Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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I still remember watching Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at a London West End theatre. That was a very long time ago, and the exact theatre escapes me.

Almost fifteen years have passed since Beckett's death at the age of 83 and, as Bryan Appleyard puts it, "Beckett's genius is, at last, becoming known to all."

The reason I have chosen to write about Beckett is an invitation I received from the Alexandria Atelier to see Happy Days performed in Arabic. The play was translated by Manar Badr from the German text that was presented at the Schiller theatre in Berlin in 1971. The play was directed by Beckett himself. Unfortunately I could not attend the performance, but I've read the beautifully translated text.

Beckett was always a controversial writer. Some thought of him as "an austere miserabilist" while others described him as "the father of modern comedy". As Appleyard puts it, "in popular imagination he has always seemed a remote and difficult figure, admired rather than read, more of a dessicated source of arid academic speculation than an enduring artistic presence. This is a falsehood that now, happily, is being corrected."

Professor James Knowlson, who has written a biography of Beckett, believes that "much modern comedy comes straight out of Beckett". And yet many critics see Beckett a bleak writer.

Some described Beckett as a comedian of genius, though one who is not easy to understand. The critic Christopher Ricks, author of Beckett's Dying Words, believes that "comedy in Beckett is based on the view that the world cannot be improved, humans are beyond help." According to him the human condition is interminable and incorrigible.

Ricks compares Beckett with Dickens. Dickens, he says, suffered the same problem as Beckett. "People are so determined to read his novels as dark satires on Victorian social conditions that they fail to see the funny side."

The same applies to Beckett. When Waiting for Godot became a great success Beckett commented that it "had been very largely the result of misunderstanding or of various misunderstandings".

Bryan Appleyard describes Beckett as "witty, gregarious, kind, compassionate, a devoted friend and a great lover of many women, most of whom loved him in return. In his work, he was wittier than Wilde and one of the greatest masters of the English language of this or any other century."

The joke in Beckett is too big to be seen. It is, writes Appleyard, "in the exact sense of the word, cosmic. In all his plays we can discern a feeling that there is no hope, that there is little human agency can do to improve things."

All Beckett's characters, in the words of one of them, are "locked in the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else". For them the spiritual journey has ended: his tramps and eccentrics contemplate only an immobility. Beckett once said that the only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. You cannot move forward, you can only, like the characters in Waiting for Godot, examine your surroundings and wait for the end.

Appleyard gives some quotes from Beckett's letters. "Success and failure," he wrote, "on the public level never mattered much to me. In fact I feel much more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my life."

In spite of the apparent harshness and pessimism in his work he was "a man of painful human sensitivities who used his art to help us cope". In a letter to his friend Alan Schneider, an American director, he wrote: "I know your sorrow and I know that for the likes of us there is no case for the heart to be had from words of reason and that in the very assurance of sorrow's fading there is more sorrow. So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds."