Samuel Beckett: Play (1964); repr. with Preface by S. E. Gontarski, 2009)

The heads of two women and one man each appear above 'identical grey urns about a yard high' and tell of unfaithfulness on the part of the phallocratic male. James Knowlson draws our attention to the real triangle between Beckett, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil and Barbara Bray.

Images of Ireland are here in the mention of Ash and Snodland, but Beckett also remembers his stay in London (where he was receiving psychiatric therapy under Wilfred Bion), lodging with the Frosts and drinking Lipton's tea.

Samuel Beckett: Come and Go (1967); repr. with Preface by S. E. Gontarski, 2009)

Flo, Vi and Ru are the protagonists of indeterminate age in this short play, three women sitting on a bench, each one leaving the bench for a short time in which one of the remaining women tells the other a secret about the woman's who's left, and the listener responds with shock. It isn't known if any of the women know of whatever terrible thing secret that's been mentioned is aware of it. The play has a stange mechanical, geometrical nature to it as seen by the women's behaviour.

Again, there is intertextual material, notably in the first (independently) complete sentence 'When did we three last meet?', which recalls Shakespeare's Macbeth, in which the First Witch, in the first line of the play, says 'When shall we three meet again'. And again, Ireland indirectly appears as a memory of Beckett's childhood: the mention of 'the playground at Miss Wade's recalls a former school in Dublin.

Samuel Beckett: Rockaby (1981); repr. with Preface by S. E. Gontarski, 2009)

Rockaby is another short play where a dying woman simply rocks in a chair which is moved without the woman's own effort, with a recorded voice poetically and somewhat repetitively speaking, urged on by the woman with just one word: 'More.' In the end the woman presumably dies: 'Rock her off / Rock her off' says the voice at the end.

Knowlson gives several sources in Beckett's life (including paintings) which may have inspired the play, which he wrote for Billie Whitelaw to perform.

Samuel Beckett: Footfalls (1976); repr. with Preface by S. E. Gontarski, 2009)

Footfalls is a short play centring on May, a woman in her forties almost constantly pacing up and down, and her elderly bedridden mother in darkness in the background. The first part (called the 'dying mother scene' by Beckett) is a conversation between the two; the second is the mother's voice saying that (the obviously seriously disturbed) May has not been out since she was a young girl; in the third section May speaks of herself in the third person and introduces the subject of a Mrs Winter and her daughter Amy (which of course is an anagram of May).

James Knowlson, in his Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, says that Footfalls 'grew out of Beckett's long-standing interest in abnormal psychology', and that May's pacing is an 'externalisation of inner anguish': Beckett had visited a psychiatric hospital in Beckenham in 1937, and two years before writing the play the daughter of a friend had told him of making similar pacing movements. But as Knowlson also says, there is more to this work than can be reduced to autobiographical instances, which of course holds for all of his works.

Samuel Beckett: Breath (1972; repr. with Preface by S. E. Gontarski, 2009)

Beckett's Breath, lasting about forty seconds and with no plot, no words and no characters, is theatrical minimalism virtually at its most minimalist, and was written as a contribution to Kenneth Tynan's Oh! Calcutta!* 'circus' (as Beckett described it). It consists of a pile of unidentified rubbish with a faint brief cry, then an intake of breath with light slowly increasing. This is followed by expiration and slowly decreasing light, ending in another brief cry. It was first performed in 1969 and first published in 1972.

As James Knowlson says, Beckett's intention was that this was an ironic comment on what followed, although someone had added 'with naked people' in the rubbish, and Beckett was very far from happy. The sequence was withdrawn from the London production of Oh! Calcutta!.

Breath is generally seen as a blurring of the difference between theatre and other art forms.

*This is a pun on Clovis Trouille's 'Oh quel cul t'as' ('Oh, what an arse you've got').

Samuel Beckett: Krapp's Last Tape (1959; repr. with Preface by S. E. Gontarski, 2009)

Krapps' Last Tape was first published in Evergreen Review in 1958, but not as part of a book until the following year. Here we have a 69-year-old man at the end of his life, making his last annual tape and listening to one he made thirty years before, when he was a person he hardly now recognises.

