Ends and Odds: Eight New Dramatic Pieces by Samuel Beckett, and: Fizzles by Samuel Beckett, and: Samuel Beckett: I can’t go on, I’II go on ed. by Richard Seaver (review)

Books in Review Ends and Odds: Eight New Dramatic Pieces. Samuel Beckett. Grove Press, 128 pp., $6.95 (cloth); $1.95 (paperback). Fizzles. Samuel Beckett. Grove Press, 61 pp., $6.95 (cloth); $1.95 (paperback). Samuel Beckett: I can't go on, I'll go on. Edited and Introduced by Richard Seaver. Grove Press, 621 pp., $15.00 (cloth). Ruby Cohn Past seventy, wielding words over a half a century, Samuel Beckett writes perturbably on. These newly published works are concentrated intensities composed between 1958 and 1976; they are not for Beckett beginners . The titles for these American volumes conceal the genre: Ends and Odds take dramatic form; Fizzles are lyrics of fiction. Though Beckett finds it harder and harder to write, he has eked out these penurious pieces that enrich some of us. Drama or fiction, these recent texts will never move more than some of us. Godot will not not come again, and Play raises a figurative curtain for such deep Ends as That Time and Footfalls. But some of us, like Marlowe's Jew, will cherish these "Infinite riches in a little room." The four Ends were written in English between 1972 and 1976, whereas the four Odds are French pieces dating from 1958 to 1963, first jettisoned by Beckett, then salvaged, and finally translated into English. Beckett's memory is undependable as to dates, and exact chronology must await Richard Admussen's recension of Beckett's manuscripts. What with the old Odds, however, the subtitle is inaccurate - Eight New Dramatic Pieces. Endsalone are new - and rich beyond belief. Each short play dramatizes the end ofa life. Each of the three stage plays centers on a single stark visual image, from which or toward which the words -flow. The television play blends simple images with minimal narration and the largo from Beethoven's Fifth Piano Trio. 97 Not 1(1972) juxtaposes two characters - a loquacious Mouth and a mute Auditor in djellaba. Mouth races through an asyntactical biography, phrases varying between one and nine words, one and thirteen syllables. More readily on page than stage six scenes emerge: loveless conception and birth (eclipsed into a single scene), silent presentation of a shopping list in a supermarket, perception of tears in the hand, silence under questioning in a courtroom, sudden speech in winter blending into speech eruption (five times evoked) on an April morning. At five points during the swift monologue the Mouth interrupts herself: "What? ... who? . . . no! ... she!" Thrice, the Auditor reacts to this denial with a gesture of helpless compassion, but by the last two self-interruptions, he is still. In this breathless monologue, speech seeks to account for itself. Nearing the biblical age of three-score-and-ten, the woman of the discourse, almost insentient, suddenly finds herself full of spring speech that Beckett's words record, verbs moving into the present tense. The Mouth tells a disjunctive, third-person story, and the Mouth utters the speech it describes in Beckett's dramatic idiom of the 1970s. Or, more accurately, one of his idioms. That Time dramatizes the end of an old man, also reluctant to use the first person. Concentrated in a whitehaired head, he hears his own voice trisected through three loudspeakers. These three voice-aspects come from three different directions in time as well as space. The first recalls a return visit to a childhood refuge, a stone among nettles. The second recalls a scene of two lovers sitting outdoors on a stone, not touching but exchanging vows. The third recalls an old Beckettian tramp huddled on a stone bench in a public building. The three voices address the old man as "you." The three voices ask questions about the time of these returns. Since the three accounts are intercalated, since the three are distanced into the past, "that time" blurs into all time, the three voices into dust. Between 1966, when Beckett completed the television play Eh Joe, and 1972, when he wrote Not 1, there is a six-year hiatus. But Beckett's first television play seeds the dramas of the 1970s, in being a drama about an end. The television protagonist has a name - Joe - and the play has...