Waiting for Godot brought in enough money to enable Beckett to buy himself a Paris flat and a small house in the country where he did much of his work. Other than simple everyday needs, his expenditure on himself stopped there. His French publisher was often in financial difficulties and Beckett not only forewent royalties but used revenue from performances to get him out of trouble. He did the same for no-one knows how many others. Anyone in need went to Beckett and he would borrow to lend money that was never returned. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1969 and a large sum of money came to him, he told me that he did not feel he deserved it and could I give him a list of needy writers he could help. By the time he received my list it was all gone. Others had come to him, often asking for as large a sum as they dared. When he died there was nothing in the bank, money was owed in tax and his heirs had to wait for it to be paid before they received any benefit.
from an article by John Calder

Neither love nor freedom
can survive the fire from
what we might become.

Several of these poems seem to take place at the junction between two hemispheres. The poet finds himself in the cold blue-before-dawn light with one foot in the old world and another in the margin that might or might not mean a future. But sometimes the margins coalesce; Shadows realign at the field’s edge.
Night self-heals, like water.

Dick Jones is a Modernist poet. In this collection he maintains a stance against cliche and the establishment and reinforces that good old modernist determination to amaze and belabor the bourgeoisie at the same time and at every opportunity.

Reading these poems one notices a telling use of language, the musician’s sense of rhythm, and the recurring echoes of the Beat poets; the voices from the 1914-1918 war, particularly Wilfred Owen; and Larkin, Thomas and Redgrove among other British poets from the middle of the 20th century up to our own day. But there is always the modernist’s unease before the incontrovertible fact that his work, no matter how avant-garde or experimental in design and execution, will have its life mainly through the patronage of a bourgeois audience.

Many of the texts are delightful and stand you back on your heels, like this one from 2004:

THE TIES THAT BIND

The morning after you left I drew
the curtains on the seven acre field.

Two hares were bowling through the stubble,
wind-blown, skidding like broken wheels.

They danced and sprung apart and danced again
and then were gone, beyond the tidemark

of the tree line. Then a mob of seagulls
swung downwind from the west, scattered,

gathered again in a brawl of wings and then
were gone, into a bleak neutrality

of towering clouds. Love or combat, the wind
blew them into the world and out again,

these dancers, bound only to the end
of their measures and not beyond.

Or, in another mood, Jones can produce taught, muscular poems like the opening Stille Nacht, with its poignant observations:

Outside a town in the Ardennes
Private Taunitz hung
like a crippled kite
high in a tree.

A cruciform against the sky,
he seemed to run forever
through the branches,
running home for the new year.

There are poems here which comment on and are inspired by events during the second World War, hand-me-downs, poems from a past before the past of the poet. Some celebrate the wonder and joy of parenthood; while others touch on the grief of loss and the awareness of death, the end of times.

I must say that I felt something was lost to me by approaching these verses via a digital (.pdf) route; and on more than one occasion I had to resort to printing the poem onto a clean A4 sheet, which immediately rendered it accessible, and often movingly so.

All in all, though, highly recommended. Go and get a copy for yourself.

I walk through her and she walks through me.

At the edge of the river-sea, river as broad as the sea, the clear air clears my mind and my legs stride on while stories walk inside me.

Walking, I write. At a stroll, words seek each other and find each other and weave stories that later on I write by hand on paper. Those pages are never the final ones. I cross out and crumple up, crumple and cross in search of the words that deserve to exist: fleeting words that yearn to outdo silence.

Born on the path of a cannonball, Montevideo is swept by breezes that cleanse the air. Before there was a church or a hospital, this point of rock, earth, and sand had a café. It was called a pulpería, the first house with a wooden door amid the huts of mud and straw. They sold everything there, from a needle and a frying pan to a pack of tobacco, while men sitting on the floor drank wine and told lies.

Practically three centuries later Montevideo is still a city of cafés.

We don’t ask, Where do you live? rather, What café do you go to?

But in the world of our time there is barely time to waste time, and the oldest cafés, the most endearing, don’t deserve to exist because they can’t turn a profit.

I go to the Café Brasilero, which miraculously lives on.

This is the last of the ancient meeting places where I learned the art of storytelling by listening to liars who, by lying, told the truth.

The café was my university.

I never knew the names of those magicians who could make what had never happened happen when they told it. From those masters, from their unhurried speech, their easy stride, I learned while pretending not to, looking out the window at a “Ford with whiskers,” as we called the many Model T’s that cruised the streets of Montevideo at the pace of a tortoise. They still do, inexplicable survivors that can be seen in our city and nowhere else: impassive, haughty museum pieces, indifferent to the vehicles of today which devour at a dizzying pace the hours and the air.

