Brad, you have read everything Beckett has written, what drives your love of his work?

No, I’ve yet to read Eleutheria (which he wouldn’t allow to be published until the end of his life) or the Dream of Fair to Middling Women. I think I’ve read everything else. You know your way around Molloy and Malone Dies a lot better than I do. It’s been six or eight years since I’ve read the novels. As for what drives my love for his work, read the rest of this spiel.

What was Beckett like as a person?

Well, my judgment about him doesn’t mean much. I’d encourage people to read about him, or, infinitely more important, to read his work, and to come to their own conclusions. Here is Richard Ellman (biographer of Joyce, Yeats, and Wilde) on Beckett:
Samuel Beckett is sui generis...He has given a voice to the decrepit and maimed and inarticulate, men and women at the end of their tether, past pose or pretense, past claim of meaningful existence. He seems to say that only there and then, as metabolism lowers, amid God’s paucity, not his plenty, can the core of the human condition be approached... Yet his musical cadences, his wrought and precise sentences, cannot help but stave off the void... Like salamanders we survive in his fire. (From Samuel Ellman’s Four Dubliners.)

Beckett’s way of dealing with the Nobel Prize for Literature (which he won in 1969) tells us something about the man. When he was nominated for the award, someone asked him if he would refuse it, as Sartre had. He emphasized that he didn’t want it, but that he would not refuse it, as that would be impolite. When he won the prize, his companion, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, whom he later married, said: "Quelle catastrophe!" And meant it. Beckett said only: "They should have given it to Joyce." He telegraphed Sweden to say that he was honored to accept the award and to apologize to the king that he couldn’t appear to accept it. He tried to avoid publicity by going with Suzanne to Tunisia. When word got out that he had won the prize, news photographers tracked him down and crowded around him like so many jackals around a wounded lion; one of these photos appears on the cover of Richard Seaver’s compendium of Beckett’s work, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On. When one of the photographers had the decency to apologize, Beckett merely smiled and said: "It’s all right." When he got the prize money, his friends, knowing he wouldn’t keep it, gathered together to put together a list of deserving causes and of writers in financial straits who might make good use of it. By the time they had done that, he had given most of the money away. One of the recipients had gone off and bought a sports car with Beckett’s money. When someone told Beckett about this, he shrugged it off.

A few more indications of what the man was about: While Beckett was living in Paris, during the war, he worked with the Resistence; after his cell had been betrayed by a corrupt priest, he was nearly captured by the Gestapo. Obviously, if he had been captured, he would have been killed, as many members of his Resistance cell were. Depending on which version of the story you want to believe, he and Suzanne got out of Paris a few hours - or a few days - before the Gestapo came for him, but not before he had warned the other members of his cell. When asked about this later, he referred to his work with the Resistence as "boy scout stuff."

Before the war, a pimp stabbed Beckett for no reason; the knife nearly reached his heart. While Beckett was waiting to testify at the pimp’s trial, he was made to sit next to the pimp; so he asked the man why he had stabbed him; to which the pimp replied: "Je ne sais pas, monsieur." The story goes that this taught him something about the role of chance in the world - either that or his reading of St. Augustine - but that’s another story.

Once Harold Pinter went to visit Beckett in Paris. Late one night they went out to eat. Pinter ordered French onion soup, and quickly acquired a horrible dose of the farts. Without saying anything, Beckett disappeared. Pinter sat alone for awhile wondering, in his embarrassment, what to do next and, I suppose, how to apologize to Beckett. Beckett finally returned with some bicarbonate of soda. He had wandered half way across Paris in the middle of the night to find the stuff.

This was Pinter’s way of returning the favor:

The farther [Beckett] goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He’s not fucking me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy - he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not - he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful.

And that, ladies and germs, is what love looks like.

You mentioned in rehearsal that Beckett’s spare style is closer to that of the Book of Genesis than to say the ornate details of Homer. Could you explain what you mean by that?

One could write a book about this, and someone should.

In his book Mimesis, Erich Auerbach contrasts the stories of Odysseus's scar (in The Odyssey) and of Abraham and Isaac (in the book of Genesis, known in Dublin as Guinness’s)."Homer's feeling simply will not permit him to see [Odysseus's scar] appear out of the darkness of an unilluminated past; it must be seen in full light and with it a portion of the hero's boyhood."

