Saturday, March 21, 2009

Life in writing / Geoff Dyer




A life in writing
Geoff Dyer

Something of a literary outlier


'I don't suppose there are many John Berger nuts who are also interested in the first world war, jazz and photography'


Interview by John Crace

Saturday 21 March 2009 00.01 GMT


P
art bad pun, part nod to Thomas Mann, from a writer who is known both as a stylist and for bleeding away the boundaries between the real and the imagined, the title of Geoff Dyer's latest novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, has to be making some kind of statement. But what?

Dyer appears puzzled by the suggestion, preferring a simple narrative explanation instead. He and his wife had been to the Venice Biennale in 2003, had been overwhelmed by the heat and intensity of the occasion, and he had wanted to write a fictional account of it. He quotes George Steiner's observation that, implicit in loving any book is the desire to write a response, though he qualifies this by acknowledging it was more the idea of Mann's Death in Venice as a universal template than the book itself to which he was responding.


"I think I've clearly highlighted it isn't me by calling him Jeff with a J," he says. But he didn't call him John, Jack or Jim, names that would have done away with any confusion from the start. And he does have form. Early on in his 2003 memoir-cum-travelogue, Yoga For People Who Can't be Bothered to Do It, which won the WH Smith travel book award, there is a reference to a Jeff, who is unmistakeably our Geoff.
"Really!" he says, laughing, completely unfazed and unrepentant at being caught out. "I'd forgotten that. So, I was playing with this kind of stuff back then. I must own up to having a fondness for my name! The blurring of fact and fiction is part of the fun, so of course there are parts of me in there.
"I could never write a book where the point-of-view character was a short person, because I just can't imagine what that's like. I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home. But equally, there are lots of things about Jeff that aren't like me at all. The key to his pissed-offness is that he hasn't written any books; my life at least has the illusion of purpose."


But Jeff is still a writer ... You can go round in circles with this stuff. No sooner do you think you've got hold of Geoff than you find you're hanging on to Jeff. It's rather like talking to Dyer in person. From time to time he can blah on a bit, and just when you're thinking he takes himself a bit too seriously, he'll smile, make a few gags at his own expense and say, "Fuck me, that was a load of pretentious crap".
In a writing career - not a word Dyer likes to use - of more than 20 years, he has turned out four novels, including Jeff in Venice, a broad range of non-fiction on subjects as diverse as literary criticism, the first world war and photography that have been garlanded with literary prizes in the UK and the US, and he's also been rewarded with publishing's equivalent of a long-service medal - a collection of his reviews and essays.
His dustjackets are splattered with the sort of quotes from fellow authors you'd be quite happy to have on your gravestone. William Boyd calls him "a true original - one of those rare voices in contemporary literature that never ceases to surprise, disturb and delight"; Zadie Smith likens him to "a postmodern Kingsley Amis: a national treasure"; for David Lodge he is "pure pleasure" and so on.


