Eleuthéria Read online

  agreed to publish them as well, provided that he was

  not broke himself by then, and the two plays along

  with the th ird novel of the trilogy were then announced as forthcoming in the pages of Beckett's first two French novels, Molloy and Malone meurt. By June

  1953 Beckett had an American publisher, Barney

  Rosset, of the fledgling Grove Press, about which

  "Sylvia Beach said very nice things, "6 and a "first version of [the English] Godot" was "in the hands of Mr.

  Harold L. Oram, 8 West 40th Street, New York, who

  has our authority to treat for the performance rights

  up till I think November 1st." The recognition that

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  SAMUEL BECKETT

  Beckett had sought for so long was now in reach, and

  he pursued it-but not without hesitations. He withdrew from publication Mercier et Gamier, "First Love,"

  and the play that bears a curious relationship to

  "First Love ," Eleu theria, which he then consistently

  withheld from publication and performance.

  Although Eleuthbia sat in Beckett's trunk, it

  was not exactly an unknown work. Beckett destroyed

  neither typescripts nor manuscript notebooks. In fact

  they were finally sold or donated to major research

  libraries, namely the Humanities Research Center at

  the University of Texas, which holds the two manuscript notebooks, Dartmouth College, which holds the original typescript, and Washington University,

  St. Louis, and the University of Reading (Reading,

  England) , each of which holds a copy of the typescript. Individual copies had also circulated freely among Beckett scholars as a sort of samizdat network

  once Beckett attracted sufficient reputation among

  academics in the late 1950s, and a number of important studies of Beckett's dramatic works have included essays on Eleuthbia. 7 By 1986, Beckett had relented

  somewhat on his ban against the play's publication.

  He allowed a significant portion of it, almost a third

  of it, to be published in France as part of a tribute

  volume to honor his eightieth birthday, in the special issue of Revu e d 'Esthetique. 8 And several pages were published in Beckett in the Theatre: the dialogue between the Glazier and his son , of which Beckett has said, "the source of the dialogue between the boy and

  Vladimir [in Waiting for Godot] is to be found in the

  unpublished play Eleuthbia. "9

  In fact, in the spring of 1986 Beckett was on

  the verge once again of releasing the whole of

  ELEUTHERIA

  Xlll

  Eleuthena to his long-time friend and American publisher Barney Rosset. That spring, Parisians were honoring the eightieth birthday of their adopted son , Samuel Beckett. The great museum o f modern art in

  Paris, the Centre Pompidou, sponsored a week-long

  celebration of Beckett's work with lectures, exhibits,

  discussions, and performances. The massive special

  issue of the Revu e d 'Esthetiqu e appeared in the windows of most of the city's bookshops in time for the Pompidou festivities. Beckett himself, slightly embarrassed by the attention, kept his distance, absenting himself, as was his habit, even from performances of

  his work. He met with friends quietly as they came

  into town at the cafe of the Hotel PLM not far from

  his Boulevard St. Jacques apartment, but he spent

  most of the time buried in the "Marne mud" of his

  Ussy retreat. On his birthday, however, he was back

  in Paris and attended a small reception at one of his

  old haunts, La Coupole, which he had avoided for

  over two decades, preferring the Falstaff around the

  corner and finally the hygienic anonymity and privacy of the Hotel PLM.

  As a group of us sipped drinks at the Bar

  Americain, Beckett's American publisher, Barney

  Rosset, came through the doors in a flurry announcing that he had been discharged from the company he built and ran for over thirty-three years, Grove

  Press. The mood of the evening shifted. It seemed

  impossible th at Rosset could be se parated fro m

  Grove ; in our minds, o f course, they were one. Rosset

  was Grove Press. But he had sold it a year earlier in

  an effort to recapitalize. The new owners, Ann Getty

  and Lord Weidenfeld, had pledged to keep Rosset

  on for five years as Editor-in-Chief- or so he thought.

  ...

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  SAMUEL BECKETT

  One clause of his con tract stipulated that Rosset actually served at the pleasure of the new owners, and they were di s p l e a s e d , p a r ti c u l arly at Ro sse t ' s

  chronic inability to adapt to the corporate structure . We sipped our drinks and shook our heads, grumbling that if the decision to publish Beckett

  rested with boards of directors, rather than visionary publishe rs like Rosse t and Lin do n , and was based on m arke tin g surveys, he would have remained an unpublished writer.

  B e c ke tt arrived-rath e r m ate r i al i z e dpromptly at eight. No one saw him come in . Suddenly, he was just standing there in a grey, outsized greatcoat and brown beret. We greeted him and withdrew to a cluster of tables in the corner of the cordoned

  bar area where Beckett was briefed on the Rosset affai r. Wh at could be don e , h e queri e d . Rosset shrugged his shoulders and muttered, more into the

  table that to anyone in particular, "Start over, I guess."

  It was immediately clear from the tenor of the conversation that for Beckett also Rosset was Grove Press.

