George Bernard ShawFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

George Bernard Shaw, (pronounced /ˈbɝːnɚd ˈʃɔː/[1]) (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright and one of the founders of the London School of Economics.

Although Shaw's first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, his talent was for drama, and he authored more than 60 plays. Nearly all of his writings deal sternly with prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy to make their stark themes more palatable. Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege and found them all defective. He was most angered by the exploitation of the working class, and most of his writings censure that abuse. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal political rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthful lifestyles.

Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived. They settled in Ayot St. Lawrence in a house now called Shaw's Corner. Shaw died there, aged 94, from chronic problems exacerbated by injuries he incurred by falling.

He is the only person to have been awarded both the Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938). These were for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion, respectively. Shaw wanted to refuse his Nobel Prize outright because he had no desire for public honors, but accepted it at his wife's behest: she considered it a tribute to Ireland. He did reject the monetary award, requesting it be used to finance translation of Swedish books to English.[2]

G. Bernard Shaw (he hated the "George" and never used it, either personally or professionally) was born in 1856 in Dublin, in a lower-middle class family of Scottish-Protestant ancestry. His father was a failed corn-merchant, with a drinking problem and a squint (which Oscar Wilde's father, a leading Dublin surgeon, tried unsuccessfully to correct); his mother was a professional singer, the sole disciple of Vandeleur Lee, a voice teacher claiming to have a unique and original approach to singing.

When Shaw was just short of his sixteenth birthday, his mother left her husband and son and moved with Vandeleur Lee to London, where the two set up a household, along with Shaw's older sister Lucy (who later became a successful music hall singer). Shaw remained in Dublin with his father, completing his schooling (which he hated passionately), and working as a clerk for an estate office (which he hated just as much as school).

It may not be a accidental, then, that Shaw's plays, including Misalliance, are filled with problematic parent-child relationships: with children who are brought up in isolation from their parents; with foundlings, orphans, and adopted heirs; and with parents who wrongly presume that they are entitled to their children's obedience and affection.

In 1876, Shaw left Dublin and his father and moved to London, moving in with his mother's menage. There he lived off of his mother and sister while pursuing a career in journalism and writing. The first medium he tried as a creative writer was prose, completing five novels (the first one appropriately titled Immaturity) before any of them were published. He read voraciously, in public libraries and in the British Museum reading room. And he became involved in progressive politics. Standing on soapboxes, at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park and at socialist rallies, he learned to overcome his stagefright and his stammer. And, to hold the attention of the crowd, he developed an energetic and aggressive speaking style that is evident in all of his writing.

With Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Shaw founded the Fabian Society, a socialist political organization dedicated to transforming Britain into a socialist state, not by revolution but by systematic progressive legislation, bolstered by persuasion and mass education. The Fabian society would later be instrumental in founding the London School of Economics and the Labour Party. Shaw lectured for the Fabian Society, and wrote pamphlets on the progressive arts, including The Perfect Wagnerite, an interpretation of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle, and The Quintessence of Ibsenism, based on a series of lectures about the progressive Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. Meanwhile, as a journalist, Shaw worked as an art critic, then as a music critic (writing under the pseudonym "Corno di Bassetto"), and finally, from 1895 to 1898, as Theatre

Critic for the Saturday Review, where his reviews appeared over the infamous initials "GBS."

In 1891, at the invitation of J.T. Grein, a merchant, theatre critic, and director of a progressive private new-play society, The Independent Theatre, Shaw wrote his first play, Widower's Houses. For the next twelve years, he wrote close to a dozen plays, though he generally failed to persuade the managers of the London Theatres to produce them. A few were produced abroad; one (Arms and the Man) was produced under the auspices of an experimental management; one (Mrs Warren's Profession) was censored by the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays (the civil servant who, from 1737 until 1967, was empowered with the prior censorship of all spoken drama in England); and several were presented in single performances by private societies.

In 1898, after a serious illness, Shaw resigned as theatre critic, and moved out of his mother's house (where he was still living) to marry Charlotte Payne-Townsend, an Irish woman of independent means. Their marriage (quite possibly sexually unconsummated) lasted until Charlotte's death in 1943.

In 1904, Harley Granville Barker, an actor, director and playwright twenty years younger than Shaw who had appeared in a private theatre society's production of Shaw's Candida, took over the management of the Court Theatre on Sloane Square in Chelsea (outside of the "Theatreland" of the fashionable West End) and set up it up as an experimental theatre specializing in new and progressive drama. Over the next three seasons, Barker produced ten plays by Shaw (with Barker officially listed as director, and with Shaw actually directing his own plays), and Shaw began writing new plays with Barker's management specifically in mind. Over the next ten years, all but one of Shaw's plays (Pygmalion in 1914) was produced either by Barker or by Barker's friends and colleagues in the other experimental theater managements around England. With royalties from his plays, Shaw, who had become financially independent on marrying, now became quite wealthy. Throughout the decade, he remained active in the Fabian Society, in city government (he served as vestryman for the London borough of St. Pancras), and on committees dedicated to ending dramatic censorship, and to establishing a subsidized National Theatre.

The outbreak of war in 1914 changed Shaw's life. For Shaw, the war represented the bankruptcy of the capitalist system, the last desperate gasps of the nineteenth-century empires, and a tragic waste of young lives, all under the guise of patriotism. He expressed his opinions in a series of newspaper articles under the title Common Sense About the War. These articles proved to be a disaster for Shaw's public stature: he was treated as an outcast in his adopted country, and there was even talk of his being tried for treason. His dramatic output ground to a halt, and he succeeded in writing only one major play during the war years, Heartbreak House, into which he projected his bitterness and despair about British politics and society.

After the war, Shaw found his dramatic voice again and rebuilt his reputation, first with a series of five plays about "creative evolution," Back to Methuselah, and then, in 1923, with Saint Joan. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Not needing the money, he donated the cash award towards an English edition of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, who had never been recognized with a Nobel prize by the Swedish Academy). Shaw's plays were regularly produced and revived in London. Several theatre companies in the United States began producing his plays, old and new, on a regular basis (most notably the Theatre Guild in New York, and the Hedgerow Theatre, in Rose Valley, PA, which became internationally known for its advocacy of the plays of Shaw and the Irish playwright Sean O'Casey). In the late 1920s, a Shaw festival was established in England (in a town, coincidentally, named Malvern).

Shaw lived the rest of his life as an international celebrity, travelling the world, continually involved in local and international politics. (He visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of Stalin; and he came briefly to the United States at the invitation of William Randolph Hearst, stepping on shore only twice, for a lecture at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and for lunch at Hearst's castle in San Simeon in California). And he continued to write thousands of letters and over a dozen more plays.

In 1950, Shaw fell off a ladder while trimming a tree on his property at Ayot St. Lawrence in Hertfordshire, outside of London, and died a few days later of complications from the injury, at age 94. He had been at work on yet another play (Why She Would Not). In his will, he left a large part of his estate to a project to revamp the English alphabet. (Only one volume was published with the new "Shaw Alphabet": a parallel text edition of Shaw's Androcles and the Lion). After that project failed, the estate was divided among the other beneficiaries in his will: the National Gallery of Ireland, the British Museum, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Royalties from Shaw's plays (and from the musical My Fair Lady, based on Shaw's Pygmalion) have helped to balance the budgets of these institutions ever since.

