A Beckett Canon

1953–58 Then These Flashes, or Gushes

1953–58
Then These Flashes, or Gushes 1953
On January 5, 1953, En attendant Godot opened at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris, but Beckett sought refuge in Ussy. Although the production was not the incendiary explosion of which legends are made, it did bring Beckett some modest public attention. Since he was already at a creative impasse, buffeted between “je” and “il” in ‹ction, the staging of Godot offered him no palliative. On the contrary. When Suzanne reported to him that Estragon’s trousers failed to drop at the end of the ‹rst performance, Beckett wrote Blin indignantly. The undropped trousers proved a harbinger of other irritations during 1953. In February an excerpt from L’Innommable (“Mahood”) was published in the prestigious Nouvelle nouvelle revue française, and he was annoyed by misprints. In August Watt was published in Paris by an improbable partnership of young foreign editors of Merlin (a short-lived periodical) and a seasoned editor of pornographic books; it too sported misprints, in spite of Beckett’s painstaking correction of the galleys. After years of translation for small sums, Beckett felt compelled by requests from theaters in England and Germany to consider translating Godot. Even pleasures were tainted by his failure to write anything new: Meeting Joyce’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, Beckett was reminded of the older writer’s un›agging creativity, in contrast to his own ›agging efforts. Reacting companionably to his new American publisher, Barney Rosset, Beckett had nothing new to offer him. 1954
The new year threatened to be comparably unproductive. A notebook at TCD contains six leaves of a jettisoned story, which is dated January 1954, 209 but I am unable to decipher it. Beckett did manage in February to pen a short appreciation of his friend, the eighty-three-year-old painter Jack Yeats, for an exhibition at the Paris Galérie des Beaux Arts—the Irish artist’s ‹rst continental exposure. Beckett was dissatis‹ed with the essay, but it is a prose poem of criticism. Hommage à Jack B. Yeats [Homage to Jack B. Yeats] The homage consists of nine paragraph-versets on a single page. Beckett rephrases his view of nine years earlier, that nationality and af‹liation are irrelevant to the artist. Beckett praises Yeats’s “uniquely self-pervaded” art, which is at one with its “wellhead.” He evokes these “images of . . . breathless immediacy,” “beyonds of vision,” “mastery which submits in trembling to the unmasterable.” Were Beckett to have enfolded the Hommage into a collection of his poems, it would not be out of place. Undated manuscripts suggest that Beckett, blocked in ‹ction, turned to drama. For all the many scenic directions of Godot, however, and for all Beckett’s skepticism about language, it does not seem to me predictable that he would turn to mime. The Mime du rêveur A was jettisoned before completion , and although it is undated, it may have preceded the several abortive steps toward Fin de partie. Mime du rêveur A [Mime of Dreamer A] The mime play’s setting is a dimly lit room with two high, round, curtained windows. The only furnishings are small benches under the windows and a central rocking chair. The single character, A, wears a bathrobe, scarf, cap, socks, and mittens; a noise of wind suggests the cold. When A moves, one leg is seen to be shorter than the other, so that he sometimes loses his balance, but he steadies himself by holding on to the “rocking chair” (an English phrase in the French typescript). Although there is no scenic division, the action is tripartite, pivoting on three unwritten mime scenes within the main mime. Action starts when A a beckett canon: 1953–58 210 The appreciation of Jack Yeats was ‹rst published in Les Lettres nouvelles, April 1954. I was ignorant of Beckett’s superb translation of this homage in 1971, when I had the temerity to translate it for Roger McHugh’s Jack B. Yeats: A Centenary Gathering (Dublin: Dolman Press). Beckett’s version appeared that year in Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957): A Centenary Exhibition. Beckett’s French and English texts are published in Disjecta. Beckett gave a four-leaf typescript of Mime du rêveur A to Lawrence Harvey, who deposited it in NhD. It has been published in (a barely readable) facsimile by Stanley Gontarski as appendix B of his Intent of Undoing. ‹rst loses his...