Herbert Blau 1926-2013

Renowned Beckett theatre scholar and director dies

Herbert Blau

From The New York Times: ‘Herbert Blau, a fiercely iconoclastic theater director, scholar and theorist who staged some of the earliest productions of Beckett, Brecht and Genet in the United States, died in Seattle on May 3, his 87th birthday.’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• San Quentin and Samuel Beckett: An Interview with Rick Cluchey
• Herbert Blau and Martin Esslin on Samuel Beckett

Charlotte Mandell on Translating Blanchot

A 2005 interview by Ready Steady Book

Photograph: E. E. Pridgeon

Mark Thwaite of Ready Steady Book talks to Charlotte Mandell about translating the French writer and theorist Maurice Blanchot:

I first came across your name as a translator of the work of Maurice Blanchot. What first got you interested in Blanchot?

Fate. My friend Pierre Joris, who translated Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, was asked by Helen Tartar (then editor-in-chief at Stanford University Press) to translate La part du feu. He didn’t have the time, so he recommended me. I sent in a sample chapter – I was only 24 then and the only book-length work I’d translated was a book of poems, Le feu l’ombre, by the French poet Jean-Paul Auxeméry. Helen liked the straightforwardness of my translation, the fact that it didn’t use any acadamese – I tried to translate Blanchot as simply and as honestly as I could.

Do you find the close reading required to translate a work has helped you to understand Blanchot more clearly than you would otherwise have done?

Definitely, yes. I feel I’ve never really “read” a work until I’ve translated it. I also make it a rule never to read too far ahead in the book I’m translating – that way everything is fresh and new, and I can’t form any preconceived notions about what will come next. I figure the author never had the luxury of reading his book beforehand, so why should I? (In the case of Blanchot it’s a little different – I’d already read many of his books in French when I was a student in Paris.)

Do you think "the common reader" can get much out of Blanchot or should he be left to academics?

Reading Blanchot is a little like watching someone think. You have to have patience, since his essays move by nuance and suggestion, and come to focus slowly. English readers – Americans especially – are used to being fed information; in the case of an essay, they’re used to the conventional statement-exposition-conclusion format. The nice thing about Blanchot (and the thing a lot of people find exasperating about him) is that he doesn’t follow that formula, or any formula for that matter. Often no conclusion is reached. The subject is examined, and questioned, and looked at from different angles, but never really resolved. I like that a lot – it’s sort of like reading poetry. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher Fynsk on Maurice Blanchot
• Photographs of Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot: Thomas Reads a Book
• Maurice Blanchot on Giacometti and Writing
• Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs
• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Editing Beckett's Letters: An Interview with Dan Gunn

A lengthy and detailed interview published in The Quarterly Conversation

Dan Gunn

An extract from my interview with Dan Gunn, one of the editors of the Samuel Beckett Letters project, published in The Quarterly Conversation:

When Cambridge University Press published the first volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters back in 2009, it broke a long and enigmatic silence. Letters by the writer had been published before, scattered here and there, but were often of largely academic interest, and focused explicitly on some aspect of his work. With the first volume, readers were granted access to a wider range of correspondence that follows a young Beckett from Ireland to London, and ultimately to Paris. While popular with many critics and academics, the collection offered the general public a privileged peek into the writer’s day-to-day life.

The second volume (of a projected four) finds Beckett in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. The letters provide a rare glimpse of Parisian life during a period of rapid cultural and historical change. We gain a sense of the books he read, the music he listened to, and the galleries he visited. There are intimate exchanges with colleagues and friends that suggest what was going on in the mind of the writer during this time. But, perhaps most significantly of all, the letters allow us to look over his shoulder as he writes some of his best-known works: The Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) and Waiting for Godot.

Dan Gunn, one of the editors of the letters, sheds light on the process that brought the collection into the public eye. The conversation touches upon the crucial role that letters often play in the lives of writers and poets, and how technology is changing the way we access and understand them. Gunn shares the difficulties and rewards of working on such a large project, expands on the cultural and artistic climate of post-war Paris, and the role that one friend played in Beckett’s development as a writer.

