dragging his hunger through the sky
of my skull shell of sky and earth
stooping to the prone who must
soon take up their life and walk
mocked by a tissue that may not serve
till hunger earth and sky be offal
According to Lawrence E. Harvey’s Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), Beckett’s early poem was a response to Goethe’s “Harzreise im Winter”:
As a vulture would,
That on heavy clouds of morning
With gentle wing reposing,
Seeks for his prey –
Hover, my song. (Tr. Edwin H. Zeydel)
Harvey contrasts the two poems thusly:
The optimism, expansive joy, and religious mysticism of the original are missing in Beckett’s poem. … “The Vulture” might be called (by a critic) “The Artist on his Art.” It is the most explicit account in Echo’s Bones of the author’s views on the nature of poetry. While the model and its offshoot have in common the theme of artistic creation, even here the views disclosed differ greatly. Goethe’s “Geier” might well be a hawk in search of its prey, for there is nothing in the above lines that suggests the carrion-consuming Accipitridae of science. Even the “heavy clouds” are heavy only in order to furnish a stable resting-place, and the poet’s heart is light. His poem is a song waiting to be born, and its author in his joyful moment of expectant creativity is in the state of poetic grace. There is little doubt that the poem will be born a healthy, happy offspring. Not so with the somber song of Samuel Beckett. (113)
After the Three Dialogues, Samuel Beckett tended to embed his aesthetic statements within his drama and fiction themselves, and central to his postwar aesthetic was the “revelation” or “vision” of 1946, dramatized in the 1958 play Krapp’s Last Tape. This dramatization, however, was incomplete, and appears in only a fragmented form in the tape that the character recorded at the age of 39:
Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indulgence until that memorable night in March at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision, at last. This fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening … What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely — (Krapp switches off impatiently, winds tape forward, switches on again) — great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality — (Krapp curses, switches off, winds tape forward, switches on again) — unshatterable association until my dissolution of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire.
Beckett borrows for this image the visual sense of German Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich. It is in part autobiographical, based upon Beckett’s own experience, which he told his biographer James Knowlson was in fact much less wild: “Krapp’s vision was on the pier at Dun Laoghaire; mine was in my mother’s room. Make that clear once and for all,” he told Knowlson in about 1987.[1] What Knowlson’s biography also provides, however, is the missing key to Krapp’s (and Beckett’s) revelation. Beckett completed Krapp’s “The dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality” in preparation for the theatrical notebook on Krapp’s Last Tape that Knowlson edited in 1987:
However, one element in particular of the Krapp passage relates it directly to Beckett’s own experience: the darkness of an inner world was, indeed, an image that Beckett reproduced with friends to whom he spoke about his revelation. Beckett explained precisely what he meant by this part of Krapp’s “vision.” He wrote that the dark was “‘in reality my most –’ Lost: [that is, when Krapp switches off the tape recorder and runs the tape forward] ‘my most precious ally’ etc. meaning his true element at last and key to the opus magnum.” Light was therefore rejected in favor of darkness. And this darkness can certainly be seen as extending to a whole zone of being that includes folly and failure, impotence and ignorance.[2]
Beckett and Krapp are of course not equivalent (when he wrote the play, Beckett was much closer to the 39-year-old Krapp than he was to the 69-year-old Krapp that holds the stage). And Krapp’s irritable, angry, and perhaps fearful desire to skip over or repudiate the lessons of his revelation certainly was not a rejection shared by his creator, who would use this darkness as the mine from which he would bring out the great postwar plays, novels, and prose. But it does confirm Beckett’s essential pessimism: as Knowlson puts it, “Light was … rejected in favor of darkness.” And it should also be noted that, as Knowlson points out, this was less a sudden revelation than a crystallization of tendencies to which Beckett’s work had been leading for years. It was a synthesis of suspicions about the nature of existence that, first, became clear, and second, provided the basis for extended aesthetic discipline, productivity, and experience. But make no mistake: this is pessimism. And Beckett — if not Krapp — learned to embrace it not in celebration but in contemplation. It is a difficult embrace but one that must be made once the recognition is experienced; if not, the work and the life are lies.
On another note, it is sometimes an unexpected pleasure to have one’s biographical information about Beckett corrected. I wrote both last week and a few years ago that Beckett had an indifference, if not distaste, for Wagner’s music, but apparently this did not extend to all of Wagner’s operas. In doing the research for the above, I came across a brief memoir by Duncan Scott, the lighting engineer at the Royal Court Theatre where Beckett directed several of his own plays in the 1970s. Discussing music with Beckett, Scott noted, “We spoke of Schoenberg, Berg, Bartok and Wagner. He said he did not like Wagner in general, only Tristan und Isolde. When I suggested that Parsifal was Wagner’s definitive statement, he showed interest, but said he didn’t know the music.”[3] So perhaps my drawing of a parallel between Beckett’s work and Tristan, at least, was not entirely without biographical basis as well.