Light and darkness (the colours black and white), youth and age, reality and fantasy, all play a part here, but certainly the most important are light and darkness. Krapp (what a name!) has 'rusty brown' trousers and waistcoat, but a 'grimy white shirt' and a white face; the stage is in darkness apart from the lit desk; the thirty-five-year-old Krapp lived with Bianca in Kedar (Hebrew for 'black') street; the younger Krapp remembers seeing a woman, 'all white and starch' with a 'black hooded' pram; the white dog has a black ball, and so it goes on, with the light and the dark sometimes blended, as with the younger Krapp shielding his woman from the the sun.

The eyes of women are a theme too: Bianca's are 'incomparable'; the woman with the pram has eyes 'like chrysolite' (recalling a word used in Othello); the eyes of the woman Krapp shields were 'just slits' in front of the glare of the sun, although they opened in shadow; Krapp's last tape records 'The eyes she had!'. In such a short play there are a number of characters, but all come from only one man.

This is a book of memory, therefore time, and we can feel it in the movement not only of the tape spool revealing the past but also, in its unwinding, Krapp's delight in saying 'Spooool', his joy of words in themselves, another example being him forgetting the meaning of 'viduery', searching in the dictionary, finding the word and also the name of the 'vidua' bird, the sound  of which he relishes.

Samuel Beckett: More Pricks than Kicks (1931; repr. with Preface by Cassandra Nelson, 2010)

More Pricks than Kicks was, after his idiosyncratic booklet Proust (1930), Samuel Beckett's first published book, being a collection of ten short stories but without the additional 'Echo's Bones', which Chatto & Windus editor Charles Prentice had initially welcomed as the eleventh story, and over which Beckett spent some time and effort, but which Prentice had to reject as a 'nightmare' that gave him the 'jim-jams' and would certainly cause Beckett to lose a number of readers. As it happened the book only sold 550 over a few years, so the unsold books were pulped. Only after Beckett had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 was there renewed interest in More Kicks than Pricks, much to Beckett's displeasure because he now saw the book as a part of his juvenilia.

In itself More Pricks than Kicks is what Beckett called 'self-plagiarism', the best kind of plagiarism to him: much of the material came from his novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which Prentice (among others) had previously rejected and was only published in 1992, several years after Beckett's death: the title is in part a play on Tennyson's A Dream of Fair Women, and with the colloquial (working-class?) expression 'fair to middling' included, is perhaps an indication of the poly-linguistic nature of the work, which ranges from foreign, esoteric, learned, slang, and taboo expressions (included in later editions, but left as in the original 1934 edition here): 'arse' is left as 'B. T. M.' and 'Flitter the fucker' as 'Flitter the --', for instance.

The protagonist Belacqua Shaua is taken from Dante's fourth canto of Purgatorio, which is the second part of his La Divina Commedia (written from 1308 to 1320). The name is (coincidentally?) a reversal of Beckett's own initials, and Dante's Belacqua was a lute-maker, lazy like Beckett himself at the time of publication, and the name indicates 'beautiful water', but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Intertextual references abound in all of the stories in the book, often to Dante, the Bible, but also to many other books Beckett was reading at the time: there's a surviving manuscript (usually just called 'Dream') in which he noted any interesting expressions of sentences he met, along with autobiographical notes. More Pricks than Kicks is in many ways an autobiographical work.

'Dante and the Lobster' is the first story, set in 8 December 1926, in which Belacqua has three obligations, although not necessarily in the order given (this is Beckett, let's remember, and narrative sequence is of minor value): there's lunch, the lobster, and the Italian lesson. Lunch is a 'nice affair', with 'nice' meaning 'subtle' or 'exacting' rather than 'pleasant', so he locks the door so no one can 'come at him'. The most interesting thing here is that the bread is personified, it '[i]s spongy and warm, alive', and even has a 'face' which he'll soon remove. Why 8 december 1926? Well, the morning after Henry McCabe (mentioned several times in this story) was hanged then for the murder of the McDonnell family and servants (six in all) in their home in Malahide, Dublin. Beckett, who was far from sure of McCabe's guilt, was in any way against the death penalty. The destruction of the food in some way feeds into the story, and this is followed by the boiling of a living lobster. Beautiful water