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, where he grew up in something close to genteel poverty. "I am a typical Irishman; my family came from Yorkshire," Shaw once said. His father, George Carr Shaw, was in the wholesale grain trade. Lucinda Elisabeth (Gurly) Shaw, his mother, was the daughter of an impoverished landowner. She was 16-years younger than her husband. George Carr was a drunkard – his example prompted his son to become a teetotaller. When he died in 1885, his children and wife did not attend his funeral. Young Shaw and his two sisters were brought up mostly by servants. Shaw's mother eventually left the family home to teach music, singing, in London. When she died in 1913, Shaw confessed to Mrs. Patrick Campbell: "I must write to you about it, because there is no one else who didn't hate her mother, and even who doesn't hate her children."

In 1866 the family moved to a better neighborhood. Shaw went to the Wesleyan Connexional School, then moved to a private school near Dalkey, and from there to Dublin's Central Model School. Shaw finished his formal education at the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School. At the age of 15, he started to work as a junior clerk. In 1876 he went to London, joining his sister and mother. Shaw did not return to Ireland for nearly thirty years.

Most of the next two years Shaw educated himself at the British Museum. He began his literary career by writing music and drama criticism, and novels, including the semi-autobiographical IMMATURITY, without much success. A vegetarian, who eschewed alcohol and tobacco, Shaw joined in 1884 the Fabian Society, served on its executive committee from 1885 to 1911. The middle-class socialist group attracted also H.G. Wells – the both writers send each other copies of their new books as they appeared. "You are, now that Wilde is dead, the one living playwright in my esteem," wrote Wells after receiving Shaw's THREE PLAYS FOR PURITANS (1901).

A man of many causes, Shaw supported abolition of private property, radical change in the voting system, campaigned for the simplification of spelling, and the reform of the English alphabet. As a public speaker, Shaw gained the status of one of the most sought-after orators in England. In 1895 Shaw became a drama critic for the Saturday Review. Articles written for the paper were later collected in OUR THEATRES IN THE NINETIES (1932). Music, art, and drama criticism Shaw wrote for Dramatic Review (1885-86), Our Corner (1885-86), The Pall Mall Gazette (1885-88), The World (1886-94), and The Star (1888-90) as 'Corno bi Basetto'. His music criticism were collected in SHAW'S MUSIC (1981). After lacing a shoe too tightly, an operation was performed on his foot for necrosis; Shaw was unable to put his foot on the ground for eighteen months. During this period he wrote CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA (1901) and THE PERFECT WAGNERITE (1898). "...I have no reason to believe that they would have been a bit better if they had been written on two legs instead of one," he said in a letter to the playwright St John Ervine. His friend had his leg amputated during WWI after being hit by a shell splinters.

In 1898 Shaw married the wealthy Charlotte Payne-Townshend. They settled in 1906 in the Hertfordshire village of Ayot St. Lawrence. Shaw remained with Charlotte until her death, although he was occasionally linked with other women. He carried on a passionate correspondence over the years with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, a widow and actress, who got the starring role in PYGMALION. All the other actresses refused to say the taboo word 'bloody' that the playwright had put in the mouth of Eliza. When she wanted to publish his love letters to her, Shaw answered: "I will not, dear Stella, at my time of life, play the horse to your Lady Godiva."

The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen had a great influence on Shaw's thinking. For a summer meeting of the Fabian Society in 1890, he wrote THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM (1891), in which he considered Ibsen a pioneer, "who declares that it is right to do something hitherto regarded as infamous." Shaw's early plays, WIDOWER'S HOUSES (1892), which criticized slum landlords, as well as several subsequent ones, were not well received. His 'unpleasant plays', ideological attacks on the evils of capitalism and explorations of moral and social problems, were followed with more entertaining but as principled productions. "To a professional critic (I have been one myself) theatre-going is the curse of Adam. The play is the evil he is paid to endure in the sweat of his brow; and the sooner it is over, the better." (from 'Preface' to Saint Joan) . CANDIDA was a comedy about the wife of a clergyman, and what happens when a weak, young poet wants to rescue her from her dull family life. But it was not until JOHN BULL'S OTHER ISLAND (1904) that Shaw gained in England a wider popularity with his own plays. In the Unites States and Germany Shaw's name was already well-known. Between 1904 and 1907 The Royal

Court Theatre staged several of his plays, including Candida.

MORELL: Man can climb to the highest summits; but he cannot dwell there. MARCHBACKS (springing up): It's false: there can he dwell for ever, and there only. It's in the other moment that he can find no rest, no sense of the silent glory of life. Where would you have spend my moments, if not on the summits? MORELL: In the scullery, slicing onions and filling lamps. (from Candida)MAJOR BARBARA depicted an officer of the Salvation Army, who learns from her father, a manufacturer of armaments, that money and power can be better weapons against evil than love. Ironically the producer of the film version of the play, Gabriel Pascal, was eager to do business with Sir Basil Zaharoff, an arms dealer.

PICKERING: Have you no morals, man?DOOLITTLE: Can't afford them, Governor.(from Pygmalion)Pygmalion was originally written for the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Later the play became the basis for two films and a musical. (Shaw's correspondence with the actresses Ellen Terry and Stella Campbell are available in book form.) Shaw's popularity declined after his essay 'Common Sense About the War' (1914), which was considered unpatriotic. With SAINT JOAN (1924), his masterpiece, Shaw was again accepted by the post-war public. Now he was regarded as 'a second Shakespeare', who had revolutionized the British theatre. Shaw did not portrait Joan of Arc, his protagonist, as a heroine or martyr, but as a stubborn young woman. And as in classic tragedies, her flaw is fatal and brings about her downfall. Uncommonly Shaw showed some sympathy to her judges. The play was written four years after Joan was declared a saint.

In 1893 Shaw collaborated with Keir Hardie in writing the party program for the new Independent Labour party. Many of his playes also were philosophical addresses on the subject of individual responsibility or freedom of spirit against the conformist demands of society. Shaw was cofounder with the Webbs of the London School of Economics, and launched the petition against the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. In 1897 he entered local government.

In his plays Shaw combined contemporary moral problems with ironic tone and paradoxes, "Shavian" wit, which have produced such phrases as "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches", "England and America are two countries divided by a common language", "Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it", and "I never resist temptation because I have found that things are bad for me do not tempt me." Discussion and intellectual acrobatics are the basis of his drama, and before the emergence of the sound film, his plays were nearly impossible to adapt into screen. During his long career, Shaw wrote over 50 plays. He continued to write them even in his 90s. George Bernard Shaw died at Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, on November 2, 1950. He was cremated and it was his wish that his ashes be mixed with those of his wife, Charlotte – she had died seven years before, "an old woman bowed and crippled, furrowed and wrinkled," as Shaw depicted her in a letter to H.G. Wells.

Since the days of the silent films, Shaw had been a fan of motion-picture. He also played in the film Rosy Rapture - The Pride of the Beauty (1914). Shaw did not like much of the German film version of Pygmalion (1935), and the penniless producer and director Gabriel Pascal persuaded the author to give him the rights to make films from his plays. "Mr Pascal, you're the first honest film producer I have ever met," Shaw told him at their first meeting and gave him a pound note. Pygmalion, produced by Pascal and directed by Anthony Asquith and David Lean (uncredited), was a great success. In one article, Pascal was picked with the Pope and Hitler as one of the ten most famous men of 1938, but his career ended in the financial fiasco of the spectacle Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). Other films inspired by Shaw's plays include Saint Joan (1927), How He Lied to Her Husband (1931), Arms and the Man (1932), Major Barbara (1941), and My Fair Lady (1964). Pascal's co-director in Major Barbara was David Lean, but for thousand pounds Lean agreed to give the full credit to Pascal.

