Joyce the Father, Beckett the Son

...Can we now say who Godot is...

...Beckett did, in fact, make many efforts to get away from Joyce...

...It is abundantly clear now why Lucky, in his monologue, parodied the Joycean manner...

...Are they tragic, then...

...He is the younger, the less ailing, and he has at least one hope...

...He was the acknowledged master, the king of language, the great innovator, the destroyer of old forms and the contemnor of old values...

...It will be remembered, too, that when he reappears, he has gone blind and he speaks poetically (in a manner which seems out of keeping with the ferocious character he has shown) of the non-existence of time, and the all-encompassing power of eternity...

...All of Joyce's megalomania and cruelty are in the episode...

...Why was Lucky's famous "thinking speech" a parody of James Joyce...

...Why were Vladimir and Estragon waiting for him...

...This play is directly and undeviatingly about Joyce and Beckett's relationship to him...

...Beckett came to Paris as a young man interested in writing modernist poetry and fiction...

...he is cruel, and yet with great dignity...

...After all, if a work of art is to make the world strange, should the work not be clear in its parts...

...From Endgame I think I have learned that Pozzo is none other than Beckett's former literary master and friend, James Joyce...

...as Hamm, he is deserted by Clov and left to die...

...Finally, was the mood of the play one of despair or of hope...

...There are any number of such parodies in Endgame, and by the central character, Hamm...

...Hearing that speech in the theater, I LIONEL ABEL, playwright and translator, has also published criticism in many literary journals, His play, Absalom, will appear this spring in Grove Press' anthology of contemporary Plays of the Artists' Theater...

...Another question: Do these plays express despair or hope...

...His associate in Endgame is a younger man, Clov, who is apparently his adopted son...

...Perhaps the tragedy has already occurred, and Beckett's figures, Hamm and Clov, Pozzo and Lucky, Estragon and Vladimir, are merely members of the chorus...

...Beckett's essay on Proust is also a flight from Joyce, and an ineffectual one...

...Proust is not described personally in the essay, nor does Kafka appear as a character in Malone, Malone Dies or Murphy...

...This, too, has to be answered speculatively...

...All of his novels are, I think, flights from Joyce—perhaps toward Kafka...

...yet they induce an exhilaration we could scarcely get from works of pessimism...

...To have adopted such a man as Joyce shows two things about Beckett which are evidenced in other ways throughout his work: first, a desire to be destroyed, and secondly, contradicting that desire, limitless self-confidence...

...Joyce was then the top figure of the whole modernist movement...

...And the answer to this question, which Endgame makes possible, provides a key to other questions which Godot provoked, Pozzo, it will be remembered, was the man with a whip driving the slave, Lucky, before him who burst onto the scene to terrify, entertain and, in a way, console the two tramps, Estragon and Vladimir...

...had a distinct impulse to believe that Pozzo himself was Godot, the Mysterious Personage the two tramps were waiting to see, and who both felt could possibly justify their sad and trivial existences...

...In fact, in Endgame there is no home without Hamm, for the attic, which he shares with Clov, is all that remains of the world, everything else having been destroyed...

...Joyce the Father, Beckett the Son By Lionel Abel AFTER THAT MARVELOUS wondering at the world which the performance of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot occasioned, came a wondering at certain characteristics of the play itself, which, not being clear in their purpose or meaning, merely puzzled, but did not cause astonishment...

...On the other hand, Joyce, whether as Hamm or Pozzo, is always more sympathetic and more human than whoever speaks for Beckett, be this Lucky or Clov...

...I think it is also the key to literary pre-eminence...

...And this was the man Beckett chose to be his literary father...

...We can only speculate about their relationship, to be sure, but on the other hand we do know something about the two men...

...In one scene, Hamm wants to tell his father, Nagg, the story of his life, and the father can only be persuaded to listen to it by a pitiful bribe...

...Clov (Beckett) is the less human of the two...

...Whereas in Godot it was Lucky—that is, Beckett —who parodied Joyce, in Endgame, it is Hamm—that is, Joyce himself—who does the parodying...

...In the end, however, this did not seem to be the case...

...Hamm keeps them in ashcans, sometimes getting Clov to lift the lids of the cans to inspect or feed or annoy them...

...he is confronted and he is vanquished, though Beckett, whether as Lucky or as Clov, is never shown to be victorious...

...he asks Clov...

...But in Endgame the two extra characters are definitely related to the principals...

...As in Godot, there are two other characters...

...According to Richard Ellmann's new book, James Joyce, the great writer once said to Beckett directly: "I don't love anyone except my family," in a tone which Ellmann notes suggested that he didn't like anyone except his family either...

...The extraordinary thing about Endgame and Godot is that they are capable of moving people who have not the faintest conception of what the relations between two writers, one young and aspiring, the other world-renowned, could be...

...Godot would be Beckett if Beckett had never had to admire Joyce...

