In August 1977, the actor David Warrilow, who had had such a resounding success with the adaptation of The Lost Ones wrote to Beckett asking him if he would write a solo piece for him to perform. After clarifying what exactly he was after Beckett declined: “My birth was my death. But I could not manage 40 min. (5000 words) on that old chestnut. Not with it now within reach.”
The day afterwards he did however sit down and attempt a piece with the opening words: ‘My birth was my death.’ Written in the first person singular; it was provisionally entitled ‘Gone’.
“It broke down … after a few thousand groans” but he considered it salvageable and returned to it in January 1979 when Martin Esslin wrote to him to ask if he had an unpublished work that could appear in The Kenyon Review. He added a set of stage directions to what had been up till then simply a monologue and, on his severity-third birthday, he posted copies to both Esslin and Warrilow. He considered it “unsatisfactory … I do not expect you to use it,” he wrote to Warrilow.
“The piece drew on childhood memories: “his father teaching him to light a match on his buttocks; the various operations involved in lighting an old-fashioned oil lamp … what his mother had told him about how he was born just as the sun was sinking behind the larches ‘new needles turning green’; a gleam of light catching the large brass bedstead that had stood in his parents’ bedroom.” He had also recently calculated his own age in days and incorporated a figure of “Twenty five thousand five hundred and fifty dawns” in his initial draft.
Interestingly, a few days after Beckett began work on ‘Gone’ he arranged for his whole house to be painted “grey like the proprietor” and, on his return from a trip to Germany seeing the walls now bare and uncluttered, he chose to let them remain that way. As James Knowlson puts it in Damned to Fame (p 650): “Life here emulated art, or at least echoed the mood that inspired it.”
- Wikipedia
No comments:
Post a Comment