0333672267_A_History_of_English_Literature

Drama

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beekett (1906-89) had the career of an Irish exile. A Protestant, he was educated at Wilde’s old school - captaining the cricket XI - and lectured in philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin. He left for Paris, still hostess to international modernism, wrote on Proust, translated Finnegans Wake into French, became Joyce’s disciple. After the war he wrote three novels - in French rather than his native language, in order to write ‘without style’. In 1952 Beckett wrote En attendant Godot. After its success in Paris, he translated it. As Waiting for Godot it came to London, following plays by Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) Camus had put forward the idea of ‘the absurd’, a philosophical reaction to the unintelligibility of life, which under the German occupation of Paris had become greater than usual. La Cantatrice Chauve (1948) by Eugene Ionesco was the first comedy of the Theatre of the Absurd (The Bald Prima Donna, London, 1958). Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble visited in 1956, the year of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.

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In 1957 came Pinter’s The Birthday Party. But London had seen nothing like Godot. Beckett’s comic, experimental novels had been ignored. He now became the West’s leading literary dramatist.

Waiting for Godot can be misunderstood - as Chekhov can - as merely bleak, especially by students who have not seen it. Subtitled ‘a tragicomedy in two acts’, its mood is one of gaiety, and the characters are clowns as well as tramps. ‘Life is first boredom, then fear,’ Larkin was to write later. Beckett would think that formulation too solemn.

Modernist nihilism of a theatrical kind had been prominent in Eliot’s The Waste Land:

‘What is that noise?’

The.wind under the door. ‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’

Nothing again nothing.

‘You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember Nothing?’

A drama, said Aristotle, is the imitation of an action. In Waiting for Godot nothing happens. Indeed, famously, nothing happens twice. Vladimir and Estragon await the arrival of Godot, a name which adds a French diminutive ending to ‘God’ (in France, Charlie Chaplin was called ‘Charlot’). But, whoever he is, he doesn’t arrive. The play ends:

VLADIMIR: We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless Godot comes. ESTRAGON: And if he comes?

VLADIMIR: We’ll be saved.

Vladimir takes off his hat (Lucky’s), peers inside it, feels about inside it, shakes it, knocks on the crown, puts it on again.

ESTRAGON: Well? Shall we go? VLADIMIR: Pull on your trousers.

ESTRAGON: What?

VLADIMIR: Put On your trousers.

ESTRAGON: You want me to pull off my trousers? VLADIMIR: Pull ON your trousers.

ESTRAGON: (realizing his trousers are down). True. He pulls up his trousers.

VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go? ESTRAGON: Yes, let’s go.

They do not move. CURTAIN

No thing happens, but words happen. Attempted reasoning replaces plot, and language becomes supreme. Set directions read: ‘Act I. A country road. A tree. Evening’, and ‘Act II. Next day. Same time. Same place.’ To this tree come Vladimir and Estragon, with their music-hall boots, trousers and bowler hat. Vladimir is the funny man and Estragon the straight man (like the British television comedians, Morecambe and Wise). Their cross-talk also comes from the music hall:

VLADIMIR: Did you ever read the Bible?

ESTRAGON: The Bible ... (He reflects.) I must have taken a look at it.

VLADIMIR: Do you remember the Gospels?

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ESTRAGON: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That’s where we’ll go, I used to say, that’s where we’ll go for our honeymoon. We’ll swim. We’ll be happy.

VLADIMIR: You should have been a poet.

ESTRAGON: I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn’t that obvious?

Silence.

VLADIMIR: Where was I ... How’s your foot? ESTRAGON: Swelling visibly.

VLADIMIR: Ah yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story?

ESTRAGON: No.

VLADIMIR: Shall I tell it to you?

ESTRAGON: No.

VLADIMIR: It’ll pass the time. (Pause.) Two thieves, crucified at the same time as our Saviour. One - ESTRAGON: Our what?

VLADIMIR: Our Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other ... (he searches for the contrary of saved) ... damned.

ESTRAGON: Saved from what?

VLADIMIR: Hell.

ESTRAGON: I’m going.

He does not move.

VLADIMIR: And yet ... (pause) ... how is it - this is not boring you I hope - how is it that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved. The four of them were there - or thereabouts - and only one speaks of a thief being saved. (Pause.) Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in a way?

As well as action and set, Beckett dispenses with the convention that the redundancy and inconsequence of everyday conversation is purged from stage dialogue. Vladimir’s attempt to debate the chances of salvation is held under difficult conditions, for weak reason is at the mercy of a weaker physique. The gushing stream of consciousness of James Joyce divides into two trickles. The absence of context means that the audience’s consciousness begins to stream, filling the void with possible meanings. The text, and the tree, suggest at times the Crucifixion and the Garden of Eden.

VLADIMIR: Christ! What’s Christ got to do with it? You’re not going to compare yourself to Christ! ESTRAGON: All my life I’ve compared myself to him.

VLADIMIR: But where he lived it was warm, it was dry! ESTRAGON: Yes. And they crucified quick.

But even less than in Prufrock are these grand comparisons lived up to, as urgent or trivial physical needs lower the tone spectacularly, rather as in the Heath scenes in King Lear, or the medieval play of Cain and Abel. Man without God is farcical as well as miserable. Beckett brings modernist literature home to an audience by inverting the relation between text and audience found in Finnegans Wake: instead of too much meaning there is too little. The audience has to make sense of a verbal and visual text as spare as an Imagist poem and as basic as a music-hall sketch. By letting in audience imagination, Beckett made extremist minority art immediate, involving, universal. His early tragicomic novels appeal to intellectuals. But another early work, a tribute to the silent film comedian Buster Keaton, was the route to the music-hall solution Eliot had tried and abandoned in Sweeney Agonistes.

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Samuel Beckett (1906-89), at a Royal Shakespeare Company rehearsal of Endgame, 1964, directed by Donald McWhinnie.

Beckett’s later work further reduces the dramatic elements: the number of actors, of their movements, of their moving parts, of their words. Words achieved a stage role they had not had for centuries. Beckett used directors, but liked to gauge every detail of his plays, every word, movement, gesture, syllable and tone of voice. In 1962 the television actress Billie Whitelaw was sent a script to read, entitled Play. It was by ‘a fairly bizarre writer called Samuel Beckett ... On paper, it seemed to be about a man, his wife and his mistress, all of whom were stuck in urns.’ She became Beckett’s favourite actress, and her performance can be seen in a videotape of the BBC television version of Not 1, a play in which a spotlit mouth speaks continuously and at breathless speed for sixteen minutes, often recycling its topics and words. Lips, teeth and tongue can be seen, not nose, chin or eyes. It gives ‘soliloquy’ a new meaning. The effect is intense.

John Osborne

The impact of Look Back in Anger (1956), by the actor John Osborne (1929-94), was due to its content rather than any novelty of form. The working-class Jimmy Porter, married to Alison, a young woman of conventional upper-middle-class background, delivers colourful tirades directed equally at the limitations of their lives and the pieties of her family, representing what was soon called ‘the establishment’, a term originally referring to the legal position of the Church of England but now extended to the inherited social set-up. The remembered social cohesion of the war years gave a

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Donald Pleasance and Alan Bates in Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, directed by Clive Donner, 1963.

dramatic edge to Jimmy's frustration at social inequality and the futility of individual action. Osborne made the grotty flat with its Sunday newspapers and ironing-board an image of its time: ‘kitchen-sink realism’ was at hand. The Entertainer (1957) is his next-best play, though protest has a good day out in Luther (1961).

Harold Pinter

Another actor, Harold Pinter (1930-), son of a tailor in the East End of London, learned from Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd. His verbal surface has a peeling realistic veneer, each character being identified by a memorable trick of speech; but the characters’ relation to what is ordinarily taken as real life is tenuous and oblique. In The Caretaker three men pursue their delusions: Aston, who has had electro-convulsive brain treatment, takes Davies, an evasive tramp, to a ramshackle room in an derelict house, used both by Aston and his brother Mick, a fantasist. Each manages his world passably enough, talking it into existence, though references to the real world become unreal. Davies is not going to ‘get to Sidcup’, any more than Chekhov’s Three Sisters will go to Moscow; but Sidcup is a less grand ambition. Inconsequential cross-talk, less logical than Beckett’s, with pauses and silences, gives way occasionally, as also in Beckett, to operatic arias of banality expressing the loneliness of the speaker. Though found in O’Casey and Beckett, these verbal rigmaroles became a Pinter trademark. Audience laughter turns to pity.

Pinter’s other speciality is undefined ominousness. The neurosis of Beckett’s speakers has a metaphysical dimension, a fear of death, eternity, nothingness. Pinter’s are scared of being found out or of being beaten up. In The Birthday Party, the nervous lodger, Stanley, is visited by old friends, who turn out to be from an organization which they say he has betrayed. As in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, nothing is clear, every-

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thing is menacing. In summary, Pinter’s plays sound formulaic; in performance, they are gifts to actors, directors and audiences. But his style is easier to imitate than Beckett’s, and dialogue in which the interlocutors speak past each other became standard.

Already by 1960, the theatre of Beckett and Pinter had triumphed. Yet The Waste Land had already left the themes of the meaninglessness of life and the impossibility of communication with limited scope for development. Pinter’s Betrayal concerns a married couple and their best man, who has a love-affair with the wife. The time-sequence of scenes is reversed, so that the consequences of telling and living a lie become, as in a detective story, progressively more intelligible and less comic. Imitated everywhere, Pinter remains an unsurpassed craftsman of spoken dialogue. His later plays are less mysterious and more political.

Established protest

The theatrical revolution of 1956-60 established the stage as a platform for anti-establishmentarianism, directorial, political and sexual-political. The Theatre of the Absurd gave way to the Theatre of Cruelty, in which audiences were spat at by actors and sprayed with pig’s blood. An admired production of King Lear by Peter Brook omitted Cornwall’s servant and all other signs of hope from the text. Sexual liberation was pursued with anarchic laughter by Joe Orton, more thinkingly by Caryl Churchill; Marxist theatre by John Arden and more grimly by Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, David Hare, David Edgar and Trevor Griffiths. The anti-capitalist attitudes of the student riots in Paris in 1968 took up residence on state-subsidized stages. The most skilled dramatists of the period were Alan Bennett (1934-), Dennis Potter (1935-97), Alan Ayckbourn (1939-), Tom Stoppard (1937-) and Caryl Churchill (1938-). Among the best plays were Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad (BBC TV 1983), Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and Travesties (1974), and Churchill’s Top Girls (1982). But it was not a great literary period in the theatre. Irish English came once again to the rescue, with Brian Friel (1929-), whose Translations (1980), Making History (1988) and Dancing at Lugnasa (1990) brought language back to the English stage.

Other dramatists

Brendan Behan, The Quare Fellow (1956), The Hostage

(1958).

N. F. Simpson, A Resounding Tinkle (1957).

John Arden, Live Like Pigs (1958), Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959).

Joe Orton, Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964), Loot (1966), The Ruffian on the Stair, The Erpingham Camp (1967), What the ButIer Saw (1969).

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Novels galore

In 1960, 30,000 new titles appeared in the UK. In 1990 England’s leading second-hand bookseller, Booth of Hay-on-Wye, calculated that the gross number of new titles of all kinds published since 1960 exceeded the number published before 1960. This is bad news for a historian of contemporary literature, who in a different way is also a valuer of secondhand books. Readers cannot keep up, although books are still often given as presents.

Dr Johnson’s question ‘Do you read books through?’ might be put to the celebrities who list the Books of the Year, to the judges of the growing number of literary prizes, and to the academic assessors of the research quality of English departments. The growth in direct mail, newsprint and publishing prompts a self-defence reaction: ‘Do I need to read this?’ At Book Weeks, actors read books aloud to people who can read.

Acclaimed novels of the 1960s, 1970s and even 1980s do not very often stand up well to re-reading. In such conditions, an account of the volcanic state of the contemporary novel must choose between providing an annotated list, marking the card of runners with summary comments, and an unannotated list with some discussion of a few names. The second seems more honest.

William Golding

William Golding (1911-93) is a name likely to last, and not only for Lord of the Flies, a fable about a party of boys from a Cathedral Choir School marooned on a Pacific island. A teacher, Golding knew something of boys, and his strong tale is believably reported through the eyes and idioms of Piggy, Ralph, Simon, Jack and Co. As commander of a rocket ship in the Royal Navy, Golding also knew something of how people behave in emergencies. At the end of the novel, Ralph, running for his life from

the spear-wielding boys, runs smack into a naval officer who has just landed on the beach. ‘Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.’ The officer, looking

of Victorian improprieties. Following the ideas of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes, Fowles provides more than one ending: luckier than the readers of 1869, those of 1969 were free to choose. A simple interest in the dilemmas of the Victorian love-triangle is trumped by a modern understanding which the reader is invited to share with the author. The double perspective is piquant but less satisfying than a real Hardy novel. Similar perspectives work better in two recent ‘Victorian’ novels, Possession (1990) by A(ntonia) S(usan) Byatt (1936-), about the dangers of poetic research, and Oscar and Lucinda (1988) by the Australian Peter Carey, based on Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son and episodes of colonial history.

Jim Dixon, of Kingsley Amis’s first novel, Lucky Jim (1953), Jimmy Porter of Look Back in Anger (1956) and Joe Lampton of John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957) were called ‘Angry Young Men’ by journalists. Whether they rose like Joe or stuck like Jimmy, they did not accept inferiority. Anti-establishment voices were heard in the novels of Alan Sillitoe (1928- ) and John Wain (1925-95). The significance of these writers is a broadly social one; a loweris substituted for an upper- middle-class point of view. Amis’s Dixon, however, is a genuine comic invention, a lower-middle-class provincial lecturer incurably hostile to all forms of pretension, especially the painfully high culture of his madrigal-singing Professor. Lucky Jim is excellent farce. Amis’s later novels developed Dixon’s talent for taking off pseuds and bores. He was a verbal caricaturist of wicked accuracy, a craftsman of the grotesque, but increasingly a curmudgeon, though Lucky Jim remains the most vigorous of university novels.

The more lasting revolution of the 1960s came in sexual rather than class attitudes, as picked by Philip Larkin in his ‘Annus Mirabilis’:

Sexual intercourse began in 1963, Which was just too late for me, Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP.

This joke offers dates for some changes: the introduction of the female contraceptive pill; leave to print four-letter words; the triumph of pop music. The notion that

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sexual inhibition is bad and explicitness good has had consequences. The spread of female contraception coincided with a new claim for equality of opportunity for women, both in employment and in relationships outside or without marriage; there was also an explicit claim for parity of esteem for literature devoted to women’s experience. The radical South African writer Doris Lessing (1919-) was angrier about men and race than the young men were about class. A challenge to heterosexuality as the norm, and a plea for same-sex relationships to be accepted, is heard in the plays of Joe Orton (1933-67). Some feminists aspired to women-only social arrangements.

Poetry

Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, friends at St John’s College, Oxford, were suspicious of high culture. They preferred jazz, beer and mockery to madrigals, wine and Romanticism. Lucky ]im ends with Jim Dixon’s attack on the myth of Merrie England. Larkin’s poem ‘Church Going’ probes uneasily the reasons why churches are visited. Larkin also questioned the authenticity of a poetic ‘myth kitty’, the religion and myth drawn on by Eliot, Yeats and earlier poets. For him those myths were dead. These Oxford English graduates doubtful of high culture were soon among its trophies: Amis a Cambridge lecturer, Larkin the librarian of Hull University. Their suspicion of pretension turned into a general irony.

Poetry has become a minority taste. The only true poets who have approached popularity between John Betjeman and Seamus Heaney have been Larkin, Hughes (and, posthumously, his wife Sylvia Plath), and Tony Harrison. There have been many good poets, and a fine anthology could be made of English verse 1955-2000. But the position of poetry within literature has been weakened, like literature itself, by media competition and social change in an age of celebrity. Few people spend an evening reading. Poets who require the highest kinds of attention, such as Geoffrey Hill, find few readers. The enthusiasm with which identifiable groups responded to the American ‘Beat’ poets, or to John Betjeman or Sylvia Plath or Tony Harrison, is due to the predispositions of readers as well as to merit in the poets. Subject matter can generate interest: the Holocaust, Northern Ireland, the death of one person, minority politics. Other poetry has had to be sold hard to reach a readership of any size. Few general publications carry any verse; poetry magazines are little magazines. ‘All the literati keep/An imaginary friend’ (Auden, ‘The Fall of Rome’). In a period when novelists have received advances of half a million pounds, none of the poets

Leading British poets: 1955-

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named above has lived off the sales of poems. Larkin said of Amis, a poet turned successful novelist, ‘He has outsoared the shadow of our night’. In 1998 Oxford University Press axed its poetry list. But popularity isn’t everything, and good poetry deserves no less space than good fiction or drama.

Tony Harrison

Tony Harrison (1937-), on the other hand, has been a public poet, writing a clanking pentameter line with punchy rhymes. His degree was in classics, but he also learned from stand-up comics in Leeds about pace, timing and delivery. He has written, translated and adapted a number of theatrical and operatic scripts for international companies.

This theatrical extroversion lends a performative impact to his own verse, which shows a bleakly Gothic range of emotions and a proclaimed and campaigning commitment to the Northern working class. His upbringing contributes richly to his idiom, which is often vulgar in the good sense of the word. Alienation from family by education is rawly recorded in telling poems to his parents in The School of Eloquence, as in ‘A Good Read’, ‘Illuminations’ and ‘Timer’:

Gold survives the fire that’s hot enough to make you ashes in a standard urn. An envelope of coarse official buff

contains your wedding ring which wouldn’t burn.

Harrrison’s long spectacular v., made into a television film, became famous. The title v. is short for versus, Latin ‘against’, as used in football fixtures such as ‘Leeds v. Newcastle’; it also means ‘verse’. It is one of several letters sprayed on his parents’ gravestone by skinheads after a Leeds United defeat. The poem dramatizes personal and cultural conflicts, giving poetry a rare public hearing. A less socially committed poem, more finely expressive of Harrison’s relished gloom, is A

Kumquat for John Keats:

Then it’s the kumquat fruit expresses best

how days have darkness round them like a rind, life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.

Seamus Heaney (b.1939). Peter Edwards, 1987-8.