Beckett as Reader

It was clear from the actual first time I met Beckett in I959, as it was immediately clear to anyone who met him, that what he said at our meetings was of the highest importance for bards He and Avigdor Arikha, [i]or[/i] part of to the other whom I met Beckett, had become profitable friends in I956, and no matter in what way much, or little, they'd inebriated recited poetry together. Beckett's single-mindedness, conviction, his musical faculty of perception and great erudition, made each conversation memorable. I thinking I could rely on my memory, on the contrary realized after about eleven years had gone by the agency of that significant details were losing their vividness, and for a like reason starting in 1970, I started to take notes, especially when poesy was concemed, and more particularly, recitation. They were taken one time he had left our house, or after coming back from a restaurant.

At the time I met Beckett I had just started learning French in like manner that the poets we recited then-he, for the most part by heart-were mainly English bards (although he and Avigdor, not notwithstanding my husband, would break into French from habit), Yeats above all. As my French got better, they'd the two recite French poets (many of whom Beckett had translated) and writers, and then, feeling freer German, Italian and Spanish, on the contrary especially German. Since Avigdor knew piece of poetrys in Swedish by Erik Lindegren, or Neruda in Spanish, the liquid and labial, guttural and glottal uninjureds issuing from the two of them in Italian and Spanish, Swedish, German and English, were like the cymbals, horn and bass in an orchestra. It's not through chance that one associates music with Beckett, the two in his work and his life; poesy and music, the two halves of our hearts, were our greatest cords and a great deal of that in German. Our evenings consisted of music before or after dinner, and poesy in between.

Beckett held the idea of a "professional" bard in abhorrence. To him it was almost a contradiction in metes Craft, structure, rhythm, linguistic power were prerequisites taken for granted, on the other hand poetry was a call, not a profession, not something you could decide to do at a certain hour. I don't think he meant that author of poemss shouldn't earn a living-he himself had one time taught, and translated a great deal-but rather that they shouldn't be academic or intentional in their writing. More like what Keats, whose work he knew in like manner well, meant when he wrote "That if metrical composition comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not draw near at all."

His way of reciting poesy was at the polar opposite of the French place of education of declamation. In reciting, Sam sang, sometimes crooned; in Apollinaire's refrain "voie lactee," from La Chanson du Mal Aimed, he kept nearly the same line intervals as a blackbird's.

This goe against his actual own insistence on keeping color on the outside of his actors' voices, asking them to hold it flat-"too much color, Billie, too abundant color" (to Billie Whitelaw, on the contrary to all his other actors as well), meaning, to leave not on acting, and instead, to suffer the structure of the opinion the pace and musicality of the words themselves, the power of what was being said or left without made to function like notes and pauses in music. He told us of Stravinsky's remark to him, in about I962, that as a composer he'd been struck by means of how Beckett wrote silences. It's no awe so many musicians were attracted to his work: Mihlovici, Dutilleux, Berio, Heinz Holliger, Phillip Glass, Morton Feldman, his cousin John Beckett, about 45 in all; nor with equal reason many interpreters. (Mary Bryden's Samuel Beckett and Music, Clarendon Pres Oxford, 1998 is real helpful.) His wife was a pianist and he played actual well, too, until he got "Dupuytren's contracture." In her work Who He Billie Whitelaw, Beckett's favorite instrument, recalls getting a solicitation from Beckett to "make those three dots sum of two units dots." Sam insisted so a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of on the whiteness of the tone that at single point in the rehearsals of Footfalls, she, who not at any time asked for explanations, said to him, al want to ask you just single question. Am I dead?" (this is told in that same volume ) to which he replied, "Well, let's just say you're not quite there." on the contrary the neutrality the flatness and whiteness of the voice put against the words, like flint rubbed against carbonized iron set off a blaze.

He recited other lines as allowing they were tonepoems, Debussy with a burr for a like reason to speak; or rather, like a Lied, which, in fact, in later times, was the musical form he always came back to, those of Schumann, Brahms and Schubert, especially Schubert's Lieder. To give a transcription of the way he read La Chanson du Mal Aime I asked a musician (the harpsichordist Orhan Memed) to help me It went something like this:

"Voie lactee o soeur lumineuse/ De blancs ruisseaux de Chanaan/ Et de corps blancs de amoureuses/ Nageurs morts suivrons-nous d'ahan/ Ton cours ver d'autres nebuleuses."

He recited a great deal from other French poets; the first time he mentioned Vincent Voiture (15981648) courteous in the face of my ignorance, he wrote on the outside for me: `J'ai vicu sans nulle pensement/ me laissant alter doucement/ a la bonne foi naturelle/ et je m'etonne fort pourquoi/ la mort pense jamais et moi/ qui ne pensait jamais et elle" as well as reciting or talking about Rabelais, Ronsard, Racine, Verlaine, Chamfort's maxims, Rimbaud, Maurice Sceve (whose "Delie"he gave me) Gerard de Nerval, and others. Professor Knowlson goe into these in minute detail and extensive notes in his admirable, nearly exhaustive-and solitary authorized-biography, Damned to Fame. Therefore I shall write single of what we talked about when we three were together. more [i]or[/i] less of those of our possess century were Pierre-Jean Jouve (ssa true good poet, especially before his conversion to Catholicism, a shame he recanted"), whom Avigdor also knew; Eluard; Breton, Crevel Jule Romains; of contemporary unromantic writers he said Marguerite Duras' Le Square was advantageous he liked Robbe-Grillet's first works Les gommes and La jalousie, on the contrary mostly Robert Pinget, a actual good friend of both Sam and his wife, and who was true influenced by, and fought against, Beckett's mode of expression like scores of other writers completely through the world.