Lois Overbeck & Brenda Bynum: Discuss Samuel Beckett

Upcoming Beckett Reading with Salman Rushdie, Edward Albee, and Robert Shaw-Smith

The Letters of Samuel Beckett is the first comprehensive edition of the letters of Irish-born writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), providing access to primary sources scattered in archives and private collections world-wide. Through The Letters, students, scholars, critics, and theater artists can trace the evolution of Beckett’s work with increased insight into his choices as a writer. The Letters of Samuel Beckett will enrich our perspective on the arts and life of the twentieth century.

Emory is celebrating the recent publication of Volume 1 of The Letters by Cambridge University Press covering the years 1929 through 1940 with a variety of events from March 17 to 20, 2009. On Tuesday, March 17 at 8:00 p.m. three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee and Emory University Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Salman Rushdie will join actors Brenda Bynum and Robert Shaw-Smith for a special evening of readings of early letters by Samuel Beckett in Glenn Memorial Auditorium entitled Fundamental Sounds: The Early Letters of Samuel Beckett. Emory University Vice President and Secretary Rosemary Magee will engage Edward Albee in a Creativity Conversation that is free and open to the public on Wednesday, March 18 at 3:00 p.m. in Room 102 of Emory’s Center for Ethics, 1531 Dickey Drive.

In 1985, Samuel Beckett authorized Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck to edit his letters. They have gathered and consulted Beckett’s voluminous correspondence (over 15,000 letters) in public and private collections. Other principal collaborators on the project are George Craig, associate editor and French translator; Daniel Gunn, associate editor; and Viola Westbrook, German translator. The four-volume edition will publish letters selected for their bearing on Beckett’s work.

Emory co-sponsors for these events are the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; The Hightower Fund; Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; The Office of the Provost, Luminaries Series; the Emory University Creativity & Arts Strategic Initiative; Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts; the Departments of Comparative Literature, Creative Writing, English, French and Italian, Irish Studies, and Theater Studies.

Lois Overbeck, Research Associate in Emory’s Graduate School and director of the Beckett project at Emory, has published widely on Beckett and modern drama. She was a consultant for the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays; project director of a collaborative, city-wide festival, Beckett/Atlanta (1987); and a coordinator of Atlanta’s Year of Beckett 2006, a festival of performances, lectures, and workshops celebrating Beckett's centennial year. Brenda Bynum, also a coordinator of Atlanta’s Year of Beckett 2006 and one of the readers for Fundamental Sounds, has an extensive resume as a theater performer, teacher, and arts advocate. She has acted and directed professionally since 1962 and has appeared on the stages of the Alliance Theater, as well as most other professional theaters in Atlanta, in a number of roles over the last twenty-five years.

Overbeck and Bynum, long-time friends and colleagues, sat down to discuss their love of all things Beckett, some little-known information about the writer, and the importance of the recently published early letters.

BB: Listening to the letters that we’re going to read next Tuesday [March 17, 8 p.m.], you’re going to hear a lot of things about Beckett you’ve never heard. It’s about Beckett writing to his best friend before he was Beckett. So it’s a young man sounding off, full of himself, and trying to discover who he is in the world.

LO: It is a question also of discovering his defense mechanisms. He’s very insecure about his writing and he’s very insecure about his place in the world. It’s the world of Dublin where he was a student at Trinity College; it’s the world of being Irish in London; it’s the world of discovering Germany several times, both through visiting family there, and especially in 1936-1937 when the influence of the Nazi regime was growing. He was there to study art, he was there to improve his German, and what he discovered about himself was probably the most important thing he took home. Among the various people he met were artists, people whose work had been proscribed, people who couldn’t speak in public because they were Jewish, and artists who couldn’t paint because they’d been forbidden to have paint. He admired them for working on their art despite these restrictions. So it was a revelation for him and he certainly had reason to measure himself against such intense devotion to the craft.

BB: I think it’s our great gift that he wasn’t writing these letters to be published but was writing to close friends. I think another thing that listeners or readers of these letters will adore is his mordant sense of humor. Of course, he’s one of the greatest writers in the English language and his personal writing reflects his own personal language in the way he used words and his whole way of expressing himself.

LO: That raises an important idea of the polyglot nature of his diction throughout this period. There are many languages at play: Greek, Latin, Italian, German, French, and Irish in the sense of patterns of phrase that are typical. Even in early days when he did not know much German he was still playing in the language. Viola Westbrook, who is our German translator and a member of the German department here at Emory, struggled with translating his German letters simply because sometimes he didn’t use the language in a way that any German reader would recognize as normal. There was always that twist or that juxtaposition that showed his mind was leaping forward even if his language proficiency was lagging behind.

He might apologize to his friend Thomas McGreevy sometimes for his crudeness or lack of attention, yet even when he knew that his friend would find his position untenable, Beckett didn’t hesitate to stand his ground. There acceptance of difference marks a deep friendship with McGreevy, and I think that makes these letters free in a way that we won’t have in other later correspondence. This is really free expression. It is also a practice ground for his writing.