For further reading: Bernard Shaw by G.K. Chesterton (1909); Bernard Shaw by H.Pearson (1942); Bernard Shaw by E. Bentley (1957); Bernard Shaw: Man and Writer by A. Williamson (1963); A Guide to the Plays of Bernard Shaw by C.B. Purdom (1963); Bermard Shaw by E.R. Bentley (1967); Concordance

to the Plays and Prefaces of Bernard Shaw by E.D. Bevan (1971, 10 vols.); Bernard Shaw: Art and Socialism by E. Strauss (1978); The Genius of Shaw, ed. M. Holroyd (1979); Bernard Shaw: The Darker Side by A. Silver (1982); Bernard Shaw: A Guide to Research by S. Weintraub (1992); Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman by Sally Peters (1996); Shaw by M. Holroyd (1988-93, 4 vols., authorized biography) - Suomeksi käännetty myös: Järjen sanoja sodasta: englantilaisen "kapinoitsijan" arvostelua (suom. Toivo Wallenius, 1917)Selected works:

% PASSION PLAY, 1878 (written)% IMMATURITY, 1879% THE IRRATIONAL KNOT, 1880% LOVE AMONG ARTIST, 1881% OUR CORNER; CASHEL BYRON'S PROFESSION, 1882 - film 1921:

Román boxera, dir. by Václav Binovec, starring Frank Rose-Ruzicka, Suzanne Marwille, V. Ch. Vladimírov

% UN PETIT DRAME, 1884 (skit, publ. 1959)% THE WIDOWERS' HOUSES, 1885-1892 (play, publ. 1893, 1898)% AN UNSOCIAL SOCIALIST, 1887% FABIAN ESSAYS ON SOCIALISM, 1889% THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM, 1891 (see Henrik Ibsen)% ARMS AND THE MAN, 1894 (comedy, prod. 1894, publ. 1898) -

Sankareita (suom. Valle Sorsakoski; Toini Aaltonen) - films: 1932, dir. by Cecil Lewis, starring Barry Jones, Anne Grey, Angela Baddeley; 1958: Helden, dir. Franz Peter Wirth, prod. Bavaria-Filmkunst (West Germany); 1989 (TV play), dir. by James Cellan Jones, cast: Helena Bonham Carter, Nicolas Chagrin, Mark Crowdy, Patsy Kensit, Dinsdale Landen, Kika Markham, Patrick Ryecart, Pip Torrens

% CASHEL BYRON'S PROFESSION, 1885 - Herra Byronin ammatti (suom. Väinö Jaakkola, 1923)

% THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE, 1897 (melodrama, publ. 1901) - films: 1959, dir. by Guy Hamilton, starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Eva Le Gallienne; 1987 (TV drama), dir. by David Jones, starring Elizabeth Spriggs, Cheryl Maiker, Graham Turner, Patrick Stewart

% THE PERFECT WAGNERITE, 1898% CANDIDA, 1897 (play, written 1895, publ. 1898) - Candida (suom.:

Helmi Setälä, 1909; Helvi Erjakka) - films: 1956 (TV play), dir. by Tudlik Johansen, prod. Danmarks Radio (Denmark); 1973: Candida (TV play), dir. by Johan De Meester, prod. Belgische Radio en Televisie (Belgium), starring Tine Balder; 1982 (TV film), dir. by Michael Cristofer, starring Joanne Woodward; 1982 (TV film), dir. by Gerard Rekers, starring Marjon Brandsma

% THE MAN OF DESTINY, 1897 (play, written 1895, publ. 1898)% PLAYS PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT, 1898 (2 vols.)% THE PHILANDER, 1898 (comedy, written 1893)% MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION, 1898 (play, written 1893, prod. 1905)

- Rouva Warrenin ammatti (suom.) - films: 1960: Frau Warrens Gewerbe, dir. by Ákos Ráthonyi, starring Lilli Palmer; 1962: Fru Warrens yrke (TV play), dir. Jan Molander, starring Margaretha Krook; 1972 (TV play), dir. Herbert Wise, prod. BBC, starring Coral Browne

% YOU NEVER CAN TELL, 1898 (play, written 1896, prod. 1899) - Ei sitä voi koskaan tietää (suom. Helmi Setälä, 1909)

% THE GADFLY: OR THE SON OF THE CARDINAL, 1898 (play, prod.)% FABIANISM AND THE EMPIRE, 1900% LOVE AMONG THE ARTIST, 1900% CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND'S CONVERSION, 1900 (play, written 1898,

publ. 1901)% CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA, 1901 (play, written 1898, prod. 1906) -

Caesar ja Cleopatra (suom.) - films: 1945, dir. by Gabriel Pascal, starring Claude Rains, Vivien Leigh, Cecil Parker, Stewart Granger ; 1965 (TV play), dir. by Hans-Dieter Schwarze, cast: Lukas Ammann, Claus Biederstaedt, Elisabeth Flickenschildt, Uta Sax, Paul Verhoeven

% THE ADMIRABLE BASHVILLE, OR CONSTANCY UNREWARDED, 1903 (play, written 1899, publ. 1909, based on Shaw's novel Cashel Byron's Profession, 1885)

% THREE PLAYS FOR PURITANS, 1901% MAN AND SUPERMAN, 1903 (comedy) - Ihminen ja yli-ihminen:

komedia ja filosofia (suom. Aino Malmberg, 1906)% DON JUAN IN HELL, 1903 (act III of Man and Superman, 1903) - films:

1960 (TV play), dir. Don Richardson, starring Hurd Hatfield, George C. Scott; 1984, dir. by Joseph Marzano

% JOHN BULL'S OTHER ISLAND, 1904 (play, publ. 1907)% HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND, 1904 (play, publ. 1907) - films:

1931, dir. by Cecil Lewis, starring Edmund Gwenn, Vera Lennox, Robert Harris; 1969: Kako je lagao njenog muza (TV play), dir. by Srboljub Stankovic, prod. Radiotelevizija Beograd (Yugoslavia)

% THE COMMON SENSE OF MUNICIPAL TRADING, 1904% ON GOING TO CHURCH, 1905% THE IRRATIONAL KNOT, 1905% MAJOR BARBARA, 1905 (play, publ. 1907) - Majuri Barbara (suom.

Annikki Laaksi) - film 1941, dir. by Gabriel Pascal, starring Wendy Hiller, Rex Harrison, Robert Morley, Robert Newton, Marie Lohr, Deborah Kerr

% PASSION, POISON, AND PETRIFICATION; OR THE FATAL GAZOGENE, 1905 (play)

% DRAMATIC OPINIONS AND ESSAYS, 1906% THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA, 1906 (play, publ. 1911) - films: 1958, dir.

by Anthony Asquith, starring Leslie Caron, Dirk Bogarde, John Robinson ; 1977: Des Doktors Dilemma (TV play), dir. by Rolf von Sydow, prod. Saarländischer Rundfunk (West Germany)

% THE INTERLUDE AT THE PLAYHOUSE, 1907 (play)% GETTING MARRIED, 1908 (play, publ. 1911)% THE SANITY OF ART, 1908% THE SHEWING-UP OF BLANCO POSNET, 1909 (play, publ. 1911)% PRESS CUTTINGS, 1909 (sketch, publ. 1909)% MISALLIANCE, 1910 (play, publ. 1914)% SOCIALISM AND SUPERIOR BRAINS, 1910% THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS, 1910 (play, publ. 1914)% FANNY'S FIRST PLAY, 1911 (play, publ. 1914) - Fannyn ensi näytelmä

(suom. Jalmari Lahdensuo)% OVERRULED, 1912 (play, publ. 1916)% ANDROCLES AND THE LION, 1912 (fable play, publ. 1916) - films:

1938, starring Guy Glover, Esme Percy, Molly Hamley-Clifford; 1952 , dir. by Chester Erskine, starring Jean Simmons, Victor Mature, Alan Young, Robert Newton

% BEAUTY'S DUTY, 1913 (playlet, written, publ. 1932)% THE WISDOM OF BERNARD SHAW, 1913 (ed. C.F. Shaw)% GREAT CATHERINE (WHOM GLORY STILL ADORES), 1913 (play,

publ. 1919) - films: 1948 (TV play), dir. by Fred Coe, starring Gertrude Lawrence; 1968, dir. by Gordon Flemyng, starring Peter O'Toole, Jeanne Moreau, Zero Mostel, Jack Hawkins, Akim Tamiroff

% PYGMALION, 1913 (romance, publ. 1914) - Pygmalion (suom. Jalmari Finne; Seppo Kolehmainen, 1976) / Neiti suorasuu - films: 1935, dir. by Erich Engel, starring Jenny Jugo, Gustaf Gründgens; 1937, dir. by Ludwig Berger, starring Lily Bouwmeester, Johan De Meester; 1938, dir. by Anthony Asquith & Leslie Howard, starring Leslie Howard, Wendy Hiller, Wilfrid Lawson, Scott Sunderland; 1942: Sürtük, dir. by Adolf Körner, prod. Ha-Ka Film (Turkey); 1948 (TV drama), prod. BBC, starring Margaret Lockwood, Ralph Michael; 1950: Kanske en gentleman, dir. by Ragnar Frisk, prod. Svensk Talfilm (Sweden); 1960: Aslan yavrusu, dir. by Hulki Saner, prod. Saner Film (Turkey); 1964, My Fair Lady in dir. by Ceorge Cukor, starring Rex Harrison, Audrey Hepburn, Stanley Holloway, Wilfrid Hyde White; 1968 (TV play), dir. Kåre Santesson, starring Harriet Andersson, Renée Björling; 1973 (TV play), dir. Cedric Messina, prod. BBC, starring Lynn Redgrave, James Villiers; 1976: The Opening of Misty Beethoven, dir. by Radley Metzger, starring Constance Money, Jamie Gillis; 1977: Galateya (TV play), dir. by Aleksandr Belinsky; 1981 (TV play), dir. by John Glenister, starring Robert Powell, Twiggy

% THE MUSIC CURE, 1914 ( play, written 1913, publ. 1926)% THE INCA OF PERUSALEM, 1916 (comedietta, publ. 1919)% MACBETH SKIT, 1916 (written, publ. in Educational Theatre Journal,

1967)% O'FLAHERTY V.C., 1917 (play, written 1915, publ. 1919)% ANNAJANSKA, THE BOLSHEVIK EMPRESS, 1918 (play, publ. 1919)% AUGUSTUS DOES HIS BIT, 1917 (play, publ. 1919)% PEACE CONFERENCE HINTS, 1919% HEARTBREAK HOUSE, 1919 (play, prod. 1920) - films: 1977 (TV

play), dir. Cedric Messina, prod. BBC, starring John Gielgud, Siân Phillips, Barbara Murray, Daniel Massey; 1986 (TV play), dir. by Anthony Page, starring Rex Harrison, Amy Irving, Rosemary Harris; 1987: Skorbnoye beschuvstviye, dir. by Aleksandr Sokurov, prod. Lenfilm Studio (Soviet Union)

% BACK TO METUSELAH, 1921 (play, written 1918-20, prod. 1922)% JUTTA'S ATONEMENT, 1923 (play, publ. 1926, transl. of Siegfried

Trebitsch's Frau Gittas Sühne)% SAINT JOAN, 1923 (play, publ. 1924) - Pyhä Johanna (suom. Helmi

Krohn; Matti Norri, 2003) - films: 1927, dir. by Widgey R. Newman, starring Sybil Thorndike; 1957, dir. by Otto Preminger, screenplay by Graham Greene, starring Jean Seberg, Anton Walbrook, Richard Widmark. "I always wanted to make a picture of it. Perhaps that was the great mistake: I loved the play so much that I didn't analyze it. I realized only later that the play is actually a very intellectual, analytical rendition of the story of Saint Joan. It's not a emotional story, and it just wasn't moving enough to get the masses to follow. Even the play, as I found out later, was never a big popular success." (Otto Preminger in Who the Devil Made It by Peter Bogdanovich, 1997)

% IMPRISONMENT, 1925 (republished as The Crime of Imprisonment, 1946)

% THE SOCIALISM OF SHAW, 1926 (ed. J. Fuchs)% TRANSLATIONS AND TOMFOOLERIES, 1926% FASCINATING FOUNDLING, 1926 (play, written 1909, prod. 1928)% THE GLIMPSE OF REALITY, 1926 (tragedietta, written 1909, prod.

1927)% THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN'S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND

CAPITALISM, 1928 (rev. as The Intelligent Women's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and Fascism, 1965)

% THE APPLE CART, 1929 (play, publ. 1930) - Amerikan keisari (suom. Seere Salminen) - TV play 1975, dir. by Cedric Messina, prod. BBC, cast: Peter Barkworth, Nigel Davenport, Helen Mirren, Beryl Reid, Trevor Baxter

% BERNARD SHAW AND KARL MARX, 1930% THE WORKS OF BERNARD SHAW, 1930-32 (30 vols., revised as

Ayot St. Lawrence Edition, 1931-32; Standard Edition, 36 vols., 1947-52)

% THE WORKS OF BERNARD SHAW, 1930-32 ( 30 vols.; standard edition, 36 vols., 1947-1952)

% WHAT I REALLY WROTE ABOUT THE WAR, 1931% screenplay: HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND, 1931 (with Frank

Launder and Cecil Lewis, dir. by Cecil Lewis, prod. British International Pictures

% )% DOCTOR'S DELUSIONS, CRUDE CRIMINOLOGY, AND SHAM

EDUCATION, 1932% TOO TRUE TO BE GOOD, 1932 (play, written 1931)% HOW THESE DOCTORS LOVE ONE ANOTHER!, 1932 (playlet)% ESSAYS IN FABIAN SOCIALISM, 1932% PEN PORTRAITS AND REVIEWS, 1932% MAJOR CRITICAL ESSAYS, 1932% THE ADVENTURES OF A BLACK GIRL IN HER SEARCH FOR

GOD, 1932% A GLIMPSE OF THE DOMESTICITY OF FRANKLIN BARNABAS,

1932 (play, written 1920, act II of Back to Metuselah, prod. 1960)