  It was Barney Rosset who was Samuel Beckett's American publisher, not some corporate entity called Grove Press. Years later, John Calder would call Rosset

  Beckett's "spiritual son ," and on that snowy April

  evening Beckett responded much like a spiritual father. Perhaps he might find something in the trunk to help Rosset begin yet again .

  Rosset and Beckett met several times during

  the week to work out details. The obvious choice was

  for Rosset to publish Dream of Fair to Middling Women,

  the unfinished English novel of 1932 which Beckett

  later plundered for two of the stories in More Pricks

  Than Kicks.lO But Dream remained a sensitive work

  ELEUTHERIA

  XV

  for Beckett in 1986. It featured a protagonist who was

  only a thinly disguised alter-ego of the author, and it

  was a roman a clef Some of its models were still alive

  and would surely be embarrassed by its publication .

  Beckett finally settled on his first full-length play,

  Eleuthma. He inscribed a copy of the play to Rosset

  to seal the agreement, and withdrew to Ussy to take

  on the clearly distasteful task of translating the play

  into English.

  Although he is listed as the translator into

  English or French on almost all of his work, Beckett

  never was. strictly a translator of himself. Each shift in

  language produced not a literary or linguistic equivalent but a new work. Beckett's translations have always been transformations, a continuation of the creative process. There simply are no equivalents between Beckett's French and English texts. Theater, moreover, required yet another major transformation, a reconceptualization of the work for stage space. During his twenty-year career as a theatrical

  director, from 1967-1986, Beckett seized any opportunity to review his plays to continue the creative process. As a theatrical director of his own work he at least revised and at times rewrote every play he directed. The task of translating Eleuthma was not as simple as it at first sounded.

&n
bsp; It came as little surprise , then , that shortly after Beckett began the task, he abandoned it as too taxing in his eightieth year. It would have meant recreating a play he wrote some four decades earlier.

  Rosset was no more disappointed than Beckett himself, but Beckett offered some consolation-three short new prose works which he called Stirrings Still

  and which he dedicated to Rosset.

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  ..

  SA.IUEL BECKETT

  Rosset, however, never abandoned plans to

  publish Eleuthbia. A draconian contract with the new

  owners of the press forbid his competing with Grove

  directly, and the publication of Eleuthbia would have

  violated at least the spirit if not the letter of that agreement. But after Grove Press changed hands yet again , Rosset resumed plans to publish Eleuthbiain English.

  On March 3, 1993, he wrote to Beckett's literary executor, the French publisher Jerome Lindon , to inform him that he was making plans to publish the work that Beckett had offered him in 1986: " . . . It is

  now time to publish Eleuthbia, and I hope that we

  can do so in cooperation with each other and avoid

  the confusion , misunderstandings, in-fighting, and

  legal battles surrounding the publication of Dream of

  Fair to Middling Women. "

  Lindon 's initial reply on March 5, 1993 suggested some room for negotiation . While insisting on Samuel Beckett's interdictu m on Eleuth bia, Lindon

  nevertheless suggested, "I do not believe that much

  in everlasting perpetuity of steadfast stand-points. It

  is likely that Eleuthbia might be published some day,

  in some way or other, in French first, then in other

  languages. When? I cannot possibly tell you for the

  time being. " Rosset continued preparations to publish the play while negotiations proceeded, commissioning a second translation from Albert Bermel and taking on a co-publisher, John Oake s and Dan

  Simon 's Four Walls Eight Windows; together they

  formed the company Foxrock, Inc. through which to

  publish the play. The negotiations between the two

  strong-willed publishers, however, grew increasingly

  acrimonious. The conflict was unfortunate in a number of respects, not the least of which was that the

  ELEUTHERIA

  XVII

  two most importan t figures in Samuel Beckett's publishing life were at loggerheads with each other, and both were acting out of the firm conviction that they

  had Samuel Beckett's best interests at heart. Lindon

  as best he could was trying to fulfill Samuel Beckett's

  final wishes to the letter. Rosset was acting through

  the hist.orical imperative that had driven his thirtythree years at Grove Press, that major work by major writers should not be suppressed or limited to an elite

  that had privileged access to it. Rosset's attitude toward Eleuthbia was no different from his attitude toward Lady Chatterley s Lover or the Tropic of Cancer, except that Samuel Beckett offered the play to him directly in 1986. Beckett was fiercely loyal to his original publishers. In fact to demonstrate his confidence in Rosset, Beckett made formal in a letter of February 1, 1986, an agreement that they had between them informally: 'This is to confirm that I have appointed

  you my exclusive theatrical agent for North America.

  This agreement shall remain in effect until such time

  as either one of us decides to terminate it."

