round song and Lucky's monologue obstreperously call at­ tention to themselves—differently structured pounders. The Chinese-box song about the doomed dog in the kitchen can be pounded ad infinitum about an infinite number of doomed dogs, and we can readily understand its appeal for one of Beckett's temperament. Unlike the old dog-song, Lucky's monologue is a highly original structure, however it borrows from the vocabulary of logic, theology, medicine, sports, meteorology. These

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two pounders contrast; the meaning of the dog-song is soon clear, and each repetition is emphasis. Lucky's speech is so unclear that no one anatomized its structure until Anselm Atkins published his penetrating note some fifteen years after the play itself.8 Atkins analyzes both sense and grammar, showing how repeated filler phrases obfuscate the meaning. In the orderly syntax of Part I, which conveys God's indifference, repetition is minimal, the word "divine" being spoken four times. In the looser grammar of the longer Part II, which conveys dwindling man, most of the repetitions blur the main syntactical line; "man" occurs four times, "for reasons unknown" six. Part III, which conveys cosmic petrefaction, freezes syntax with rife repetition, accumulating two "Steinweg and Petermans," five "stones," and eight "skulls," to break off at the seventh "unfinished." Despite fragmentation, how­ ever, Part III repeats "so calm," "so blue," and "labors abandoned, left unfinished," of Part I; as well as "but time will tell," "I resume," "what is more," which belong mainly to Part II. The most anguished repetition is unique to Part III, where nine "alas"es preponderate over eight "on"s, the pounding decreasing toward the very last. "On" recalls Pozzo, master and victim of a Lucky whose repetiti­ ous phrasing and asyntactical anarchy drain his speech of meaning but not of significance. The very repetitions that blur the grammar provide incantatory rhythms. The effect on an audience is predicted in the effect on the stage audi­ ence, who react aggressively to the verbal pounding. It is entirely reasonable in Lucky's tirade that the most frequent repetition is "for reasons unknown." The phrase embraces Lucky's own learning and the wait for Godot. Lucky's words are flamboyantly repetitive, and they differ from the repetitions of the other characters in being dis­ connected from stage time, place, props. Lucky is literally as well as colloquially "out of it." Like vaudeville come­ dians, Vladimir and Estragon quip about immediacies; even Pozzo, for all his rhetoric, discourses on the visible

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twilight. But Lucky pounds at Western civilization—both repetitive and repetitious. Thematically, Lucky's speech may be viewed as a springboard to Endgame, completed seven years later in 1956. Divine indifference greets the prayer of Nagg, Hamm, and Clov. Complaining all the way, man wastes and pines on stage. Though the earth is not yet an "abode of stones," it is dulled to gray: "Light black. From pole to pole." Whatever happens in Endgame—"What's happen­ ing? What's happening?"—does so "for reasons un­ known," and though no one utters Lucky's old-fashioned word "alas," all four Endgame characters voice the weari­ ness at its root. Beckett has been unusually explicit about Endgame: "Das Stuck ist voller Echos, alle antworten einander."9 Since the action of Endgame is confined to one act, it cannot quite at­ tain the structural repetition of Godot. However, the end repeats the beginning in Hamm's opening and closing so­ liloquies addressed to his curtain-handkerchief. Gestures are often repeated: though we see only the one unveiling, we assume it is Clov's daily task. Clov obeys Hamm's or­ ders as though he has heard them before. Nagg and Nell rise from their ashbins as though they have done so for years. Clov twice wheels Hamm around the shelter, and Clov twice looks out the windows at earth and sea. Gestural repetition is grounded on verbal repetition. Only a concordance can reveal whether Endgame actually contains more verbal repetition than Godot, but only an audience can respond to the heightened feeling of repeti­ tion. Moreover, the claustrophobic setting of Endgame in­ creases pressure on the characters, so that the repetitions ricochet off one another with apparently random frenzy. But of course they are patterned. The repetitive devices of Godot are repeated in End­ game—simple doublets, echo doublets, simple triplets, echo triplets, pounders, volleys, and especially refrains. Like Godot, Endgame uses everyday language (for the most

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part) in simple sentences (for the most part). However, the simple words in simple sentences convey a more pro­ nounced feeling of deja entendu because of increased alliter­ ation, anaphora, rhyme, stichomythia; sound repetition accentuates word repetition. In dissecting the repetitions of Endgame, it is true to the theater impact to treat refrains first, and then to describe the plethora of doublets, triplets, pounders, and volleys. The neologism "Godot" has no parallel in Endgame, but the many "nothings" of Godot correspond to the "no mores" in Endgame—sufficiently numerous to be heard as a refrain. Godot harps on the number "one," and Endgame on the ad­ verb "once." Clov and Nell exclaim "Once!" Speaking of Mother Pegg, Hamm recalls, "She was bonny once," and Clov's echo pauses before "once" to emphasize that that time is past. The last time Clov says "once" is a subtle comment on much of the repetition of Endgame. Hamm has called his father twice, but Clov reports that Nagg heard "Once only." So with the very practice of repetitions: in the theater they are often heard "Once only," however they may register subliminally. Polysemic refrains are more frequent in Endgame than Godot. Hamm and Clov speak the verb "finish" some twenty times. Perversely, Clov opens the play: "Finished, it's finished." However, he then qualifies it with "nearly finished," and further qualifies, "It must be nearly fin­ ished." "Finish" in these phrases resonates its first dic­ tionary definition: "to bring to an end." Soon, however, the verb means "complete" in Clov's: "First you finish your dog and then you put on the ribbon!" It acquires a deadly sense in the series of repetitions that start with Hamm's "Why don't you finish us." After the middle of the play Hamm repeats Clov's opening words (with var­ iants): "It's finished, we're finished. (Pause.) Nearly fin­ ished." By the middle of Endgame, "finish" reverts to "end," perhaps accumulating the deadly sense for "we." "End" is another refrain-word, with some dozen repeti­ tions, including the title. Though more stable in meaning,

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it is not quite fixed, since it puns on time and location in Clov's remark about the incomplete toy dog: "The sex goes on at the end." The titular endgame is the logical rather than the actual finale of a chess-game, and the play End­ game ends with incomplete finality. Hamm early declares that it is time to end, and yet he hesitates to end. He can­ not live up to his ethic of universal annihilation, but he and Clov try to talk up to it through repetitions of "end" and "finish." More problematical is the verb "get." As recurrent as "Godot," "get" is so innocuous a word that it might not register as a refrain, to which Beckett's characters assign several meanings. Most usual is the typical format of Hamm's commands to Clov: "Go and get ..." bicyclewheels, dog, gaff, glass, and oilcan. In the same phrase, Clov volunteers to "go and get" catheter, tape, glass, powder. "Get" means "fetch" in these configurations. Remaining transitive, "get" changes to "beat" in Hamm's midplay expression of triumph over Clov—"Got him that time!" More lethal are Hamm's question about the flea: "Did you get him?" and his injunction to himself: "Ah let's get it over!" Ironic is Clov's "What skilled attention they get ..." meaning "receive." Intransitively, the verb can play against stage immobility, as in Hamm's "Get working on that raft!" Clov announces that the rat "got away"; Hamm boasts that he has "got on" with his story, and Hamm encourages himself (four times): "We're getting on"—possibly a pun, although he does not "get on" with his family. Hamm recalls gloomily that he and Clov "got into the way of it"; he commands his imaginary kingdom, "Get out of here and love one another!" Though such lexi­ cal shifts may be too small, quick, and widely separated to hear in the theater, they are unmistakable in close proxim­ ity: HAMM: GO and get him! (Exit Clov.) We're getting on.

The refrain-word "leave" also shifts meaning. The four characters of Endgame exist in their shelter—lives ebbing,

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play exhausted, and "no more" objects. Invisibly tied, the two couples sometimes strain to separate, through words rather than gestures, for the flesh is very, very weak. "I can't leave you," Hamm acknowledges to Clov. "I'll leave you," Nell threatens Nagg with disappearance into her ashbin. Clov, mobile and drawn to his offstage kitchen, bluffs separation in some dozen repetitions of "I'll leave you." Yet when Clov accuses Hamm, "So you all want me to leave," he means permanent departure. Clov finally re­ peats "I'll leave you" after he has sighted the small boy, wound up the alarm-clock, and heard Hamm dismiss him. For once Clov sounds determined to abandon the shelter, and yet he is still on stage at the end of the play. Clov is not the only one to chant the refrain-word "leave," whose am­ biguities are underlined by proximity in repetition: HAMM: Leave him like that, standing there imploring

me. I'll leave you. HAMM: Leave me the gaff. CLOV: I'll leave you. CLOV:

Clov sometimes follows "I'll leave you" with "I have things to do." Of the several refrain-words of Endgame it is "thing" whose meaning veers most sharply. In Clov's sen­ tence the "things" are unnamed tasks. Hamm's "The thing is impossible" may mean any subject from bicycles to the play itself. When Clov declares "Things are livening up," he may mean the human situation or the play. Hamm's "Did you ever think of one thing?" refers to a subject or an idea, like Clov's "There's one thing I'll never understand." Clov's reaction to Hamm's story of the painter-engraver is: "There are so many terrible things." Does he mean events or losses? Hamm endows the word with larger signifi­ cance, even as he searches for a larger word to express what they have "had enough" of, and what "has gone on long enough"—"this . . . this . . . thing." Ambiguities deepen in one of the play's key speeches:

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NELL: Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.

And we laugh, we laugh with a will, in the begin­ ning. But it's always the same thing. The "most comical thing" is the monstrous joke of unhappiness, but the "same thing" portends disaster. In Hamm's final fling with the refrain-word, he provides his own synonym: "One thing more. (Clov halts.) A last favor." "Something" particularizes "thing," but in Endgame it generalizes ambiguity. Hamm's command: "Think of something," denotes a subject or idea, like "thing." Clov feels a growing force in: "Something is taking its course." This is quite another "something" from what Hamm wor­ ries they might begin to mean. And still another from Hamm's request to Clov: "Say something." In no other play does Beckett explore so thoroughly the polysemy of banal refrains. Filler-words that abound in concordances are unrecog­ nizable as refrains—pleonasms, articles, prepositions, con­ junctions, auxiliary verbs, interrogatives, and negatives. On the border between filler and refrain is initial "then," as conjunction to a sadistic conclusion: HAMM: Then there's no reason for it to change. . . . Then

let it end. CLOV:

Then we'll die. . . . Then we won't die.

As in Godot, stage props become refrain-words, but the props change—wheelchair, sheet, alarm, gaff, glass, dog, biscuit. The non-props, pap and pain-killer, are depleted to the same rhythm. HAMM [to Nagg]: There's no more pap. You'll never get any more pap. CLOV [to Hamm]: No more pain-killer. You'll never get any more pain-killer. The refrains of Endgame are more plentiful, innocuous, and polysemic than those of Godot. It is useful, too, to

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draw a distinction in Endgame between refrains and tags, the former spoken by more than one character and the latter farcically associated with a single character. Thus, though three characters speak of leaving, Clov alone owns the tag "I'll leave you." Hamm owns "Is it not time for. . . . " The main refrains of Endgame, common words, provide texture for the theme of dying time. Or to return to the metaphor I applied to Godot, the refrains form a warp for the woof of less pervasive repetitive devices. Hamm bears the main burden of dialogue, and the word games of Godot become his repetitive verbal patterns—contradiction, abuse, courtesy, narration, and above all questions. His simple doublets are more numerous than those of the other three characters combined. Occurring throughout the eightyfive minutes playing time, they need not be quoted. Dis­ tanced doublets, however, are easily overlooked, and Hamm is the most faithful executant of this device. His epithets for his father—"Accursed progenitor!" and "Ac­ cursed fornicator!"—are separated by a minute of stage time, probably the limit of audience retention, but several sequences distance repetitions over a longer period: "For­ give me . . . I said, forgive me," "You exaggerate," "Perhaps it's a little vein," "Outside of here it's death." To Clov Hamm addresses a distanced triplet: "Don't stay there, you give me the shivers." Clov's distanced triplet accumulates callousness, as he comments "Looks like it," about the end of a day, of a flea, and of Nell in her ashbin. As in Godot, Endgame's repetitions sometimes extend to simple triplets or quadruplets, with Hamm always the leader. Most forcefully, the speaker's repetitions can grow into a pounder, a technique common to the three men of Endgame, with Hamm more insistent than Clov or old Nagg. In cursing his son, Nagg repeats "sleep," "listen," "need." Clov pounds repetitions in two tirades—his open­ ing soliloquy and his farewell speech. Uttered tonelessly, Clov's opening contains five incantatory sentences, of which only the center one fails to repeat. In his similarly toneless farewell Clov implicitly indicts the staleness of all

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language, by five repetitions of "They said to me. . . ." Only after Hamm's pained interruption does he admit "I say to myself," but it would be more accurate to declare "I repeat to myself," for much of Clov's long speech repeats words heard earlier in the play, and within the speech it­ self he pounds "one day," "never," "end." Hamm, author and autocrat whose name puns on ham­ mer, pounds repetitions. A distanced triplet opens his three soliloquies: "Me to play." The first soliloquy pounds "suffer," "hesitate," "end." His prophecy to Clov ham­ mers "one day," "like me," "sit," "eat," "wall," "pity," and the innocuous "get." His chronicle is more rhetorical than his everyday dialogue, but the repetition compulsion continues: ". . . it was a . . . day, I remember. . . by the . . . meter," "pale," "don't look at me," "you know," "little one," "good," "come on," "bread," "corn," "deep in sleep," and "use your head." When, late in the play, Hamm delivers his second soliloquy, sentences shrink, and doublets spawn multiplets, to crescendo in pounding: "weep," "save," "help," "all that," "go on," "perhaps," "there I'll be," "all over," "I'll have called," "babble," "moment," "life," "and then?" as well as "use your head." Hamm's final spare soliloquy virtually limits his repetition to doublets that dry into silence after the most moving epithet ever addressed to a handkerchief, the dis­ tanced doublet "Old stancher." Simple doublets, triplets, and pounders account for the preponderant quantity of repetitions in Endgame, but as in Godot—more than in Godot—their distinctive quality rests on echo. Endgame's surface often resembles sections of Godot, but both couples lace their conversations with echoes. Nell departs from conversation with Nagg on only two occasions; she echoes Hamm's "Perhaps it's a little vein," compelling assimilation of the pun, and she ad­ dresses her final word to Clov—"Desert!"—which he echoes in a pun. Both Nell and Hamm find unhappiness "comical," and Clov echoes Nell's "Why this farce day after day?" In the main, however, each couple cir-

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cumscribes its own echoes, Nagg and Nell cornered in ashbins, Hamm and Clov at stage center. The echo may be exact: NAGG: I had it yesterday. NELL (elegiac)·. Ah yesterday!"

or varied: CLOV: Who do you mean, he? HAMM: Who do I mean! Yet another.

As simple doublets are the base for simple triplets, mul­ tiplets, and pounders, so echo doublets are the base for echo triplets, multiplets, and volleys. In Endgame echoes are rarely limited to doublets. A simple triplet echoed in a doublet seems to mock the very devices of repetition that are strewn so liberally in Endgame. CLOV (looking): Gray. (Lowering the telescope, turning to­ wards Hamm, louder.) Gray! (Pause. Still louder.) GRRAY! (Pause. He gets down, approaches Hamm from behind, whispers in his ear.) HAMM (starting): Gray! Did I hear you say gray?

Especially telling are volleys in the Hamm-Clov ex­ changes about the glass, the alarm, burials, or opening a window. Most moving, perhaps, is the volley of "heart" near the play's end. HAMM: A few words . . . to ponder . . . in my heart. CLOV: Your heart! HAMM: Yes. (Pause. Forcibly.) Yes! (Pause.) With the rest,

in the end, the shadows, the murmurs, all the trouble, to end up with. (Pause.) Clov . . . He never spoke to me. Then, in the end, before he went, without my having asked him, he spoke to me. He said . . . CLOV (despairingly): Ah . . . ! HAMM: Something . . . from your heart. CLOV: My heart! HAMM: A few words . . . from your heart.

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Both hearts are at once mocked and stressed by their in­ teraction. Subliminally, too, an audience might absorb Hamm's earlier arresting image of a heart in his head, and his mordant implication that his heart is not living. The "heart" volley is diversely burdened. In theory, dramatic dialogue can harbor (« — 1) echoes, η being the number of characters in the play, but a threeway echo never occurs in Endgame, despite the triple prayer. The rapier skills of echo are most adroit in this Beckett play. An ordinary conversational echo might go unnoticed; Nagg asks Nell, and Hamm asks Clov: "Do you not feel well?" And yet, in context, the ordinary word "less" commands attention; Hamm has bled, and Clov has had visions: "Less." Nell and Hamm exclaim about "yes­ terday," which Clov defines cynically. Within a few min­ utes of one another, Hamm and Clov urge each other, "Keep going, can't you, keep going." The words of Hamm and Clov circumnavigate one another in the throes of an ending action. Paradoxically in that gray light on that dying action, they vibrate in new blends of tone and meaning. Rather than increase "the churn of stale words" in subsequent plays, Beckett ex­ plores new avenues of repetition, that substantive that embraces theater rehearsal and life process. For all the realistic surface of All That Fall, repetition soon undermines verisimilitude. Like Endgame, All That Fall unfolds in a single action, replete with repetition. Maddy Rooney goes to Boghill station to meet her blind husband on his birthday; her journey from the train station inversely repeats her journey toward it. In both directions she listens to Schubert's Death and the Maiden and com­ ments on the laburnum tree, hinnies, and dung—dis­ tanced doublets. She hears nonverbal rural sounds of sheep, bird, cow, cock, which are briefly repeated on her homeward voyage, and her steps sound at the play's beginning and end. Outward bound there are repetitive sounds of several vehicles—cart, bicycle, motorcar, and finally trains. On the homeward journey Dan Rooney's

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cane strikes the ground. These nonverbal noises are a new departure for Beckett in a new medium, and he counter­ points verbal repetition against them. Probably the only phrase repeated often enough to be considered a refrain is "up mail," spoken seven times. An Irish phrase for the mail-train, its repetition suggests a pun on "up male" in this play about de-creation, where females are particularly vulnerable, from the hen to Mr. Tyler's daughter. Most of the repetitions are simple doublets or triplets, though Dan Rooney brims over into a pounder on the word "well," so as to emphasize how unwell he is. In this invisible play, where characters nevertheless have to be identified, proper names occur in both simple and echo doublets. Once Dan Rooney arrives, his counting compul­ sion is evidenced in simple number doublets. Given the large cast and its acerbic protagonist, Maddy Rooney, sar­ donic echo doublets abound, withering the words of others. Often echo-words are themselves humorous— dung, stydung, stiff, crouch down, Cissy Slocum, big pale blur, ramdam, a hitch, straight run, safe to haven. Against such comic echoes, we hear a tragic echo triplet at the end: JERRY: It was a little child, Ma'am. MRS. ROONEY: What do you mean, it was a little child? JERRY: It was a little child fell out of the carriage, On to the line, Ma'am. (Pause.) Under the wheels,

Ma'am. An old woman meets her husband on his birthday, repeti­ tively judged "nice day," "divine day," "lovely day." But it proves to be the death day of a little child, a phrase asso­ ciated with Christ in this play with a biblical title. Krapp's Last Tape of 1958 is also about a birthday and a death day—of the protagonist. "One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day ..." intoned Pozzo in Godot. Krapp was born sixty-nine years to the day before the time of his last tape, set in some putative future, but he is reborn every birthday through his ritualization; he lis­ tens to an old tape and records a new one. With the device

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of the tape-recorder, Beckett provides a credible stage rea­ son for his favorite technique, repetition. As the two repetitive days of Godot suggest that all days are repetitions, so Krapp's three birthdays suggest that all years are repetitions. It may be recalled that sixty-nineyear-old Krapp, the ruined figure on stage, is addicted to bananas that constipate him, to alcohol that he drinks offstage, to desire for women in fact (Fanny) and fantasy (Effi Briest). He listens to the tape recorded on his thirtyninth birthday, in which he laments his addiction to bananas, resolves to drink less, and lingers over his farewell to love. In that tape Krapp speaks of a tape made ten or twelve years earlier, in which he recalls his constipa­ tion, his weakness for alcohol, and his affair with a woman named Bianca. Each age reveals its own ambition, its own loss, and his self-scorn. "At each stage Krapp sees the fool he was, not the fool he is."10 The conflict of light and dark is central to Krapp's Last Tape;11 it is therefore fitting that his refrain-word should be "eyes," those perceivers of the visual conflict. Repeated some ten times in the play, eyes are what attract Krapp to three women. Less often, he lovingly repeats the word "spool," whose sound reflects its shape. Most of his verbal repetitions are unobtrusive doublets, mainly to emphasize, occasionally to question: "Black ball?" "Viduity." Dis­ tanced doublets of the recorded tape—"gently," "incom­ parable," are unnoticeable in the theater. Scarcely notice­ able on one hearing is Krapp's tendency to begin recording in the same way—an extended distanced doublet: "Just been listening to . . .," "Hard to believe I was ever . . ." Or a statement of solitude at sixty-nine as at thirty-nine: "Not a soul." Very noticeable, however, is the sentence doublet that ends the play: "But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back." "Them" are years, but the desiccated wreck on stage belies the bravado of the repeated taped words. Krapp plays the "Farewell to love" three times, but he listens to different segments, and only the lyrical passage

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from "my face in her breasts" to "Never knew—" is ac­ tually heard three times. Although the rhythm in this sec­ tion is binary, a triplet reinforces sexual suggestion: "We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down and from side to side." After the stylized repetitive banalities of Godot and End­ game, All That Fall and Krapp's Last Tape veil repetition by an apparently realistic surface. However, the dated diction of the radio play and the self-address to the tape-recorder warn us to look below the surface. I have earlier noted that Embers, Beckett's second radio play, written less than a year after Krapp's Last Tape, turns sharply against realism. Only the situation is realistic; Henry faces the sea, obsessed by repetitive sea-sounds. Against the sucking magnetism of the sea Henry seeks hard noises—hooves on a dry road, stones clashing, human voices in fact and fantasy. The opposite of T. S. Eliot's Prufrock—"Till human voices wake us, and we drown"—Beckett's Henry fears to drown without human voices; even his own is preferable to the incessant seasound. Paradoxically, the play-long refrain is: "Not a sound," in spite of that nonverbal sound. Given to doublets throughout the play, Henry attempts vainly to conjure his drowned father, then successfully arouses his wife Ada, whose low remote voice rarely re­ peats words. All the more striking is her pounder—nine "Don't"s, begun on a domestic note but rising to fend off the ardent lover of twenty years ago. This memory follows an evocation of their daughter Addie at her music and rid­ ing lessons, where the masters drill repetitively, and where Addie herself repeats a mistake in playing her musi­ cal scales. But Henry cannot convert his daughter's noisy activities to a screen against the sound of the sea. Instead, he utters a pounder in a summary-parody of domestic life. To Ada's question, "Did you put on your jaegers, Henry?" he replies: "What happened was this, I put them on and then I took them off again and then I put them on again

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and then I took them off again and then I took them on again and then I—" But he is unable to say whether they are on him now. I have commented on Henry's story about Bolton and his doctor, Holloway. Hesitant and self-correcting, Henry repeats his revisions in simple triplets: "shutters . . . no, hangings, hangings, all the hangings drawn and the light, no light, only the light of the fire." Through the story runs the refrain-word "fire" which will burn down to the titular embers. Henry composes his story, not in the complete and sometimes orotund sentences of Hamm, but in short phrases, sometimes exactly repeated or sometimes re­ peated with variants: "bitter cold, white world, cedar boughs bending under load, . . . white world, even the spire, white to the vane. . . . Holloway, Bolton, Bolton, Holloway, old men, great trouble, white world, not a sound." With a distanced repetition of "Christ!" Henry walks to the sea, and we hear the repetitive sound of his steps on the shingle. He looks at his "little book," and in his final phrases pronounces the word "nothing" seven times. His last words are, "Not a sound," the play's refrain and the single phrase shared by his life and his fiction. As the many "nothing"s of Godot are subtly tied to the many "Godof's, so the "nothing"s of Embers dissolve into the sea, despite the brave words, "Not a sound." The sea of nothingness drowns the fire of all brave words, however the embers may endure through repetition. Henry's narrative style, bristling with noun phrases in subtle arrangement and rearrangement, becomes the basic rhythm for several subsequent Beckett plays, as the obses­ sive imagination of a single character becomes the setting for monodramas. Two years after Embers, in 1961, Beckett completed Happy Days, a further step toward monodrama, with dialogue built largely of phrases permuted, repeated, and newly syncopated. When Beckett came to direct Happy Days a decade later, he designated in his Director's Note-

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book "Repetition Texts" and "Variation Texts"; by the lat­ ter he meant variations on repetition, and in both groups we find what I have been calling refrains. Structurally, Happy Days recalls Godot, but thematically it resembles Endgame. As in Godot an indefinite time elapses between the two acts. However, the second act of Happy Days repeats not events, but only characters, props, and words. Winnie's attitude toward events is repetitively cheerful: "That is what I find so wonderful." Refrains and doublets or triplets constitute the warp and woof of Godot; the weave is similar if more complicated in Endgame, with a marked increase of refrains, doublets, trip­ lets, distanced repetitions, pounders, and volleys. In Happy Days the texture is so luxuriant with repetition that it is difficult to distinguish refrains. My definition—"A meaningful word or words often repeated during the course of a play, so that the audience grows aware of that repetition"—will vary with the audience, and with the sensitivity of a spectator to banalities. Maddy Rooney of All That Fall says that she speaks: "A few simple words . . . from my heart," but it is Winnie who actually does so; no "ramdam" or "pismire" adorns her vocabulary, and even the "emmet" is exceptional. However, Winnie combines and reiterates these "few simple words" into a verbose monologue, punctuated by six exchanges with her hus­ band Willie. Many refrains thread through Winnie's monologue. In Beckett's Director's Notebook for the Berlin production he lists as "Repetition Texts" what I call re­ frains: "old style," "that is what I find so wonderful," "O well, what does it matter, that is what I always say," "And now?" "strange." Still other refrains are gathered under his rubric "Variation Texts": "What day?", "not long now," the several variants on "happy day," "mercies," "there is so little one can . . . " a n d " I say I used to. . . . " Most numerous are repetitions of "no no"—Beckett counts six in Act I, nine in Act II—which would not be noticed as a refrain. Unnoted in Beckett's directing book, but neverthe­ less written into his text are other high-frequency words—

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"old things," "ah well," "ah yes," and perhaps the phrase most audible as a refrain "bell for sleep." Winnie intones all the refrains of Happy Days, and they are closely interwoven with her many, many simple and distanced doublets (over a hundred, on cursory count), few triplets, and occasional multiplets. The refrain "old style" often separates the two members of a doublet. As in earlier Beckett plays, stage props provoke doublets, but "bag" and "light" accumulate multiplets. In Act II Win­ nie's eyes become a virtual prop, but she also imagines "Eyes on my eyes." Several quotations repeat the word "woe," and four of the fourteen are introduced by her dis­ tanced repetition of "What are those . . . lines?" But twice that same question goes unanswered by a quotation. Many of Winnie's repetitions are addressed to her invis­ ible husband Willie—"hole," "head first," "finger," "hands and knees"—and she envies his sleep as "marvel­ ous" or "wonderful gift." Variants of the verb "under­ stand" sprinkle her remarks to and about Willie. The "genuine pure" of her distanced toothbrush multiplet is transferred to the "genuine pure" filth of Willie's postcard. These repetitions are spectatorial on Winnie's part, but she also questions Willie directly, in a doublet, "Is that not so, Willie?" and a triplet: "What would you say . . . ?" Or she gives orders in a doublet: "Don't look at me like that." When Winnie quotes Willie, it may take doublet form: "Take it away, Winnie, take it away." She also echoes his "I worship you, Winnie, be mine," and "golden, may it never." She tries to share memories with Willie and re­ peats at a distance, "remember" and "recall." She basks in his presence in a variant doublet: "Just to know you and "Just to feel you. . . ." In a distanced triplet of Act I she solicits his attention: "I hope you are taking in. . . . I hope you heard . . . I hope you caught something of. . . ." Though Willie provokes many of Winnie's repetitions, more of them center upon herself. An exceptionally rhetor­ ical distanced triplet is: "gaze before me with compressed lips." A sentence of self-address illustrates how Winnie

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blends refrains—"old style," "bell for sleep," "not. .. long now"—with a varied doublet "make ready for the night." "It is perhaps a little soon—to make ready—for the night—(stops tidying, head up, smile)—and yet I do—make ready for the night—feeling it at hand—the bell for sleep—saying to myself—Winnie—it will not be long now, Winnie—until the bell for sleep." Like Hamm and Henry, Winnie composes a story. Like Hamm, she forms full sentences, but like Henry, she re­ peats in self-correction: ". . . descended the steep . . . (pause) . . . slipped on her nightgown, descended all alone the steep wooden stairs." Or "what was the matter . . . (pause) . . . what on earth could possibly be the matter." Less controlled than Hamm or Henry, she repeats the word "scream" seven times in her account of Mildred—a pounder—and she actually screams three times. Perhaps because Winnie's character Milly is a little child, her only nonverbal sounds are screams. More verbal is the Shower/Cooker couple, who may be factual or imagined. As Hamm recalls a vision of a painter/engraver, Winnie twice (once in each act) recalls the Shower/Cooker couple, repeatedly the "last human kind—to stray this way." Like Winnie, each member of the couple has a bag, but unlike Winnie and Willie, they walk hand in hand. And unlike Winnie and Willie, they con­ verse freely, the man more volubly; "coarse fellow" and "coarse creature" form Winnie's varied doublet about him. Mr. Shower/Cooker's repetitions are anaphoric, and often emphatic; those of his woman companion tend to be scorn­ ful echo doublets. At the end of each evocation, however, despite scorn, the man and woman are again, in a dis­ tanced doublet "hand in hand." Aggressive though it may be, the dialogue of the Shower/Cooker couple represents wishful thinking for Winnie, whose near-silent husband speaks his few words repetitively. Distanced doublets occur at the beginning and end of Act I—the advertise­ ments of the yellowed newspaper. Willie's other remarks respond to Winnie, four out of six in repetition. To Win-

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nie's question whether he hears her, he replies five times, "Yes." To her plea that he echo her, he twice explodes, "Fear no more!" He explains the burdened emmet to Win­ nie in a simple doublet: "Eggs" and then "Formication." His echo doublet questions Winnie's self-description: "Sucked up." His final word, "Win," inspires her echo doublet which leads to the last of her many repetitions—a simple doublet about the "happy day." But Winnie's affirmation is undercut by her distanced repetition of qual­ ifying phrases—distanced by all of Act II: "After all. (Pause.) So far." Rather than being a cross-weave of repetitions and re­ frains, Happy Days hovers between Winnie's long repeti­ tive monologues and a few dialogue exchanges that culmi­ nate in Willie's appearance on stage. Unlike those of Godot or Endgame, the repetitions of Happy Days are monosemic. More than Vladimir, Hamm, or Henry, Winnie depends on words, and, for all the fragmentation of her sentences, leading to our skepticism about their substance, words earn her trust. A single exception stems from the parasol that reappears even after it explodes: "one keeps putting off—putting up—for fear of putting up—too soon—and the day goes by—quite by—without one's having put up—at all." Winnie's words pun on what she has to put up with, beyond parasols. As in earlier Beckett plays, the repetition of Happy Days imitates the repetitive quality of all human experience. However, in this play, the audience has ironic awareness of repetition, whereas Winnie remains relatively unaware of it. Vladimir and Hamm know that they are repeating themselves—"Ah the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!" Each day is a new day for Win­ nie, with its own questions, answers, and built-in memories of a past that may never have happened. How­ ever, we see Act I before Act II, and we hear Winnie's val­ iant repetitive defenses, with their minute variants. We know that each "happy day" accumulates repetitions of the last.

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Happy Days cost Beckett a year and a half of effort, but, as noted earlier, its completion in 1961 enabled him to com­ pose in quick succession two radio plays in his two writing languages—the English Words and Music followed by the French Cascando. Since music is a character in both these radio plays (an innovation on radio), verbal analysis explores only part of the pattern of repetition. In Words and Music the master Croak speaks largely in simple doublet commands, which recall Pozzo's com­ mands to Lucky. In his first few speeches, Words recalls Lucky's mechanical repetitions in a parody of scholastic style. Music helps Words to graduate from scholastic setpiece to poetic creation, from repetitious rhetoric to lyri­ cism on the theme of Love and to creative hesitation on the theme of Age, hesitation entailing repetition. Closing dis­ tanced triplets, Words finally and unhesitatingly sings a trimeter sonnet, whose subject combines Love with Age. Croak reacts with five repetitions of the new theme, "The Face." Words again begins coldly, with Latinate vocabu­ lary and few repetitions. Gradually caught up in his own composition, however, he begins to hesitate, and then to correct himself, like Henry and Winnie before him. Dou­ blets and triplets rhythm the corrections, which glide into another short and short-lined lyric, to the accompaniment of Music. Overcome, the master Croak shuffles away, and Words assumes his brief doublet commands. In the more complex play Cascando, Croak is parallelled by Opener, controller of composition. Opener's tag is, "I open," and he announces in a distanced doublet that he is opening in May of the long days. First he opens Voice, a repetitive and schizophrenic creator of words; schizo­ phrenic because Voice is torn between his story of Woburn and his desire to rest from all stories. He expresses his plight in an asyntactical rush of phrases, separated in print by three dots, and accumulating many repetitions which become refrains in this short piece. Nearly a dozen times we hear "finish," "rest," "sleep," "this time," "the right

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one," "same old," "no more stories," and an injunction to himself or his character Woburn to "come on." About a dozen other phrases appear in doublets or triplets. The story of Woburn, patterned on Beckett's own fiction, evokes "same old" seven times. Rather than becoming aware of individual refrains, however, an audience might respond to a general feeling of refrain. Occasionally, Voice echoes Opener, or vice versa. Opener quotes his accusers: "It's in his head," and Voice asks about Woburn: "What's in his head." In his first speech Voice refers to stories: "All I ever did . .. in my life .. . with my life." Later Opener declares, "It's my life, I live on that." Difficult to absorb, Voice of Cascando intensifies the staccato rhythms of Henry's narrative—an asyntactical medley of tense repetitive word-groups. Ten years later, Voice changes sex and language to convey the monologue of Not I, but the rhythms remain. In 1962, however, shortly after the radio plays were completed, Beckett wrote Play, divided into Chorus, Nar­ ration, and Meditation. In Martin Esslin's summary:"These three parts are repeated, and the play ends, as it began, with the Chorus. But, Beckett explained, there must be a clear progression by which each subsection is both faster and softer than the preceding one"12 (my italics). Repetition is total in this play alone (although Beckett curtailed the Chorus in production), and into that overwhelming repeti­ tion, Beckett stitches others. Viewing the whole play, Rosemary Poutney has sug­ gested that each of the three characters makes nine state­ ments on a basic theme, and that the three are in "a terza rima relationship"13 (two repeating the same idea, with the third member left out), which sometimes corresponds to what I have been calling an echo doublet. Wl echoes M's conviction of "no proof" of his infidelity; W2 echoes his "what . . . talking about." M describes Wl's detective as "glad of the extra money," and at some distance W2 won­ ders whether Wl attracts M with "her money." Wl and

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W2 speak a distanced triplet about an "open window," both "confess," and both worry about looking for "sense" where there may be none. More frequent than such echoes, however, are the dou­ blets or triplets within the nine basic statements of each character, and Wl even utters a quadruplet "dark" during the Narration. Wl employs the dated word "stricken" in a distanced doublet. When accused of infidelity, M describes at some distance but with similar words how "I took her in my arms," swearing or saying that he could not live with­ out each of the women—and meaning it. Provoked by the spotlight into a simultaneous "Yes" that opens Play, the three voices diverge immediately. Sounding like gibberish, doublets are unrecognizable, but Beckett has scored the text in rhythmic dimeters. Once the spotlight elicits individual speeches, repetition is audible. All three characters use the verbs "give," "smell," "swore," and the noun "thing." Though the chronology is confusing, the spot elicits a Narration that an audience translates into linearity, but Meditation seems to disturb the spotlight, which wavers and shifts, creating distanced doublets as each character picks up the continuation of the segmented soliloquy. Some ten times the spotlight interrupts M in mid-sen­ tence, and he recapitulates his phrases; in a triplet he asks the spotlight: "Why go out?" Not only does the spotlight's caprice cause repetition, but each member of the trio grows uncertain, repeating the word "perhaps" and faltering in simple doublets or triplets of common words. The three lose egoism, all repeating the word "all," and they express compassion in repetitions, M with a doublet on "pity," Wl with a doublet and W2 with a triplet on "poor." In a dis­ tanced doublet on "sorry," Wl pities the restored couple and imagines them feeling sorry for her, whereas M has a fantasy of the three of them in "a little dinghy"—a triplet. Reinforcing the growing compassion are Wl's four pleas for "mercy," and M's five "pardons," the latter the only multiplet to sound through all three parts of Play. Inaudi-

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ble in the opening Chorus, "pardon" is finally incom­ prehensible, since it is bisected by the spotlight. A me­ chanical response to his hiccups, the requests for pardon are only implicitly penitential. To M belong the final words of Play, a distanced and slightly varied triplet. His first in­ dividual sentence exposes the triangle: "We were not long together when she smelled the rat." During the Meditation he regrets, "To think we were never together." When the Chorus is repeated, his words are incomprehensible in the simultaneous speeches, but in the truncated third round his words sound out, and they close the play: "We were not long together—"14 Repetition and truncation of M's opening line expand its resonance from a maudlin tale of passion to a metaphysical complaint. In Play Beckett uses his habitual doublets and triplets, but conceals them by variation or distance. Calling marked attention to itself, however, is the repetition of the whole play, with its inti­ mation not only that life is repetitive play, but so is any conceivable afterlife. After Play, a stage play concealing and varying familiar techniques of verbal repetition, Beckett wrote two scripts that rest on gestural repetition, Film (1963) and Come and Go (1965). The former is silent, but the latter intercalates into gestures a repetitive pattern of speech, rather than re­ petitive speeches: 1) Summons to attention; 2) Questions; 3) Answers; 4) Reactions to inaudible secret; 5) Dreams or Memories.15 So rigid is this pattern that Beckett's in­ genuity lies in not repeating the actual words. Neverthe­ less, "God" occurs as a distanced triplet in the "Answers." "That way," "old days," "old way" compose a triple rhyme in "Memories," and "hold hands" is a distanced doublet in this doomed ballet. In 1965, with Eh Joe, Beckett first ventured into televi­ sion, the medium for which he has written two recent plays. Though the title Eh Joe is unpunctuated, "eh" is an interrogative interjection, and in the text its ten repetitions are always followed by a question mark. This nonverbal re­ frain is balanced by the refrain-word "love." Joe is haunted

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by a guilt expressed in his own words but in the voice of a loved and abandoned woman, since he apparently aban­ doned all those who loved him. Henry of Embers needed to hear voices, but Joe needs to throttle voices in his mind, an act conveyed in a memorable doublet—"mental thuggee." Eh Joe begins with the protagonist checking for intruders at window, door, cupboard, each of which he curtains off. Then, seated on the bed, he hears his name called twice by a woman's "voice like flint glass," the simile emphasized by a doublet. Through nine zoom moves of the television camera, the voice taunts him, her discourse sprinkled with accusative doublets. After the seventh camera move the "flint glass" voice begins to narrate the suicide of a woman abandoned by Joe, quoting him in an ironic phrase difficult to speak—"The best's to come"—a distanced triplet. The details of a distanced doublet describe Joe's victim: The green one . . . The narrow one . . . Always pale . . . The pale eyes . . . Spirit made light. . . To borrow your expression . . . The way they opened after The green one . . . The narrow one . . . Always pale . . . The pale eyes . . . The look they shed before . . . The way they opened after . . . Spirit made light The flint-glass voice relentlessly recounts the particulars of the suicide, ordering Joe to imagine them, four times re­ peated, three times italicized. So, too, "stones" is five times repeated, four times italicized as the stones are pressed by the drowning woman's lips, hands, breasts. In a last evocation of love (repeated some ten times as a refrain-word) Joe's guilt is stressed through distanced rep­ etition of barely audible but familiar words:"There's love for you . . . Isn't it, Joe? . . . Wasn't it, Joe? . . .Eh Joe? . . . Wouldn't you say? . . . Compared to us . . . Compared to Him . . .Eh Joe?" Doublets intensify the insidiousness of the questions in the flint-glass voice. These devices of repetition—refrains ("love" and "Eh Joe?"), emphatic pounders ("imagine" and "stones"), and many doublets—are not new to Beckett. What is new is

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their blend in a play consisting of a single discourse, punctuated by a series of camera moves that magnify how pain distorts. In Beckett's dramatic progress Not I of 1972 continues the death's threshold re-view of a lifetime, which started in 1958 with Krapp's Last Tape. But Not I is post -Play, so that the vista point is some limbo, from which to look back on life's repetitions. From the mouth of Not I flows a stream of words that are permuted, recombined, and repeated (and punctuated only by four laughs and two screams). In the swift delivery demanded by Beckett, it is impossible to dis­ tinguish doublets, triplets, or even multiplets of the lone speaker, but they nevertheless increase the subliminal resonance. Even through the rapid torrent, a refrain is marked by the five repetitions of "What? . . . who? . . . no! . . . she!" We hear two questions and two exclamations, monosylla­ bles all: Mouth asks twice and twice denies her own un­ spoken reply—I. Auditor reacts four times to this se­ quence, with diminishing shrugs of compassion. Though these two-character colloquies (one silent) are the most theatrical repetitions of Not I, Mouth interrupts herself another seventeen times with the question: "What?" which thereby becomes so insistent that it is noticeable as a refrain-word. As Porter Abbott cogently observes: "The voice recurs continually to certain points of reference—the [light] beam, the buzzing, the voice, the brain, or 'picking it up' again back in the field [in April]."16 Of the seventeen interruptions, only one goes unrepeated. Seven insist on the buzzing "so-called." Two designate the age of "she," and two underline the importance of the tongue in forming the word-stream. Two indicate possible body positions of "she" when April speech struck, while another three in variant triplets gnaw at possible reasons for speech. Such repetition is easiest to hear: "what? . . . not that? . . . noth­ ing to do with that? . . . nothing she could tell? . . . all right . . . nothing she could tell." Throughout the discourse, phonemes, words, and