Questions/Topics

• How did you become involved in the publication of Samuel Beckett’s Letters?
• Beckett’s letters are addressed to recipients all over the world, and form correspondences across several languages. What kind of challenges has this posed to the editorial team?
• Over the course of such a massive project, what is it about Beckett’s correspondence that has kept you motivated?
• Beckett’s work can be read alongside works by other writers living in Europe during the same period, but he remains a strangely elusive, even removed figure. What do the letters suggest about his engagement with the intellectual and artistic communities of post-war Paris?
• If the poet Thomas MacGreevy was Beckett’s chief correspondent throughout the first volume, Georges Duthuit appears to dominate the second. Why was his friendship so important to Beckett during this period? (And what prompts your own personal attachment to their exchanges?)
• It can be surprising to see how expressive and affectionate Beckett appears towards Duthuit, when letters to other friends and colleagues seem, by contrast, more reserved. Why do you think Beckett opened up to Duthuit in the way that he did?
• There comes a point where Beckett’s relationship to Duthuit becomes strained. Why did they drift apart?
• What will Volume III tell us about Beckett the novelist as against Beckett the playwright?
• Multi-volume editions of letters by Beckett and T. S. Eliot have recently drawn much public and critical appreciation. As technology changes the way writers work and communicate, do you have any thoughts on future publications of this kind?
• What might readers expect to see in the next volume of the series?
• Finally, in an age in which letters play so diminished a role, how does working on letters make you feel? 

[Read the Full Interview]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Dan Gunn on Samuel Beckett's Letters
• George Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters
• TLS reviews Beckett Letters 1941-1956
• Blanchot and Beckett's Letters
• Gabriel Josipovici reviews Beckett Letters 1941-1956
• Samuel Beckett Letters win MLA Award

Barbara Bray 1924-2010

Friend and collaborator of Samuel Beckett's passes away

Barbara Bray, a champion of European literature and personal confidant to Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, has died aged 85. Andrew Todd details her rich and varied career, paying particular attention to her close personal relationship with Beckett:

Barbara Bray, who has died aged 85, was one of the most significant links between British and French literature in the 20th century. She was the principal translator and an early champion of Marguerite Duras, who was her close friend, and also translated the work of Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Anouilh and Alain Robbe-Grillet. As a young and influential script editor at the BBC in the 1950s, she fostered the work of many writers including Harold Pinter and, perhaps most importantly, Samuel Beckett, who became her personal and intellectual partner for more than 30 years. [...]

Working under Val Gielgud, Donald McWhinnie and John Morris, she was at the spearhead of a risky enterprise to introduce the postwar British public to avant-garde 20th-century drama. She was involved in recommending, commissioning and translating work by Duras, Robert Pinget, Ugo Betti and Luigi Pirandello. Bray supported Pinter in particular, assuring him a steady flow of commissions after the failure of his London theatre debut, The Birthday Party. Pinter wrote A Slight Ache, A Night Out and The Dwarfs initially as radio commissions for her, and remained grateful to her throughout his life for this crucial early support.

Bray met Beckett in 1956 during the production of his radio play All That Fall, and they became more closely involved when she helped him with Embers, his second BBC commission, in 1959. By then Bray was in a relationship with McWhinnie, her estranged husband having died in an accident in Cyprus, leaving her in sole charge of their two young daughters.

She said later that it took 30 seconds to fall in love with Beckett. Despite being drawn by his graceful, generous manner and his voice, which she described as sounding like the sea, she nonetheless kept her distance, and it was he who made the first moves in what was to become a relationship of central importance for both of them. [...]

Her relationship with Beckett lasted for the rest of his life. He sent her work in progress by mail (sometimes twice a day, even if they were meeting anyway) and worked with her, by her own account, as a sounding-board, as a direct help with translation (he translated his own work between French and English), and as a gadfly who would encourage him to complete projects.

She was the only person with whom he regularly shared his work in progress and one of very few with whom he discussed his work at all. She never claimed credit for his work, stating that she had no creative imagination at all. She "wasn't any influence on the nature of the work", she later recalled, "because he was absolutely unique and sure of himself and knew what he wanted to say". She described their relationship as one of equals, an impression corroborated by those who knew them at the time.