'Fingal' is the second story, which Mary Power calls a 'Modern contribution to the duinschenchas tradition of place in Irish literature' (Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1981-82), pp. 151-156 (151). Belacqua walks in Fingal with Winnie Coates: the name is one of Beckett's jokes, as Donald Winnicott was a psychoanalyst. They are near where what was then called the lunatic asylum at Portrane, where Winifred knows the psychiatrist Dr Sholto, whom she meets. Belacqua then steals a bicycle and goes back to Dublin, where he happily goes to the pub.

'Ding-Dong' is the third story, in which Belacqua 'enlivened the last phase of his solipsism, before he toed the line and began to relish the world, with the belief that the last thing he had to do was to move constantly from place to place'. His movements are confined to going from pub to pub and in the end is conned into buying seats in heaven by a woman in a pub.

'A Wet Night' is the fourth story, and like Joyce's 'The Dead' has a festive Christmas setting with a number of people involved, although of course Beckett (like Belacqua) hated social gatherings. Of note are some of the characters, such as Caleken Frica, who represents Mary Manning (Howe), Beckett's friend who he helped with her play 'Youth's the Season'; the Alba, who represents Ethna MacCarthy, an unusually liberated woman Beckett met at Trinity College, and with whom he was obsessed; the Syra-Cusa represents James's Joyce's highly disturbed daughter Lucia, who was infatuated with Beckett although he did his best to avoid her; and 'Chas': Jean du Chas was Beckett's fictitious poet born on the same day as him, and with whom he took pleasure in introducing in a lecture to the Trinity Modern Languages Society. The party represented here (in a very distorted way) really existed, and was given by Susan Manning, Mary's daughter.

'Love and Lethe' is the fifth story, which concerns Belacqua picking up Ruby Tough from her home at her parents and driving off to a mountain where they have made a suicide pact, either by bullet or poison. Ruby accidentally fires the gun which doesn't find a target and as she has tempted him they have sex: love and death are much the same, aren't they? Dante's Purgatorio is an obvious reference, although there are biblical references, such as to Perugino's Pietà, as well to the temptation of Christ, with Ruby seen as Mary Magdelene, for instance: we have woman seen as both the sacred and the profane. More obscure references as to Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy’s fairy tale princesses Florine and Truitonne in L'Oiseau bleu, and Knowlson has also discovered an allusion to Tasso's Aminta.

'Walking Out' is the sixth story, the title referring to an expression of courtship, and sees Belacqua riding horseback in the countryside with his fiancée Lucy, only when Lucy discovers that her fiancé has gone there to spy on a German couple having sex (voyeurism isn't uncommon among Beckettian heroes) she leaves quickly, gets hit by a car driven by a drunken lord and spends the rest of her time in a wheelchair (again, a means of transport not unkown in the Beckett canon). Meanwhile Belacqua, unaware of the accident, is caught by 'the Tanzherr' (the male spied on) and beaten severely. Belacqua marries Lucy. 

'What a Misfortune' is the seventh story, referring to Voltaire's eunuch's comment on Cunégonde's beauty in Candide: 'O che sciagura d’essere senza coglioni ! (Oh quel malheur d'être sans couilles !)': both the Italian and the French are given in Voltaire, meaning 'What a misfortune not to have balls'. This story is a satire on the bourgeois Irish Protestant family. Two years after his marriage to Lucy, she dies. The narrative very much concerns Belacqua's and his wedding (plus reception) to Thelma bboggs [sic], who's the daughter of Otto (in, ahem, toiletries) and Bridie, who's been sexually serviced by Walter Draffin, with the full approval of Otto, who doesn't have to bother with the chore: so Walter (as the cicisbeo) receives a wedding invitation, which he accepts. The friendless Belacqua co-opts 'Hairy', or Capper Quin, into being best man. We learn in the final chapter that Thelma dies on the honeymoon night.

