Terminal Art: Steiner on Beckett

Critic and scholar George Steiner on the work of Samuel Beckett

George Steiner on the later prose texts of Samuel Beckett, first published in the New Yorker in 1968:

[...] Beckett's landscape is a bleak monochrome. The matter of his singsong is ordure, solitude, and the ghostly self-sufficiency that comes after a long fast. Nevertheless, he is one of our indispensable recovers, and knows it, too: 'Peekaboo here I come again, just when most needed, like the square root of minus one, having terminated my humanities.' A dense, brilliantly apt phrase. The square root of minus one is imaginary, spectral, but mathematics cannot do without it. 'Terminated' is a deliberate gallicism: it signifies that Beckett has mastered humane learning (these texts bristle with arcane allusions), that he has made an academic inventory of civilization before closing the lid and paring himself to the bone. But 'terminated' also means finis, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape. This is terminal art, making most criticism or commentary a superfluous vulgarity.

The vision that emerges from the sum of Beckett's writing is narrow and repetitive. It is also grimly hilarious. It may not be much, but, being so honest, it might well prove the best, most durable we have. Beckett's thinness, his refusal to see in language and literary form adequate realizations of human feeling or society, make him antithetical to Henry James. But he is as representative of our present diminished reach as James was representative of a lost spaciousness. Thus there applies to both the salutation spoken by W. H. Auden in Mount Auburn cemetery: 'Master of nuance and scruple.'

George Steiner, 'Of Nuance and Scruple'

George Steiner at the New Yorker

More at A Piece of Monologue:

• Featured Artist: Samuel Beckett
• George Steiner on Thomas Bernhard

Primo Levi on Shame

An excerpt from The Drowned and the Saved

Primo Levi discusses the complex emotional implications of being a Holocaust survivor:

After my return from imprisonment I was visited by a friend older than myself, mild and intransigent, the cultivator of a personal religion, which, however, always seemed to me severe and serious. He was glad to find me alive and basically unhurt, perhaps matured and fortified, certainly enriched. He told me that my having survived could not be the work of chance, of an accumulation of fortunate circumstances (as I had maintained and still maintain) but rather of Providence. I bore the mark, I was an elect: I, the non-believer, and even less of a believer after the season of Auschwitz, was a serious person touched by Grace, a saved man. And why just I? It is impossible to know, he answered. Perhaps because I had to write, and by writing bear witness: wasn't I in fact then, in 1946, writing a book about my imprisonment?

Such an opinion seemed monstrous to me. It pained me as when one touches an exposed nerve, and kindled the doubt I spoke of before: I might be alive in the place of another, at the expense of another; I might have usurped, that is, in fact killed. The 'saved of the Lager were not the best, those predestined to do good; the bearers of a message. What I had seen and lived through proved the exact contrary. Preferably the worst survived, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'grey zones', the spies. It was not a certain rule (there were none, nor are there certain rules in human matters), but it was, nevertheless, a rule. I felt innocent, yes, but enrolled among the saved and therefore in permanent search of a justification in my own eyes and those of others. The worst survived - that is, the fittest; the best all died.

Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

Also on A Piece of Monologue:

• Primo Levi on Dante and Arachnophobia
• Sic!
• Claude Lanzmann's liberated memories

Disjecta: This week's links

[Image: Albert Exergian's modernist TV poster for Twin Peaks]

This week has seen new developments in the world of the e-book: Apple has introduced the new iPad, while Amazon has fallen out with Macmillan publishers over retail prices. Jonathan Safran Foer promotes his new book, Eating Animals. A new art exhibition pays homage to the work of J. G. Ballard. And Martin Amis makes the provocative but questionable statement that J. M. Coetzee has 'no talent'. The deaths of historian Howard Zinner and writer J. D. Salinger have also loomed large in this week's headlines, and a selection of links have been included below.

Literature:

Philip Roth: In praise of phone books (and Philip Roth)
Jonathan Safran Foer: On his new book, Eating Animals
Will Self: An introduction to the Book of Revelation
Gabriel Josipovici: New story, 'Love Across the Borders'
J. M. Coetzee: Amis claims Coetzee has 'no talent'
J. G. Ballard: An art exhibition pays homage
Don DeLillo: On DeLillo's 'glacial aesthetic'
J. D. Salinger 1919-2010: More on A Piece of Monologue
Literary Journals: Are literary fiction magazines and journals in decline?
Bookshelves: Lee Rourke on building your own
Amazon/MacMillan: Amazon pulls Macmillan titles in e-book skirmish
Apple iPad: First review of new e-book reader
William Burroughs: John Coulthart on Burroughs The Movie

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Jean Baudrillard: L'Espirit du Terrorisme

Slavoj Žižek: Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Fredric Jameson: The Dialectics of Disaster

Slavoj Žižek: The world according to Žižek

Jacques Lacan: Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet

Howard Zinn 1922-2010: Renowned American historian

Music:

Bob Dylan: Dylan to perform at the White House
Krautrock: BBC documentary, 'Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany'

Television:

Modernist TV Posters

Art:

Harry Diamond 1924-2009: Photographer of Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon

Etc.:

Garry Kasparov: The Chess Master and the Computer
Holocaust Memorial Day

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Waiting for Godot: Haymarket, London

UK production of Samuel Beckett's landmark play

Lyn Gardner reviews Sean Mathias's continuing production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, now with a modified cast:

There are broad smiles amid the catastrophe in Sean Mathias's ­production, which returns to the Haymarket with Roger Rees (Vladimir) and Matthew Kelly (Pozzo) joining original cast members Ian McKellen ­(Estragon) and Ronald Pickup (Lucky). Played out on an impressive crumbling theatre-within-a-theatre design by Stephen Brimson Lewis, in which the iconic tree pushes through the broken boards of a ravaged stage, Mathias's production suggests that the show really will go on endlessly for Estragon and Vladimir, a bottom-of-the-bill double act trapped in an epic drama with no beginning and no end. It's as if the Haymarket itself is falling down around our ears, and we are all buried inside, the survivors of some terrible calamity. Haiti, of course, now springs immediately to mind.