% MAJOR CRITICAL ESSAYS, 1932% OUR THEATRES IN THE NINETIES, 1932% MUSIC IN LONDON, 1890-94, 1932% AMERICAN BOOBS, 1933 (also publ. as The Political Madhouse in

America; The Future of Political Science in America)% ON THE ROCKS, 1933 (political comedy)% PREFACES, 1934% VILLAGE WOOING, 1934 (comedietta)% THE SIX OF CALAIS, 1934 (play)% SHORT STORIES, SCRAPS AND SHAVINGS, 1934% THE SIMPLETON OF THE UNEXPECTED ISLES, 1935 (play)% WILLIAM MORRIS AS I KNEW HIM, 1936% THE MILLIONAIRESS, 1936 (comedy) - film 1961, dir. by Anthony

Asquith, starring Sophia Loren, Peter Sellers, Alistari Sim, Vittorio de Sica

% ARTHUR AND THE ACETONE, 1936 (playlet)% LONDON MUSIC IN 1888-1889, 1937% CYMBELINE REFINISHED, 1938 (play)% GENEVA, 1938 (play)% "IN GOOD KING CHARLES'S GOLDEN DAYS", 1939 (historical play)

% EVERYBODY'S POLITICAL WHAT'S WHAT, 1944% THE BRITISH PARTY SYSTEM, 1944 (playlet)% SELECTED NOVELS, 1946% BUOYANT BILLIONS, 1947 (comedy, prod. in Zürich in 1948 under the

title Zu viel Geld)% SIXTEEN SELF-SKETCHES, 1948% FARFETCHED FABLES, 1949 (six fables, prod. 1950)% SHAW ON VIVISECTION, 1949 (ed. G.H. Bowker)% SHAKES VERSUS SHAV, 1949 (puppet play)% WHY SHE WOULD NOT, 1950 (written, incomplete comediatta)% PLAYS AND PLAYERS, 1952 (ed. A.C. Ward)% SELECTED PROSE, 1953 (ed. D. Russell)% SHAW ON MUSIC, 1955 (ed. C. Bentley)% THE ILLUSIONS OF SOCIALISM, 1956% SHAW ON THE THEATRE, 1958 (ed. E.J. West)% AN UNFINISHED NOVEL, 1958 (ed. D. Weintraub)% SHAW'S DRAMATIC CRITICISM: 1895-1898, 1959 (ed. J.F.

Matthews)% HOW TO BECOME A MUSICAL CRITIC, 1960 (ed. D.F. Laurence)% PLATFORM AND PULPIT, 1961 (ed. D.H. Laurence)% SHAW ON SHAKESPEARE, 1961 (ed. by E. Wilson)% THE MATTER WITH IRELAND, 1962 (ed. D.H. Laurence and D.H.

Greene)% G.B.S. ON MUSIC, 1962% ON LANGUAGE, 1963 (ed. A. Tauber)% RELIGIOUS SPEECHES, 1963 (ed. W.S. Smith)% HEARTBREAK HOUSE, 1964% THE COMPLETE PREFACES OF BERNARD SHAW, 1965% SHAW ON RELIGION, 1967 (ed. W.S. Smith)% SHAW: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1969-70 (2 vols.)% THE BODLEY HEAD BERNARD SHAW, 1970-1974 (7 vols., US title:

Collected Plays with Their Prefaces)% THE ROAD TO EQUALITY, 1971 (ed.L. Crompton)% COLLECTED MUSIC CRITICISM, 1973% BERNARD SHAW'S PRACTICAL POLITICS, 1976 (ed. L.J. Hubenka)% THE PORTABLE BERNARD SHAW, 1977 (ed. S. Weintraub)% THE GREAT COMPOSERS: REVIEWS AND BOMBARDMENTS,

1978 (ed. L. Crompton)% THE COLLECTED SCREENPLAYS OF BERNARD SHAW, 1980 (ed.

B.F. Dukore)% LADY, WILT THOU LOVE ME?, 1980 (attributed to Shaw, 18 love

poems to Ellen Terry, ed. J. Werner)% EARLY TEXTS: PLAY MANUSCRIPTS IN FACSIMILE, 1981 (12

vols., ed. G. Laurence)% SHAW'S MUSIC, 1981 (3 vols., ed. D.H. Laurence)% SHAW ON DICKENS, 1984% AGITATIONS, 1985% THE DIARIES, 1885-1897, 1985% SELECTED SHORTER PLAYS, 1987% COLLECTED LETTERS, 1965-88 (4 vols.)% BERNARD SHAW'S BOOK REVIEWS, 1991% THE COMPLETE PREFACES, 1993% THE DRAMA OBSERVED, 1993% UNPUBLISHED SHAW, 1996

Samuel BeckettFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the Irish writer. For the fictional scientist, see Sam Beckett.Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer, dramatist and poet. Beckett's work offers a bleak outlook on human culture and both formally and philosophically became increasingly minimalist. As a student, assistant, and friend of James Joyce, Beckett is considered by many one of the last modernists; as an inspiration to many later writers, he is sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is also considered one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called "Theatre of the Absurd."

Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 for his "writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".[2] Beckett was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984. He died in Paris of respiratory problems.

The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him.

He’s not f---ing me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy — he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty.

His work is beautiful. -- Harold PinterSamuel Beckett is sui generis...He has given a voice to the decrepit and

maimed and inarticulate, men and women at the end of their tether, past pose or pretense, past claim of meaningful existence. He seems to say that only there and then, as metabolism lowers, amid God’s paucity, not his plenty, can the core of the human condition be approached... Yet his musical cadences, his wrought and precise sentences, cannot help but stave off the void... Like salamanders we survive in his fire. -- Richard Ellman

Still stirring – a centenary review of S.B."Oh all to end." Thus Samuel Beckett concluded his last work of fiction, "Stirrings Still," making explicit once again, thirty years and more after Vladimir and Estragon first considered hanging themselves on the stage of Waiting for Godot, the powerful yearning behind so much of his work: for silence and extinction.

But while Beckett was granted his quietus in 1989, there is no closure for his readers and critics, nor would we want it; for if a death wish was central to his writing, no prose was ever livelier. So the one hundredth anniversary of Beckett's birth on April 13 of this year has been an occasion for celebration and fresh reflection. There is a handsome four-volume edition of his works, edited by Paul Auster and with introductions from J.M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Edward Albee, and Colm Tóibìn,[1] a new collection of academic essays from the University Press of Florida (Beckett after Beckett), a fascinating and detailed memoir from Anne Atik, whose artist husband Avigdor Arikha was the author's friend and drinking companion (How It Was), and a rich collection of memories taken from interviews with Beckett himself and with those who knew him (Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett).

The drift of many of those remembering Beckett is that admission to the literary canon isn't recognition enough for "this separate man," as his friend the philosopher Emil Cioran called him.[2] There are hints of sanctification. "Many have sensed," remarks the Harvard professor Robert Scanlan, who visited Beckett on his deathbed in 1989, "that Beckett's serenity towards the end resembled the patience of a saint." The Polish writer Antoni Libera feels he owes the success of his own work "to Beckett's 'blessing' and to his spirit, which was watching over everything." The German actor Horst Bollmann considers that his "encounter with Beckett is reward enough, in itself, for having been an actor all my life." Many mention his "legendary generosity" and love of children. Scanlan concludes his piece: "Here's to you, Sam Beckett. God rest and bless your sweet and patient soul."