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phrases are combined and recombined in a thick repeti­ tive texture. In close proximity, the following word-pairs sound like doublets: step-stop, feeling-foolish, streamstrain, realize-recognize. Other words are repeated ver­ batim up to ten times, but they are probably not heard as refrains—"sudden flash," "oh long after," "so on," and Winnie's qualifier "so far," sometimes preceded or fol­ lowed or both, by the nonverbal "ha." Words are repeated in new combinations; thus, "love," "a scream," and "a feeling" evoke the comment "spared that"; "feeling" and "realization" are first "sudden," then "gradual"; syntax can vary—"even shopping," "out shopping," "busy shopping center." Time, thought, reason, punishment, and suffering thread through various phrases; interrogatives abound, and negatives proliferate. Much of Mouth's speech treats repetitively of speech, to which the discourse often refers. Before her April afflic­ tion, Mouth's protagonist was "practically speechless," except for sudden urges "once or twice a year . . . always winter some strange reason." Overwhelmed with the speech "she" comes to acknowledge as her own, Mouth compulsively tries to explain it, even though she reiterates that "she" has "no idea what she's saying." Despite this claim of non-comprehension, we strain a story through the echolalia. The discourse opens on an account of birth, with a swift flashback to conception. Suddenly the "tiny little thing" is "coming up to sixty," corrected to seventy. Twice, as the monologue approaches the end, and Mouth affirms that there is "nothing she could tell," the narration repeats the baby's birth, a distanced triplet that functions as a circular return. Beckett's text is at once an onslaught of words and a third-person account of that onslaught or buzzing "socalled." As the words are permuted and combined, the April scene shifts through its five repetitions. On first evo­ cation, "she" is looking for cowslips to make a ball—a child's pastime—when all goes dark. Mouth recapitulates this in her second evocation, and

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then begins an extended account of how "she" was strick­ en with speech. On third evocation of the April scene, "she" sinks face down on the grass and tries to hear and make sense of the words. On the last two evocations, her face is in the grass, words pouring out of her mouth. Fi­ nally, "she" lies in the position of Woburn of Cascando or the green one of Eh Joe, but "she" drowns in the stream of words. Porter Abbott has suggested that repetition "can mean no conclusion (and hence no redemption), or it can mean renewal."17 Since the last intelligible words of Mouth are the multiplet "pick it up," Abbott chooses a renewal aris­ ing from repetition of April and larks. What is "picked up" may be flowers, words, a body, a spirit. With neutral "it," Beckett chooses polysemy in another end without finality. Once the curtain is down, "Voice continues behind curtain, unintelligible." But, we may be sure, repetitive. From Krapp's Last Tape on, most of Beckett's dramas are essentially monologues. Negatives and interrogatives are repetitive rhythms in all his works, and yet his people speak distinctive idioms. Winnie and Mouth, to choose two feminine protagonists separated by over a decade, are sisters—immobile in space, confusedly mobile in time, at­ tracted to a sack, dubious about love, and unable to curtail their compulsive monologues. Winnie's syntax undergoes erosion by comparison with, say, Krapp's, and repetition with variants is an erosive agent. Mouth's syntax is far more anarchic; repetition with variants turns into repeti­ tion of the variants. Repetition is a stabilizer for Winnie in her resolution to pass happy days and avoid a "wilder­ ness" of lonely silence. Repetition marks Mouth's cumula­ tive consternation; she doesn't know who her protagonist is, what she is saying, and yet she and "she" find them­ selves saying again and again. Frenzied repetition belies her denial of suffering. Though That Time (1975) is closely related to Not I (1972), all frenzy is past. Emotion is recollected if noι in tranquil­ lity, at least with quiet intensity. Mouth says that speech

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struck "her" in the dark, and the old man of That Time keeps his eyes closed to listen to his speech-memories, which he and we hear through three different loudspeak­ ers, as earlier noted. The spatial directions imply three directions in time— childhood, maturity, old age—but Beckett specifies that "They modulate back and forth without any break in general flow." A single voice, directionally trisected, uses a single distinctive idiom. In verse-paragraphs of approximately equal length, That Time is divided into three parts, with a repetitive pattern in each: I: A C B A C B A C B C A B II: C B A C B A C B A B C A III: B A C B A C B A C B A C Though this pattern is not readily evident to the ear, it heightens the incantatory quality of the flow. However, that quality derives mainly from a series of verbal repetitions and variations, some within the same verset, and others distanced. The A or childhood voice is partial to such phrases as "was the ruin still there," "where you hid," "as a child," "among the nettles." The B voice reiterates "vowing every now and then," "you loved each other," "together," "stock still," as well as the wheatfield, towpath, sand where a love scene may have taken place. The C or old-age voice stresses "out of the cold," "out of the rain," "was that the time," "or was that another time," and especially "dust." A few phrases are shared. A and B echo "on the stone," "in the dark," "making it up," "in the sun" though the sun is always "pale" for A. A and C echo "was that your mother still ah for God's sake," "the old green . . . coat," "all gone long ago," "neither right nor left," "away to hell out of it," "not knowing who you were." Or, within a few lines C: "muttering to yourself who else" and A: "talking to yourself who else." B and C share "not a sound," "ev­ ery now and then," "till . . . dried up." All three voices

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share "when was that," "gave up," and the main refrain "that time." Listed in this way, the doublets, triplets, and multiplets seem to tell their own story. What is new in the repetitions of That Time is the liquid erosive action of the words, inten­ sifying the irrealization of time that was begun in Happy Days. The A voice, instead of nostalgically recalling child­ hood, conjures a return to a ghost-town where once a lonely child hid on a stone to imagine other voices. The B voice can hardly credit, however often he repeats it, that he ever took part in a love scene whose location shifts until it disintegrates. Only the C voice remains repetitively con­ sistent in its bleakness, evading epiphany and predicting the last judgment by the dust. In That Time dust is quoted as chanting "come and gone" four times before dying away in a lingering doublet: "in no time gone in no time." At the end of That Time, then, the C voice rephrases the biblical "From dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou re­ turn." "That time"—so short a span between imaginative childhood on a stone and shivering age on a slab—is finally "no time." As the continuity of Krapp filtered through his repetitive resolutions and frustrations, so the continuity of the old man of That Time filters through his semi-syntac­ tical repetition of the skew times of a human life. Footfalls follows Play and Not I into limbo, and yet limbo becomes paradoxically concrete. Footfalls beats metronomic time as M paces back and forth on a brightly lit strip of stage board—thirty lengths back and forth, or two hun­ dred seventy steps. She almost never speaks while pacing, and yet repeated sentences blend into the footfalls. Not only does Beckett return to full English syntax in Footfalls, but he tacitly acknowledges an audience by the doublets "it may be asked" and "as the reader will remember." To my earlier summaries of Footfalls, I add another examination. In three repetitive scenes a suffering mother tries to understand her daughter's strange behavior. Each scene is introduced by a chime, a little fainter each time. In

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each successive scene the daughter paces fewer lengths in fainter light—an asymptotic action like Endgame and Play. The artifice of repetition is pronounced in each of the three scenes. The play opens with a simple doublet—daughter calling mother. To the daughter's question whether the mother was asleep, the mother slightly varies a triplet on the rhyming words "deep sleep." Then the mother twice counts the daughter's steps before closing a distanced doublet in inquiry about the daughter's sleep. The daugh­ ter counters with anaphoric offers to alleviate the mother's pain: "Would you like me to . . . again?" The mother's in­ terrupted triplet answers, "Yes, but it is too soon" (as Clov told Hamm it was "too soon" for his pain-killer). The daughter twice asks her age, and the mother twice coun­ ters: "And I?" Twice, too, the mother asks the daughter's forgiveness (as Hamm asked Clov's). In simple doublets and multiplets, the scene closes: V: Will you never have done? (Pause .) Will you never have done . . . revolving it all? M: (halting ) It? V: It all.(Pause.) In your poor mind. (Pause) It all. (Pause) It all. In the second scene, invisible V's scene, the prose begins more continuously, soon gathering simple doublets and triplets. Then the mother's monologue quotes a dialogue between an unnamed mother and a daughter May. The formality of the dialogue within the monologue resembles that of the actual dialogue of the first scene. After May's distanced and crucial doublet, "I must hear the feet, how­ ever faint they fall," the mother resorts to simple doublets and the refrain "it all." "Tells how it was. (Pause.) Tries to tell how it was. (Pause.) It all. (Pause.) It all." The third scene, M's scene, starts on the simple doublet "Sequel," and yet the continuation is subtle. Beginning like her mother with description, the daughter tells in the third person of one "as though she had never been, it never been" (like M in Play, "as if . . . never been"). She

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enters a locked church at nightfall to walk "up and down, up and down." Then, introducing "The semblance" with another simple doublet, the daughter offers a third-person description of herself in what might be called a cumulative doublet/triplet: "Grey rather than white, a pale shade of grey. (Pause.) Tattered. (Pause.) A tangle of tatters. (Pause.) A faint tangle of pale grey tatters." We see it and have seen it. The daughter then shifts to a mother-daughter dialogue of formal repetition within her monologue. The names are changed to Mrs. Winter and Amy, and the dialogue be­ comes stilted and Victorian. Long phrases or sentences sound in doublets and triplets, but the single word "strange" is prefaced by a three-dot pause before the four repetitions. Five times, in a volley of cumulative emphasis, mother and daughter echo "not there"—the daughter's claim of absence at the evening service. The third scene like the first closes in dialogue—an extended and dis­ tanced doublet, except that the daughter speaks both parts. What we may call a doubled doublet links Scenes 2 and 3: V: The mother: What do you mean, May, not enough, what can you possibly mean, May, not enough? M: Mrs. W: What do you mean, Amy, to put it mildly, what can you possibly mean, Amy, to put it mildly?" Through the three scenes sounds the refrain "poor"— "poor lips," "poor head," two "poor arms" (one prefaced by "His") and three "poor mind"s. Even distanced, the reiteration of "poor" affirms compassion as pain is trans­ lated into pattern, only to reveal further pain. As Christ felt human pain, M thinks human pain and paces repetitively in a semblance of what she revolves in her mind—"it all." In his most recent stage play Beckett blends the refrains of "poor" and "it all" with doublets and triplets of varying length. Unique is the syncopation of these repetitions into the back-and-forth pacing on the stage board. Recalling

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the board of Godot, the back-and-forth walks of Clov and Krapp, odd phrases of earlier plays, verbal ellipses of Not I and That Time, Footfalls weaves such recollections into a new and distinctive idiom, rich in echoes. It is possible too that the pacing culminates in an epiphany. For many years, coming and going has been for Beckett a Janus-symbol. In the Book of Job Satan comes to the Lord: "From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it." For Beckett's characters, this becomes a satanic damnation, condemned to the purpose­ less, repetitive activities of this world. On the other hand, the lulling rhythm of such repetition occasionally bursts into another order of experience. Murphy in his rocker achieved freedom of the mind, and the O-figure of Film tried through rocking to escape self-perception. In Come and Go the coming and going of Flo, Ru, and Vi may have enabled them to conjure rings. Perhaps M's pacing hallows home and church. Beckett's recent television plays, played together as Shades, are anti-epiphanies. Both dramatize a man's obses­ sion with an absent woman—imagining he hears her in Ghost Trio, imagining he sees her in . . . but the clouds. . . . Ghost Trio resembles Beckett's first television play Eh Joe in playing zoom moves of a camera against a woman's voice. Named for Beethoven's Fifth Piano Sonata, Ghost Trio counterpoints words and music, but they never blend as in the radio plays. In the first of the three scenes, doublets sprinkle a woman's description of what the camera re­ veals, but the word "grey" sounds four times, as its shades dominate the small screen. In the midst of rectangles of the same size and shape—door, window, pallet—a figure sits with head bowed over what will prove to be a small rec­ tangular cassette. The woman's voice repeats the descrip­ tion to start the second scene, but we also learn that the figure thinks he hears "her," and yet "No one" sounds four times. After the figure surprises himself in a mirror the woman's voice closes a distanced doublet about his thinking "he hears her." The third scene is wordless, the

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figure confronting a real boy instead of the desired one— woman, goddess, spirit? Finally, we re-view the figure as we first saw him, but we now see his full pained face be­ fore he recedes into distance and fades out. In. . . but the clouds . . . , whose title is a phrase from The Tower by W. B. Yeats, the camera is stationary, but a man's voice follows a man's figure as he emerges from the west in greatcoat and hat, then emerges from the east in skullcap and robe, and then retires into a center sanctum, where he pleads for the appearance of a nameless woman, whose face is occasionally visible to him and us; what we see is "reduced as far as possible to eyes and mouth," but never­ theless dominates the screen. The man's voice speaks in the first person, correcting or interrupting himself, and then continuing with doublets. Gradually achieving preci­ sion, he comments seven times: "Right." The verb "ap­ pear" threads as a refrain, for this is what he begs of the silent female presence, who is never designated by any noun. Doublets rhythm his narration of activities when she fails to appear: "busied myself with something else . . . or with nothing . . . busied myself with nothing . . . until the time came, with break of day, to issue forth again, void my little sanctum, shed robe and skull, resume my hat and greatcoat, and issue forth again, to walk the roads." The man's closing quartet of Yeats' Tower is almost a repetition, for the ghost-woman's lips have twice "utter[ed the first line] inaudibly." All Beckett's plays repeat; almost all Beckett's characters repeat. Clas Zilliacus, examining silence in Beckett's plays, writes: "I find that his most frequent stage direction, Pause, is best explained if it is attributed not to his characters but to Beckett himself."18 If that is so, Beckett's dramatic char­ acters are the weaker for it, but I believe Beckett's people are theatrically strong. However well pauses and repeti­ tions serve Beckett as metaphors, they also function in con­ text. Beckett has ingeniously explored repetition, that com-

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mon device. Godot embodies the most varied repetition of acts, characters, props, gestures, simple and echo doublets and triplets, pounders, volleys, and haunting refrains. In the single act of Endgame end recapitulates beginning, but character couples diverge; a single mobile character repeats his own gestures, but all four characters repeat their own words and echo those of a partner—in a shower of dou­ blets and a drizzle of multiplets; through several tags and refrains Beckett sounds the polysemy of banal words. Though All That Fall and Krapp's Last Tape were written for radio and stage respectively, they both conceal repetition behind a realistic surface; the radio play counterpoints ver­ bal repetition against nonverbal sounds, and the stage play justifies repetition through its tape-recorder. In Embers sea-sounds are counterpointed against Henry's refrain— "Not a sound." Through Henry's story Beckett begins to jettison syntax as the author-protagonist corrects, repeats, and varies the noun phrases that compose his narrative. In the long monologues of Happy Days Winnie repeats herself with variants and then composes fugues of those variants; residual echoes sound through the six brief exchanges of husband and wife. Though Winnie often speaks in phrases rather than complete sentences, she is quite meticulous about her diction and syntax. In Cascando, Beckett's last play to be written in French, Voice's story of Woburn is syntactically anarchic, but no more repetitive than Henry's story of Bolton and Holloway; the repetitive staccato rhythm of these fictions culminates in the asyntactical triumph of Not I. Alone of Beckett's plays to be totally re­ played, Play embeds several doublets, triplets, and even multiplets within spotlight-bounded snatches. Though in no way a retreat toward syntax, That Time blends its noun phrases into a fluid continuum that terminates paradoxi­ cally on repetitions spoken by the dust. Having worked through seemingly random but always repetitive struc­ tures, Beckett arrives at highly formal and syntactical dialogue in Footfalls; the artifice of repetition circles, even

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as in Come and Go, around an unspoken mystery. Verbal repetition serves Beckett as music, meaning, metaphor. The repetitions themselves are very various, and against that background, singular phrases shatter "as one frozen by some shudder of the mind."

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7 The Play That Wasn't Written:

Human Wishes Beckett's work—fiction and drama—astonishes by its internal coherence, and I have tried to chart five aspects of his consistency in drama. Digressions and discarded ef­ forts are rare, but they do exist, some in private collections or libraries, others still in Beckett's possession. Because his published work is so coherent, it is instructive to examine his singular fragments and failures, and I choose one of each in the dramatic medium—the abortive Human Wishes (1937) and the jettisoned Eleutheria (1947). Despite errors, Deirdre Bair's recent Beckett biography provides us with an ambience for the creation of early works. In 1937, by the time Beckett had passed his thirtieth birthday, he had published an academic monograph (Proust), a collection of ten dispassionate stories (More Pricks Than Kicks), a collection of thirteen obscure poems (Echo's Bones); he had completed the novel Murphy but was unable to find a publisher. As Beckett entered his fourth decade, his life was still an open question—domicile, pro­ fession, commitments. Drawing upon Beckett's correspondence with his friend Thomas McGreevy, Bair describes Beckett's fascination with Samuel Johnson at about this time. He visited Johnson's birthplace in 1935 and in 1936 read Johnson's works and criticism of them. By 1937 he brooded about a "Johnson fantasy," which he decided to cast in dramatic form.1 Today every Beckett student knows his literary allegiances—the Bible and Dante above all; Shakespeare, Pascal, Proust, Joyce, Fontane, Holderlin, but it is not easy to see why Johnson would attract him. To be sure, they

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share Christian names and bad vision. Both were good students, and both published translations from French and Italian. Both were productive while claiming to be indo­ lent, and both were late in finding their literary way. Both were awarded honorary degrees by Trinity College, Dub­ lin, although Beckett could scarcely have foreseen this at the time of his concern with Johnson. These affinities are strained from a preponderance of contrasts: the eighteenth-century classicist against the twentieth-century Bohemian, the Christian rationalist against the nihilistic skeptic, the English Tory against the apolitical expatriate, the scrofulous grotesque against the handsome athlete, the "gross feeder" (Mrs. Thrale's phrase) against the man who has to be reminded to eat, the slovenly dresser against the trim figure, the ungainly man "whose whole person is in perpetual motion" (Fanny Burney's words) against the man who cherishes stillness, the brilliant conversationalist against the loather of groups, the swift writer of periodic sentences against the slow writer of progressive syntactical hesitancy, the professional man of letters against the deeply personal artist. We might pit Johnson's "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money," against Beckett's ". . . to be an artist is to fail, as n o o t h e r d a r e fail. . . . " A writer may of course be drawn to his opposite, but Johnson embodies many of the proprieties that Beckett mocks in his novel Murphy—belles lettres, received respectability, lucid rationality, fair pay for honest work, chastity in sex, abstemiousness in alcohol. Johnson's de­ pressions and death-obsession are belied by his public per­ sonality, and they probably attracted Beckett, as did his es­ sential loneliness. On August 4, 1937, Beckett wrote his friend McGreevy about Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, who seemed to him a hideously mismatched couple: . . . there can hardly have been many so completely at sea in their solitude as he was or so horribly aware of it . . . she had none of that need to suffer or necessity of

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suffering that he had . . . he, in a sense was spiritually self-conscious, was a tragic figure, i.e., worth putting down as part of the whole of which oneself is part2 Johnson's dark side was bared to Mrs. Thrale, and she is even less a Beckettian character than the Great Cham. Re­ cent scholarship has revealed that she was a more devoted wife and mother than Beckett could have known. James Clifford, evaluating all the evidence, calls her "a chame­ leon changing colour with her varying surroundings."3 Different contemporaries record different impressions of her, but all accounts agree on her vivacity, a quality that we would not expect Beckett to appreciate. Mrs. Thrale was pert rather than intelligent, pretty rather than beauti­ ful, and capriciously sympathetic to Johnson's many ail­ ments. She was proud of her aristocratic Welsh descent and complacent about her husband's wealth. What is per­ haps most noteworthy about the relationship of Johnson and Mrs. Thrale is their sixteen years of mutual interde­ pendence, occasioning 377 extant letters from him to her and 140 from her to him.4 Beckett can no longer recall why he decided to write about Johnson "in love," but he thinks he began system­ atic research only after seizing that kernel. In approaching the Johnson-Thrale material, Beckett read avidly, took copious notes, but produced only part of a single scene. The notes and scene are now in my possession, and Beck­ ett has given me permission to quote and discuss them. The scene speaks eloquently for itself,5 but two hundred pages of notes can only be summarized. This chapter is therefore lopsided, much of it dwelling on notes and little on Beckett's actual creation, but the very fullness of the notes illuminates the aborted creation. First, however, a brief summary of the Johnson-Thrale relationship as viewed by modern, post-Beckett scholar­ ship.6 When Johnson met Mrs. Thrale in January 1765, he was fifty-five and she twenty-four years old. Fifteen months earlier she had married Henry Thrale, a wealthy

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brewer ten years her senior. As was usual in the eight­ eenth century, it was an arranged marriage. Thrale aug­ mented his father's business, dabbled in politics, and took his pleasures in hunting, gluttony, philandering, and poli­ tics. Mrs. Thrale bore him children, wrote with some en­ ergy but little talent, and wished to take her pleasure in a lively social life. Soon after meeting Dr. Johnson, the Thrale husband and wife virtually adopted him. For fif­ teen years Johnson had his own quarters at their houses in Southwark and Streatham, spending only weekends at home. (In 1776 he moved into Bolt Court, London, where he offered a home to an impecunious, fortuitously gathered quintet. That house burned down in 1819.) In her Anecdotes of the late Dr. Samuel Johnson Mrs. Thrale later recorded the importance of their hospitality to Johnson's well-being: To the assistance we gave him, the shelter our house af­ forded to his uneasy fancies, and to the pains we took to sooth or repress them, the world perhaps is indebted for the three political pamphlets, the new edition and cor­ rection of his Dictionary, and for the Poets' Lives, which he would scarce have lived, I think, and kept his facul­ ties entire, to have written, had not incessant care been exerted at the time of his first coming to be our constant guest in the country; and several times after that, when he found himself particularly oppressed with diseases incident to the most vivid and fervent imaginations.7 Her claim inadvertently reveals how little Johnson wrote while living with the Thrale family. W. Jackson Bate, Johnson's definitive biographer, augments this list, but the total over sixteen years remains meagre. No longer need­ ing money, Johnson apparently substituted the spoken for the written word. He attracted his famous friends to the Thrale estate, so that the house in Streatham became a lavish salon. That salon closed abruptly in 1781, when Henry Thrale, having already suffered a severe stroke, died after an in-

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cautious meal. Dr. Johnson was named one of the four executors of his will. The widowed Mrs. Thrale, at age forty-one, soon had marriage offers, and gossip coupled her name with Johnson's, Boswell anonymously printing his "Ode by Samuel Johnson to Mrs. Thrale upon their supposed approaching nuptials." Within eighteen months of Thrale's death, his widow rented the Streatham estate, Johnson's preferred home. A few months later, on April 5, 1783, Mrs. Thrale and Johnson saw each other for the last time, although neither of them apparently realized that it would be the last. She did not confide to her old friend her passion for Gabriel Piozzi, an Italian musician. Over the objections of friends and family (four of her thirteen chil­ dren were living), Mrs. Thrale married Piozzi in July 1784, sending identical letters conveying this information to each of her late husband's four executors. To Johnson Mrs. Thrale added a personal excuse for concealment, claiming that she "could not have borne to reject that counsel it would have killed [her] to take." Johnson exploded: Madam If I interpret your letter right, you are ignominiously married; if it is yet undone, let us once talk together. If you have abandoned your children and your religion, God forgive your wickedness; if you have forfeited your fame and your country, may your folly do no further mischief. If the last act is yet to do, I who have loved you, es­ teemed you, reverenced you, and served you, I who long thought you the first of human kind, entreat that before your fate is irrevocable, I may once more see you. I was, I once was, Madam, most truly yours, Sam. Johnson July 2, 1784 I will come down if you permit it.8

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Mrs. Thrale replied with haste but dignity; however, she did not invite Johnson to "come down" to Bath, where she was staying, and she suggested that they "converse no more" unless he could accept Mr. Piozzi. Johnson wrote again, the only "converse" open to him—to wish her hap­ piness in this world and the next, and to thank her "for that kindness which soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched." He closed "with great affection," but he never wrote to her again.9 After the weddings (two ceremonies, one for each reli­ gion), the Piozzis went to Italy, while ailing aged Johnson visited friends in Litchfield, Birmingham, and Oxford. Three weeks before his death, he maintained that he never spoke of Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi, driving her out of his mind. He died at Bolt Court on December 13, 1784. Except for Johnson's reaction to Mrs. Thrale's second marriage, his long relationship with her would seem suited better to a novel than a drama, and Beckett can no longer recall why he fixed on dramatic form. Deirdre Bair docu­ ments his interest in Dublin drama at this time, but it is not clear whether that interest fed or was fed by his "Johnson fantasy" of 1936-37. Although Beckett had resigned from academia five years earlier, he retained academic research habits and plodded through background materials on his two main characters. Starting with George Birbeck Hill's edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson, Beckett delved into some dozen books, taking notes not only on his principals, but on such members of the Johnson circle as Arthur Murphy (who introduced Johnson to the Thrales), Fanny Burney (who was Mrs. Thrale's best friend), John Hawkins (who was Johnson's friend and the executor of his will), Queeney Thrale (Mrs. Thrale's eldest daughter and Johnson's special protegee), and the members of Johnson's household at Bolt Court— the black servant Francis Barber; the blind friend Anna Wil­ liams; degreeless Dr. Robert Levett; Johnson's dead wife's widowed friend Elizabeth Desmoulins; occasionally her

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daughter; and Polly Carmichael, who may have been a prostitute.10 Robert Levett and Anna Williams died, at intervals of about a year, before Johnson. Beckett's sources are vague on chronology, and he there­ fore notes the dates throughout the long and mainly sepa­ rate lives of his odd couple. Dr. Johnson had completed fifty-five years of hard living before meeting the Thrales, and Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi lived on for forty years after Johnson's death. Beckett's notes meander into the lives of tangential members of the Johnson circle, such as the blue­ stocking Mrs. Montagu, the Italian tutor Giuseppi Baretti, the actor Samuel Foote, and even the poet William Cowper, whom Johnson never met but who suffered from similar attacks of melancholy. Three bound notebooks testify to Beckett's scholarly dil­ igence. Although the second and third notebooks are con­ tinuations, the three are distinguishable; the first contains summaries and quotations from both primary and sec­ ondary sources, the second consists almost entirely of quo­ tations from primary sources, and the third attempts to whittle the material down to a scenario for the intended play. The first notebook was made in Munich; perhaps Beckett began it while traveling in Germany in 1936. The second and third notebooks were bought at Browne and Nolan, Dublin, when Beckett was back at his Foxrock home after April 1937. Inside the front cover of the first notebook Beckett lists Mrs. Thrale's steps in dissolving her friendship with Johnson: Mrs. Thrale meets Piozzi 1780 Thrale dies 1781 Piozzi in Paris July-November 1781 Engagement with P. presumably early 1782 Oct. 1782 leaves Streatham & goes to Brighton with J. In Brighton avowal to F. Burney & Thrale daughters End 1782 back to London (Argyll St.) Jan-Feb. 1783 formal engagement & break with P.

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April-May 1783 Mrs. T. takes leave of J. & P. who goes to Italy [Mrs. T.] goes to Bath April 1784 Piozzi recalled May " Mrs. T. in London to consult with F. Burney. After 10 days back in Bath to await P. July 1784 last exchange of letters with J. Marriage with P. and departure to Italy. Does not return to England till 1787. J. dies Dec. 13th 1784 Inside the back cover of the first notebook Beckett offers two alternative possibilities for the play's shape: Act 1 Mrs Thrale in Bath. April 1784 Act 2 " & J. In London May 1784 Act 3 J. in London July A line is drawn, and four scenes (or acts) are then pro­ jected: 1. Streatham. Autumn 1781. [On the facing page, Beck­ ett notes an alternative possibility: "or Bolt Court. Shortly after T.'s death 1781. J. & Barber."] J.'s ap­ prehension. Piozzi in Paris. Mrs. T. Bored. Position expounded. J.'s departure (flight) to Ashbourne. Murphy & FB. 2. Streatham. Year later. Mrs. T. makes avowal to Piozzi before Queeney. Confesses to FB. Piozzi to J. impo­ tent salvation, and J. in love misery. Murphy & FB. 3. Argyll St. April 1783. Mrs. T. & J. Mrs. T. & Piozzi. Murphy & FB. 4. Bolt Court. Late summer 1784. Dr. J. & Barber. Except in the last scene (or act), it appears as though Beck­ ett intended Arthur Murphy and Fanny Burney as a kind of chorus. Of these several notes, only the alternative pos­ sibility of Scene 1 was actually dramatized, but without "J. & Barber." Between the covers of the first notebook are ninety-three

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handwritten pages drawing upon several contemporary accounts (mainly Boswell's Life, Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi's Anec­ dotes, letters to and from Queeney Thrale in the Marquis of Lansdowne's 1934 edition.) Secondary sources were Thomas Seccombe's "Essay Introductory" to A. C. Broadley's 1910 Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale and especially C. E. Vulliamy's 1936 Mrs. Thrale of Streatham; Beckett also dips into the Dictionary of National Biography entries for Mrs. Thrale, Giuseppi Baretti, Arthur Murphy, Samuel Foote, Frances Burney, Christopher Smart. In this first notebook Beckett tries to sift the material in his several sources so as to understand his principals. He often notes dates, with death indicated by a cross. As in the two following notebooks, he writes recto only, with rare comments or bib­ liographies verso. Beckett begins with brief miscellaneous jottings from Boswell, including such Johnson quotations as "The Irish are a fair people. They never speak well of one another." After three pages of Boswell and DNB entries, more sus­ tained notes start with Seccombe's introduction to Broadley's book, which calls Mrs. Thrale "the bride-elect of the great Doctor's intellect for nearly twenty years." (Beckett does not quote this phrase, but it conveys the tone.) Sec­ combe's introduction to Broadley's text maintains that it is a long-needed vindication of the memory of Mrs. ThralePiozzi. Beckett quotes Mrs. Thrale's remarkably dispas­ sionate "character" of her husband, and he traces the rise and especially the fall of the Johnson-Mrs. Thrale friend­ ship. After Thrale's death in 1781, each criticizes the other: JOHNSON:

She has done nothing right since T's bridle was off her neck. MRS. THRALE: Since T's death, the bear has become unbearable.

The progress of the Thrale-Piozzi romance, is carefully dated, climaxed by Johnson's explosive letter. After ex­ cerpting part of Mrs. Thrale's reply, Beckett quotes Johnson's last letter in full, underlining and marking with

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an exclamation point Johnson's claim that the marriage "has not been injurious to me." Still following Seccombe, Beckett notes the hostility to Mrs. Thrale of Giuseppi Baretti, who was once Queeney Thrale's Italian tutor and who (along with Johnson) had accompanied the Thrales on a trip to Paris. Briefly, Beckett remarks that Macaulay (in various essays) wrote "romantic bilge" about Johnson's misery at Bolt Court after being driven from Streatham by Mrs. Thrale. The material from Seccombe is broken at: "He burns her letters." Returning to Boswell, Beckett blends his own short notes with quotations from Johnson. (Watt readers may find the first entry of interest: "[Boswell] calls the cells in Bedlam the 'mansions.' " Connoisseurs of the vocabulary of Krapp and Hamm will relish, "Very fond of word scoundrel.") On the facing page Beckett directs himself to Mrs. Montagu's Letters, Essay on the Genius of Shakespeare, and Plimenson's Life of Lady Montagu, but the notebooks yield no evidence that he actually consulted these works. Summaries follow of the DNB entries on Giuseppi Baretti, Arthur Murphy, Christopher Smart, and Frances Burney. Beckett then returns to Broadley on Mrs. Thrale (with bib­ liography), to Boswell quotations from Johnson (on Ireland and death), and back to the DNB for an entry on Samuel Foote, "the Eng. Aristophanes," who dared not lampoon Johnson. On the facing page to the first of these notes ap­ pears Beckett's first use of the blue crayon that he reserved for marking information pertinent to the intended play: "For Mrs Williams, Mrs & Miss Desmoulins, Miss Carmichael (Polly), Dr Levett & Frances Barber Cf Sir Leslie Stephen's Life of Johnson, Hill's Boswell & the Globe Bos­ well." After the DNB entries, Beckett returns to Seccombe, observing that after the Welsh tour Johnson was not invited to Streatham, and he asks: "Has J. then begun already to irk her?" A little less than halfway through the first notebook Beckett lists a bibliography of twelve contemporary ac­ counts, copied from Vulliamy's Mrs. Thrale of Streatham,

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and to these he adds the French Journals of Dr. Johnson and of Mrs. Thrale, which were published in 1932. (Mrs. Thrale's private diary Thraliana was not published in full until 1942.) Beneath this list Beckett quotes (somewhat freely) from Vulliamy: "She knew Johnson better than anyone else could possibly have known him during the period of his greatest eminence" (12).11 Upon thirty pages of notes from Vulliamy Beckett's blue crayon registers his main emphasis. To Mrs. Thrale's description of overhearing Johnson "so wildly proclaim what he could at last per­ suade no one to believe, & what, if true, would have been very unfit to reveal" (62), Beckett asks on the facing page: "What?" On a left-hand page, too, he lists the birth-dates of Mrs. Thrale's thirteen children and quotes Vulliamy (freely): "Taking into account a few miscarriages Mrs. T. [was] almost continuously pregnant during period of her friendship with Johnson" (52-53). Beckett leaned heavily on Vulliamy's semi-scholarly biography of Mrs. Thrale, whose approach may be gleaned from such chapter titles as: "VI. Family Group, VII. A Ramble in Wales, VIII. A Trip to Paris, IX. Company at Streatham, X. The House of Bondage, XI. Farewell to Mas­ ter, XII. Caro Carissimo, XIII. The Amazing Romance, XIV. Mr. Johnson in Love." Ostensibly scholarly—"In writing this book I have drawn upon the results of a study of the Johnson circle extending over many years" (11)—Vulliamy is irritating to read because he does not acknowledge the sources of his many quotations, he makes unsubstantiated judgments ("Poor Thrale was hardly in his grave before people were speculating, in a manner half ribald and half serious, on the possibility of his widow marrying Dr. John­ son. It is now almost unquestionable that Johnson himself speculated on the same possibility") (202). He is coyly frank about sexual matters ("No serious attempt has ever been made to examine the sexual character of Dr. Johnson. Most people would sooner think of examining the sexual character of an archbishop.") (243). Vulliamy is often hostile toward Mrs. Thrale: "Her chil-

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dren never interested her very much, they never aroused her profound emotions, and she was never seriously dis­ tressed when they died" (69). Although Vulliamy narrates Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi's post-Johnson life, he closes the book on a patchwork of condemnations drawn from Johnson's sayings and letters: "She has become a subject for her enemies to exult over, and for her friends, if she has any left, to forget or pity. I drive her out of my mind. Sir, I look upon her as the most abandoned woman in the world" (328). In 1937 Vulliamy's was the fullest account available of the relationship between the Great Cham and Mrs. Thrale. Usually, Beckett summarizes or quotes without comment, except for a rare remark on the lefthand pages. Of Johnson's early foreboding about Piozzi (in July 1781) Beckett notes in German: "Hier Anfang, wenn nicht mit dem Tode Thrales, April desselben Jahres." Next to the in­ formation that Johnson and Mrs. Thrale met for the last time on April 5, 1783 in her London apartment at Argyll Street, Beckett writes: "Exactly 2 years after T's death." In the matter of the crucial last scene between Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, Beckett reproduces Vulliamy's three-page ac­ count. He then analyzes: After parting in Argyll St. Johnson never saw Mrs T. again. What happened at interview impossible to say (I shall say it). But perhaps tacit agreement on J.'s part to final separation. Farewell gifts? (extract from an unpublished letter of Mrs P published by Lord Lansdowne). J. must have known or guessed something of Piozzi affair at be­ ginning of 1783 (hence perhaps his 'expostulation' at last interview.) His letters to Mrs T. between May 1783-June 1784 have a pathetic formality, but no allusion to possi­ bility of a meeting. After his stroke June 1783 he actually declines her offer to come & see him until he is in a state of more complete dereliction. Any letter with details of his 'complication of miseries' suppressed by Mrs T., anx­ ious to make him appear merely senile.

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Leaving Vulliamy, Beckett returns for a page to Boswell (Johnson on madness and death), then quotes from Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes and miscellaneous writings. On the page facing her account of Thrale's valet's supplying Johnson with a fresh wig each evening, Beckett invents: "Act 2. [J.] refuses to take wig." Also designated for Act 2 is Johnson's quip about Mrs. Thrale's remarrying, to which she replies: "I suppose, Sir . . . they think they are doing me honour with their imaginary matches, when perhaps the man does not exist who wd. do me honour by marrying me. . . . Till I am in love I will not marry, nor perhaps then." Mrs. Thrale said that Fanny Burney praised Piozzi as "a man to [her] natural taste," and Beckett notes accurately: "Invention." The last ten pages of Beckett's first notebook are drawn from a volume published in 1861 as Autobiography Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale). Edited by A. Hayward, this book tried "to rescue [Mrs. Thrale] from the disrepute into which Boswell's Life of Johnson and Macaulay's essays had thrust her."12 A hasty compilation, it was superseded by the full publication of Thraliana in 1942. But Beckett was reading and writing in 1937. Beckett's second notebook relies more heavily on pri­ mary sources, the single exception being commentary by George Birbeck Hill, whose annotated edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson marks the start of modern Johnson scholarship. Continuing the first notebook, Beckett quotes from Mrs. Thrale's so-called Autobiography between 1782 and 1784. In the entry for August 22, 1782, Mrs. Thrale mentions her desire to go abroad with her eldest daughter Queeney, and she registers pique that Johnson approved the project. On the facing page Beckett blue-crayoned: "Invention?" He apparently answered his own question: "Even supposing Johnson in love with Mrs T. her depar­ ture in one sense a relief to him, to the half that feared to realize situation." By November 1782, Mrs. Thrale re­ corded in her diary under the heading Confessio Amantis what she herself terms "the strength of my passion for

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Piozzi," and she showed that diary passage both to Fanny Burney and to her daughter Quefeney. Cynically, Beckett writes on a facing page: "Why all the fuss about Queeney. Was her marriage before Q.'s coming of age penalized in T.'s will?" Beckett then devotes some eight pages to detailed dis­ cussion of Dr. Johnson's illnesses, as described by con­ temporary physicians, and including the autopsy called a "neuropsy." On facing pages Beckett translates into mod­ ern vocabulary the maladies of acromegaly, dropsy, eye ailments, endocrine disorders, tumor of the testis, asthma. Beckett's most voluminous quotations from any single work comprise some thirty-five notebook pages from Sir John Hawkins' Life of Samuel Johnson, but none of these passages is blue-crayoned, and Beckett makes few com­ ments. He notes that Johnson's boasts about his wife's beauty are a form of assertion of his own potency. He wonders how, given Johnson's bad vision, he knew the prostitutes with whom he liked to converse were "hand­ some." Beckett adds to Hawkins' report such bits of infor­ mation as Johnson's remark that suicide had increased with smoking, and that Johnson's improved circumstances after Mrs. Johnson's death permitted him to engage black Francis Barber as a servant. He notes also that Dr. Robert Levett had long acted as Johnson's apothecary before com­ ing to live with him. To Hawkins' opinion that "Johnson in pity loved Levett, because few others could find anything in him to love," Beckett reacted: "Balls. He was a symptom of J.'s anxiety." Beckett lists the nine original members of Johnson's Club, including Hawkins. But he finally de­ clares: "No light on, hardly a mention of, relationship with Thrales, in Hawkins," and this explains the absence of blue-crayon marks. Nor are there any in the remainder of the second notebook, which quotes in turn from Lord Lansdowne's edition of the Queeney Thrale letters, and from George Birbeck Hill's editions of Boswell's Life and Johnson's Letters and Miscellanies. One of Beckett's quota­ tions bears on the scene that Beckett actually wrote:

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"When Mrs Williams & Levett both home: Ί have now no middle state between clamour & silence, between general conversation & self-tormenting solitude.' Mrs Desmoulins, her daughter and Miss Carmichael, who certainly . . . did not increase the happiness of the household were its in­ mates only some 5 years or so. . . . Happily during their residence J. mixed very much in general society." A little farther on, Beckett quotes several pages in which Hill compares Johnson's melancholy to that of the poet Cowper. On the last page of his second notebook, he quotes from Johnson's Annals, his autobiography to his eleventh year, printed in Hill's Johnsonian Miscellanies. Beckett's third notebook continues these Annals briefly, skips to Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes, then leaps to Chapter 5 of Leslie Stephen's 1878 Samuel Johnson, for information on the several inhabitants of Johnson's London house at Bolt Court—Mrs. Williams, Dr. Levett, Mrs. Desmoulins, Fran­ cis Barber, and Hodge the cat. Again, Beckett notes Mrs. Thrale's annoyance at Johnson's refusal to accompany her to Italy: "She could not bear that her leaving him should fail to torture him." A little later he quotes Johnson's defi­ nition of damnation: "Sent to hell, sir, & punished ever­ lastingly." Finally, Beckett notes Johnson's last three requests to Sir Joshua Reynolds, as well as Reynolds' de­ scription of Johnson's erratic way of moving. But the third notebook stops abruptly after eight pages, on the episode of Johnson visiting his home town of Litchfield. At this point in Beckett's research—after some two hun­ dred pages of notes—the play's structure must have so­ lidified in his mind: one act per year for the four years be­ tween Thrale's death and Johnson's death. Leaving many blank pages, Beckett skipped to the center page of his third notebook, apparently to focus on what was immediately relevant to his play. However, his list of events soon over­ flowed any workable scenario. He did succeed in moving in from the circumference of the Johnson circle to center on Johnson himself, but not on the Johnson-Mrs. Thrale rela­ tionship.

