Samuel Beckett

Alba Arikha: Samuel Beckett was my godfather - and all I could do was rebel

David Sexton
London Evening Standard, 24 Nov 2011



Ten years ago, Anne Atik, the wife of the painter Avigdor Arikha, published a marvellous memoir of their friend Samuel Beckett, called How It Was.

Having known Beckett since 1959, she had taken notes on their regular meetings from the early Seventies until his death in 1989. Thus this book is more trustworthy and based on closer know-ledge than almost any other memoir of Beckett - it gives a great close-up picture of him coming to their flat to talk about Dante, Shakespeare and Dr Johnson, recite poetry, and listen to lieder by Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, often while Arikha sketched him. I've long treasured How It Was, not just for its insight into Beckett but also for the way it shows serious art being thus shared.

Avigdor Arikha, born to German-speaking Jewish parents in Romania in 1929, had survived the concentration camps to reach Palestine in 1944. After being severely wounded in Israel's War of Independence in 1948, he moved to Paris in 1954, and there, in 1956, met Beckett, who declared him "fort sympathique". They remained close friends for more than 40 years - and in 1969 the Arikhas named their first child "Alba", after Beckett's intricate poem of that title.

Alba became the god-daughter of Beckett, who had no children of his own. Her mother proudly recalls Beckett giving her a baptismal spoon and a coral teething necklace and buying her the most elegant pram in the shops and the biggest teddy bear in Paris. He also gave the little girl copies of his own work right from the start - a dedicated edition of that tough piece How It Is for her first birthday, the manuscript of The Lost Ones for her second.

And what was it like to grow up in such a very high-minded household? Alba Arikha, now in her early forties, living these days in one of the nice bits of Queens Park, has just published a memoir of her own, Major/Minor, which tells us: not so easy.

It was at her mother's book launch, she remembers, that somebody asked her: "What was it like for you, growing up with your mother and father and having Beckett come round? So I started writing the book very quickly. It was very cathartic."

The result is a fast and compelling read. In Major/Minor, Alba tells the story of her adolescence, from 11 to 17, in a series of brief paragraphs, some single sentence, all in the moment, without later retrospect, mostly in the present tense.

It's a history of rebellion. As a teenager, she found her family stifling and both her father's cultural rigour and his sense of Jewish identity oppressive.

At 13, on a visit to Israel: "I feel the anger boil inside me. Everything is about my father. His history sits between us like an intruder who will never leave. I should be somewhere else."

At 15, on Yom Kippur: "My mother is good and gentle. Patient and kind. And I hate her for it. I lie. I scream. I shout at my parents. I resent their purity and knowledge. .. But I cannot detach myself from them."

The fights get worse. Her mother tries to explain that her father doesn't understand her because he never had an adolescence himself. "'I'm not in a concentration camp!' I shout. I have a right to a normal life! I fall to the floor."

To add to her angst as a teenager, Alba Arikha hated her own looks: "I hate my thick, frizzy hair, my pimply face, my wiry legs." She had, moreover, to wear a metal back brace, for scoliosis. But the woman who comes to the door seems barely recognisable as the same person at first, so strikingly good-looking is she. She doesn't display a trace of her younger self's anger either. The book is an exercise in memory, above all.

Her father, who died last year, never read the memoir - "probably a good thing, I think," she says. She sought his approval for years, she admits, and never really got it. "I didn't understand him and I don't think he understood me, really, either," she says calmly. "It was a big conflict. There was love but there was great conflict. He didn't understand why I wanted to live in a different way and why I didn't want to be like him."

At 17, Alba broke with her family for eight months, moving to live with a family in the New York suburbs - "it was absolutely awful". So she didn't do her baccalauréat and completed her education in a New York high school, followed by college in Massachusetts. After music studies in Paris, she went into the writing programme at Columbia, before moving to London and publishing a novel and a collection of short stories.

Her second husband, Tom Smail, is a composer and she has a son of 16 and a daughter of nine. Although she speaks French to her children, she considers London home now - "I don't know if could live in Paris again," she says - while she finds Jerusalem, where her family went every summer, depressing. "I used to love going there but the Jerusalem I saw two years ago was totally different. It was much more religious and the mood was different."

In the book, she says that to her "being Jewish is an aside" only. "Like having green eyes. Or curly hair. An intrinsic part of me, perhaps, but not one I pay much attention to. Why would I? It doesn't define me. It only happens to be there."
Her parents, however, took being Jewish as their absolute identity. When I ask her if the way her father behaved to her resembled the parenting of other Holocaust survivors, she readily agrees. "I think the way they are with their children is probably similar. The over-protectiveness, extreme over-protectiveness, which is what we had. Definitely. And fear - fear of the law.