  In fact, when Rosset took on Samuel Beckett

  as a Grove author, Beckett warned him in a letter

  dated June 25, 1953 of the implications involved in

  publishing his work:

  I hope you realize what you are letting yourself in for. I

  do not mean the heart of the matter, which is unlikely

  to disturb anybody, but certain obscenities of form

  which may not have struck you in French as they will in

  English, and which frankly (it is better that you should

  know this before we get going) I am not at all disposed

  to mitigate. I do not of course realize what is possible

  in America from this point of view and what is not. Certainly, as far as I know such passages, faithfully translated, would not be tolerated in England. II Both publishers by then had taken consider-

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  ..

  SA."M:UEL BECKETI

  able risks with Samuel Beckett's work, financial and

  legal, and Beckett was intensely loyal to both, making Jerome Lindon finally his literary executor and trying to insure Barney Rosset' s future by offering him

  his last major unpublished work for publication.

  In September 1994 Rosset decided to bring

  the play to the attention of a broader audience by

  offering a public reading in New York. Samuel

  Beckett's nephew, Edward, denounced the action to

  the New York Times, suggesting that "all those who may

  be party to this New York event [i.e., the play's reading] which deliberately transgresses the will expressed by Samuel Beckett, would of course expose themselves

  to legal proceedings." That threat was enough to scare

  off the New York Theater Workshop, where the reading was originally scheduled to take place. Undeterred by the theater's failure of nerve , Rosset gathered the

  audience outside the New York Theater Workshop

  and led them through the streets of New York, a procession in search of an author, to his apartment building, where space was found for the reading. By November 22, 1994 the acrimony had increased. Rosset had been discharged as Beckett's theatrical agent, and

  Lindon wrote to co-publishers john G.H. Oakes and

  Dan Simon :

  In order to avoid any ambiguity, I made a point of warning Barney Rosset by return post that should he publish Eleuthma then the Beckett estate would prosecute not only the publishers but all those-translators and

  distributors, among others-who have been accessory

  to that illicit action.

  At this point of maximum conflict, when it

  looked as though the only resolution to this drama

  would be a protracted court battle, the issues were

  resolved. A third translation was commissioned from

  ELEUTHERIA

  XlX

  the novelist Michael Brodsky, and Lindon prepared

  to publish the play in French before its English appearance. The "Avertissement" to his edition makes clear, however, that he was publishing the work against

  his better judgment since Beckett considered it "u ne

  piece ratee" ( a failed play) .

  Rosset's position was that such judgments are

  best left to history. Beckett had often been overly critical of his own work. In the letter to Rosset dated February 11, 1954, for example, Beckett noted, "It's hard to go on with everything loathed and repudiated as

  soon as fprmulated, and in the act of formulation,

  and before formulation ." In the same letter, Beckett

  noted that he has had to resist Lindon 's pressure to

  publish another oeuvre inachevee: "[Lindon] also

  wanted to publish Mercier et Gamier, the first 'novel' in

  French and of which the less said the better, but I

  had to refuse ." It is our good fortune that Jerome

  Lindon persisted and finally prevailed, and Minuit

  published Mercier et Camier in 1970, Grove in 1974. It

  is to our good fortune as well that Beckett's two major publishers came to an agreement about the publication of Eleuthbia.

  To Lindon 's mind, "tous les vrais connaisseurs

  de son travail que j'ai connus consideraient Eleutheria

  comme u ne piece ratee. "And critics like Ruby Cohn have

&nbs
p; agreed. But how successful Eleuthhia is as a play (qu a

  play) may not be exactly the right question to ask

  about its publication. Carlton Lake, for one, places

  the focus on the work's historical significance: "It is a

  late-blooming transitional work and, even though

  preceded by other works in French, forms a bridge

  between Beckett the English language writer and

  Beckett the French writer. "12 And in what is perhaps

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  SAMUEL BECKETI

  the most comprehensive essay written on the play,

  Dougald McMillan writes:

  [Eleutheria] was thus the culmination of [Beckett's] examination of the dramatic tradition of which he was a part. If we do not have for Beckett a direct manifesto

  like Corneille's First Discourse on the Uses and Elements of

  Dramatic Poetry, Strindberg's prefaces to Miss Julie and

  A Dream Play, Zola's preface to ThereseRaquin, or Brecht's

  Short Organum for the Theater, we do have in Eleuthma

  Beckett's own full statement on dramatic method-a

  statement which clearly influenced his later plays.l3

  There is no question that Beckett was not

  happy finally with this play and that he had not fully

  solved all its dramatic problems, and so could not

  translate it when he tried. It is after all a drama in the

  throes of resisting becoming a drama. Beckett wrote

  a play in which the main character refuses to or simply cannot explain the very motives of his action, which motives have traditionally driven the machinery of drama, his desire to be nothing. With Eleuthhia, Beckett was learning to risk absence on the stage, to

  empty the theatrical space, first of motive, then of

  character. It would take another play before he would

  solve this dramatic problem of presenting "nothing"

  by removing one of the cen tral characters from the

  stage-Godot. Eleuthhia is not there yet, but it shows

  the way. It may be only, say, Krap 's first tape, which of

  course is less developed, less complete than Krapp's

  last tape. But Eleuthhia is the beginning of "it all." It