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No Author Served
Better: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan
Schneider. (Review)
Author/s: Jim Mccue Issue: Jan 29, 2025
Maurice Harmon (editor) Harvard University Press, 486pp,
[pounds]21.95
"I've the feeling no author was ever better served," wrote
Samuel Beckett in September 1961 to Alan Schneider, who had
just directed the first American production of Happy Days. It
is a feeling compliment, and these letters bear out
Schneider's long, painstaking devotion to Beckett as a
playwright and love of him as a man.
Generosity was doubtless the motive when the editor of this
exchange of letters pared the compliment down to form a title
that sounds suitably Beckettesque (a little like those other
titles that Beckett never chose, Nohow On and As No Other Dare
Fail). Unfortunately, and inadvertently, this serve-yourself
title raises the issue of fidelity to the author's wishes -
the responsibility of directors, editors and publishers -
which we know concerned Beckett acutely.
"I prefer those letters not to be republished and quite
frankly, dear Alan, I do not want any of my letters to anyone
to be published anywhere, either in the petit pendant or the
long apres." No author better served? This whole book is a
betrayal of a wish that could scarcely have been more clearly
stated.
"Samuel Beckett's letters have been edited in accordance
with the wishes of the Samuel Beckett estate, which stipulates
that only letters, or parts of letters, relevant to Beckett's
work may be published," says the editor's note. Where there
are excisions, what may not be printed is summarised or even
quoted in the notes, but the estate's proviso has excluded
little, because it could be argued that every paragraph that
tells us where Beckett went, whom he saw or how he greeted
news about productions of his plays enables us to glean
something about his working methods. If, however, only letters
that contribute substantially to our understanding of his work
had been selected, this 470-page book would have been slimmed
to perhaps 100 pages. But selection means the exercise of that
much suspected thing, judgement.
During a correspondence stretching from 1955 to 1984
Beckett becomes world famous and Schneider gradually learns
how desperately he wanted to protect himself and the forms his
work took. He learns not to improve on his author, not to omit
a specified recapitulation, not to shift his work from one
medium to another, not to expect him to come to rehearsals in
America, not to print his remarks, not to ask him to give
interviews, not to televise bits of his plays, not to ask him
to elucidate his meaning.
There is dreadful comedy in the ordeals Beckett is put
through, when directors ignore his directions, actors ad lib
their own dialogue and censors alter his. After Schneider had
seen off those who would remove some everyday words from
Godot, he wrote with relief: "So glad you have been able to
preserve the text in all its impurity." Imagine how he must
have felt when he heard that at the end of a production of
Endgame Clov was carrying skis.
Misapprehensions continue here among the notes. When
Schneider writes, on 13 August 1976, that it is a "nice lucky
number of a day", he is referring not to Beckett's birthday,
13 April, but to its being Friday the 13th (as he does on two
other occasions). And when Beckett looks forward to a transfer
of Endgame "with Pat and Jack and perhaps the stumps going
into Aldwych rep in June", he is referring not to cricket, but
to Nagg and Nell, stuck like amputees in ashcans throughout
the play.
By the time of his death, Schneider probably realised how
inappropriate it had been to ask Beckett to translate Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? into French, or whether Endgame
might be filmed with all the parts played by Charlie Chaplin.
He may even have realised that "God bless" was not the best
possible salutation to Samuel Beckett. His appreciation,
insight and gratitude deepened, and they were reciprocated
warmly; so it is startling when Beckett abruptly writes: "I'm
sorry to be of so little help. The remains of some convention
seems to lie between us." Schneider's account of directing
Footfalls and That Time while his mother lay dying brings home
how very direct and literal these plays are. Happily, just
before his own death he managed, after a great struggle with
American Equity, to direct Billie Whitelaw in Rockaby in New
York. It was a triumphant end.
Foolishly one had hoped that Beckett's would be among the
great last literary correspondences, crafted as carefully as
his prose and with every sentence, as he put it, "viable". Of
course not. He had to answer letters incessantly, arranging
meetings, passing on news, congratulations, consolation and
adjudications. True, his work is much concerned with stretches
of waste and void, but not like this. Only once every 50 pages
or so is there a remark that is properly his: "Fin de partie
gains unquestionably in the greater smallness of the studio";
"Things here are dark, to put it brightly"; "I am writing an
even worse affair"; "Footfalls to boot"; "Acute perception of
mental bluntening. Final paradox"; "That shd about finish me
if all goes well".
Most of these are hardly "relevant to Beckett's work", and
least relevant of all is a two-sentence letter after the death
of Schneider's father. The first sentence reads: "I know your
sorrow and I know that for the likes of us there is no ease
for the heart to be had from words or reason and that in the
very assurance of sorrow's fading there is more sorrow."
This is not about Beckett's work, but compassionately and
completely part of Beckett's work. It is because of these
things that the copyright notice in this book is right to
indicate that Samuel Beckett has never died. Beckett, Samuel,
1906-.
COPYRIGHT 1999 New Statesman, Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
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