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1781 is set in a room at Bolt Court, when Johnson returns home after witnessing the death of Henry Thrale. Three further pages list Johnson's publications and visits during the remainder of that year. 1782 contains Beckett's observation that Johnson and Boswell did not meet then. On January 17, while Johnson was with Mrs. Thrale, Dr. Robert Levett died. Quotations follow from Johnson's letters—about illnesses, deaths, and Mrs. Thrale. 1783 finds Johnson severely paralyzed, his friends fear­ ing for his life. Beckett devotes some ten pages to excerpts from Johnson's letters (mainly on his illnesses), but he pays only perfunctory attention to Mrs. Thrale's love for Gabriel Piozzi. Beckett's interest has shifted from the couple to disease and death. 1784 continues quotations from Johnson on his health. In a letter of March 27 to Bennet Langton, Johnson writes that the asthma specialist Sir John Floyer "panted on to 90 as was supposed." Underlining and repeating the phrase on the facing page, Beckett elaborates in dramatic imagina­ tion: "Spoken towards end of last act, when, with J. pant­ ing in silence after 'sent to hell, Sir, etc.,' curtain falls." Thus, the play might end not with Johnson's death but with the repercussions of damnation. Continuing the Johnson life rather than the relationship with Mrs. Thrale, Beckett instructs himself to read letters to and from Johnson, Hawkins' account, Baretti's Stric­ tures, but also Mrs. Thrale's Anecdotes (presumably to check the material already noted). He indicates that Johnson's letters of June 1784 to Dr. Brocklesby are important for medical details. Beckett the translator copies Horace's elegiac ode to Torquatus (in Latin) and Johnson's transla­ tion of November 1784. He records Johnson's last meeting with Boswell (July 1) and his last voyage to and near his Litchfield birthplace, and, finally, the details of his death on December 13. At some point in this summary, Beckett may have realized that he was outlining a biography of Johnson over

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these four years, rather than a scenario for a play. Turning to the midpoint of his third notebook, On the page facing the beginning of the Johnson saga, Beckett began to list events in Mrs. Thrale's life during these years. But he could not stretch them beyond five and a half pages, as opposed to thirty-five for Johnson. The notebook breaks off with lists of contemporary sources of Johnson anec­ dotes, particularly of his last days. On the facing page, blue crayon identifies Mrs. Desmoulins as the daughter of Johnson's godfather, mentions Johnson's "ghastly smile." There are notes in ink on Mrs. Desmoulins and Miss Carmichael, as well as Johnson's description of his "Seraglio" at Bolt Court. Beckett then abandoned notebooks for loose yellow unlined sheets, on which he wrote accounts of the inhabit­ ants of Bolt Court—eighteen pages on Mrs. Williams, eight and a half on Dr. Levett, four and a half on Francis Barber, four on Mrs. Desmoulins, and one on Miss Carmichael. These pages are filled with quotations drawn from his notebooks. In the fragmentary scene he composed, he used some of the material of the yellow sheets. For exam­ ple, Mrs. Williams is blind, Welsh, and learned; Miss Carmichael is young and nondescript; Dr. Levett drinks heavily, and Mrs. Desmoulins is the widow of a scribe. However, the black servant Francis Barber, who served Johnson (with two intermissions) from 1752 until his death in 1784, does not enter the incomplete scene. Beckett's point of departure for his scene may well have been Johnson's letter of March, 1778 to Mrs. Thrale: "Wil­ liams hates everybody. Levett hates Desmoulins and does not love Williams. Desmoulins hates them both. Poll loves none of them."13 Yet Johnson spent his weekends with these haters. Beckett's play is entitled Human Wishes, leaving under­ stood "Vanity of" from Johnson's poem of that title. The partial scene is handwritten in ink on unlined yellow sheets, then retyped on the same yellow paper. It begins with the setting and list of characters. The scenic direction

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with which the scene opens is, "Silence." Beckett's pen moves briskly through the first page, with few changes, but difficulties apparently arose on the second page. Not only are several lines crossed out (some in the same ink as the writing and some in blue crayon), but the bottom of the second page blossoms in Beckett's doodles that are familiar to anyone who has perused his manuscripts.14 Doodles usurp half the third page; four different men are crucified with the traditional three nails, but in modern clothes. Four lines of music cover the bottom of the page. Only one doodle appears on page 4 (a castle with initials Eb), after which the writing resumes until page 11, with only occa­ sional words or phrases barred. A new pen begins page 12, and a new impetus, so that there are no changes. Yet the scene breaks off in the middle of page 14, never to be resumed. Although the scene is published in Appendix C, a brief summary may guide analysis. After the play's initial silence, three women converse. Their dialogue is punctured by frequent silences and cemented by frequent repetitions. All the dialogue exudes eighteenth-century elegance—"my dear madam," "pray tell me," "God grant," "I perceive," "upon my soul," "of little consequence," "it is idle to. . . ." During the course of the scene, a drunken Dr. Levett in greatcoat and hat ap­ pears in the background and wends his way upstairs. He utters no words, but he emits "a single hiccup of such force that he is almost thrown off his feet." The mutual hostility of the three women seeps through their conversation, but only Mrs. Desmoulins voices her wrath. Brooding on death, blind Mrs. Williams distinguishes between perceiv­ ing it by the mind or by the heart. Miss Carmichael reads aloud a passage about death from Jeremy Taylor's Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying. Mrs. Williams, who interrupts her with acid comments and questions, guesses that the au­ thor is Sir Thomas Browne, but Miss Carmichael, consult­ ing her title-page, informs her that it is Taylor, and upon that word Beckett's fragment ends.

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It is a pity that no one mentions Burton (whom Johnson appreciated) for there is melancholy in the partial scene, but the surface is comic and may be anatomized for telltale signs of the later Beckett. On stage are a trio of women who, as in Come and Go, suggest such well-known trios as the Three Witches of Macbeth, the three Fates, or a dark side of the three Graces. As in Endgame the main character is blind, decrepit, but acutely aware of feelings and sur­ roundings. Mrs. Williams even has a stick that prefigures Hamm's gaff, and she enumerates her illnesses as proudly as does blind Dan Rooney in-AZZ That Fall. Miss Carmichael deceives blind Mrs. Williams as Clov will deceive blind Hamm. Although the external world is not yet "Corpsed," many of its inhabitants are dead, but a dispute arises as to whether Hugh Kelly is alive or dead. (He was actually dead, and generous Johnson, who never met him, wrote a Prologue for a performance to benefit his wife and chil­ dren.)15 The surface of the Human Wishes scene is more comic than Endgame, but Mrs. Williams talks to herself in deadly earnest. On the other hand, she also indulges in a light verse about never being moved to mirth. And al­ though she is not yet as committed a writer as later Beckett authors are, she wishes the verse preserved in "what will not dry black and what was never white"—a twisted cliche, a comic device that already sprinkles Beckett's fic­ tion up to 1937, and that will later serve him in drama too. Noteworthy in this early scene is the way Beckett inter­ rupts his dialogue with rhythmic silences. Prophetic, too, is the counterpoint of word and gesture; thus, an unverbal Dr. Levett is the most mobile character in the scene; his os­ tentatiously neglectful audience is quiet as they pretend not to notice his drunken stumbling, but their silent disap­ proval is eloquent. The references to the play as a play are less novel, since Pirandello had been performed for well over a decade in the Paris where Beckett had often visited and was soon to live. Most anticipatory is Beckett's varied repetition—simple doublets and triplets, pounders, and a volley on "merry." The stage trio of women wish for

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mirth, and yet Mrs. Williams wishes for death, so that the very title Human Wishes evokes Beckett's blend of tragic and comic. Like Theater I and Theater 11 years later, the Human Wishes scene is a fragment that Beckett does not wish performed. Beckett abandoned it, and critics will inevitably seek rea­ sons. Deirdre Bair quotes Beckett's 1972 explanation: It was a question of putting it into the Irish accent as well as the proper language of the period. It would not do to have Johnson speaking proper language, after the man­ ner of Boswell, while all the other characters speak only the impossible jargon I put into their mouths.16 Bair then describes Beckett consulting linguistic texts for a precedent in combining Irish inflections (since the play would be performed in Dublin) with eighteenth-century English speech patterns. Bair also believes the plans for an ambitious production may have discouraged Beckett from continuing the script. She may be right, but I venture to guess at a more telling reason than language or expense: historical realism betrays Beckett's own developing vision. Nearly two years earlier, he had stretched fictional realism in Murphy, but even the first scene of Human Wishes bursts stage illusion as he syncopated Johnson's biography into the seriocomic blend, the silences, and the repetitive rhythms that took possession of the stage of his mind. This may have been so disconcerting to the neophyte play­ wright that he did not know how to continue. He could not resolve the conflict between the realistic biographical drama he had painstakingly prepared himself to write and the verbal ballet he actually found himself writing. The vanity of that particular human wish resulted in an abor­ tive scene with distinctly Beckettian features. I for one would love to see it on a double bill with Come and Go.

8 The Play That Wasn't Staged: Eleutheria

When Beckett turned again to drama—in his adopted lan­ guage, French—he completed three full acts that would last over three hours in performance. If Beckett permitted performance. But he withdrew the play from director Roger Blin and publisher Jerome Lindon. To the preten­ tious Greek title Eleutheria (freedom) he appended a subti­ tle "drame bourgeois," and the subject is bourgeois rather than Greek—a sensitive young man misunderstood in the bourgeois world. It is not surprising that Beckett refuses to make public this play written in 1947, but rather that he ever considered publishing or staging it. Yet it was an­ nounced for publication by Les Editions de Minuit, and di­ rector Roger Blin accepted it for production, along with Godot. Even more surprising than such acceptance— almost incredible—is that Beckett should have written so relatively conventional a play shortly before creating Godot.

A plot summary is necessary, not only because the play is unavailable to most readers, but because different scholars summarize it differently.1 The titular "eleutheria" or freedom is the aim of the play's young hero, Victor Krap. Idealistic despite his family name, Victor is thus in the romantic lineage that spilled over into the well-made play. Such heroes are mocked in the play itself, when a Glazier upbraids Victor: Vous etes Ie pauvre jeune homme, 1'heroique jeune homme. On vous voit crevant comme un chien a trente ans, a trente-trois ans, vide par vos labeurs, par vos decouvertes, ronge par Ie radium, terrasse par Ies veilles,

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par Ies privations, mort en mission, fusille par Franco, fusille par Staline. On vous applaudit. La mere s'en va de chagrin, la jeune fille aussi, qa ne fait rien, il faut des hommes comme vous, des hommes a 1'ideal, au-dessus du confort, au dessus de la pitie, pour que Ie nougat puisse continuer a se vendre.® For all the derision in the "nougat," however, Victor Krap remains an avatar of the idealistic young hero, and the play's title declares that his ideal is freedom. What is un­ usual about him is that he desires freedom to do nothing so as to be nothing: "Π est peut-etre temps que quelqu'un soit tout simplement rien."b The action of Eleuthiria takes place in Paris, on three suc­ cessive days in three conventional acts. As noted in Chap­ ter 2, Eleuthiria contains two simultaneous sets, and this is unrealistic, but each of the sets is realistic: the furniturefilled salon of the Krap house and the virtually bare hotel room, located near l'lmpasse de l'Enfant-Jesus. The scenic directions explain: "La chambre de Victor passe insensiblement dans Ie salon Krap, comme Ie sale au propre, Ie sordid au convenable, l'ampleur a l'encombrement."c The main action of Act I is played in the Krap salon while Victor remains in his hotel room. Between Acts I and II Henri Krap dies in the salon, which then moves stage right while the main action of Act II is played in Victor's room at stage left. In the Krap salon the servant Jacques comes and goes, looking often at his dead master's armchair. Late in Act II Victor Krap enters the salon to sit motionless in his father's a You are the poor young man, the heroic young man. You are seen dying like a dog at age thirty, at thirty-three, drained by your toil, by your discoveries, corroded by radium, crushed by vigils, by privations, dead on a mission, shot by Franco, shot by Stalin. We applaud you. The mother fades away with grief, the young lady also, it makes no difference, we need men like you, men with ideals, above comfort, above pity, so that candy can continue to be sold. b It is perhaps time that someone be quite simply nothing. c Victor's room unnoticeably slips into the Krap salon, like the dirty into the clean, the sordid into the respectable, free space into congestion.

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armchair. By Act ΠΙ Victor's room usurps the whole stage. The divided set has rather obviously symbolized two different ways of life. Eleuthiria opens like many a well-made play: a servant presents his mistress (Mme. Krap) with the calling card of an unknown, but the unknown proves to be her sister, who in middle age has suddenly married a Dr. Piouk. The reunion of the sisters is interrupted by the visit of Mme. Krap's friend, the recently widowed Mme. Meek. The con­ versation of the three women reveals that young Victor Krap has left home two years ago and cannot be induced to return. Dr. Piouk arrives to call for his new wife, and Henri Krap to banter with the guests. Mme. Krap leaves the salon and is soon announced in Victor's room on the other side of the stage, but she does not appear there. In the meantime Mr. Krap manages to converse alone with Vic­ tor's fiancee, Mile. Skunk, and he persuades her to pre­ tend to be alive, so that Victor may do so too. (Inexplicably, Henri Krap isMr. Krap, though all other titles are French.) When Mme. Krap returns, an acrimonious conversation erupts between husband and wife, and he threatens to kill her. However, calm is restored as Mme. Krap recounts to her husband that she has threatened to cut off Victor's funds if he does not return. Toward the end of Act I, then, the problem has been dramatized in the fashion of the well-made play: Can Victor Krap be induced or coerced to return to his parental home? Instead of bringing the cur­ tain down climactically on this problem, however, Beckett closes the act on an affectionate conversation between Henri Krap and his servant Jacques, after which the master remains motionless in his armchair. We learn in Act II that he has died while the curtain was down. The act itself opens explosively when Victor flings his shoe through the window of his hotel room, and a Glazier (with his ten-year-old son) immediately arrives to repair it (remaining through two acts). In Act II a series of callers attempt to persuade Victor to return home—Mme. Meck and her two strong-arm men, Mile. Skunk with Mr.

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Krap's last behest, the newly-wed Piouks, and finally Mme. Krap in black. As Mr. Krap in Act I enlisted the aid of fair young Mile. Skunk, so Dr. Piouk does in Act II, but his cure for Victor's state is more drastic. He wishes Mile. Skunk to offer poison to the life-weary young man; if he takes it, he will prove his weariness, but, if not, he will have to rejoin those who act as though they are alive. The climactic terrain thus shifts from the question of whether or not Victor will return home to the question of whether or not he will return to normal life. Victor in the meantime quietly enters the empty Krap salon to sit in his father's chair. The usual well-made play would have a swift denoue­ ment in the third act, but Beckett delays any denouement. The Glazier wakens Victor to receive the visit of Jacques, the servant, who reports that Mme. Krap is ill, as well as Dr. Piouk, so that Henri Krap's funeral must be post­ poned. Jacques thanks Victor for explaining himself (off­ stage) at the Krap house, but a Spectator jumps on stage to complain of Beckett's play. Spectator and Glazier—both strangers to a smooth denouement—insist that Victor ex­ plain himself. When his silence continues, they call a Chinese torturer to the stage, who threatens to tear Vic­ tor's nails out. Terrified, Victor breaks into long digressive speeches, but finally he does define his life: "C'est une vie mangee par sa liberte." More specifically, he utters a decla­ ration of independence in a pattern for his own living: En etant Ie moins possible. En ne pas bougeant, ne pas pensant, ne pas revant, ne pas parlant, ne pas ecoutant, ne pas percevant, ne pas sachant, ne pas voulant, ne pas pouvant, et ainsi de suite. Je croyais que c'etaient la mes prisons.*1 Having named these prisons, Victor acknowledges that they are inescapable while one is alive, and he agrees to d By being as little as possible. By not moving, not thinking, not dream­ ing, not speaking, not listening, not perceiving, not knowing, not desir­ ing, not being able and so on. I thought those were my prisons.

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abandon the effort of "being as little as possible." The Spectator then reformulates the choice that Dr. Piouk first propounded; Victor has either to kill himself or return to normal life. Having re-established the plot line, the Spec­ tator leaves. Dr. Piouk enters with Mile. Skunk to confront Victor with the actual choice that the Spectator merely enunciated: take poison or return to mother. Victor jus­ tifies his name by triumphing over any decision. He will continue as he is: "Ma vie, je vais vous dire a quoi je l'userai: a frotter mes fers l'un contre l'autre. Du matin au soir et du soir au matin. Ce petit bruit inutile, ce sera ma vie."e Victor rejects the very terms of bourgeois choice, ac­ cepting neither suicide nor normal life. Having rid himself of all visitors, including his landlady, he looks long and hard at the real theater audience, then lies down on his folding bed, turning his thin back on humanity. I have tried to summarize Eleutheria in the spirit of the well-made play on which it is partly modeled, but this was virtually impossible in Act III. However, Beckett's devia­ tions occur passim. The opening scene, in which three middle-aged women recount their afflictions, recalls the Human Wishes fragment and predicts Come and Go in sub­ ject, but the pattern is more clumsily satiric. Victor's father Henri believes himself in Dante's ninth circle, but recog­ nizes, "Mon fils est dans Ie vrai." The widow Meck an­ nounces her departure many times but does not depart. All the middle-aged bourgeois characters are ill, and Mr. and Mme. Krap have difficulty rising, once they are seated. Father and son are both writers. Though repetition is in­ frequent, Jacques the servant knocks every time he enters the Krap salon, and he enters often. Victor's standard reply to most questions is: "Je ne sais pas." Before Victor retires to his bed, he pushes that bed as far as possible from the audience, and looks fearfully about him, predict­ ing O in Film and Joe in Eh Joe. e I'll tell you how I'll live my life away: rubbing my chains against one another. From morning to night, and from night to morning. That faint vain noise will be my life. (Beckett's translation.)

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Godot is often played as vaudeville, but Eleutheria first explores such techniques. The salon characters have obscene names—Krap, Piouk, Skunk, Meck (French slang for pimp)—and such obscenity is pointed: "Depuis quand ma soeur s'appelle-t-elle Madame Piouk?" Mr. Krap can­ not urinate, and his wife has a fallen uterus. The old couples savor unsavory aspects of sex: Dr. Piouk seduces Mile. Skunk, and Mr. Krap urges her to uncover her phys­ ical magnetism. Dr. Piouk is immoderately ugly, and he is so concerned about humanity that he wishes to destroy it by all means from birth control through euthanasia, inclu­ sive of homosexuality, though he himself wishes to father a child. The servant Jacques tries to model his behavior on the long tradition of comic valet; when he kisses his master on request, both complain that the whiskers of the other are prickly. The unrealistic Glazier prides himself on his realism: "Quoi qu'il fasse, il faut qu'on sache a peu pres pourquoi." Vaudeville sometimes mocks itself as a staged rou­ tine—Pirandello for the masses. So Beckett writes dialogue that mocks his own play. Henri Krap speaks most such lines: "Au point de vue dramatique l'absence de ma femme ne sert a rien."f About Mme. Meek, who is large: "Elle domine la scene, ma foi, elle qui n'a rien a y voir."g To Dr. Piouk: "Je me demande a quoi vous allez servir dans cette comedie."h Dr. Piouk wonders no such thing, but he pre­ scribes for Mr. Krap: "En vous forgant un peu vous arriverez peut-etre a amuser Ies badauds."1 And the phrase "amuser Ies badauds" is repeated both by Mr. Krap and the Glazier, who claims to be "un poete qui prefere s'ignorer." Of Mmes. Krap and Piouk, the Glazier exclaims: ' From the dramatic point of view my wife's absence is of no use. B She dominates the scene, indeed, though she has nothing to do with it. h

I wonder what use you'll be in this play. By exerting yourself a bit you might succeed in amusing the passersby. 1

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"Le temps qu'on perd avec Ies figurants!"1 And of course the very existence of the roles of Prompter and especially Spectator departs from the well-made play, resembling vaudeville. The Spectator denigrates the play in which he is a discontented character: "Ne m'interrompez que si vous etes certain de pouvoir faire de l'esprit. Nous en avons ete un peu prives jusqu'a present."11 and "Je dis farce a dessein, dans l'espoir de vous couvrir. Cest ce que font nos meilleurs auteurs, intitulant ainsi leurs ouvrages Ies plus serieux au cas ou l'on ne saurait Ies prendre au serieux."1 And he mentions the name of one "meilleur auteur"— Beckett "(il dit Bequet)." This within-the-play commentary on the play enters Beckett's own scenic directions, some­ what in the spirit of the Addenda to Watt: Ce passage s'acheve brusquement, comme envahi par un sentiment de fatuite. Silence. Gestes d'impuissance, d'indifference, haussements d'epaule. Meme Jacques qui a failli dire, Si Madame alertait la police?, Ieve Ies bras et Ies laisse retomber avec mollesse. Accablement de Mme. Piouk. Elle va a la porte, hesite, se retourne, veut parler, se ravise, sort. Pressentiment que la piece toute entiere pourrait s'achever de la meme fagon.™ Along with these well-worn vaudeville techniques, Beckett hints at what interests him seriously: a man in bed ' The time that's wasted with supernumeraries. k Don't interrupt me unless you're sure you can be witty. We've been somewhat deprived of that up to now. 11 deliberately say farce in the hope of protecting you. That's what our best authors do, designating with that word their most serious works in case they won't be taken seriously. m This passage ends abruptly, as though overcome by a feeling of fatuity. Silence. Gestures of impotence, of indifference, shrugging of shoulders. Even Jacques, who was about to say: "If Madame were to call the police?" raises his arms and lets them drop loosely. Dejection of Mme. Piouk. She goes to the door, hesitates, turns around, wants to speak, changes her mind, leaves. Foreboding that the whole play might end in the same way.

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in a nearly empty room, a search for self that precipitates into a search for non-being, a father and son who are writers. More important, however, is the dramatic insist­ ence on the human situation, as in all the later plays. The reason for Victor's indigence is not the obligatory secret of the well-made play; his disaffection for life is virtually he­ reditary, since his father Henri (head of the family) enun­ ciates it in Act I: Etant done dans l'impossibilite de vivre et repugnant au grand remede, par pudeur ou par lachete, ou parce que precisement il ne vit pas, que peut faire l'homme pour eviter la demence, oh bien discrete, bien effacee, qu'on Iui a appris a redouter? (Pause.) Il peut faire semblant de vivre et que Ies autres vivent." This pretense is what Victor rejects to achieve his victory. The few critics who have read Ekutheria agree with its author's adverse judgement, as do I: And this convention [of formal dramatic structure] closes round Victor like water round a stone, incapable of assimilating him.2 Beckett never again makes the elementary mistake of using a protagonist whose one desire is to escape from himself without giving him a self to escape from.3 But perhaps the most damning criticism one could make of "Eleutheria" is that it does not encourage one to en­ visage its individual dramatic configurations in a way that even an unpublished Godot would have done.4 The critics are as dissatisfied with Victor as they are with the play, and they imply that Victor fits badly into the play. However, none of the critics comments on a clash of tone " Finding it therefore impossible to live and reluctant to apply the great remedy, through modesty or cowardice, or precisely because he is not liv­ ing, what can a man do to avoid the madness (o very discreet and con­ cealed) he has been taught to fear? He can pretend to be alive and that others are alive.

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between Victor and his human surroundings. His family and friends damn themselves dramatically by their lack of sympathy for this earnest young hero. We are not meant to take them seriously, as is clear from the names that con­ demn their values. But we are meant to take Victor seri­ ously, and this becomes difficult when he is so serious about himself. Neither before nor since Eleutheria has Beckett viewed a protagonist with so little irony. Victor's coeval (in the chronology of Beckett's works) Molloy has comparable aims, but how deftly ironic is Beckett's expression of them: And once again I am I will not say alone, no, that's not like me, but, how shall I say, I don't know, restored to myself, no, I never left myself, free, yes, I don't know what that means but it's the word I mean to use, free to do what, to do nothing, to know, but what, the laws of the mind perhaps, of my mind, that for example water rises in proportion as it drowns you and that you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery. Or Moran, who embodies the whole Krap salon rolled into one caricature—before he starts out in search of Molloy. Afterwards, however, his ambition resembles Victor's, but how ironic is his statement: To be literally incapable of motion at last, that must be something! My mind swoons when I think of it. And mute into the bargain! And perhaps as deaf as a post! And who knows as blind as a bat! And as likely as not your memory a blank! And just enough brain intact to allow you to exult! And to dread death like a regenera­ tion. Victor is less dramatic than these fictional protagonists, and Eleutheria suggests that Beckett knew too much about conventional drama to theatricalize him. Despite Victor's

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untraditional motives, he belongs to the lineage of the sen­ sitive idealistic rebel. The salon characters belong in social satire, and they reduce his condition to a soluble problem, casting over the whole the shadow of the problem play. In the Krap salon Jacques is a semi-comic valet, who derives from comedy going back through Moliere to Plautus. A practitioner of Molieresque medicine, Dr. Piouk also intro­ duces a note of bedroom farce, a la Feydeau. The basic structure of Eleuthiria is that of the well-made play, but irrelevant characters derive from vaudeville. It is a piquant touch that the most sustained irrelevant charac­ ter, the Glazier, insists upon plot relevance and psycholog­ ical credibility. No one could have wielded so many dra­ matic traditions into theatrical coherence, and Beckett realized this instinctively by turning his thin back on the lot. Beckett learned that what is true of man is true of a play; in Hamm's words: ". . . the bigger a man is the fuller he is. And the emptier." Conversely, the smaller he is, the less full and the more profound. Or, as Beckett was to write in a marginal note on That Time: "Less is more." Ev­ erything depends, however—to paraphrase the Unnamable on silence—on the kind of "lessness." In the midst of its faults Eleuthiria peeps at human less­ ness in a parenthetical exchange. Having frightened Victor into speech in Act III, the Spectator complains of the hero's generalizations: "C'est votre cas qui nous preoccupe, pas celui du genre humain." To which Victor retorts: "Mais ils sont solidaires." What Beckett learned in Godot, and what he remembered through his subsequent dramatic writing, is how to dramatize the particular, even while rendering its solidarity with the human species.

9 The Play That Was Rewritten: Fin de partie A play aborted and a play jettisoned contrast with Beck­ ett's favorite play, Endgame, which was worked, reworked, and translated from the French. As an approximation, Deirdre Bair is probably right to surmise that Beckett turned to drama when he reached a creative impasse, but drama too can be an impasse, and Beckett labored two years over Fin de partie. Of all his plays, it underwent most extensive revision.1 Beckett wrote his friend, anglicist Jean-Jacques Mayoux: La redaction definitive de Fin de partie est de 56. Mais j'avais aborde ce travail bien avant, peut-etre en 54. Une premiere, puis une deuxieme version en deux actes avait precede celle en un acte que vous connaissez.32 The "deuxieme version en deux actes" of Fin de partie is in the Ohio State University Library, and the "premiere ver­ sion" is in the Beckett collection of Reading University, England; Beckett does not mention a brief handwritten continuation of the latter, now in Trinity College Library, University of Dublin.3 The twenty-one-page typescript at Reading bears no ti­ tle, but Beckett's hand notes: "avant Fin de partie." Another hand labels the piece "Abandoned Theatre in French," and the text does apparently abandon its two actors in the middle of their action. Bair asserts that the play was begun with specific actors in Beckett's mind—Roger Blin who a

The final draft of Endgame dates from 56. But I had started this work much earlier, perhaps in 54. A first, then a second version in two acts had preceded the one act that you know.

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played Pozzo in Godot and Jean Martin who played Lucky.4 If this is so, the new play would continue their roles of master and servant, those staples of French com­ edy. Designated by the letters X and F (for Factotum), the master's baptismal spoon reads Jeannot, and the servant is variously called Donald, Lucien, and, mainly, Albert. As the letter X suggests, the master is almost as unknowable as Godot, but he is distinctly visible and audible. F wants to address X as "Votre Honneur" or "Monsieur" or even "Patron," but X rejects such honorifics. F declares himself incapable of calling X "vieux con" as directed; neverthe­ less, he does so once, even while continuing his plea for the privilege of saying: "Votre Honneur." X and F interact in a place undescribed in the few scenic directions, but Beckett seems to have envisioned a shelter not unlike that of Endgame, since F speaks of two large windows (now aveuglees), and he retires to his offstage kitchen, whereas X is confined to his wheelchair. F locates the shelter in Picardy, where destruction occurred "dans des circonstances mysterieuses" between 1914 and 1918. (In the final Endgame only Nell's mention of the Sedan hints at the French War, where Napoleon III was disas­ trously defeated in 1871.) The location may be Picardy, but the props are neutral, and X recites their inventory—a drum and stick attached to X's chair (instead of the later whistle around his neck), a superfluous syringe, a baptis­ mal spoon, and a Bible. X does not mention his Fahrenheit thermometer, but he desires a telescope. Beckett's few scenic directions specify silence, X's drum-beating to summon F, F's entrances and exits, X's vain efforts to move his wheelchair, and F's actual movements of the chair. Beckett evidently heard the dialogue before he saw all the gestures in his mind's eye. And what he heard is an action about playing, passing time, and ending. In X's first ex­ pository monologue he says he is blind and paralyzed, then says he is pretending to be blind and paralyzed, then wonders whether he is lying or mistaken. His self-doubt is more insidious than Hamm's, as is appropriate to his

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name, X. Perhaps the Cartesian heritage is stronger; he doubts, therefore he is, and he doubts out loud. Of the twenty-one typed pages at Reading University, X's opening monologue (punctuated by ten silences) takes one and a half pages, the first X-F duologue takes four and a half pages, before X recites a shorter monologue. Another five pages of duologue are followed by a shorter X monologue. Like Hamm, X tells a story, and like Hamm he comments on the interaction of master and servant. Unlike Endgame, however, this play ends—or breaks off—in duo­ logue (but is carried a little further in the Trinity College manuscript). X addresses F in the tu form, but F shows re­ spect for X with his vous, instead of the familiar equality of the final version. The pointed pointlessness of the duologues recalls Godot and predicts the verbal ping pong of Endgame: X: Pourquoi ne me tues-tu pas? F: (Avec degout) Je vous aime. (Silence) X: Pourquoi? F: Je suis malade. X: Moiaussi. F: Vous etes malade? X: Je t'aime. F: Alors nous nous aimons.b X's story and its enactment—the playing theme—gradu­ ally assume importance, but the ending theme of Endgame is barely seeded. F repeatedly asks if he may address X as "Your Honor," which privilege is refused. He pleads for the stability of master-servant conventions, and it early be­ comes evident that this pair, like Vladimir and Estragon before them, have trouble in living through endless time. Dubiously, F remarks that everything has an end, and X 11

X: F: X: F:

Why don't you kill me? (With disgust) I love you. (Silence) Why? I'm sick.

X: Me too. F: You're sick? X: I love you. F: Then we love one another.

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retorts with the stale vaudeville joke about the sausage, which has two. The two men touch on several other subjects that will preoccupy Hamm and Clov—weather, a dog, repetition, F's departure, X's centrality, whether their activities have any meaning. More explicitly than Hamm, X sighs: "Dommage que nous soyons Ies derniers du genre humain." He requests F to wheel him here and there, to take him for a promenade. The connection between fact and fic­ tion is stronger in the early version: X calls for his dog, then amends this to his wife, and finally shifts to his mother, who becomes the protagonist of his story, as enacted by F. The mother has had a terrible accident that invalids her, but she is carefully tended: "Et hop la revoila sur pied."c Three times during his narrative, X cries out disjunctively, "Cherchez-la dans Ie coin."d After the last time, F enters disguised as the mother, but after a brief mother-son duologue, X instructs F to get rid of that putrefaction. Alone again, X broods: "Nous jouons si mal que ς& n'a plus l'air d'un jeu."e Then, resolving that "Cette nuit sera comme Ies autres nuits,"f he corrects himself: "Nous ne jouons pas si mal que ga."g On his drum X summons F, who informs his master: "II s'agit de ne pas mourir."h The Reading typescript breaks off after: F: Eh bien, il y a toujours l'affaire Bom. X: Bom . . . Ah oui, cette pauvre vieille qui reclame une goutte d'eau. F: Non, ga c'est l'affaire Bim.' And hup there she is on her feet again. Look for her in the corner. " We're playing so badly that it no longer looks like a game. ' Tonight will be like other nights. 8 h We're not playing as badly as that. It's a question of not dying. 1 F: Well, there's always the Bom business. X: Bom. . . . Ah yes, that poor old woman who begs for a drop of water. F: No, thaf s the Bim business. c

d

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From the time of his collection of stories More Pricks Than Kicks, written over two decades earlier, Bim and Bom recur sporadically in Beckett's work. Russian clowns whose comic routines contained—and were permitted to con­ tain—criticism of the Soviet regime, they became for Beck­ ett emblems of human cruelty, disguised under a comic garb. In a deleted passage of Godot Vladimir and Estragon compare Pozzo and Lucky to Bim and Bom. In the Reading University piece Bim and Bom are transformed into parched old women, but, combined with the clown over­ tones of narration and disguise, their names are a not unfitting terminus for duologues at once cruel and comic. The Trinity College manuscript continues for two hand­ written pages that present a failing X informed by F that an old woman has died of thirst. Less directly reproachful than Clov, F turns a phrase that will later be modified for Hamm: X: Et comment sais-tu qu'elle est morte? F: Elle ne crie plus.' The Reading University manuscript (and its brief Trinity College continuation) do not manage to weave the several strands: the meditations of X, the master-servant duo­ logues, the X narration that leads to an F enactment. But this abandoned piece already contains Endgame's physical space, a climate of illness and disaster, the love-hate inter­ change of master and servant, their penchant for story and play. There is no date on the Reading University typescript, so that we cannot know how much time elapsed before Beck­ ett turned to a new version—still untitled but complete by April, 1956—now in Ohio State University Library. We know from Beckett's letter to Jean-Jacques Mayoux that he may have started the first draft as early as 1954, and we know from his letters to Alan Schneider that he began the 1 X:

And how do you know she's dead? F: She's no longer crying.

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two-act version in December 1955, so that at least a year separates the two stages.5 In the two-act version repetitions underline the playing theme and the ending theme. To some extent Beckett di­ vided the two themes between the two couples who people the play. Master and servant (designated as A and B) are preoccupied with playing out their daily routines. However, the servant is less servile than F, and he is a more versatile player; he appears not only as a woman, but also as a boy. Like the mother of the first draft, this boy is engendered by the master's fiction. The other couple, M and P (for Meme and Pepe, French for Granny and Grampy) are ending their long lives in stage ashbins. The two main characters, A and B in the manuscript, address each other by Christian names; A is French Guillaume, and B English James. Lacking any other national indication, they both speak colloquial French. M once addresses P as German Walther. A little boy in A's story is French Andre, but in references to what will become Mother Pegg, Beck­ ett leaves a blank space for a name. Gone is all reference to Picardy, and the two acts of the Ohio State version take place in the unnational set of the Endgame we know, except for the absence of the painting, and the presence of the color red—on Hamm's blanket, robe, nightcap, and handkerchief; on the faces of the three men in Act I. Nell's face is white, in premonition of her death. The "ensign crimson" versus the "pale flag," which Winnie will salvage from Romeo and Juliet, are already emblems of life and death. B's beret is yellow and the toy dog black, but other props are nondescript and not de­ scribed—drum, Bible, and thermometer retained from the earlier draft; new additions are a gaff and an alarm-clock. When Beckett directed Endgame in Berlin in 1967, he segmented the action into sixteen rehearsal scenes, which are already discernible in the two-act version, though differently proportioned.6 In the final play the ending ac­ tion dominates the playing action after Scene 12, and Beckett emphasizes this in the English translation by bor-

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rowing Shakespeare's Tempest line, "Our revels now are ended"—in the original French "Finie la rigolade." The French phrase opens Act II of the earlier draft, appearing on page 35 of the sixty-five page typescript. As in the final Endgame, the dialogue of the two-act ver­ sion begins with an expository soliloquy by Clov-B and ends with a soliloquy of resignation by Hamm-A, but the earlier versions are longer and more repetitive. Clov's opening sentence illustrates the rhythm: "Mort lente, mort rapide, vais-je rester, vais-je Ie quitter, pour de bon, Ie quitter pour de bon, ou rester pour de bon, pour la vie, jusqu'a ce qu'il meure, ou jusqu'a ce que moi je meure?"k However, it is not dialogue but gesture that opens and closes the two-act play, as it does the final Endgame. Clov's opening mime is similar to that of Endgame, but at play's end Hamm-A buries his face in his hands—a less stoic ges­ ture than curtaining his face with the "old stancher," Beckett's brilliant translation of "vieux linge." Like his successor Hamm, A simultaneously desires an end and hesitates to end. Although the play in the theater has to end, an endless process is subliminally suggested by the repetition of phrases, gestures, pauses which do not add up to whole events. Of primary importance, therefore, is Beckett's change of Nell-M's death at the end of Act I to Clov's laconic report in revision: "Looks like it [her death]." Death un happens between the two-act and final End­ game. Less decrepit than Nagg, P wants to hold M's hand, and he knocks at the lid of her ashbin. Alarmed that she does not answer, P urges B to examine her bin. The servant bends over, looks in, bends still further. There is a long si­ lence. Then B straightens up, gently covers the bin, and removes his beret. When Nagg-P asks: "Alors?" B removes the old man's skull-cap, but blind A yawns to close the act with French cliche syllables of dismay, "Oh la la." k

Slow death, rapid death, will I stay, will I leave him, for good, leave him for good, or stay for good, for life, until he dies, or until I myself die?

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In Act II Nell-M's ashbin is gone from the stage. Hamm-A wears a black nightcap, Clov-B a black beret, Nagg-P a black skull-cap. The faces of A, B, and P are white, like M's in Act I; are they close to death? To A's question about whether P is happy that M is dead, the old man replies, "Tres." Toward the middle of Act II, P tells B that it isn't worth the trouble to make sawdust for his bin, and B declares that these may be P's last words. They are certainly his last words in this version of the drama. Before the end of the two-act version, A speaks Hamm's final speech of Endgame (with a few variants); then he and B en­ gage in a last duologue. B leaves, and A continues to speak a few feeble words. Though A has earlier told B that he has pondered about his last words, the one spoken on stage is simply "Bon." Present from the beginning of the two-act version is the visual impression of the play we know: two ashbins and one wheelchair in a bare shelter, with two windows that B can reach only by means of a ladder. Although A asks B suspiciously whether he has shrunk (as Hamm will ask Clov), it is rather the dialogue that shrinks between Beck­ ett's two-act and one-act versions (from sixty-five to thirty-seven typed pages). Of the four characters, only Nell-M speaks similar lines although her speeches come in a different order, and she lacks memories of Lake Como. Beckett curtails many speeches of the three men in the final Endgame. Nagg-P no longer comments on Hamm-A's meditations, nor does he declare that Nell-M can crawl out of her bin; nor does he swear an oath on his honor (al­ though Hamm does). Also excised are Clov-B's reminis­ cences about seaweed and seagulls, his clown business with rolling-pin and telescope, his recitation of an undes­ ignated sonnet, his difficulties with the dative case and pronunciation of the word Pentateuch, and his regret that he cannot lie to Hamm-A. From the master Beckett takes away a Pascalian exclamation about infinite spaces, the measurement of temperature at 98.6 Fahrenheit, the recita­ tion of B's basic duties, and A's ruminations about prepar-

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ing his last words. Excision shortens the A-B duologues where both men struggle through time in sequences about passing the time, about the toy dog, and about tears and laughter. In one routine A and B cry in synchrony, giving a comic tone to their tears. Also deleted is B's hesitation be­ tween two commands—that of A to wheel his chair to the center of the shelter and that of P to replace the skull-cap on his head. Both commands desire a return to the status quo ante, delaying an end. B weighs his choice: "Mon coeur balance. (Un temps.) A moins d'un fait nouveau nous sommes figes pour l'eternite."1 Eyes front, B begins to re­ cite from Rimbaud: "O saisons, ο chateaux!" The impasse passes when A commands that B serve P, and B therefore comments: "On repart. Dommage.""1 Beckett's most telling revision is the complete elimina­ tion of two Clov-B scenes of disguise, one in each act. Without the anticlimactic color of these scenes, the ending action becomes more continuous and relentless, appar­ ently dating from the biblical flood. In the two-act draft, the Flood reference is specific, for B reads to A from Genesis, then turns to the descendants of Shem, chanting a litany of long-lived patriarchs who engendered large families. A's response is Oedipal since he asks for his mother to help him engender. When B protests that A must mean his wife, the master retorts that it's all the same to him whether it is mother, wife, sister, daughter; what counts are two breasts and a vulva. B exits, to re-enter in blonde wig, false breasts, and a skirt over his trousers. It is not clear whether A is deceived by the disguise, for B also assumes a woman's voice, and it is B who speaks what will become Nell's line in the final Endgame: "Alors, mon gros, c'est pour la bagatelle?"" Since B is both himself and the woman, there follows a comic triangular scene, but instead 1 My heart is poised between the two. (Pause.) Unless a new fact enters, we're fixed for eternity. m We're off again. Pity. " What is it, my pet? Time for love? (Beckett's translation in English

Endgame.)

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of two men competing for the favors of the woman, both A and B wish to foist her on the other. If a child is conceived, B's woman's voice tells A, they will drown it. A child is conceived in the two-act draft. Even in the final version, Clov reports seeing a small boy through the window (a report abridged in Beckett's English transla­ tion), whereupon Hamm informs Clov that he is no longer needed. In the two-act draft, B surmises this on his own, once the boy is sighted. Soon after A calls his father the boy appears on stage, played by B in his second disguise—red cap, short trousers, and the gray smock of French schoolchildren. Changing voice with costume, B complains of hunger, and A seems to believe B's disguise. He bribes the boy with an offer of chocolate and orders him to look into an ashbin, to push his wheelchair, to bring his gaff. But when B as boy claims the chocolate, A announces that there is no more chocolate. Recalling how he desired a drum when he was a child, A offers his instrument to the boy and pleads: "Viens." The boy backs out of the shelter, but blind A continues to address him. He attributes to the boy the greed that Hamm will attribute to old folks. Only after a long silence does A realize that he is alone. He tries vainly to move his chair, as X tried in Beckett's Reading piece, as Hamm will try in Endgame. Then, throwing away the gaff, A whispers "Bon," his last word before burying his face in his hands. In the theater B's disguises would be comic in spite of the grim overtones of Beckett's two-act play. Beckett's elimination of these comic scenes balances his decision to cut the cruellest scene from the earlier draft. In that version P is reluctant to listen to his son's story, so that A orders B to put P's head into a pillory, making him a literally captive audience. A then stages a professor-pupil scene in which he plays both professor and pupil in a lesson on madness. Not satisfied with his father as mere listener, A orders him to recite the story of his life. Canged though he is, P re­ fuses until A, wheeled by B to P's ashbin-pillory hits him on the head with his drumstick, and then threatens him

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with hammer and gaff. Thus beaten into speech, the old man delivers a seriocomic life story in telegraph phrases. In Beckett's novels Molloy strikes his mother on the head, and a stranger strikes Malone, but Beckett must have de­ cided that such physical violence is too crude for his stage, and Hamm's hostility toward his father is reduced to the verbal in the final Endgame. (Servant strikes master with the toy dog in both versions, but the weapon mitigates cruelty.) In spite of the crucial concentration of two acts into one, the final Endgame seems more symmetrical. Hamm and Clov are more evenly balanced than are A and B. Their dialogue is more equitably shared; Clov's five laughs at the beginning are balanced by Hamm's five yawns; Hamm's wheelchair by Clov's ladder; Hamm's dark glasses by Clov's telescope, and his whistle by Clov's alarm-clock. Re-inforcing such balance is the way Hamm and Clov speak of kissing, whereas Nagg and Nell try to kiss. Because Beckett's revision achieves balance, economy, and concentration, his few additions are noteworthy. Beckett molded Endgame at its beginning and end to sug­ gest that "The end is in the beginning." Thus, only in the final version are all four characters in the same stage space at beginning and end. Only in the finished play does Hamm address his handkerchief as "old stancher" near beginning and end, and only there does he sniff for Clov near beginning and end. Beckett supplies new binding threads in the final ver­ sion. He concretizes the difficulties of ending by reference to Eleatic grains and moments, he makes the characters more aware of playing, and he underlines the ending theme by references to more phenomena running out. Dwelling on the entropic action, Beckett embellishes Hamm's wasteland prophecy and his recollection of the painter; Beckett moves the master's richest and loneliest speech to the very end of Endgame. Only into the final version does Beckett introduce the old vaudeville joke about hearing that has not failed—

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"our what?"—and only there does he add Nagg's signifi­ cant joke about the poor quality of God's created world. Endgame intensifies pathos as well as humor; in the final version alone we find the last moving Hamm-Clov ex­ change, from Hamm's "Before you go . . . say something" through Clov's most extended speech that begins: "I say to myself—sometimes. ..." Both characters imply a link be­ tween speech and suffering, but that link is stronger in Endgame because Beckett's words are stronger, and they are ordered for maximum tension. The variety of words is diminished by the increase of repetition, which was already markedly increased between the Reading and Ohio State University drafts. Several Clov threats to depart are added to the final version of Endgame. The most frequent scenic direction in the Reading frag­ ment is "Silence," but "Un temps" takes the lead in the last two versions, and the final Endgame contains new repe­ titions of "Alors" and "Meme jeu." As is often noted, Hamm begins his three soliloquies with the same striking phrase: "A moi de jouer," and in the final version Mother Pegg, the light, and the earth are all "eteint." Repetition itself sounds starker and more continuous in the economy of the single act. Although the immense effort required to play, pass time, and end is common to the three versions, Beckett did not set out to compose on given themes. He probably began like other playwrights in other styles with characters in a setting—with a paralyzed master and an ailing servant in an almost hermetic room. The two-act version accommo­ dated a second couple. With four characters confined to a single act, however, the play achieves the linear force of a tragedy by Racine, an author long appreciated by Beckett. Still, it is a circle rather than a straight line that diagrams Endgame, whose end echoes its beginning, whose hero or­ ders his servant to wheel him round his shelter, whose dialogue is riddled by pauses and zeros, in all versions. Along with sustained themes—playing, passing time, ending—comes a consistency of detail in the three ver-

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sions. The bare set with its centered wheelchair and offcenter ashbins is the dominant image. The physical Bible of the first two drafts evaporates into words in the final ver­ sion; conversely, the Reading draft merely mentions a dog, which subsequently becomes a visible toy. In the three versions the master accuses the servant of stinking, but the servant's appreciation of the master's honor undergoes a curious development. X's honor, the right to be called "Your Honor," is the most insistent phrase of the Reading draft. In the two-act Ohio State version, honor belongs to Nagg-P, or at least he mentions it when swearing an oath that he will appear when summoned. In the final play it is Hamm who promises on his honor to give Nagg a sugar­ plum, at which they laugh heartily. The innuendo is that Hamm has no honor, and we learn that he does indeed lack it, for "There are no more sugar-plums"—the only "no more" announced by Hamm rather than Clov. Moreover, the very coupling of honor and sugar-plums deflates honor as effectively as does Falstaff. Few lines of dialogue survive revision into one act. However, each master—in different words—requires his servant to kiss him, and each is refused. In exactly the same words in each version, the master asks the servant why the latter doesn't kill him; in the original French the sound play mitigates the grimness: "Pourquoi ne me tuestu pas?" In another verbal survival through only two ver­ sions, Beckett converts a question by X to a statement by Hamm. The Reading typescript has X anxiously interro­ gate F: "Est-ce une journee comme Ies autres jusqu'a pre­ sent?" pleading to be reassured about the insignificance of this day. Early in Endgame Hamm asks a comparable ques­ tion: "C'est une fin de journee comme Ies autres, n'est-ce pas, Clov?" Hamm is more or less reassured by Clov's re­ ply: "On dirait." Later in Endgame, after Hamm tells Clov of the painter's catastrophic vision, master and servant agree that: "Ca a assez dure." And Hamm draws the gloomy conclusion: "Alors c'est une journee comme Ies au­ tres." The English is more pointedly repetitive: "It's the

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end of the day like any other day, isn't it, Clov?" and "Then it's a day like any other day." But of course Hamm is wrong. It is not like any other day, for only on this day are there "no more" things, from bicycle-wheels to coffins. Only on this day does Clov sight a small boy and propose to leave. It is only this unending day that Beckett stages, with the symmetries and repeti­ tions that seem to support Hamm's conclusion—the old questions, the old answers, the old moves, the old pauses. This day and only this day is distinguished by its brave comic play against a background of tragic waning, but Beckett's skill—exercised in revision—leaves us with Hamm's impression. Hamm is wrong about the insignifi­ cance of the day, but he is right to worry about "beginning to mean something." For Beckett has revised Endgame into its present meaningful economy.

