In Our Time - Samuel Beckett

Episode Date: January 17, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989), who lived in Paris and wrote his plays and novels in French, not because his French was better than his English, but because it was worse. In works such as Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Molloy and Malone Dies, he wanted to show the limitations of language, what words could not do, together with the absurdity and humour of the human condition. In part he was reacting to the verbal omnipotence of James Joyce, with whom he’d worked in Paris, and in part to his experience in the French Resistance during World War 2, when he used code, writing not to reveal meaning but to conceal it.WithSteven Connor Professor of English at the University of CambridgeLaura Salisbury Professor of Modern Literature at the University of ExeterAnd Mark Nixon Associate Professor in Modern Literature at the University of Reading and co-director of the Beckett International FoundationProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, Samuel Beckett, 1906 to 1989, lived in Paris and wrote his plays and novels in French, not because his French was better than his English, but because it was worse. In works such as Waiting for Godo, Endgame, Malloy and Malone dies,

He wanted to show the limitations of language what words could not do, together with the absurdity and humour of the human condition. In part, he was reacting to the verbal omnipotence of James Joyce, with whom he'd worked in Paris, and in part, his experience in the French resistance during World War II, when he used code writing not to reveal meaning, but to conceal it. With me to discuss Samuel Beckett R. Steve Connor, Professor of English at the University of Cambridge.

Laura Salisbury, Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Exeter and Mark Nixon, Associate Professor in Modern Literature at the University of Reading and co-director of the Beckett International Foundation. Steve Connor, what was Beckett's background in Ireland? Well, Beckett had a rather, in a way, undramatic, un-glamorous

upbringing. He was brought up in a wealthy suburb of Dublin, Fox Rock, in a largely Protestant community. His family were pretty staunchly Protestant. His father was a Quantity surveyor, successful businessman. Beckett did extremely well at school, very successful. It looked as though his path was set out for him either to join the family firm or when that didn't seem to be working out because he'd done very well at school.

He'd got himself into Trinity College. It looks as though he was going to become safely entombed as an academic in Trinity College. That's the point of which things began to... What did you read at Trinity College? He read languages. He read French and Italian. And it was when he was away in Paris. He was set up for an academic post, a fellowship,

on his return from the Econ Normale, I think I'm right in saying, in Paris. And somehow that, during that year in Paris, it all suddenly seemed to become impossible. There was a sort of crisis for Beckett. He did go back to Dublin. but it was not going to be possible for him to be an academic. For the rest of his life, I think the sense of that, not disappointment, the sense of a kind of narrow escape, I think, from his point of view,

always, I think, kind of dogged or haunted him. He remained tremendously involved with academic thinking. You seem to suggest there was something that cracked him. Was there a thing or was it an recreation of things? Was it being away from Ireland? Was it meeting James Joyce? I think it was certainly being in a very different environment in Paris, although, you know, he was in quite an academic environment in Paris.

He might have just moved smoothly back. And I don't think it's, I don't think there is one thing. But I think it is certainly the case that all of a sudden the world outside Ireland and in particular Dublin opened itself out for him, as it had for James Joyce before him. But he met James Joyce, who's 24 years old than he was, and beginning a great international success and James, as it were, took him up and that was a huge

impact, had a huge impact on him. Enormously important and Beckett remained to the end of his life full of respect, admiration for this heroic character he called him. He became one of a, quite a large entourage

of people who helped Joyce's sight was terribly bad. It had always been terribly bad, but it was getting worse. And so he needed the help of people to do a lot of A lot of reading for him. He was never exactly Joyce's secretary, although that was sometimes said for quite a long time, but he certainly worked very closely with him.

Just to clear up any doubt, can you tell those few listeners who don't know what the size of Joyce's reputation was and for what? Well, Joyce had published his masterwork really Ulysses in 1922, and he was really at the centre of the European avant-garde. This Irish writer was, was regarded by many as the most dramatic, the most challenging, the most provocative, and the most authoritative modern writer, really.

Joyce had embarked on his 17-year undertaking of writing the book that would become Finnegan's Wake. And in fact, Beckett translated a little bit of Finnegan's Wake, a rather strange notion. It's hard to know what language is in in the first place, but he produced a French version of one of the chapters of that. So, Laura Salisbury, he was in this great world around Joyce. Can you give some idea who else was in it? Because what other sort of artists who might have influenced him and so on? What was going on?