Footnotes
James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 319. [↩]
James and Elizabeth Knowlson, eds., Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett: A Centenary Celebration. New York, NY: Arcade Publishing, 2006, p. 215. [↩]
The worst is not
So long as we can say “This is the worst.”
King Lear (IV.1)
During a long sad cold train ride yesterday I had the opportunity to read once again[1] Anne Atik’s How It Was, her 2001 memoir of Samuel Beckett. Atik, the wife of Avigdor Arikha, one of Beckett’s closest friends, provides an intimate portrait of the writer from the late 1950s through his death in 1989. It is, largely, a collection of Beckett’s table talk, though this erudite writer’s distrust of erudition is clear — his admiration for Yeats’ late poems, Leopardi, Kant, Schopenhauer, Swift, Sam Johnson, and Dante; his preference for the music of Webern, Schubert, and Haydn’s late string quartets over Mahler, Bach, and Wagner; his concern with the ways in which poetry should be read aloud. How It Was also chronicles, however, a few of Beckett’s personal traits, such as his clear, uncondescending pleasure to be in the presence of children of all ages; his wit; his occasional dark silences. The volume is lovingly illustrated with reproductions of holograph letters from Beckett and several of Arikha’s drawings. A good holiday present, I think, for Beckett enthusiasts.
On the second leg of the journey I re-read Company, Beckett’s 50-page “novel” of 1980 and available in Nohow On. And once again I was moved by the mastery of Beckett’s late work; this, along with Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho, constitute Beckett’s final major prose texts. The simple chronicle of a man lying on his back in the dark, listening to a series of fables that his imagination creates (“lie” and its various permutations are among the most frequently repeated words in the text), is a profoundly expressive exploration of solitude in the waning hours of existence; lacking the cruelty of How It Is or even Beckett’s final stage play, What Where, these three pieces constitute a slow putting-away of an artist’s tools. The implicit comparison with Shakespeare’s The Tempest is deliberate; Ruby Cohn says that “a new gentleness suffuses Company, not unlike Shakespeare’s late romances after the tragedies”[2] — a gentleness also reflected in the writer’s own behavior, as Atik’s book testifies. I am looking forward to revisiting the other two works in the volume, and leave you this Friday with the conclusion of Company:
You now on your back in the dark shall not rise to your arse again to clasp your legs in your arms and bow down your head till it can bow down no further. But with face upturned for good labour in vain at your fable. Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With every inane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark. And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always were.
Alone.
Footnotes
I am at that point in my life, I think, when I am more drawn to revisit those books and artworks that have meant so much to me in the past, for they continue to remain new with each new encounter; this preferred to so many so-called “new” things which to my understanding seem old and inadequate. [↩]
Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2001, p. 354. [↩]
While John Hurt continues his run at BAM in the Gate Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, those who lack the wherewithal to attend this (through lack of time, money, connections, what-have-you) should note that the Beckett on Film project recorded the same production several years ago; it can be found on YouTube here. This is not the only major American presentation of the play these days — concurrently, Brian Dennehy is appearing in the play at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre through 18 December. A Krapp-tastic winter here on these shores; there must be something in the air; an Effi Briest revival, perhaps.
Also from YouTube, in five separate parts, comes Ian Rickson’s notable 2006 Royal Court Theatre production of Krapp’s Last Tape, with Harold Pinter as Krapp. (You can expand the video to full-screen viewing by clicking on the “expand” button in the lower right-hand corner of each segment.) I first posted these videos here in September of 2010.
Waltrud Meier as Isolde in the Heiner Müller production of Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth.
A few years ago (in 2008 to be precise) I wrote the below essay after seeing Dieter Dorn’s production of Tristan und Isolde at the Met. A much shorter version of this essay appeared on 1 April 2008 at the Guardian theatre blog.
I’ve appended two videos to the essay — the Liebestod from the 1993 Heiner Müller Bayreuth production, sung by the extraordinary Waltrud Meier, and the first part of Samuel Beckett’s Play, as directed by Anthony Minghella for the Beckett on Film project — to offer an interesting comparison and contrast.
On the face of it, there couldn’t be two more different theatre artists than Richard Wagner and Samuel Beckett — the first the egomaniacal, nineteenth-century composer and theorist who had giants and gods banging about the stage in forests and faux-Olympias like Valhalla to thundering orchestral music in five-hour-long operas; the second the spare, self-effacing master of essences who, towards the end of his career, turned out plays — often quiet, approaching silence — that rarely exceeded twenty minutes.
Beckett himself cared very little for Wagner (or for Mahlerian histrionics for that matter; Schubert’s songs were more his style). But the production of Tristan und Isolde by Dieter Dorn which was recently restaged at New York’s Metropolitan Opera with Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner suggests there may be more to the comparison than meets the eye. After the Ring cycle of operas and Die Meistersinger, this opera and Parsifal expressed essences of suffering, desire and renunciation — the same essences that provided the matter for Beckett’s own last plays. And, apart from the extraordinary opportunities and challenges that these works provide for their performers (Voigt and Heppner won a ten-minute standing ovation for their work), there’s just as much, if not more, to say about the theatre practice that these works represent.