...And from this comes the suggestion that like Hamm, Pozzo was Beckett's image of Joyce, only more caricatured in the first than in the second play...

...Who was Godot...

...Why don't you kill me...

...The core of Beckett's experience as revealed by Endgame can be summed up as follows: The worse thing that happened to Beckett was also the best thing that happened to him—his encounter with Joyce...

...When the curtain was rung down on Godot, a certain number of questions remained...

...Who could have imagined, when induced to pity for the two tramps, and to terror by the spectacle of the roaster with a whip, that Beckett was bespeaking his own literary friendship with the author of Ulysses...

...This is the key to their cupboard...

...Beckett has not spared his master any more than Clov would have spared Hamm, or than Lucky would spare Pozzo if he were able to overpower him finally...

...There have not been many such since Finnegans Wake, which was intended, I suspect, to make any masterpiece after it impossible...

...Certainly, very few who saw Godot could have suspected that the experience of the two central characters symbolized so literary a relationship as the one that obtained between Joyce and Beckett...

...Beckett and Joyce were after all writers, scribes: Whatever happened between them could not be tragic except in the derived way discovered by Samuel Beckett, and which has made both of his plays authentic and extraordinary works...

...Those who felt that Beckett's talent does not lie in dramatic construction, contrivance of plot or development of character—at least, as customarily understood—and would be best expressed in the simpler rhythm of a single act, are justified by the proportions of the more recent play...

...Endgame is one long act where Godot was somewhat repetitious in two...

...Hamm is, among other things, the ham actor of the story of his life...

...Beckett did show Joyce his own work...

...In fact, Hamm is a mixture of Pozzo and Vladimir, while Clov is a mixture of Estragon and Lucky...

...The subordinate characters are Hamm's parents—his father, Nagg, and his mother, Nell, both of whom have lost their feet in an accident...

...Beckett—in his plays at least—only about himself and Joyce, and, in Endgame, of Joyce's father and mother...

...And yet...

...it is purer in form, denser in meaning, a deeper expression of Samuel Beckett's ultimate purposes...

...Had they become Beckett's grandparents...

...For those who saw the play performed, he may be a mythical being and stand for whatever unattainable thing they might be waiting for...

...Yet Joyce as Pozzo is blinded...

...He is blind—like Joyce—and tyrannical, yet human...

...But Joyce is present in Beckett's plays...

...Joyce wrote, and abundantly, of his own father and mother...

...Why were Pozzo and Lucky in the play at all, since they seemed to have no definite relation to the two tramps...

...This work is also the story of his own life, Perhaps it is even the story of how Clov-Beckett became Hamm-Joyce's son...

...So much for the question of form, My question, though, was: Who is Pozzo...

...But I think that his feeling for Joyce went further than admiration...

...Hamm has none...

...Not quite...

...Clov's hope is that he may some day leave Hamm...

...When we consider how many men have been ruined because their fathers had too much power or personality, we can better appreciate what Beckett's daring must have been in adopting as his literary master and single human relation the mighty, cooly indifferent and self-absorbed literary giant...

...In this very name there is a suggestion that Shem and Shaun were just masks, that the real personality was Hamm-Joyce...

...For Hamm is a writer, he is apparently occupied with a Work in Progress, and surely with this detail Beckett wants us to identify him as Joyce...

...He had more pride than any other writer of the time, and he was more self-absorbed, too, being the very figure of a man dedicated to himself, For Joyce had little interest in other writers...

...What I get from a study of the plays is that in Beckett's mind Joyce became Beckett's one family relation, his adopted father...

...A strange menage, certainly, as Rimbaud remarked of his relationship with Verlaine, and like that relationship, literary in essence...

...But if Joyce wrote of his own father and mother, and in every one of his books, Beckett never writes in his plays of his parents—only of Joyce's...

...And it was Beckett who adopted Joyce—not Joyce, Beckett, though Hamm in Endgame claims to have adopted Clov...

...Because I don't have the key," Clov answers...

...With how much suffering must Beckett have paid for Joyce's admiration of his work...

...On this topic Hamm is humorous: "Without Hamm no home...

...My suggestion, though, derives from my first impression that Pozzo, whom I identified as Joyce, was, in fact, Godot: Godot would be Joyce if Beckett had never met him...

...Some of these questions can now be answered, Samuel Beckett's subsequent play, Endgame, treating the same experience dealt with in Godot, illuminates, at least speculatively, much that remained obscure in the latter, and most surprisingly, Endgame, though less effective on the stage, is superior in many respects to Waiting for Godot...

...It does strike me that the plays are more despairing than hopeful...

...Nell and Nagg are a chorus at a further remove...

...there is tragedy somewhere near the characters, not in them...

...It is the chorus which expresses the drastic pessimism of Sophocles' tragedies, never the protagonists who endure the agony...