It was the 1920s. Can you just tell us about it? Yes. Well, I think the interesting thing is that Beckett wasn't particularly a part of the sort of expatriate, modernist groups, people like Gautred Stein and Ernest Hemingway. But he was very involved. with a particular Irish group that had accumulated around Joyce. So he had friends there like Thomas McGreevy, who was a poet.

But he became involved with the group around the little magazine called Transition, which had really been set up by the trilingual American, French, German, writer called Eugène Jolras. And this part of Transition's purpose, really, was to publish what was called at the time Work in Progress and then later became Finnegan's Wake. And Beckett had some of his very first publications in that journal or that little magazine. And he contributed to the attempt to demonstrate to the world that this book, or what was going to become a book, Work in Progress, actually had a value. Because although Joyce had been extremely successful with Ulysses,

people actually didn't want to publish Work in Progress because they said it was unreadable. and so Beckett was involved This is Finningens Wake was unreal. Yes, yes. So Beckett was involved in writing a defence of that saying that actually the people who wanted Fingan's Wakes to be something different to what it was

didn't understand that this was actually pushing a language absolutely to a different kind of limit. Can we just go a bit further with the relationship between Joyce and Beckett? I said, I think I said, Joyce to a certain extent, adopted this younger man so some of you say in your notes. Anyway, he enjoyed having this chap running around after him.

What was Beckett getting from Joyce in terms of intellectual development and also personally? Well, I think he got the sense of Joyce's extraordinary capacity across languages, his engagement with philosophy. Beckett was also involved with Joyce's family. He had a brief relationship with Joyce's daughter, Lucia, that ended rather badly and in fact nearly came between Joyce and Beckett. So that was a very difficult aspect. Because really I think Beckett was interested in Joyce more than he was interested in Lucia,

although he remained very kind to her throughout his life. She eventually ended up in sadly in a psychiatric ward with schizophrenia, yeah. Yes, she did. And Beckett, I think, kept her in mind throughout his life, actually, although there was a certain kind of guilty. I think he felt guilty that perhaps she felt more for him than he did for her. But certainly Joyce, I think, was seen by Beckett as somebody who was doing something, an Irishman who was doing something with modernism that was not about nationalism,

but was about a real polyglot internationalism. Beckett in the 30s also travelled in Germany. And his reaction to Germany was not quite what we'd have expected. Yes, yes. Well, it was, I think Beckett was perhaps aware earlier than some others about the difficulties that were emerging in Germany in the 1930s. He had family who lived there, family who were Jewish. So he had a sense of the looming difficulties of the emergence of fascism. But really, a lot of what he was up to when he went into Germany was to, educate himself about art and about painting in particular. So in terms of the intensity of his diaries, which are always there, there's not a great mention, there's not a great outrage at what is going on politically in Germany. I think there are moments where you find it,

but it's not a political diary. It's an aesthetic diary, and it's about Beckett's coming to an understanding of what he thinks art might be and what it is art might do. Let's stick with the diaries in Mark Nixon. What are the diaries and notebooks of that time reveal about him? Well, the earlier notebooks, in the early 30s, he keeps a lot of notebooks on a range of topics.

He takes notes on philosophy, he takes notes on psychology. Which particular philosophers? Actually, the notes that we have are from a history of philosophy, written by Wilhelm Vindelband. And essentially, he copies out all the way from the beginning, pre-Socratics, all the way through to 19th century philosophy. philosophy, he copies out large parts. So there's no one philosopher that stands out in these

particular set of notes. He tends to just, as it were, give a survey of the entire field. And the other sets of notes are equally interesting, especially he takes notes on the literary histories of England, Germany, France. And it's a, it's, there are, there are, there are sign of his continual academic kind of approach to knowledge and so forth. As just mentioned before, the German Diaries are fascinating documents. They're the only diary that we know Beckett ever kept during his trip through Nazi Germany from October 1936 to April 1937. And they're fascinating because they're very meticulous. He records everything that he witnesses and sees and does during the day. He writes down every single meal that he has. He records the conversations that he has

with people in pubs. And in particular, yes, they are a record of his intense scrutiny and study of art, both in galleries, public galleries, but also in private collections. With the, Virginia Woolf was similar. She, as it were, I'm sorry to use this word, maybe the wrong word. Please correct me. As it were, breeze through Germany without making the contact that one would have expected, say, ordn an issue would did, for instance. Yeah, that is true. I think that's very, that's very,

that's very, in Becker's case, very different. He really engages with the politics of the day, with the people that he meets, and generally the situation within Germany. Right, I got a different impression from my notes, so I was obviously wrong there. When the war started, and why did this stay in France? Well, I think, well, he was in Ireland when war broke out.