Every time we passed passport control, he'd get extremely nervous, every single time. Waking up in the middle of the night shouting I am sure was something the others had as well. There's a fragility really. My sister once said he had post-traumatic stress disorder and I think she was probably right. Of course, I had absolutely no idea then."

And Beckett's role in the upbringing against which she rebelled so fiercely? When she was younger he seemed to her just part of the relentless high-mindedness that she found so oppressive in her family. Her father told her that such a man was only born once every 300 years. But she longed to have "a French bourgeois normal family".

There's a scene in the book where Beckett comes to dinner and duly recites Keats and Shakespeare, leaving her, aged 13, bored and uncomfortable. "We discuss homework and school. Sam asks a few questions. I answer evasively. I cannot wait for dinner to end."

But later she discovered Beckett for herself. When she read Endgame at school, it inspired her to reconsider this friend of the family. "No surplus, all essentials; something to strive for, when I'm older and wiser." Thus she joins all those to whom Beckett has been an inspiration without ever having met him.

She remembers him now with great fondness: "He had a very gentle way of talking, Beckett, very calm. He spoke slowly and there was definitely something very soothing about him, very shy about him. He never judged, really."

When she began writing as a teenager, she'd send him her stories and poems. If he liked them, he would reply encouragingly; if not, not. Now she likes to think he might just have found a good word for Major/Minor. Surely he would.

Major/Minor is published by Quartet at £15.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett Vol 2 edited by George Craig – review

A collected letters in which the author states that he has nothing useful to say about the work has a certain Beckettian irony

Philip Hensher

guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 December 2011 22.55 GMT


Illustration by Clifford Harper/agraphia.co.uk

The circumstances of the collection of Beckett's letters are deeply curious, and have produced two volumes now that don't seem attuned to the interests and curiosity of the general reader and admirer of Beckett's work. In large part, Beckett himself is to blame. Notoriously unwilling to entertain any kind of biographical study or to supply explanation for his imaginative work, he was persuaded to agree, in 1985, to the publication of letters. The agreement, however, came with an ultimately unhelpful caveat: any letters published should bear directly on his work. Each letter has been discussed by the estate and by the editors, who have interpreted the restriction differently, without, apparently, disagreeing that it will exclude some letters that most of us would find of the highest vulgar interest. Readers, however, will not know what has been omitted due to these strictures, and may only discover by chance that Beckett's requirements mean that readers are kept from some interesting material (though, naturally, not material which limits itself to discussing the publication arrangements of L'Innomable).


The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956
by Samuel Beckett

It is fair to say that these conditions are not well understood, even by Beckett's many fervent admirers, who have agreed to back the editors and the estate in whatever interpretation they may have reached. This backing may take the form of unwittingly misleading the reader. The admiring Michael Horovitz, for instance, has said in the Independent on Sunday that the first letter in the second volume "dates from 1945 because no others were found from the war years". Curiously, he then goes on to claim that the volume also "traces" the transformation of a career, "beginning with his last reunion with James Joyce in Vichy in June 1940". Both these statements are incorrect, as a reading of the volume ought to have shown. The introduction states clearly that "there are few letters for the period 1941-44, and not a single letter about the work, owing to Beckett's circumstances during the war". Because of this, no letter from the period is included in the volume, although several are quoted from in the introduction. I don't know what evidence Horovitz has for saying that the volume goes back to the last meeting with Joyce in Vichy in 1940 – it only cites, again in the introduction, a later letter to Patricia Hutchins, without benefit of date, in MS in Dublin.

This sort of elementary confusion seems common among Beckett enthusiasts, many of whom have allowed their justifiable admiration for this great author to veil their sense of what might be interesting or valuable in his collected letters. Ferdinand Mount, in the Spectator, has drawn our attention to the fact that this volume omits a series of moving letters he wrote from Dublin in 1954 while waiting for his brother to die – as Mount says, these letters are clearly part of the imaginative world which created Fin de Partie, and fulfil Beckett's requirement that they be published as bearing on his work in the most obvious way. These letters haven't been unearthed by any extraordinary scholarly endeavour on Mount's part. They were quoted from in James Knowlson's biography, Damned to Fame. Readers should be aware how the definition of relevance has been drawn in an exceedingly limited way, although they can only guess how much of great interest lies within the 60% of the letters from this period that have been omitted from the collection.

Whether anything bearing directly on Beckett's work has been left out, I can't say either. Certainly, this side of his correspondence is likely to outlive the reader's interest. There is a large amount of correspondence dealing with practical arrangements with publishers, contracts, censors, translators, editors and so on. Some of this does have some general interest, particularly in letters where Beckett ticks off Simone de Beauvoir or Alexander Trocchi for various bits of crappy professional behaviour. His views on the production and rendering of En Attendant Godot are fascinating, as we see a great masterpiece take its first steps, and those concerned try to understand what sort of world it is they are supposed to be creating. ("The Left Bank Can Keep It: This is Tedious" was the Daily Mail's initial view.) But I can't say that letters to Jerome Lindon promising to bring the final text of Malone Dies next Wednesday ("if another day suits you better, please be kind enough to let me know") are of such vital importance to our understanding of Beckett to justify their inclusion, however directly they can be shown to relate to one of his works.

This is the period of Beckett's explosion into fame, with one masterpiece after another – the plays Godot, Fin de Partie and that most affecting of his works, Tous ceux qui tombent, the novels Watt and the splendid trilogy. The narrow interpretation of Beckett's wishes filled the first volume of this series with slightly tiresome statements of cleverness – "But all [Vico's] old anti-isms are flourishing and I am tired of them: you know what they are — priests and soldiers & the Romantics — mainly. And then the enduring & unendurable QUIP, far worse than the Giraudoux astuce." (I came to the conclusion, after reading the first volume, that Beckett went all round Germany in 1937 and 1938 and hardly noticed that it was being run by National Socialists – his correspondence was mostly all about Bruegel.) The same interpretation fills much of this second with brisk dealings with the publishing and theatrical world, which is something of an improvement.

And there are glimpses of a faculty of observation and curiosity, which greatly leavens the mix. We get some observations about country life and nature, and Beckett writes to Georges Duthuit from his country cottage in Ussy about "a gravedigger coming out of a cemetery pushing a wheelbarrow"; there are other vignettes of peasant life. But is it enough? Don't we relish the great literary letter writers for their consistent interest in the outside world, and not for the ways in which their correspondence bears, directly or indirectly, on their published work? Frankly, whatever their relative status as writers, Beckett's published letters so far have a tenth the interest and value of Evelyn Waugh's.

In the end, there is a definite irony about the idea that Beckett's published letters should be limited in this way. According to him, surely correctly, he had nothing whatever to say about his work, telling one naive inquirer in a rip-roaringly rude letter that "I know no more about this play than anyone who manages to read it attentively. I know no more of the characters than what they say, what they do, and what happens to them. I do not know who Godot is." A collected letters limited to letters that bear directly on the work while stating that its author had really nothing interesting or useful to say about that work has a certain Beckettian comedy to it, I must say.

The editors have carried out their work within their self-imposed restrictions conscientiously, translating idiomatically from this mostly French correspondence, and quite enjoyably noting whenever Beckett falls into a faux ami, saying "re-edit" in English when he means "republish", and "relevantes" in French when he means "pertinentes". The annotations are generally reliable, though the editors will find some help in explicating Beckett's momentary enthusiasm for Leibowitz's postwar performances of Schoenberg's wind quintet, a subject which rather defeats them, in the biographies and writings of Pierre Boulez. For the rest of it, many readers may fervently wish for a samizdat edition of Beckett's letters, limited to the correspondence that doesn't mention his work at all; not one bit.

Nick Clegg: My hero Samuel Beckett

'It's that willingness to question the things the rest of us take for granted that I admire most about Beckett'

Nick Clegg [UK Lib-Dem Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister]

guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 April 2010 22.00 BST


Clegg's hero ... Samuel Beckett in 1986. Photograph: Corbis / Bob Adelman

I've always read a lot, mainly fiction. These days, with three young sons, often the most I can manage is a quick chapter here, a few pages there; but there are still very few nights when I'll get to sleep without dipping in to whatever book I have on the go.

So I am grateful to those writers who have made it easy to go back to them, night after night, year after year. They are the greats, and Samuel Beckett is one of them. My first encounter with Beckett was when I was studying in Minnesota and I acted in a student production of Krapp's Last Tape. Back then I remember images of Beckett making as great an impression on me as his work. He always looked so impressive – that beak-like nose, eyes staring dead into the camera – and he had an austerity to him, even when he was young, that makes it very easy to connect the man to the words.

Since then I must have read Waiting for Godot – of course – a hundred times. Every time I go back to Beckett he seems more subversive, not less; his works make me feel more uncomfortable than they did before. The unsettling idea, most explicit in Godot, that life is habit – that it is all just a series of motions devoid of meaning – never gets any easier.