PERFORMANCE

10 Some Beckett Theatricians A latecomer to the professional theater—Beckett was fortyseven when Godot was first performed—he has earned abiding loyalties among theater workers, whom I group under the neologism "theatricians." Fehsenfeld and McMillan have collected revealing testimony from many theatricians,1 but I limit my discussion to those I most ap­ preciate. And I begin at the beginning, with Roger Blin's production of Eti attendant Godot, which I attended in 1953 at the now defunct Theatre de Babylone. Blin has described his attraction to both Beckett manu­ scripts, Eleutheria and Godot, and his economics-based decision for Godot.2 Despite the play's minimal financial demands, however, it took Blin three years to find funds. With the help of poet-playwright-administrator Georges Neveux, the Blin-Beckett enterprise received a French gov­ ernment grant for a first play. Since Jean-Marie Serreau knew that his Theatre de Babylone was sentenced to demo­ lition, he leased it on generous terms. January 5, 1953, is inscribed in theater history (Godot's publication in 1952 preceded its premiere by a few weeks). Although I have perused the few reviews, I find no trace of the rhythmic intensity of that performance. Or of the odd­ ity of such funny patter in the same play as callous master with mistreated—servant? slave? trained animal? Play­ wright Anouilh's summary still rings true: "Godot or the Music-Hail Sketch of Pascal's Pensies as Played by the Fratellini Clowns." Only in retrospect do I marvel at Blin's ingenuity in converting the miniscule Babylone stage (a theater named with total irony!) first to a vaudeville plat­ form, and then, when Pozzo and Lucky entered, to a circus ramp, with Blin himself a vicious ringmaster.

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Through the years Roger Blin has directed scripts that at­ tract him, however audience and critics may respond— Strindberg, Shakespeare, Genet, Mrozek, and Beckett. He regards no drama as "un spectacle Blin" but studies a script with "une humilite active."3 His respect for Beckett is phrased humorously in an interview of 1953: Si vous connaissez quelqu'un qui connaisse quelqu'un qui connaisse Samuel Beckett, on pourrait peut-etre enfin, je veux dire, on pourrait peut-etre Iui demander si par hasard, il n'aurait pas l'idee, bien sur quand il aurait Ie temps, d'ecrire une nouvelle piece.34 Since then, Beckett has written many "une nouvelle piece," and Blin has directed (in French) Krapp's Last Tape, Embers, Happy Days, and the Endgame that is dedicated to him. He has acted Pozzo and Hamm, the one role with snappy bluster and the other with world-weary grace viv­ idly conveyed by his slim and regal hands. Admiring Em­ bers above all Beckett's work, he has wished to stage that radio play in the theater, but he has abided by Beckett's re­ fusal. Publicly, Blin has always expressed admiration for Beckett, but it is rumored that he has not directed the re­ cent plays because Beckett's scenic directions leave no creative scope for the director. Most recently, this friend of Artaud and Genet has directed Godot for the Comedie Frangaise, the most established of establishment theaters. Despite the unexpected success of the 1953 Godot, Blin was unable, four years later, to finance Fin de partie. Again, publication preceded performance which was realized only when George Devine offered London's Royal Court The­ atre. After a few weeks' rehearsal, Fin de partie opened on Sloane Square (with Acte sans paroles I) on April 3,1957, ini­ tiating Beckett's periodic sojourns at the Royal Court. Iron­ ically, Fin de partie was incorporated into a French a

If you know someone who might know someone who might know Samuel Beckett, you might maybe, well I mean, you might maybe ask him if by any chance, the idea mightn't occur to him, when he has the time of course, to write a new play.

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Fortnight, graced by the presence of the French Ambas­ sador to Britain. British critic Irving Wardle describes "the Daimlers roll[ing] up," the "frigid courtesy" of British re­ viewers, and the Lord Chamberlain's refusal to permit staging of Beckett's English translation the following year.5 With God changed from "bastard" to "swine," how­ ever, English Endgame opened at the Royal Court (with Krapp's Last Tape) on October 28, 1958. Like Blin, George Devine directed and played Hamm. Jack MacGowran as Clov danced, maimed and elflike, around Devine's stolid residual majesty. After Endgame Devine directed Happy Days in 1964 and Play later that same year. Devine's ap­ preciation of Beckett's directorial suggestions occasioned a tart note from Kenneth Tynan, then Literary Advisor of Britain's National Theatre: "I trust the play completely, and I trust your production of it. What I don't especially trust is Beckett as co-director." To which Devine replied: "The presence of Beckett was of great help to me and to the actors."6 Shortly before Devine's death in 1966, at the age of fifty-five, he dictated to Jocelyn Herbert a tribute for Beckett's sixtieth birthday, the tribute of a lifelong theatrician: ". . . this extraordinary mind and poetic vision; at the same time so rich and so simple."7 On the double bill with the London opening of Devine's Endgame Donald McWhinnie directed Pat Magee in the play that Beckett wrote for him, Krapp's Last Tape. A year earlier—1957—McWhinnie had directed All That Fall on BBC radio, with Pat Magee as Mr. Slocum and Jack Mac­ Gowran as Tommy. Both Irish actors, Magee and Mac­ Gowran date their impressive acting careers from these small parts in Beckett's radio play, from whose broadcast he was absent. "That's when I started," Pat Magee told me, "Late in the day I grant you, but better late. . . ." Inde­ pendently, both Irish actors sought out Beckett and be­ came his friends, protective of his privacy. Beckett has written a play for each of them—1958 Krapp's Last Tape for Magee and 1965 Eh Joe for MacGowran. Magee and Mac­ Gowran played together as Hamm and Clov in an Endgame

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coached by Beckett in 1964. Separately, the two actors have portrayed other Beckett characters. Independently, each has composed an all-Beckett theater evening. MacGowran died in New York City at the age of fifty-four; Magee has had difficulty in recent roles. Each actor has paid tribute to Beckett: He's opened a door and now there's no limit to how far he can go with his style. . . . He is uplifting, exhilarating in the theatre. For an actor, to explore his compassion and his lyricism is very satisfying. He demands every­ thing from body, mind, and voice. (MacGowran.)8 He can . . . write, quite a glory in our age of audio-visual barbarism, and he has thrust his tongue a little deeper into the Pierian spring than most. And into warmer wa­ ters than that to judge by the glint in the rapscallion's eye. (Magee.)9 Of Beckett's theatricians the American Alan Schneider is the most indefatigable, having directed all the stage plays in the theater and three Beckett plays on television, as well as filming Film. Schneider has staged the plays in the ab­ sence of their author, but he has always consulted Beckett: "Before each production, including the first one, I've sailed or flown or trained or driven at the production's expense, if possible, if not on my own—to spend whatever time with Sam he could give me." (277)10 Looking back on a quarter-century of collaboration, Schneider is able to conjure the shy semi-recluse of the 1950s. He met Beckett's work before he met Beckett himself, at a time when the visible theater work consisted only of Waiting for Godot. Although Schneider knew little French, he nevertheless was so stirred by the first Paris production of Godot that he yearned to direct it but was unable to locate the author to obtain the American rights. He abandoned his search only when he heard that Peter Glenville would soon direct the play in London with Alec Guinness and Ralph Richardson (a project scrapped be-

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cause of the reluctance of the actors). He was therefore surprised and pleased in 1955 when the producer Michael Myerberg engaged him for a pre-cast Godot with Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell as Estragon and Vladimir. Schneider sailed across the Atlantic for his first consultation with Beckett; a fellow-passenger was Thornton Wilder, who had admired Godot in French and English. A few days after Schneider met Beckett in Paris, they traveled to London to see Peter Hall's Godot, night after disapproving night. Of this first extended meeting with Beckett, Schneider later wrote: "I came with respect; I left with a greater measure of devotion than I have ever felt for a writer whose work I was engaged in translating to the stage."11 Beckett has sensed this devo­ tion, giving Schneider first refusal on American produc­ tions of his plays. There have been no refusals. Although we might imagine that a Beckett director would show Blin's ascetic intransigence, Devine's quiet acquiescence, or McWhinnie's dour musicality, it is the pragmatic Schneider who alone has directed the corpus of Beckett's plays, and his career merits summary. Born in Russia of physician parents, he came to the United States at the age of six. He dates his passion for theater from a production of S. N. Behrman's Biography, seen when he was still in high school. "I was never the same after that," he has said, prophetically paraphrasing the speaker of Beckett's That Time. "Never the same," he nevertheless delayed committing himself to theater. At college Schneider studied physics, political science, and comparative literature, but he also acted and directed. Graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1939, he hopscotched around in journalism, public relations, and mainly radio, to escape from which he took part in com­ munity theater. He was awarded a fellowship to Cornell University, where he wrote a master's thesis on Nicolai Evreinov, a nonrealist Russian playwright still unknown in English-speaking countries. In 1941 Schneider joined the Theater Department of Catholic University in Washington, D. C., where he began his directorial career with a world

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premiere of William Saroyan's Jim Dandy. He spent a dec­ ade loosely attached to academe—from 1941 to 1952, with leaves for war service and directing stints. While still attached to Catholic University, Schneider came to believe that creative theater was best performed in local repertory companies, and since 1951 he has been as­ sociated with the Arena Stage in Washington, D. C., cofounded by one of his students, Edward Mangum. On Broadway Schneider's first directorial effort was a black production of Gorki's Lower Depths—in 1948; afterward he took a ten-week course in directing from Lee Strasberg. His pre-Beckett Broadway successes were the domestic comedy The Remarkable Mr. Pennycracker (1953) and the romantic melodrama Anastasia (1954). He became famous with Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), winning Tony and Outer Circle awards. His directing range has been wide—realist and nonrealist plays, American and European plays, Broadway and university theaters, small and large casts, simple and elaborate sets. Often raging against the time-is-money pressures of the American commercial theater, Schneider has achieved considerable acclaim in that theater. He has summed up the theatricians' situation in commercial America: "We have only two choices, that of leaving the theatre—which a great many of us are contemplating doing at the moment, either for the groves of Academe or the graves of Hollywood—or that of making the theatre over in some grander and less selfseeking image. In the meantime, we go on."12 Going on, Schneider has directed all Beckett's plays (though not necessarily with professional casts), and years before Walter Kerr decreed that the Pinter moment had come to Broadway, Schneider was directing his tight constructions. In 1964 at the Cherry Lane Theater off Broadway, Schneider directed his two favorite playwrights on the same bill—Pinter's Lover and the American pre­ miere of Beckett's Play (the latter truncated of its repetition in early performances). On this occasion Beckett's pres-

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ence was given a ghostly analogue in rehearsal; the prompting spotlight was nicknamed Sam. A man of sizzling energy, Schneider has not only di­ rected several plays a year, but he has also served as drama reviewer, advisory editor, consultant in theater, occasional lecturer. In 1976 he became Director of the Juilliard Theater Center of New York City, and in 1979 he accepted a posi­ tion at the University of California (San Diego). Schneider has been privately moved by Beckett's works, and he has been able to translate his private emotion into public per­ formance. After the "spectacular flop" of Godof in Miami in 1956, he has nearly always been able to cast sympathetic actors in Beckett's plays. Although five different productions of Godot (and Krapp a close runner-up with four) might suggest that that was Schneider's favorite Beckett play, he obliquely denies it: "Let's just say: the one I favor is the one I'm going to be working on next." (272) Working on each play, Schneider is scrupulous about Beckett's dialogue and scenic di­ rections. "In all the Beckett plays I get credit and blame for following Beckett's intentions."13 He is not frustrated by the decreasing physicality of the plays, and he scorns gratuitous embellishment. "I have always held to the oldfashioned belief," he has written, "that a first produc­ tion—certainly of a living author, especially of an author as clear and as explicit in his directions to all concerned as Beckett has always been (and is increasingly becoming more so)—should try to bring to stage life the author's play." (274) Dwelling on detail, Schneider has been more successful than Anthony Page in London or Beckett himself in Paris at lighting the Auditor of Not I, so that he can be seen to gesture in the dark. When Schneider directed a non­ professional Godot at Stanford University, he had his cast scour the area for a tree that would be right for Godot; dry and gold, it lent its own twilight grace. Generalizing about his long experience with Beckett, Schneider has written:

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The key to my directing Beckett, then, may be described as that of dealing simultaneously with what I have come to call "the local situation" (in contrast to that other more cosmic one) and his rhythmical and tonal structure, his specific style or "texture." . . . Dealing with "the local situation" simply assumes that I try to concern myself primarily with who the characters are as human beings, and what their human situation is. What are they doing, wanting, getting, not getting in a given scene? How do they change or not change? What happens to them in the play? How do they affect their own situation, and the other characters? What is their awareness of and reaction to the various events of the play? . . . Most importantly, what is their physical, their sensory, reality? . . . It is the sensory reality with which the director must be primarily concerned. (282) In exploring such questions at the Stanford Godot, Schneider drew images from the actors' experience: ping pong for the rapid Vladimir-Estragon exchanges; motherson for Vladimir's protective attitude toward Estragon; games for the rivalry between the two friends. Schneider told his Lucky, making his first appearance on any stage, that the servant was always fermenting thought, but Pozzo's command triggered the voicing of that continuous thought. Unlike Blin, Schneider has been happy to direct Beck­ ett's recent short plays, about which he wrote me: "On the matter of Beckett's increasing minimality, it has never oc­ curred to me. I only read about it in reviews." It has never occurred to him because so much remains to be done by the director, as no one knows better than Alan Schneider, who has admirably described his work on a 1977 produc­ tion of Play: So what did I do, after all, with that urn play of Beck­ ett's? I picked the actors, . . . I decided on the curve and shape and size and texture and location of the urns in question. I worked out the aesthetics and mechanics

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(fascinating and difficult) of that omnipresent light beam, which in essence became not only the categorical imperative but the seeing eye of the author. Over our three rehearsal weeks, our ten inadequate days of tech­ nical rehearsals, as well as a week of invaluable pre­ views, I was able to arrange and rearrange and select and sample and change and change again the symphony of tones and volumes and rhythms and sounds and si­ lences which together determined the particular texture and shape of this particular production of Beckett's Play.14

In contrast to Roger Blin who launched Beckett in the theater, and to Alan Schneider who has been associated with all his plays, Billie Whitelaw has appeared in only a few late Beckett plays, but she has elicited his unstinted admiration. Born in Coventry, England, she drifted into provincial theater in 1950. With minor parts in minor plays, she nevertheless attracted sufficient attention to be cast in television after 1952 and in films after 1955. Her first important London stage role was Sara Melody in a 1962 production of O'Neill's Touch of a Poet. In 1964 the late George Devine cast Billie Whitelaw as W2 for the first English production of Play, her introduc­ tion to Beckett. Within a few months of W2, she went on to play Franceschina in The Dutch Courtesan and Desdemona in Othello. Her other Beckett roles are Mouth in Not I in 1973, the Secretary in Rough for Radio in 1976, M in Footfalls in 1976, Voice in Ghost Trio in 1976, and Woman in . . . but the clouds . . . in 1977. Although Beckett was weary of thea­ ter, he volunteered to direct Billie Whitelaw in Happy Days, in 1979. A veteran of stage, screen, and television, Billie Whitelaw finds that Beckett's plays make unique demands upon her, requiring intense concentration in memorizing, re­ hearsing, and actual performance. In her 1964 introduction to Beckett, however, when she was cast as W2 in the Old Vic Play (with Robert Stephens as M and Rosemary Harris

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as Wl), she was not frightened by the text: "And I must say, to my shame, that I knew nothing about Samuel Beckett at all. All I knew was that he was a writer who wrote some strange writings that had nothing to do with me at all. When the script of Play was sent to me, although I did not understand it, the actual text moved me very much, although I did not understand why. I was not frightened about tackling this play at all."15 Lacking formal training in acting, Whitelaw never thought to ask psychological questions about her role. Beckett, present at director George Devine's rehearsals, was impressed by Whitelaw's reading of "the other woman." He himself drilled each actor separately in the high speed he desired, before Devine assembled them as a quartet (with the light). Whitelaw now likes to recall that one of Beckett's first notes to her was that she pause for two dots rather than the three indicated in the script. Her main memory of Beckett's presence at Play is his plea: "Faster! Faster!" Beckett still recalls the wild octave of Whitelaw's laugh. In that production Beckett suggested an inexact repeti­ tion oiPlay, to reinforce the impression of the light's uncer­ tainty: "The repeat may be an exact replica of first state­ ment or it may present an element of variation. . . . Changed order of speeches in repeat as far as this is com­ patible with unchanged continuity for actors."16 This fur­ ther emphasizes the "quartet" quality of Play; it is not the actors who cue one another, but the light; each actor must concentrate wholly on his/her part. Whitelaw superbly mastered this unusual untogetherness, along with speed and articulation. Two years later, when the play was performed on radio (with Beckett's permission) and with the light translated to a buzz, she again displayed her musicality. Not until 1973, nearly a decade later, did Whitelaw play another Beckett role—Mouth of Not I. Although Anthony Page directed, he benefited from Beckett's advice. Beckett

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vividly remembered, as he wrote me, that Whitelaw was "so remarkable in Play and brilliant vocally." Whitelaw has said of this late Beckett play: "Not I came through the letter-box. I opened it, read it and burst into tears, floods of tears. It had a tremendous emotional impact upon me. I knew then that it had to go at great speed. It was incredibly moving. When he came over, Beckett and I would sit for hours going through it together. Fortunately, my first reac­ tion was on the right lines. One just knew it had to go at pace." A quick study, Whitelaw had no special tricks for memorizing the long monologue of Not I; she learned it chunk by chunk, after marking her script with differentcolored pencils and visualizing the colors as she spoke. Whitelaw assumed that Mouth was talking about herself: "The person she's talking about is such a mess she can't bear it."17 Therefore, not I. In repeating the part aloud, Whitelaw conducted herself with hand, forefinger, or big toe. Until she evolved a breath rhythm, she might have a sudden dizzy spell during rehearsal: "I would fall over at rehearsals; my jaw felt as though it had full Army kit on. I know now how an athlete feels when his muscles become over-tired. The jaw would not open and shut. These were obstacles one had to crack and break through, just as an athlete does." Not I was hard for Whitelaw, but not because of mem­ ory problems for which other actresses have used a teleprompter. Acting athlete that she is, Whitelaw controlled her breathing long before the opening. Highly visual, she was frustrated because she could not imagine what the au­ dience saw. For the role she blacked out her face and wore a black hood as well; she experienced not only blindness but an overall sensory privation. Having committed to memory the arduous monologue (with pauses), she achieved crystalline articulation through the breathrationed pace, but the strain of rehearsal once broke her down—the only time in her professional career:

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I don't know what happened. I just stood there with tears pouring down my face. And then I saw Beckett himself walking towards the back of the theatre with his head in his hands. After a while he came back and reached up and held me. "Oh, Billie," he said, "what have I done to you?" He's a wonderful man, compas­ sionate and kind. I've never asked him what his play is about, but I feel fairly certain that I understand it emo­ tionally. . . . It's a dreadful thing to admit, but I'm sure that all actors—and writers too—are grateful to have this emotional bank [of personal tragedy] to draw on.18 In the performance of Not I Whitelaw was strapped into a chair high off the stage floor, in utter darkness; she had the sensation, when the unwavering spotlight shone upon her mouth, of piloting a small plane through an electric storm. Even as she drove through the fifteen-minute monologue, part of her could back off in self-encouragement: "Pilot your plane, Billie, pilot your plane no mat­ ter what." So impressed was Beckett by her Mouth that he reluctantly gave her permission to enact it on television. She was to decide whether it would be broadcast; he would have nothing to do with the project. However, when Beckett came to the BBC Television Studios to direct Ghost Trio, he consented to view Not I and now prefers it to the original stage version. Asked to direct a play for the Royal Court Beckett Season honoring his seventieth birthday, Beckett requested that Billie Whitelaw play M in his recently completed Footfalls. By 1976, twelve years after Play Billie Whitelaw knew Beckett terrain; her colored pencils were ready to mark her script, and her ears were tuned to pause, pace, and pitch. She even asked during rehearsal whether M had commit­ ted suicide. "No," Beckett replied, "she is just not there." Whitelaw understood at once, and in rehearsal she would sometimes repeat to herself: "I'm not there, I'm not there." The role of M in Footfalls is less constricting than Mouth.

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Far from breaking into sobs, Whitelaw joked with Beckett during rehearsal breaks. To begin, Beckett separated M's walking from talking; for the former he wanted exactly the right ring of heels on the wooden strip, but he had no pre­ conceived idea of posture and walk. Beckett demonstrated one hand at throat and the other crossed to the opposite shoulder, but Whitelaw's clawlike clutch evolved gradu­ ally, as did the loose-kneed walk. When focusing on speech, Beckett and Whitelaw recited the lines together, each conducting as from a score. After she learned M's lines, Whitelaw gradually blended word-rhythms into step-rhythms. Although M rarely walks and talks at the same time, Whitelaw contrived that each continue the other—pain and brooding on pain. Her technical skill served her emotional center based on private grief. She performed the third scene as though she were Amy's ghost, narrating to us, an audience of ghosts, a tale of her still-living mother, Mrs. Winter. Beckett did occasionally use the word "ghostly" during rehearsals, but she never told him the full fiction of her performance. As Beckett's "Faster! Faster!" was the watchword for Not /, so his "Softer! Softer!" was its equivalent for Footfalls. Whitelaw's voice was to hover at the threshold of audibil­ ity. Once she grasped this, Whitelaw took the initiative of uttering no sound but shaping with her expressive mouth the words "Amy" and "Amen." Daringly, she prolonged the final "It all" to a hollow, haunting groan. In 1977 Billie Whitelaw could choose her part, but she accepted brief roles in Beckett's two plays for television— an invisible voice in Ghost Trio and a silent face in . . . but the clouds . . . although her lips move in the final phrases from Yeats' Tower. The separation of voice from gesture of Footfalls continues in these television plays, but she feels no lack of artistic fulfillment. On the contrary, she finds within his "meticulous framework a marvelous freedom." Whitelaw reacts angrily to anyone who hints that Beckett might be difficult to work with: "I tell them he has more

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compassion and love in his little finger than most people in their whole bodies."19 Rick Cluchey would agree with that judgment, for Beck­ ett has been to him, in his own words, a Godot who ar­ rived. Born in Chicago in 1933, the eldest of eight children, Cluchey spent much of his childhood in reformatories. In his native slum crime was a way of life. At twenty-one Cluchey was sentenced in California to life imprisonment for kidnapping, shooting at, and robbing a hotel executive while under the effect of drugs, although the unharmed victim pleaded in his behalf. In San Quentin prison Cluchey saw his first play, Wait­ ing for Godot.20 The 1957 Actor's Workshop performance struck him at a transitional period in his life. A cradleCatholic without faith, he had volunteered for work in the prison chapel, so as to obtain minor privileges, but Father Dingberg undertook Cluchey's education, and he began to devour plays after he saw Godot. In reading, he tried to imagine the vivid person-to-person encounter that he had experienced at the performance. Other prisoners were also moved by the performance, including several men with theater experience, who re­ quested permission to form a drama group. This was granted, provided that: 1) everyone compete for the roles, 2) neither the police nor the government be criticized, and 3) no man impersonate a woman. (The last ruling was re­ laxed for Endgame.) The group produced two shows a year in the chapel-cum-theater that seated sixty-five. In 1961 the San Francisco Actor's Workshop returned to San Quentin to see the prisoners' production of Godot, with Cluchey as Vladimir. Members of the San Francisco company vol­ unteered to advise the prison performing group, until a new warden dissolved it in 1966, after thirty-five produc­ tions. Cluchey believed that he would spend the rest of his life in prison, and he hoped to work at theater. Through the

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chaplain and his reading, he found an inner peace that reconciled him to his sentence. It was an active peace, driv­ ing him to participate in all aspects of theater—acting, di­ recting, designing, building, and, finally, playwriting. Through a new prison chaplain, Father Aherne, Cluchey's case was brought to the attention of Governor Edmund Brown of California, and in December 1966 Cluchey was released on parole. While in prison, he had taken part in four Beckett plays, as actor or director—Godot, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, and Act Without Words II. Since his re­ lease, he has devoted himself to prison reform and theater, sometimes combining them. Ex-prisoners of the San Quentin Drama Workshop regrouped in Cluchey's native Chicago, where they were joined by several civilians. With no subsidies, their work was necessarily sporadic. In 1972 they were invited to the Edinburgh Festival, where they performed Endgame and Cluchey's play The Cage. Contracting to write his autobiog­ raphy for a London publisher, Cluchey began to meditate on his life—and the importance of Beckett's work in it. On tour with Endgame in Paris, he spotted Beckett in the street and immediately introduced himself. The two men went to a bistro and formed a lasting friendship. Early in 1975 Cluchey was invited to West Berlin to direct Genet's Deathwatch, a prison play, for the adventurous, now defunct Forum Theater. Beckett was at that time di­ recting Godot at the well-subsidized Schiller Theater in the same city. Illness and poverty dogged Cluchey and his family that winter, and Beckett came inconspicuously to the rescue, arranging for Cluchey to stage manage his Godot, although Cluchey knew no German. Cluchey had directed Godot twice before stage-managing Beckett's production, but Beckett radically changed his understanding of the play. Ignorance of German was an advantage, enabling him to concentrate on space, light, rhythm. While working on Beckett's Godot, Cluchey de­ cided that he would like to direct—in English—Beckett's

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stage versions of his own works. His impulse was not doc­ umentary but intuitive; after watching Beckett, Cluchey felt that that was the only way to stage the play. Since theater is a collective enterprise, Cluchey could not realize his impulse until he awakened the enthusiasm of others. Back in the States, without money, committed to work in prisons and theaters, he again activated a San Quentin Drama Workshop. Although there were no exprisoners in the new group, Cluchey felt that the name was appropriate since his prison training had seeded the undertaking. Performing his Cage and Beckett's Endgame, the Workshop was awarded CETA funds for training un­ employed workers in new skills. They renovated an old van to tour, and at Augustana College in Rock Island, Il­ linois, Dean Betsy Brodhal freed them from box-office pressure, so that Cluchey could stage Beckett's conception of Godot. Following photographs of the Berlin production, the ac­ tors designed and costumed the show, making everything themselves. Despite the actors' versatile skills, however, Godot has to live by performance. Lacking the difference in height of the German actors Wigger and Bollmann, Vladimir-Thorpe wore shoes with foot-high soles. When the group took a Christmas break, Pozzo-Ostrander broke his leg, and Cluchey had to step into the part for their Jan­ uary commitment. Not only were the lines difficult for him to memorize, but he could not manage the German accent (common to many English-language Pozzos) and the German words introduced to pay homage to Beckett's Ber­ lin production. It took many minutes on stage before Pozzo-Cluchey swelled to full bluster, but he did endure through the scheduled performances. This commitment fulfilled, Cluchey and his family flew to Berlin on a DAAD fellowship. He hoped not only to write but to persuade Beckett to direct him as Krapp and advise on restaging Endgame, so that the San Quentin Drama Workshop could take on tour a Beckett trilogy, not

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only as written but as conceived by Beckett in stage space. In June, 1977, Beckett directed his recent television plays in Stuttgart, and Cluchey came to present his request. He later wrote me: "I drove the whole way [from Berlin] alone, slept in the car, the whole bit. It was 1600 kilometers round trip. And I'd do it again tomorrow. . . . When I finally got up enough guts to ask Sam, his first words were: 'How, when, where?' " Cluchey had ready answers; Krapp would rehearse and play in English at the Akademie der Kiinste as part of West Berlin's annual Fall Arts Festival. Cluchey would play Krapp, and other members of the Workshop would man the lights, the critical sound booth, and stage management. Fondness for Cluchey conquered Beckett's fatigue, and a month's rehearsals filled September, 1977. (An account of the Beckett/Cluchey Krapp will be found in my chapter on Beckett directing.) Despite a severe headcold, Cluchey opened on schedule, a few hours after he was informed that he would no longer have to report an­ nually to his parole officer. At forty-four he was a free man, happily portraying a sixty-nine-year old deathbound derelict. But happy endings do not occur in Beckettland. Cluchey had personal difficulties after his success as Krapp, not the least of which was lengthy mouth surgery. Back in Berlin in 1978, he decided to direct Endgame, which he had not seen in Beckett's version. Since the 1978 theme of West Berlin's annual Fall Arts Festival was the Circus, he tried to conceive the play within that context—colorful and spir­ ited. When Beckett arrived in Berlin to direct his Play for the Schiller Werkstatt, the San Quentin group, on easy terms with him, again asked him for direction. He agreed to consult, and this meant, surprisingly to their surprise, scrapping the circus motif and re-casting Nagg and Clov. A critic writes off a new conception in a swift sentence, but for the Workshop this meant designing a new set and cos­ tumes, hammering, sawing, sewing, shopping, in an effort to shape the piece to the eye of Beckett's mind. Halfway

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between the two conceptions, I am told, Endgame opened in a circus tent and was drowned out by a neighboring rock band. It then moved into a hospitable church, the ashbins still lurid with circus paint. Having begun to play Beckett while behind bars, Rick Cluchey moved his Krapp and Endgame in 1978 to London's Open Space Theatre. The end is not in sight as theater bookings slowly arrive for the San Quentin Drama Workshop.

11 Jumping Beckett's Genres1 Some Beckett theatricians have been more faithful to his texts and genres than he himself, but his intention is fidel­ ity. In 1957 he wrote his American publisher, Barney Rosset: "If we can't keep our genres more or less distinct, or extricate them from the confusion that has them where they are, we might as well go home and lie down."2 In his feeling for generic distinctness Beckett is one of today's rare classicists, and although he has kept his "genres more or less distinct," he has occasionally—almost quixoti­ cally—allowed others to be less strict. As early as 1952, before the first theater staging of Godot, he consented to excerpts on French radio. In 1960 the BBC broadcasted all of Godot, including stage directions (which were read aloud), and in 1961 the BBC televised Godot, with Beckett's permission. Similarly, the BBC broadcasted Endgame in 1962. In 1961 Beckett offered his French transla­ tion of Krapp's Last Tape as an opera libretto to the com­ poser Mihalovici. In 1963 the BBC televised Krapp, and in 1969 Beckett made suggestions for televising that same play, which were followed in a German telecast. In 1965 he helped Jack MacGowran shape the performance anthology Beginning to End, designing the actor's costume. In 1965, too, he made suggestions for Shivaun O'Casey's dramati­ zation of From an Abandoned Work. In 1966 he not only gave permission for the Paris filming and BBC broadcast otPlay, but he cooperated on both projects, fascinated as he was by the newly invented phonogene, which changes the speed of speech without varying its pitch. As late as 1976 Beckett was present at the BBC televising of a new ver­ sion of Play, but he was so dissatisfied that the project

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was scrapped, spurring him to replace it with . . . but the clouds. . . . In 1976 Beckett allowed the German composer Wolfgang Fortner to set That Time to music, and in Beckett and Broadcasting Clas Zilliacus describes some of these ex­ ceptional productions, but the point is that they are excep­ tional. In the main, Beckett wants his works to be per­ formed in the medium for which they were composed. With or without permission, however, directors have crossed his genre designations. The easiest genre jump is to film or videotape a stage production. Two such Beckett transfers have had wide cur­ rency, one on each side of the Atlantic—Alan Schneider's 1961 Godot for television's "Play of the Week" Series and Tristram Powell's 1976 telecast of Not I for the BBC, both filmed with Beckett's permission and misgivings.3 In con­ trast, Beckett himself grappled with televising Krapp's Last Tape. Translation from radio or television to the stage is less frequent, but Beckett's first radio play All That Fall has tempted several directors. Rarest has been the adaptation of Beckett's difficult fiction for performance. In contrast to many nominally faithful and candidly faithless Beckett productions, the eight that I describe germinated from de­ votion to Beckett and from a particular esthetic sensibility. Stage to Video: Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, Not I

Today Alan Schneider is the dean of Beckett directors, having guided his plays through their American or world premieres. In 1961, when Schneider filmed Godot, he had directed that tragicomedy twice on stage—in Miami and Houston. Though his Godot adaptation is now rented as a movie, it was shot live for television showing in a hundred minutes. In other words, it had a very short rehearsal peri­ od, then one technical rehearsal, one dress rehearsal, and finally the live shooting. Schneider was limited to ten shooting hours, even if that meant that actors had to read their lines off cue cards.

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The most consistent difference between Schneider's film and most Godot productions is that he played the action in depth rather than width. Beckett's "country road" curves downstage from the horizon, tree slightly to the right of it, Gogo's mound to the left. At the start of play, Estragon is seated on the mound, and Vladimir enters from upstage. In Act I Pozzo and Lucky enter downstage and exit upstage into the cyclorama. All four characters perform mainly on the broad road, arid despite Estragon's refer­ ence to mud. Intended for the small television screen, Schneider's film abounds in waist-up or even closeup shots of the actors. Instead of being omnipresent, the stage tree is seen mainly when the dialogue draws the camera to it. In Act II, when the four actors lie on the ground, the camera shoots them from above. The film spectator, unlike the theater-goer, needn't sit on the edge of his seat and crane to see the ac­ tion, but Schneider attempts to include the film spectator in the action, by gigantic full-face closeups of VladimirMeredith and Estragon-Mostel when they refer to the au­ dience as "inspiring prospects" and "that bog." Schneider develops the filmic character of each actor, often shooting the searching look of Burgess Meredith as Vladimir, the cranky confusion of Zero Mostel as Estragon, the blind ar­ rogance of Kurt Kazner as Pozzo, and the half-demented palsy of Alvin Epstein as Lucky. Realization of the film is marked by Schneider's respect for Beckett's text. Nevertheless, Schneider drops such ob­ scenities as the brothel joke, erection when hanging, Mother Gozzo's clap, Vladimir's urination, Estragon's question about farting, and Pozzo's injunction to kick Lucky in the privates. Except for this new sanitation, Schneider adheres to Beckett's dialogue, but he does not adhere to Beckett's scenic directions. Vladimir and Estra­ gon often sit together on a stone mound, or even on the ground. Hat business is added for both Vladimir and Es­ tragon, who tip their bowlers in vaudeville fashion. Vlad­ imir takes off his hat and leaves it behind when he exits to

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urinate, and both friends wave their bowlers in their Act I farewell to Pozzo and Lucky. During Lucky's speech, the two friends walk in rhythm to the words; Lucky falls to his knees while speaking, and at the end of the monologue he stands on Estragon's mound, from which the friends top­ ple him. The monologue is often incomprehensible, punc­ tuated by non-verbal sounds in its four-minute delivery. At the end Vladimir and Estragon follow the scenic di­ rections in not moving, but Estragon's hands are clasped at his navel, holding up his beltless trousers, and Vladimir's hands join over his pubis. Only once do we see an obvious filmic cut rather than a sequentially filmed theater play. After the two friends dance and fall to the ground, Didi says, "How time flies when one has fun"; the camera backs off to give the impression of that fun dissolving to boredom. A dependent Estragon contrasts with a protective Vlad­ imir. Estragon-Mostel's infantilisms are endearing as he pouts, pants, yawns, queries, insults, chews, and almost cries: "I'm unhappy." In falling asleep, he sucks his thumb. After each of Vladimir's repetitions that they can't leave because they're waiting for Godot, Estragon-Mostel puts his hand to his cheek as though with sudden tooth­ ache. Large and light-footed, he tends to dance away on his toes whenever he scores a point over Vladimir. Burgess Meredith had difficulty in learning Vladimir's lines, and Schneider turned the actor's searching look to­ ward cue-cards into more penetrating interrogation. Puz­ zled by his situation, Vladimir-Meredith raises his eye­ brows so that his derby descends to cover them. When he takes off his hat to scratch his head, it is almost a meta­ physical itch. In Act II, while Estragon falls asleep, Vlad­ imir soliloquizes, "Was I sleeping, while the others suf­ fered? Am I sleeping now?" Meredith ponders the words with motionless lips, as Laurence Olivier filmed Hamlet's soliloquies. Vladimir-Meredith's lips move again to explode, "I can't go on." Near the end of the play, Estra-

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gon expresses similar helplessness— "I can't go on like this," and Vladimir retorts cynically, "That's what you think." The implication is that they will both go on, eve­ ning after evening, effectively framed by the tree's branches as they fade out. Unlike Godot, essentially a film of a staged performance, Krapp's Last Tape has had a close relationship with technol­ ogy. As mentioned earlier in this study, Beckett was moved to write for Pat Magee after he heard the whisper­ ing rasp of the actor's voice in the 1957 readings from his Trilogy on the BBC. In Paris, where Beckett lives, reception of the BBC broadcast of All That Fall was poor, so the BBC sent him the tape. As a result of this experience with radio and tape, Krapp's Last Tape in 1958 became a one-act play focused on tape. Martin Esslin delineates the roles of the different media: Krapp's Last Tape owes its existence both to Beckett's dis­

covery of the fascinations of tape recording in the wake of the production of All That Fall (the reception of its sec­ ond broadcast had been even worse than the first, so the tapes were sent to Beckett) and to his discovery of Magee as an ideal embodiment of characters like Molloy. Yet this play, directly inspired by Beckett's contacts with radio, is by its very nature incapable of being performed on radio. The effect of the play depends, above all, on the counterpoint of the powerful visual image of a man listening to his own recorded voice with his reactions to his past personality registering on his features.4 The small television screen can capture Krapp's reactions, and several directors have tried to do so. A 1963 BBC tele­ cast of Krapp's Last Tape with Cyril Cusack as Krapp pad­ ded Beckett's script with flashback scenes. Not until 1972 did the BBC rectify this, when Donald McWhinnie directed Pat Magee in a faithful Krapp, as Alan Schneider says he did with the late Jack MacGowran at about the same time, but there is unfortunately no BBC in the United States, and

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Schneider has been unable to find an American distributor for his televised Krapp, in which he considers MacGowran's performance superb. Perhaps Beckett was amenable to televising Krapp's Last Tape because its genesis is linked with technology. In any event, he evolved television ideas at about the same time he was preparing to direct the play at the Berlin Schiller Theater Workshop. Independently but with the same ac­ tor, Martin Held, the German stage and television plays were premiered in October, 1969. Beckett's notes are explicit about the relation of television to the stage play: "No additional material. Elucidation by camera of play as it stands."5 Beckett elucidated with two cameras, one to function as an objective eye examining Krapp's general situation in his room. The second camera was to investi­ gate particular details and even to interpret Krapp's feel­ ings: "This camera listens and its activity is affected by words spoken. It can thus be used, not only as 'savage eye,' but as a means to distinguish in this recorded past those moments which matter little or nothing to Krapp from those which matter much or extremely. It arrives at this by a corresponding reduction or cessation of activity expressive of Krapp's changing levels of attention." The second camera freezes on Krapp's five taped erotic memo­ ries—Bianca, the girl in green, the dark young nurse, and twice on the woman in the boat. Although Beckett designates the first camera as "mere eye," it too stresses Krapp's emotion, by four sudden stops while Krapp listens. Krapp spends much of the play listen­ ing, and Beckett suggests several cuts from one camera to the other, but he ends the telecast where it began, with the first camera focussed on "Krapp and table tiny island of light in midst of shadows." At the last there is stillness, both of sound and motion. Director Johann-Richard Hansel followed Beckett's sug­ gestions, but only a television expert would notice the in­ dividual functions of the two cameras, or indeed that there were two cameras. As compared to the stage, the televi-