There's the famous quote, whether it is a quote or not, where Beckett says that he preferred France at war to Ireland at peace. But I think the fact of the matter is at that point, he considered France's home. And so it was quite understandable for him to return to France, even though war had just broken out. His partner, Suzanne, lived there. He had his flat there. He had most of his friends were living in Paris at the time.

And at the same time, I do generally think that he, I think he was quite willing to stand up against fascism around that time. He worked for a resistance group called Gloria. What did you do in that group? Well, essentially he was given information which he re-encoded, he copied out, which was then passed on to Courier so that these notes would make their way back to England. What were these notes about? I'm actually not quite 100% sure. Do you, Laura? I don't think we know exactly what they're about. But they're about to give him a lot of trouble

because he got raided by the Gestapo and just got an hour's notice and he and his fiancé and his partner just got out in time and went to the south of France to around Arucian in Provence. Yes, that's absolutely correct. The cell was betrayed by a priest, I think,

although that sometimes debated. But he, most of the cell, most of the other members of the cell were arrested. and he managed to get away pretty much by the skin of his teeth, really. Thank you. Steve, Connor, when he went to the south of France, we are told he continued work in the resistance, but that's not as well recorded.

So where are we there? I don't think there's very much evidence of him continuing systematically. I mean, of course, the point about groups like this is that they're not, you know, they're not meant to be part of a well-known network. So they kept their heads down, but keeping their heads down was pretty much, you know, what they did for the rest of the war. Because although this was the notionally unoccupied territory, it was deeply, deeply unsafe. So he needed to live absolutely incognito, which he did, working in the fields, staying with farmers.

And continuing to write, he'd published one, his first real novel in 1938. and he wrote the most extraordinary book I think that anyone will ever read, which has never really been published in its entirety, on sheets of tissue paper with a blunt pencil, almost unreadable, night after night after night, as he got back from laboring in the fields. It was an extraordinary time. What was this book on tissue paper about? The book is called What?

and it's really about a man who arrives in a house and acts as a servant for a couple of years and then leaves. But it's really a book of obsessive, compulsive, logical games and investigations. You raise your hand. Yes, well, I was just going to say that there's an interesting link back to the work that Beckett was doing when he was in the Resistance Earl, Gloria, SMH,

because when he, at the end of the war, he attempted to return to Ireland in order to visit his mother, who was very ill, the British authorities confiscated the notebooks for what because they thought they were code. And actually, when you look at them, they do look encoded in some kind of strange way. It's certainly not a kind of straightforward act of communication.

Can we just go back to the war? He's in the south of France. It's unoccupied, but it's still controlled. So how does this experience of many years, or does it affect a change his writing? I think it's the, there are two things that come together. One is the incredible tension, suspicion, living from day to day, not knowing, of course, how the war was going to turn out, but equally, you know, not knowing what the next day is going to bring,

not knowing whether he would ever return to the life that he began. gun slowly to build for himself as an artist and writer in Paris. But I think the other thing that was hugely formative was actually living among ordinary people. He'd moved in fairly exalted circles in many ways, academic circles, artistic bohemian circles. He was working with ordinary people. He was doing what for the rest of his life he always liked doing, which was hard, repetitive manual labour, an enormous consolation for him. And I think there was something humanising for this man

who I'm not sure that it would have been terribly pleasant to meet Mr Beckett before the Second World War. He was a moody, withdrawn, rather self-absorbed person. That seems to have changed largely as a result of this extraordinary exposure. There are many Norris Halsbury who think that waiting for Godot is some sort of abstraction of the way that he himself lived his life during the Second World War before we get to that, I'd like to talk about Wed and Port Ovid, could you tell people who don't know, could you possibly...

You're not going to ask, don't blink, what it's about. If you can manage it, you're the first in the century. Well, I think the plot is kind of hard to describe. I'd want to invoke, I think, the Irish critic Vivian Mercier, who wrote that Waiting for Godo is a play in which nothing happens twice. So the idea that it is quite hard to talk about action because there is no action. What you have is you have two figures.