It's that willingness to question the things the rest of us take for granted that I admire most about Beckett; the courage to ask questions that are dangerous because, if the traditions and meanings we hold so dear turn out to be false, what do we do then?

But amid the bleakness, there is also humour, and it's no surprise that there are so many comedians among Beckett's fans. His appeal lies in his directness – the sparse, unembellished prose that can make his meticulous stage directions unexpected. He leaves you with a sense that you knew what he meant, even if explaining it back would leave you lost for words. Direct and disturbing – it is impossible to grow tired of Beckett.

Murphy. Mercier. Molloy. Malone.

Scholars have puzzled for decades over why so many of Beckett's characters should have names beginning with the letter M.

Quite by chance I think I've stumbled upon the answer: young Sam must have read the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes story "The Empty House" which describes Holmes' resurrection after his apparent death at the hands of the dastardly Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach falls.

Here's the passage in question:
****************************************************************************************************************
"Have you heard the name?" [Holmes asks of Watson}

"No, I have not."

"Well, well, such is fame! But, then, if I remember aright, you had not heard the name of Professor James Moriarty, who had one of the great brains of the century. Just give me down my index of biographies from the shelf."

He turned over the pages lazily, leaning back in his chair and blowing great clouds from his cigar.

"My collection of M's is a fine one," said he. "Moriarty himself is enough to make any letter illustrious, and here is Morgan the poisoner, and Merridew of abominable memory, and Mathews, who knocked out my left canine in the waiting-room at Charing Cross, and, finally, here is our friend of to-night."

He handed over the book, and I read: "MORAN, SEBASTIAN, COLONEL. Unemployed. Formerly 1st Bengalore Pioneers. Born London, 1840. Son of Sir Augustus Moran, C.B., once British Minister to Persia. Educated Eton and Oxford. Served in Jowaki Campaign, Afghan Campaign, Charasiab (despatches), Sherpur, and Cabul. Author of `Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas,' 1881; `Three Months in the Jungle,' 1884. Address: Conduit Street. Clubs: The Anglo-Indian, the Tankerville, the Bagatelle Card Club."

On the margin was written, in Holmes's precise hand: "The second most dangerous man in London."

Another startling parallel between an Arthur Conan Doyle Holmes story and a passage in Beckett's work.

Consider this short extract from "The Dying Detective" in which Holmes, for the best of motives, dupes Watson into believing that he [Holmes] is delerious with a fatal tropical fever:
***************************************************************************************************************
He seemed to have been watching the clock as well as I, for it was hardly six before he began to talk with the same feverish animation as before.

"Now, Watson," said he. "Have you any change in your pocket?"

"Yes."

"Any silver?"

"A good deal."

"How many half-crowns?"

"I have five."

"Ah, too few! Too few! How very unfortunate, Watson! However, such as they are you can put them in your watchpocket. And all the rest of your money in your left trouserpocket. Thank you. It will balance you so much better like that."

This was raving insanity.
***************************************************************************************************************
Nor consider this brief extract from the "Sucking Stones" episode in Beckett's "Molloy":
***************************************************************************************************************
One day suddenly it dawned on me, dimly, that I might perhaps achieve
my purpose without increasing the number of my pockets, or reducing the
number of my stones, but simply by sacrificing the principle of trim.
The meaning of this illumination, which suddenly began to sing within
me, like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, I did not penetrate at once,
and notably the word trim, which I had never met with, in this sense,
long remained obscure. Finally I seemed to grasp that this word trim could
not here mean anything else, anything better, than the distribution of
the sixteen stones in four groups of four, one group in each pocket, and
that it was my refusal to consider any distribution other than this that
had vitiated my calculations until then and rendered the problem literally
insoluble. And it was on the basis of this interpretation, whether right
or wrong, that I finally reached a solution, inelegant assuredly, but
sound, sound. Now I am willing to believe, indeed I firmly believe, that
other solutions to this problem might have been found and indeed may still
be found, no less sound, but much more elegant than the one I shall now
describe, if I can ...
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
What Holmes terms "balance", Molloy terms "trim".

It is also worth nothing that:

1. As well as raving about half-crowns in "The Dying Detective", Holmes also raves about oysters.

2. Molloy's preoccupation with the sucking stones develops when he finds himself at the seaside.

...and what better summary of the entire Beckett oeuvre that this single sentence from the same Holmes story "The Dying Detective"?:

"Ah, I am wandering! Strange how the brain controls the brain! What was I saying, Watson?"