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sion picture lacked depth, minimizing Krapp's clown qual­ ity. Thus, Krapp's banana business and his exits for al­ cohol were less funny than on stage. More important than the loss of comedy was the loss of sharp light contrast; the stage Krapp sits under "a strong white light" with "rest of stage in darkness." Since Krapp looms large on the small television screen, we lose the dark mystery that surrounds him. The first camera often backed off, reducing the size of large Martin Held; the telecast therefore lacked the erosive effect of the theater, where Krapp-HeId seemed ground down by forty-five minutes of play, so that his recording was believably his last tape. When Krapp is absorbed by his tape, the intensity of his listening is visible on stage mainly in posture, on television in facial expression. The telecast, missing the light-dark metaphysics of the theater, resembles a realistic drama, replete with credible psychology. In contrast to Beckett's concerned care about televising Krapp, he did not want to televise Not I at all. The idea originated with Bill Morton, director of the Second House of BBC Television, and Beckett consented only because it was the wish of actress Billie Whitelaw, who thought it would enable her to see her performance. Beckett had nothing to do with the filming, was skeptical about its feasibility, but finally was so captivated by it that he pro­ nounced the telecast more effective than the stage play. In the original conception of Not I a dark figure in djelIaba reacts gesturally to a Mouth's rapid asyntactical monologue. The text describes both Mouth and Figure as "faintly lit," but in New York, London, and Paris theaters the mouth was brightly spotted; in New York the gigantic listener was fully visible, but in London his movements could not be seen, and director Beckett eliminated him en­ tirely from the first Paris production. In televising Not I Powell says that he did not direct Whitelaw, but simply decided on the camera position.6 Only after trying to convey the mysterious relationship be­ tween the compulsive mouth and the silent auditor, and

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failing, did Powell dispense with that auditor, having heard that Beckett did so in Paris. As in the theater, Whitelaw was strapped in a chair-pillory that prevented any motion. Her face was painted black, and a fixed cam­ era recorded what the spot lit—her mouth. Glistening erotically, framing two rows of strong white teeth and a sen­ sual tongue, the image conveyed no realistic imitation of an old woman's mouth. In the theater the mouth is frail, hovering and pulsing in the surrounding dark. On the small television screen the mouth is gigantic, hypnotic, coercive. The theater balances us between seeing and hear­ ing, as we strain through the dark and the verbal speed. On television the visual dominates, but because that visual is all and only Mouth, because we read Whitelaw's lips, we cannot escape hearing each soundly articulated word. In the theater Mouth is a wound and the discourse its secre­ tion. On television Mouth is a uterine being and the dis­ course its breathless life. Mouth's swift monologue—thirteen minutes on televi­ sion—is structured by five self-interruptions: "what? . . . who? . . . no! . . . she!" Whitelaw's lips stretch taut for "she," bellowed the first time, shouted the second, then dropped an octave below the "no" on subsequent utter­ ances. After the word "she," the lips close down momen­ tarily—a sine curve on the black ground. Passionate denial hardens into geometry at the first four pauses in the rush of words. Only at the fifth and most defiant denial does the mouth remain open, breathing hard. Whitelaw's Mouth exhibits astonishing variety. Words seem sometimes to storm, sometimes to flow, and some­ times to slither. A drop of spittle can loom large while a mobile tongue pulses expressively. Even magnetized by visual sinuosity, we may feel a background binary rhythm: "so far" is always punctuated by a sharp double breath; the tongue thickens to two trickling laughs; double screams are sharply cut. On the television screen the mag­ nified mouth is subtle as a serpent, but unlike serpents it forms words undergoing stress—from the birth of the baby

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("vowels all wrong") through the pointed probing of words by brain, and on to the April pastoral scene, repeti­ tively evoked. In the theater we reach out in empathy for the throbbing mouth, but on television we almost literally hang on Mouth's lips. Finally, the whole becomes an image for all that is said that cannot be said.7 Radio to Stage: All That Fall

As Waiting for Godot, Beckett's first play to be produced, remains his most popular theater piece, so All That Fall, his first radio play, remains most popular on that medium. A mixture of realism and poetry, it occasions the longest chapter of Clas Zilliacus in his Beckett and Broadcasting; he sifts the manuscripts, analyzes form and substance, and summarizes the production history. The chapter "The Plays out of Their Element," is largely devoted to eight staged versions of All That Fall. Two of these were ac­ corded Beckett's permission, although he subsequently (1968) refused permission to the British National Theatre when Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright wished to play Dan and Maddy Rooney. On its sound surface, All That Fall is the most realistic of Beckett's radio plays, and one might think that transfer to the stage would increase the realism, but this was not true either of Deryk Mendel's Berlin production of 1966, or of Christopher Hampton's production in Calgary, Canada, the following year, both authorized. Each director thought that staging would enhance the symbolic aspect of the play. In 1966 Beckett had not yet directed at Berlin's Schiller Theater, but he had advised on his friend Deryk Mendel's Godot production, and he consented to Mendel's triple bill (which opened in January, 1966) of Act Without Words II, the world premiere of Come and Go (in German), and the theater translation of All That Fall. Looking back on it in 1971, Beckett wrote Clas Zilliacus, "I must have known

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about and authorized Mendel's 'stage reading' of All That Fall. I would not consent to [it] today."8 With Beckett's consent came the cooperation of Beckett's Paris-based de­ signer friend Matias and of two well-known German ac­ tors, Bernhard Minetti and the late Lu Sauberlich. Wishing to eschew the surface realism of the radio script, Mendel had designer Matias strip the stage to black, white, and gray, while he worked only with words, susceptible to symbolic extension. The stage was encased in a bonewhite box whose ground was dark. On it the characters moved, Maddy and Dan Rooney in their black smocklike coats, and the other characters in gray. The vehicles of the text were invisible, and their sound effects smothered. The production emphasized the tripartite division of All That Fall: 1) Maddy moved painfully from stage left to right, meeting each neighbor in turn; 2) at stage right, in dim light, shadowy figures jostled one another at Boghill Station; 3) leading her blind husband, Maddy moved back from right to left, meeting no one. Through all their com­ plaints and digressions, the old couple shared a dialogue. Clas Zilliacus has aptly summarized Maddy's physical itinerary in All That Fall: "ruinous house by the road— laburnum—ascent of station steps—platform—descent of steps—laburnum—ruinous house. It ends where it be­ gan."9 On stage the to-and-fro movement of the large dark figure against the white ground hinted at purposeless absurdity. Although a more somber voyage than the aural trip of the BBC broadcast, the visualization offered a few comic moments in the stance or gait of the Boghill dwellers—Christy, Mr. Tyler, Mr. Slocum, and especially stiff Miss Fitt (played by Sibylle Gilles). All that fall actually add up to zero, but the sporadic lack of equilibrium re­ called clown pratfalls. Funny and far-reaching was Dan Rooney-Minetti as a bellowing statue: "Once and for all, do not ask me to speak and move at the same time." The director, Mendel, made no such request of Minetti, who groped his slow way, seeming to reach for more than his way but stopping to sputter phrases. An intellectual actor,

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Minetti delivered his lines with a Cartesian crankiness; neither thinking nor being brought him any pleasure. In contrast, Maddy-Sauberlich exhibited verbal zest even when she questioned her own words. As Zilliacus points out, "Beckett identifies uncertainties of language with epistemological uncertainty."10 From both uncertainties Sauberlich evoked tender laughter. The harmonized per­ formances of the two veteran German actors left one cer­ tain of uncertainty about the death of the child: accident or murder? And that uncertainty radiates to all death, always sudden, always mysterious. Christopher Hampton (not to be confused with the Brit­ ish playwright) knew nothing of the German staging when he requested Beckett's permission for a multimedia pro­ duction in 1967, and, surprisingly, Beckett consented: "Though I continue to think that ATF as written cannot survive even the dimmest light, I am impressed by your awareness of the problem and by your approach to it. I au­ thorize you to try and stage the work in the way you de­ scribe, on the understanding that you will not insist if you find it doesn't work."11 Hampton had directed a professional stage Endgame in Canada, and the same actors volunteered for the experi­ mental All That Fall, which local Calgary newspapers misbilled as a "world premiere." Hampton has summarized the play's theme: "All That Fall is about the human choice of love and the consequent suffering and the death implicit in that choice."12 In staging, he wished "to suggest sym­ bolic intent through light-projections and thereby head off realistic readings. The directorial metaphor, then, is based on paradox: we must guard against the verisimilitude im­ plicit in the visibility of actor, set and prop, and at the same time we hope through visible projections to emphasize symbolic content." Maddy's visible and realistic journey was to be undertaken in an environment composed of symbolically suggestive slides. All That Fall actually received three stage productions in Calgary's Studio Theater, at intervals of about two

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months. In the first production the performers were sur­ rounded by screens on which were projected images of 1) actual people, places, objects; 2) forms based on scenes but moving toward nonrealism; and 3) abstract forms with col­ ors expressing mood. Some three hundred slides over­ whelmed the setting. When Hampton was asked how he felt about staging a world premiere, he answered that he was too busy trying to arrange three hundred slides to worry about premieres. The technical logistics may also have led to insufficient concern with acting, as he came to realize. For the second attempt, then, Hampton toned the vis­ uals down to avoid what he called "focal dispersion." Four large screens that had surrounded the audience were moved behind the performers, and scrims were interposed between actors and audience. Images were then allowed to slide from scrim to screen to cyclorama, so that they lost intensity as compared to the acting. In addition Hampton deployed lights and microphones to emphasize that the ac­ tors were at the center of the performance. "The combina­ tion of image shifts and screen shifts, together with greater intensity achieved for the actors, seemed to pull the show into a unity."13 For the third and last production, new research was undertaken into more variety in the nonrealistic slides. To reduce technology stealing from the actors even further, control of all projectors was centered in one experienced technician, who could coordinate scenic changes with act­ ing rhythms. In his article on the production, Hampton states that it fell short of the BBC radio version, but his let­ ter to Beckett summarizes what was gained: You will recall that in an earlier letter to you I mentioned the problem of how powerful the scenic projections be­ came, and how they stole stage from the actors. . . . Throughout the feeling was one of the actors in conflict with an environment which was always very powerful,

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but, and this I think is the major point, an environment which could be alternately remote and sometimes ac­ tively cruel towards the characters: precisely the sort of thing you achieve in the Acts Without Words, and in the apparent antagonism of things toward characters in Godot and Endgame. But what we have stumbled upon here is an enormously more complex means of dramatiz­ ing this metaphor of the alternately passive and active environment. Hampton now feels that the experiment was successful, although in a letter to me he admits, "One loves one's own children." Fiction to Theater: Molloy, The Unnamable, The Lost Ones

Efforts to dramatize Beckett's complex fiction are most challenging. Each director read—or reread—that fiction with an eye on his own needs, even as Beckett read Joyce and Proust. E. T. Kirby, highly conscious of his use of technological devices, called his work projection theater "allud[ing] both to the projection into dramatic action of sound and visual images and to projection as a basic mech­ anism of consciousness itself. The representation, then, is of a form of theatre in which there is a direct participation in the mind and its operations. The suitability of Mr. Beckett's work to such a project should be apparent."14 Less apparent without Kirby's published notes is his de­ pendence upon R. D. Laing's false-self system for his in­ terpretation of Beckett's novel; the murders in Molloy sym­ bolize attempts to eliminate aspects of the false self in order to arrive at the essential self. Kirby has himself summarized his adaptation of Beckett's novel: The staged presentation, with the exception of the pro­ logue, was derived entirely from the second or Moran

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section of the novel.. . . First conversational scenes were selected and the dialogue extracted from these scenes, then passages of narrative were selected to be used as such. . . ."1S Thus, the performance was compartmentalized into dra­ matic units connected by narrative units, into both of which technological devices were introduced. Kirby has written of total theater in which he uses two main techniques, synesthesia and hieroglyph, and they are evident in Molloy. The films and slides were to effect trans­ lation from one sense to another—synesthesia. His hiero­ glyphs depend upon a compartmentalization inspired by Beckett's techniques in his own plays. For example, "each slide shows the character in a different and par­ ticular pose and this was accompanied by a specific line of dialogue, the slide changes taking place before and after the line, to provide the compartmentalization. . . . A similar technique was used with live action in the two scenes in which movement was suspended between lines of dialogue by slide changes in the projection of the colors that illuminated each speech."16 Kirby has published the script of his Molloy adaptation, along with pictures of the actors. Live performers played Moran, his son Jacques, and Gaber, who was masked. Molloy and a Figure appeared only on slides and film. The Man with the Stick, the Dim Man, and the Farmer, wear­ ing masks, appeared only on slides. In commenting on his production, Kirby gives far more attention to technical matters than to acting. He would have liked actors trained in Tai Chi Chuan (not nearly as common in 1969 as now), but he had no time for such training. Unlike Hampton, Kirby offers no suggestions about preventing the technol­ ogy from stealing the show—perhaps because he believed in the projective force of such technology. Refusing to evaluate it retrospectively, he writes modestly that he liked it.

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Kirby is a rare and brilliant theoretician of theater, who was driven to directing by Beckett's fiction. In contrast, Joseph Dunn and Lee Breuer are directors of theater com­ panies dedicated to doing theater, and their esthetic has been colored by Beckett. Part of the Off-Broadway theater ferment of the 1960s, Joseph Dunn garnered critical praise for imaginative staging of Pirandello, Ferlinghetti, and es­ pecially Arrabal's Automobile Graveyard. In 1965 he and Irja Koljonen founded the American Contemporary Theatre. The financial hardships of new theater groups were inten­ sified in their case because they wished to present what they called "holistic theater," which demands sophisti­ cated and expensive technical equipment. Dunn has listed the desiderata of holistic theater: 1) 2) 3) 4)

holographic with synergistic behavior and effects neither egocentric nor anthropocentric neither tragedy nor comedy total system is purposeful, i.e. has action and goals, as do all of the elements within it 5) resultant event not dependent upon the intuition or "taste" of the key investigator designer 6) complexity of released event system does not permit #5 above nor does it permit of a total observer view­ point

"You've got to begin with basic concepts," he has ex­ plained, "a kind of matrix of reality, and you've got to evolve mechanisms with which to translate this reality into a variety of languages and forms."17 ACT mixes several technologies in its translation of reality. Dramatizing The Unnamable, the last difficult novel of Beckett's Trilogy, the American Contemporary Theatre played journey against stasis, movement against a still cen­ ter, revolution against rotation. Dunn wrote Beckett of his complex production plans and received permission to adapt the novel (although Beckett no longer recalls why). Dunn marked Beckett's novel as another director might mark an acting script. With different colored pens, he

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separated "I" dialogue from the dialogue of "they" or "others." Red underlined the vital textual references to light, and purple to sound. Although brown was nomi­ nally reserved for "general" effects, I cannot distinguish these passages from "I" dialogue. Passim in the margins Dunn notes the novel's few events. The program note to the ACT Unnamable suggests: "Time, light, sound and design values as well as their ef­ fects are content and explicate the event as process and ob­ ject." In performance, the audience sits on four sides of a square playing area, behind a triple trough of footlights. At the center is a hollow cylinder nine feet high and nine feet in diameter; a large oval window permits a view of the in­ terior. After a few minutes of total darkness, the eyes dis­ cern a dim light in the cylinder, which begins to rotate clockwise with its barely visible human content, the "I" of Beckett's Unnamable. Beckett's "talking ball" becomes ACT's talking cylinder, beginning speech where Beckett begins: "Where now? Who now? When now?" The "I" speaks nothing but Beckett's words—about one-fifth of his text in two and three-quarters hours. The basic rhythm is set by the main actor's audible breathing, but the words are not always distinguishable since their direction changes as the cylinder rotates. Events emerge from Beckett's text. As the "I" peers around him and guesses at his surroundings, so does the audience in the dim light; shadows, phantoms, figures— "they"—momentarily appear at various points of the room, not only the playing area. Then, as the "I" turns in­ ward, ACT actualizes the Unnamable's two Mahood stories. In the first a world-weary cripple returns to his rotunda home, limping, crawling, writhing his way to­ ward the center, losing his limbs en route, but cheered on by his invisible but (taped) audible family of voyeurs— Beckett's sardonic rendition of the traditional voyage of life. When this story literally fades out, Mahood is redis­ covered, urned to his chin in a kind of vessel-sculpture

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which is festooned with brightly colored Chinese lanterns. In that vessel Mahood is solicitously tended by the restaurant-owner whose menu he sports; she de-louses him, brushes his container like a pet animal, even as one hears the animal cries at the nearby slaughterhouse. This savage sonic assault eclipses the second Mahood-figure, and the "I" in the cylinder turns to himself, condensed to an ovoid glow. For the first time the three-tiered light troughs are acti­ vated in a carefully calculated pattern that seems random, as the "I" reacts to a ubiquitous "they" that attacks him with half-comprehensible lies, blinding lights, and noises of varying volume and pitch. Gradually, slowly, the bar­ rage subsides, and the body in the cylinder is seen collaps­ ing before it fades from view, although his voice grows stronger, and his words rush out articulately. Finally, sound and light return to the beginning; in a dim golden glow the cylinder rotates, breathing the last syllables of Beckett's text: "I can't go on, I'll go on." At the very last "I" is walled in, silent. Each spectator has undergone a differ­ ent experience of "I"—hearing different words, seeing different forms—but the total environment forces him/her to share the sensual meditation of the "I." Adapted, directed, and designed by Joseph Dunn and Irja Koljonen, the piece uses six actors (Douglas Woolley and Kathleen Forbes alternated in the actor-killing role of the Unnamable), ten light circuits, recordings of a Moog synthesizer whose playback requires eight speakers and six tape recorders and amplifiers. The early part of the per­ formance is lit largely by hand-held flashlights, but after the restaurant scene the light troughs are activated in six­ teen sequences that last from twelve seconds to five min­ utes. Unlike the semi-phantom figures of "they," which are unique for each spectator, the complex light patterns are totalitarian in their claims upon all spectators' atten­ tion. Elaborate as the technology sounds (and is), how­ ever, it is always subservient to the large concept of "I" 's

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war with "they" and his final retreat into himself. In the same year as the ACT Unnamable, 1972, and with­ out knowledge of that performance in Buffalo, the Mabou Mines Company wished to present a Beckett theater eve­ ning in New York City, composed of Play, Come and Go, and a reading-demonstration of a late prose text. Their first choice was Imagination Dead Imagine, but scale and lighting proved to be technically and financially prohibitive, so that director Lee Breuer selected The Lost Ones as a substitute. There was no problem about obtaining Beckett's permis­ sion, since The Lost Ones was intended as a readingdemonstration, actor David Warrilow holding the book as he pointed to a cross-section of cylinder with its two hundred-odd inhabitants of tiny dolls, each half an inch high. Completed in French in 1966 as Le Depeupleur, Beckett's Lost Ones narrates the saga of two hundred people "each searching for its lost one," but that search is confused with another quest—for a mythical exit from their cylinder abode. Moreover, although each of the searchers seeks compulsively, their methods differ, and any given individ­ ual need not sustain his method. At any moment, how­ ever, the cylinder population divides into even multi­ ples: 5 vanquished or non-searchers x 4 = 20 sedentary searchers X 3 = 60 watchers x 2 = 120 climbers of ladders, for a total population of 205, in round numbers 200. Beckett's rhythms imposed themselves on Warrilow's memory, and at the same time he found that the book hampered his demonstration of the cylinder. After War­ rilow decided to abandon the book, Mabou Mines designer Thom Cathcart, having scraped the paint off 205 toy Ger­ man railroad dolls, conceived the decisively brilliant idea of seating the live theater audience in a rubber cylinder en­ vironment. Director Lee Breuer, actor David Warrilow, and designer Thom Cathcart worked closely on realizing the total concept, whereupon composer Philip Glass taped an electronic sound score, lasting some fifty minutes. With

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Warrilow's editorial training, he and Breuer were able to cut Beckett's text by about a third, to be performed with the music. Although Breuer and several company members had worked together for as long as a decade, only in 1971 did they formally constitute themselves as the Mabou Mines, named after the Nova Scotia town in which they trained during summers. The Beckett evening was to coalesce the three strands of their esthetic: 1) the Stanislavski legacy of motivational acting, 2) estrangement-narrative perform­ ance deriving from Brecht and Oriental theater, 3) the con­ ceptual formalism of the visual arts of the 1960s. Like all their pieces, the Beckett performances would weave these strands, but Breuer also wished to show development dur­ ing the single evening. Thus, Play adhered closely to Beck­ ett's staging directions, Come and Go departed from them quite far, and The Lost Ones staged a non-dramatic text. Moreover, Play was to dramatize death, and Come and Go displacement; so The Lost Ones was to culminate dra­ matically in loss through death, displacement, and sheer entropy. Finally, the audience witnesses and experiences lostness. In performance the spectators are asked to remove their shoes before entering Thom Cathcart's dark foam-rubber environment, approximating the text's "solid rubber or suchlike." That environment is differently shaped in dif­ ferent playing spaces, but ideally it is cylindrical, dark, and fetid. Within it the play of light is subtle and complex (some eighty light cues, including nine blackouts). Philip Glass's music approximates the sound that Beckett's text describes as a "faint stridulence as of insects." Beckett's fifteen unequal paragraphs move back and forth between a cylindrical rubberized world and the naked desiccated bodies that dwell there. Upon that equi­ librium actor Warrilow imposes another: back-and-forth movement between detached, quasi-clinical demonstra­ tion of the cylinder world with its centimeter-high inhabit-

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ants and passionate involvement in the destiny of equals. The overall direction of the performance moves from the playful to the grave, though there are hints of mirth and melancholy throughout. After the shoeless spectators take their seats in the rub­ berized cylinder, the lights dim, then rise to reveal Warrilow as a seedy intellectual with head bent, professorially reciting the beginning of Beckett's text. In a faint yellow light coming from under the tiered seats, reinforced by a waist-high lamp, we perceive Warrilow lean on the dark wall of the cylinder that contains us all. Beckett's text early predicts its end: "Then all go dead still." The lights black out, and Warrilow surmises, "It is perhaps the end of their abode." Not yet, however, since "all begins again." The light and sound of Beckett's text are translated into the light and taped music of the performance, as Warrilow be­ gins to be mimetic. He looks at his watch for fourteen sec­ onds before enunciating "about fourteen seconds," adding ten to the time in the text. "Imagine then the silence of the steps," he invites us, as he steps silently sideways. Begin­ ning to explain Beckett's complicated arrangement of lad­ ders, Warrilow takes from an inner jacket pocket a toy lad­ der, about three inches long. He bends down to prop it ludicrously against our cylinder wall, and then stands up to look down on it. From under his arm he takes a dark box and lays it on the foam-rubber floor. One by one, he delicately picks up five tiny ladders (for the text's fifteen) and stands them up in a circle of light, about a foot in diameter. As he mentions the searching climbers, he places a doll climber on one of the ladders. At the foot of each ladder on the circle of light, he sets a line of would-be climbers, inseparably joined. When Warrilow mentions detached ladder-rungs, which the text declares are used "mainly for attack and selfdefense," he lifts a rung with a pair of tweezers. Having arrived at the description of "niches or alcoves" to which the ladders lead, he plants on the floor's circle a cross-

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section of cylinder, about eighteen inches high; into the small area bounded by the circle of light he pours a popula­ tion of tiny figures. Using tweezers, he positions a few figures in the niches and one or two against the wall-rim of the circle of light. Vanquished, sedentary, watchers, and climbers—Becketfs inferno is complete. At the dark cylinder wall, Warrilow stands up tall to counterpose the alternative theories about an exit from the cylinder. Undercutting his involvement, Mabou Mines ac­ tors, planted in the audience, burst out laughing at these preposterous assumptions. Mastering his passion, Warrilow returns to demonstration. He walks toward us and even seats himself in our midst, so that we are closer to his narrative. As he mentions the lost one who has to be thumped into descending the ladder, Warrilow himself descends the tier-steps. He is still ironically superior about some dolls—the ladder-loser whom he removes from his pocket to stand on his knee, or the tunnel-crawler whom he inserts into his ear and removes from the other ear (an addition to Beckett's text). Back on the floor of both cylin­ ders, Warrilow describes the sedentary searchers, one of whom, "stepped on instead of over," bursts out in pain and fury; we hear the cry of a planted actor seated with other spectators on our floor. A second planted actor quietly plays one of the non-searchers or vanquished who "may be" and in performance is "walked on without . . . reacting." Gradually, the equation is drawn between the "little people" of Beckett's text and the human beings of per­ formance and audience, as Warrilow circles with the searchers, or squats frozen when "abandonment freezes them." Although calm and studied articulation is Warrilow's vocal norm, he deviates from it as his involvement increases. When "the eyes suddenly start to search afresh," he looks frantically about him. His whole body laughs in hysterical diabolism at "the sensation of yellow . . . not to say of sulphur in view of the associations."

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After a blackout Warrilow lies full-length on our floor, head under the glare of a naked bulb a few inches above his face. In one of the most rending moments of perform­ ance his enlarged eyeballs roll while his body stiffens and his voice modulates to a groaning whisper: "eyes blue for preference as being the most perishable would be seen to redden more and more in an ever widening glare and their pupils little by little to dilate till the whole orb was de­ voured." Warrilow's Gulliver-like detachment has evaporated; while describing the desiccating cylinder climate, he re­ moves his clothes; clinging to the dark wall of our cylinder, his pale back toward us, he twists and stretches in the rhythm of the rare copulation in the cylinder "prolonged in pain and hopelessness long beyond what even the most gifted lovers can achieve in camera." During a blackout WarriIow speaks in rare tenderness of the vanquished woman who is called the North. When the lights come up, a nude actress, Linda Woolf, mimes what Warrilow recites: "her head between her knees and her legs in her arms." Departing from Beckett's description, in exquisite accompaniment to Glass's music, she lifts her face and slowly spreads arms and legs. Then, with meas­ ured precision, she resumes her closed, head-down posi­ tion. In another blackout she vanishes. The return of light reveals a still-naked Warrilow sitting among us high on a tier. He holds up a tiny figure whose enlarged shadow we see on our cylinder wall: "There he opens then his eyes this last of all if a man and some time later threads his way to that first among the vanquished so often taken as a guide." Warrilow threads his own way back down, crossing the cylinder floor to the small cylinder cross-section. Stopping close to where the nude actress sat, he shines a pencil-light on two tiny figures outside the demonstration-circle. He speaks softly: "On his knees he parts the heavy hair and raises the unresisting head. . . . He himself after a pause impossible to time finds at last his

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place and pose whereupon dark descends." Dark de­ scends on us too, as Warrilow's voice, moving toward the exit, concludes The Lost Ones of Beckett and of Mabou Mines. Light returns, but the total impact is too intense for applause. It is a reaction that Beckett actors should cherish, whatever the genre.18

12 Beckett Directs Theater ist fiir mich zunachst eine Erholung von der Arbeit am Roman. Man hat es mit einem bestimmten Raum zu tun und mit Menschen in diesem Raum. Das ist erholsam. Das Inszenieren auch? Beckett lacht: "Nein, nicht so sehr, es ist anstrengend.""1

Exhaustion notwithstanding, Beckett has been directing for well over a decade—his own plays with the single ex­ ception of L'Hypothese by his friend Robert Pinget. Critical silence about his directing, in respect for his wishes, ended early with the publication of Michael Haerdter's illuminat­ ing Materialien zu Becketts Endspiel (1967), and more recent reports offer us a more public view.2 My own account is that of a reader and spectator of the plays, most of which I read before experiencing them in Beckett's productions. Often privileged to attend late rehearsals, I reveal no con­ fidences but try to convey a sense of the live performance. Like other scholars, and with Beckett's permission, I occa­ sionally summarize or quote from his Director's Note­ books; unlike other scholars, I do not summarize or quote reviews, drawing instead on my own impressions and re­ collections. Beckett's involvement with theater has increased with the years. The main product of that affair is twenty-one ex­ tant plays, excluding the several abandoned fragments. The byproduct of that affair is intense attention to per­ formance of those scripts, beginning with the lost Kid. a For me theater is first of all a relaxation from work on fiction. We are dealing with a definite space and with people in this space. That's relax­ ing. Directing too? Beckett laughs: "No, not very, it's exhausting."

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Written in French in 1931, while Beckett was a graduate student at Trinity College, Dublin, the play is a parody of Corneille's Cid, mocking the unity of time. Twenty-fouryear-old Beckett played Don Diegue, the aged father of the Kid, in period costume but a bowler hat. The play had only two performances and did not inspire Beckett to continue with theater. Five years later, asked by a friend to help her with a play, Beckett "began to hang around on the fringes of various dramatic groups in Dublin."3 Other than the aborted Human Wishes, however, he was still not inspired to continue with theater. Ten years later, in 1947, Eleutheria bears witness to his familiarity with problem plays, simul­ taneous sets, pirandellian quips. Affiliation with performance, however, came only with attendance at Roger Blin's 1952 rehearsals of En attendant Godot, whose premiere was January 5, 1953. Although ac­ counts differ as to the extent of that affiliation, it seems clear that Beckett's grasp of staging was swift. By the late 1950s and early 1960s his advice was often sought for stag­ ing his plays, and his performance concepts dominate sev­ eral productions directed by others, notably the London Endgame and Krapp of 1958, a Paris 1961 Godot and 1964 Comedie, a Paris/London Endgame of 1964, and the Royal Court Godot of 1964. Beckett's independent directing of his own plays began in 1965, although the first piece to bear his name as director was the 1966 Stuttgart telecast of Eh Joe. By 1962 he had enunciated his director's guidelines in a conversation with Charles Marowitz: Producers don't seem to have any sense of form in movement. The kind of form one finds in music, for in­ stance, where themes keep recurring. When in a text, ac­ tions are repeated, they ought to be made unusual the first time, so that when they happen again—in exactly the same way—an audience will recognize them from before.4 Aside from those in Beckett's own plays, it is rare to find actions repeated "in exactly the same way," but they do

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recur in Robert Pinget's Hypothese, and perhaps that is why Beckett undertook to direct it. He refuses to claim di­ rectorial credit, admitting only to helping actor Pierre Chabert "since there was no one else."5 As a student in Paris in 1963, Chabert,played Krapp with sufficient rhythm to interest the musical Mrs. Beckett, who attended the performance. She suggested to Pinget that Chabert should perform his Hypothese, another onecharacter play. The little-known author Pinget and the un­ known actor Chabert began sporadically to rehearse, and Pinget brought Beckett to an early run-through. After brooding on what he saw, Beckett told Chabert that he would like to think about the performance. When Beckett next called Chabert, he had reconceived the production in his mind's eye. The Hypothesis resembles Krapp's Last Tape in that a writer-protagonist reacts to another aspect of himself— Krapp to his tape and Mortin to films of his face. As the live Krapp moves physically between his table and an offstage room, Mortin moves physically between a book­ case, a stove, and his table on which are a glass of water and a manuscript. Unlike Krapp, Mortin never leaves the stage, for he is delivering a speech—the contents of the manuscript—to an audience in the actual theater. That speech is about a writer and his manuscript, which is hypothetically at the bottom of a well. "Mortin's struggle with this hypothesis by means of a series of pseudo-logical and delirious conclusions [imperfectly recalled and recited] . . . parallels the predicament of the imaginary author in the manuscript."6 In the light of Beckett's subsequent directing practice, his guidance of Chabert seems inevitable, but unpredicta­ ble is his decision to cut about one-third of Pinget's text, with the author's consent. Since Chabert's face had al­ ready been filmed for the five movie sequences, Beckett ac­ cepted this fact and occupied himself with palpable thea­ ter. He moved the room's furnishings to dramatize the table, and he located the stove downstage right, the book-

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case upstage left, thus creating three distinct areas but leaving the back wall as a free screen for the film. On the newly centered table lay the manuscript in an enormous pile of loose pages. Most important was Beckett's almost Stanislavskian spine for the play-author's relation to his manuscript: in Chabert's words, "a visceral relation." Whenever Mortin left his table, he took manuscript pages which he dropped as he recited his text. Pages were soon strewn over the floor, functioning visually and also audi­ bly, as Mortin-Chabert rustle-walked on the leaves of manuscript. By the end of the play, as three enlarged film images of Mortin shouted out his inadequacies, Pinget had his author throw the manuscript into the stove. Discourse broken, he slowly removed his clothes, and his staccato phrases closed the play. In Beckett's direction Mortin had only one page left to throw into the stove, which clacked shut sharply upon it. Pinget's final phrases were severely cut, so that the author seemed consumed with the remains of his manuscript. Although Chabert gave only three per­ formances, the notices were so good that L'Hypothese was included in 1966 on a Beckett-Ionesco-Pinget program at the Odeon Theater, where Beckett helped the late JeanMarie Serreau direct Comidie and especially Va et Vient. A few months later Beckett staged his own production of Va et Vient on a different program in the same theater.7 Beckett's titles give us clues to the main action, and so with Come and Go. Not actually sounded in the brief text, the titular phrase describes the physical actions of the three women on stage. When the bright lights come up, three women—Flo, Vi, Ru—are seated on an invisible bench, facing the audience, each clasping her bare hands in her own lap. Once speech begins, pattern reigns; once move­ ment begins, pattern reigns. During the course of the brief play, each woman in turn goes out of the bright center light and comes back into it. Each woman utters short speeches, punctuated by her exit and re-entrance. As each woman in turn disappears into darkness, one of the remaining two whispers into the other's ear, with ostentatious gesture.

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The recipient of the inaudible message, with equally osten­ tatious gesture, exclaims, "Oh!" Then she asks whether the absent one is aware of her fate. The teller of the secret invokes deity in a fervent hope for the absent victim's ig­ norance. Finally, having gone into darkness and come back into visibility, the three women sit together again in the light, bare hands again clasped, but each hand clasps another's. The discrete individuals of the opening tableau are linked by their hands in the closing tableau, in a chain traditionally associated with harmony. Beckett's text specifies "dull" colors for the three women's garments, and it only hints at their turn-of-thecentury appearance in Serreau's production, long coats cloaking them from shoulder to ankle, and broad-brimmed hats shading their faces. Visually, they evoked Chekhov's three sisters rather than Macbeth's witches or Lear's daughters. The whispered destiny insinuates a hint of the three Fates, and not until the final tableau does a man­ nered pose recall the three Graces. The "dramaticule" leads to Flo's final line: "I can feel the rings," but Beckett's scenic direction stipulates: "No rings apparent." This is the play's second contradiction, for Ru reminisces about "Holding hands . . . that way" before the three women touch hands. When the three women sit together in the light, they re­ call their bright schoolgirl dreams of love. When one glides into the dark, however, the remaining pair share the knowledge of her doom. Their choral "Oh!"s (changed in French translation to "Misere." "Malheur." "Misericorde.") punctuate the secret each pair shares about a third. Choral chant and dance, offstage doom and onstage courage—this is minimal Greek tragedy. Both protagonists and chorus, the three women look the same at the begin­ ning and the end of the "dramaticule." However, they are seated in a new order as they clasp one another's hands in a stylized pose. Flo at right holds two left hands, and it is she who imagines feeling the ambiguously symbolic rings,

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but all three actually feel the mortal flesh of other human hands—ungloved and vulnerable to the light. In the first French production Ru wore violet and Vi rose; Flo was in soft yellow, as specified in the text. Embel­ lishing the text's description, broad-brimmed hats sported fruit, flowers, and feathers—perishable adornments. At rest, the three women suggested deities of vegetation; in motion, however, they were neither bird nor bloom, but softly gliding phantoms, feet invisible under the long coats. A few months later, Beckett mounted his own produc­ tion at the same Paris theater. The garments were muted to three shades of gray; the broad hats and long coats were stripped of ornament: the women exuded a mineral qual­ ity. Beckett slowed the playing time from three to seven minutes, so that each gesture seemed wrested from still­ ness. When Flo finally announced that she felt the rings, their putative absence was at once the climax and conclu­ sion of the drama that had spiraled slowly around an absent center. Since the bench was invisible, the three women were seated in a void. Each of them spoke unheard words, and one of them mentioned unseen rings, those rimmed holes. Not unlike a Mallarme poem, this Come and Go drained away coming, going, listening and speaking, into a final harmony. As a Mallarme poem resides in words about a void, Beckett's dramaticule, under his direction, resides in a worded rondo about a void, rendered almost palpable through strict pattern. It is with this theater training that Beckett embarked on full directorial responsibility for the Berlin staging of his Endgame (1967), Krapp's Last Tape (1969), Happy Days (1971), Waiting for Godot (1975), Footfalls and That Time (1976), and Play (1978), along with sporadic stints in Paris and London. Although he has had other offers to direct, he has ap­ preciated the distance from his plays provided by the German translations of Elmar Tophoven. By 1978 Beckett had all but forgotten his French 1965

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production of Come and Go when he undertook to advise Walter Asmus in a German version.8 Aside from making minor phrasal changes, Beckett reassigned a few lines for stricter balance. When the three women are together on stage, they speak Vi-Flo, Flo-Ru, Ru-Vi, finally circling back to Vi-Flo. The opening speaker of these trio-couplets is always the one to leave, and the closing speaker is al­ ways the one to confide the secret. For that confidence new hand movements were choreographed. At each shocked reaction to the unheard secret, the listener brings a bare hand to her throat, while the speaker holds a bare hand to her lips. In synchrony the two hands slowly return to their respective laps. At the final joining of hands Vi in the cen­ ter reaches out and up (breast high) for the outer hand of each neighbor. After a beat the neighbors clasp their inner hands, all hands high. Then slowly the three pair of hands fall to laps and rest there for a beat before Flo speaks of the invisible rings and the whole still image fades to darkness. In the words of Beckett's notebook, "Hands taken in air at top of gesture sink gently plumb together." For production in Berlin, Beckett approached all his plays in the same basic way: 1) meticulous examination of Tophoven's German translation and subsequent correction toward his own English version (since Tophoven translates from the French); 2) intense visualization of the play in theater space—what Beckett calls "trying to see"; 3) com­ mitment of the revised German text to memory (including stage directions); 4) composition of a director's notebook to which he does not refer during actual rehearsals (his re­ discovery of his own texts is remarkable—e.g., that it is always the center woman of three who opens speech in Come and Go, that glass is contained in several Winnie props of Happy Days, that there are twenty-one pleas for help in Godot, that the B-voice of That Time sketches a scene already conveyed by a verse of Holderlin); 5) trans­ mission of design ideas to his friend Matias, who does a first rendering while they are still in Paris. Only when

A. Beckett, Bollman, and Schroder rehearsing Endgame. Copyright Foto Use Buhs.

Β. Beckett and Held rehearsing Krapp's Last Tape. Courtesy Schiller-TheaterAVerkstatt.

C. Beckett, Schmidt, and Schultz rehearsing Happy Days. Copyright Foto Ilse Buhs.

D. Beckett, Bollman, and Wigger rehearsing Waitingfor Godot. Copyright Foto Ilse Buhs.

E. David Warrilow in the Mabou Mines Lost Ones. Copyright Erika Rabau Photographer.

F. Anna Williams (Artist Unknown). Courtesy The Curator, Dr. Johnson's House.

G. Beckett and Whitelaw rehearsing Happy Days. Courtesy John Haynes.

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these steps are completed does Beckett arrive in West Ber­ lin, where the plays are precast. At Beckett's first meeting with the actors in a play, he never speaks about the play but plunges right into it. Work on scenes begins at once, and Beckett shakes his head at questions that stray from concrete performance. On the other hand, no practical detail is too small for his attention. Sitting or standing, he seems poised to spring to the stage. Early in rehearsals he requests permission to interrupt the actors, and this is always granted. The spoken text must be not only letter-perfect, but punctuation-perfect; he will stop an actor who elides a comma-pause. Yet he rarely in­ terrupts the early run-throughs, and he deliberately ab­ sents himself from a late rehearsal or two, so that the actors may feel freer in their final discoveries. Although Beckett arrives at the Schiller Theater with the production com­ plete in his mind's eye, he usually makes minor changes during rehearsal. Beckett chose to begin his German directing career (which he did not anticipate as a career) with Endgame, his preferred play. While still in Paris, he perused the German text with translator Tophoven, who has described their col­ laboration: Durch die bestandige Zusammenarbeit, durch Straffungen, wo diese moglich erschienen, durch Streckungen, wo die Biihnenwirklichkeit sie verlangte, durch spate Entdeckungen und Neueinfiihrungen von Assonanzen und Konkordanzen, durch Tilgung uberhorter Gallizismen, durch Verhinderung unerwiinschter Assoziationen und Beseitigung phonetischer Fehlerquellen entstand eine verbesserte deutsche Version, die einer NeuaufIage des Endspiel-Textbuchs zugrunde liegen wird.b9 b Through constant work together, through tightening where this was possible, through expansion where the stage demanded it, through late discoveries and introduction of new assonance and harmony, through

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(This new edition has been published only in Volume I of the 1976 Suhrkamp collected works of Beckett. Postproduction texts have not been published in English.) In this eschatological play Beckett's slim director's note­ book is limited to staging matters.10 For rehearsal purposes he divided Endgame into sixteen scenes: 1. Clov's dumbshow and first soliloquy 2. Hamm's awakening, first soliloquy, and first dialogue with Clov 3. The Nagg-Nell dialogue 4. The excited Hamm-Clov dialogue, with Hamm's first turn around the room, ending on Clov's sigh: "If I could kill him. . . . " 5. Clov's comic business with ladder and telescope 6. Hamm's troubled questioning of Clov, climaxed by the burlesque flea-scene 7. The Hamm-Clov dialogue, ending with the ironic mirror image of the toy-dog episode 8. Clov's rebellion, giving way to Hamm's story of the madman, and subsiding in the alarm-clock scene 9. Hamm's story of the beggar 10. The prayer, ending with Nagg's curse 11. The play within the play of Hamm and Clov; Hamm's continuation of his story 12. The second round of the wheelchair 13. The Hamm-Clov dialogue leading to 14. Hamm's "role" 15. Clov's emancipation, ending with his monologue and exit 16. Hamm's final soliloquy (42-43) Concerned with the physical rather than the metaphysi­ cal, Beckett's Director's Notebook focuses on mobile Clov. A diagram delineates the path of his "thinking" walk, and another diagram traces his "winding up" walk. Carefully elimination of Gallicisms that had been overlooked, through prevention of undesirable associations and removal of phonetic difficulties, an im­ proved German version appeared, which will be the basis for a new edi­ tion of Endgame.