It’s also interesting to see how he writes about the same event at different times to different recipients. We have one example of that in the evening of readings where he’s responding both to George Reavey who is his agent for the novel Murphy, and to Mary Manning Howell, a childhood friend living in Boston who had published with Houghton Mifflin and was doing her best trying to interest people in American in Beckett’s novel. To his agent Beckett is outraged when he’s asked for cuts, but the very next day to Mary Manning Howe he goes off on a fantasia of insult and self-deprecation. Seeing those two letters side-by-side is very interesting because we see that he allows himself certain kinds of expression depending on his relation to his correspondent…

BB: …and in that way we recognize ourselves in Beckett. It’s the person to whom you’re speaking or writing who determines your whole point of view and the way you are expressing yourself. There are a few letters in our reading that are to other people, but the bulk of them are to this one person over a period of time…

LO: …and that’s Thomas McGreevy who was also a Trinity graduate and who taught at the École Normale Supérieure before Beckett’s period there and stayed on in Paris when Beckett arrived. McGreevy really taught Beckett a great deal as well as introducing him to Joyce, Jack Yeats, Richard Aldington, and others who formed a supportive circle for Samuel Beckett both in Paris and in Ireland. McGreevy ultimately became the director of the National Gallery of Ireland in 1950.

BB: As you can see, Lois is completely knowledgeable and most articulate on so many of the details and the ramifications. I’m showbiz; what I love is the personality and the heart. I respond to Samuel Beckett 90% emotionally and for the other 10% I try to bring my brain to bear. In particular for this reading on Tuesday night I wanted the audience, many of whom will not know a great deal about Beckett, to sit in the room and fall a little bit in love with this passionate, full of himself, impossible young man.It’s the feeling that you’re in the room with somebody you wish you’d been able to know in those days, wish you’d been able to sit in pubs or cafés with and talk all night. That’s what I’m hoping people will feel like when they hear these letters.

LO: We are thrilled that Edward Albee and Salman Rushdie will participate in this reading. Both of them have publicly expressed the importance that Beckett’s writing has had to their work. The intensity of attention that so many readers have for Beckett’s writing is remarkable. People come to these works and continue to come to them when they need to be refueled. That’s not everybody; a lot of people are dismissive of Beckett because he’s supposedly negative, but I think the strong impact of his work is overwhelmingly the human compassion that it carries. Perhaps this little taste will invite people to go back and read the work again -- and invite Brenda to start over again producing Beckett’s work…

BB: …That is one thing we’re very proud of -- the City of Atlanta is one of the few cities in the world which has seen professional productions of all of Beckett’s plays. That puts us in with Dublin, Paris, London, and New York.

[JM: Has reading Beckett’s early letters changed the way you’ve always thought of him?]

BB: Oh yes. As much as I had been doing Beckett over the years - acting in it, directing it, advocating for it, carrying on about it, teaching it - reading these early letters I discovered the young man. When he started writing these letters he was not much older than I was when I read my first Beckett. I never quite understood why, when I first read the first word of Waiting for Godot in the late fifties, it struck me with such power. I was certainly not prepared to be struck but I knew that something extraordinary had happened to me it. I connected with the human being much more with these letters than I ever have before.

LO: It should be clear to people who may be attending the evening of readings from the letters or are interested in learning about Beckett that he didn’t finish Waiting for Godot until the spring of 1949, and that it was not produced until 1953. He was born in 1906. To say he was a late bloomer is maybe beside the point but, late bloomer though he was, he kept moving and developing and pushing the limits of every genre that he worked in. He was listening to the voices and writing what he heard. He was reticent or refused to talk about his work to scholars and critics, not to be elusive but feeling, rather, that he had nothing to say about his work because he only knew it from the inside. In the letters we have Beckett’s own words about his work, which he didn’t give away to people during his lifetime. He didn’t do interviews. He’d say “I’ll talk to you but I won’t talk about my work,” and so one hears reports of conversations about cricket and tennis and things like that because he was, as anybody else would be, glad to talk about human things.

BB: I think that anybody who’s coming to the event on Tuesday who thinks they know about Beckett will walk out thinking “I didn’t really; everything in there I didn’t know.” It will be a discovery for everyone.

LO: And people who don’t know about Beckett might say “maybe I should put aside what I’ve heard or what my preconceptions are” because this is a new adventure…

BB:…I want to know more. This guy is cool! He really is the sexiest playwright in the world.

[JM: How does the format of the evening work? How did you decide who reads which letters?]

BB: Lois went through the manuscript and pulled the letters that reflected the things she wanted the audience to hear. Then I just did a little trimming and arranging and added a bit of narrative. When it came to assigning parts I was given my cast, which is quite a distinguished one, and I sat down with it and thought thematically and dramatically and rhythmically. I actually went on YouTube and listened to Salman Rushdie and Edward Albee give lectures and speak and read at different events to get their voices in my head. Then I read through the entire manuscript with our other actor, Robert Shaw-Smith, who is a young Irishman. He represents the young Beckett for me in these letters and he will read those letters that deal more with personal and emotional reactions. To Albee and Rushdie I assigned many of the jewels of letters where Beckett is talking about his work, talking about other people’s work, and his reading. I am reading the narration, which is just enough biographical material to help the audience know where we are in the time period from 1929–1940.

[JM: Any final thoughts or comments?]

BB: Beckett rules!

For more information about the project and a complete listing of events, visit http://www.gs.emory.edu/beckettletters

Edited by Jessica Moore
Communications Coordinator
Arts at Emory

Photos:
Top: Lois Overbeck
Botton: Brenda Bynum