Fig. 1: Photograph of Samuel Beckett by Roger Pic (1977)
Fig. 2: Arthur Atkinson as Hogg in Beckett's one-act play And Then What
(BBC Television 1972)
When it comes to the Irish writer Samuel Beckett - last of the great modernists, etc., etc. - the strange thing is that whilst I'm fully on board with his absurdist philosophy and think him a hugely attractive figure and daring as an artist - one possessed of the courage to both wander and squander - I've never been a fan of his work and often wonder why that's so.
Similarly, I've never been a fan either of Beckett's one-time mentor James Joyce (whose daughter, Lucia, Beckett may or may not have fucked) [1].
Perhaps, like Joyce, Beckett is just a bit too intellectual and experimental for my tastes; too rooted in psychoanalysis and avant-gardism. One is almost tempted to say of Beckett what D. H. Lawrence wrote of Joyce; "too terribly would-be and done-on-purpose, utterly without spontaneity or real life" [2].
Almost, but not quite and it's possible that Lawrence would have found more to admire in Beckett than he did in Joyce [3].
At any rate, I certainly prefer Beckett to Joyce - as evidenced by the fact that there are several posts published on Torpedo the Ark that refer positively to Beckett's work: click here, for example, to access the post from 2013 on Beckett's idea of failure in Worstwood Ho (1983); or here, to read the post on Beckett's short story 'Dante and the Lobster' (1934).
Finally, I've just recently read Beckett's one-act play Krapp's Last Tape (1958), which, again, I very much like as an idea, but didn't much care for as a short drama.
However, I did love Beckett's little known play entitled 'And Then What', which was filmed by the BBC in 1972, starring the legendary music hall performer and comic actor Arthur Atkinson in the role of Hog - 'a lonely, bitter, pinched, wizened git' - a role written especially for him by Beckett, a lifelong fan of Atkinson's, as he was of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and other vaudeville clowns.
A short clip can be viewed on YouTube by clicking here [4].
Notes
[1] Beckett was introduced to Joyce in Paris in the late 1920s and the meeting had a profound influence on the younger man. Afterwards, he served as a research assistant for Joyce, who was then working on Finnegans Wake (1939) and Beckett's first published work (1929) was an essay defending his master from accusations of wilful obscurity.
Meanwhile, he was also (allegedly) involved with Joyce's daughter, Lucia. However, after making it clear to her that he really wasn't interested in a serious romance - not least because he was seeing another woman at the time and she was already showing signs of mental illness - his relationship with the girl's father also cooled somewhat, though they remained close and when, in 1936, Beckett was almost fatally stabbed in the chest, it was Joyce who paid his hospital bills and made regular visits.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Harry Crosby (6 September 1928), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 548.
The (non-)relationship between Lawrence and Joyce is fascinating. Although very much aware of one another in the 1920s, the two men never met and each disparaged and dismissed one another's work. Readers who are interested in knowing more might like to see the essay by Earl Ingersoll entitled 'D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce: The Odd Couple of Literary Modernism',
in
The D.H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2013), pp. 1-20. It can be accessed on JSTOR: click here.
[3] Not that Beckett was overly enthusiastic about Lawrence's writing. Having read the latter's short novel St Mawr (1925), Beckett wrote in his journal: 'Some lovely things as usual and plenty of rubbish'. As Lawrence died in March 1930, he had no opportunity to read any of Beckett's work.
[4] For those who might otherwise be confused, please note that this is a clip from The Fast Show (S3/E8), dir. Mark Mylod and first broadcast on BBC Two (29 December 1997). It features Simon Day as Tommy Cockles and Paul Whitehouse as Arthur Atkinson.
For more random thoughts on Beckett - in relation to fashion, bravery, and overcoming the spirit of revenge - please click here.
For me, speculatively transposing Lawrence's resentful - and doubtless envious/competitive - comment on Joyce to Beckett ('almost' or otherwise - once one has floated the thought, the 'almost' really becomes rhetorical bric-a-brac as 'the damage is done') would be mainly to advertise a spectacular gift for missing the entire point when it comes to SB's art - leaving aside the peculiarly perverse demand for 'spontaneity' applied to the pre-determined concept of a theatrical script. Beckett wasn't some kind of over-excited vitalist or theonaturalist or tedious realist, rather obviously. Rather, his plays depict characters who are, so to speak, human remains/remainders, stripped of becoming, or distilled down to a condition of what Agamen has called 'bare life'. Krapp is by definition an excremental figure, constipated on his own refuse, paralysed by his past. in 'Happy Days', Winnie is embedded in a mound of earth, first up to her waist, and then up to her neck - she literally cannot move, though still maintains a kind of uncanny optimism in the midst of her stasis. In 'Endgame', Hamm is blind (just as Pozzo is blinded in 'Godot') and imprisoned in a chair, like Dr Who's Davros. And so it goes on. With a deathly blue eye, Beckett''s art 'sees through' life as a kind of barmy, if sometimes beautiful, charade, to examine its puppet-like conditionedness, whose unassailable importance hangs on his peerless realisation of such a vision in his genre-defining oeuvre.
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