Wagner was always a man of the theatre first. “Everything he did was determined by his need to create theatre,” said the editors of an anthology of Wagner’s prose work, and by the time Bayreuth was built, Wagner, like Beckett, found it necessary to direct his own music-dramas. But there was more. Both Beckett and Wagner recognized Arthur Schopenhauer’s contribution to aesthetic philosophy and exemplified this same philosophy in their stage work.
For Schopenhauer, music was the highest of the arts because it most effectively permitted the description of the ultimately indescribable Will that lay beyond the world of earthly appearances. In music’s abstraction lay its power. The words of a libretto (or, for Beckett, of a playscript) made this communication, this description, more precise, and for Schopenhauer, the lyrical, tragic drama was second only to music in its ability to communicate these descriptions.
There was, in addition, the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk: the theatre work as a distillation of all the arts. Wagner did not live to see the implementation of electric light in the theatre, which, in the hands of designers like Adolphe Appia, made abstraction tangible. Wagner’s production practice in the 1860s was heavily invested in the realistic theatre practice of the era: the naturalism of historically-accurate sets and costumes as exemplified by the work of Saxe-Meiningen. (It’s still done, as Sir Peter Hall demonstrated in his Ring cycle of several years back.) As effective as Tristan und Isolde was when it premiered in Munich in 1865, it didn’t seem to come into its own until Appia’s theory — which was heavily indebted to Wagner’s more metaphysical operas – became current in the 1920s. With the abstraction of the Impressionists, Matisse and Picasso, shape and color became more evocative of the poetic currents that lay beneath photographic realism. Appia demonstrated that this was true in the theatre just as much as on the canvas.
In the post-war era, Bayreuth’s directors Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner seized on Appia. The Tristans produced there were shorn of naturalistic and realistic costumes and sets; instead, geometrical shapes on a bare stage were flooded with electric light. At about the same time, Beckett’s first plays were being performed in Paris — plays that also depended for their effect just as much on the painterly ability of the director and designer as the performers. Here, too, there was little more than a nod to realism. For Beckett’s 1961 production of Waiting for Godot in Paris, sculptor Alberto Giacometti designed a tree that was made with wires and plaster: an obvious construct, a mere suggestion of a real tree. Even these scenic elements became less and less common in Beckett’s later work, until 1972′s Not I presented a mere pair of lips, spotlit at center stage. The theatrical event is reduced to its essence: a speaking mouth.
Dorn’s production for the Met marries Beckett’s stage practice to Wagner further. There is a nod to Beckett’s conception of colorless existence in the gray floor of the raked stage, and in the three pure-white cycloramas that are gathered into a very visible vanishing point upstage center, a vanishing point that suggests the unity and nothingness for which the two lovers yearn. (This is not unlike the “very pompier trompe-l’oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance” that Beckett specifies in the stage directions for Happy Days.)
In the foreground of this stage image there is in Tristan, as in much of Beckett, physical stasis, a lack of physical activity. The Day/Night duet that makes up most of the second act of Tristan is performed by the characters in a deep blue light, the lovers wrapped into one seeming unified and motionless object at center stage, nearly impossible to see in the darkness – and the audience, too, is bathed in this darkness for 45 minutes, as the lovers reject day for the night which finally allows them unity. Instead, it is what we hear — the words and the music — that constitutes, for the opera, the dramatic event. As in either act of Godot, there is little more than talk for nearly an hour, but in Wagner this talk is filled with sublimely beautiful music, and in Beckett, devastatingly lyrical speech. Over a century of Tristan performances and half-a-century of Godot performances have demonstrated the profound power of such a theatrical essentialism.
Instead of working from realistic detail inward to the spirit, Wagner worked from within the spirit outward. “[In Tristan] in perfect confidence, I plunged into the inner depths of soul events, and from the innermost centre of the world, I fearlessly built up its outer form,” Wagner wrote in “The Music of the Future.” “… I have rejected the exhaustive detail which an historical poet is obliged to employ so as to clarify the outward developments of his plot, to the detriment of a lucid exposition of its inner motives, and I trusted myself to the latter alone. Life and death, the whole meaning and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul.” This is a practical statement about staging as well as a statement about the aesthetics of composition. As in Wagner’s final operas, Beckett’s dramas from 1962′s Play onward also strip this exhaustive detail to allow the motives themselves expression.
Beckett and Wagner share in their theatrical aesthetics the same precision of soul. They do so through a spare essentialism: the rooted power of theatre based in simple rituals of performance. A little unexpected, perhaps. But theatre makes strange bedfellows, and not just after the opening night party.
For more about Wagner’s relationship to Schopenhauer and philosophy in general, I guide you towards Bryan Magee’s excellentThe Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy.
Via YouTube: Waltrud Meier sings the Liebestod at the end of Act III of Tristan und Isolde, from the Heiner Müller Bayreuth production, filmed in 1995:
And, again from YouTube, the first half of Anthony Minghella’s film of Samuel Beckett’s Play:
