THE MASTER OF GLOOM AND A SORROWFUL JOY

Author: By Kevin Kelly, Globe Staff

Date: Wednesday, December 27, 1989
Page: 1
Section: ARTS AND FILM

But if that was all Beckett had told us, his death this past weekend at the age of 83 might have been just another dead writer's stimulus for carefully arranged crepe and a nice literary dirge.

Beckett told us more, so much more, than gloom and purposelessness. He found in the gloom -- and gloom it was without a falling mote of sentimentality -- a kind of ironically sorrowful joy. In his best-known play, and the 20th century's acknowledged masterpiece, "Waiting for Godot," which was first performed in Paris in 1953, Beckett imagined two tramps, Estragon (Gogo) and Vladimir (Didi), waiting -- marking time -- for the arrival of someone who never appears, the someone as deliberately allusive as God, whose identity may or may not be found in the name Godot. Gogo and Didi are tramps as vaudeville clowns who struggle to entertain themselves through relentless expectancy and weighted silence. Their activity is briefly and dramatically enlivened by the appearance of Pozzo and Lucky, a cruel master and his servant.

Searching for fleas, fingering for cracks in a boot, knocking heads then embracing, challenging riddles, carping, wailing and upstaging each other, Gogo and Didi not only exist inside the oppressive fear of the expected unknown (god or the devil, a relative or an alien), but manage to achieve a measure of happiness. Boredom is the killer. Breath must carry more than breath. There must be thought (however confused), communication and observation. There is, for example, a deliberately taciturn reference to the suffering of Christ. And all of this, as exchanged between Gogo and Didi, is proof that they are living or, as Gogo says, "We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?" The pathos in the question is heightened later when Gogo, staggering, says, "Do you think God sees me?" Didi answers, "You must close your eyes." Didi does. And staggers even worse.

Beckett, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, went on to write other plays, including radio scripts, as well as novels in which the prose
impenetrably thickened ("Watt," 1953, "Malone Dies," 1956, "How It Is," 1964, the latter English versions of French texts published respectively in 195l and 1961). Among the plays after "Waiting for Godot" are three confirmed classics, "Krapp's Last Tape," "Endgame" and "Happy Days." As time went on, the work on the page became ever more taciturn, as though Beckett were fast approaching Shakespeare's "The rest is silence." He defined some of his later pieces as "dramaticules," one of which, "Come and Go," takes approximately 45 seconds in performance, exempting the playwright's stage direction that exits and entrances be accomplished "slow, without sound of feet."

On April 26, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Poets' Theater staged the premiere of what seems to have been Beckett's final text, "Stirrings Still." In 1986, having said that he intended to write nothing more, Beckett sent the beginnings of "Stirrings Still" to Barney Rosset, who had published his work in this country since the 1950s through Grove Press. "Stirrings Still" was eventually expanded to three sections, remaining however within the range of a dramaticule. (The published book, a limited edition at $1,700 a copy, runs 22 pages with big type and rarely more than 150 words on a given page). It is typical Beckett, bleak, beautiful, repetitive, inwardly confusing, sometimes just a private vision largely inaccessible but, nonetheless, haunting. Its first sentences, unpunctuated by commas, might pass as Samuel Beckett's epitaph: "One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go. One night or day. For when his own light went out he was not left in the dark." On the final page there is this, "Time and grief and self so- called. Oh all to end."

kkelly;12/26 LDRISC;12/27,15:55 APPREC27