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| Samuel Beckett. Photograph: John Haynes |
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| Harold Pinter. Photograph: John Haynes |
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| Billie Whitelaw and Samuel Beckett. Photograph: John Haynes |
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| Billie Whitelaw and Samuel Beckett. Photograph: John Haynes |
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| Design: Rhys Tranter |
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| Justin Mortimer, 'Harold Pinter' (1992) |
Lady Antonia Fraser’s Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter is unlikely to change the course of Pinter studies, however revealing it may be about the dramatist’s day-to-day life. It’s not biography but memoir, and its primary source therefore is that most unreliable of authorities, memory. The same can be said for Anne Atik’s How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett, a similar journal-like narrative of Beckett’s tabletalk: no replacement for Knowlson’s biography (as Lady Antonia’s book is no replacement for Billington’s biography of Pinter).
Neither of these books precisely qualifies as gossip either, even if Pinter’s second marriage was in the headlines for some time following his difficult separation from Vivian Merchant in the mid-1970s. But what we do have — and what we lack in the more formal life studies from their biographers — is a more intimate glance at these two writers, their social peccadilloes, their conversational tics. They’re away from their work and public lives and, with close friends and lovers, their guard is down. Both Atik and Lady Antonia are writers, of course, and can be expected to have some kind of affinities with their subjects. After that, what is left?
The curiosity we have about the personal lives of writers, especially those whose work we admire, whose work touches us somehow, can’t be chalked up to celebrity culture — not if we’ve been getting writers’ biographies and their acquaintances’ memoirs since John Aubrey’s Brief Lives of the late 17th century and Samuel Johnson’s 1779-81 Lives of the Poets. It’s more likely that if we feel we recognize something of ourselves in their work, we’d recognize something of ourselves in their daily lives as well. This may be a wholly inadequate basis for criticism or interpretation, but isn’t necessarily untrue or unhelpful for that reason.
What we do get, perhaps, is a chance to see how they moved about in social situations similar to ours, and perhaps also to guess how they might transform these situations into a universalizing vision. Or else, and perhaps more to the point, to see how they could live day to day as they bore this vision within them. In the case of both the Pinter and the Beckett memoirs, the curtain between the vision and the life remains fairly opaque: neither Atik nor Fraser is possessed of a pair of X-ray psychological spectacles. But as they discuss the bouts of melancholy, the rather quick wit, the intellectual and less-than-intellectual chit-chat of their subjects, they reveal something else: an example of personal, provisional eudemonics, a way of passing through the world with some happiness and satisfaction in spite of all. [Read More]
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| Photograph of Barney Rosset, taken by Allen Ginsberg in New York City, 1991. |
For those of a certain age and literary inclination, Grove Press was more than a publishing house — it was a philosophy to hang a worldview on. Between its dedication to publishing the novels and plays of the late modernists, from Beckett and Pinter and Stoppard to Burroughs and Henry Miller and Kerouac, its resolute mission to eradicate censorship laws and publish in the mainstream some of the most transgressive sexual literature in history, and its opportunistic but prophetic publication of the works of political radicals like Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Frantz Fanon, Grove Press and its founder Barney Rosset might be said to have revolutionized American drama and literature, the nation’s erotic life, and its political discourse. In the end, if Grove Press and Barney Rosset hadn’t existed, these revolutionary upheavals might well have occurred anyway. But they wouldn’t have happened the way they eventually did if it hadn’t been for the publishing house and Rosset himself. The mass-market paperback Black Cat series and the more “literary” quality paperback Evergreen Originals remain essential volumes in any bookshelf devoted to English-language theatre and the late modernist movement. Like his British equal, John Calder, Rosset may have been the last of the genuinely, culturally influential publishers. [Read More]
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| Ian Rickson |
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| A still from The Handmaid's Tale (dir. Volker Schlöndorff, 1990) |
For ten minutes there is some hope for Volker Schlondorff’s film of Margaret Atwood’s searching and claustrophobic novel of 1985. Only a few years from now, somewhere in a northern region of the United States, there has been a violent revolution. Inspired by a sudden loss of fertility in the human species, women-despising fundamentalists have come to power, and have reshaped society in their own insanely constrictive image. They call their terrible new world Gilead.
A young married couple attempt to escape across the border with their small daughter; the husband is killed, the child confiscated, and Kate, the brand-new widow (Natasha Richardson in flowing, nubile form), finds herself in a kind of concentration camp, where she will be taught to be a Handmaid; a breeder for the new elite. These initial scenes are shot with an icy sweeping clarity; just as in his film version of The Tin Drum, Schlondorff superbly evokes the moments just after the final calamity, the chaos and the stunned hush of zero hour, the deracinated despair of the exile.
Unfortunately, as soon as Kate begins to understand what it means to become a Handmaid, Schlondorff loses touch with the tale. It is, perhaps, not his fault, nor for that matter Atwood’s. In a work of sustained and concentrated prose, the dystopian abstractedness of the social setting helps to sharpen the arguments it conveys. But neither Schlondorff, nor Harold Pinter, whose screenplay is notably uneasy, show themselves capable of handling those implausibilities in the opened-out perspective of the film. [Read More]
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| Harold Pinter's One for the Road/Victoria Station, Young Vic, 2011 |
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| Alberto Giacometti (left) with a sculpted tree for Samuel Beckett's (right) Waiting for Godot |
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| Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, with Jonathan Pryce, left, and Alan Cox. Photograph: Helen Warner / March 8, 2012 |
Sometimes you can't put your finger on what you've been missing until you encounter it again. After seeing two fine revivals of plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter — "Waiting for Godot" at the Mark Taper Forum and the British production of "The Caretaker" at San Francisco's Curran Theatre, respectively — I suddenly realized how ravenous I was for language in the theater with poetic density and grit.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Beckett, 20th century playwriting's No. 1 game-changer, and Pinter, his most original disciple, were writers steeped in literature. Their education and training didn't come courtesy of an M.F.A. program, with its cramped curriculum divorcing the stage from the other arts. They were carving paths for themselves as wide-ranging men of letters, to use a phrase that has sadly gone the way of "bibliophile" and "public intellectual."
