Samuel Beckett's Embers: "A Matter of Fundamental Sounds"

SAMUEL BECKETT'S EMBERS: UA MATTER OF FUNDAMENTAL SOUNDS" IN BECKETI' STUDIES, examinations of Waiting for Godot are finally being supplemented by other kinds of research. The most recent of these is the study of the explorations Beckett has made in media during the present decade. His experiments with electronics have provided his eternal themes with new channels, and expounders have produced valuable analyses of his skill in transforming media technique into cognitive statement. There are, however, some early plays in danger of neglect. So far, the only non-theatrical dramatic works from the fifties, the radio plays All That Fall and Embers, have received rather scant treatment in Beckett scholarship. This is particularly true of Embers, the subject of this essay. "My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else," Beckett once wrote to his American director, Alan Schneider.l Taking his declaration literally, I shall approach the text of Embers as a guiding description of a radio production, not as a work that can be analysed in purely literary terms. The original B.B.C. recording of the play (BBCLP 24968) will be referred to whenever necessary for the full understanding of the text as a radio script.2 Most comments on Beckett's radio plays have been concerned with their verbal structure . Embers, however, is a carefully wrought shorthand version of a larger statement which exists in an aural dimension only. The text of Embers arrived at the B.B.C. on February 16, 1959, according to an entry in the card index of the Play Library (Sound) of the Corporation. The task of producing the play was given to Donald McWhinnie, the distinguished staff producer who, in 1956, helped to persuade Beckett to write All That Fall, his first work for radio.3 Jack MacGowran was chosen for the part of Henry. With Patrick Magee, another Irish actor, MacGowran has since become Beckett's chief interpreter in English. Apart from a small role in A II That Fall this was his first Beckett part. The production (duration 45'00") was first broadcast on June 24, 1959, in the B.B.C. Third Programme. Although audience reactions 1 Letter dated December 29, 1957; printed in The Village Voice Reader (New York, 1963), p. 168. 2 I wish to express my gratitude for kind assistance and for permission to quote from copyright material, to Martin Esslin, B.B.C. Head of Sound Drama, and to the Audience Research Department of the Corporation. 3 See McWhinnie, "All That Fall: Plays of the Week in Sound Radio," Radio Times, January 11, 1957, p. 4; Idem, The Art of Radio (London, 1959), pp. 133151 . . 216 1970 BECKETT'S Embers 217 were mostly negative, it was given two repeats in the same year. Many listeners in the Third Programme Panel sample remarked that the play had been admirably conceived as a radio work, taking full advantage of the resources of the medium. Most commentators, however , remained far from enthusiastic, one of them pointing out that uthe personae are not characters ... they are the same old croakers we've had in the previous Beckett effusions and I've heard the lot."4 Beckett specialists, too, disagree about the qualities of the play. The extremes are represented by the director Roger Blin, who finds Embers the most admirable of all Beckett's plays, and by the critic Richard N. Cae, who calls it "not only minor, but one of his very few failures."5 As with most of the author's works, the things going on ("Call that on," sneered the Unnamable) in this "admirable failure" are deceptively easy to summarize. Henry, a genuinely Beckettian recluse and solipsist, is "sitting on the strand."6 He is trying, as he has done innumerable times before, to establish contact with his drowned father. The memory of the dead man dominates him just as strongly as the living man did. His attempts to communicate are, as is to be expected, . vain: My father, back from the dead, to be with me. (Pause.) As if he hadn't died. (Pause.) No, simply back from...