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Beckett Before Godot
| Article
# : |
19567 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
6,474 Words |
| Author
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Enoch Brater
Enoch Brater is professor of English and theater at the
University of Michigan. His books include Beyond Minimalism:
Beckett's Late Style in the Theater, Beckett at 80/Beckett in
Context, and Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights. This
essay is adapted from his recent work Why Beckett? (Thames and
Hudson, 1989). |
On a fine sunny morning in the mid-1960s, Samuel Beckett was walking to Lord's Cricket Ground across Regent's Park. He had traveled to London from Paris especially for the test match between England and Australia, staying with publisher John Calder at his house behind Wigmore Street. John Gibson, an Irish director in the BBC radio department, remembered how enthusiastic the playwright was about the green trees, the birds singing, the company of good friends, the beautiful blue sky. At this someone remarked, "Yes, on a day like this it's good to be alive." To which Beckett replied: "Well, I wouldn't go as far as that!"
This anecdote of Martin Esslin's is revealing, situating us, as it does, somewhere between hope and despair. That is essentially how it is in Beckett's imaginative world. In Waiting for Godot, his landmark play, two characters the script names Vladimir and Estragon (but who in performance call one another Didi and Gogo) anticipate for two acts the arrival of a "kind of acquaintance" who never appears. Their only scenery is a rock, a single tree, and a landscape leading nowhere: "What is there to recognize?" says Gogo. Though they never stop waiting on their lonely country road, their constant vigil in the theater is not without its sometimes somber, sometimes hilarious qualifications. "Nothing is certain," Vladimir demurs to his sidekick, "when you're about." As the dramatic action, or lack of it, unfolds, this weary player will later universalize, "But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not." Estragon, taking the measure of the unfortunate Lucky, will be similarly global in his commentary: "He's all humanity."
Beckett used a school notebook to work on Waiting for Godot in the late 1940s. He composed in French. Later he rendered En attendant Godot into English by himself because, as he said, he felt "bad having to change what someone else had translated." For his novel Molloy, also conceived in French, he had engaged Patrick Bowles to carry out the work. In the end, in fairness to the young writer, he decided to do the French-English translation on his own, a strategy he then generally employed. Beckett began the Godot project methodically, writing only on his schoolbook's right-hand pages; when he ran out of space, he backed up to the verso sides he had skipped before. Beckett first calls Vladimir "Levy"; in the second act, he abruptly gives him the name by which he has become known to two generations of theatergoers. Unlike most of his manuscripts, the text for this play was written clearly, almost, it seems, without hesitation. "It wrote itself," he told Peter Lennon, "with very few corrections, in four
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