The brilliance of Beckett's play is that it is both non-specific and incredibly concrete, endlessly elusive and yet universal. With this quartet you feel the play's realness: they're not trying to embody metaphysics, they're acting people – people like ourselves who continue to wait, even as we ponder what we're waiting for. Is it for life to really start, or for death to finally claim us? This sense of realness is essential, and there is genuine pleasure in the way these four fine actors play effortlessly off each other as if they've known each other all their lives (which they probably have). They are easy with each other – generous, too. [Read the article]

Lyn Gardner, 'Waiting for Godot'

guardian.co.uk, 28 January 2010

Waiting for Godot is at the Haymarket Theatre in London until 3 April.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• "What's not to get?": Michael Billington on Waiting for Godot
• Bluffer's Guide to Godot
• A Godot Worth Waiting For
• Waiting for Godot: Stewart Argues with a fan at UK Revival
• Godot Has Arrived
• Waiting for Godot on BBC's The Culture Show

Hamlet and Mourning

The Big Think on Shakespeare's most discussed play

The Big Think suggests Shakespeare's Hamlet as a work of mourning, an idea familiar to readers of Jacques Derrida (Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International):

[...] So perhaps Hamlet is less about madness and more about mourning. And if this is true, perhaps we take solace in the idea that mourning is a place where we all become a little bit mad. It is a place of mild terror (O’Rourke quotes C.S. Lewis’s "A Grief Observed:" “no one ever told me that grief felt so like fear”), perhaps because it is a place of unique helplessness.

An inability to bring back someone we have lost: this is inaction defined. Like a child’s rage, the furor of grief is disproportionate to the rational interpretation of the wish. Still, we rage on. Eventually we concede our lack control even over the process and progress of our own mourning. It is idiosyncratic, messy, and slow. The Stages are elegant guideposts but they are also largely illusory. [Read the article]

Lea Carpenter, 'How Hamlet Can Teach Us About Loss'

The Big Think, 28 January 2010

See also:

• Literature and Consolation: Mark Thwaite on Hamlet
• Meghan O'Rourke, 'Losing Rituals'

J. D. Salinger 1919 - 2010

Author of The Cather in the Rye passes away

American writer J. D. Salinger has died of natural causes, aged 91. He was best known for his novel, Catcher in the Rye.

The New York Times:

Mr. Salinger, who was born on Jan. 1, 1919 in Manhattan, has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish. N.H. for more than half a century. He has not been photographed in decades.

Mr. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" caused a sensation when it was published. With its very first sentence, the book, which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. "Nine Stories," published in 1953, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone.

In the 1960s, though, when he was at the peak of his fame, Mr. Salinger went silent. "Franny and Zooey," a collection of two long stories about the fictional Glass family, came out in 1961; two more long stories about the Glasses, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour: An Introduction," appeared together in book form in 1963. The last work of Mr. Salinger's to appear in print was "Hapworth 16, 1924," a short story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker. The story, which came out in book form in 1997, continued, and perhaps even completed, the saga of the strangely dysfunctional Glass family. In the '70s Mr. Salinger stopped giving interviews, and in the late '80s he went all the way to the Supreme Court to block the British critic Ian Hamilton from quoting his letters in a biography. [Read the article]

Profile of J. D. Salinger

The New York Times, updated 28 January 2010

J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.

Mr. Salinger’s literary representative, Harold Ober Associates, announced the death, saying it was of natural causes. “Despite having broken his hip in May,” the agency said, “his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death.”

Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”

“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Though not everyone, teachers and librarians especially, was sure what to make of it, “Catcher” became an almost immediate best seller, and its narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled from prep school, became America’s best-known literary truant since Huckleberry Finn. [Read the article]

Charles McGrath, 'J. D. Salinger, enigmatic author, dies at 91'

The New York Times, 28 January 2010

The Guardian:

Salinger had his own troubled history in various schools until he was dispatched to Valley Forge military academy at the age of 15. There he began writing at night using a torch under his bed covers and published his first story in a fiction magazine in 1940.

He submitted a number of stories to the New Yorker that were rejected, including one called I Went to School with Adolf Hitler. But the magazine did accept a later story about a disaffected teenager called Holden Caulfield, the first time the character appeared.

In 1942 Salinger was conscripted to fight in the second world war where he took part in the Normandy landings. He married a German woman while serving with the occupation forces after the defeat of Hitler. The couple moved to America but the marriage soon fell apart. Salinger took up Zen Buddhism.

He found fame disagreeable and the year after the publication of his most famous novel he left New York city for the town of Cornish, New Hampshire. There he remarried, to Claire Douglas, had two children, and then divorced in 1967. [Read the article]

'JD Salinger dies, aged 91'

guardian.co.uk, 28 January 2010

Jerome David Salinger retreated from the limelight in 1953, living life as a virtual recluse at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire. His last work was published in 1965. If a writer is defined by their writing (or at least the writing they allow the world to see), then Salinger has effectively been absent for over 40 years. He took himself away and he never came back. So far as the world is concerned, his actual death arrives almost as an afterthought.

The upside of all this, of course, is that we can only remember Salinger in his gilded heyday. His reputation remains enshrined, built on the great adolescent yawp of The Catcher in the Rye and the travails of the Glass family, and the gorgeous shimmer of his short fiction. If the later years saw a withering of his talent he never let us see it. In guarding his privacy he guarded his legacy too. [Read the article]

Xan Brooks, 'JD Salinger: America's great literary hermit

guardian.co.uk, 28 January 2010

Los Angeles Times:

[...] Perhaps no other writer of so few works generated as much popular and critical interest as Salinger, who published one novel, three authorized collections of short stories and an additional 21 stories that only appeared in magazines in the 1940s. He abandoned publishing in 1965, when his last story -- "Hapworth 26, 1924" -- was published by the New Yorker. Rarely seen in public and aggressively averse to most publicity, he was often called the Howard Hughes of American letters.