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noted and numbered are Clov's sixteen entrances and exits, his twenty-six stops and starts, his nine repetitions of "There are no more . . ." and his ten repetitions of "I'll leave you" (in German). Beckett's Endgame plays the ending of a world, and his set alerts us to that ending process. The original French describes the set as an interior without furnishings, and Beckett translated this as "Bare interior." However, his Berlin stage set was spare rather than bare. High curtained windows, one on each side wall, face earth and sea—what remains of nature. Turned inconspicuously to the foot of the left wall is a picture—what remains of art. Downstage left are two touching ashbins covered by a sheet—what remains of an older generation. In the center is an armchair covered by a sheet—what remains of the prime of life. After the opening tableau, action begins with Clov's re­ moval of the sheets. (The Notebook calls it an "unveil­ ing.") What is unveiled is a family—ordinary in its memories, attachments, and quarrels; but extraordinary since it is the last of the human race. As I stressed in my chapter on repetition, the words "finish" and "end" punctuate the dialogue. Both Hamm and Clov utter the words of Christ on the cross: "It is finished." Biblical echoes abound. The names Nagg and Hamm pun on Noah and Ham of Genesis, who are also survivors of a world catastrophe, safe in their shelter. Hamm and Clov use the apocalyptic imagery of the biblical Book of Revelations—light and dark, earth and sea, life and death, beginning and end—although they experience no revela­ tions. Hamm's chronicle is set on Christmas Eve, and Hamm's final soliloquy distorts scriptural phrases. How­ ever, Beckett does not place an actual Bible on stage, as in an earlier version of the play (discussed in Chapter 9). Beckett conveys endlessness through the grain-of-time theme, which apparently contradicts the ending theme. Hamm and Clov fear and wish an end, but the drama plays through an endless ending process. Toward the end of the play Hamm ruminates: "Moment upon moment, pattering

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down like the millet grains of . . . (he hesitates). . . that old Greek, and all life long you wait for that to mount up to a life." "That old Greek," whose name Beckett actually for­ got, might have been any anti-empirical philosopher of the Megarian or Eleatic schools. Having forgotten the name when writing, however, Beckett later mentioned Zeno to his cast. It was the playing theme that Beckett pointed up in di­ recting. The title and stage tableaux hint at a chess game, and yet this was never more than a hint, as opposed to the weight assigned the game by critics. Hamm's whistle is the residue of more active games, and the word "discard" summons cards. In spite of Hamm's age, he calls for a toy dog; even his chronicle shows gamesmanship, and the whole play is a game in which Hamm initiates play with rhythm, pattern, spirit. At the first rehearsal Beckett told his cast, "Das Stuck interessiert hier ausschliesslich als Spielvorlage."c (38) Only when rehearsals were well under way did he answer ques­ tions about the biblical flood and the Eleatic philosophers. He explained to Hamm-Schroder: [Hamm] ist der Konig in dieser von Anfang an verlorenen Schachpartie. Er weiss von Anfang an, dass er Iauter sinnlose Ziige macht. Dass er etwa mit dem Bootshaken gar nicht vorankommt. Nun macht er zuletzt noch ein paar sinnlose Zuge, wie sie nur ein schlechter Spieler macht, ein guter hatte langst aufgegeben. Er versucht nur, das unvermeidliche Ende hinauszuschieben. Jede seiner Gesten ist einer der letzten nutzlosen Zuge, die das Ende aufschieben. Er ist ein schlechter Spieler.d (83) c

Here the only interest of the play is as dramatic material. Hamm is king in this chess-game that is lost from the start. He knows from the start that he is making loud, senseless moves. That he will not get anywhere at all with the gaff. Now at the last he makes a few more senseless moves, as only a bad player would; a good one would have given up long ago. He is only trying to postpone the inevitable end. Each of his motions is one of the last useless moves that delay the end. He is a bad player. d

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He's a bad player because he's a good performer—the show must go on. As Beckett admitted in another re­ hearsal: "Hamm sagt das Nein gegen das Nichts."e (75) Hamm expressed that Nein under Beckett's meticulous direction. Of the month's rehearsal time, Beckett spent about half the period on individual roles and half on har­ monizing the whole. Midway during the rehearsal period, after the actors knew the book, Beckett held a rehearsal for tone, pitch, rhythm. Especially in the last two weeks, he tended to comment in musical terms—legato, andante, piano, scherzo, and a rare fortissimo. Often he spoke of "reine Spiel," pure play. Early in the rehearsal period he told Hamm-Schroder and Clov-Bollmann: "Zwischen den beiden muss vom ersten Wortwechsel an maximale Harte gespielt werden. Ihr Krieg ist der Kern des Stiickes."' (40) And he defined the basis of their conflict: "Clov hat nur den einen Wunsch, wieder in seine Kuche zu kommen, das muss immer spiirbar sein, ebenso wie Hamms standiger Versuch, ihn daran zu hindern. Diese Spannung ist ein wesentliches Spielmotiv."g(66) Beckett compared the Hamm-Clov relationship to a marriage—nec tecum, nec sine te.

To all four actors Beckett declared: "Es gibt keine Zufalle im Endspiel, alles ist auf Analogien und Wiederholungen aufgebaut."h (54) Analogy and repetition supply the sym­ metry in this one-act play—two couples, two windows, two sheets, two ashbins. Such pairs nourish paired mo­ tions. In the opening mime Clov is similarly clumsy at each window. He draws each window-curtain with the same e Hamm says No to nothingness. ' From the first exchange between the two, maximum hostility must be played. Your war is the nucleus of the play. g Clov has only one wish, to get back into his kitchen, that must always be evident, just like Hamm's constant effort to stop him. This tension is an essential motif for playing. h There are no accidents in Endgame; everything is built on analogy and repetition.

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jangle, away from the audience. He removes each sheet with the same jerky motion, and he does not fold the sheets as specified in the text, but drags them to his kitchen. He lifts each ashbin-cover with the same clatter. In Hamm's opening and closing soliloquies he folds and unfolds his handkerchief with the same four limited, symmetrical movements. Nagg and Nell emerge from their respective ashbins, lids raised to precisely the same height; they never turn their heads, and they rarely blink their eyes. Nagg lifts his hand identically to wrap twice on Nell's lid, and Hamm makes a similar gesture when he knocks at the hollow back wall. In Hamm's recollection of the painter/engraver, he points toward the earth-window after speaking of corn, and he makes a mirror gesture toward the sea-window after mentioning the herring-fleet. Hamm looks down at the beggar of his story as he looks down at the toy dog. Clov and dog, both lame, stand similarly, Clov supporting the dog. At each window Clov looks through the telescope in the same way. Clov lifts Nell's bin-cover, then Nagg's bin-cover, to ascertain whether they are dead. In the final tableau of Endgame the four characters occupy the same positions as in the opening tab­ leau, props on the floor. During a late rehearsal, Beckett wondered whether there wasn't too much symmetry, but he kept it all. In Beckett's Endgame text different characters speak the same old words, but more often they repeat their own words, and Beckett wanted such repetitions spoken identi­ cally. Often he asked actors to eliminate expression— "Ein-to-nig." He increased echoes in the German text, changing all Clov's threats to go to, "I'll leave you." He drilled Clov-Bollmann to achieve lightness for frequent: "There are no more. . . ." To two different Clov questions, Hamm replies: "Less." Beckett didn't care whether the word was spoken dispiritedly or euphorically, but it must be repeated in the same tone. Aware of his verbal dou­ blets, Beckett added some to the German text. He rein­ forced the double "Father" of Hamm's last soliloquy with a

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double "Clov," as well as earlier inserting a double "Nell" from Nagg. Nevertheless, Beckett did not want the play's end to mirror the beginning absolutely. He rejected Hamm-Schroder's suggestion that Clov re-cover him with the sheet: "Zwischen Anfang und Ende liegt der kleine Unterschied, der zwischen 'Anfang' und 'Ende' eben liegt."1 (75) Nell declares: "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness." Beckett finds that the most important line in the play, and in Berlin he directed to display the fun of unhappiness. In Clov's mime he wanted small gestures, soft voice, and swift rhythms. Leicht, locker, and schnell were his recurrent injunctions, so that the few violent moments were striking. Although he paced the play quickly, he asked the actors for disjunction between gesture and word: first they were to assume an attitude and then speak the lines. The macabre humor of the effect was disturbing as though they could not move and speak simultaneously. Hamm and Nagg are virtuoso performers in Endgame, and Beckett desired each of them to find three different voices; Hamm is narrator, protagonist, and beggar of his chronicle; Nagg is narrator, tailor, and client of his story, but both also criticize their own performances—a fourth voice. Nagg and Nell, caged in their bins, are comically romantic; when they strain to kiss, they can barely move. Since Clov alone is mobile, Beckett directed his move­ ments to be both painful and funny, instructing him: "Sie diirfen niemals langsam laufen, es ist fiir das Stiick sehr gefahrlich."1 (87) Clov always takes eight steps from the door to Hamm's chair, where his normal position is an apelike stance. Bent over, he stumbles when he passes in front of Hamm, momentarily obscuring all but the toque. On his rare occasions of passion, Clov straightens up and flings out his left arm. When he speaks to Nagg or Nell in the ashbins, his own head disappears into the bins. In the 1 Between the beginning and the end lies the small difference that lies precisely between beginning and end. J You should never run slowly; that's very dangerous for the play.

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parallel phrases beginning "Sometimes I wonder if I'm in my right mind," and "Sometimes I wonder if I'm in my right senses," Clov speaks the beginning with verve and the end with sadness. After trying the opposite, Beckett found it funnier that Clov react sadly to being as lucid as before, as intelligent as ever. At the play's end, a hatted Clov carries a gray-green coat in his right hand, and in his left a valise, raincoat, and umbrella—poor preparation for the desert outside. Partly because Clov alone is mobile, and mainly because of Bollmann's comic gift, he was the funniest character in the Berlin Endgame. His full face contradicts the asceticism implied in the text, and his roundness belies his bent stance and angular movements. His infectious laughter lightened the gray play's start, and his silence darkened the end. Almost pathetically, Beckett warned his actors, "Pathos ist der Tod des Stuckes." (45) And yet his direction admit­ ted pathos. Toward the end of the play, Beckett's Note­ book reads tersely, "Clov entrance 16 while Hamm trying to move chair. Stands near door watching Hamm. Turns head aside on first Clov. Back after gut and motionless till end." Clov-Bollmann did remain motionless, but he was under visible strain, forcing himself not to participate in the ending action. To Hamm-Schroder's question as to whether Hamm covers himself to die, Beckett replied: "Nein, nur damit er besser schweigen kann." At the last Hamm-Schroder covers his face with his handkerchiefstancher, drops his hands to arm-rests—"Speak no more." Beckett commented: "Die Stimme kommt aus dem Schweigen und kehrt ins Schweigen zuriick." (98) In Matias' set the ashbins were gray-black, and their color blended into the lighter gray walls of the rectangular shelter. Gray curtains shaded small rectangular windows cut into the side-walls. Hamm wore dark gray and Clov light gray. Hamm's dark embroidered toque was a gift from Sean O'Casey to Beckett through Jack MacGowran. Hamm's footrug was lightly striped at the base, and his chair wheels were as small as those of roller-skates. The

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red-and-white faces of the published text were monochromed to gray-white, and the handkerchief lost its bloodstains. Cold light shone on door, chair, and ashbins—invariant throughout. In homage to the German phi­ losopher Schopenhauer, who loved his poodle, the toy dog became a ragged, almost black, almost lifesize poodle. And that poodle is emblematic of the production—philos­ ophy concealed, artifice patent, injury risible, since "Noth­ ing is funnier than unhappiness." After the intricate cross-relationships and complex re­ petitive texture of Endgame, directing Krapp's Last Tape might seem like child's play. It will be recalled that Beckett wrote the one-character piece in English for actor Pat Magee, who was first directed by Donald McWhinnie. In 1958 in London Beckett worked closely with actor and di­ rector. The three of them played hard and then pubcrawled, but there was no pub-crawling in 1969 in Berlin, where Krapp's role went to ponderous Martin Held. James Knowlson has discussed the complex symbolism of Krapp's Last Tape, succinctly summarized in Beckett's Di­ rector's Notebook: Krapp decrees physical (ethical) incompatibility of light (Spiritual) and dark (Sensual) only when he intuits pos­ sibility of their reconciliation as rational-irrational. He turns from fact of anti-mind alien to mind to thought of anti-mind constituent of mind.11 Despite this esoteric and symbolic background, the surface of Krapp's Last Tape is realistic, but Beckett's Director's Notebook dwells on realistic and nonrealistic detail. Unlike the Endgame notebook, that for Krapp does not di­ vide the play into rehearsal scenes. Instead, Beckett lists twenty-seven matters needing directorial attention, from the metaphysical "1. Choix-hasard" to the very physical "27. Endgiiltig Werkstatt." Beckett calculates that Krapp has been recording for forty-five years, since there are nine boxes, each containing five spools of tape. The Notebook designates the tape-recorder as a masturbatory agent, and

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Beckett instructed Held to hold the box erotically. His sep­ aration of speech from motion, introduced into Come and Go and Endgame, becomes the fulcrum of performance: "Piece done composee de 2 parties sensiblement egales, ecoute/immobilite et hors ecoute/agitation."k For the ecowie Beckett began rehearsals with a provisional tape of thirtynine-year old Krapp, but this was replaced. Beckett wished abrupt and vivid disjunction between still listening and agitated non-listening. Toward this end, he amplified his stage directions and simplified his stage picture. He eliminated Krapp's clown makeup and en­ dowed him with worn-out rather than farcical clothes. Krapp's table was clean at the start, and Beckett excised the comic business with keys and envelope, but he introduced fumbling rheumatic fingers. He suggested to Held a mov­ ing "rest" gesture; Krapp hugs himself shivering. Realisti­ cally, an old man seeks warmth; symbolically, Krapp loves himself. Because of Beckett's stage simplification, we more easily grasp similarities between the young and the old Krapp. Action begins when Krapp peers shortsightedly at his large silver watch, and it proves to be time for his banana. After two bananas are eaten on stage, Krapp on tape men­ tions three. The man who has stepped from his spotlighted circle into darkness and back listens to a tape announcing that he loves to return from darkness to himself, Krapp. And yet, Krapp-Held looks in astonishment at the taperecorder when he hears the voice say: "Me. (pause) Krapp." For Krapp as for Rimbaud, "Je est un autre." Separating speech from motion, Beckett moved Krapp toward pathos, although the effect in Endgame was lugu­ briously comic. In the opening mime Krapp makes clumsy comic gestures, but it is a rheumatic old man who makes them, and it is a lonely old man who personifies tapes as "little rascal" and "little scoundrel." Whenever KrappHeld rises from the table, he leans heavily on both hands. k Play therefore composed of two approximately equal parts, listening/ immobility and non-listening/motion.

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Whenever Krapp walks away from the table, he crosses in front and to the right; he fears the darkness at his left. His love-hate relation with objects is comic, for pathos is a greater danger to Krapp's Last Tape than to Endgame. Beckett dissolved pathos by beating time for Krapp-Held's non­ verbal and comic noises—wheezing, walking, turning pages, drinking, and even slamming objects on his table. When taped speech fills the theater, Krapp listens mo­ tionless, comic gestures spent. His head is bent at an angle of 45 degrees, his left hand caresses the tape-recorder, and the fingers of his right hand sometimes drum impatiently. Unrecorded in Beckett's Notebook is the frequent ternary rhythm evident in performance. Krapp listens to three main events; there are three breaks in the equinox account and three in the "Farewell to Love." At the play's begin­ ning Krapp walks three times out of his spotlight into darkness and back. He disappears through his backstage curtain three times—for his ledger, pile of tapes, and tape-recorder, the increased weight of the objects revealed by increased fatigue. In the later action Beckett changed the three backstage exits to offstage drinking, search for a dictionary, offstage drinking and search for a microphone. Krapp consults his watch three times; he moves the tape ahead three times and back three times. After he records, he looks at the machine three times before he wrenches off his last tape. Within this ternary pattern Krapp shows emotional variety—his lubricity on peeling a banana, his impatience with a younger self, his contained grief at his mother's death, his boast to a whore, his extrapolation of a novel, his fear of dark at his left, his inability to sustain love, which he perhaps regrets when he plays and replays the "Farewell to Love." Krapp-Held squinted when he trem­ ulously spoke of eyes—in the words of the Notebook "ein Traumgefressener Mensch." With improved vision of his own (after operations to re­ move cataracts), Beckett returned to Krapp in 1975—in his French translation, to accompany the French premiere of

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Not I at the Petit d'Orsay. Ten years after L'Hypothese Beck­ ett and Chabert again worked together on a one-character play. In Paris as in Berlin, the central image remained a Krapp who was "one body with the machine."12 As in L'Hypothese Beckett divided the small stage into areas: the central table (place of reverie) and the backstage alcove (place of practicality). Because of Chabert's relative youth, Beckett dressed him in a frayed dressing-gown to hide his tall frame, a toque to hide his abundant hair, and black half-gloves that evoke premonitions of death. Pale and thin, Krapp-Chabert shiv­ ered with an old man's cold, and his myopic eyes seemed intent on piercing the dark. He stretched to listen so as to compensate for his deafness, one hand curled round the recorder handle. Immobile, he sucked at his cheeks, leav­ ing his mouth open. Tall, he bumped the overhead light when he rose from the table, and the light continued to move while he listened, still, to the "moves" of the "Farewell to Love." Musically trained, Chabert readily responded to Beck­ ett's sonata breakdown of the dialogue into b-A(b)-A-B-a, A being the taped voice, B the live voice, and small letters standing for short duration. Much of the brief (three-week) rehearsal period was devoted to the B-voice, sharp and staccato in b and (b), but rhythmically varied in B; the highpitched quaver of the conventional stage old man was especially to be avoided. In both A and B, Beckett wished counterpoint between objectivity and self-disgust, or be­ tween objectivity and fascination with a woman or a word. In Paris Beckett revised key scenes of both non-listening and listening. When Krapp goes backstage to drink, he leaves a curtain open, so that his guzzling shadow is seen in a long light rectangle, projected from a Chinese lantern on a screen. This space is sharply different from the dream/memory space of Krapp's table. Thus, Krapp versus his past is theatricalized audibly as Krapp versus his taped voice; visually as a shrunken actual Krapp versus his en­ larged shadow. In the three playbacks of the love scene,

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Krapp first listens with bowed head, then with his face on the table, and finally, after a long look over his left shoul­ der into darkness, with stony erectness. Krapp-Chabert's last playback of "Farewell to Love" is clarified as his stoic farewell to life as well. After the stage-lights go out, the tape-recorder light continues to glow—a small memento mori. A little over two years later, in 1977, Beckett found him­ self directing an English Krapp in Berlin's Akademie der Kiinste, as a favor to his friend Rick Cluchey. Despite two previous productions, he made extensive Director's Notes, which have been published in the San Quentin Drama Workshop Program and in Bethanien Center Publications. His headings summarize the areas of his concern: "Tape Montage, Costume, Props [a long list], Lighting, Opening, Haiti, Drinks, Song, Microphone, End." Visual details were carried over from the Paris production—a dressinggown, modified banana business, enlarged shadow of drinking, erect posture at the end as at the beginning. This time Beckett divided the play into four rehearsal scenes: 1) Beginning to ledger note: "Farewell to—love." 2) "Thirty-nine today . . ." to "A girl in a shabby green coat. . . . No?" (with "Connaught" replaced by "Kerry" and the hymn cut). 3) "When I look back—" to preparations for re­ cording. (Watch business is cut. Looking up "viduity" in the dictionary, near-sighted Krapp first reads "vicar" and "vicious.") 4) From the newly introduced "Fanny" before "Just been listening . . ." to the end. ("One pound . . . doubt" disappears. "Finger and thumb" replaces "a kick in the crutch," and "dozed away" replaces "went to sleep.") In contrast to Held's erotic recorder, Cluchey's is both friend and enemy, alternately caressed and cursed. Even more sharply than earlier, the Akademie Krapp points up opposites: stillness-movement, silence-noise, dark-light, black-white. As a corollary to such polarity, Beckett had Cluchey emphasize the "or"s in the "viduity" definition. Beckett never spoke to the Workshop members of the symbolic genesis of the play, but they worried together in

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the inadequately equipped Akademie about nuances of light and sound. To the ternary rhythms of the earlier pro­ ductions Beckett added long still "brood"s after the words "Incomparable," "crystolite," and "side by side." He sought tonal interest for the often-repeated phrase "Ah well," which had nearly become the play's title. Live Krapp's "Be again, be again" was to sound like the churchbells of his youth. Clinging to rhythm in the face of death, Krapp-Cluchey was sometimes rehearsed with Beckett beating time—for the little rushes of seven steps to and from the table, for the longer series of thirteen steps to and from the alcove, for the offstage drinking sounds (clink of bottle against glass, bottle down, drink, glass down, cough/sigh), and for the long Haiti (sudden stiffening, slow head turn to left, hold, slow return to right, resume tape). Although the American group knew little German, they prattled glibly of the Haiti, unaware that it derived from the Matthias Claudius poem. Seeking the precise shufflesound he wanted from Krapp's run/walk, Beckett gave Cluchey his own worn slippers. In the last week (of nearly four) of rehearsals Beckett changed Krapp-Cluchey's lis­ tening position, right hand embracing the recorder, left hand behind it, head angled about 60 degrees to the table. Under a conical dunce-cap light, the metallic rotating tape was reflected on Cluchey's left cheek—a kind of shadow pulse. San Quentin technical men Hauptle and Thorpe conferred on how to eliminate it, but Beckett told them softly, "I love it." I have juggled Beckett's directorial chronology to de­ scribe the Krapp succession, but behind Krapp-Cluchey stands the still haloed head of a London and Berlin That Time; Krapp-Cluchey's audible rush of steps rests on Foot­ falls in London and Berlin; the Akademie Krapp borrows spare rectangles of television's Ghost Trio and a monastic robe of . . . but the clouds. . . . By 1977 Beckett endowed Cluchey's Krapp with the gravity of his own recent director­ ial experience. In 1971, however, at the Schiller Werkstatt, Beckett was

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first confronted with a stationary protagonist—Winnie of Happy Days. The performance had to live largely through

language. Half-buried under a blazing sun that never sets, Winnie sustains a discourse that is climaxed by the en­ trance of her husband Willie, in full dress but on all fours. Despite the climax, however, Happy Days plays an ending action, like other Beckett plays. In trying to end her day, Winnie marshals several resources—the stage props, her husband Willie, composition of stories, and inadvertent recollections that include fourteen passages of English verse. An emmet appears momentarily, and her parasol bursts abruptly into flames, but Winnie can scarcely depend upon external events in a world even more "corpsed" than that of Endgame. As earlier noted, she tries to endure through each happy day by careful deployment of props and words, by sparing dependence on her hus­ band Willie. For Beckett's cruellest stage image, he composed a detailed Director's Notebook—eighty-five handwritten pages.13 On the flyleaf is a neatly printed Table of Con­ tents, no doubt done last. On the facing page is Beckett's division of the play into rehearsal scenes, eight in Act I, when Winnie is buried to her waist, and four in Act II, when she is buried to her neck. Act I: 1) Opening to "old eyes." 2) To the point where Willie fans himself and Win­ nie takes up her magnifying glass. 3) Winnie's "Fully guaranteed" to Willie's "It." 4) To end of laugh. 5) To Winnie's "No no. (Smile off. Looks at parasol.)" 6) To Win­ nie's "(voice breaks, head down) . . . things . . . so wonder­ ful." 7) To end of Shower/Cooker story and end of nail fil­ ing. 8) To end of Act I. Act II: 1) To Winnie's "And now?" 2) From Winnie's "The face." to "Gently, Winnie." 3) To Winnie's "Sing your old song, Winnie." 4) To end. This Notebook, unlike those of Berlin Endgame and Krapp, reveals how Beckett theatricalized his way through every word and gesture of his text, as well as through props and sound effects. He enumerates the contents of Winnie's bag, specifying that they should be worn-

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looking, conspicuous, and non-realistic. Her parasol and spectacles are sketched, and Beckett notes that Winnie should handle glass props with her left hand, setting them down on her left and returning them to the sack in inverse order of their removal. For the eight times the bell rings, Beckett itemizes pitch, volume, and duration. Early in the Notebook, Beckett focuses on Willie, who is invisible and inaudible through most of the play. A dia­ gram nevertheless traces Willie's invisible crawl into his hole, and another diagram traces his visible crawl up the mound. Beckett lists Willie's three Act I positions—sitting against the mound (partly visible), lying down behind the mound (invisible), and lying in his hole (invisible). His voice was to sound different from his different positions, but he was to read the same newspaper advertisements in the same way each time. Beckett counts Willie's words and describes his actions through the dozen scenes of the two acts, and he adds breathing noises to indicate his exer­ tions. A page and a half of minute description details his final crawl up the mound. It is, however, Winnie who dominates Beckett's Note­ book. An unusually explicit interpretive note lays the groundwork for her performance: "Relate frequency of broken speech and action to discontinuity of time. Win­ nie's time experience incomprehensible transport from one inextricable present to the next, those past unremembered, those to come inconceivable." The audience must be made to sense the nature of her time. Beckett lists Winnie's repeated refrains and her repeated gestures; he also lists variations upon repetitions. For example, when she is buried to her waist in Act I, she has three main series of movements; she turns back and right to look at Willie, she turns forward and left to explore her bag, and she looks down in front of her to read the inscrip­ tion on her toothbrush. Each of these three main move­ ments contains three variants: 1) She simply turns to Wil­ lie, or turns and then leans back, or turns, leans, and cranes as far as she can. 2) When she begins to explore her

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bag, she is sometimes prevented and sometimes inter­ rupted; sometimes she plunges her hand in. 3) To read the print on her toothbrush, she uses naked eyes, glasses, then glasses and magnifying glass before she deciphers "Fully guaranteed genuine pure hog's setae." The Notebook lists Winnie's thirty-one smiles, five happy ex­ pressions, and eight signs of gloom. Beckett noted the Eng­ lish sources of Winnie's fourteen quotations, and on the opposite page he wrote out the standard German transla­ tions (rather than Tophoven's efforts, as published). Before rehearsals began in Berlin, Beckett and his scene-designer Matias (who eight years earlier designed Happy Days for Roger Blin in Paris) pored over sketches. Beckett no longer wished Winnie to be "in exact center of mound," but slightly to the right, so as to give more impor­ tance to Willie. Matias' earlier set substituted a baked de­ sert for the scorched grass of the text, and on the shallow stage of the Schiller Werkstatt, mounds and hillocks were contrived to give an impression of depth. Very early in rehearsals Beckett told Winnie, played by Eva Katherina Schultz, that her performance had to clarify the Seltsamkeit (strangeness) of her situation. Very early, too, he worried about her "rest" position; instead of the symmetrical, head-down sleep of Madeleine Renaud, he suggested a pose that he proceeded to demonstrate—left arm protecting the bag and right arm folded back to pro­ tect the nape of the neck. Even before Schultz learned her lines, Beckett described Winnie's vocal variety. She was to speak in three main voices—a neutral prattle, high articulation to Willie, and childlike intimacy to herself. In Act I she also imitates Wil­ lie's voice imploring her to take the revolver away; in Act II she imitates his proposal of marriage. Winnie's Shower/ Cooker story necessitates another three voices—objective narrator, gruffly energetic man, and hostile lady compan­ ion; moreover, in Act Π Mr. Shower/Cooker was to adopt an erotic tone as he asked about Winnie's legs. In the Act II story about Mildred and the doll, Winnie was to speak in an

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infantile voice. Further, Beckett wanted a special tone for reading the print on her toothbrush, and he wanted some­ thing like a chant for the literary quotations, not readily recognizable in German translation. On first utterance, "happy day" and "old style" should be stressed, and then de-emphasized on each repetition. Beckett insisted that "the many colors" of Winnie's Act I voice must contrast with her usually "white voice" of Act II. As in Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape, he wished separation of words from mo­ tions, and their smooth coordination remained a problem to the last. Beckett early told Winnie-Schultz that the bag is her friend, the bell her enemy. She loves her well-worn props, including the revolver that she personifies as Brownie. Yet she turns to the bag seventeen times in Act I, as against twenty times to Willie. So, in Act II, she looks more often in Willie's direction than in the bag's. In their shared laugh, Willie begins alone, then is joined by Winnie, but it ends with Willie alone. Beckett described the laugh in French as rire jaune, which might be translated as sardonic laugh. When Winnie remarks, "Ah earth you old extin­ guisher," the audience must sense that the earth extin­ guishes not only the parasol fire but Winnie herself. Beck­ ett added that her fate was all the more pathetic because this weightless being is devoured by the earth. After ten days of rehearsal of Act I, Beckett recited Act II for Schultz, complete with face movements, since only her head is visible. By Act II Winnie can no longer speak full sentences nor recall whole lines of verse. The volume and duration of her speech are both reduced; phrases come in fragments, memories in utter doubt. Beckett stressed the significance of her line "Then . . . now . . . what difficulties here, for the mind." Accordingly, she was to convey the difficulties of "then" by her articulation of the six repeti­ tions of "I used to . . . , I say I used to . . ." Beginning with the auxiliary verb of a continuous past—used to—Winnie breaks off unbelievingly, then resumes speech as a recita­ tion rather than an account of past experience.

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Only midway during the month's rehearsals was the final Willie cast, and Beckett rehearsed Rudi Schmidt alone for two days, playing Winnie himself. He compared Willie to an old turtle, very much of the earth. Even though the audience cannot see Willie, Beckett wanted Schmidt to mime the actions Winnie described. Willie's movements, like Winnie's, are often built on a ternary rhythm. He has three periods of visibility; he puts on his hat three times (twice the boater, and once the stove-pipe) with the same flick of the finger against hat. He blows his nose resound­ ingly three times. Beckett departed from his text to have WUlie turn the pages of the yellowed newspaper three times on first reading, then another three on the second. At the end of Act II Willie crawls into sight. As soon as the stage set was built (of resilient polyester), Beckett crawled through Willie's stage path, and he corrected Wil­ lie's movements right up to the dress rehearsal, always in­ sisting upon the dramatic quality of silence during that climactic crawl. In the final tableau Beckett positioned Wil­ lie's hand to sustain the ambiguity as to whether he reaches for Winnie or the revolver. As in almost every stage production, there were techni­ cal difficulties before opening. Beckett wanted no shadows on stage, so that the lighting had to be reset. The harsh bell-sounds rose precisely in pitch, but their duration had to be retimed. The long handle of the toothbrush was bal­ anced by the long muzzle on the revolver, but the long parasol handle (without the sheath demanded by the text) was too shiny and had to be darkened. Winnie's wirerimmed spectacles looked like Beckett's, but the handles would not stand clear of the lenses. Music-box and burn­ ing parasol were not perfected until the technical rehearsal (when the parasol continued to burn backstage). For the technical rehearsal, Beckett reduced the size of Willie's handkerchief, ridiculously dainty when it perched unprotectively on Willie's bald head. As in most technical re­ hearsals, mere acting suffered. At the dress rehearsal, when the house is traditionally

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quite full in West Berlin, Beckett sat in a tiny side balcony of the Werkstatt and frowned through much of the per­ formance, taking no notes. Absent from the premiere, he accepted congratulations at the post-performance party, but he already seemed far away from Gliickliche Tage. On the next day he rehearsed the late Jack MacGowran in Be­ ginning to End. While in Berlin for Happy Days, Beckett was asked to di­ rect his best-known work, Waiting for Godot. He had first come to Berlin in 1965 to advise director Deryk Mendel at the Schiller Theater, but by 1971 he was amenable to taking full direction. However, Beckett's Berlin Godot materialized only in 1975. No other play occupied him so long and so obsessively. In the past Beckett had only sporadic control of his most celebrated work. With few comments, he attended 1952 rehearsals of Roger Blin's original production. He was not consulted by either Peter Hall or Herbert Berghof for the first London (1955) or New York (1956) productions, but he did correspond with Alan Simpson and Alan Schneider about the first Irish (1955) and American (1956) produc­ tions. Having observed Mendel in Berlin in 1965, Beckett worked with Mendel's cast in 1975, except for Pozzo and the Boy. Although Beckett knew that Godot would be his most demanding directing project, he forced himself to think about it only in 1974, when he was fully committed to the Schiller Theater (rather than the smaller Werkstatt of his other plays). The earlier plays were allotted about a month's rehearsal time, but two months were planned for Godot. Rehearsals actually lasted ten weeks, with the pre­ miere on March 7, 1975. At the end of January, Martin Held, who had never read or seen Godot before rehearsals began, withdrew from the role of Pozzo on a medical ex­ cuse, and he was replaced by Carl Raddatz, who had never seen or read Godot either. The five steps preceding Beckett's Berlin rehearsals took longer for Godot. Tophoven's German—his first Beckett

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translation—was serviceable, and yet Beckett changed many details. Tophoven had translated from the original French, but Beckett brought the text closer to his own Eng­ lish version, which he now prefers.14 He pared away some of Pozzo's Act I business with pipe, whip, and seating ceremony, as well as his conversation about Lucky's bur­ dens, dancing, and rebellion. Gone, too, are the definition of the "knook" and the music-hall joke about the strong and weak lung. In Act II when all four characters lie on the ground, Vladimir and Estragon lose a few lines, and while they prop up Pozzo, they no longer speak about friendship and evening. (This scene was further cut in rehearsal.) In contrast, Beckett made one remarkable addition to the dialogue. When Vladimir in Act II asks the Boy whether Mr. Godot's beard is fair or black, the German question approximates: "Blonde or . . . he hesitates black . . .he hesi­ tates or red?" Thus, Mr. Godot is pointedly related to Estragon's smutty story about the Englishman at the brothel,15 juxtaposing—as so often in Godot—the serious and outrageous. In less noticeable symmetry between Acts I and II, Beckett had Estragon accuse the fallen figure— Lucky in Act I, Pozzo in Act II: "He's doing it on purpose." Other than the few additions and several deletions, Beckett further revised Tophoven's text. He rewrote the name-calling sequence for humor and euphony. He in­ serted "ihn ihm" for its squeal effect in the discussion of giving Lucky his hat to think, repeating the phrase six times. When Vladimir goes offstage to urinate, Estragon actually directs him to the backstage toilet of the Schiller Theater. Beckett also altered several of Tophoven's variant translations into exact repetitions. Most consistently, the verb tun becomes machen (over a dozen changes); these German verbs are roughly equivalent to their English cog­ nates do and make, but German can often say machen where English cannot say make. Thus, the English tragicomedy opens: "Nothing to be done," but the German is: "Nichts zu machen." The textual changes were easier for Beckett than "trying

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to see." While on summer vacation, he spent long hours at the beach imagining and often disapproving of Godot. He thinks that his difficulty was due to his lack of theater experience at the time of writing. "Messy," "not well thought out," he has castigated this play that is considered a model of modern form.16 In the Notebook, he pinpointed his directorial goal: "Der Konfusion eine Gestalt geben." Beckett's third and fourth steps—memorizing his text and composing his Director's Notebook—overlap, and most especially for Godot. It is the only play for which Beckett needed two Notebooks, the second an expansion of the first. It was also the most difficult play to commit to memory, with stage directions, because all five characters are differently mobile and voluble. Of necessity, then, of Beckettian necessity, memorizing the play depended on the substance of the Notebooks. As in the Happy Days Notebook, the lefthand cover contains a list of special prob­ lems, and the righthand page the breakdown into re­ hearsal scenes. Of Beckett's usual fifth step—transmission of design ideas to Matias—there is no record in the Notebooks. For Beckett as for Artaud, stage space is empty, and the Notebooks reflect his characters' valiant efforts to move through it.17 That valor is evident in stylized standing up, sitting down, walking about, and especially falling. Beck­ ett's many diagrams showing the movements of the char­ acters amplify the text. This is not only traditional block­ ing, but concern with who faces where at every moment of time, with each actor's moment-by-moment victory over stillness, with the total stage pattern, with the counter­ point of word and gesture, with visual echoes, symme­ tries, and oppositions. In Godot Beckett's characters ma­ neuver through stage space to help pass time. For it is of course with time that Beckett's classic is obsessed—the time of waiting. Beckett points this up by a dozen waiting tableaux. Dramatically, each act of Godot falls into three parts: be­ fore Pozzo-Lucky, with Pozzo-Lucky, after Pozzo-Lucky (a

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structure that Beckett was to emphasize in the novel How It Is). For Berlin rehearsals, however, Beckett divided Act I into six scenes, Act II into five. In each act the VladimirEstragon couple play through two scenes before the master-slave couple arrive, and the friends play one poignant scene after they depart. Pozzo and Lucky play through three scenes in Act I, two in Act II; their onstage presence lasts about twice as long in the first act, but the time of waiting conspires to make Act II seem as long as Act I. (Actual playing time was seventy minutes for Act I, fifty for Act II.) The seed of Godot is Luke's account of the crucifixion, as summarized by St. Augustine: "Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume: one of the thieves was damned." The two thieves are Vladimir and Estragon; the two thieves are Pozzo and Lucky; the two thieves are Godot's goatherd and his offstage shepherd brother. And Beckett shaped the play to reflect that fearful symmetry— in text and performance. There are two acts, one repeating the other. There are two couples, one contrasting with the other. Within the acts, within the couples, symmetries and oppositions occur. In the summary of Bert States: "Thus the logic of dramatic conflict gives way . . . to a logic of complementarity."18 Either act yields the following plot summary: at twilight two friends meet by a tree to wait for Godot. A burdened slave and his master arrive, remain a while, and then leave. When the friends are alone again, a boy messenger arrives to inform them that Godot will come not today but tomorrow. The boy departs, and the moon rises swiftly. Though the friends decide to leave, they are still on stage when we see them last. In Notebook and performance, as opposed to the printed text, each act begins and ends in absolute still­ ness—a Wait with both friends onstage facing front; at the beginning of each act, they are apart, and by the end they are together. In performance, the verbal repetitions blend into the gestural repetitions newly introduced or newly

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emphasized by Beckett. At the beginning of Act I and at the end of Act II the friends look in synchrony at the tree, ask what kind it is, speculate on its serving them as gal­ lows. At the beginning of both acts, Vladimir wishes to embrace Estragon but is spurned. In both acts Vladimir feeds Estragon, and in both acts Estragon sleeps. In both acts Vladimir calms Estragon. In both acts Pozzo holds a rope around Lucky's neck, and Lucky carries the same burdens. In both acts Lucky falls to the ground, and in both acts he wounds Estragon. Though Estragon feels pity for Lucky in Act I, and fury in Act II, the pain in his leg causes him to leap identically both times. In Act I Estragon threatens Pozzo with a chill if he doesn't sit, and in Act II Estragon threatens Vladimir with a chill if he doesn't rise. In each act the two friends support a disabled man—Lucky in Act I and Pozzo in Act II, both tableaux recalling the many paintings of a crucified Christ between two thieves. In both acts, while Vladimir questions the Boy, Estragon falls asleep; in both acts the Boy backs off in time to the moon's swift rise. In Act I the friends look together at the moon (like the couple in the painting by Kaspar David Friedrich, as Beckett comments in his Notebook), but in Act II they do not notice it. However, we see its cold light as they freeze into fixity. Although the friends speak in each act of separating, they remain together. At the end of Act I they face us from a stone; at the end of Act II they stand under the sparely leaved tree. (Beckett intended both stone and tree to be bone-color.) This repetitive symmetry of incident contrasts with an oppositional symmetry of person. The Pozzo-Lucky couple is an interlude in the wait of the Vladimir-Estragon couple, who are almost always present. Beckett wanted to relate the members of each dissimilar pair through their costumes. As in most productions since the original, Vlad­ imir and Estragon wear the derby and tuxedo of vaudeville comedians, but in Act I Beckett's Vladimir wears black coat and striped trousers, whereas Estragon wears striped coat and black trousers, and the reverse is true in Act II.

