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1 14 9 Beckett and America j o h n p. h a r r i n g t o n The great Samuel Beckett Centenary of 2006 proved to be truly exhaustive. However, one of the least frequently noticed events of the anniversary year was announcement that the Coconut Grove Playhouse had been declared a historic landmark. Many will remember that this was the site of the out-oftown tryout of the American premiere production of Waiting for Godot that drew sensationalist press and hugely self-congratulatory celebration of the magnitude of the artistic disaster. The theater building, in what in Florida is called “Mediterranean Revival,” may well be a good example of vernacular architecture of the 1930s in the Miami area. But the only reason given in the press for its preservation for historical purposes is that it was host to the Godot “resounding flop,” in which, according to the Gainesville newspaper story on the landmark status, “the audience did not understand the play’s metaphysical subtleties, and a third of the attendees left at intermission, while others lined up for refunds.”1 None of these three statements is historically accurate. But what is really interesting is the whole legendary quality of the episode: European culture transferred to America in its own fabled 1950s and proudly rejected as such. The Beckett Centenary of his birth is also the Diamond Jubilee of the Coconut Grove production with Bert Lahr and movement of it with him alone to Broadway. Perhaps the fifty-year distance helps us understand our own vanity in gloating over Beckett’s remoteness, Florida’s superficiality, and Broadway’s commercialism. Then, Beckett helps us, Americans, know ourselves. Some of the most frequently cited occasions on the great Samuel Beckett centenary of 2006 have as emphasis Beckett the European, including the exhibition at Reading, center of European Beckett Studies, called “Samuel Beckett and America | 115 Beckett—the Irish European.” One might think that would offend the early “Irish Beckett” enthusiasts. It does not because the “Irish Beckett” is itself a now historical concept formed some time ago, when Ireland was Ireland and Europe was Europe and the differences were evident. The European Beckett, especially as advanced by the Journal of Beckett Studies, center of American Beckett Studies, is focused on what it called “genetic criticism,” or how his work had genesis in Continental culture. It advances study of that genesis.2 Another area of interest has to do with output rather than the input, in what happened when Beckett’s characteristic work reached its audience, and this area is extremely interesting when the work meets a distinctly foreign audience, such as American. Instead of genesis, this is advanced through performance history. The record does not argue for a hitherto undiscovered American Beckett; in fact, the interest in Beckett and America lies in the great gap between the producer of the work and the receivers of it, a gap that presumably existed in Paris and in London and in Dublin, but never quite as wide as that significantly greater great yawning gap between Beckett and America, where the differences continue to be evident. Hence the interest: not in identity, but in contrast. I’m delighted to report that, as recorded by his biographer James Knowlson, at the end of Beckett’s single visit to America , after a trip to the 1963–1964 World’s Fair, and after persisting through the final inning of a New York Mets double header at Shea Stadium, Beckett headed into the departure gate of his return flight from New York with, according to his publisher Barney Rosset, these words: “This is somehow not the right country for me . . . the people are too strange.”3 To put the matter of contrast on a slightly higher plane than Waiting for Godot at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, the idea of contrast as enriching is a wonderful one in Pascale Casanova’s book The World Republic of Letters. She is very interested in how national literary cultures are evolving into international ones without ever completely obliterating origins, and in her study both Beckett and Ireland are perhaps the preeminent cases. Casanova wants us to forego exclusionary theories of literature and reading and instead engage more complex models in which, in her words, “the literary world needs to be seen . . . as the product of antagonistic forces. . . . [and in which] international space proceeds for the most part through rivalries within national fields between national and international writers.”4...

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