His silence inspired a range of reactions from literary critics, some characterizing it as a form of cowardice and others as a cunning strategy that, despite its outward intentions, helped preserve his mythic status in American culture. Still others interpreted his withdrawal as the deliberate spiritual stance of a man who, shying from the glare of celebrity, immersed himself in Eastern religions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Hindu Vedantic philosophy.

His stories -- heavily autobiographical, humorous and cynical -- focused on highly idiosyncratic urban characters seeking meaning in a world transformed by the horrors of World War II, in which Salinger was a direct participant.

His stellar fictional creation was Holden Caulfield, the teenage anti-hero of "The Catcher in the Rye," who was, like Salinger, unsuccessful in school and inclined to retreat from a world he perceived as disingenuous and hostile to his needs. [Read the article]

Elaine Woo, 'J.D. Salinger, reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, dies at 91'

Los Angeles Times, 28 January 2010

"Don't ever tell anybody anything," J.D. Salinger wrote in the closing lines of "The Catcher in the Rye." "If you do, you start missing everybody."

For more than two decades now, I've thought about that ending as a piece of code. Not that Salinger, who died Wednesday at age 91 in Cornish, N.H., was an oracle, despite what his most dedicated followers -- those who hung around his driveway, hoping for a glimpse of the reclusive author, or parsed his sentences on a million websites -- might believe.

But Salinger was a writer who refracted his perspective into language, producing work that was personal and profound. Between 1951 and 1965, he produced four uncommonly sensitive books of fiction -- "Catcher," "Nine Stories," "Franny and Zooey" and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" -- before retreating to his home in Cornish and refusing to publish any more.

As he once wrote to biographer Ian Hamilton (in the course of suing Hamilton for quoting from his unpublished letters), "I think I've borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime."

For the last 45 years, this was the encoded story, Salinger's self-imposed silence, as readers debated whether he was still writing or off in some twilit oblivion of his own. For his part, Salinger's interactions with the public were infrequent and largely litigious. As recently as July, he won an injunction preventing the release of an unauthorized sequel to "The Catcher in the Rye."

And yet, our collective fascination with his life rather than his writing suggests another bit of code, or at least a set of clues. Wasn't this, after all, what Salinger was rejecting, a culture of celebrity in which the most important thing was appearance and no one cared about the level of the soul? [Read the article]

David Ulin, 'J.D. Salinger: a gift of words and silence'

Los Angeles Times, 28 January 2010

The Daily Telegraph:

The recluse's recluse, Salinger's refusal to engage with the outside world had long been abetted by a 1,600 strong community that did its best to be unhelpful to visiting reporters and fans.

That code of silence was clearly disintegrating when I visited, as many neighbours were more than happy to supply anecdotes and theories about the local celebrity known by all as "JD". Still somewhat cranky, he was - it was commonly agreed - respected rather than liked.
Sadly, nobody was able to offer a definitive answer on the burning question of whether he was still writing - a former girlfriend said she once saw shelves loaded with notebooks and two completed but unpublished novels.

What they could say was that he was an increasingly rare sight in Cornish, although he still ventured occasionally to the local supermarket, restaurant and café.
As for socialising, the only event he appeared still to patronise regularly was a monthly turkey dinner at the little Universalist Unitarian church - a multi-religion denomination that would have appealed to a man who tried out several faiths - 10 miles away in the town of Hartland.

"Nobody is supposed to acknowledge that he's there. You just treat him like he's just another normal person," said Kay Cavendish, a regular church and dinner goer. [Read the article]

Tom Leonard, 'JD Salinger's 'last words to the media'

telegraph.co.uk, 28 January 2010

Gish Jen:

[...] Where did this start? In a 1940 letter to a friend, a twenty-one- year- old Salinger describes his novel in progress as “autobiographical”; decades later, too, in an interview with a high school reporter—the only interview he’s ever given—Salinger says, “My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book.” Of course, there are differences. Unlike Holden, Salinger is, among other things, a half-Jewish, half-Catholic brotherless World War II vet who attended a military academy. He did, though, like Holden, flunk out of prep school, and he was also, like Holden, manager of his high school fencing team, in which capacity he really did, according to his daughter, Margaret, once lose the team gear en route to a meet.

More important, Salinger seems to have shared Holden’s disaffection. Numerous youthful acquaintances remember him as sardonic, rant-prone, a loner. Margaret Salinger likewise traces the alienation in the book to him, though it does not reflect for her either her father’s innate temperament or difficult adolescence so much as his experiences of anti-Semitism and, as an adult, war. Where Salinger fought in some of the bloodiest and most senseless campaigns of World War II and apparently suffered a nervous breakdown toward its end, shortly after which—while still in Europe—he is known to have been working on Catcher—it is hardly surprising that Holden’s reactions should evoke not only adolescent turmoil but also the awful seesaw of a vet’s return to civilian life. Holden may be a rebel without a cause, but he is not a rebel without an explanation: it is easy to read the death of his brother as a stand-in for unspeakable trauma. And witness the notable vehemence with which Holden talks about the war—declaring, for instance, “I’m sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it. I’ll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.” [Read the article]

Gish Jen, 'The Catcher in the Rye'

A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors

More on J. D. Salinger:

• J. D. Salinger in the New Yorker archives
• 3:AM Magazine on Salinger
• The Rumpus on Salinger
• Literary Kicks on Salinger
• GalleyCat on Salinger
• The Salon on Salinger
• Tablet Magazine on Salinger

Will Self on Sebald and the Holocaust

A public lecture

Will Self's lecture on W. G. Sebald's writing on the Holocaust has been published by the TLS:

"I have been asked if I was aware of the moral implications of what I was doing. As I told the tribunal at Nuremberg, I did not know that Hitler was a Nazi. The truth was that for years I thought he worked for the phone company. When I did finally find out what a monster he was, it was too late to do anything as I had already made a down payment on some furniture. Once, towards the end of the war I did contemplate loosening the Führer’s neck napkin and allowing a few tiny hairs to get down his back, but at the last minute my nerve failed me."