'The Smeraldina's Billet-Doux' is the eighth story, and is based on a love letter that a cousin of Beckett's, Peggy Sinclair, written to him. She had left with her family for Germany when young and had an affair later with Beckett, who several times visited her in Germany, although she died in 1931, when Beckett was in hospital in Dublin. Peggy's parents were angry with Beckett's mention of her letter to him, in which he parodies Peggy's poor English.

'Yellow' is the ninth story, which sees Belacqua in hospital for operations on his neck and toe (like Beckett). His reference to being frightened of 'wet[ting] the bed' is probably an allusion to Jules Renard's writing, which was a great source of pleasure to Beckett. Beckett too had been in hospital, although unlike Belacqua he survived: Belacqua's anaesthetic was too strong.

'Draff', which refers to dregs, is the tenth and final story, and concerns the Smeraldina (Belacqua's third wife) handling his funeral. The unnamed groundsman drinking his Guinness will becaome Doyle in 'Echo's Bone's'. There's a suggestion that the Smermaldina and Capper 'Hairy' Quin will become a couple, and as Hairy drives to Belacqua's former house the gardener has set it on fire: another reference to the Malahide murders.

Much ink has been spent on More Pricks than Kicks and no doubt will continue to do so, as stories in it seem endlessly re-interpretable.

Deirdre Bair: Samuel Beckett: A Biography (1978)

Deirdre Bair's PhD was on Beckett, so she obviously knows her subject, this was the first biography on the writer and he wasn't opposed to its publication, and this is certainly a thorough work on the man's life and his work. It's excellent in many ways, but although I reviewed Anthony Cronin's work earlier neither of the books are up to the standard of James Knowlson's biography, which I've yet to read.

Unfortunately this book is spoiled by errors, and not just a few but many. OK, Bair didn't know that Beckett was beaten several times by Alfred Le Peton at Earlsfort House School. But sometimes she says weird things: for instance, Montpellier had a population of a little under 100,000 in the fifties, and yet she calls it a 'romote village'. I ask myself what her understanding of the French language and culture was (she died this April), because many of the things she writes border on the willfully sloppy, with accents either non-existent or all over the place: how about the truly bizarre 'Il nous ailes en culer a la gloire'?; there are two references to a certain '[Jean] Genêt'; she confuses 'mec' with 'mac' and says it mean pimp; she manages the cedilla in 'Academie Française', but not the acute on the 'e'; Jean-Pierre Jouve is just 'Jouve, Pierre' in the index, etc, etc. Occasionally dramatic or odd adjectives are used: Beckett doesn't just fall into a mechanic's pit but 'drop[s] six terrifying feet' (my emphasis), and why are the women knocking on the elderly and married Beckett's door in Germany called 'nubile'?

I'll read the Knowlson in due course.

My Samuel Beckett posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anthony Cronin: Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist
Samuel Beckett: En Attendant Godot | Waiting for Godot
Francisco Pérez Navarro: Galería de moribundos
Deirdre Bair: Samuel Beckett: A Biography
Samuel Beckett, 14e arrondissement

Samuel Beckett, 14e arrondissement

'ALLÉE

SAMUEL BECKETT

FOXROCK 1906 – 1989

ÉCRIVAIN IRLANDAIS

PRIX NOBEL DE LITTÉRATURE'

It's fitting that this sign should be in an area lived in by Beckett in his last days, near Parc Montsouris where he used to sit.  The 'allée' also reminds me of Hamm's paradoxical words about God in Endgame: 'The bastard! He doesn't exist', because the allée doesn't exist either, there's just this sign in the middle of the avenue René Coty.

My Samuel Beckett posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anthony Cronin: Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist
Samuel Beckett: En Attendant Godot | Waiting for Godot
Francisco Pérez Navarro: Galería de moribundos
Deirdre Bair: Samuel Beckett: A Biography
Samuel Beckett, 14e arrondissement

Francisco Pérez Navarro: Galería de moribundos: introducción a las novelas y al teatro de Samuel Beckett (1976)

I was unaware of the existence of this book until a few months ago: ah, the endless power of the internet! I was a friend of Francisco Pérez Navarro's eldest son for some years, although his joke that he thought his father was writing the complete works of Samuel Beckett in Latin now (a little at least) makes more sense: the back cover of this book states that Pérez Navarro had (by 1976 anyway) also (among other things) written a translation of Beckett's Comment c'est (or How It Is in the English edition) into Castilian. (The book also describes him as preparing a work on Peter Weiss called 'Carlota Corday compra un cuchillo' ('Charlotte Corday Buys a Knife'): unfortunately I can discover no reference to this book, or indeed any references to later works by Francisco Pérez Navarro).