There are those who say Montevideo is a boring city.

Maybe they are right.

Nothing happens here.

Nostalgia wins out over hope.

In a yawn, you can lose two aunts.

But this is also the capital of a country governed by guerrillas released from prison and elected democratically, and it is the city that produces the most experts who philosophize on everything and nothing, the city with the most independent theaters and the most noncommercial moviehouses, including the first to show Bergman and Polanski, the city that celebrates the longest carnival in the world, and the one that produces the most soccer players, because here every baby is born screaming goal.

Montevideo, the city where I was born.

The city where I would be born again.

B writes a book in which he makes fun of certain writers, variously disguised, or, to be more precise, certain types of writers. In one of his stories there is a character not unlike A, a writer of about B’s age, but who, unlike B, is famous, well-off and has a large readership; in other words he has achieved the three highest goals (in that order) to which a man of letters can aspire. B is not famous, he has no money and his poems are published in little magazines. Yet A and B are not entirely dissimilar. They both come from lower-middle-class or upwardly mobile working-class families. Politically, both are left wing; they have in common a keen intellectual curiosity and a deficient formal education. With A’s meteoric rise, however, a sanctimonious tone has crept into his writing, and B, who is a slave to print, finds this particularly irritating. In his newspaper articles, and with increasing frequency in his books, A has taken to pontificating on all things great and small, human or divine, with a leaden pedantry, like a man who, having used literature as a ladder to social status and respectability, now safely ensconced in his nouveau-riche ivory tower, snipes at anything that might tarnish the mirror in which he contemplates himself and the world. For B, in short, A has become a prig.

. . .The only contact he had with people was when he shoved their heads down toilet bowls, and he couldn’t do that to the teachers.
As an adult, looking back, I understand that the reason everyone was frightened of Karl wasn’t because he growled but because we could all see where he was going and at some single-cell stratum of our evolved souls we were afraid that if he touched us, or looked at us, or got too near us, we’d have to go with him.
From the short story, If All Is Dark.

As a postscript to one of these stories Mat Coward explains how he set about writing short stories for themed anthologies during the initial years of the 21st century: I generally tried to make my stories fit into the theme as completely as possible in all aspects – the title, the setting, the plot, the jokes, the clues and twists, everything – and at the same time, just to add interest and emphasis, to find a way of making everything in the story work against the theme, too.

There are twelve stories collected here, introducing us to a passionate affair which remains unconsummated; a guy who created an entire religion based on chips; a military Captain and supporter of King Richard on the eve of the assassination of Mat Tyler. In addition there is a barman used by a world-weary policeman; a kind of detective called Doggo and his vile partner, Vincent; Rocket, a kid brought up in the back of a car; and very large Harry, a detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police.

But the title story is the gem of the collection, in which Steve organises a reunion party for his old punk palls from the seventies. The narrator sets about trying to analyse what his experiences as a young man have meant in the totality of his life, leading to a calm, serene, moving and reflective piece of fiction:

Let me tell you about punk rock. For an exhilarating few months the kids controlled the music. The business, the media, they had no influence over what was happening. They recovered quickly, of course, and re-established the status-quo, and they learned from it – they determined never to let things get out of hand again.

They learned from it; but so did we.

“No future” was the big slogan back then, and it’s only taken me half a lifetime to figure out what it means. The future never arrives, and the past never departs, and what matters in between isn’t how you dance – it’s why you dance. And the day you realise that, is the day you go punk.

We’re still out there, us old punk rockers. We don’t bother with the safety pins any more, or the bondage trousers, or the gobbing. But you’ll know us when you see us. We’re the ones jumping up and down.

The scene changes to an empty room.

Rimbaud has gone to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the slave trade. Wittgenstein has first chosen schoolteaching, then menial work as a hospital orderly. Duchamp has turned to chess. And, accompanying these exemplary renunciations of a vocation, each man has declared that he considers his previous achievements in poetry. philosophy, or art as trifling, of no importance.

But the choice of permanent silence doesn’t negate their work. On the contrary, it imparts retroactively an added power and authority to what was broken off; disavowal of the work becoming a new source of its validity, a certificate of unchallengeable seriousness. That seriousness consists in not regarding art (or philosophy practiced as an art form: Wittgenstein) as something whose seriousness lasts forever, an “end,” a permanent vehicle for spiritual ambition. The truly serious attitude is one that regards art as a “means” to something that can perhaps be achieved only by abandoning art; judged more impatiently, art is a false way or (the word of the Dada artist Jacques Vaché) a stupidity.