Following Freud – himself driven into exile by the Nazis – there are some things too serious not to joke about, and this applies to Hitler, to the regime he initiated, and even to the murders – through war, mass shootings, extermination camps and forced marches – that that regime carried out: mass murders the true extent of which will never now be established with complete accuracy. Twenty million, thirty? What can such figures tell us about the reality of a single individual crushed beneath the Nazi juggernaut?

I should qualify the above: some things are too serious for some people not to joke about them. I cannot decide whether or not W. G. Sebald would permit himself even the wryest of smiles in response to Woody Allen’s parody of Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, which I quote from above. After all, it isn’t the Holocaust that “The Schmeed Memoirs” seeks to extract humour from; rather, Allen is savagely mocking Speer’s claim that at the time it was taking place, he personally knew nothing of the murder of millions of Jews. By transforming Hitler’s erstwhile architect – who subsequently became his Minister for War Production – into a self-deluding barber, Allen performs the essential task of the satirist: to expose the lie of power for what it was, is, and always will be, and to strip away the protective clothing – of idealism, of denial, of retrospective justification – from the perpetrators of genocide.

Ours is an era intoxicated by its capacity to reproduce history technologically, in an instantaneous digitization of all that has happened. But far from tempering our ability to politicize history, this seems to spur both individuals and regimes on to still greater tendentiousness. Among modern philosophers Baudrillard understood this development the best, and foresaw the deployment of symbolic events alongside the more conventional weaponry of international conflict. Sebald understood it as well: in The Rings of Saturn his fictive alter ego observes the Waterloo Panorama, a 360-degree representation of the battle warped round “an immense domed rotunda”, and muses: “This then . . . is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was”. To counter this synoptic view – which, again and again throughout his work, Sebald links to dangerous idealisms and utopian fantasies – the writer offered us subjective experience. This was not, however, reportage that relies for its authority on witness; Sebald, as he wrote with reference to the Allied bombing of Hamburg in his essay “Air War and Literature”, mistrusted seeming clarity in the retelling of events that had violently deranged the senses. Rather, his was a forensic phenomenology that took into account the very lacunae, the repressions and the partial amnesias that are the reality of lived life. [Read More]

Will Self, 'Will Self's 2010 Sebald lecture

Times Literary Supplement, 26 January 2010

Listen to an audio recording of Self's lecture.

Disjecta: This week's links

Image: Samuel Beckett on the set of Quadrat.

This week, Tablet Magazine reviews the new David Mikics biography of French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The London Review of Books examines Philip Roth's most recent novel, The Humbling. And Mark Thwaite has published an essay on the theme of madness in Shakespeare's works. There's also an interview with Alice Herz-Sommer, the last woman alive to have known Franz Kafka; Cormac McCarthy appears on Oprah, where he discusses the influence of James Joyce on his writing style; and there's a chance to see the German television productions of Quadrat 1 + 2, written and directed by Samuel Beckett.

Literature:

Best European Fiction Events 2010
Mervyn Peake: Titus Awakes in new addition to the Gormenghast series
Allen Ginsberg: A review of Howl, a film based on Ginsberg's life
J. G. Ballard: Etsy's Ballardian fridge magnets
Postmodern Novel and Society: From The Quarterley Conversation
Apocalypse Literature
Cormac McCarthy: Discusses the influence of James Joyce on his work
Philip Roth: London Review of Book's on Roth's recent novel, The Humbling
William Shakespeare: Mark Thwaite on Shakespeare and Madness
Franz Kafka: Alice Herz-Sommer, the last woman alive to know Kafka personally
Martin Amis: On writing Time's Arrow

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Jacques Derrida: The Culture Machine on Sean Gaston's Derrida, War and Literature

Jacques Derrida: A review of David Mikics new biography

Walter Benjamin and Psychoanalysis: On new book, Catastrophe and Survival

Slavoj Žižek: Žižek discusses First as Tragedy, Then As Farce on French radio

Søren Kierkegaard: On translating Kierkegaard into English

Music:

Morton Feldman Interview
Jazz: The BBC and the future of Jazz
Jazz: Ornette Coleman: Jazz Revolutionary
Jazz: American Legends: Sonny Rollins

Film:

The Big Lebowski: Coen Brothers' film as Shakespearian play
Stanley Kubrick: Trivia on Jack's typewritten notes in The Shining

Television:

Newsnight Review: Host Kirsty Wark discusses the revamped BBC arts show

Art:

Bauhaus: Exhibition of Bauhaus at the Museum of Modern Art

Theatre:

Samuel Beckett: Quadrat 1 + 2

Etc.:

Inspiring Teachers
Reading Your Way Out Of Depression

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde

Nicholas Lezard reviews Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde in The Guardian newspaper:

In the third of Samuel Beckett's three dialogues with Georges Duthuit, we are treated to the following exchange: Duthuit – "One moment. Are you suggesting that the painting of van Velde is inexpressive?" Beckett (a fortnight later) – "Yes." D – "You realise the absurdity of what you advance?" B – "I hope I do."

In Beckett's lexicon, "inexpressive" is not derogatory. It signals, in fact, that an artist is getting to the core of what it means to be an artist – as in his often-quoted remarks about "the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express."

Bram van Velde could have been made for Beckett. He could, come to think of it, have been made by Beckett, not only in the sense that he has the characteristics of the typical Beckettian character, but in that it was as much thanks to Beckett's private and public support as to his own talent that he was able to lift himself out of the extreme poverty which he had suffered for much of his life.

There are 30 pages of interviews with Beckett in this book; 120 pages with van Velde. However, one should not feel cheated should one be hoping to hear more from the more famous master: there is plenty about him in the conversations with van Velde. My favourite is his recollection of the time Beckett came to visit him during one of the rare periods when he – van Velde – wasn't too unhappy with his own work. He told Beckett that he was "almost satisfied", and Beckett replied "expressionlessly": "There's really no reason to be."