^

I hope the Ph.D. candidate who amplifies this whole new insight into Samuel Beckett into a thesis gives due credit to the AATU site.

The waiting game: Beckett with an all-black cast

What can an all-black production add to Waiting for Godot? Andrew Dickson finds out

Andrew Dickson

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 31 January 2012 22.01 GMT


By the grace of Godot ... Jeffery Kissoon and Patrick Robinson in rehearsals. Photograph: Christoher Thomond for the Guardian

In what used to be a warehouse in Leeds, two men are waiting for something – anything – to happen. One rummages in his pockets. The other sucks morosely on a carrot. "The essential doesn't change," decides the first. "Nothing to be done," says the second.

Waiting for Godot might be theatre's most famous representation of a world where nothing changes (twice), but in one major respect this new production is different: the actors, Jeffery Kissoon and Patrick Robinson, are black, as are their fellow cast members. This is the first time Godot has been performed in Britain with an all-black cast.

The production is the brainchild of Patricia Cumper, outgoing artistic director of black-led theatre company Talawa. Cumper was looking for a way to mark the troupe's 25th anniversary, with the help of the West Yorkshire Playhouse. She cackles: "Everyone said, 'Oh, that'd be interesting.'" Ian Brown, who directs, nods. "You need a good reason to do Godot, and I immediately thought this would be it."

Of all the things the play has been interpreted as – a howl of existential angst, a rueful tribute to music hall, quite deliberately about nothing at all – how it relates to race remains an intriguing, and controversial, question. In 1964, it was staged in the American deep south in support of civil rights ("There are those," reported the New York Times, "who want to look at the play and see something beyond Mississippi"). In a black-only South African version in 1976, it became a thinly veiled attack on apartheid; more recently, an African-American company performed Godot in post-Katrina New Orleans, where this story about homeless men waiting on some kind of deliverance acquired a jagged political edge.

Cumper sensed the play could connect with black British experience – not simply as protest theatre, but as an examination of identity. "There are references to being beaten, slavery," she says. "But more subtle things, too: power relationships between the characters, friendships, even the language. I grew up in the Caribbean, and there are many turns of phrase [in the play] that seem familiar."

Although Brown and Cumper insist they're not aiming to evoke a specific time or place – the script is calculatedly vague – things have crept in. Kissoon and Robinson give Beckett's text a subtly African-Caribbean flavour ("digging into our own ethnicity" is how Robinson puts it), making Vladimir and Estragon seem less like tramps or clowns, and more like men in unfamiliar surroundings, perhaps waiting for a new life to begin. "There's Windrush somewhere in the background," reflects Cumper, referring to the ship that brought West Indian migrants to Britain in 1948. "They arrived with these expectations – they could have gone to Paris, they could have gone somewhere else, but they ended up here."

All of which suits Beckett, an Irish writer who moved to France, sojourned in England and developed a style that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere (he wrote Godot first in French, then translated it into English). The play's very open-endedness makes it resonate, Brown suggests; sometimes it feels universal, sometimes eerily prescient. "We've lost our rights?" asks Estragon. "We got rid of them," replies Vladimir. Says Brown: "You don't have any backstory, or sense of who they are. And it doesn't contain the things you expect from a play. But actually, it's full of action, and there is a kind of narrative."

Godot is a good fit for Talawa, a company that showcases the talents of black theatre-makers, not just by commissioning new work from the likes of Bola Agbaje, Roy Williams and Kwame Kwei-Armah, but by staging classic plays that, despite the rise of colour-blind casting, black actors are still rarely asked to perform. British theatre has come a long way, but not far enough, argues Cumper: roles are more limited (just yesterday David Harewood criticised the lack of "authoritative, strong black characters" on British TV), and producers are still unwilling to stage plays by black writers that don't conform to stereotypes of gangland violence or urban poverty. Also, by its nature, colour-blind casting doesn't allow actors to bring their heritage to bear. "There are issues we need to address," she says. "Many things that need to be talked about."

Including Godot? Brown nods: "I don't want people to leave the theatre saying, 'Oh, how lovely – it must have been groundbreaking in its time.' I want it to feel fresh-minted." Cumper smiles. "It's the same play," she says. "The rhythm's still there – but the music's slightly different."

Beckett reimagined

Chris Riddell on the coalition's approach to growth

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 19 February 2012 00.05 GMT

eddie wrote:Another startling parallel between an Arthur Conan Doyle Holmes story and a passage in Beckett's work.

WATT = Beckett novel

WATSON = Friend and colleague of Sherlock Holmes