How curiously this valediction rings, addressed as it is to a man who satirized every form of metaphysics and renounced any mental comfort that might subtract him from the exhausting experience of being alone with his conviction that the world was without meaning and expression futile, yet that all the same he was duty-bound to express the fact. But perhaps it is precisely in Beckett's repeated renunciations—of English for French, of a rich and traditional narrative facility for texts stripped of everything we would normally think of as plot or color—that we can find a link between these sometimes sentimental centenary remembrances and the core of the author's work, his special position in the literature of the twentieth century. "How easy," wrote Cioran, "to imagine him, some centuries back, in a naked cell, undisturbed by the least decoration, not even a crucifix." With Beckett, it is the persistence of a "religious" seriousness in the declared absence of any sustaining metaphysics that gives his work its special, for some, saintly, pathos.

Born in 1906, Beckett was brought up in a well-to-do Protestant family in County Dublin. Educated at private schools, he excelled in both academic work and sports and, after graduating in French and Italian at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1927, went back and forth between teaching posts in Dublin and Paris, where he met James Joyce, who was then writing Finnegans Wake. But Beckett soon decided he was not cut out for teaching and gave up his job, thus disappointing his parents. The ensuing and bitter arguments, with his mother in particular, plus what appears to have been a number of panic attacks, led to the decision to undergo psychoanalysis in London, where Beckett spent two years trying and failing to start a career as a reviewer. After an extended visit to Germany and another unhappy period in Dublin, he settled permanently in Paris in 1937.

In two essays written in his twenties Beckett declared his great admiration for Proust and Joyce, yet his first novel, Murphy, written shortly afterward, suggests a different inspiration. While Proust and Joyce share a confident commitment to the evocation of complex psychological reality within a densely described material world, Beckett seems embarrassed to present his story of a feckless, unemployed Irishman in London as "real" at all. Despite, or perhaps because of, the novel's evident autobiographical content, all kinds of strategies are used to prevent the reader from becoming immersed in plot and character in the traditional fashion. The book opens with a tone of mockery:

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make other arrangements, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings.[3]

The very etymology of "novel" suggests that the form brings newness. Echoing Ecclesiastes, Beckett renounces the idea. The solar system is a prison, ever the same, and the notion that Murphy might have achieved some freedom by sitting "out of it" (out of the sunshine ) is laughable. Nor is it the only prison. His room is a

"cage" in the rigid grid of London's terraced streets. Even the language aligns itself with this imprisoning environment as groups of words are repeated as though to form the walls that close Murphy in: "eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off" is mirrored by "eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting his clothes on and off," while in between "a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect" faces "medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect." Those compound, hyphenated adjectives—medium-sized, north- western—reinforce the sense of entrapment, making the irony that Murphy's room might "command" a view even heavier.

In Joyce, Beckett had admired the fusion of word and sense. "When the idea is sleep, the words go to sleep," he remarks, and he speaks of his compatriot as the heir to Shakespeare and Dickens in this regard, great masters of onomatopoeia and evocation. But a letter written to his friend Axel Kaun a year before the publication of Murphy suggests that Beckett's sense of what could be achieved with language was changing quite radically:

It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come...when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.

And he adds: "With such a program, in my opinion, the latest work of Joyce has nothing whatever to do."

Interesting here is the way what at first seems the dissatisfaction of any adventurous young artist with current conventions is drastically extended to the whole of language, which, in the name of honesty, is to be attacked with "a mocking attitude towards the word, through words." The position explains those odd slippages in the opening sentences of Murphy where first we hear of clothes being "put on and off," rather than put on and taken off, and then more comically of "buckling to" not to finding a new apartment or a job, but "to eating, drinking, and sleeping," three activities not usually considered onerous. Throughout the book Beckett misses no opportunity to exploit certain automatisms in the language which lead it to fall into error. It is as if he were constantly warning us that his own verbal brilliance is a matter of little import beside the threat of "quite alien surroundings."

Murphy himself is implicated in the book's linguistic waywardness when his girlfriend Celia remarks that his words "went dead" as soon as spoke, as if he didn't believe in them. It is not difficult here to see a relation between the author's denial of a traditional realism to his story and Murphy's problems with language, his problems above all in taking seriously the world of employment in 1930s London, something that might well reflect Beckett's own difficulty in engaging with the very conventional expectations of his parents.

Yet despite the air of mockery that hangs over Murphy, reality of the economic variety does impinge: if the hero is to make a living, and above all to stop his beloved Celia from prostituting herself to pay the rent, he will have to take the world of work seriously, even though he can't. He simply cannot do it. But he must. It's an early formulation of what would become Beckett's motto, "I can't go on, I'll go on." This is not, as is sometimes supposed, a celebration of human resilience, but simply the contrast of an emotive conviction on the one hand—I can't go on—and an inevitable fact on the other—willy-nilly life goes on. "No future in this," says the narrator in Worstward Ho, and continues: "Alas yes."

Needless to say, the only and ultimate solution to such a contradiction is death. At

the end of the novel Murphy's ashes will be flushed down the lavatory of his favorite pub. If Beckett later chose to end his novels and plays without anything so clear-cut as his main character's demise, nevertheless his works always point in that direction, to the release of silence and nonbeing. There thus emerges a complicity between the plots he creates and his attitude toward language. So far as either leads to a resolution or final truth it lies not so much within the text as in the silence after its end.

Much is made in the academic world, and rightly so, of Beckett's "deconstruction" of traditional realism, his constant undermining, that is, of the premises of conventional fiction. "He veritably hunted realism to death," says Paul Davies with evident satisfaction in Beckett After Beckett. And indeed the writer's second novel, Watt, makes fun of traditional narrative in all sorts of wonderful ways. In the following passage, for example, the bleakest possible pessimism is framed in a nursery rhyme sequence of rhyming monosyllabic anapests:

Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place, that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end.

It is genuinely hard for the reader of this passage to respond to the unhappiness of the speaker, since his attention is captured by the trite ordering of experience into so many opposites—girl/boy, tear/joy—and in general by the bizarre manner of the expression which exposes language's inevitable tendency, as Beckett would see it, to mask reality.

Yet for all these aggressive experiments one is struck on rereading Beckett that he did not dispense with traditional realism tout court. Throughout his work we come across passages of haunting descriptive power in which we cannot help feeling the author has a considerable emotional investment. Deciding to fill the empty days before his death by telling himself stories, the character Malone, in Malone Dies, casually invents a family of ignorant farmers, the Lamberts. After some high comedy with Mr. Lambert's pig-sticking activities, we have this:

Then Mrs. Lambert was alone in the kitchen. She sat down by the window and turned down the wick of the lamp, as she always did before blowing it out, for she did not like to blow out a lamp that was still hot. When she thought the chimney and shade had cooled sufficiently she got up and blew down the chimney. She stood a moment irresolute, bowed forward with her hands on the table, before she sat down again. Her day of toil over, day dawned on other toils within her, on the crass tenacity of life and its diligent pains. Sitting, moving about, she bore them better than in bed.... Often she stood up and moved about the room, or out and round the ruinous old house. Five years now it had been going on, five or six, not more. She told herself she had a woman's disease, but half-heartedly. Night seemed less night in the kitchen pervaded with the everyday tribulations, day less dead. It helped her, when things were bad, to cling with her fingers to the worn table at which her family would soon be united, waiting for her to serve them, and to feel about her, ready for use, the lifelong pots and pans.