"Totally thrown by this response, Bram retreated to a corner of the studio, where he sat down at the table and began to eat to cover his confusion. Meanwhile, Beckett stood motionless in the loft, fixing him with his eagle eye." No wonder that, in the next interview, van Velde says: "Beckett? There is nobody more silent. From time to time he used to let slip a few words. But they were not encouraging."

But they were, really. Van Velde calls Beckett an "archangel", and his meeting with him in 1940 so fortuitous that it might well have saved his life (or his art). "When you've known someone like him, so many other people seem like mere robots by comparison."[Read the article]

Nicholas Lezard, 'Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde by Charles Juliet'

The Guardian, 23 January 2010

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde
by Charles Juliet
192pp, Dalkey Archive, £13.95

Pinter's Beckett First Edition returned to Library

Late library book returned

A news story reported by The Times back in December: a Samuel Beckett first edition of Murphy, borrowed by the late Harold Pinter, is returned after a 'pause' of fifty-nine years:

In 1950 Harold Pinter borrowed a first edition book by Samuel Beckett from the Central Library in Bermondsey. There was a pause before the library saw it again.

A 59-year pause, to be precise, lengthy even by the late Nobel prize-winning playwright’s standards.

Pinter had no intention of returning Murphy — describing the prolonged loan as an act that he had “never regretted” — but now the antiquarian bookseller that sold Pinter’s library has returned the book so that he can buy it back off Southwark Council for £2,000 and reunite it with the rest of the collection.

Pinter died last Christmas Eve, and the London antiquarian booksellers Maggs Bros have been preparing a catalogue of his nearly 5,000 books after their sale to a private collector.

In a speech opening the Reading Beckett exhibition in 1971, Pinter openly admitted to stealing it.

“Sometime in 1949, somewhere in Ireland, I happened to pick up a copy of a magazine called Irish Writing, turned the pages, and came across a passage ... I continued to read this passage, my hair standing on end. The title was Extract from Watt by Samuel Beckett. I had never heard of him; nor had anyone I knew in London. Not even the Westminster Public Library knew the name. But eventually they unearthed a book, Murphy, which had been resting in the Bermondsey Public Reserve Library since 1938.

“The book, in fact, I could tell from the stamping, had not been read since that date. I therefore took possession of it; my one criminal act, as far as I know. But I have never regretted it, though I don’t recommend it as general practice.”

Ed Maggs, of Maggs Bros, said that the discovery of the book had left him in “something of a quandary”.

“It definitely belonged with the rest of the Pinter collection: it represents the intensity of Pinter’s feeling for Beckett, and provides a direct connection with this important formative period. However, a stolen book is a stolen book, no matter how sincere an act of homage the theft was, and we don’t deal in stolen books. It’s something we take seriously.” [Read the article]

Ben Hoyle, 'Harold Pinter’s library book is returned after pause of 59 years'

The Times, 12 December 2009

Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon and Masonry

An exclusive extract from Lynn Brunet's recent book

The following is an extract from Lynn Brunet's study of Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett, A Course of Severe and Arduous Trials, published by Peter Lang. Brunet is an Australian art historian whose research examines the coupling of trauma and ritual in modern and contemporary art and literature. She was a full-time lecturer in art history and theory from 1994 to 2006 and she is a practising artist. She lives and works in Melbourne:

[The] study is the product of a developing body of research and a new theory within the creative arts that proposes that particular artists and writers, especially those who appear to express a deep and confusing sense of anxiety and despair, may be representing the traces of initiatory rites found in various fraternities, religious groups, secret societies and cults.

Two of the twentieth century's most important creative figures, the artist Francis Bacon (1909-1992) and the writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), both convey in their work a sense of foreboding and confinement in bleak, ritualistic spaces. Gilles Deleuze has suggested that it is in these spaces that Bacon and Beckett 'have never been so close', as Bacon's figures and Beckett's characters 'trundle about fitfully without ever leaving their circle or parallelpiped'. This book provides a reading of Bacon and Beckett's work that demonstrates the many parallels between the spaces and activities they evoke in their work and the initiatory practices of fraternal orders and secret societies that were an integral part of the social landscape of the Ireland of their childhood. As T. Desmond Williams notes, secret societies were probably more a part of everyday life and politics in Ireland than in most other countries and since the eighteenth century new fraternal orders were being formed in Ireland every decade. Many of these societies modelled their ritual structures and symbolism on the Masonic order.

In the modern era the artist's role has often been interpreted as providing an important link to the subliminal currents that underpin the community, revealing those taboo or repressed issues that the society as a whole is unable to confront. Some artists do this by exploring their own struggles and psychological experiences and then externalising these explorations in creative form. The cliché of the tortured artist accompanies this modern concept. By making their struggles visible artists confront their viewers with unresolved issues that some in the public may share [...]

Lynn Brunet, A Course of Severe and Arduous Trials: Bacon, Beckett and Spurious Freemasonry in Early Twentieth Century Ireland

Disjecta: This week's links

(Image: Woody Allen stands in front of the New Yorker building)

This week has seen a proliferation of William Burroughs on the web, including two wonderful documentaries. In other news, The Guardian reviews Joyce Carol Oates' latest novel, A Fair Maiden, and plans have been made to restore George Orwell's Indian birthplace. Woody Allen contributes a short, humorous piece to the New Yorker magazine, Radio On director Chris Petit announces his new road movie, Content, and Paul Morley interviews music producer Brian Eno.