Vladimir and Estragon, they're sort of tramp-like figures. They are waiting. They're talking to each other. Whilst they're waiting for this figure called Mr Godo, two more figures come on, Potsow and Lucky. Lucky is clearly Potso slave, and there's this very difficult. controlling power play that goes on between them. At the end of Act 1, a boy comes on stage

and tells Vladimir and Estragon that Mr Godo isn't coming today. They say, okay, we'll go, and then they don't. So Act 2, they come. They're still there. Potser and Lucky come back on. By now, Lucky, who had been able to speak in this extraordinary sort of explosion

of language in Act 1 is by now mute. Potsso can no longer move around in the way that he could before. And then a boy comes on at the end and says, Mr Goddo is not coming today. And they say, fine, we will go, and then they don't. So that's about as good as I can. And that's heroic.

There's certainly a round of applause. In the breakfast or whatever it is of England. So Mark Nixon, Why do you think this play so brilliantly? And then when nothing happened twice, why did it become such a phenomenon, which it has become, in this country all around the world,

in different culture, Japanese culture, wherever you look, it's still there, still played, so on and on and on, you know, it comes back to the Western regularly, and so on and so forth. Why has it been so successful? Well, the first thing we need to remember

is that when it was first staged, it wasn't successful. Yeah, we know that, but it became successful. It did become very successful, and as you say, it's still staged across the world. I think there's various reasons for this. I think the humour of the play is something that still appeals to people.

I think it's because it's a non-specific humour, it's not rooted within a particular historical moment. I think it's something that still makes people generally laugh. At the same time, the play is not all about laughs, and I think it's precisely those aspects of the play, the suffering that, as it were, is a subtext to the play. is something that speaks to us it's still today,

especially in times of austerity and in times of migration, after all, these are homeless people. And I think it's very telling that the play is very often, has very often been staged at times of crisis. Very famously, it was staged in Sarajevo in the early 90s during the Bosnian War.

Susan Sontag. Yes, a Susan Sontag production. And it was staged, for example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in the ruins, outdoors, it was performed. So I think it's a play that speaks to us because of that, because it somehow is something that we can continuously relate to.

And it's also, as you say funny, it's people, comics have played this and played it very well because it's full of clowning, isn't it? And Beckett loved the circus, he loved clowns, you love clowning, and that is part of it. As there is the sense of impromptu, there is a sense that the two of them are going, where they're going, they don't know why.

It isn't written as a script. They're making it up as they go along. Yes, absolutely. I mean, in many ways, the play, obviously, one doesn't just wait. One does something while one waits. And in this case, the characters are, to a certain degree, keeping each other entertained and keeping themselves entertained as they go along. And that's precisely what entertains us.

And we also all have experienced waiting for all sorts of different things. So I think that's, you know, that's the relevance of the play. And a great title, Steve. And I think there's something very Irish about it. I think there's the, you know, needing to have a turn. Everyone at the end of the evening needed to stand up and be able to do your thing. Beckett loved routines and he loved the expertise. He looked for expertise of knowing how to do, you know, hat tricks and knowing how to do things together.

I mean, it's clumsy in a sort of Tommy Cooper sort of way, but the kind of the cleverness of the art that disguises art is enormously important. And it's very vernacular. It's very popular. It's about, I think one of the reasons for the success of the play is that this is written at a moment at which big historical things, as they do today, are impacting on ordinary people's lives. And this is the play about what ordinary people do in the face of those, enormously world historical kinds of suffering.

How do they pass the time? But is there anything you can say about the structure or lack of structure or deliberate lack of structure? Well, what Beckett is trying... I mean, Beckett came to be very impatient with the play. I think he found it very messy compared with some of his later much more austerely finished and formalized work.

But I think what audiences like about it is actually seeing the patterns emerging from the messy, chaotic, my God, what are we going to do next? Actually seeing that there is almost a kind of reassurance in the fact that things just come around and come round again. Although nothing ever repeats exactly in Beckett, and that's one of the grimest things about it, everything always inexorably gets slightly worse. Laura?

Yes, I was just thinking about the structure of something. something like Waiting for Godo, one of the reasons why it's hard to explain what goes on in it, but also that it has this kind of relationship to things like vaudeville. It's as though the gags of something like vaudeville or the bits of farce that you might get. It's like they've been moved centre stage instead of them being the kind of warm-up act. This is the act. So the warm-up act is the thing that you get to be placed within. and it never comes to an end.