Homer places in the foreground a full description of his characters, their thoughts and their surroundings; the Hebrew writers left such information in the background. Because Homer informs his audience of his characters' experience and history, we need not interpret it. But of the experience of Abraham and Isaac the Hebrew writers of Genesis say virtually nothing. "It is left for the reader to visualize. ... " We don't know where god comes from, nor where Abraham is; neither we nor Abraham have the slightest idea why god tests him so terribly. This god would not, like Zeus, discuss a man's fate in council with other gods; nor has he recently arrived from a battle or feast or celebration. "He enters from some unknown height or depth and calls: 'Abraham!'" Abraham's position in relation to this god is not physical but moral; he awaits a command he dare not disobey. Abraham and Isaac follow their god on a three day journey about which their author tells us nothing. Auerbach calls this journey "... a silent progress through the indeterminant ... a process which is inserted like a blank duration between what has passed and what lies ahead. ... [T]he decisive points of the narrative are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation." "The Biblical narrative is so greatly in need of interpretation [that] it seeks to overcome our reality." Because we are told so little, the story is "fraught with background;" unlike the Homeric characters, who have simple, strong, immediately expressed emotions, the human relationships of Abraham and Isaac are "entangled and stratified;" their experience is "multilayered." In this complexity the Hebrew writers express "... the simultaneous existence of various levels of experience and the conflict between them." [The quotations are from: Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp.6-13.]

The insane violence that god perpetrates on Abraham, and that Abraham perpetrates on Isaac, refraining from murder only when god stops him at the last second, tells us something about Hamm’s feeling for Nagg, Clov’s feeling for Hamm, and what the boy outside (if he exists) can expect from Clov, unless Clov manages to break the cycle, which is not impossible. This pattern can appear outside the shelter as well, with the possibility that it will be based on love rather than violence: As Joyce follows Shakespeare, Beckett follows Joyce, so Pinter follows Beckett.

An emptiness lies behind Beckett’s work (Hamm tells Clov that it’s death outside their shelter), as it lies behind the story of Abraham and Isaac; that emptiness forces us to attempt an interpretation, but cripples the attempt to interpret. (Remember the "secret violence" Lucretius spoke of.) We want, and we try, to form firm conclusions about the background of Hamm’s, Clov’s, Nagg’s, and Nell’s story, but we can’t. It’s like trying to work out what was the crime in the park in Finnegans Wake. There are many possibilities, and they all have their partisans, but Joyce makes certain that there are no certainties. Or like trying to answer a kid who keeps on asking "why?". Our answer, as everybody finds out sooner or later, is the same as the pimp’s: "I don’t know." And so, to cop a line from Macbeth’s porter, this vacant background makes us and it mars us. Reconcile yourself to that uncertainty or flee from it as you will, Beckett had the intelligence and the courage to see it and to face it straight on.

How does Beckett’s work relate to music?

This is another thing someone should write a book about. Beckett was an accomplished pianist - no Rubinstein or Horowitz - but he was good at it. Some scholars speculate, accurately for all I know, that if he’d had the time and inclination he could have been a concert player. He was particularly fond of Chopin and Bach, which is to say that he knew how to work his way around a fugue or a sonata. For an example of a literary fugue, which Beckett knew to the bone, check out the Sirens chapter of Ulysses. I can’t answer this question for all of Beckett’s work (we’d be here for a year), but as for Endgame: Pick a theme, "yesterday," or "ashes," or the sea, the color grey, or Clov’s ladder, fathers and sons, or any one of many themes he works out in the play, and follow it through the play. You’ll find that he repeats and alters and develops that theme the way a composer develops a musical theme or motif. Listen to the way Clov and Nell contend with the word "yesterday," or the way Nagg condemns Hamm, as Hamm condemns Clov, to a future of loneliness and misery. Or take the number "4." There are four characters; each has a name made of four letters; there are sixteen scenes. To grossly oversimplify, four is the number of liberation and compassion. As Hamm tells Clov, a great compassion is needed, and it won’t be easy. To get the full story on this, check out Joseph Campbell on the Hindu anahata mandala (to give you an idea what it looks like, it was modified slightly and taken into service as the Mogen David) in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space.

There are dozens more examples of this in Endgame, but these may suffice to get you started if you’re inclined to get started.

What are things you have learned about Endgame by hearing it and seeing it day after day in rehearsal?

With the possible exceptions of Macbeth and Othello, this is probably the most intricated (intricate and integrated smashed together into a Carrollian portmanteau word) play ever written. Hindu myth has it that the thunder god Indra wore jeweled crown in which every jewel reflected every other jewel. What I’m finding is that everything in Endgame is reflected by everything else; to say the same thing another way, I’m learning that Beckett put this play together the way Mozart put together the five voice fugue in his Jupiter Symphony - every theme works in counterpoint with every other theme. I’ve listed a few of these themes in my copy of our working script, and have mentioned even fewer of them here; every time I hear the play I hear more of these themes and I have to add them to the list. I’m hoping someday to come to the end of it.