Literature:

William S. Burroughs: The BBC Arena documentary
William S. Burroughs: Documentary on Burroughs' life and work
William S. Burroughs: Polina Mackay on The Naked Lunch
William S. Burroughs: Sound recording, The Doctor is on the Market
Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man documentary
J. G. Ballard: Hitchens on Ballard
Martin Amis: The Guardian book club reviews Time's Arrow
Will Self: Sebald, the Nobel prize and pets
Mervyn Peake: Book cover designs
Joyce Carol Oates: A review her new novel, A Fair Maiden
George Orwell: Orwell's birthplace in India to be restored
Reading: Natasha Tripney on the unvanquishable book pile
Humanities: Increasingly 'commercialized' university culture

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Slavoj Žižek: Žižek speaks at the London Society of the Arts
Harold Bloom: Hospitalized
Walter Benjamin: Radio broadcasts for children
Timothy Clark: Robert Eagleston on The Poetics of Singularity
Most Cited Authors, Critics and Philosophers in the Humanities
101 Great Philosophers: The Guardian reviews Madsen Pirie's new book

Music:

Brian Eno: Paul Morley interviews the unique producer

Film:

Woody Allen: A piece in the New Yorker's 'Shouts & Murmurs' column
Werner Herzog: Guernica on the reissued journal Walking on Ice
Werner Herzog: Mark Kermode's memoir recalls Herzog's gunshot wound
Eric Rohmer 1920-2010
Chris Petit: Petit presents his new documentary, Content

Television:

Treme: New Orleans drama from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

Art:

Damien Hirst: Art critic Jonathan Jones is 'finished' with Damien Hirst

Theatre:

Thomas Bernhard: Heldenplatz at London's Arcola Theatre this month

Etc.:

Elsie de Wolfe: Profile of the interior designer at Critical Cookie


Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Literature and Consolation: Mark Thwaite on Hamlet

On the consolatory power of Shakespeare's work

Mark Thwaite of ReadySteadyBook has written a deeply moving account of his experience reading Hamlet. A wonderful testament to the way literature can articulate our anxieties, and engage a new perspective on immense personal hardship:

In early December, I picked up a cheap paperback copy of "Hamlet". I'd never read "Hamlet" nor even seen it performed. The play has such cultural weight that a presumption of familiarity is attributed to anyone who might by considered by others to be "well read" (or some such). But the play -- the play that Harold Bloom calls a "poem unlimited" -- had almost wholly passed me by.

I'm not sure why I picked it up. I'm not sure why of the countless books in my book-lined, book-overloaded little flat, this tatty copy of "Hamlet" suggested itself as the book that might awaken me to books. But it did. And it did so insistently. You will all, I'm sure, know the outlines of the story of "Hamlet" better than I did. And, surely, unconsciously, half-consciously, I knew that something in the story of the antic Prince would unsettle my settled misery, would unencumber me of grief's sometimes comforting carapace, would make me aware that my own madness was merely the mildest confusion, a pale mania, cousin to mourning but a distant relation worthy of consideration but not the insistent indulgence I had been giving it. [Read More]

Mark Thwaite, 'Hamlet and I'

ReadySteadyBook, 14 January 2009

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• How Beckett Can Save Your Life

In Theory: Barthes' Death of the Author

Andrew Gallix unravels one of Roland Barthes' best known ideas

Founder of 3:AM Magazine begins a new series of articles on literary theory for The Guardian website. He begins with Roland Barthes influential essay, 'The Death of the Author':

I have chosen to inaugurate this series with a few considerations on "The Death of the Author" because of its truly iconic nature: it symbolises the rise of what would come to be known as "theory". Even if he never names them, Roland Barthes (like Proust before him) launches an attack on the traditional biography-based criticism à la Sainte-Beuve or Lanson which still dominated French academia in the sixties. The paradox, of course, is that this essay – with its symbolic slaying of the paternal "Author-God" – could lend itself to a textbook psychological reading given that Barthes lost his own father before his first birthday. The "Death of the Author" theme itself takes on added meaning, in hindsight, when you consider that Barthes's critical career was, at least in part, a displacement activity to avoid writing the novel he dreamed of. Does any of this invalidate his theories? I'll let you be the judge of that...

In 2002, the prestigious Pompidou Centre in Paris devoted a major exhibition, not to an artist, philosopher, scientist or novelist, but a literary critic: Roland Barthes. Now that the "theory wars" – which had once torn apart literature departments on both sides of the Atlantic – were largely over, it served as a reminder of a time when a posse of structuralists and post-structuralists superseded the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre as France's premier intellectual icons. Many of them were primarily philosophers, anthropologists, historians, linguists or psychoanalysts – Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva et al – but the locus of this intellectual revolution was undoubtedly literary criticism.

La nouvelle critique was flavour of the month, much like its culinary counterpart, nouvelle cuisine, albeit more of a mouthful. Critics-cum-thinkers such as Barthes himself – who was equally at home at the lofty Collège de France or down the trendy Le Palace nightclub – achieved bona fide celebrity status. Their works often became bestsellers in spite of their demanding and iconoclastic nature. Soon, NME journalists were peppering their articles with arcane references to Baudrillard while Scritti Politti dedicated a postmodern ditty to Jacques Derrida. The whole movement seemed as provocative, and indeed exciting, as Brigitte Bardot in her slinky, sex kitten heyday. Its defining moment was the publication of a racy little number called "The Death of the Author". [Read the Article]

Andrew Gallix, 'In theory: The Death of the Author'

guardian.co.uk, 13 January 2010

George Orwell's Diaries

The TLS reviews George Orwell's diaries:

Diaries brings together the eleven individual journals that George Orwell compiled between 1931 and 1949. The final entry, written in September 1949, describes the daily routines of University College Hospital, where he was to die of advanced tuberculosis early in 1950. All were published in the monumental twenty-volume Complete Works (1998), but now appear consecutively for the first time. There is certainly a twelfth diary, and possibly even a thirteenth, among the items taken from a Barcelona hotel room in June 1937 by Soviet agents and now gathering dust somewhere in the NKVD archive in Moscow. In his introduction, Peter Davison reveals that he once met a man – Miklos Kun, grandson of the Hungarian Communist leader Béla Kun – who had tracked down Orwell’s NKVD file, but was unable to fillet it before the archive shut its doors to the public.