So the moment where, you know, the narrative would take off, where Godo would arrive, where we'd find out what it was all about, you just never get there. You're kept within these bits of drama that passed the time, although as Beckett says, or as the play says, but it would have passed in any case. But the strange thing is, and Mark pointed out quite correctly, that at the beginning it was not a success,

but then it became a tremendous success and it's just on the highest possible level and in every culture. And it's not that one worship success at all but this is phenomenal that this should happen to me, maybe not to you. I think it was very strange for Beckett because in a way, you know,

we think of him as the writer of failure and a writer of, you know, a sort of literature of exhaustion or a theatre of exhaustion in many ways. And of course Beckett spent the latter part of the 1920, in the 1930s and quite a bit of the 40s, not being able to get published very easily. And he felt that failure very keenly. He didn't enjoy it at that point. We didn't find much to make of it at that point. But I think what happened, particularly through the war, is a kind

of realization that within failure, within incapacity, within the way in which things go on, when all going on is purposeless, that there is something to be. made, even if it's only small things, something to be made from that. And I think one of the things about the reasons why Waiting for Godot retains its importance is that it speaks to people at moments when there is this sense of we're going on, we're going on, but we're never going to get to the thing where everything is achieved. Is this related thing that Laura was saying so eloquently to his decision to write in French? I think it can do. I mean, his...

Well, what's your view of the reason he decided to write in French? Well, Beckett struggled with language, language itself, from a very, very early period onwards, already in the early 1930s in his first unpublished novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, he's already saying there that he's got a problem with the English language in particular, and that the French language is much better

because you can write without style. You can speak without style, as it were. And this distrust of... What does he mean speak without style? Write without style? The idea that the English language has many words for the same thing. But I think he was also trying to alienate himself from language and therefore to, as it were, start again

in a way that made him think about words in a far more careful way. Is there also a feeling that he was trying to alienate himself from Joyce, who knew and could write everything to a different sort of writer altogether? Well, that could well be. I mean, he never said that himself. I mean, he himself always kept coming back to this idea of he wanted to, as it were,

find a language, as it were, that was more minimal, that was more abstracted. And I think the term to French allowed him to do that. There's a very famous letter that he wrote in July 1937 to a German friend, and it's actually written in German, where he argues that a fact, official English language makes no sense to him anymore.

And he feels that it's become, its style and grammar has become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit. And he goes on to argue that what he wants to do is find a literature of the unword. He wants to, as it were, bore holes through the language until it becomes porous. And what's behind language becomes visible.

Steve Conner, do you think he did that even more emphatically in the novels? In Malloy, Malone dies. advantage of the novels is that novels are there but in a sort of virtual way compared with the theatre and so you can play with the possibility that

the character that you are reading whose words you seem to be hearing that is speaking to you may be just an effect of the words themselves I mean when he said I'm not quite with you well of course what he wanted to do what he wanted to do was to write a novel that was the equivalency he hadn't written waiting for Godot at this point, but that took away everything that was usually all of the appurtenances and furnishings of a novel,

characters and settings and plot. And the one thing that had to remain was that somebody had to be speaking or writing. When he said that it was easier to write without style in French, well he said it in French, it's more facile to create sans style, which is quite close to Ecrier sans stilot which would mean in French writing without a pen and in fact he plays a little joke with that

in one of his novels Malone dies where the character says well I've lost my pencil and I don't really know how I'm even writing this you know so the idea that you would somehow create a condition in which you would be writing in a strange sort of thin air with nothing to write about

nothing to write with except the writing itself. But I remember when I first read them, there's an extraordinary density. It's almost airless. And you feel it's great or you feel it's good or you think you can't stop reading, but you can't keep reading because it almost hurts your head. It is very, very, very, I had exactly that. I read them very early when I was an adolescent. I'm 16 or 17, but it was, a bad time to read them. A bad time to read them. I found them very frightening. I found the obsessiveness of them very frightening and my and the obsessiveness that I sort of developed with regard to them quite frightening

and very, very laborious, tremendously arduous reads, although you always get a little rewarding joke about every page and a half if you stick with it. Laura, he did, he's in France, has been in the south of France, but he goes back to Ireland, now and then, not very often, but principally to see his mother,