Beckett had just married Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil when Bray moved to Paris in 1961. Suzanne had helped him recover his health after he was stabbed in 1938, and both had been hunted by members of the Resistance during the latter part of the second world war. Bray claimed that Beckett remained faithful to both of them, a situation which was not without consequences for Bray and her children, who were brought up as the offspring of an occasionally anguished "other woman", devoted to her often-absent companion.

Beckett and Suzanne's relationship had been forged in adversity and before his fame. They had much less in common intellectually than he and Bray. His double life was most likely the point of departure for Play (1963), in which a man, wife and mistress confess their lives to an intermittent spotlight, confined to the neck in earthen jars. The similarly-confined but irrepressible Winnie in Happy Days (1960) has sometimes been likened to Bray, who was possessed of an unstoppable, effusive attitude bordering on the manic. She denied the link.

Bray spoke of writing a memoir of her life with Beckett, but never completed it. She abhorred others' tell-all accounts of sometimes superficial relations with him, and perhaps preferred in the end to allow silence to descend on the mystery of their relationship. We can nonetheless speculate whether the second part of his career would have been as varied and adventurous without her, ranging across television and film and inspired by sources including the Noh theatre, to which she introduced him. Her last collaborative act with him was to type his final work, What Is the Word (1989), which he composed when confined to the Tiers Temps nursing home in Paris. He died that December. His 713 letters to her are kept at Trinity College Dublin (he destroyed all personal correspondence he received). She left a brief account of her life with him in an interview with Marek Kedzierski.

After Beckett's death, Bray continued to translate, and she put great energy into the bilingual Paris-based theatre company Dear Conjunction, which she co-founded and for which she directed lesser-known Pinter and Beckett works. [Read the article]

Andrew Todd, 'Barbara Bray obituary'

guardian.co.uk, 4 March 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'

Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg on the subversive power of the imagination

Chris Rodley interviews David Cronenberg on his adaptation of Naked Lunch, the politics of imagination, and the dangerous act of writing:

Naked Lunch was to see Cronenberg working through his long-standing conceptual and visual association not only with Burroughs's work, but with his beliefs that writing is a dangerous business. Cronenberg himself had often linked imagination with the idea of disease: something that is catching and can cause harm.

David Cronenberg: To make a metaphor in which you compare imagination to disease is to illuminate some aspect of human imagination that perhaps has not been seen or perceived that way before. I think that imagination and creativity are completely natural and also, under certain circumstances, quite dangerous. The fact that they're dangerous doesn't mean they are not necessary and should be repressed.

This is something that's very straightforwardly perceived by tyrants of every kind. The very existence of imagination means that you can posit an existence different from the one you're living. If you are trying to create a repressive society in which people will submit to whatever you give them, then the very fact of them being able to imagine something else - not necessarily better, just different - is a threat. So even on that very simple level, imagination is dangerous. If you accept, at least to some extent, the Freudian dictum that civilization is repression, then imagination - and an unrepressed creativity - is dangerous to civilization. But it's a complex formula; imagination is also an innate part of civilization. If you destroy it, you might also destroy civilization.

We've become very blasé in the West about the freedom, the invulnerability of writers. We take it for granted, particularly on the level of physical safety. But look what happened to Salman Rushdie. And now we find that under their dictatorship, Romanians had to register their typewriters as dangerous weapons! They couldn't own photocopiers. Every year you had to supply two pages of typing using all the keys so anything typed on your machine could be traced back to you. That is true fear of the power of the written word.

But even in the West, writing can be perilous. Taking his cue from Jean Genet, Burroughs says that you must allow yourself to create characters and situations that could be a danger to you in every way. Even physically. He in fact insists that writing be recognized and accepted as a dangerous act. A writer must not be tempted to avoid writing the truth just because he knows that what he creates might come back to haunt him. That's the nature of the bargain you make with your writing machine.

Cronenberg on Cronenberg

Edited by Chris Rodley

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Cronenberg to direct DeLillo's Cosmopolis
• David Cronenberg on Beckett
• David Cronenberg on J. G. Ballard