Interestingly, the book I own not only has the author's signature but his address in Mapperley, Nottingham: I remember visiting that home as an intellectually naive working-class teenager, terrified yet thrilled to be surrounded by books in French and Spanish in the television-free living-room-cum-library. The back cover of this book also tells me that he moved to England in 1955. It doesn't state that, after living in Great Malvern and marrying the Franco-Swiss teacher Françoise, he moved permanently to Nottingham some time in the 1960s.

For a relatively short time in the eighties the author taught me Spanish at Clarendon College, Nottingham, and his lessons were far removed from the norm. He used to come in, take a large number of books and papers from his bag and line them on his desk, and on one occasion gave me a news item (or fait divers) in French for me to translate aloud (slowly) into English for the class (including myself) to translate back into Spanish. This was, of course, long before Ofsted was created to dumb down the level of education and manufacture robotic students through teachers' lesson plans and exam targets, etc. No, these were the days when education was still fun, not a careers-oriented conveyor belt designed to produce uniform government-worshipping, economically-minded zombies whatever the interchangeable political party.   I don't remember the name of the magazine, but I treasure the moment when, other students out for a break, Francisco quietly slipped me (as if it were an illicit drug) a Spanish anarchist paper and just whispered that I should throw it away if I didn't like it. I'm sorry to say I never kept it through the years.

This is a venerable work now in the fortieth year of its life, and in its day it was ground-breaking not only in that it introduced the Spanish-speaking peoples to works which hadn't been translated, but also addressed issues of poor translation: how about Watt being translated into Spanish with its four parts in chronological order, but not in the order in which they were originally written and published? That's quite a howler.

The title Galería de moribundos comes from 'galerie de moribonds', from Beckett's original French Molloy, and translates literally into English as 'gallery of moribunds', which Malone uses of Murphy, Watt, Yerk, Mercier et al.

So what are the themes throughout Beckett's work? Pérez Navarro uses the lovely expression 'podredumbre ontologíca',  or 'ontological putrefaction', which certainly serves as a general catch-all term, but then within this of course there's meaninglessness, thoughts of suicide, death, the loss or non-existence of God but the ever-clinging religious vocabulary, tramps, clowns, even bicycles (which makes me think of Alfred Jarry). Pérez Navarro reckons that the early More Pricks than Kicks (which he can't seem to decide is a novel or a collection of short stories) contains most of the themes of Beckett's future work.

And although Pérez Navarro's book was written some time before Beckett had finished his publications – the final work mentioned being Not I (1976) – certainly  he'd long since achieved his greatest works, most of them written (although not actually published) from 1947 to 1950: the novel trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and of course the play Waiting for Godot.

Galería de moribundos is essentially a book describing the skeleton of the 'plots' followed by an interpretation of them, and I loved it. My only quibbles are that there isn't a conclusion (although I wonder at the same time how there could be one), but most of all that the author sees Beckett's work as a dramatization of Sartre's L'Étre et le néant. No, I just don't see it: Sartre's work is much more optimistic: there's much more being beyond the nothingness.

Francisco Pérez Navarro's obituary is here.

My Samuel Beckett posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anthony Cronin: Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist
Samuel Beckett: En Attendant Godot | Waiting for Godot
Francisco Pérez Navarro: Galería de moribundos
Deirdre Bair: Samuel Beckett: A Biography
Samuel Beckett, 14e arrondissement

Samuel Beckett: En Attendant Godot | Waiting for Godot (1952)

Beckett wrote En attendant Godot in a relatively very short time – between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949 – and it was intended as a form of relaxation, and unlike his novels not viewed with anything like the same seriousness. Beckett was much bemused not only by the play's success, but also by the many interpretations that have been made of it.