and that is a factor, not only seeing his mother, but it's a factor in his writing. Yes, absolutely. So he returns really throughout the 1940s to see his mother, who was becoming increasingly unwell with Parkinson's. This was something that I think Beckett, Beckett had an extremely tense and difficult relationship with her, right from the beginning, it seems,

although his relationship with his father seemed much more straightforward. His father was a sporty type. He was, yes. And Beckett himself, we haven't said yet, was a sportier, a cricketer and all that. Absolutely. So I think he had this, I think he had a bit of both of them in him, I suppose. But certainly the relationship with May Beckett was more difficult. He had this experience of going back in the late 40s to see her, which he called himself a revelation, which is quite an odd word for Beckett to use, not a very usual word for Beckett to use. He saw her, she was very frail. She had Parkinson's. Her face was completely. expressionless. And he said, I looked at her and I realized that all my writing had been going along the wrong track, that I had thought that I could be like Joyce, that I could add to the sum of knowledge in the world. And then I realized that what I had to do was to embrace these ideas of

darkness, incapacity, ignorance, and impotence. And he said, and that's when it was at that point, he said that he started to write the things that he really felt. And language is not reaching the point of articulated and comprehensible expression? Absolutely, yes, that's right. That Beckett, I think as far back as what, is very interested in the sort of strange materiality of language. What has these sections of pages and pages of permutation, which are almost, I think, impossible to read.

I think if you don't skim read those sections, that says something very significant about you, because they just go on and on and on. And the language starts to detach, really, from what it might be referring to. Certainly as we get into something like the unnameable, this sense of a kind of compulsive and propulsive language is very key. And I think one of the really fascinating things about,

if you look at the notebooks that the unnameable, was written in, was written in French first, is that it comes to the end right at the end of the notebook. It was as though he needed the back cover in order to actually stop this sort of, well, what would it be, sort of oozing or this propulsive relationship towards languages.

So this is sort of the matter of the notebook itself needed to bring it to an end. Let's go back to the plays. Mark Nixon. his plays are often staged with minimal scenery and so on but he himself started often with clear images can you tell us a bit about that yes the manuscripts of all the plays

show that very often Beckett started out with a more realistic kind of setting or backgrounds than the finished play would end up showing we know for example from the manuscripts of Endgame that he was thinking along the time of the First World War when he was writing the piece. But these kinds of historical, specific details disappear as he continues writing the plays.

So what we have is a kind of an abstraction of something that is more real and accessible that ends up being staged. And you see him departing from, because artists took him up very much later on, took Beckett's work up and used his work. And you see a relationship between the work he did for the plays and the work they did based on his work?

Well, I think so. I mean, in the sense that anybody who would stage Beckett's works would very often come back to the way that Beckett staged his plays himself. His theatrical notebooks, which contain the notes where he very meticulously plans the staging of the plays. I mean, if we think of Godo, as we were mentioning before, as somewhat chaotic when it's on stage, his notes which informs his own directing of the play showed just how immensely mathematical and precise

he's orchestrated and choreographed the plays And you know this time's fully formed There is this little sketch for a play that he tried unsuccessfully to write about Dr Johnson Of all people And we only got a little scene from this But actually I've staged it as a dramatised reading And it's perfectly imagined

I mean, this play has a line in which the comaginly old woman delivers herself of the view that, I may be old, I may be blind, halt and maim, I may be dying of a petuitous defliction, but my hearing is unimpaired. And, you know, just the absolute command in the midst of a world that is falling apart is the characteristically,

Bacchetian note, I think. And one thing about Bacchetian audiences that they're looking and expecting to find hidden meanings and so on, what's your view of that? Can we bring in this thinking that we've slightly skipped, the philosophers he particularly, I know he went through, as we were told earlier,

went through the whole book of philosophy and the one or two philosophers he sort of clove to. He was tremendously interested in and attracted to Rene Descartes who in a sense begins the project of modern philosophy because he strips everything back to what he can't doubt

and builds it all up from me. He can't doubt the fact he's thinking. Beckett strips it all back and also doubts the fact that he may even be thinking. So he's interested in that kind of philosophy that is absolute and that is about dealing with incapacity, dealing with the mysteriousness, actually, of the present to hand. He doesn't, I don't think he was much of an admirer of Martin Heidegger, but I think he appreciated Heidegger's attempt to grasp the simple thereness of existence

