Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett

Preface

Preface I seem to remember something earlier, but the first letter I saved from Beckett was typed, dated 21.9.59, and sent from 6, rue des Favorites, where some days later we met. In the small courtyard to entrance C, there was, as if from a picture I had seen, the bicycle next to the trash can, perhaps the model for Nagg's and Nell's. A woman answered the door, reddish hair, illfitting suit-I knew nothing then of Suzanne-and said Mr. Beckett was still at his desk. She quickly disappeared, but there he was, rising, wearing a white shirt, tie tucked, face long, graven, thin-skinned, hair severely brushed, standing high in resistance, looking, I thought, like Clov, with the same aggrieved passion for order. In a moment he was impatient with his own slightest negligence, apologizing, muttering, after seating me on the day bed, about something that had been misplaced. The typewriter was off to one side, a new portable used in its case. What he had typed began with the formulary, "Thank you for your letter." The word your was inserted by hand, in blue ink, above the word my, which had been crossed out. The letter was nothing more than a note, giving me his phone number-all the world can have it now: BLOMET 09.11-and saying he'd be glad to see me. I like to think, however, there was something proleptic in the correction, as if the my were saus rature (under erasure, as they'd be saying in emergent deconstruction) and-as with a couple of essays in this collection-identities conflated in the slippage of pronouns, his voice momentarily in the grain of my voice. As I suggest more than once in the essays, Beckett was not only aware of the slippage but sometimes agonized over the perfidy of pronouns, as he was later baffled and even outraged by the presumptions of performance, particularly when they entailed taking liberties with his plays. I will have something to say about that in remarks on directing Beckett, one of two interviews in the collection, gathered otherwise from writings over more than forty years, beginning with the program notes for the productions of Waiting for Gadat and Endgame that I directed in the fifties at The Actor's 2 / Sails of the Herring Fleet Workshop of San Francisco. If my engagement with Beckett came through the theater, it has in recent years taken a theoretical turn, yet personal, equivocal, virtually a habit of mind that, almost from the beginning-in the shift from thinking about him to the sensation of thinking through him, by means of his thought, such as it was, in the extremity of meaning's absence-also resists the habit. I stopped seeing Beckett for some years (foolishly, no doubt) because everybody was seeing him, and I hesitated for some years to collect these essays, or write anymore about him, because he was overwritten. But among the reasons for the collection, aside from bringing it all together from diverse sources over time, is that time has made it apparent ("that time you went back to look"P that nobody who has directed his plays has sustained, from the rehearsal into the writing, with the writing as a kind of rehearsal, such intimately extended reflection upon the unsettling substance of Beckett, turning it over and over, what and how he thinks, its aporetic expertise in "the science of affliction," and-suspended painfully to the point of laughter in the aphasia of desire: "quick grab and on"-its peculiar mixture of stringency and nostalgia. The title of the collection, moved by the nostalgia, is prompted by a passage from one of the essays, which expresses a recurring theme, though here the titular phrase (from Endgame) is floating in a stream of thought initiated by "the constant process of decantation," as well as the intricate language, of his early meditation on Proust: "If Beckett, despite himself, is still turned toward origins or the moment forgotten as an appearance in the fluid of future time, from things about to disappear-like the sails of the herring fleet or all that rising corn, the mordancy rising with the myth of rebirth, all that corniness-he turns away in time, like the painter or engraver: 'Appalled.'" Which is what makes him modern and postmodern at once, or merely confounds the categories. To stay with what's appalling in Beckett, which even the laughter...