"Mortal tedium," announces Malone dismissively, after constructing this description. Yet surely mortal tedium is more the experience he has effectively evoked than the reader's reaction on reading it. Albeit with the small rhetorical flourishes that remind us of Malone's self-conscious, creative efforts, the passage is as convincing and moving as anything in conventional fiction.

What is new in Beckett, however, is the way these powerful moments of realism are never allowed to extend right across a novel or play, creating, as in a traditional work, a fully imagined and consistent world that the reader is invited to consider reality. Rather they appear in brief fragments, the vagaries of an idle mind, their

intensities contrasted with the inertia of the moribund narrator who produces them; or they emerge as unreliable, fleeting memories to which no date or place can be attached—"afterimages," S.E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann call them in their introduction to Beckett After Beckett, a book largely concerned with the many different relationships between Beckett's narrators and the images they half remember, half invent.

The consequence of Beckett's strategy is that we are never allowed to relax into the determined forward movement of the traditional story or the encyclopedically complete worlds of Joyce and Proust. Rather, something is given, then immediately taken away, as the mind tracks back and forth between engagement and disengagement, or in Malone's case memories of life and the more urgent reality of dying.

Remembering Beckett includes a few pages of notes that Patrick Bowles made of his conversations with Beckett while undertaking the translation of Molloy. Written immediately after the war, this was Beckett's third full-length novel, the first written in French, and the first of what would become the trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable), in which, as the work proceeds, we have the impression that each narrating voice—the bedridden Molloy, the detective Moran, the dying Malone—turns out to be actually no more than an invention or earlier manifestation of the next, until finally we arrive at the "unnamable," the voice behind and beyond all the others, unsure of anything except the interminable chattering of language in the mind.

In his notes Bowles recounts a conversation in which Beckett insisted that in order to represent the meaninglessness of the world it was necessary to allow chaos into the text and break down form, to declare the maker of the work as "blindly immersed" in "chance" rather than standing outside it. At the same time, all mere details of history or social setting must be stripped out of the work, so as to arrive at the ultimate reality of consciousness and being. We understand that it was partly in response to these convictions that Beckett decided to work in French, renouncing the greater control and facility he had in English, together with the powerful associations a mother tongue inevitably brings with it.

However, in the same conversation it is clear that author and translator take very great pains over the exact choice of the words in the English version of Molloy. Similarly, Richard Seaver, who translated the short story "La Fin," recalls Beckett's meticulous work on the English text. Reflecting on the sentence "They dressed me and gave me some money," Beckett suggested, "What would you think if we used the word 'clothed' instead of 'dressed'? 'They clothed me and gave me money.' Do you like the ring of that better?" "Yes," replies Seaver, "'clothed' was the better word."

So although facility must be shunned, form broken down, the creator shown to be subject to chance, etc., actually nothing was left to chance when it came to the ring of a word. "It was as far apart from machine translation as one could imagine," writes Bowles.

Beckett was aware of course of the contradiction in his position, that it is inconsistent if not masochistic to talk, as he does to Anne Atik, of writing being a "sin against speechlessness," and then to go on writing, perverse to apply such meticulous control in texts that seek to demonstrate the impossibility of control. Given this state of affairs, honesty (and sanity) demanded that he bring the contradiction to his readers' attention, use its colliding energies—the yearning for expression and the conviction of its futility—to give his work pathos, and, in the end, realism, since it was this contradiction that lay at the core not only of Beckett's experience, but of a whole strand of Western thought that declares the world without sense, but then finds that to go on living one is obliged to behave as if the opposite were the case. Looking for a voice for this modern state of mind, Beckett

produced a style in which, with all its developments over his long career, lyricism and parody, affirmation and denial, are always fused together in such a way that each intensifies the other. Here are three examples.

2.

Watt was written during the war but not published until 1953. The eponymous hero of the book has spent many pages trying and failing to explain the world—at once elaborately structured and utterly incomprehensible—in which he finds himself at the house of Mr. Knott. Leaving, as he had arrived, in obedience to mechanisms beyond his ken, Watt is mocked and has water poured on him from a bucket at the railway station, where, after his departure, the abusive station workers look out across the countryside:

The sun was now well above the visible horizon. Mr. Gorman, Mr. Case and Mr. Nolan turned their faces towards it, as men will, in the early morning, without heeding. The road lay still, at this hour, leaden, deserted, between its hedges, and its ditches. From one of these latter a goat emerged, dragging its pale and chain. The goat hesitated, in the middle of the road, then turned away. The clatter came fainter and fainter, down the still air, and came still faintly when the pale had disappeared, beyond the rise. The trembling sea could not but be admired. The leaves quivered, or gave the impression of doing so, and the grasses also, beneath the drops, or beads, of gaily expiring dew. The long summer's day had made an excellent start. If it continued in the same manner, its close would be worth coming to see.

Irrelevant to the progress of the book's plot, the passage is a complex mix of lyricism, caprice, tease, and satire, though as so often with Beckett it's not immediately clear what the object of that satire might be. At the center of the piece there is the goat, free, but not enjoying the fruits of freedom because still attached to the post he drags around, disappearing, but like so much in Beckett, never quite gone. There are the men, distinguished only by their undistinguished names, unconscious of being locked into the mechanisms of the universe where the day is described as a magnificent frame—dawn and dusk—but without reference to any content in between. And there is the language, a constant mingling of beauty and fatuity, including as it does the pretty play with "latter," and "clatter," "still air," and "still faintly," then the pomposity of "could not but be admired," followed by the disturbing absurdity of "gaily expiring dew." The genius of the passage is that the more the tone of address seems wayward, random, uncommitted, the closer it gets to the goat cut free from wherever he was chained but still dragging himself melancholically about, not unlike the book's hero, Watt, who, now freed from his duties at Mr. Knott's house, asks for a train ticket to "the end of the line" and when asked which end replied, "the nearest end."

"No symbols where none intended," Beckett wrote at the end of Watt. The object of his satire, it would seem, is our futile desire to attribute meaning to his prose.

Some years later, in Malone Dies, Beckett had now settled on the technique of dramatizing the act of narration and indeed speech in general as a stratagem for killing time, filling silence. Here, Malone has been trying to tell himself the tale of a young boy, Sapo, who, ill adapted to the world of his anxious middle-class parents, wanders alone about the countryside. Malone is finding it hard to keep up his interest in Sapo:

The market. The inadequacy of the exchanges between rural and urban areas had not escaped the excellent youth. He had mustered, on this subject, the following considerations, some perhaps close to, others no doubt far from, the truth.

In his country the problem—no, I can't do it.

The peasants. His visits to. I can't. Assembled in the farmyard they watched him depart, on stumbling, wavering feet, as though they scarcely felt the ground. Often he stopped, stood tottering a moment, then suddenly was off again, in a new direction. So he went, limp, drifting, as though tossed by the earth. And when, after a halt, he started off again, it was like a big thistledown plucked by the wind from the place where it had settled. There is a choice of images.