that we suddenly come to understanding of ourselves in what Heidea called a condition of govorphenheit, thrownness. One of Beckett's plays actually begins with a character thrown literally onto the stage. And just having to cope with the world that you're in, in a sense, was a philosophical kind of objective for Beckett. So this is why drama is so important to him, because drama allows him and requires him to work with particular kinds of objects. I think it's wonderful that his father was a quantity surveyor, because I think Beckett was in the the way he directed his plays too. Well, you know, it mattered how many, it mattered how much. At the end of Waiting for Godo, one of the characters, Estragon's trousers fall down

because he takes the bit of rope out to hang themselves, and the trousers fall down. And Beckett heard that the trousers in the production, he wasn't there for this in Paris, the trousers hadn't fallen all the way down. And he's anguished by this. He writes a letter saying, it's imperative. The trousers must fall down. to the ankles. And this was the way in which he directed his plays.

What mattered were the details. Laura, what's briefly been Beckett's impact on other writers? Well, I think one of the really interesting things about Beckett is that he wrote across so many different genres. So he wrote fiction, theatre, poetry. He wrote... Let's stick with drama for the moment.

Well, film, TV and radio also. But in terms of, if we think about fiction, then it certainly used to be the case that people used to think of Beckett as staging some kind of move between modernism and postmodernism. I think now we tend to think of Beckett as more of a late modernist and you see his particular style, his interest in number, his interest in calculation. A writer like J.M. Kutzier, for instance, is extremely influenced by Beckett. did his PhD on Beckett actually. But even in 2013, there's a book called A Girl is a Half-Form Thing by Emma McBride. What do you say about Stop-Up?

The people that people know well, what about Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinder, for instance? I think they were, I mean, they were part of the same milieu in very many ways. And this sense that what one might want to put on the stage, the conditions of life, which are not realist, but ones that are. about nothing happening in various kinds of ways. And what comes in to, how do you stage nothing? What happens when one nothing is followed by another nothing? What's the relationship between them? And I think that's something that Beckett and people who follow him

are interested in passing out in various ways. And to add on to that, Mark Dickson, you're on the Beckett Foundation. What would you say his legacy was at the moment? Well, his legacy is extremely varied. I mean, the influence is not only on writers. Beckett has influenced philosophers. Many philosophers have written about Beckett. His influence on classical music has been quite noticeable.

We'll see the, we'll see Georgi Kortarck's opera of Endgame. Georgi Kortarv, a great Hungarian composer. So he's very clearly. inspiring a lot of different people. And you find this? I think that Beckett withdrew from the world of omnipotence of Joyce. And what he, even he, I think, couldn't have realised

is that he would have opened up an entire world of possibility through what he did. And, I mean, whatever I write is always made possible by the fact that Beckett seems to have developed a technique for something that no one's ever thought of having a technique for before, like giving up. you have to do that in some way or other. Thank you very much, Steve Conner, Laura Salisbury and Mark Nixon.

Next week, the innovative mathematician Emma Nutter, whose colleagues objected to her teaching as she was a woman and who then asked it sacked because she was a Jew, but whom Einstein called the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. didn't talk much. You're right about sport.

I'm very keen on Beckett as a sportsman. Laura once rang me up or sent me an email which had just seen a bit of footage. The only footage I think I know of Beckett walking. And she said this looks like a sportsman's walk. There's a sort of bounce and swagger there. He was a boxer of all. He's supposed to have squared up to Peter O'Toole, which you'd have to have a bit of confidence in yourself to do, wouldn't you? And I think that's the key to an awful lot of Beckett.

It's the key to his capacity for absorption. I was very interested in the mathematical thing and in the diagrams because it doesn't for me to contribute to the real programme. But I did something with Beckett, and he didn't want to do an interview, but he sent a play. Was it TV? Yeah, when I was at the BBC. And he sent a playing which was like a piece of geometry to start.

There were lines, it reminded me of the horrors of, geometry at school. Was that quad? Yeah. Yeah, we have the manuscripts of Reading and it's, that's right. You open up the first page and you're thinking, this is maths. This is not a piece of literature. Imagine getting that one, a young producer.

