Images of Beckett - Index of

8 IMAGES OF BECKETT
been further from the truth. He was invariably helpful, for example, to actors
with whom he was working. But his suggestions were practical, detailed and
down-to-earth, confined to what they needed to speak their lines or perform
their moves or gestures. He never entered into discussions with them about
philosophical issues or even questions of psychological motivation. In
private conversations, he was much more at ease discussing the practical
problems of a particular production or the strengths of an individual actor or
actress than he was in elucidating the themes or discussing the imagery of his
plays. With academics who were writing books and articles on his work, he
was also remarkably cooperative, providing them with information, mostly of
a bibliographical or textual nature, since, again, he did not trespass into areas
of meaning and interpretation.
There were, nonetheless, occasions when, privately, he could be quite
revealing about his art, his approach to theatre and his practice as a writer.
While dining with him once in Paris, for instance, I remember referring to
the musical rhythms of his play, Krapp’s Last Tape, and wondering if, like
Gustave Flaubert in what the great French novelist used to describe as his
gueuloire, he read his words out aloud. ‘I do’, agreed Beckett and went on to
quote the passage in which Krapp is lying with the girl in the punt, adding:
‘if you take a single syllable out of those lines, you destroy the sound of the
lapping of the water on the side of the boat’. His comment was followed by
an embarrassed laugh, as if he had somehow committed an indiscretion.
On another occasion – and the example is typical of how Beckett came to
make such observations – we had been discussing the difficulty that he was
experiencing in translating his play, That Time, into French. ‘There is a
problem with the title to begin with’, he said. ‘After all That Time means both
“the time when” and “that Time” in the wider sense. How ever do you render
both?’ For his published French translation, he had to settle on Cette fois,
thereby missing the wider Proustian allusion to Time as ‘that double-headed
monster of damnation and salvation’, about which he had written in his early
(Right) John Hurt in Krapp’s Last Tape, 1999