Of course great artists such as Beckett and Pinter are anomalous. (Nobel laureates still haven't gone into mass production.) Yet there's something to be learned from the example of two writers whose spectacular destinies can be glimpsed in their literary beginnings.
Beckett, a brilliant student of Romance languages, had a formative association with James Joyce, wrote a penetrating essay on Proust early in his career, and was as conversant with Dante as he was with the major philosophical currents of his day. Remarkably, he wound up having as profound an impact on the novel as he had on drama. (Only Chekhov, who revolutionized the short story while transforming the future of playwriting, can match this legacy among modern authors.)
Pinter, a young devourer of Dostoevski, Kafka and Joyce, was an actor and director as well as a playwright and screenwriter, but his identity as a poet preceded his dramatic work and he confined himself to poetry (and political rabble-rousing) in the last years of his life. Although Julian Sands' recent one-man tribute to Pinter at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble didn't convince me that Pinter's standing as a poet matches his standing as a playwright, the tensile strength of his dialogue, with nary an extraneous work, is inseparable from his lifelong poetic labors. [Read More]
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| Laura Harring and Naomi Watts as Rita and Betty in Mulholland Dr. (2001) |
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| Barney Rosset |
From John Gall, art director for Vintage and Anchor Books, comes word that legendary publisher and film distributor Barney Rosset has passed away at the age of 89. Gall points us to a lively profile by Louisa Thomas that ran in Newsweek in late 2008: "Rosset's publishing house, Grove Press, was a tiny company operating out of the ground floor of Rosset's brownstone when it published an obscure play called Waiting for Godot in 1954. By the time Beckett had won the Nobel Prize in 1969, Grove had become a force that challenged and changed literature and American culture in deep and lasting ways. Its impact is still evident — from the Che Guevara posters adorning college dorms to the canonical status of the house's once controversial authors. Rosset is less well known — but late in his life he is achieving some wider recognition. Last month, a black-tie crowd gave Rosset a standing ovation when the National Book Foundation awarded him the Literarian Award for 'outstanding service' to American letters. This fall, Rosset was also the subject of a documentary, Obscene, directed by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O'Connor, which featured a host of literary luminaries, former colleagues and footage from a particularly hilarious interview with Al Goldstein, the porn king. High literature and low — Rosset pushed and published it all." [Read More]George Hunka has also paid tribute over at Superfluities Redux:
It is hard, if not impossible, to overestimate the role that Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset, who died on Tuesday at the age of 89, played in revolutionizing both the American theatre and the American literary consciousness. From the time he bought the small company in 1951 to the time he sold it to Ann Getty and George Weidenfeld in 1985, Rosset championed and published — at great personal cost — magazines, plays, and books that exploded the comfortable ease of the American literary scene. His publication of the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch led to dozens of obscenity trials, almost all of which Rosset won, but just as importantly, the Grove Press drama backlist reads like a curriculum of experimental and international theatre of the second half of the twentieth century. Grove Press published extensive lists of almost every significant European playwright of the era, from Arrabal and Artaud to Charles Wood, with Beckett, Brecht, Havel, Ionesco, Pinter, and countless others in between. Nor did Grove Press neglect radical politics; both The Autobiography of Malcolm X and books by Che Guevara were issued by the house. [Read More]Finally, Douglas Martin wrote the following in the New York Times:
Barney Rosset, the flamboyant, provocative publisher who helped change the course of publishing in the United States, bringing masters like Samuel Beckett to Americans’ attention under his Grove Press imprint and winning celebrated First Amendment slugfests against censorship, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 89. [Read More]Also at A Piece of Monologue:
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| Harold Pinter |
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| PJ Harvey |
"Pinter leaves me speechless. Just unbelievable. A poem like 'American Football' or 'The Disappeared'. TS Eliot of course. Ted Hughes. WB Yeats. James Joyce." She leans forward, freshly excited. "Just that feeling of reading something profound and having your breath quite literally taken away by the end of a piece. I'm reading John Burnside's poems at the moment. Do you know his work? I'm getting that feeling – just reaching the end of every poem, going 'Oh my God!'" She clutches her chest and laughs. "And all of these writers offer me a greater understanding of what it is to be alive, and that is such an incredible thing art can do for other people. It made me want to try and get close to this strange, mysterious thing that people can do with words." [Read more]Source: Dorian Lynskey, 'PJ Harvey: 'I feel things deeply. I get angry, I shout at the TV, I feel sick', The Observer, 24 April 2011
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| James Joyce. Photograph: Roger Viollet/AFP/Getty |
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| Samuel Beckett |
What kind of art is Beckett's? It completely ignores the traditional conventions of the stage, among them clarity. Beckett's most famous play is Waiting for Godot. Asked who Godot was, Beckett replied, "If I knew, I would have said so in the play." As for form, he once wrote to his younger disciple Harold Pinter, "If you insist on finding form [for my plays] I'll describe it for you. I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cancer. In the silences I could hear his screams continually. That's the only kind of form my work has."Also at A Piece of Monologue:
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| Virginia Woolf |
