More about samuel beckett

[RonPrice]

At the beginning of the Five Year Plan(1937-1944) of the North American Baha’i community, a Plan I am confident that the Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett(1906-1989) knew nothing about---but one whose extension into a series of Plans I have been associated with now for nearly 60 years--- Beckett wrote a letter to the publisher Axel Kaun. This letter was, wrote another Irish novelist John Banville(1946- ), “one of the most significant and revealing Beckett ever wrote.”1-Ron Price with thanks to 1John Banville, “Beckett: Storming for Beauty,” The New York Review of Books, 22 March 2012.


Was your goal in ’37 in Ireland some
abstract literature, dissolving word’s
surfaces, dealing as you tried to do
with your depression, psycho-somatic
problems, your book and your mother.2

Words are not like music, nor are they
like painting. They rub-up against actual
things and, if they lose their meaning, all
one has is noise. One must struggle with
the faintest pinpricks of light, & darkness
when one communes with oneself, & the
world as one looks for meaning—you did.

You were hospitable, but you had not any
sustaining metaphysics. You were serious,
evoked a complex psychological reality, a
sense of futility and despair as well as an
endless waiting and we too, Samuel, wait.3


1 See, The NYRB above and The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I: 1929–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 512–520. The freedom and directness, unique in the letters published so far, that Beckett allowed himself in addressing Kaun, may in part be accounted for by the fact that the letter is written in German, a language that Beckett knew well but in which he was not entirely fluent….Beckett was one of the greatest letter writers.
2 Samuel Beckett, Wikipedia.
3 Tim Parks, “Beckett: Still Stirring,” The New York Review of Books, 13 July 2006.; and “Samuel Beckett, infoplease.


Ron Price
8 March 2012

 

[Skwim]

Off topic but still about Beckett.

I am currently involved in a production of "Krapp's last tape," whose allure and importance I have failed to grasp. Can you clue me into why it is regarded so highly.

Thanks,
Skwim.

 

[RonPrice]

I just saw your post, Skwim. I am happy to provide some comment on this work of Beckett's, but it may be too late. Let me know.-Ron

PS You might find Wikipedia has an excellent overview of this play. Although there is only one person onstage, there are a number of 'characters' mentioned throughout. The play is considered to be Beckett at his most autobiographical, and it does draw heavily on biographical detail. He once told the actor Laurence Harvey, though, that his "work does not depend on experience. It is not a record of his experience. Still you use it." Beckett takes elements from his own life, his failed love life, his drinking, his – at the time – literary failures and looks where things might have gone. "When, in 1956, Vivian Mercier saw him in Paris, he told him that he felt 'all dried up, with nothing left but self-translation.'" The name Krapp with its excremental connotations had been used before by Beckett however and needs to be noticed. Millions of people find, in the end, that their lives were "crap." As one person put it: "they ******-up their lives."

Beckett had this to say about the drained old man we see onstage: "Krapp sees very clearly that he’s through with his work, with love and religion." He told Rick Cluchey, whom he directed in 1977, that Krapp was "in no way senile [but has] something frozen about him [and is] filled up to his teeth with bitterness." "Habit, the great deadener" has proven more tenacious than inspiration. His "present concerns revolve around the gratification of those very bodily appetites that, earlier, he had resolved should be out of his life." I wish you well Swim.-Ron Price, Australia