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Moreover, Vladimir's coat is too small, and Estragon's trousers are too long; each wears the other's clothes. The tan-brown check of Pozzo's trousers is repeated on Lucky's waistcoat, and Lucky's gray trousers match Pozzo's waistcoat—invariant in the two acts. The two cou­ ples are visually distinct, but all four characters are linked through their derbies and wornout garments. This is strik­ ing in Pozzo's case, for his boasts and grand manner are ludicrous when belied by his shabby clothes. In contrast, Godot's Boy is lone and luminous in a light shirt and trousers, but even he speaks of an oppressed offstage brother, forming another oppositional symmetry. The main symmetry of the play lies in Vladimir and Estragon, played in Berlin by tall thin Stefan Wigger and short plump Horst Bollmann, though ten years earlier their roles were reversed. They sit together on the stone or stand together by the tree, squat stone almost imitating Estragon and tall tree Vladimir. The two friends embrace at the beginning of each act, and they discuss parting at the end. They make identical gestures with hat and shoe, re­ spectively. They walk in step as they talk about Godot or emerge from Estragon's nightmare. Each of them mimics Lucky with his burdens, to ask Pozzo why the slave doesn't put them down. In a duet (as opposed to the text) they ask whether Pozzo wants to get rid of Lucky. Both friends applaud Pozzo's recital about nightfall by raising the right thumb and pursing the lips—a traditional gesture of enthusiasm in German theater. The two friends fall to the ground in similar stylized ways, and they rise in per­ fect synchrony. Both of them often ask, "What?" But Estragon usually desires an explanation, whereas Vladimir has been lost in his own thoughts. In the Act II verse-like sequences, both speak with quiet articulation, Vladimir in synonyms and Estragon with subtle insistence. Toward the end, each of them protests that he can't go on. Pozzo and Lucky present more surface difference, but both are attached to possessions, across which they ex­ change looks of compulsive intensity—what the Notebook

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calls a "Hypno look." Master and slave fall to the ground in the same slow three beats—right knee, left hand and knee, right hand. Beckett paired objects, as well as people. In the text the horizontal country road is crossed by the vertical tree. In Beckett's production the road was broad, raked, and re­ silient, and the tree so frail as to recall Pascal's thinking reed. In Act II each of its three drooping branches sprouts a six-inch green leaf, and tall Vladimir-Wigger touches one unbelievingly. A stone rather than a road balanced the tree on the Schiller Theater stage, and Beckett verbalized this in Vladimir's line: "that tree . . . that stone," before referring to the audience as "that bog." The stone is a lodestone for Estragon, who returns to it several times. Although Vlad­ imir also sits on it, he does so only with Estragon, and he is never fully at rest on it since the stone is too narrow to support them both. Stone and tree, inadequate as they may be, are the only stable props in the world of Godot. Of the movable props, hats and shoes are pre-eminent. Early in the play, Estragon's shoe business is repeated by Vladimir's hat business. As the play progresses, hat and shoes attain their own individuality. Lucky's hat is a necessity before he can think, but Estragon's shoes do not facilitate his locomotion. Gradually, hats and shoes be­ come painful encumbrances. By the end of Act I, Estragon has removed his shoes; onstage at the opening of Act II, the shoes are evidence that the friends are at the same spot—evidence that Estragon refuses to accept. When Estragon-Bollmann tries the shoes on, he walks with a roll­ ing spring. When he and Vladimir engage in hat-juggling (borrowed from the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup), Estragon's small head disappears under the large hats of Vladimir or Lucky. Less marked than hat and shoes are the food pairs. In Act I turnip and carrot have the same phallic shape, and in German the same designation—weisse Riibe and gelbe Riibe. In Act II the black radish (called "unpink" in the Note­ book) has the roundness of a red one ("pink" in Anglo-

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Irish). In Act I Pozzo eats a chicken leg, and Estragon gnaws at the bone, but each man belches with pleasure and exclaims, "Ah! That's better." On these scattered symmetries rest the binary rhythms of Lucky's monologue. Researchers are named in pairs— Puncher and Wattman, Testew and Cunard, Fartov and Belcher, Steinweg and Peterman. Key phrases fall into bi­ nary rhythm—"but time will tell," "but not so fast," "wastes and pines," "abode of stones." In Act II, when all four characters are on the ground, Estragon and Vladimir sing two-note calls: "Pozzo Pozzo . . . Abel! Abel! Zu mir! Zu mir!. . . Kain! Kain! Zu mir! Zu mir!" Although the main rhythm of Godot is binary, a ternary rhythm sounds a minor key. The play is divided into two acts, but each act is seen in three lights—twilight, darker twilight after the departure of Pozzo and Lucky, still darker moonlight after the departure of the Boy. The three-branched tree is stationary throughout. Hat and shoe present symmetry, since they are worn at the top and the bottom of the human body. When Vladimir and Estragon search within these objects, the investigation proceeds in three stages. 1) After removal of hat or shoe, the friends look into it and shake it. 2) After removal, they look into it, feel around in it, tap it, shake it, and look again. 3) After removal, they look into it, feel around in it, blow into it, tap it, shake it, and look again. At the end of Act I two splayed shoes (Estragon's) and a hat (Lucky's) are at the front of the stage in a triangle. In Act II Vladimir and Estragon juggle three hats, two large and one small. Most usually, Beckett chooses a ternary rhythm for mo­ tion across the wide stage—what the Notebook calls "Ap­ proach by stages." Estragon undermines Vladimir's faith in their appointment in three insidious stages, Vladimir wakes Estragon in three panicky stages, Estragon makes up to Vladimir in three conciliatory stages, Vladimir and Estragon approach Lucky in three curious stages, Pozzo and Lucky fall to the ground in three stylized beats, Act I farewells fall into three rhythmic groups, the Boy arrives at

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center stage in three movements, Vladimir addresses the Boy in three phrase-groups of rising anguish. Each of these ternary rhythms exploits several areas on the raked gray stage. Mathematical and even mechanical as this may sound, subtle patterns are achieved. In contrast, a triple structure that blatantly calls attention to itself is Lucky's echolalia. Usually rushed through as nonsense, this monologue became a miracle of intelligibility as delivered by Klaus Herm, on Beckett's instructions. The first scene stressed in rehearsal, the monologue was divided by Beckett into three movements—an apathetic God, dwindling man, and indifferent nature. Lucky-Herm began slowly with a hy­ pothesis of divine indifference; he quickened the tempo for the first counter-argument about man shrinking—"and considering what is more"; always articulate, he sped to the second counter-argument of earth as abode of stones—"and considering what is more much more grave." He finally raves in a frenzied coda, where the word "head" sounds eight times. The whole monologue lasts six minutes, Herm haranguing with earnest conviction while his onstage audience register distress in ternary rhythms. Pozzo first puts his fingers in his ears, then his coat over his head, and finally the stool over his coat as he sinks to his knees. Vladimir and Estragon exit twice and re-enter twice (not simultaneously) from opposite ends of the wide stage before they knock Lucky down with stylized punches. However painful the wait for Godot, intensified through twelve tableaux of absolute stillness, Beckett endowed it with rhythm. For the most part he did so in his mind's eye, committing details to his Notebook before he arrived in Berlin. More than his other productions, however, actual rehearsals prompted changes, which he recorded in red ink in the expanded Notebook. Physical space caused Beck­ ett to reorder the sequence in which Estragon takes Pozzo's handkerchief and is kicked by Lucky. The growth of Vladimir's despair after each interview with the Boy is

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traced, step by step, in red ink. The opening dialogue and gestures of Act II are listed in nine red steps. Red also in­ troduces musical variety into Godot; Vladimir was origi­ nally to sing the dog tune four times, but Beckett substi­ tuted three different melodies: 1) Vladimir sings Estragon to sleep with "Schlaf mein Prinzchen." 2) The friends hum Chopin's Trauermarsch as they walk off Estragon's night­ mare. 3) After spiritedly calling each other names, the two friends dance lightly to the Merry Widow Waltz. In red, too, a new sequence for an Act II Wait is barred as "Un­ realizable." How much was realizable in actual perform­ ance is amazing. Notebook immanence is not performance, and finally the actors alone perform—as every director realizes with occasional frustration. The Mutt-and-Jeff difference in height of Vladimir-Wigger and Estragon-Bollmann was a comic asset, but it made for difficult synchrony of gesture. Vladimir-Wigger paced in long, rather than "short, stiff strides," specified by Beckett's original scenic direction, and Wigger also held his hands stiffly, particularly at times of stress. (As the run extended, the stiffness hardened to paralysis.) Estragon-Bollmann developed a lovable waddle unmentioned in the text, and his childlike "Hor auf" or "Meine Fusse" aroused compassion. An inventive actor, he made a pendulum of Lucky's basket, and he presented his begging hat to Pozzo with a soft-shoe near-dance. Two days before the dress rehearsal he substituted French: "C'est la vie" for "So ist das Leben." At the dress re­ hearsal, Pozzo still was trying to subdue the whip that served him in versatile fashion, and Lucky was still seek­ ing the right note for the repetitious Kopf of dementia. Inevitably, technical problems arose toward the end of rehearsals. The three degrees of light required painstaking adjustment. The moon rose so jerkily that Beckett called it a hiccupping moon. The costumes did not look sufficiently worn, and the actors seemed reluctant to dirty their skin. Lucky's wig made him look like a blonde Cleopatra, and one could hardly see the spit-curl that Beckett had affixed

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on Pozzo's otherwise bald pate. The three leaves of the tree would not face front, and they were invisible in profile. Estragon's rope-belt did not tear when tugged at, and his trousers did not fall cleanly at the end. Inevitably, how­ ever, technical problems were solved or smoothed over. At the dress rehearsal, in a nearly full theater, Beckett sat front row center, as he often sat at other rehearsals, ready to climb on stage if needed. This once, he sat still, watch­ ing concentratedly through his tinted glasses. Occasion­ ally, his left hand moved as though conducting; less often, he scribbled in a small notebook. Surrounded by wellwishers at the end of each act, he responded with his usual courtesy and unusual equanimity. Afterwards, he went to the greenroom to give the actors their last notes for the premiere he would not attend, but for weeks afterward the German phrases of Godot echoed in his mind's ear. It would be formally neat to close the description of Beckett's directing with Godot, his first play to be profes­ sionally performed, but his directorial career lacks the ele­ gant structure of the individual dramas. After returning from Berlin in March, 1975, with a single day's respite, he began a month of rehearsals for the Paris opening of Not I, to play on a double bill with Krapp's Last Tape. His direction of Chabert has been described, moving Krapp more dis­ tinctly toward death. Against Beckett's intention, how­ ever, Madeleine Renaud's Mouth in Not I uttered words that were too vivid and vital in timbre. The translation into French of Not 1 was so hard that Beckett might not have completed it without the urging of Renaud, who wanted to play Mouth. He spent months (off and on) on the phrasing of the French text but only four weeks of an hour or two a day on rehearsing the French actress. During that time he gradually whittled away Re­ naud's penchant for expression by making her speed up the delivery. So arduous was the process that technical matters were left too late. At London's Royal Court pro­ duction the auditor's gestures could not be seen. In the Petit d'Orsay of Paris, after trying several places for Pierre

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Chabert as the auditor, Beckett eliminated the role. Made­ leine Renaud as Mouth spoke to and for herself, or to the physical residue of a self, since her face was visible almost up to her nose, almost down to her chin. Not the most memorable example of the skills of either performer or di­ rector, Pas Moi was restaged in 1978, replete with Auditor, whose gestures were still unsatisfactory to Beckett. While rehearsing Godot in Berlin in 1975, Beckett was sought after for other directing projects, but he was weary of performance. However, he finds it hard to say NO, and, admiring Billie Whitelaw's acting skill, he committed him­ self to directing her in the world premiere of Footfalls at the Royal Court. More reluctantly, he returned to Berlin in 1976 to direct the short evening of Damals (That Time) and Tritte (Footfalls). As in London, four weeks were allowed for rehearsals. However, the Royal Court's meager techni­ cal equipment could not compare with the munificent resources of the Schiller. The Royal Court Beckett Season of 1976 began with a visit of Beckett's Berlin Godot (reduced with surprising ease to the small dimensions of the Court stage). Another evening was devoted to Endgame directed by Donald McWhinnie, and a third to Play and That Time directed by McWhinnie and Footfalls by Beckett. The last was an eve­ ning of decelerating tempo: first the swift pace of Play, then the more measured flow of That Time—each with its hallucinatory still image—and finally the parallel cadences of Footfalls. Pat Magee was the star of the Royal Court Beckett Sea­ son, enacting Hamm in Endgame and the old man of That Time. He enjoyed himself in interviews, reminiscing about his long career—twenty years of acting Beckett; he mocked earnest academics who dig through Beckett's works for buried gold. Not long before curtain time Magee would hold amusing court at the neighboring bar, and then pro­ ceed to play a commanding Hamm—on some nights. Back at the bar after the performance, he might wax eloquent about Beckett's scenic directions, which he maintained to

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be so simple and specific that any idiot could follow them. He played only minimally in That Time, which was hard to realize to Beckett's specifications, under Donald McWhinnie's direction. Although the dialogue is recorded by a single voice, the loudspeakers must distinguish the three directions of that voice. Although the light shines on a single still head, eye movements and breath must pre­ cisely punctuate the three divisions of the word-flow. Beckett's sparest stage image rigorously theatricalizes his undivine comedy, where the Α-voice renders a paradise lost, B evolves into purgatory, and C subsumes a lone in­ ferno. Beckett wished an uninterrupted verbal flow, except for the pauses at the end of the three parts. On first recording, Magee's breath was too audible, and editing would have required unavailable time and money. For the second recording, therefore, Magee was permitted one breath within each of the thirty-six paragraphs, and these were easily edited out. Hours of patient repetition in a long day finally achieved the right phrasing and intonation for some twenty minutes of tape. Once recorded, however, Magee's tense purr became in the theater "beauty like a tightened bow." In performance Magee was draped in black, seated on a high chair, head clamped looking upward. His own white hair was combed back and blended into a halo-wig with frayed edges. Spotlighted, his fine features registered strain within repose, until the voice ceased, eliding into a panting that filled the small theater with human breath. The past has been, in Enoch Brater's telling catalogue: "Repeated, recycled, redistributed, rearranged, recombined, but never synthesized."19 At the Schiller Theater Werkstatt, sound and light tech­ nicians were always at Beckett's disposal, and Assistant Director Walter Asmus (who had served Beckett on Godot) could follow through when Beckett left the theater.20 Nev­ ertheless, rehearsals were more arduous than in London. A few days before leaving for Berlin Beckett received

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Tophoven's German text of That Time, and he revised it while he committed it to memory. Tired after the London season, Beckett was often disturbed by outside construc­ tion noises. Although Klaus Herm had played Lucky in 1975, the other German actors were not Beckett veterans. A battery of Schiller technicians labored to bring forth a minimal Damals. Herm's round face lacked the visual drama of Magee's chiseled features, and although Herm had brilliantly varied the tempo of Lucky's speech under Beckett's direction, he could not achieve Magee's seem­ ingly effortless intensity and impeccable articulation. Magee's two recording sessions contrast with Herm's nine (if I read Asmus' account correctly). A slowdown of the verbal flow before and after blackouts that terminate each scene was new to the Berlin production. Finally heard at the threshold of audibility, Herm's voice compelled strain. The low susurrous word-stream flowed toward the still, haloed head from each of the three loudspeakers—A to the left of the face, B to the right and behind, and C farther right and forward. Magnified in silence and strong white light, the head seemed to pale and shrink under the rush of words in the dimmer light. Brightly illuminated at the last, his eyes glistening as though with tears, Herm's smile (not "toothless for preference" as in the text) merged with his audible panting into a single scornful exhale-laugh— Beckett's last-minute inspiration. So still is the visual image of That Time that Beckett has occasionally wondered whether the piece is a stage drama at all. Neither his own direction nor that of Donald McWhinnie has decided the question for him. However, there is no doubt about Footfalls. Instead of the few spare face movements, a whole gowned body paces back and forth. Instead of the same voice heard from three different directions, two voices engage in dialogues announced by chimes. The central image of footsteps is at once visual and audi­ ble, and once embarked on theater production, Beckett lis­ tened everywhere for the exact sharp sound he desired.

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While still in Paris, he changed the number of M's steps from seven to nine. In London, he began rehearsals with the steps, early asking that the wooden strip be built, and that Whitelaw's shoes be fitted before the rest of her cos­ tume. He practiced walking with Whitelaw on the strip, establishing the pace, which slows twice. In the early re­ hearsals she wore a long skirt over her levis to learn the feel of that walk. Since Endgame opened before Footfalls, Whitelaw paced in total concentration upon her board, ob­ livious of the curved "shelter" around her. Although Whitelaw had brilliantly negotiated the pauses in Not I, Footfalls presented a new diapason, indicated by comma, period, question mark, colon, dash, (pause), and three dots. Nor was it a simple matter of mathematical du­ ration, but rather of the quality of hesitation. For example, a question mark did not signal a rise in voice; frequent co­ lons designated breaks between speaker and speech in the mother-daughter dialogues within each of the women's monologues. Marking her script with different colored pencils, Billie Whitelaw sometimes conducted herself dur­ ing rehearsal, sometimes squatting to recite her lines along with Beckett. Days before the dress rehearsal, Whitelaw was able to harmonize steps, stops, and haunting phrases. Rose Hill as V at first found it difficult to break away from character motivation, in which most actors are trained. Fortunately, she had a musical background and could respond to that terminology from Beckett. Coaching each actress individually, Beckett prescribed for their sepa­ rate needs. He urged Hill to speak more softly, to drain words of conventional emotion, to time phrases like musi­ cal bars. On the other hand, after Whitelaw mastered her own flat melody, he began to be concerned lest the words not be heard, especially when she whispered. Only in the last rehearsals could he blend the two voices into a duet about the measured footfalls, beating out their human pain. The historic Royal Court Theatre resonated briefly with an exquisitely feminine grayness—taps, tatters, and blended duets.

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With the London production of Footfalls only a few months behind him, Beckett wrote relatively little in the Director's Notebook he used for both short plays in Berlin, 1976. He traced the daughter's walk, counting the gradu­ ally diminishing number of lengths and steps for all three parts. New to the Berlin production was the daughter's muffled muttering "on and off" while pacing and stand­ ing. Thus, her mother's voice is no longer "in her mind." Intent on her own thoughts, the daughter does not hear the mother's words. Beckett's Notebook underlines the parallels between the mother-daughter dialogues within the two monologues. V, he noted, should use her own voice for the mother but assume a voice for the daughter. Similarly, M should use her own voice for the daughter and assume a voice for old Mrs. Winter. On the facing page Beckett suggested the possibility of M assuming Amy's voice and V assuming May's "equating May with Amy." However, he chose the first plan in performance. The Notebook does not record Beckett's solution for the problematical fourth scene of Footfalls. After M completes the third scene, there is a blackout, but the audience must not think that the play is over. In London a blurred light shone through the blackout, but even a blurred light is not shapeless, and Beckett wished to prevent the audience from shaping it. In Berlin he ordered a thin line of vertical light back and to the left of the wooden strip. Against his unshaping intention, however, this looked like a door into the unknown. The vertical lightline joins the illuminated horizontal strip to suggest a frame. Lights, chimes, echoes, footfalls—these were more pre­ cisely deployed in Berlin than in London, but the play lives mainly by its actors. Hildegard Schmahl was precast as M, but Beckett was asked (as in London) to select between two actresses for V—a chore that unnerves him. The voice of Charlotte Joeres as V proved more amenable to his guid­ ance than the walk of Hildegard Schmahl, which was not perfected until a dress rehearsal.

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Rehearsing the two short plays in Berlin, M-Schmahl and Old Man-Herm had contrasting problems. The latter had to arouse tension through the muted feelings of his old man, whereas Schmahl had to mute her own expression of a woman who paces in pain. Particularly trying for her was the third scene, with its oblique fiction. To Herm Beckett suggested playing with full realistic expression, then gradually bringing it down. He advised Schmahl not to concentrate so hard on concentrating, but to try to let the character absorb her from within—"sein fur sich." German technical expertise veiled the acting skills: Herm's wig was like an effulgent halo, with no hint of the derelict whole; M's "pale gray tatters" were resplendently gold. Incon­ gruously, Beckett's rhythms pierced the finery. The Berlin Beckett evening was filled by these two brief plays, complementing each other: man's voice and women's voices, stillness and compulsive motion, a round constant image and a right-angled frame, a rush of asyntactical phrases and a series of grammatical dialogues with parallel phrases. Both plays present three fragments torn from an infinite continuum. Both plays present a graveside view of life: the old man might be on his death-bed sum­ moning for the last time his half-invented selves; isolated from one another and from a world, mother and daughter suffer aloud. Shakespeare's Ariel "foot[s] it featly," and very differently from Beckett's M, no matter "how feat she wheels." For Beckett that time—that human time—is "gone in no time," along with footfalls, "however faint they fall." In fall, 1976, in West Berlin, one could see within a single week the delicate duet of Damals and Tritte and the or­ chestral suite of Godot. It was with that suite, conducted in architectural space, that Beckett intended "for to end yet again" a directing career that he never viewed as other than a violon d'Ingres. Subsequent directing has been quasi-accidental; Krapp was a favor for a friend, and Play an obligation incurred through that favor. His own dramathreshold composition of That Time, followed by Footfalls,

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challenged him to the theatereality of image and rhythm. Although Elmar and Erika Tophoven translated the con­ centrated plays of the 1970s into German even before they were published in English, Beckett delayed the translation into French, and he might not have done it at all without the persuasion of Madeleine Renaud for Not I and Footfalls. Renaud is the quintessential interpreter of aristocracy as fantasized by the bourgeoisie, and she brought an ideal consumer's absorption to Act I of French Happy Days, but Act II handicapped her so that she rolled her eyes as though in search of a mirror to authenticate her existence. (She has intermittently revived Oh Ies beaux jours since its 1963 premiere, each time probing a little more deeply into Act II.) Her irrepressible expressive range militated against the French Not I, so that it was courageous of her to under­ take invisible V in Pas (Footfalls), with M played by Delphine Seyrig, who was a veteran of Beckett's Comedie and Va et Vient. Paris Pas followed Berlin Tritte by only six months, which in turn followed London Footfalls by three months.

Beckett concentrated on the actresses in each language, and the only change in French was a shuffle-sound instead of the sharp clack of English and German footfalls. That sound was obtained by gluing an emory board to Seyrig's rope-soled shoes. Like her two predecessors, Seyrig dis­ covered her own walk during rehearsal; with head bent and hands on opposite shoulders, she crossed her arms symmetrically in a V, and moved with a slight side-to-side rock. When speaking, Seyrig lifted her head and lowered her arms about six inches. She sometimes sank so deeply within herself during Renaud's monologue that her tears shone as her lips moved silently. Beckett recalled with pleasure the performances of both actresses in Comedie over a decade earlier. However, he recalled the pleasure and not the arduous staging of that play, which demands an adroit interrogator and three actors who can attain high nervous tension while evoking laughter through rapid but distinct articulation. He

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thought German Spiel was his first directorial bout with his Play.

In September, 1978, Beckett arrived in a Berlin familiar and friendly to him. Ensconced in his favorite studio at the Akademie der Kunste, he walked again the two miles to and from the Schiller Theater Werkstatt. The plays were pre­ cast, and the actors were not strangers. Klaus Herm had played Lucky in 1975, the Old Man in 1976, as well as the two television plays in 1977. Hildegard Schmahl had played M in Tritte, and although Sibylle Gilles had not worked with Beckett, she had played Miss Fitt in Deryk Mendel's 1966 staging of Alle Die Die Fallen. The Godot cast dropped in to see Beckett over coffee or beer. The San Quentin Drama Workshop was in residence in Bethanien, and they enlisted Beckett's aid on their Endgame and a re­ freshed Krapp, after Cluchey's mouth surgery. Walter Asmus was again Beckett's Assistant Director. "He's in­ valuable; I'm lucky to have him," Beckett told me. For Beckett's last directorial commitment to the Schiller Theater—Play—he proceeded as was his habit. In Paris with the Tophovens, he scrutinized the German text, revis­ ing slightly for euphony or symmetry. He reversed the po­ sitions of first and second woman, placing the legitimate spouse on the man's right. As he committed the text to memory, he wrote seventeen pages in a small notebook. Dealing mainly with rhythmic groups, these notes are the last example to date of the way Beckett rediscovers his text for staging. He lists the number of meetings of the mem­ bers of his triangle: two for the two women, three for the man with each of the women. Then he extracts themes as they strike him: "Being seen? Being heard? What being demanded? Will eye weary? Meaninglessness. Loss of rea­ son." Plot summary, light plot, new doublets, reduced Chorus—an experienced Beckett theatergoer could vis­ ualize the production from the notes. As in the productions of 1976, Schiller Theater techni­ cians replaced a designer, and trouble began for Beckett. From the start he explained that the spotlight manipulator

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was a fourth character whose precision must govern the whole. When, after two weeks of rehearsal, it was appar­ ent that no staff technician could man the spot, Asmus in­ troduced Frank Arnold who had been the interrogator in a student production. For professional work, however, he wanted a professional salary, and while this matter was negotiated, the unwieldy spot remained idle, so that the actors had less than a week's rehearsal with it. (Arnold's name does not appear on the program.) The actors had their own problems with the carefully cadenced text that was to be recited articulately at high speed, in "toneless" but not monotonous voices. Helped by their recent roles in other Beckett productions, Herm and Schmahl soon memorized the lines, but all three actors made mistakes in the difficult synchrony of the choral pas­ sages, in which individual words cannot be understood but the phrasing is as strict as an instrumental trio. So difficult was the total rendition of Spiel—spotlight, choruses, individual recitations—that there was not a single flawless run-through in rehearsal. The role of the prompter (Renate Terint), who might almost be a fifth character was therefore crucial. In a trap behind the three figures, each kneeling behind his/her urn, the prompter read the entire text aloud with each actor. She corrected mistakes by touching the erring actor on the elbow, con­ tinuing to whisper the text until the actor picked it up—a virtuoso feat at that speed. Beckett's Play was heavier than McWhinnie's Royal Court production of 1976. With urns glazed like artpottery, the actors looked well-nourished under the graygreen makeup they spent twenty minutes applying thickly so that it would not crack during the rapid recitation. With faces varying between bland and impassive, their pres­ sured voices conveyed a grave situation in past and present, only occasionally spiced by the man's hiccups and "Tropchen" of lemon, and the women's counter-recriminations. At their best, they achieved the lawnmower rhythm designated in the text: "A little rush, then

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another." Except for one long remonstrance to Asmus— inaudible to everyone else—Beckett was undemanding at late dress rehearsals. Play's spotlight triggers actors into speech, and it should also focus audience attention. However, the Schiller technology that contrived Winnie's burning torture in 1971 lapsed into restful gold by 1978. Moreover, the desired high-intensity light for Narration and Meditation was scarely distinguishable from the dimmer choral light. Of the tripartite performance the Meditation was most skill­ ful, since errors of interrogator and responders seemed part of the play, where speeches are cut in mid-sentence and where recapitulations can mesmerize the spectators. The nervous movements of the spotlight supply a credible rationale for the tonal deviations of the women—Wl's con­ tralto scream, "Get off me," and W2's rising scale of laugh­ ter. In contrast the Man's deviations from the rhythmic norm are low and slow: "Am I as much as . . . being seen? . . . We were not long together—" The last broken phrase expressed the feeling of Beckett's many Berlin friends when he caught flu during the final rehearsals of Play and was persuaded to leave precise de­ tails in the capable hands of Asmus. For the first time in his Berlin directing decade (1967 Endspiel to 1978 Spiel) Beckett was still in the city when rhapsodic reviews appeared, but he was too ill to notice. Inconspicuously, Beckett's direct­ ing career is interrupted rather than concluded, coughing to an autumn halt. Scheduled for 1979—"the month of May . . . the reawakening" promises Happy Days. Happy Days as Postscript It was June, 1979, when Beckett's Happy Days played at London's Royal Court Theatre. At the same time Andrei Serban directed Beckett's play—with inhabitual re­ straint—at the New York Shakespeare Festival Theater. Chirping through Inferno were two versatile Winnies, Irene Worth in New York and BiIlie Whitelaw in London. The

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thankless part of Willie went to George Voskovec in New York, Leonard Fenton in London. Instead of the "very pompier trompe-l'oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky," Serban's designers Yeargan and King created a hilly beach against a gently lit, sky-blue, cloudbrushed backdrop. London designer Jocelyn Herbert also contoured Winnie's mound, but she backed it with a rude curve of molten orange, harshly lit. In the center of each invariant set is Winnie. In New York Irene Worth was elegantly groomed in a purple felt hat with perky feather; in London Billie Whitelaw wore garish lipstick, a false beauty mark, straggly hair, and a small flower-printed hat that matched her one-strapped, erotic evening dress. Their props were as different as their clothes: flexible black cloth bag in New York and round leather bag half-buried in the London mound. WinnieWorth's mirror had a photograph on the back, and Winnie-Whitelaw's music-box was smaller than her tooth­ brush. Worth's white parasol burst into spectacular flame before she dropped it front and center; Whitelaw's tiny pink parasol emitted smoke before she flung it out of sight behind her. With contrasting Winnies on dissimilar sets, the two productions sported Willies who might be twins in their Act II full dress. In Act I they wore similar boaters which they dotted to reveal similar bald heads (without the text's bloody scratch). However, Voskovec was flashier—bright ribbon on boater, crisp instead of yellowed newspaper, giant postcard, all too conspicuous crawl in Act I, and ex­ tensive acrobatics in Act II. Nevertheless, Happy Days belongs to Winnie, a Pan­ dora-Prometheus who knows that "one loses one's clas­ sics." A stage veteran, Irene Worth is a Beckett novice. Like Madeleine Renaud in French, she can display verve, courage, curiosity, tenderness, irony, nostalgia, vanity, and occasional sadness. Repeated phrases—"ah well," "old style," "And now?" "That is what I find so won­ derful"—are newly shaded on each utterance. Her re-

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sources are varied but volatile, building no structure. She derives more actable pleasure from her props than she does from her husband, and yet the two biggest laughs greeted lines to and about Willie—"Oh, Willie, you're not eating it!" and "What a curse, mobility." Often regal on stage, Worth can lapse comfortably into comic vulgarity. In Act I she examines her gums by pulling at her frankly aging face, and she holds her toothbrush with clenched teeth when her hands are busy. In Act II she clownishly crosses her eyes to see her nose, mouth, tongue. Speaking standard English, she shifts to Brooklynese for the Shower/Cooker dialogue. Even sunk to the neck, she retains grim cheer. Near the play's end she is an appreciative spectator of Willie's antics on the mound. Her "Merry Widow" rendition is pure poignancy, and yet she etches a lasting image of merry widowhood. Billie Whitelaw is sad from the start of her happy day: even asleep, her arms are protectively around herself, like Beckett's German Krapp. Her first words—"Another heavenly day"—are a tired sigh. Her anxious question— "Did I brush and comb my hair?"—has an obviously nega­ tive answer. Although her props are realistic, with no spe­ cial attention accorded to glass, she handles them all like a designer rather than consumer. Whenever she tries to read the print on the toothbrush, she holds it high to her right. Whenever she tries to see an invisible Willie, she cranes back to her right. Immobilized, she is never still, but bends gracefully to Beckett's choreography—in Act I. But Act II is stark—head motionless, face wan and pale, voice slow and frail. As in his German production of 1971, Beckett's Winnie registers three voices—a patronizing tone to Willie, spon­ taneity for the immediacies of her happy day, and brood­ ing for her involuntary lapses from happiness. WinnieWhitelaw is also a gifted mimic—an Irish brogue when quoting Willie, broad Cockney for the Shower/Cooker couple and a child's treble for the Mildred story. But deep notes of despair sometimes intrude into all Whitelaw's

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voices. Consistently but subtly, she sorrows through passages about "strange." Unexpectedly wrenching is a phrase of the Shower/Cooker dialogue. In the text the man exclaims: "I'd dig her out with my bare hands." Whitelaw then drops her voice—as only she can—to repeat with in­ tense longing: "With my bare hands." The four words are an encyclopedia of love's expectations. The phrase also epitomizes the dramatic function of hands in Beckett's production. Winnie-Whitelaw poises hers with a dancer's grace. She dries them on the mound or stretches them to examine her nails. At the end of Act I she starts to clasp her hands for prayer, but they remain in midair at curtain-fall. Sometimes, her hands seem to con­ verse with Willie's hands, but his carry on their own monologue. His right hand flicks his boater in Act I, and doffs his topper in Act II. When Winnie's hands are buried in Act II, she still uses the word "hand" to Willie crawling up the mound; every time he hears it, he raises his upstage hand. When Winnie sings her barely audible "Merry Widow," Willie's downstage hand rests inert between wife and revolver; we will never know whether this is the last happy day in an asymptotic finale. Beckett affirms that Whitelaw's Happy Days is his theater swan song. In it he leaves traces of his directorial career— the repetitions of Endgame, the self-hug of Krapp, the sinuous mouth of Not I (especially in Act II), the crawl of Pozzo, the tangled hair of Footfalls. The speleological rigor of Samuel Beckett, director.

Notes PAGES 3-33 CHAPTER 1 1. Since Beckett often punctuates with three dots, I do not space them when I quote him; I do space my own ellipses. 2. Unless otherwise noted, dates designate completion. 3. In conversation. 4. See Robert Potter, The English Morality Play (London, 1975). 5. Colin Duckworth, Angels of Darkness (London, 1972) 17. 6. Clas Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting (Abo, Finland, 1976) 30. 7. Martha Fehsenfeld and Dougald McMillan trace revision in their in­ valuable Beckett at Work, which they generously allowed me to read in manuscript. German revisions are incorporated in the first volume of the 1976 Suhrkamp edition of Beckett's complete works. 8. John Calder, ed., Bedcett at Sixty (London, 1966) 99. 9. Gabriel d'Aubarede, "En attendant. . . Beckett," Nouvelles Litteraires (16 fevrier 1961) 7. CHAPTER 2 1. Unpublished, the manuscript is in the University of Texas Library at Austin; a typescript is at Baker Library, Dartmouth College. 2. Fehsenfeld and McMillan. 3. Pierre Melese, Beckett (Paris, 1966) 90. 4. James Knowlson, " 'Krapp's last tape' [sic]: the evolution of a play, 1958-75," Journal of Bedcett Studies (Winter, 1976) 50-65. 5. Zilliacus, chap. 5 and 6. 6. The confusion between reality and realism is not mine, and I hope the neologism will help distinguish them. 7. Alain Robbe-Grillet, "Samuel Beckett, auteur dramatique," Critique (February, 1953) 108-14; translated by Richard Howard in Alain RobbeGrillet, For a New Novel (New York, 1965) 111-26. 8. Martin Esslin, "Samuel Beckett and the Art of Broadcasting," En­ counter (September, 1975) 38-46. 9. Porter Abbott, "A Poetics of Radical Displacement," Texas Studies in Literature and Language (Spring, 1975) 219-38. 10. A Piece of Monologue, an incomplete play of 1979 for David Warrilow, could be performed in theatereality. 11. In a telephone conversation on September 7,1976. 12. For a brilliant interpretation of Ghost Trio see Beryl S. Fletcher et al., A Student's Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett (London, 1978) 210-16.

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NOTES, PAGES 34-77

CHAPTER 3

1. Kenneth and Alice Hamilton,Condemned to Life (Grand Rapids, 1976) 17, cite the birth certificate date as May 13. 2. Franz Link, Die Dramaturgie der Zeit (Freiburg, 1977). 3. Monique Borie, "Structures du temps theatral dans Ie theatre de Beckett," Revue des Sciences Humaines (July, 1972) 420. This is basically the view of Meinhard Winkgens, Das Zeitproblem in Samuel Becketts Dramen (Bern, 1975); Winkgens generously sent me his study. 4. Richard Coe, Samuel Bedcett (New York, 1964) 89. 5. C f . Link, chap. 5. 6. Lawrence Harvey, "Art and the Existential in En attendant Godot," PMLA (March, 1960) 143. 7. See note 4. 8. I was mistaken on page 154 of my Back to Beckett. 9. See Winkgens, 129. 10. Becketf s note is printed in the London, Faber & Faber paperback edition oiPlay, 1969, p. 24. CHAPTER 4

1. Thomas Van Laan, The Idiom of Drama (Ithaca, 1970) 31. 2. Bert O. States, The Shape of Paradox (Berkeley, 1978) 109. 3. Van Laan, 31. 4. Andrew Kennedy, Six Dramatists in Search of a Language (London, 1975) 154. Not until publication of Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds (Princeton, 1978) has there been rigorous examination of interior monologue and stream of consciousness. For contrast with dramatic solil­ oquy, see pp. 255-57. 5. Van Laan, 31. 6. Kennedy, 154. 7. VanLaan, 31. 8. George E. Duckworth, The Nature of Roman Comedy (Princeton, 1952) 103. 9. Enoch Brater, "The T in Becketf s Not I," Twentieth Century Literature (July, 1974) 198. 10. Van Laan, 31. 11. Ibid. CHAPTER 5

1. See Martin Esslin, "Beckett's Rough for Radio," Journal of Modern Lit­ erature (February, 1977) 102, for a different view. 2. Elin Diamond, "The Fictionalizers in Beckett's Plays," in Ruby Cohn, ed., Samuel Beckett (New York, 1975) addresses this subject from another point of view.

NOTES, PAGES 78-127

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3. Michael Haerdter, Materialien zu Becketts 'Endspiel,' (Frankfurt, 1968) 42-43. 4. Zilliacus, 143. 5. Esslin, 100. 6. Zilliacus, 86. 7. Hersh Zeifman, "Religious Imagery in the Plays of Samuel Beckett" in Ruby Cohn, ed., Samuel Beckett, 90. 8. Esslin, 101. 9. Zilliacus, 109. 10. Dating is a problem. Beryl Fletcher et al., A Student's Guide to the Plays of Samuel Bedcett (London, 1978) consulted Beckett to establish the order of composition as Words and Music, Radio I, Cascando, and Radio II. Manuscript dating confirms the order of the first three pieces, but Radio II may predate Radio I. 11. Zilliacus, 119. 12. Zilliacus, 128. 13. According to Zilliacus, 135. CHAPTER 6 1. Tom Driver, "Beckett by the Madeleine," Columbia Forum IV (sum­ mer, 1961) 25. 2. John Pilling, Samuel Bedcett (London, 1976) 31-33. 3. Elizabeth Segue, Style in Beckett's Prose, Dissertation University of California, Berkeley, 1975. 4. Bruce Kawin, Telling It Again and Again (Ithaca, 1972) 4. 5. C f . Peyton Glass, "Beckett: Axial Man," Educational Theatre Journal (October, 1977) 362-73. 6. C f . Anthony Easthope, "Hamm, Clov, and Dramatic Method in Endgame," Modern Drama (February, 1968) 429; Veronique Boulais, "Samuel Beckett: une ecriture en mal de je," Poitique #17,126-27. 7. See Susan Hayward, "The Use of Refrain in Becketf s Plays," Lan­ guage and Style (Fall, 1975). 8. Anselm Atkins, "A Note on the Structure of Lucky's Speech," Mod­ em Drama (December, 1966) 309. 9. Haerdter, 46. 10. S. E. Gontarski, "Crapp's First Tapes," Journal of Modern Literature (February, 1977) 64. The whole article describes the manuscript stages of the play. 11. James Knowlson, Light and Darkness in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett (London, 1972). 12. Esslin, 44. 13. Rosemary Poutney, "Samuel Beckett's Interest in Form," Modern Drama (September, 1976) 237-44. 14. Spotlight caprice is built into the printed text, since Wl rather than M is the first individual speaker after the introductory Chorus.

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NOTES, PAGES 128-163

15. Thanks to Breon Mitchell, Beckett's final English version appears only in Modern Drama (September, 1976) 257-60. However, Beckett has further revised the German text. 16. Abbott, 236. 17. Abbott, 237. 18. Zilliacus, 164. In the vocabulary of semiotics Betty Rojtman studies repetition among other phenomena in Forme et Signification dans Ie Thiatre de Beckett (Paris, 1976) CHAPTER 7

1. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Bedett (New York, 1978). Her quotations from letters are invaluable, but her own comments and quotations from con­ versations should be read cautiously. For example, I have not read all Johnson's works, but to none that I know does Beckett display "an as­ tonishing similarity of style." Nor does it sound like Beckett to affirm: "And if I follow any tradition, it is his [Johnson's]." (p. 257) 2. Bair, 256. 3. James Clifford, Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale) (Oxford, 1952) xv. W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York, 1977) augments Clifford's ac­ count. 4. Clifford, 468, 466. 5. See Appendix C. 6. This summary is based on Bate, Clifford, Hill, and has profited (I hope) from the learned suggestions of Professor Robert Hopkins of the University of California (Davis). 7. Mrs. Thrale, Anecdotes in G. Birbeck Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies (Oxford, 1897) vol. I, 341-42. 8. R. W. Chapman, ed., The Letters of Samuel Johnson (Oxford, 1952) #970. 9. Ibid., #972. 10. Bate, 502. 11. C. E. Vulliamy, Mrs. Thrale of Streatham (London, 1936) to which page numbers in parentheses refer. 12. Clifford, 471. 13. Chapman, #591. 14. An example is printed by Sighle Kennedy, Murphy's Bed (Lewisburg, 1971) facing 64. 15. Bate, 522. 16. Bair, 255. CHAPTER 8

1. Bair, 361-63 describes the manuscript at the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin.

NOTES, PAGES 164-193

285

2. Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett (Berkeley, 1968) 141. 3. John Fletcher and John Spuiling, Beckett: A Study of his Plays (New York, 1972) 51. 4. John Pilling, Samuel Beckett (London, 1976) 73. CHAPTER 9

1. After this chapter went to press, I learned from Richard L. Admussen, The Samuel BedcettManuscripts (Boston, 1979) p. 129, that Sotheby's in July, 1973, sold a Beckett notebook "containing early versions of Fin de Partie (Endgame), 53 pages with revision on 3 facing pages. . . ." I did not know of the existence of this manuscript, which is not available to scholars; until it is, my chapter is an interim study. 2. Jean-Jacques Mayoux, "Le theatre de Scimuel Beckett," Etudes Anglaises (October, 1957) 350. 3. I am grateful to Professor James May of University College, Dublin for sending me a photocopy of this manuscript. Beckett does not mention the notebook described in Note 1. 4. Bair, 447. 5. "Becketf s Letters on Endgame," in Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher, eds., Village Voice Reader (New York, 1963) 166. 6. Haerdter, 42-43, translated in Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett (Princeton, 1973) 146-51. CHAPTER 10

1. FehsenfeldandMcMillan. 2. John Fletcher, Samuel Beckett's Art (London, 1967) 43. 3. Melese, 147. 4. Roger Blin, "Une Solidarite entre maigres," Aris (9 juillet 1953) 5. 5. Irving Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine (London, 1978) 205. 6. Ibid., 208. 7. John Calder, ed., Beckett at 60 (London, 1967) 99. 8. Anon, "Why Actors are Fascinated by Beckett's Theatre," The Times (December 31, 1964) 4. See also Richard Toscan, "MacGowran on Beck­ ett," Theatre Quarterly (July-September, 1973) 15. 9. Pat Magee, "A Ramble Round Sam," Arts Guardian (May 5,1976) 10. 10. Schneider writes vividly, and he has published several pieces on directing Beckett's plays. "Working with Beckett" appeared first in Theatre Quarterly (September-November, 1975) and then in Harper, McMillan, Morot-Sir, eds., Samuel Beckett: the Art of Rhetoric (Chapel Hill, 1976), to which page numbers in parentheses refer. Alan Schneider has kindly checked my account for factual accuracy, but opinions are of course my own. 11. Ruby Cohn, ed., Casebook on Waitingfor Godot (New York, 1961) 56.

286

NOTES, PAGES 194-218

12. Alan Schneider, "Director as Dogsbody," Theatre Quarterly (AprilJune, 1973) 30. 13. Richard Schechner, "Reality Is Not Enough," Tulane Drama Review (Spring, 1965) 129. 14. Alan Schneider, "What Does a Director Do?" New York Theater Review (Spring, 1977) 17. 15. Information about Whitelaw comes from conversation and James Knowlson's interview in Journal of Beckett Studies (Summer, 1978). 16. Samuel Beckett, Play (London, 1968; paperback edition only) 24. 17. Anon, "Kindred Spirits," The Sunday Times (January 14, 1973) 28. 18. Ibid. 19. Michael Davie, "Le Grand Sam plays it again," The Observer Review (May 2,1976) 36. 20. A description opens Martin Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd (New York, 1961; revised edition 1968). Unless otherwise noted, information about Cluchey comes from several letters and conversations. CHAPTER 11 1. Of the genre jumps described, I have not seen Dunn's Unnamable, Hampton's All That Fall, and Kirby's Molloy, but I respect their other work. I am very grateful to Lee Breuer, Joseph Dunn, Christopher Hampton, E. T. Kirby, and David Warrilow for their generous informa­ tion. Becketf s tolerance of "anthologies" is seen in an October, 1978, let­ ter to an Irish actor: "Had you asked me in the first place—as you should have done—for permission to do this 'hodge-podge,' I would have re­ fused, as you no doubt surmised at the time. Now you ask me to bow before the 'fait accompli'! Ah well, go ahead. Yours, Sam Beckett." 2. Zilliacus, 3. 3. Beckett knew nothing of the 1977 Los Angeles Actors' Theatre tele­ cast of Godot, and, given the superficiality of that production, it is just as well. 4. Esslin, 42. 5. Becketfs television plans are published by Zilliacus, 204-205. 6. I am grateful to Tristram Powell for his information about Not I, and more grateful for his rich and strange production. 7. I thank Linda Ben-Zvi and Daniel Labeille for sharing their im­ pressions and contributing to this description. 8. Zilliacus, 180. 9. Ibid., 39. 10. Ibid., 50. 11. Beckett letter to Hampton, June 17,1967. 12. "Staging All That Fall," Drama at Calgary (November, 1967) 48. 13. Christopher Hampton, "All That Fall, Productions II and III, Final Report," Drama at Calgary (May, 1968) 40.

NOTES, PAGES 219-251

287

14. Ε. Τ. Kirby, "A Projection Theatre Production of Samuel Beckett's Mo/toy," Silo (Spring, 1969) 5. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 6. 17. Anon, "Holistic Theatre in Buffalo," Mtermtive Theatre (December, 1975) 2. 18. The Mabou Mines Company have also radically adapted Beckett's radio play Cascando for stage performance, and their adaptation of the novel Mercier and Camier is scheduled for 1979. Although Beckett has not seen Warrilow perform, he has offered him A Piece of Monologue.

