Abstract
The first two volumes under review – Beckett Matters and Beckett’s Thing – are issued in the series ‘Other Becketts’ edited by Stan Gontarski, one of the world’s leading Beckett scholars. Professor Gontarski’s own contribution to the series is a collection of his essays – all previously published – which span a period of two decades, years during which he established himself as a major authority on Beckett’s plays and on the short prose works that were published in the later years of the author’s life.
As an editor of his writings Gontarski’s contribution has been especially significant: the theatrical notebooks that Beckett compiled in preparation for directing performances of Endgame in Berlin in 1967 and in San Quentin in 1980 were reproduced in facsimile with a transcription and commentary and published by Faber & Faber in 1992. The volume sheds valuable light on the changes the author made to his own text as production developed. This editorial experience has made Gontarski a formidable critic of the often corrupt texts issued by Beckett’s publishers: only now are the ‘misreadings, misprints and distortions’ being corrected under the watchful eye of the Beckett estate (p. 104).
What Gontarski calls Beckett’s ‘hybrid art’ – gravitating as it does ‘to where he always thought it belonged, among the plastic arts’ (p. 199) – is the subject of David Lloyd’s book on Beckett’s visual aesthetics. Beckett was a connoisseur of the arts, both while he was living in Ireland and later on in Paris. He was particularly drawn to painters who were not in the mainstream. In Ireland he championed the work of Jack B. Yeats (the brother of W. B. Yeats). In Paris he became a fervent admirer of Bram van Velde, a Dutch abstract painter. His lifelong friendship with Israeli artist Avigdor Arikha led to some remarkable portraits of the writer (pp. 169, 170) and to Arikha’s illustrations of some of his texts that were issued in limited editions.
Lloyd eschews what he calls ‘the approach to drama as text and narrative’ in favour of seeing plays as visual art: ‘it is a striking fact about Beckett’s dramatic works that one can arrest the action at almost any point and be rewarded with a tableau that is a virtual painting’ (p. 7). This is especially true of Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), where, as the turning spool plays on, Krapp stares motionless into the middle distance, meditating on a failed love affair which has just been recalled on tape: ‘I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed …’ (Krapp’s Last Tape, London: Faber & Faber, 1959, p. 16).
Another such tableau occurs at the end of Happy Days, where ‘the figure of Winnie subsiding, act by act, into her burial mound continues to operate visually with emphatic theatrical images’ that serve to ‘unify the space of the stage around the human figures which they frame or project’ (p. 78). In Waiting for Godot the tree and the stone – strikingly illustrated on p. 77 with a still from the 1999 Gate Theatre production by Walter Asmus, one of Beckett’s longest-serving directors – operate in a similar fashion.
One of Beckett’s earliest works was a study of À la recherche du temps perdu, and it remains to this day the best short introduction to Proust’s masterpiece. Sensations proustiennes is the latest issue in the series ‘Marcel Proust aujourd’hui’ edited by Sjef Houppermans and others. The volume contains a number of interesting essays. One, on ‘orphan’ screen adaptations of the novel, discusses a project by Harold Pinter – commissioned by Joseph Losey but not filmed – in tandem with another, by Suso Cecchi d’Amico, for a movie that Luchino Visconti was never able to make.
Another essay examines the problems faced by Martin de Haan and Rokus Hofstede, the translators of a new Dutch version of Du côté de chez Swann (Amsterdam: Athenaeum, 2015). This will be of particular interest to all who have tried to wrestle with Proust’s French in other languages. Here, the euphemism for sexual activity which Swann uses with Odette, ‘un bon petit catleya’, is rendered ‘een fijn potje catleya’, ‘solution qui peut être taxée d’anachronisme mais qui a la vertu d’évoquer l’expression consacrée “een potje vrijen” (une partie de jambes en l’air)’ (p. 165). The volume as a whole is proof that scholars keep returning to Proust, as they do to Beckett: of studies of this quality there seems, happily, to be no end.