Samuel Beckett and Happy Days

SAMUEL BECKETT AND HAPPY DAYS THE WRITING, PERFORMANCE, AND PUBLICATION OF Happy Days in 1961 has brought the number of Samuel Beckett's stage plays to four, most of them composed in the last few years during an eclipse of his novel-writing. The famous Waiting for Godot (written in the late 1940's) has been followed by Endgame (written in 1956), Krapp's Last Tape (written in 1958), and Happy Days.l To this output should be added two radio plays-All That Fall (written in 1956) and Embers (written in 1959)-and two pantomimes, Acts Without Words I and II. Here is a body of work large enough to confirm or modify certain earlier inferences about Beckett's plays. What is "the Beckett myth"if by "myth" is meant that recurrent dramatic pattern which concentrates and objectifies a fundamental valuation of human life? What are the evident lines of growth of this myth? Following the necessary description of the new play, these questions will be attempted in their order. I The curtain of Happy Days rises to show a buxom middle-aged blonde firmly imbedded to her waist in a mound on a scorched desert in blazing sunlight. This is Winnie. Her husband Willie lives behind the mound in a hole from which he can stir for a few feet. Entirely out of sight at the start, Willie occasionally shows a hand or the back of his head. Winnie must twist with great effort to see him at all. A bell rings, waking Winnie to what in conventional language would have to be called a new day. Without hurry but with an occasional sense of schedule, Winnie spends the first act going through her round of doing and undoing, before the bell will ring again, this time for sleep. She prays, she brushes her teeth. She becomes fascinated by the fine print on the handle of her toothbrush. She wakes Willie, who begins to read obituaries and help-wanted ads from a yellowed newspaper. Of the many objects which Winnie unpacks from her bag, one is a revolver affectionately called Brownie, a constant invitation to suicide. Another is a music-box which plays a sentimental love-tune. 1 Years of composition are taken from the "Chronology" which appears in Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1961). 417 418 MODERN DRAMA February At one point Winnie holds up her parasol in the terrible heat; it bursts into flame. At another, she spies an ant carrying an egg through the scorched grass; she and Willie snigger at this sign of God's sense of humor. Now the day declines. Winnie repacks her bag; Willie backs into his hole. Winnie does wish that sometime Willie could come out in front where she could "feast on him." But she will settle for present blessings. When Willie answers her final question toward deciphering the banal legend on the toothbrushhandle , Winnie is overjoyed: "Oh this is a happy day!" The spectator's dominant impression of Winnie so far is that of a trite, desperate, warm-hearted, but, above all, a babbling vitality. Winnie exists because she can talk to Willie. They live out of each other's sight; Willie hardly listens, he rarely volunteers any expression of himself, his personal habits are nasty-but he is there. As Winnie says: Just to know that in theory you can hear me even though in fact you don't is all I need ... not just to be babbling away on trust as it were not knowing and something gnawing at me. Doubt. She goes on to describe what for her would be the intolerable hour: Oh no doubt the time will come when before I can utter a word I must make sure you heard the one that went before and then no doubt [will] come another time when I must learn to talk to myself a thing I could never bear to do.... Or gaze before me with compressed lips. All day long. No. That solitude seems to be approaching. In the meanwhile Winnie fluctuates between a heart-broken nostalgia for the blurred old moments when she was a golden-haired sweetheart, and...