Samuel Beckett's patient explanations

NO AUTHOR BETTER SERVED: Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider edited by Maurice Harmon (Harvard University Press, GBP 35) ADAM PIETTE

ALAN Schneider was the main American interpreter of most of Beckett's plays, hugging the plays close to him like hoarded treasure. His dog-in-the-manger stranglehold on Beckett productions in the States attracted some criticism, but Beckett continued to entrust him with his major works. This was not because Schneider was a slavish admirer, but because he was known as a meticulously faithful stager of playwrights' intentions, as well as being a lonely champion of avant-garde theatre in the relatively Philistine off- Broadway scene. And he was a good director, Billie Whitelaw praising his attention to detail - "he has eyes and ears everywhere".

Because of the geographical distance between the two men, letters became the only means of clarifying stage matters, and it was lucky in a way that Schneider was at once so pernickety about detail and so dim-witted. Invaluable, precise notes by Beckett on the staging of Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, Krapp's Last Tape, Play and Film had to be given to answer some very foolish lists of questions. Beckett angrily dismisses the realist conventions underpinning many of them - "some convention seems to lie between us". If the limitations of Schneider's intelligence forces fine comments from the great man, they also make the letters infuriating reading. It is a very real loss to culture that Beckett had to spend so much time answering correspondence in his later years. Though Beckett repeatedly makes the point about the hell of dealing with so much mail, Schneider, thick-skinned and unctuously possessive, insists on regaling Beckett with letter after long letter detailing illnesses, theatre gossip, dull Beckett-industry backchat. For a long while in the 1970s and 1980s, Beckett suffered severe writer's block ("Mind going silent"), making writing a hellish and sombre business. Though he repeats this truth many times in the letters, Schneider comes back again and again with his insistent whine for "another play for me to direct". There is surely concealed venom in Beckett apologising for writing "mere prose" in response to one of these pleas. He is describing his greatest prose work, Ill Seen Ill Said. Most of the correspondence is dusty stuff about various productions on the go around the world, but there are priceless things, like this comment on the lethal voiceover to his television play, Eh Joe: "Voice very low throughout - plenty of venom. Face just listening hard and brain agonising. Voice should be whispered. A dead voice in his head. Minimum of colour. Each sentence a knife going in, pause for withdrawal, then in again." And of course the killing jokes: "I dream sometimes of all German directors of plays united in one with his back to the wall and me shooting a bullet in his balls every five minutes till he loses his taste for improving authors." He never had that problem with Alan Schneider. Pity. When angry, Beckett spat jewels.

Copyright 1998
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