Handsomely produced, illustrated with Orwell’s own pencil sketches and footnoted with Davison’s customary élan, this latest wave in the repackager’s tide invites two questions. Why did Orwell write diaries? And what do they tell us about him? Most writers’ diaries are self-conscious affairs, where the reader ends up with a sneaking feeling that the real audience is only a remote posterity. Orwell’s are notably unvarnished, often no more than a mundane domestic record, and yet this doesn’t make them personally revealing. There is, for example, almost nothing in them about Orwell’s literary techniques. Neither is there very much in the way of confidential remarks. When he notes in 1941, out of nowhere, that he is “thinking always of my island in the Hebrides, which I suppose I shall never possess, nor even see”, there is a sudden glimpse of all kinds of things not often associated with Orwell – frustrated yearnings, sequestered retreats, the deepest of romantic chasms. [Read the article]

D. J. Taylor, 'George Orwell's days'

Times Literary Supplement, 13 January 2010

George Orwell, Diaries, edited by Peter Davison.

Antonia Fraser on Harold Pinter

Wife of the late playwright remembers her husband

Michael Billington reviews Antonia Fraser's memoir of life with Harold Pinter:

[...] Yet while Harold was never a purely autobiographical writer, I found that his imagination was invariably triggered by a memory of some past event. The Caretaker was born out of an image that stuck in Harold's mind when he and his first wife, Vivien, were living in a modest flat in Chiswick High Road: one day he paused on the stairs and looked in a room to see the tramp who had taken up residence rifling through a bag, silently watched by his bene factor. And, while The Home coming is a universal play about family life, it had its origins in the story of one of ­Harold's Hackney friends who for years kept his marriage to a Gentile girl a secret from his Jewish family.

Even more surprising than Harold's disavowal of his work's personal origins is the record of an evening in 1977 spent with Samuel Beckett and his close friend, Barbara Bray. Since Beckett hardly ever went to the theatre, Harold acted out for him the Simon Gray piece, Close of Play, that he was directing at the time. This prompted a discussion in which Bray claimed that everything in art is political. To which Harold replied, ­vehemently, "Nothing I have written, Barbara, nothing, ever, is political."

This hardly squares with Pinter's later assertion that early plays such as The Birthday Party and The Hothouse were driven by a strong political motive. But, while Pinter-sceptics may seize on this as proof of his inconsistency, I suspect it simply proves Harold's dislike of aesthetic dogma. I can actually picture him bubbling with resentment at being told by Bray what art has to be.

But, if Antonia's book sometimes makes one's eyebrows start upwards in surprise, it also offers the most vividly intimate portrait we're ever likely to have of the real Harold Pinter. It records the energy and exuberance for living that burned off him and that made him so attractive to male and female friends alike. It describes his passionate love of England: its cricket, its countryside, its natural beauty and its historic regard for liberty. It was precisely because he saw that liberty being curtailed and eroded that he became such a ferocious opponent of successive governments. Indeed, the book pins down the embattled despair that Harold sometimes felt in later years as his sense of the world's injustice coincided with his own declining health. But he never gave up. As he said when about to perform at the National in his own sketch, Press Conference, while wrestling with chemotherapy for his cancer, "I'm not just sitting here waiting to die." [Read the article]

Michael Billington, 'Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser: a perfect match'

The Guardian, 13 January 2010

Must You Go? My Life With Harold Pinter by Lady Antonia Fraser is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20.

Links:

• Michael Billington, 'Does Harold Pinter's private life shed light on his plays?'
• The Telegraph reviews Antonia Fraser's memoir

Raymond Federman and 'Surfiction'

Experimental writer's unique approach to literature

Ready Steady Book has drawn my attention to a fascinating essay on Raymond Federman in The Reading Experience:

Raymond Federman was generally associated with those American writers who in the 1960s and 70s began writing what is now called "metafiction," but there was always something about Federman's work that seemed different, its self-reflexivity even more radical and enacted in a more aggressive way. Where Barth and Coover laid bare the devices of fiction allegorically (J. Henry Waugh as "author" of his fictional baseball world) or through the occasional narrative disruption (the "author" making his presence known, as in Barth's "Life-Story"), Federman's fiction was more direct and unremitting in its undermining of narrative illusion. With its prose freed from the constraints of typographical bondage, climbing up, down, across, and around the page, and its "stories" of writers attempting to tell a story without quite succeeding, Federman's fiction as represented in Double or Nothing (1971) and Take It or Leave It (1976), still his most important books, challenged not only reader's preconceptions about fiction but also basic assumptions about reading itself.

Federman rejected both "metafiction" and "experimental fiction" more broadly as labels accurately describing his work, instead coining the term "surfiction" to sum up what he--as well as other innovative writers, such as Ronald Sukenick--was after. [Read the article]

Dan Green, 'Performing Its Own Self'

The Reading Experience, 11 January 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Raymond Federman 1928-2009

William Burroughs' Belongings

Photographic gallery of the American writer's possessions

William Burroughs' typewriter

William Burroughs' panama hat

William Burroughs' shoes.

A collection of William S. Burroughs' personal affects grant a voyeuristic glimpse into the life of one of America's most prominent writers (link via: The Paris Review):

Like estate sales or cat burglary, Peter Ross’s photographs of William Burroughs’s possessions provide a glimpse into the material world of someone we thought we knew. In the interview below, Ross explains how the pictures (see here for the complete collection) explore the myth of the man through a selection of weird, touching, and often unexpected possessions found in Burroughs’s windowless New York City apartment, preserved since his death in 1997.

William Burroughs's Stuff by Peter Ross
Interview by Nicole Pasulka

The Morning News, 11 January 2010

Also on A Piece of Monologue:

• Will Self on Burroughs and Junky
• The Cat Inside: William Burroughs
• William Burroughs and Susan Sontag on meeting Beckett
• 'The Ugly Spirit': Burroughs and the Naked Lunch
• J. G. Ballard on Burroughs
• Naked Lunch: The Fiftieth Anniversary

Disjecta: This week's links

(Image: Paul Buckley's design for the 25th Anniversary edition of Don DeLillo's White Noise)

A number of interesting articles and reviews in this week's selection. Jonathan Jones speculates on the degeneration of Philip Roth's artistic powers, Will Self meets The Road director John Hillcoat, and Joyce Carol Oates takes time out of her busy schedule to answer questions. There's also a link to Žižek's recent appearance on The Today Programme, a review of Celan's correspondence, and fifteen things you may or may not already know about coffee.