Well, yes, thank you, Mr. Beck. What do we do? Sorry, I interrupted you. I think Beckett's incredibly interested in systematic thinking, but it's always systems that are on the point of breaking down. So it's not, so at one level, there's a sense that, systems create a kind of hyper order, but that hyper order is always tipping over into a kind of absurdity. So the system, it's the sort of glitches in the systems, I think, that Beckett's

really interested in. And I would say even with his philosophy, he's not, I mean, he said, I'm, you know, I'm no intellectual, he said, which of course isn't quite true. I mean, he's obviously very learned in all sorts of ways. But I think part of what he means by that is that he means he's not somebody who has a kind of intellectual system that he is explaining or exploring. He is a writer who uses, he sort of grabs little bits

of intellectual matter and does something with them in art. But he's not, he's not a systematic, a fully systematic thinker. I think he's actually a skeptic to a certain degree. He doesn't like rationalising systems, essentially,

things that explain the world away in many ways. It doesn't matter whether that's totalitarianism, and it also informs his, I think, distrust of religion in many ways. There was, I did, I mean, the people who do the notes for this are spot on, but there was, it seems to me, I got myself confused about Germany because I'm sure I read that his interest in the Nazi movement was not particularly marked. can you seem to suggest,

likely it was? Well, he was and he wasn't. He was, I think, purely because he was confronted with it. But he does, for example, say at one point in the diary, there's a wonderful line where he says, listen like a fool to four hours of the opening of the Reichstag. So he actually spends four hours listening to all these broadcasts by Hitler and Goebbels and so forth,

and he records his thoughts about what he's hearing and what he's listening to. So there is an engagement with, the everyday reality of politics within Nazi Germany at the time. I think the diverse show that. But hardly anybody really engaged politically, apart from Orden an issue word, who saw clearly, and partly because they had come from a much stronger kind of political investment in the first base.

But many other writers, I think, you know, Virginia Woolf was the same, just saw all kinds of things that were objectionable about Nazi Germany, but it was mostly the fact that it was ugly and vulgar. Well, I think that upset them. Not that it was cruel and dangerous. I mean, the diary is strange because at no point, or very rarely, does he evaluate what he sees. He tends to, as it were, just comment on what he sees rather than evaluate it. But every now and again, there are glimpses of what he generally is feeling. There's a sense also that he was worried that the dires were going to be confiscated.

He was told more than once by the people that he was meeting, especially, persecuted artists, that if he went back to Ireland and published bad things about Germany that they might get into trouble. I think that that era of suspicion and tension that he's witnessing within Nazi Germany and he's mainly talking to persecuted artists.

Yes, people that he meets in the pub and on the road, but he seeks out those people who are against the Nazis or at least are artists that somehow are suffering. And I think that's very telling. Yes. I mean, the whole question of Beckett's politics is a complicated one because he was so sort of evasive.

I mean, he was really quite friendly with Theodore Adorno, who wrote about his work, which is a little bit hard to understand. There's a funny... Why is it hard to understand? Well, because Adorno is so committed to a particular political line. Beckett is so skeptical and so... Which line is that? Well, this is a mode of aesthetically inflected Marxism

that he finds exemplified in Beckett, and Beckett always kept that at arm's length. Beckett did once write him a note, though, about the 1968 uprisings in Paris and elsewhere. And the note says rather oddly and perhaps rather typically, never was such rightness allied to such foolishness. which leaves you not quite knowing what to think about what he thinks about. Yeah.

I think Beckett was, he was very, he was anxious about cruelty, although in many ways his plays stage cruelty over and over again, this was something that I think when he saw it, he felt was politically objectionable. And I think he did assert himself around that. He was a great signer of petitions, for instance. and he supported people like Vashlav Havel, he wrote a play, dedicated to him,

he supported anti-apartheid movements, that sort of thing. So there was a sense in which he wanted to align himself with certain kinds of politics of liberation, but I think he was very anxious about the kinds of violence and systems that needed to be put in place in order to enact them. He died just after, the fall of the Berlin Wall and apparently he was in a nursing home at the time

and he saw the Berlin Wall coming down and he said it's going too fast sort of anxiety that you know it was going too fast and the violence, the potential violence of it was going to produce disaster

well the disaster is a good way to end on because our producer is pouring at the door we really should go but would you like to your coffee first Not for me, thank you. Let's go. We can't.

They don't move. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Before you go, let me just squeeze in here and tell you about the Flip Podcasts from BBC Radio 4. Each month there's a new book set to listen to from people like Rees James, May Martin and Joe Lysitt. Subscribe to the Flip Podcast on BBC Sounds.