Only when Malone drops all the social considerations and finds a parallel between Sapo's uncertain style of perambulation and his own narrative hesitations is he able to go on. At once the tone shifts from comedy to lyricism, as we sense Malone's engagement grow. Ironically this can only happen when he ceases to believe in the story he was telling himself and turns back, however indirectly, on his own fragility and unease.

A hierarchy of reality thus begins to emerge in Beckett's work. Center stage is the purgatorial presence of the moribund narrator, the decrepit Krapp of the play Krapp's Last Tape being perhaps the most famous example. Any ultimate reality lies in the future with death and silence. Meantime, all vigor and purpose lost, the mind wanders oneirically over a past drained of substance or sense, except in those moments when it can be understood as foreshadowing the narrator's present state. Intriguingly, the original French of this passage from Malone does not include the final distancing remark, "There is a choice of images." It is as if, when he came to translate the piece, Beckett was uncomfortable with its poignancy and decided to add his characteristic gesture of denial.

Having renounced the extended and coherent plot, and reduced his characters to larvae, one of the problems Beckett faced after the trilogy was a difficulty sustaining the length of text we are used to in a novel. So the later works get shorter and shorter, and the form toward which they aspire is now the rhythm of breathing, something that was as close as one could get, on the page, to a representation of being.

In Company (1980), which is just twenty-three pages in the new edition, a consciousness in the dark speaks of another voice that it hears intermittently declaring a few spare facts which may or may not be memories. Any notion of identity, time, or place is gone; we have only voices speaking in darkness; nor is it clear whether these voices belong to the same person or to separate people. Yet even in this state of extreme deprivation, lyricism occasionally flowers, attended as always by bathos and comedy:

You are an old man plodding along a narrow country road. You have been out since break of day and now it is evening. Sole sound in the silence your footfalls. Rather sole sounds for they vary from one to the next. You listen to each one and add it in your mind to the growing sum of those that went before. You halt with bowed head on the verge of the ditch and convert into yards. On the basis now of two steps per yard. So many since dawn to add to yesterday's. To yesteryear's. To yesteryears'. Days other than today and so akin. The giant tot in miles. In leagues. How often round the earth already. Halted too at your elbow during these computations your father's shade. In his old tramping rags. Finally on side by side from nought anew.

Once again we have dawn and evening and nothing in between but footfalls, ditches. Deathly and grid-like, ditches are as omnipresent in Beckett as in Dante's Inferno. Irony and pathos are delivered simultaneously in the pun "sole sounds" or in the suggestion of "aching" behind "akin" ("Days other than today and so akin"), or again in the comic possibilities of "the giant tot." There is the typically Beckettian satire of the futile pursuit of descriptive precision ("Rather sole sounds for they vary from one to the next") and in the vain search for some kind of control in computation, the count of the footsteps being soon baffled by the sheer enormity of "yesteryear's...yesteryears'," whose lyricism, in turn, calls up the deceased father's shade, not in his winding sheet, but his "tramping rags." The rhetorical flourish of

"Finally on...from nought anew," a refrain repeated throughout Company, is one of those wry gestures to an elegance, at once archaic and compressed, which give to the speaker the illusion of a stoic dignity, while at the same time reminding us of his counting obsessions. If language falsifies, we nevertheless indulge in its consolations and comic possibilities.

For those of us who were long ago enchanted by this prose and believe it second to none, there will always be a certain sadness in the reflection that Beckett achieved fame through the theater and will be remembered by a wider public only for his plays. Yet there are obvious reasons why Beckett's peculiar aesthetic was more immediately effective on stage. Some of the most intriguing pages of Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett come from actors who recall the author traveling to theaters all over Europe to follow productions of Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, and Happy Days, telling them not to play their parts realistically, never to inquire about the characters' lives outside of a text, and, in general, to deliver their lines so far as possible in a flat monotone. "Too much color" was his frequent, head-shaking objection during rehearsals. Once again he was uneasy with the potential for sentimentality in what he had written.

Yet the actors often felt he was quite wrong and that the plays worked better with a lively, realistic delivery, a position to which Beckett himself eventually began to come around. The fact is that the flesh-and-blood presence of the actors on stage creates for the spectators a sense of reality and identification which the absurd plots and dialogues then undermine, so that the tension behind all of Beckett's work between affirmation and denial is dramatized for us in the contrast between the believable actor and the inexplicable, disorienting world he is in. At the same time, the conventions of the theater, which trap us respectfully together in an intimate space for a pre-established time, make it far more likely that the skeptical will follow a Beckett work from start to finish and have time to be enchanted by the rhythms of his writing. If few get through The Unnamable or How It Is, almost everybody can watch Godot to the final curtain.

But most importantly of all, the theater allows both silence and physical movement to come to the fore in a way they cannot on the page. A blank space between paragraphs simply does not deliver the anxiety of a hiatus in a stage dialogue. Only in the theater, as the audience waits in collective apprehension for the conversational ball—between Didi and Gogo, Hamm and Clov—to start rolling again, could Beckett's sense that any deep truth must be located in something, or nothing, beyond speech come across with great immediacy. Likewise the actors' interminable and pointless movement back and forth across the stage is a more immediate statement than the words of a page-bound narrator telling us of his aimless daily wanderings. When we watch the plays, the impotence of language to explain the characters' experience is powerfully evident. Conversation serves above all to pass the time.

Exploding, with his multiple internal voices, the old fiction of individual identity, Beckett created one of the most identifiable literary voices of the twentieth century. Shunning inquiries into his life, he lived to see it given a well-defined shape in the public mind, raised to the status of myth almost: the mother obsession, the attachment to Joyce, the service in the French Resistance, the years of determined toil on the trilogy, the sudden celebrity after Godot, the Nobel Prize, and, finally, the years when everyone who was anyone wanted to be able to say they had spent an evening in a Parisian café drinking with "Sam"—the Sammists, as one old friend ironically dubbed these late arrivals.

Beckett rarely denied himself to them. For the truth that emerges from the biographies, and again now from Beckett Remembering and Atik's very lively How It Was, is that although everybody liked to see him as a solitary and even saintly man, "a withdrawn being who pursues an endless and implacable labour," as Emil Cioran put it, Beckett in fact loved company, particularly drinking company, and far from

living alone spent most of his adult life with his partner and finally wife, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil. Her voice is conspicuous for its absence in Beckett Remembering, indeed she is hardly mentioned at all, as if there were some collective denial on the part of Beckett worshipers that their unworldly hero might have had a conjugal life at all. But in a breach of the general discretion, charming because unique, we hear this from the theater designer Jocelyn Herbert:

I think a lot of [Sam's relationship] with Suzanne...was gratitude and loyalty and I think that he felt remorse for the fact that he had so many friends whom he got drunk with. She didn't drink. And he had after all endless other women. And when people say to me he was a saint I say: "Oh no, he wasn't a saint at all. And thank God he wasn't."

How interesting that God is invoked even here where sanctity is denied. Beckett would have appreciated one more demonstration of meaningless linguistic inertia. Still, it is cheering to think that during all those trips to direct his own plays, urging the actors to avoid all color, Beckett was in fact—in another of the contradictions that make his work so real—actually seeking to add a little color to his own life. Certainly, Jocelyn Herbert seems very sure of what she is talking about; and those three words of hers, "after all endless," have a decidedly Beckettian ring to them.