TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010890/0108410.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.1 KB | 128 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 69

Giving Birth "Astride of a Grave"

Samuel Beckett: 1906-1989


By WILLIAM A. HENRY III


    "This dust will not settle in our time. And when it does
some great roaring  machine will come  and whirl it all
sky-high again."

    -- ALL THAT FALL, 1957


    The most evident social trend of the 20th century has been
consolidation -- multinationalized businesses, globalized
politics, homogenized cultures. Amid this bustling bigness and
togetherness has been heard a persistent cry of smallness and
aloneness, a sense that comforting certainties are being
stripped away and each individual left isolated with nameless
terrors, deterioration and death. Painters and composers,
philosophers and poets have struggled to express this
sensibility by reducing their art forms to the essential,
scaling ambition down from the eternal to the minimal. Where
once creators held that truth was beauty, in these despondent
works truth is achingly ugly, beauty a mirage of the memory.

    Many of the century's most imaginative artists, from Jackson
Pollock to John Cage to Sartre to Camus, poured their beings
into this exploration of nothingness. None did so more
persistently and penetratingly than Samuel Beckett, the
Irish-born writer whose death was revealed last week in his
adopted city, Paris, where for decades he lived in an apartment
overlooking the exercise yard of a prison. In such plays as
Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape; in novels,
including Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable; in verse and
essays and the script for a wordless Buster Keaton film,
Beckett distilled despair.

    His works were often funny -- the two battered tramps of
Godot might have been written for Laurel and Hardy and were in
fact played by Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell, Robin Williams and
Steve Martin -- but the humor intensified the sadness. In the
play's most vivid and haunting image, one character cries out
about all mankind, "They give birth astride of a grave."
Beckett regarded himself as a sort of historian, a chronicler
of misbegotten times. "I didn't invent this buzzing confusion,"
he said. "It's all around us, and . . . the only chance of
renewal is to open our eyes and see the mess." Yet he had
nothing of the reformer, no impulse toward public life. He
rarely granted interviews, resolutely declined to discuss his
works, rebuffed would-be biographers by saying his life was
"devoid of interest." He even refused to show up to collect his
1969 Nobel Prize in literature -- an award he had lobbied the
Swedish Academy not to give him. Characteristically, his death
on Dec. 22 was kept secret until after a private funeral four
days later.

    Born on a disputed date in spring 1906, Beckett claimed to
remember being a fetus in the womb, a place he recalled not as
a haven but as a dark ocean of agony. The son of a surveyor and
a nurse, he had a conventional Dublin Protestant upbringing,
studied classics in high school and romance languages at
Trinity College. At 21 he went to Paris and fell in with
literary expatriates including James Joyce, who became a friend
and an inspiration -- although, as Beckett noted, Joyce tended
toward omniscience and omnipresence in his narrative voice,
"whereas I work with impotence and ignorance." Three years
later Beckett returned to Dublin, but he soon grew disenchanted
with the conservatism of Irish life and, yearning for the
Continental avant-garde, emigrated in 1932.

    When Paris was invaded by the Nazis, Beckett and his future
wife fled to the south of France, hiding by day and journeying
by night. That harrowing experience, especially the footsore
conversation along the way, probably inspired the futile
wandering in Godot, according to its first Broadway director,
Alan Schneider.

    An even deeper real-life influence on Beckett's work,
scholars have suggested, came in 1938. As Beckett walked along
a Paris street, a panhandler stabbed him in the chest,
perforating a lung and narrowly missing his heart. When Beckett
later asked why the attack happened, the assailant replied, "I
don't know, sir." That glimpse of the random perils of
existence may have confirmed Beckett's dark vision but did not
initiate it. His novel Murphy, published the same year, depicts
a destitute Irishman, living in London, who daydreams away his
days in a rocking chair until a gas plant explodes and shreds
him. At his instruction, his ashes are flushed down the toilet
of Dublin's Abbey Theater.

    Through the '40s, Beckett kept writing, shifting, for
reasons he never explained, from English to French as the
language in which he created. He remained obscure until a
spectacular burst from 1951 to 1953, in which Godot and three
novels appeared to acclaim. The plays Endgame, Krapp's Last
Tape and Happy Days followed by 1960. Thereafter he produced
fewer and fewer, shorter and shorter, bleaker and bleaker
pieces but never quite lapsed into the ultimate despair of
artistic silence. His last work, Stirrings Still, a fiction of
less than 2,000 words, was published in March 1989 in an
edition limited to 200 copies.

    Beckett's images have transfixed countless theatergoers, who
watched the tramps in Godot wait for a savior who never comes,
or heard the old man in Krapp's Last Tape review recorded
fragments of his life as he murmurs, over and over, "Spool,"
or shared the haplessness of the elderly couple in Endgame as
they face the end of the world while encased in trash cans.
Beyond his own art, Beckett shaped the vision of countless
others. They emulated, if never equaled, his simplicity of
means, philosophical daring and ability to engage vast ideas
in tiny trickles of closely guarded language. Above all,
Beckett's life and work taught others the lesson he said he
learned from Joyce: the meaning of artistic integrity. His
vision never yielded. Even on a sunny day in London, as he
strolled through a park in evident pleasure, when a friend
remarked that it was a day that made one glad to be alive,
Beckett turned and said, "I wouldn't go that far."