Literature:

Philip Roth: Jonathan Jones on The Humbling and Roth's late career
Don DeLillo: Celebrating the 25th anniversary of White Noise
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Writer's son his father's rejects 'Old Testament' image
Paul Celan: Benjamin Ivry on Celan's Letters
J. M. Coetzee: The New Yorker briefly reviews Coetzee's Summertime
Philip K. Dick: Controversy grows over Google's Android/Nexus product line
Joyce Carol Oates: Questions and Answers

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Slavoj Žižek: Žižek appears on BBC Radio 4's The Today Programme
Feminism: The Guardian reviews 'the feminist year ahead'

Music:

Jazz: Miles Davis' b-flat trumpet, on display in LA's Grammy Museum
Stewart Lee: Lee chooses his top musical influences
Samuel Beckett: Morton Feldman's Neither, words by Samuel Beckett

Film:

DVDs of 2009: Sight and Sound Magazine's top picks
Disney: Racial and gender stereotypes in Disney animations
Will Self: Self meets John Hillcoat, director of The Road

Television:

The Wire: A profile of the career of Michael K. Williams, The Wire's Omar Little
Mad Men: Life lessons from a Mad Men art assistant

Art:

The art of Henri Privat-Livemont

Etc.:

The Onion: Front pages 1988-2008
Cardiff Arcades Project
Coffee: Fifteen Things Worth Knowing About Coffee

New Faber edition of Beckett's Poetry

Includes some material published in translation for the first time

Gerald Dawe reviews the new Faber edition of Samuel Beckett's Selected Poems 1930-1989, edited by David Wheatley:

Before he was anything else Samuel Beckett was a poet. He wrote poetry as a young man, living a somewhat bilocated life, first in Dublin in the 1920s and early 1930s, between home life and college life – at Trinity College, where he had rooms – and between Dublin, London and Paris, where he eventually settled and remained, from his return there after the liberation to his death, 20 years ago, in his early eighties.

The poems Beckett wrote in the 1930s were published in “little magazines” in all three cities, and he made a name for himself as a poet in the small avant-garde groups that clustered around publications such as Dublin Magazine , transition and TS Eliot’s the Criterion , before George Reavey, the northern Irish poet, translator and editor, published Echo’s Bones and other Precipitates in 1935, through his Europa Press, based at 13 Rue Bonaparte in Paris.

In the preceding five years Beckett had published with the Hours Press the provocatively obfuscating Whoroscope (1930), the succinct and stimulating essay Proust (Chatto Windus, London, 1932) and, with the same publishing house, More Pricks than Kicks (1934), a collection of interconnected stories that, with his novel Murphy (1938), included some seriously mocking gibes at the expense of the Dublin literary scene from which Beckett was slowly but ineluctably withdrawing. Beckett was also translating poetry from French into English and beginning to write poetry in French, the language in which he would later write all his major fiction and drama.

In the years leading up to the publication of Echo’s Bones Beckett had resigned from his lectureship at Trinity, experienced the loss from tuberculosis of his cousin Peggy Sinclair, to whom he was much attached, and also lost his beloved father to a fatal heart attack (in 1933). “He was in his sixty first year,” writes Beckett in a most poignant letter to Thomas MacGreevy, his fellow Trinity graduate and Paris-based poet, “but how much younger he seemed and was . . . He lay in bed with sweet pea all over his face, making great oaths that when he got better he would never do a stroke of work . . . All the little things come back . . . I can’t write about him, I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him.” [Read the article]

Gerald Dawe: 'Shadows, ghosts and havoc'

The Irish Times, 05 December 2009

More on A Piece of Monologue:

• Samuel Beckett Selected Poems 1930-1989
• Featured Artist: Samuel Beckett
• Fulcrum: Samuel Beckett as Poet
• New Faber editions of Beckett's work
• Faber & Faber unveils new editions of Samuel Beckett's fiction

Samuel Beckett Selected Poems 1930-1989

A new collection published by Faber and Faber

Adam Thorpe reviews the new Faber edition of Samuel Beckett's poetry, edited by poet and critic David Wheatley:

[...] A literary revelation came upon me: Samuel Beckett did not invent, he observed. His is not an attenuated, surreal, abstracted world (the extreme end-gasp of that glorious era of high modernism), but utterly, piercingly real. It was telling that Ian McKellen, rehearsing this year's celebrated production of Waiting for Godot, discovered that Beckett's play, far from being "difficult", was actually rather straightforward – closer to music-hall patter than tortured existentialism.

The danger, of course, is that Beckett will be made cuddlier, the vertiginous depth of his despair superseded by a shiny surface of comic misanthropy. Beckett's compass points firmly to the sunless north of King Lear, humanity no more than a "forked radish" in a world in which spots of love flicker on a vast bleakness of heath, and language is more dangerous than silence. Beckett articulates the void for us, in a way which no one in English letters has done since Shakespeare; and we need that articulation's purity, its catharsis.

Beckett's achievement is so vast in his plays and novels that his poems have been reduced to something ancillary, of interest mainly to Beckett scholars, much as Joyce's poetry was. The curve of his verse career saw an early flowering, a long pause and then a remarkable and under-appreciated late bloom. As David Wheatley points out in his introduction to this new, rather glumly-designed Selected: "It was as a young poet that Beckett launched himself in the little reviews of 1930s Paris, and as a poet that he would make his first breakthrough into French." [Read the article]

Adam Thorpe, 'Selected Poems, 1930-1989 by Samuel Beckett'

The Guardian, 09 January 2010

More on A Piece of Monologue:

• Featured Artist: Samuel Beckett
• Fulcrum: Samuel Beckett as Poet
• New Faber editions of Beckett's work
• Faber & Faber unveils new editions of Samuel Beckett's fiction