Put simply, the play concerns two men (Vladimir and Estragon) waiting (although they don't know why) for a person called Godot, and they are attached to each other, talk a great deal, but apparently about nothing in particular. Their activities, such as they are, are interrupted by a dictatorial man (Pozzo) with a slave (Lucky) on a rope lead. At the end of the act a boy comes on and announces that Godot will come the following day. The same events occur in the second (and final) act, although the words are different.

Beckett gave no explanations as to the meaning of Waiting for Godot. Even if he had I hope that they'd have been severely disputed: the real meaning of a work, once written, no longer belongs to the author but to the reader. Waiting for Godot is understood by many to be about the human condition, and there are certainly many examples in the play to suggest that. There has been much attention given to the word 'Godot' itself. God? Beckett denied this, but suggested 'godillon' or 'godasse', meaning shoe, to producer Roger Blin. A French cyclist of that name has been mentioned, and then there's the story of Beckett waiting for a bus on the corner of the rue Godot de Mauroy and being approached by a prostitute, and so on.

The relationship between Pozzo and Lucky has been put in a Marxist context – the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat; the bowler-hatted men have been seen in a vaudeville light, resembling Charlie Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy, and then their conversations have been seen as a mirror of the conversations Beckett himself had with his companion Suzanne. And then we can play further with the words used, the religious imagery, the way everything returns or repeats – such as the conversation continually returning to Godot, the second act returning to the first – not far removed, perhaps, from the song about the dog in the kitchen repeating itself ad infinitum.

There are a number of common elements, even themes if that's not too strong a word to use for such a sparse (but oddly extremely rich) play: boredom, waiting, suffering, habit/repetition, religion, attachment, memory, etc.

All of the above words could easily be used biographically to relate to Beckett, although is there a danger of reading too much into what Beckett intended as a mere amusement for himself? Certainly the list misses out how funny the play is, but then do we simply laugh because we see ourselves, indeed see life, in the same miserable condition?

To me it's a play that means nothing and yet means everything at the same time: to pin a specific meaning on it would limit it in the same way that the movements of the tied Lucky are limited, or in fact in the same way that all the characters are trapped in the same timeless, eventless world.

Waiting for Godot is possibly Beckett's idea of a game, but probably not, but then it's the lack of certainty about almost anything in it which is a part of its greatness.

My Samuel Beckett posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anthony Cronin: Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist
Samuel Beckett: En Attendant Godot | Waiting for Godot
Francisco Pérez Navarro: Galería de moribundos
Deirdre Bair: Samuel Beckett: A Biography
Samuel Beckett, 14e arrondissement

Anthony Cronin: Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1996)

Anthony Cronin's Samuel Beckett is the first biography of the writer that I've read, and before this I knew very little about him outside his work. I remember studying En Attendant Godot when I was doing my first degree (which was in French) at Leicester University, and the late Dr Peter Fawcett suggesting that Beckett perhaps wasn't all gloom and doom as he'd lived with his wife in sunny Vaucluse in Provence. He didn't appear to be joking, although I've learned through this biography that Beckett only lived in Vaucluse during the war as this was unoccupied France, but the material circumstances in which Beckett and his companion Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil (this being some time before their marriage) were living were pretty dire.

When I first read Beckett the study of literature was under the critical yoke of F. R. Leavis (and may even still be to a certain extent): close study was all-important, and shouldn't be supplemented by extraneous circumstances, such as knowing anything about an author's life, the social conditions under which a book was written, and so on. And if that's an exaggeration it's only a slight one.

All the same, although there's always a danger of reading too much autobiographical detail into a book, it's still worth remembering what I very often note that B. S. Johnson said – that even the three-headed monster of science fiction involves the concepts three, head and monster: this isn't saying that all writing is autobiographical, but that writing isn't sui generis, that it comes from somewhere.

Having said that, it doesn't surprise me that Beckett wasn't a happy-go-lucky guy, nor that (as I'm sure some people have believed) he was playing a literary hoax, refusing to say anything about his work's meaning because there in fact was no meaning. No, Beckett was a serious writer, and not just a major 20th century writer but a major writer tout court.