From The Aesthetics of Silence, (1969) by Susan Sontag; the whole essay reprinted in Aspen: The Minimalism Issue.

POZZO:
(suddenly furious.) Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

We were at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds to see their production of Waiting for Godot with Ian Brown directing the Talawa Theatre Company‘s all Black cast.

The play has been produced with an all-Black cast several times before, though this is the first time in the UK. The text, however, is so strong and so insistent that before ten minutes of the first act had passed the skin colour of the players had become insignificant. The main duo chatter away in authentic Carribean accents, but again, this does not affect the audiences interpretation of the play. I have seen productions with Irish, Scottish, French, American and English accents, but I can’t honestly claim that any of these have improved my enjoyment or understanding of the text,

Nevertheless, the cast is a strong one and they push the play forward with tremendous energy and skill. If I had to single out a performance to tip the scales, it would be Guy Burgess’s portrayal of Lucky. But this is to take nothing away from the other players and the director, all of whom should be rightfully proud of their achievement.

This production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot reminded me of Beckett’s 1930 essay on Proust, where he demonstrates how time, habit, memory and salvation permeate À la recherche du temps perdu. The passing of time is a constant reminder of death, and as a way of by-passing this, Proust’s characters fall into everyday habits, repetition, boredom, distractions. This in turn can lead to the awakening of involuntary memory, and in that moment, the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being. Involuntary memory undoes time and habit. This is a kind of salvation.

Beckett is not only concerned with Proust, he is primarily concerned with his own influences and preoccupations and to work out an aesthetic manifesto on which to base his future preoccupations.

Time, habit, and memory are the concepts which underline Waiting for Godot, and there are multiple references to them in the play.

The other thing that came to mind while watching the performance was the recollection that Tennessee Williams called The Glass Menagerie a ‘memory play.’ Menagerie was written eight years before Godot and concentrates on a series of abandonments, but it also has everyone in the cast and the audience ‘waiting’, in this case for a gentleman caller. Perhaps Godot is also a ‘memory’ play in the same sense?

I don’t know who Godot is. I don’t even know (above all don’t know) if he exists. And I don’t know if they believe in him or not – those two who are waiting for him. The other two who pass by towards the end of each of the two acts, that must be to break up the monotony. All I knew I showed. It’s not much, but it’s enough for me, by a wide margin. I’ll even say that I would have been satisfied with less. As for wanting to find in all that a broader, loftier meaning to carry away from the performance, along with the program and the Eskimo pie, I cannot see the point of it. But it must be possible … Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo, Lucky, their time and their space, I was able to know them a little, but far from the need to understand. Maybe they owe you explanations. Let them supply it. Without me. They and I are through with each other.
Samuel Beckett.

The play continues at the West Yorkshire Playhouse until the 25th February, then goes on tour to Albany Deptford London, Old Rep Birmingham, Theatre Royal Winchester and New Wolsey Ipswich.

Reviews of previous productions of this play are available here and here.

Mark My word, if and when these preachers get control of the (Republican) party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.
‘Mr Conservative’, Republican Senator and Presidential Nominee, Barry Goldwater.

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I used to say when I taught playwriting that when you bore somebody, you’re wasting their time and, in fact, their life . . . even with a short run, you’ve wasted so much human life, it’s like murdering a toddler.
Tony Kushner.

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Occasionally, a stranger would come in the house uninvited and catch Dashiell Hammett off guard. He might be reading in an easy chair. Miss Hellman would introduce him, and he would elegantly rise and shake hands. Like many a famous writer who detests being disturbed in his private self, a million miles from any social confrontation, he had learned to scare off the intruder with his smile. Here he was luckier than most, for rather than looking pained and fraudulent, rather than a predictable Sam Spade/Humphrey Bogart hard-guy leer, the smile Dashiell Hammett produced on his clear-eyed, lean, aristocratic face was so nearly beatific that it disarmed the intruder long enough for Dashiell Hammett, with no more than a how-do-you-do, to vanish from the room. The armchair or the book gave his only evidence. Even the invited dinner guest coming punctually into the room would know the same ectoplasmic presence, when Miss Hellman, the laughter mingled in her greeting, would immediately explain what Dash had said—what his joking exit line had been on, it seemed, the instant of your entrance. He was elusive but never aloof.
The Paris Review.

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