CHAPTER 12 1. Haerdter, 88. 2. See Bair and especially Fehsenfeld and McMillan. 3. Bair, 236. 4. Charles Marowitz, "Paris Log," Encore (March, 1962) 44. 5. Information on VHypothese, which I did not see, comes from Pierre Chabert's letter to me of July 20, 1978, and from transcripts of his inter­ view with Dougald McMillan. 6. For a more detailed account of Becketfs staging of VHypothese see Fehsenfeld and McMillan, now in press. I can repeat this sentence for al­ most any of the productions I describe, and I am most grateful to them for allowing me to read their manuscript of Beckett at Work, which enabled me to minimize overlap in our two studies. 7. Becketfs memory and mine are at odds on this version, since he credits Serreau with direction. Alec Reid, All I can Mamge . .. (New York, 1968) 93, credits Serreau with directing the French premiere. Breon Mitchell, "Come and Go," Modern Drama (September, 1976) 252, credits Beckett but erroneously sets the production in the Odeon Theater's Petite Salle. (Mitchell's manuscript study is invaluable.) Bair leaves the director vague and mistakenly statesCome and Go to be a translation of Va et Vient. 8. Beckett insists that he was merely a consultant on the Berlin Come and Go, but Walter Asmus told me that joint discussion governed the pro­ duction. 9. Haerdter, 127. This fine account is the main source of my informa­ tion about Endgame rehearsals, upon which I drew in my Badc to Beckett. I thank Princeton University Press for permission to quote that account, as well as Happy Days. Page numbers in parentheses refer to Haerdter. 10. See Fehsenfeld and McMillan for fuller details. 11. C f . James Knowlson, "Krapp's last tape," journal of Beckett Studies (Winter, 1976) 50-65. 12. Pierre Chabert, "Beckett as Director," Gambit #28, 62. 13. This account is drawn from pages 186-92 of my Back to Beckett.

288

NOTES, PAGES 252-279

14. Discrepancies between different English language versions are noted by Hersh Zeifman, "The Alterable Whey of Words: The Texts of Waitirtgfor Godot," Educational Theatre Journal (March, 1977) 77-84. 15. An Englishman, having drunk a little more than usual, goes to a brothel. The bawd asks him if he wants a fair one, a dark one, or a redhaired one. The Englishman replies that he wants a boy. Shocked, the bawd threatens to call a policeman, whereupon the Englishman pleads: "O no, they're too gritty." 16. I have never heard him call it "bad," as Bair says on pp. 383, 388, 415. 17. Fehsenfeld and McMillan give more Notebook and production de­ tails for Godot than for any other Beckett play. 18. States, 48. 19. "Fragment and Beckett's Form in 'That Time' and 'Footfalls,' " Journal of Beckett Studies (Summer, 1977) 75. 20. Walter Asmus, "Practical aspects of theatre, radio and television," Journal of Beckett Studies (Summer, 1977) 82-95. Only That Time and Foot­ falls are described.

Bibliography of Works Cited Abbott, Porter. "A Poetics of Radical Displacement," Texas Studies in Literature and Language (spring, 1975) Admussen, Richard L. The Samuel Beckett Manuscripts, Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1979 Asmus, Walter. "Practical Aspects of theatre, radio and televi­ sion," Journal of Beckett Studies (summer, 1977) Atkins, Anselm. "A Note on the Structure of Lucky's Speech," Modern Drama (December, 1966) d'Aubarede, Gabriel. "En attendant . . . Beckett," Nouvelles Iitteraires (February 16,1961) Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978 Bate, W. Jackson. Samuel Johnson, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977 Blin, Roger. "Une Solidarite entre maigres," Arts (July 9,1953) Borie, Monique. "Structures du temps theatral dans Ie theatre de Beckett," Revue des Sciences Humaines (July-September, 1972) Boulais, Veronique. "Samuel Beckett: Une Ecriture en mal de je," Poitique #17 Brater, Enoch. "The T in Beckett's Not I," Twentieth Century Liter­ ature (July, 1974) . "Fragment and Beckett's Form in 'That Time' and 'Foot­ falls,' " Journal of Beckett Studies (summer, 1977) Calder, John, ed. Beckett at Sixty, London: Calder and Boyars, 1966 Chabert, Pierre. "Beckett as Director," Gambit #28 Chapman, R. W., ed. The Letters of Samuel Johnson, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1952 Clifford, James. Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale), Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1941 Coe, Richard. Samuel Beckett, New York: Grove Press, 1964 Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978 Cohn, Ruby, ed. Casebook on Waiting for Godot, New York: Grove Press, 1967 . Back to Beckett, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973

290

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cohn, Ruby, ed. Samuel Beckett, New York: McGraw Hill, 1975. Davie, Michael. "Le Grand Sam plays it again," The Observer Re­ view (May 2, 1976) Diamond, Elin. 'The Fictionalizers in Beckett's Plays," in Ruby Cohn, ed. Samuel Beckett, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975 Driver, Tom. "Beckett by the Madeleine," Columbia Forum (sum­ mer, 1961) Duckworth, Colin. Angels of Darkness, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972 Duckworth, George E. The Nature of Roman Comedy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952 Easthope, Anthony. "Hamm, Clov, and Dramatic Method in Endgame," Modern Drama (February, 1968) Esslin, Martin. "Samuel Beckett and the Art of Broadcasting," Encounter (September, 1975) . "Beckett's Rough for Radio," Journal of Modern Literature (February, 1977) Fehsenfeld, Martha and McMillan, Dougald. Beckett at Work, London: Calder, in press Fletcher, Beryl, et al. A Student's Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beck­ ett, London: Faber, 1978 Fletcher, John. Samuel Beckett's Art, London: Chatto and Windus, 1967 Fletcher, John and Spurling, John. Beckett: A Study of his Plays. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972 Fortier, Paul A. Unpublished Concordance to En attendant Godot, University of Manitoba, 1974 Glass, Peyton. "Beckett: Axial Man," Educational Theatre Journal, (October, 1977) Gontarski, S. E. "Crapp's First Tape," Journal of Modern Literature (February, 1977) . Beckett's Happy Days: A Manuscript Study, Columbus: Ohio State University Libraries, 1977. Haerdter, Michael. Materialien zu Becketts 'Endspiel,' Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968 Hamilton, Kenneth and Alice. Condemned to Life, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976 Hampton, Christopher. "Staging All That Fall," Drama at Calgary (November, 1967) . "All that Fall, Productions II and III, Final Report," Drama at Calgary (May, 1968)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

291

Harvey, Lawrence. "Art and the Existential in En attendant Godot," Publications of the Modern LanguageAssociation (March, 1960) Hayward, Susan. "The Use of Refrain in Beckett's Plays," Lan­ guage and Style (Fall, 1975) Hill, George Birbeck, ed. Boswell's Life of Johnson, revised by L. F. Powell. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1934-50 . Johnsonian Miscellanies. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1897 Janvier, Ludovic. Samuel Beckett par lui-mem. Bourges: Seuil, 1969 Kawin, Bruce. Telling It Again and Again, Ithaca: Cornell Univer­ sity Press, 1972 Kennedy, Andrew. Six Dramatists in Search of a Language, London: Cambridge University Press, 1975 Kennedy, Sighle. Murphy's Bed, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1971 Kenner, Hugh. Samuel Beckett, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968 Kirby, Ε. T. "A Projection Theatre Production of Samuel Beckett's Molloy," Silo (spring, 1969) Knowlson, James. Light and Darkness in the Theatre of Samuel Beck­ ett. London: Turret Books, 1972 . " 'Krapp's last tape:' the evolution of a play 1958-75," Journal of Beckett Studies (winter, 1976) . "Practical aspects of theatre, radio and television," Jour­ nal of Beckett Studies (summer, 1978) Link, Franz. Die Dramaturgie der Zeit, Freiburg: Rombach, 1977 Magee, Pat. "A Ramble Round Sam," Arts Guardian (May 5,1976) Marowitz, Charles. "Paris Log," Encore (March, 1962) Mayoux, Jean-Jacques. "Le Theatre de Samuel Beckett," Etudes anglaises (October, 1957) Melese, Pierre. Beckett, Paris: Seghers, 1966 Mitchell, Breon. "Art in Microcosm," Modern Drama (September, 1976) Pilling, John. Samuel Beckett, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976 Potter, Robert. The English Morality Play, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975 Poutney, Rosemary. "Samuel Beckett's Interest in Form," Modern Drama (September, 1976)

292

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Reid, Alec. All I Can Manage, More Than I Could, New York: Grove Press, 1968 Robbe-Grillet, Alain. "Samuel Beckett, auteur dramatique." Critique (February, 1953); revised and translated in For a New Novel, New York: Grove Press, 1965 Rojtman, Betty. Forme et Signification dans Ie Thiatre de Samuel Beck­ ett. Paris: Nizet, 1976 Schechner, Richard. "Reality Is Not Enough," Tulane Drama Re­ view (spring, 1965) Schneider, Alan. "Waiting for Beckett," Chelsea Review (Septem­ ber, 1958); abridged in Ruby Cohn, ed. Casebook on Waitingfor Godot, New York, Grove Press, 1967 . "Director as Dogsbody," Theatre Quarterly (April-June, 1973) . "Working with Beckett," Theatre Quarterly (SeptemberNovember, 1975); reprinted in Harper, McMillan, Morot-Sir, eds. Samuel Beckett: The Art of Rhetoric. Chapel Hill: Univer­ sity of North Carolina Press, 1976 . "What Does a Director Do?" New York Theater Review (spring, 1977) Segre, Elizabeth. Style in Beckett's Prose, Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1975 States, Bert O. The Shape of Paradox, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978 Toscan, Richard. "MacGowran on Beckett," Theatre Quarterly (July-September, 1973) Van Laan, Thomas. The Idiom of Drama, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970 Vulliamy, C. E. Mrs. Thrale of Streatham, London: Jonathan Cape, 1936 Wardle, Irving. The Theatres of George Devine, London: Jonathan Cape, 1978 Winkgens, Meinhard. Das Zeitproblem in Samuel Becketts Dramen, Frankfurt: Lang, 1975 Zeifman, Hersh. "Religious Imagery in the Plays of Samuel Beck­ ett," in Ruby Cohn, ed. Samuel Beckett, New York: McGraw Hill, 1975 . "The Alterable Whey of Words: The Texts of Waiting for Godot," Educational Theatre Journal (March, 1977) Zilliacus, Clas. Beckett and Broadcasting, Abo: Acta Academiae Aboensis, Ser. A Humaniora, 1976

APPENDIX A

Beckett as Playwright* 1931 1937 1947 1949 1956

1958

1959 1961

1962 1963 1965 1966 1972 1975

1976 1979

Le Kid Human Wishes + Eleutheria En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot, 1954) Fin de partie (Endgame, 1958) Acte sans paroles I (Act Without Words 1,1958) Acte sans paroles II (Act Without Words II, 1959) All That Fall Krapp's Last Tape Theatre I? (translated 1975) t Theatre II (translated 1975) + Embers Happy Days Words and Music Esquisse radiophonique (Rough for Radio I, 1976) t Poehade radiophonique (Rough for Radio II, 1975) t Cascando (translated 1962) Play Film Come and Go Eh Joe Breath Not I That Time Footfalls Ghost Trio . . . but the clouds . . . A Piece of Monologue t

* Dates are those of completion or abandoning, which sometimes cor­ rect those listed in my Back to Bedcett. t Designates fragments.

APPENDIX B

Beckett as Stage Director 1965 L'Hypothese, by Pinget 1966 Va et Vient 1967 1969 1971 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979

Endspiel Das letzte Band Gliickliche Tage Warten auf Godot Pas Moi, La Derniere Ba Footfalls Damals, Tritte Krapp's Last Tape Pas, Pas Moi Spiel Happy Days

Musee d'Art Moderne Odeon, Paris Odeon, Paris Schiller Werkstatt, Berlin Schiller Werkstatt, Berlin Schiller Werkstatt, Berlin Schiller Theater, Berlin D'Orsay Petite Salle, Paris Royal Court, London Schiller Werkstatt, Berlin Akademie der Kiinste, Berlin D'Orsay Grande Salle, Paris Schiller Werkstatt, Berlin Royal Court, London

APPENDIX C

Human Wishes * ACT 1 A room in Bolt Court. Wednesday, April 4th, 1781. Evening Mrs Williams (meditating). Mrs Desmoulins (knitting). Miss Carmichael (reading). The cat Hodge (sleeping—if possible). MRS D. He is late.

(Silence) MRS D. God grant all is well.

(Silence) MRS D. PUSS puss puss puss puss.

(Silence) MRS W. What are you reading, young woman? MISS C. A book, Madam. MRSW. Ha!

(Silence) MRS D. Hodge is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.

(Silence) MRSD. For his age, an uncommonly fine cat in all

MRS W. MRS D. MRSW. MRS D. MRSW. MRS D. MRS W.

respects. When Hodge was a younger cat, I well remember— You are knotting, Madam, I perceive. That is so, Madam. What? I am knotting, my dear Madam, a mitten. Ha! The second of a pair. (Silence) What book, young woman? (Silence)

2%

HUMAN WISHES

MRS W. (loudly). I say, WHAT BOOK? Miss C. Upon my soul, Madam, your perceptions are very fine, very fine indeed, uncommonly fine in all respects. MRS W. I may be old, I may be blind, halt and maim, I may be dying of a pituitous defluxion, but my hearing is unimpaired. MISS C. And your colloquial powers. MRS D. Dying of a what, my dear Madam? MRS W. And while I continue to live, or rather to respire, I hope I shall never submit to be insulted by sluts, slovens, upstarts, parasites and intruders. MRS D. Come, come, my dear lady. MRS W. Knot on, Madam, knot on, or endeavour to talk like a sensible woman. MRS D. YOU wish to provoke me, Madam, but I am not provoked. The peevishness of decay is not pro­ voking. Miss C. Insupportable hag. MRS D. (Rising). That is not the language of a gentle­ woman, Miss Carmichael. Miss C. (Rising). I have not the advantage, Madam, of being the relict of a writing-master. MRS W. (Striking the floor with her stick). Be seated; and let your scurrility be the recumbent scurrility of polite society. Miss C. Nor the daughter of a Welsh mechanic. MRS D. Of whom you are the relict, Miss Carmichael, or of how many, I prefer not to enquire. MRS W. Were I not loath, Madam, to abase myself to your syntax, I could add: or of whom the daughter, or of how many. Miss C. (Laughs heartily, sits down and resumes her book). MRS W. Is the jest yours, Madam, or is it mine? MRS D. To be called a loose woman would not move me to mirth, for my part, I believe. (Sits down).

HUMAN WISHES

297

MRS W. And to be called the daughter of a loose woman,

MRS D. MRS W. MRS D.

MRS W.

MRS W. MRS W. Miss C. MRS W.

Miss C. MRS W.

Miss C. MRS W.

Miss C. MRS W. MRS D. MRS W. MRS D. MRS W. MRS D. MRS W.

would that move you to mirth, Madam, for your part, do you suppose? It would not, Madam, I believe. But what would move you, Madam, to mirth, do you suppose, for your part? TO mirth, Madam, for my part, I am with diffi­ culty moved, I believe. (Silence) Madam, for mirth, for my part, I never had the heart; Madam, for my part, to mirth I have not been moved since birth. (Silence) Please to take it down. I repeat. (Repeats). (Silence) Is it down? It is, Madam. In what will not dry black and what was never white. Give it to me here in my hand. (Rises, takes a blank sheet off the table, hands it to Mrs W. and returns to her seat). (Fingering the sheet tenderly). I did not hear the scratch of the quill. I write very quiet. I do not feel the trace of the ink. I write very fine. Very quiet, I write, and very fine. (Silence) Mrs Desmoulins. Madam. YOU have ceased to knot, I perceive. That is so, Madam. (Silence) Mrs Desmoulins. What is it, Madam? YOU say you are not merry. Very well. But who is

298

MRS D. MRS W. MRS D. Miss C. MRSD. MRS W. MRS D. Miss C. MRSW. MRS D. MRS W. Miss C. MRS W.

MRS D. MRS W. MRS D. MRS W. Miss C. MRS W. Miss C. MRS W. MRS W.

MRS W.

HUMAN WISHES

merry in this house? You would not call me merry, Madam, I suppose? NO, Madam, you are not what I would call merry. And Frank, Madam, would you call Frank merry? NO, Madam, I would not. Except when drunk. The gross hilarity of ebriety is not merriment, Miss Carmichael, to my mind. And Levett, Madam, would you call Levett merry? I would not call Levett anything, Madam. Not even when drunk. And poor Poll here, Madam, is poor Poll here what you would call merry? She was taken into the house to be merry. I do not ask why she was taken into the house. I ask is she merry or is she not merry. I was merry once, I think. (Loudly). What is it to me, Miss, that you were merry once? Are you merry, or are you not merry, NOW? She was taken in to enliven the house. I do not feel myself enlivened, for my part. What you feel, Madam, and what you do not feel, is of little consequence. I am aware of that, Madam. I am not merry, you are not merry, Frank is not merry— Except when drunk. Silence! Levett is not merry. Who remains? The cat. (Striking the floor with her stick). Silence! Silence. The cat does not remain. The cat does not enter into the question. The cat cannot be merry. Silence. I ask, who remains? Silence

HUMAN WISHES

299

MRSW. (Loudly). I ask, who remains, who might be merry? MRS D. Who was taken into the house to be merry. MRS W. (Striking the floor with her stick). Silence! Silence MRS W. I ask, who remains who might be merry, and I answer (pointing her stick at Miss Carmichael), she remains. Silence MRS W. IS she merry? Silence MRS W. (At the top of her voice). IS SHE MERRY? Miss C. (Softly). She is not. Silence MRS W. (Softly) Nobody in this house is merry. MRS D. I hope you are satisfied, Madam. Silence Miss C. And the doctor, is the doctor. . . . Silence MRS D. He is late. Silence MRS D. God grant all is well. Enter LEVETT, slightly, respectably, even reluctantly drunk, in great coat and hat, which he does not remove, carrying a small black bag. He advances unsteadily into the room & stands peering at the company. Ignored ostenta­ tiously by Mrs D. (knitting), Miss Carmichael (reading), Mrs W. (meditating), he remains a little standing as though lost in thought, then suddenly emits a single hiccup of such force that he is almost thrown off his feet. Startled from her knitting Mrs D., from her book Miss C., from her stage meditation Mrs W., survey him with indignation. L. remains standing a little longer, absorbed & motionless, then on a wide tack returns cautiously to the door, which he does not close behind him. His unsteady footsteps are heard on the stairs. Between the three women exchange of looks. Gestures of disgust. Mouths opened and shut. Finally they resume their occupations.

300

HUMAN WISHES

MRS W. Words fail us. MRS D. NOW this is where a writer for the stage would MRS W. MRS D. MRS W. MRS D. MRS W. Miss C. MRS W. MRS D. MISS C. MRS D.

Miss C. MRS D. MRS W. MRS D. MRS W. MRS D. MISS C. MRS W.

Miss C. MRS W.

Miss C. MRS W.

MRS D.

have us speak no doubt. He would have us explain Levett. To the public. The ignorant public. To the gallery. TO the pit. TO the boxes. Mr Murphy. Mr Kelly. Mr Goldsmith. Let us not speak unkindly of the departed. The departed? Can you be unaware, Miss, that the dear Doctor's debt to nature— Not a very large one. That the dear doctor's debt to nature is dis­ charged these seven years. More. Seven years to-day, Madam, almost to the hour, neither more nor less. His debt to nature? She means the wretched man is dead. Dead! Dead. D-E-A-D. Expired. Like the late Queen Anne and the Rev. Edward . Well I am heartily sorry indeed to hear that. SO was I, Miss, heartily sorry indeed to hear it, at the time, being of the opinion, as I still am, that before paying his debt to nature he might have paid his debt to me. Seven shillings and six­ pence, extorted on the contemptible security of his Animated Nature. He asked for a guinea. There are many, Madam, more sorely disap­ pointed, willing to forget the frailties of a life long since transported to that undiscovered country from whose—

HUMAN WISHES

301

MRS W. (Striking the floor with her stick). None of your

MRS D. MRS W.

MRS W.

MRS D. MRS W. MRS D.

MRS W.

MRS D. MRS W.

MRS D.

Miss C. Mrs. W. MRS D.

Shakespeare to me, Madam. The fellow may be in Abraham's bosom for aught I know or care, I still say he ought to be in Newgate. (Sighs and goes back to her knitting). I am dead enough myself, I hope, not to feel any great respect for those that are so entirely. SUence Also I should very much like to know, Madam, if the power of speech has not deserted you, for what reason it is improper in poor Poll here to mention the "dear doctor", and proper in you to pronounce the sacred name of that drunken staymaker Hugh Kelly, dead and damned these five years. YOU are mistaken, Madam. In what am I mistaken? In saying that Mr Kelly is no longer with us. It is impossible that the creator of False Delicacy should have been laid to rest and the fact not come to my notice. Your notice! After fifty years of dropped stitches, pious exertions and charity-brats, you still speak of your notice. (Scorns to reply). And your "laid to rest!" Laid to rest in lakes of boiling small-beer, with his Dublin publican papa, that's where he's laid to rest, your stayless, playless, briefless, drunken party-scribbler. Miss Carmichael, would you have the great goodness to close the door. I would not, Madam. (At the top of her voice). KELLY IS DEAD, MADAM. (Rising) I have nothing more to say, Madam, but that you are mistaken, most offensively mis­ taken. (Exit, banging door behind her). Enter Mrs D. She speaks from the threshold.

302

HUMAN WISHES

MRS D. Mr Kelly is alive and, I trust, drawing his pension without encumbrance. Mr Kelly may be poorly, but he is alive, and, I pray God, drawing his pen­ sion without encumbrance. (Exit, banging door.) Enter Mrs D. as before. MRS D. Should however Mr. Kelly, by some extraordi­ nary haphazard, be no longer alive— MRS W. Nor drawing his pension without encumberland. MRS D. And the fact not have come to my notice, I. . . I. . . . (Weeps) MRS D. I shall regret it bitterly . . . bitterly. . . . (Exit, clos­ ing door softly) Silence MRS W. Forgive me. I was musing. Silence MRS W. I was musing as to whether what she . . what the. . . . (Breaks off. Strikes floor with stick). Pest! Silence MRS W. I was musing thus: is what she bitterly regrets, what already it may be she . . . (Breaks off. Strikes floor with stick). PEST! Silence MRS W. (In a strong decided tone) What will the woman bitterly regret, if she does not do so already, the death of Kelly or the fact not having come to her notice. Silence MRS W. There is a notice of the mind and there is a notice of the heart. The first is nothing. And the heart is cold. Silence MRS W. (Now evidently talking to herself). For years, for how many years every day, dead, whose name I had known, whose face I had seen, whose voice I had heard, whose hand I had held, whose—but it is idle to continue. Yesterday, in the flower of her age, Mrs Winterbotham, the greengrocer of the

HUMAN WISHES

Miss C. MRS W.

Miss C. MRS W. MRS W.

MRS W.

MRS W.

Miss C.

MRS W.

Miss C. MRS W.

303

Garden; Monday, Mr Pott of the Fleet; Sunday, in great pain, in his home in Islington, after a lin­ gering illness, surrounded by his family, the Very Reverend William Walter Okey, Litt.D., LL.D; Saturday, at Bath, suddenly, Miss Tout; Fri­ day,—but it is idle to continue. I know— And to-day, Madam? (With a start). I beg your pardon? And to-day, Madam. To-day is not yet over, Miss Carmichael. Silence I know they are dead, their deaths are come to the notice of my mind. Silence When my father, Mr Zachariah Williams, died, on the 12th of June, seventeen hundred and fifty-five (old time), at twelve at night, in his eighty third year, after an illness of eight months, in full possession of his mental faculties, I knew at once he was dead. He died, and at once I knew he was dead. I wept, because one weeps, when one's father dies. I remember turning, that morn­ ing, with tears in my eyes, whose vigour even then was beginning to abate, the pages of his pamphlet: An Account of an Attempt to Ascertain the Longitude at Sea: with a Table of the Variations at the most Remarkable Cities in Europe. Silence But it did not come to the notice of my heart until the Christmas following. Silence "Death meets us everywhere, and is procured by every instrument and in all chances, and enters in at many doors; by violence—" What twaddle is this, Miss Carmichael? I am reading from my book, Madam. I did not suppose you were inventing it.

304

HUMAN WISHES

Miss C. "By violence and secret influence; by the aspect of a star and the stink of a mist—" MRS W. The stink of a mist? Miss C. Yes, Madam, the stink of a mist. MRS W. Continue, continue. Miss C. "Of a mist; by the emissions of a cloud and the meeting of a vapour; by the fall of a chariot and the stumbling at a stone; by a full meal or an empty stomach; by watching at the wine or by watching at prayers; by the sun or the moon; by a heat or a cold; by sleepless nights or sleeping days; by water frozen or water thawed; by a hair or a raisin—" MRS W. A hair or a raisin?* Miss C. Yes, Madam, a hair or a raisin. MRS W. HOW do you suppose death enters in by a hair, Miss Carmichael? Miss C. Perhaps a horse-hair is meant, Madam. MRS W. Perhaps so indeed. I know if death would be con­ tent to enter into me by a horse-hair, or by any other manner of hair for that matter, I should be very much obliged to him. Miss C. "By a hair or a raisin; by violent exertion or by sit­ ting still; by severity or dissolution; by God's mercy or God's anger; by everything in Provi­ dence and everything in manners, by everything in nature and everything in chance." Silence MRS W. Brown for a guinea. (Miss Carmichael rises). MRS W. I say: Brown for a guinea. Miss C. I hear you, Madam. MRS W. Then answer me. Is it Brown or is it not Brown? Miss C. Brown or Black, Madam, it is all one to me. * Beckett's fair copy ends here, but the holograph continues to "Taylor."

HUMAN WISHES

305

MRS W. IS it possible she reads and does not know what

she reads. Miss C. I read so little, Madam, it is all one to me. MRS W. Turn to the title page, my child, and tell me is it Brown. MISS C. (Turning to the title page). Taylor.

Index NOTE: All works cited herein are by Samuel Beckett unless otherwise in­ dicated. A (Fm de Partie), 178-86 Abbott, Porter, 29 Act Without Words I, 4-6, 21 Acf Without Words 11, 5-6, 51 Ada (Embers), 25, 84,118 Addie (Embers), 24,118 Akademie der Kunste, 205,249-50, 274 All ThatFall, 6, 23-24, 82-83, 92, 115-17,138,161,191, 208, 211, 215-17 American Contemporary Theater, 221 Amy (Footfalls), 56,135 Animator Qiadio II), 86-87 Arnold, Frank, 275 Asm us, Walter, 236, 268, 274-75 Atkins Anselm, 106 B(FindePartie), 178-86 Bair, Deirdre, 143,148,162,173 Barber, Francis, 148, 152,156-57, 159 Baretti, Guiseppi, 149,151-52,159 Bate, W. Jackson, 146 Beckett, Samuel, as director, 24, 34-35, 204-06, 230-79; research on Samuel Johnson, 143-61; theories on theater, 207, 216, 230-79 Bedcett and Broadcasting (Zilliacus), 208, 215 Beginning to End, 207 Berkeley, George, 5 Bethanien Center, 249-50 Bible, The, 143, 239-40, 259-61 Bim, 176-77

Blin, Roger, 19,163,173,189-91, 197 Bollmann, Horst, 261-66 Bolton (Embers), 83-85,119 Bom, 176-77 Borie, Monique, 34-35 Boswell, James, 148,152,155,158 Boy (Waiting for Godot), 257-66 Brater, Enoch, 71, 268 Breath, 4, 6 Brecht, Bertolt, 225 Breuer, Lee, 221, 224-25 Broadley, A. C., 151 Burney, Fanny, 144,148,150-52, 155 . . . but the clouds . . . , 32-33,13637,197, 207-08, 250 Cage, The (Cluchey), 203-04 Carmichael, Polly, 149-52,157, 159-61 Cascando, 27, 83-92,124-25,138 Cathcart, Thom, 224-25 Chabert, Pierre, 232-33, 248-49 characters, in Beckett's work, 12, 76-77, 92 Cherry Lane, Theater, 22 Cid (Corneille), 231 Claudius, Matthias, 250 Clob (Endgame), 21-22, 42-45, 60-64, 77-80,107-15,161,178-86, 238-45 Cluchey, Rick, 202-06, 249-50, 274 Coe, Richard, 35, 42 Collected Works of Beckett (Suhrkamp), 238 Come and Go, 7, 29,127-28, 136,

308

INDEX

Comeand Go (cont.)

139,161,167, 224-26, 233-37 Comidie, 233-37, 287n Comedie Frangaise, 190 comedy as used in plays, 11-13, 58-61 Cooker (Happy Days), 9, 47,122, 253-56 costumes in plays, 11-13, 58-61 Cowper, William, 149,157 Croak (Words and Music), 88-89,124 crucifixion as theme in plays, 31-34, 259-61 Cusack, Cyril, 211 Dante, 143 Death and the Maiden (Schubert),

115 death as theme in plays, 50; in Comeand Go, 7; in Endgame, 7-8, 80; in Footfalls, 10-11; in Godot, 7-8; in Happy Days, 7, 9, 81; in Krapp's Last Tape, 10; in Not I,10; in Play, 10; in That Time, 10, 74 Deathwatch (Genet), 203 Desmoulins, Elizabeth, 148, 152, 157,159-60 Devine, George, 190-91,197-98 dialogue, 59-60, 81, 96-139 Dick (Radio II), 86-87 Dictionary of National Biography,

151-52 directors of Beckett plays, 207-29 Directors Notebooks, 24,119-29, 230-79 distanced doublet, 99,115,117, 122-23,136 distanced triplet, 113,121, 130 Dunn, Joseph, 221-22 echo doublets, 99-100,107-08,113, 115,138-39 echo triplets, 100-01,107-08,11316,138-39 Echo's Bones, 143

Eh Joe, 6-7, 28-29, 31,127-29,167,

191 Eleutheria, 4, 97, 143, 163-72,189;

setting for, 17-18, 32, 36 Eliot, T. S., 85,118 Embers, 6, 24-25, 65-66, 82-86, 92, 118-19,138 Endgame, 7-9,12, 21-23, 60-64, 69, 77-80, 161,190-91, 202-07, 267279; and Fin de Partie, 174-86; German production of, 237-45; and Happy Days, 83; repetition as device in, 107-15; time as theme in, 35, 42-45 Ends and Odds, 80 Epstein, Alvin, 209 Esslin, Martin, 87,125 Estragon (Waiting for Godot), 7-9, 13, 20-21, 36, 41, 58-60, 98-108, 257-66 Ewell, Tom, 193 F (Fin de Partie), 174-86 F (Ghost Trio), 31 Fehsenfeld, Martha, 20,189 Fenton, Leonard, 277 fiction, as device in plays, 76-95; dramatized, 219-29 Film, 5-7, 28-29, 136, 167, 192 film plays, 5-6, 28 film productions of theatrical works, 209 Finde Partie, 173-86, 190 Flo (Come and Go), 233-34 Floyer, John, 158 Fontane, 143 Foote, Samuel, 149,151-52 Footfalls, 10-11, 30, 53, 55-56, 74, 93-95, 133-36,138,197, 200-01, 250, 267, 269-73, 279 form, Beckett's interest in, 11 Fortier, Paul, 102-03 Fortner, Wolfgang, 208 Forum Theater, 203 Fox (Radio II), 86-87

INDEX Friedrich, Kaspar David, 260 From an Abandoned Work, 207 Gaber (Molloy), 220 German productions of Beckett's work, 235-48 Geulincx, Arnold, 5, 35 Ghost Trio, 6, 31, 33,136,197, 250 Giacometti, Alberto, 19 Gilles, Sibylle, 274 Glazier (Eleutheria), 163,165-72 Glass, Philip, 224 Glenville, Peter, 192 Guiness, Alec, 192 Haerdter, Michael, 230 Hall, Peter, 193 Hamlet (Shakespeare), compared with Endgame, 62; with Krapp's Last Tape, 65; with Godot, 7 Hamm (Endgame), 8,13, 21-22, 42-45, 60-64, 77-80,107-15,152, 161,174, 178-86, 237-45, 267-68 Hampton, Christopher, 215-19 Hansell, Johann-Richard, 212 happiness, as theme in Godot, 104 Harris, Rosemary, 197 Happy Days, 7, 9, 25-26, 46-50, 64-69, 80-82,119-24,138,191, 197, 236, 276-79; compared with Endgame, 82 with Godot, 46-47: German production of, 251-56 Hawkins, John, 148,156,159 Held, Martin, 212-13, 245-47, 256 Henry (Embers), 6, 25, 83-86, 118-19 Herbert, Jocelyn, 191, 277 Herm, Klaus, 264-69, 272, 247-76 Hill, George Birbeck, 148,156-57 Hill, Rose, 270 Hodge (Samuel Johnson's cat),157 Holderlin, J.C.F., 143, 236 Holloway (Embers), 84-85, 119 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 159

309

Human Wishes, 143-62,167; see also Appendix C VHypothise (Pinget), 230, 232-33, 248 Idiom of Drama (Van Laan), 101 Imagination Dead Imagine, 224 infinity as theme in plays, 35 interrupted doublets, 99 Ireland, used as locale in plays, 23-24 Jacques (Eleutheria), 166-72 Jacques (Molloy), 220 Joe (Eh Joe), 28-31,167 Joeres, Charlotte, 271-72 Johnson, Samuel, 143-62 Joyce, James, 11,143 Kawin, Bruce, 97 Kazner, Kurt, 209 Keaton, Buster, 5-6 Kelly, Hugh, 161 Kennedy, Andrew, 64, 66 Kid, 230-31 Kirby, E. T., 219-21 Knowlson, James, 24 Kott, Jan, 19 Krap, Henri (Eleutheria), 164-66 Krap, Madame (Eleuthiria), 165-72 Krap, Victor (Eleutheria), 17-18, 74, 163-72 Krapp (Krapp's Last Tape), 24, 50-52,116-18, 52 Krapp's Last Tape, 10, 24, 64-66, 116-18,138, 191, 204-06, 208, 211-13; Cluchey production, 249-50; French production, 24849; German production, 245-47; time as theme, 36, 50-52 Lahr, Bert, 193 Laing, R. D., 219 Langton, Bennet, 158 language in plays, 20, 41, 63-64,

310

INDEX

language in plays (cont.) 70-72, 75, 90, 97-139,183-85; see also repetition, 257-58 Levett, Robert, Dr., 148-49,152, 156-61 Life of Samuel Johnson (Hawkins), 156 Lindon, Jerome, 163 Link, Franz, 34 locale, in plays, 17-33 Lost Ones, The (Le Depeupleur), 224-25 Lucky (Waiting for Godot), 7, 20-21, 38-42, 58-60, 99-108,174, 257-66 M(FindePartie), 178-86 M (Footfalls), 30,133-36,197, 20001, 271-73 M (Play), 28, 53-54, 69,125-27 McGlome, Miss (Krapp's Last Tape), 24 MacGowran, Jack, 191-92, 211-12, 244 McGreevy, Thomas, 143 McMillan, Dougald, 20,189 McWhinnie, Donald, 191, 267-69, 275 Mabou Mines Company, 224-29, 287n Macaulay, 152, 55 MaAeth (Shakespeare), 161 Magee, Pat, 23, 64, 191-92, 211, 267-68 manuscripts for Fin de Partie, 17386, 285n Marowitz, Charles, 231 Martin, Jean, 174 Matias, 19, 216, 236, 244, 253, 258 Maude (Radio II), 86-87 May (Footfalls), 55-57,93-94,134-36 Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, 173,177 Melese, Pierre, 23 Mendel, Deryk, 215-16, 256 Meraer and Camier, 287n Meredith, Burgess, 209-11 Millie (Happy Days), 81 Minetti, Bernhard, 216-17

Milton, John, 35 Molloy, 219-21 Montagu, Mrs., 149,152 Moran (Molloy), 219-21 More Pricks Than Kicks, 143, 177 Mortin (L'Hypothise), 232-33 Morton, Bill, 213-14 Mostel, Zero, 209-11 Mother (Footfalls), 56-57, 93-94 Mouth (Not I), 29-30, 54-55, 70-71, 92, 129-31, 197-201, 213-15, 266-67 Murphy, 143-44, 62 Murphy, Arthur, 148,151-52 Music (Words and Music), 88-89 Myerberg, Michael, 193 Nagg (Endgame), 8, 21-22, 43-45, 61-64, 78-79,107-15, 179-86, 237-45 nature, as theme in plays, 26 Nell (Endgame), 8, 21-22, 43-45, 78-79,107-15,174,179-86, 237-45 Neveux, Georges, 189 New York Shakespeare Festival Theater, 276 Noel, Jacques, 22 Not 1,10, 29-30, 53-55, 60-70, 72, 92, 95, 129-31,138, 197-201, 208, 213, 279; French production, 262-63 O (Film), 5-6, 28-29,167 O'Casey, Sean, 244 Olivier, Laurence, 215 Opener (Cascando), 87-91,124-25 Oriental theater, 224 Osborne, John, compared with Beckett, 58 P (Fin de Partie), 178-86 pathos-mathos (Aeschylus), 3 Piece of Monologue, A, 30, 281n, 287n Pilling, John, 96 Pinget, Robert, 230, 232-33

INDEX Piouk, Dr., (Eieuthma), 165-72 Piozzi, Gabriel, 147-61 Pirandello, Luigj, 75-77, 92,161 place, sense of in plays, 17-33 Play, 3,10,27,53-54,69-70,125-27, 138,191,196-98, 207, 224-25, 267; German production, 273-76 Plowright, Joan, 215 polysemic refrain (dialogue de­ vice), 103,108-12 pounders (dialogue device), 10102,104-08,112-13,118,138-39 Poutney, Rosemary, 125 Pozzo QNaitingfor Godot), 7-8, 19-20, 38-43, 45, 58-60, 99-108, 257-66 Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 101-02 prisons, Beckett productions in, 202-04 projection theater, 219-21 Proust, 143 Proust, Marcel, 143 Raddatz, Carl, 256-66 radio plays, 6, 27, 82,138 radio broadcasts of Beckett plays, 208-11, 215-17 Radio 1, 83, 89 Radio 11, 83, 86-89 refrains (dialogue device, 101-04, 107-112,120-28 Renaud, Madeleine, 253, 266, 273 repetition, as dramatic device, 96139, 183-85 Reynolds, Joshua, 157 Richardson, Ralph, 192 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 27 Rooney, Dan (Al/ That Fall), 6,13, 23, 82-83, 92,115-17,161, 215-18 Rooney, Maddy {All That Fall), 23, 25, 115-17, 215-18 Rough for Radio, 27,197 Royal Court Theater, 22-23,190, 267, 270 Ru (Come and Go), 233-36

311

Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (Taylor), 160 Sam (Watt), 35 Samuel Johnson (Stephens), 157 San Francisco Actor's Workshop, 202-03 San Quentin Prison, 202-04 San Quentin Drama Workshop, 202-05, 249-50, 274 Sauberlich, Lu, 216-17 SchiUer Theater, 203, 256-57, 274 Schiller Theater Workshop (Schil­ ler Theater Werkstatt), 212, 250, 253, 256, 268, 274 Schmahl, Hildegard, 271-72, 274-76 Schmidt, Rudi, 255-56 Schneider, Alan, 19, 22,177,19297, 208-12, 256 Schultz, Eva Katherina, 253 Seccombe, Thomas, 151-52 Segre, Elizabeth, 96 Serban, Andrei, 276-79 Serreau, Jean-Marie, 189, 233 settings in plays, 17-33,260,262-63 Seyrig, Delphine, 273 Shades, 32, 136 Shakespeare, compared with Beckett, 22, 36, 70, 78, 84,143, 179 Shower {Happy Days), 9, 47,122, 253-56 Simon, Neil, compared with Beckett, 58 simple doublets (dialogue device), 98-102,107-08,113,116,118, 121-24,126, 129,132-33, 137 simple triplets (dialogue device), 100-02,107-08,112-13,116,124, 126, 132-33 Simpson, Alan, 19, 256 Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello), 76 Skunk, Mile. (Eleuthiria), 165-72 Slocum, Mr. (All That Fall), 23

312

INDEX

Smart, Christopher, 151-52 soliloquies, as used in plays, 58-76, 81,113 space, importance of in plays, 17-33 Spectator (Eleutheria), 167-72 Stanislavski method, 225 States, Bert, 60, 259 Stenographer (Radio II), 86-87 Stephen, Leslie, 157 Stephens, Robert, 197 Taylor, Jeremy, 160 Tai Chi Chuan, 220 television plays, 6, 28-29, 31 television productions of Beckett works, 208, 212-15 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 179 Terint, Renate, 275 That Time, 10, 30, 36, 50, 52-53, 72-74, 92-93, 95, 131-33, 138, 208, 236, 250, 267-69, 272 theater productions of Beckett works, 207-29; see also televi­ sion, radio and fiction theater, Beckett's theories on, 221-29 Theater Trilogy, 77 theatereality, 30-31, 273 Theater II, 80, 86 Theatre de Babylone, 189 theatricians, 189-206 theatrum mundi topos, 92 Thrale, Henry, 144-45, 58; Mrs. Henry, 144-61; Queeney, 148, 150-53, 155-56 time, in plays, 20-21, 34-57, 258-59 Tophoven, Elmar, 235-37, 256-57, 269, 273; Erika, 273 tragedy, as used in plays, 7, 13, 61 Tynan, Kenneth, 191 Unnamable, 221-24 V (Footfalls), 270-73 Va et Vient, 233-37, 287n

Van Laan, Thomas, 101 vaudeville element in plays, 11,13, 58-60, 99,168-72 Vi (Come and Go), 233-36 Vladimir (Waiting for Godot), 7-9, 13, 20-21, 36-42, 58-60, 98-108, 257-66 Voice [Cascando), 89-92,124-25 Voice (Ghost Trio), 197 volleys (dialogue device), 101-02, 107-08, 114,138-39 Voskovec, George, 277 Vulliamy, C. E., 151-54 W 1 (Play), 28, 69,125-27, 276 W 2 (Play), 28, 53, 69,125-27, 197, 276 Waitingfor Godot, 7-8, 12, 69, 18990,192-93,195-96, 202-04, 20710, 231, 236, 279; compared with Happy Days, 46-47, 68; German production of, 256-66; repetition as device in, 97-108, 263-64; set­ tings for, 17,19-21, 24, 262-63; time as theme, 36-42, 258-59 Wardle, Irving, 191 Warrilow, David, 224-29 Watt, 35, 152 Whitelaw, Billie, 31, 197-202, 21315, 267, 270-72, 276, 278-79 Wigger, Stefan, 261-66 Wilder, Thornton, 193 Williams, Anna, 148-49, 152,157, 159-62 Willie (Happy Days), 9, 26, 47, 49-50, 66-68, 80-82,119-24, 25156, 276-79 Winnie (Happy Days), 9, 26, 46-50, 66-69, 80-82, 118-24, 251-56, 276-79 Worburn (Cascando), 90-92,124-25 Woolf, Linda, 228 Words (Words and Music), 88-89, 124-25 Wonis and Music, 27, 83, 88-89,124

INDEX Work in Progress (Joyce), 11

313

Yeats, William Butler, 137

Worth, Irene, 276-78 X (Fin de Partie), 174-86

Yeargan, 277

Zeifman, Hersh, 84 Zeno, 35, 42 Zilliacus, Clas, 84, 88-90,137, 208, 215-17

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Cohn, Ruby. Just play. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906—Criticismand interpretation. 2. Beckett, Samuel, 1906—Stage history. I. Title. PR6003.E282Z619 848'.9'1409 79-83981 ISBN 0-691-06410-5