This is a huge 600-hundred page book that Cronin claims he intended for the general reader, a claim I find a little bizarre, but we'll pass on that for the moment. Beckett wasn't an existentialist – although it pleased some people at the time to lump him into the same bag as Sartre and Camus, etc – but in some respects the Beckett in this book can be seen in an existentialist light. Although it is simply divided into unnamed chapters and with no sections, I can see a quite clear division between the first and the second half of the book, and those two halves don't simply correspond to the unsuccessful and the successful Beckett, it's something deeper than that.

The earlier, largely unpublished Samuel Beckett the man is – put quite simply – an enormous mess. He's painfully shy, hardly talks at all, and leads a rather aimless existence largely subsidised by his mother after his father's death, hopping between Paris, his home in Dublin and relatives in Germany. He suffers from pyschosomatic disorders, such as a cyst on his neck that a doctor lances but which springs up again. Cronin mentions a number of things about Beckett's sex life (such as it was) in the first half but – most probably because there's no information on it (no doubt again partly because there was very little of it) – hardly mentions it in the second half. There are several references to the younger Beckett masturbating, to his occasional use of prostitutes, but also to a big problem he had: his huge reluctance to have sex with anyone he was emotionally involved with.

He had a bit of a 'thing' (difficult to put into a word or phrase) with Peggy Sinclair, although he was content just to look at her face rather than get physical with her. His relationship with the sexually liberated Peggy Guggenheim was troubled too: she claimed that he once had sex with her, but said that on another occasion she couldn't understand why he chose a double hotel room (actually with twin beds) when he wanted to sleep on his own – and when Beckett stated that it was cheaper than two rooms this was beyond her comprehension, and later still she claimed that she thought he was a homosexual. I won't go into another troubled relationship – Beckett and James Joyce's disturbed daughter Lucia.

Beckett first met Suzanne through playing tennis, although they first, er, came together after he'd been stabbed in Paris in the early hours of the morning after an argument with the pimp Robert Jules Prudent. Cronin is somewhat vague about the early stages of the relationship, but they would remain together for over fifty years, although after a few the author does mention that Suzanne described it as celibate, and as a non-drinker (even hating the smell of wine) she didn't take part in Beckett's frequent pub-crawling.

But the habit (a key Beckettian word) of the relationship obviously did him a great deal of good, and – although Beckett was rather apolitical – the commitment to helping in the Resistance saw him moving into very different existential territory: the reader really feels that the second part of Beckett's life, indeed the new Beckett, began in Provence.

But it wasn't until a few years later that Beckett's real professional break came: when Jérôme Lindon, of Les Éditions de minuit, began publishing his books, and the name Samuel Beckett soon became widely known.

Beckett and Suzanne will soon have money, but not that they have any great love of it: Beckett gave much of his £30,000 Nobel Prize for Literature away, and interestingly he is said to have provided a new sports car for another experimental writer: B. S. Johnson, whose work Beckett praised, and who is (lamentably) one of the very few writers of his kind that England has ever had.

Surprisingly, perhaps, there are humorous moments in the second half of the book: Beckett's chaotic driving in central Paris; his ducking and diving to ensure that his lover (if that's the right word) Barbara Bray doesn't run into Suzanne; and his enthusiastic bar crawls, etc. Through this comes a picture of a tender man – Lindon is brimming with praises of his goodness; Beckett makes sure the postman doesn't delivery letters in his mailbox where finches are nesting; and he marries Suzanne (who incidentally died a few months before him) out of concern that she should benefit from his money after his death.

I've mentioned nothing of his work itself, but then Beckett shunned interpretation. A great deal could be said about his novels, his plays, even his one short film ('starring' Buster Keaton and viewable here), but that shall be for other times.

What did I think of this book? Intended for a 'general reader', this is a huge work that also has the appearance of a very scholarly one. In six hundred pages we can expect a few minor errors and we get them, of which one example is 'Vaux-de-Chermay' for Vaux-de-Cernay, and surely the interior monologue influence on Joyce comes not from Valery Larbaud but from Édouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés? There are one or two direct, and perhaps two other indirect, negative references to Deirdre Bair's biography of Beckett. I have this book but have not yet read it, but just flicking through it tells me that the textual apparatus looks sound, whereas Cronin's book only has a Bibliography of Beckett's work – not a general Biblography of the material he read or consulted while writing the book; furthermore, Bair does at least use generous endnotes, and marks them in the text: Cronin has a mere twelve pages of endnotes, but leaves no indication of them in the text, meaning that they are virtually useless. But then, this is only for the 'general reader' and I nevertheless found great enjoyment in reading it. But I shall be reading Bair's book in due course and form a better conclusion.

Just another point: one of the plates shows a tree in the Dublin mountains, and the caption suggests that this may have been 'the original tree' in Godot. Ha, well maybe so, but maybe not, but that seems to be a bit of needless space-filling. If Beckett had been alive to read this, I'm not sure if he'd have laughed or cried.

My Samuel Beckett posts:
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Anthony Cronin: Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist
Samuel Beckett: En Attendant Godot | Waiting for Godot
Francisco Pérez Navarro: Galería de moribundos
Deirdre Bair: Samuel Beckett: A Biography
Samuel Beckett, 14e arrondissement

Highgate Cemetery #8: Max Wall

'MAX WALL
1908–1990

I believe that since My life began
the most I've had is just a Talent to
Amuse'

Max Wall was born Maxwell George Lorimer and was the son of the comedy actor Jack Lorimer. His career began in pantomime and he is noted for his performances as 'Professor Wallofski', a character who an influence on John Cleese in his 'Ministry of Silly Walks' sketch. After going through a low period for some years, interest in Wall revived and he played in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1979) and Krapp's Last Tape (1984), Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, and even recorded a version of Ian Dury's 'England's Glory'. He died after falling and fracturing his skull at Simpson's-in-the-Strand restaurant, London.

Robert Coover: Spanking the Maid (1982)

Robert Coover's Spanking the Maid seems quite a provocative title and the cover image suggests porn, and it's just a novella with large font size and broad margins, as if designed for people who don't read a great deal. But.

There's a lot of repetition in this, although it's not for nothing. There are just two (unnamed) characters here – the maid and the master – and it's not certain (in spite of the rear cover blurb) if the events in this novella take place in one day or over a large number of days. There are what appear to be many re-takes, as in the making of a movie, when the maid enters the room, but can never get it perfect, so she has to re-try, re-try, and so on: the influence of French literature and cinema, particularly the nouveau roman, is blindingly obvious.

The master is a perfectionist and is never satisfied with the maid's performance, so she's punished for making a mistake, and the master beats her on her (usually naked) 'sit-me-down' with various instruments, such as a birch rod,  a bull's pizzle, his belt, his hands, etc. If this takes place 'each morning', as the rear cover suggests, then how is it that the maid's welts heal up so quickly, how is it that – even if this apparent madman may be paying her well – she still comes back for more extreme violence to her 'sit-me-down', thus risking her health and perhaps even her life? Or is she just a part of the master's dream? What is this relationship in this one-room apartment (or hotel room) that so much resembles Hamm and Clov's interdependent hell in Beckett's Endgame?

There's no obvious mind and body duality in Spanking the Maid as could be said to exist in Endgame, but there is a series of other dualities: master and servant, night and day, light and dark, teacher and student, punishment and reward, life and death, order and chaos, pain and pleasure, etc.

Religion is important, and the maid memorizes hymns such as George Herbert's 'The Elixir' to help her toward her perception of perfection, which her master has 'taught' her, and she not only comes to hope (against hope) for this unrealizable ideal, but seems to see a direct link between God and the master, as the master must clearly do, and he seems to take all his beliefs from an unnamed (and very mysterious) manual, in spite of his apparently half-hearted moral self-questioning.

And what of the odd things the maid finds in the master's bed? Maybe a simple crushed flower, or a bull's pizzle, or a bloody pessary, or a frog, or a fetus?

A tiny book with a mass of unanswered questions. A gem.

My other post on spanking:

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Jean-Pierre Enard (Text), Milo Manara (Drawings): L'Art de la fessée | The Art of Spanking