Which presents a slight problem. Dyer is not an ingenu; he is now 50. Yet he is still something of a literary outlier. "Oh dear," he laughs, "I guess it's my unfailing eye for missing the boat and career self-destruction.
"When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing."
The structure of the new novel is disconcerting. The first "Jeff in Venice" half is familiar Dyer territory: third-person male narrator, Jeff - much the same age and height as Dyer - goes to Venice for the Biennale, gets a bit wasted on drugs and booze and has an intense affair with an impossibly attractive, much younger American woman, Laura.
So for the "Death in Varanasi" sequence you're rather expecting some kind of resolution to Jeff and Laura's relationship. Instead, you get a first-person narrative from someone who may or may not be Jeff - it's never made explicit, though you rather assume he is - who accepts a travel writing gig to Varanasi and never comes back. And by the time you finally twig that Laura isn't going to reappear, that she's been left in mid-air, mid-book, it's hard not to feel a little cheated.
"With my usual unerring eye for commercial suicide," he says, "I originally wanted to subtitle the book 'A Diptych' to make clear the two stories were separate. But I was urged not to, and when I saw a mock-up of the front cover with the word 'diptych' on it, I thought, 'Oh God, that's too pretentious even for me'. So I agreed to knock it off. But I'm beginning now to wonder if I shouldn't have let it stand.
"When I sent a first draft to a friend in Canada," he says, "he advised me to make the connections between the two halves much more explicit. And my immediate response was, 'yes you're right', and I started rewriting it in that way. But then I thought, 'hold on, you've never been a big story-teller or plot maker, so why play to my weakness?' Rather than trying to solve the problem, I decided to do away with it and make the two halves distinct. So it's not clear whether the second half even chronologically follows the first or if it's the same person; just as everyone is an avatar of someone else in Hindu myth, so the characters are different incarnations of each other."
If you really want to get to grips with his authorial identity, Dyer himself suggests, you are better off thinking of each book as a small part of a larger whole that comprises the unity of the Dyer experience than as separate entities in themselves.
"If you just take me as a fiction writer, then you're probably going to find me fairly limited. I don't come up with great story lines and my three previous novels [The Colour of Memory (1989), The Search (1993) and Paris Trance (1998)] could all loosely be said to be about the same thing - a group of friends having a good time together."
Dyer calls The Colour of Memory "a bit of a mess, though with lyrical passages of which I remain quite fond", while The Search gets a brutal "it sank without trace".
While his fiction may feel a bit samey and lightweight, his non-fiction is anything but. As ever with Dyer, you have to issue a warning about possible category errors. Non-fiction for him is really just another location on the fiction continuum, and versions of Geoff/Jeff are as likely to turn up there as anywhere else; but, given this, the range of subject matter is prolifically diverse. And, unlike his fiction, there is no sense - apart from a lightness of touch and flashes of comedy - that you are getting a standard Dyer take on a subject. In Ways of Telling, Dyer took on John Berger, a literary hero whom he has gone on to outdo in the range of his output; The Missing of the Somme is a mini-masterpiece on memory and loss inspired by a chance visit to the first world war Thiepval Memorial; But Beautiful is a lyrical, offbeat homage to the jazz greats; Out of Sheer Rage manages to pull off the impossible - an engaging book on Dyer's failure to write a serious critique of DH Lawrence; Yoga for People Who Can't be Bothered to Do It is part-travelogue, part-memoir, part-history, and should by rights be a total mess but somehow hangs together; and in The Ongoing Moment he came up with a series of scholarly essays on photography that had professional snappers drooling in admiration despite Dyer's flip but frank admission that "he can't be bothered to take pictures himself when he goes abroad because it's too much effort".
As he admits, he's rather gone out of his way not to build a following. "I don't suppose there are many Berger nuts who are also interested in the first world war, jazz and photography. But I've always taken the view that I'll write what I want to write. Whenever a publisher asks me what I'm going to do next I say, 'Whatever the fuck I want.' After all, it's me that's going to be stuck indoors doing the hard work, so I might as well try and enjoy it."
So if someone suggested he do a book on tennis - Dyer plays as often as his increasingly wonky knees allow, and the hallway to his flat is stuffed with trainers and cans of balls - where he takes on Federer, Nadal and Murray, he'd turn it down on principle? "Er, as a matter of fact, I have proposed something like that already," he confesses.
This might offer his publisher and agent a chink of hope, but you can't help feeling that Dyer's determined anti-careerism will be making them a little anxious. After roughly 15 years of being published by Little, Brown, Jeff in Venice is his first outing for Canongate, and the idea behind the move must be to try to take him over the line from cult to mainstream. "Writers switch publishers the whole time. The reason I went to Canongate was that my American agent, who also represents Jeffrey Eugenides, told [Canongate publisher] Jamie Byng that 'Geoff' was thinking of moving publishers. Jamie thought he was in with a chance of getting Eugenides, and by the time he realised it was me it was too late to back out."
It's that old Geoff/Jeff thing again.
There's also the matter of what Dyer quite happily calls his "arrested development". Search through his books and you'll find barely a mention of children. "I've never had any desire either to have children or to write about them," he says. "The things that interest me now are pretty much the same things that interested me when I was in my early 20s." This could have restricted his development as a writer, but Dyer has made it work for him. On a practical level, he hasn't needed to sell out for a bigger advance as, without anyone else to worry about, he's been quite happy single-mindedly bumping along in the pursuit of the writer's life; and on an artistic level, he's had little interference to distract him.
Out of Sheer Rage, Dyer's non-book about DH Lawrence, is a case in point. It works so well precisely because he left it far too long to write the book that he originally wanted to write - a serious critique - that he ended up with an extremely funny and arguably even more serious book about the deadening effects on literature of the kind of leaden critical theory he had been planning to write. It's a book that only Dyer could have written; not just for its panache but because you can't imagine anyone else getting round to it. For him, it was a book he simply had to get out of his system. "Lawrence had always been a huge influence on me since university," he says. Apart from their explicit depictions of sex, it's hard to see too many parallels between the two; where Lawrence tends to the florid, intense and overwrought, Dyer is pared down, relaxed and comic. So what was the attraction? "Class."
Dyer comes across as the quintessential, slightly bohemian, north-London literary man. He talks softly, with a vaguely classless, metropolitan accent, and his Camden flat has all the accessories - wood floors and joss sticks - you'd associate with the alternative middle-class. "Yes," he smiles. "There's something about coming from Cheltenham that makes everyone snigger and think of a refined gentility.
"But my father was a sheet-metal worker and my mother was a school dinner lady and hospital cleaner. Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming to be from the wrong side of the tracks; we were a perfectly respectable, hard-working family. But we were poor: I was just one of those working-class boys who did well out of the grammar school system and went to Oxford.

"Oxford was the perfect grounding for becoming a writer," he says, tongue in cheek. "With no lectures and just one tutorial per week, I got used to the idea of only doing what I wanted when I wanted. So living in Brixton, signing on the dole and trying to get by doing reviews for City Limits felt like a natural segue; I'm not sure how happy my parents were about it, mind."
His reinvention has certainly paid off. He spent most of the 1990s abroad - France, the US and all destinations between - in pursuit of misery and muses, but this century he's been an almost ever-present figure on the London literary scene. His address book drips with writerly celebs, he's not shy of the odd party - "It's a lot more fun than staying at home or going to the pub, and the conversation's a lot better" - and his reviewing has lost some of its sharpness now he's one of the great and the good. "You can only review a friend's book if you really like it," he says a little awkwardly. "If you write and say you hate it, you can't really remain friends with them."
You'd think, then, that Dyer was now pretty much where he'd always wanted to be. "Not really," he says. "I'd really like to be living in California. Ever since I first went there in my 20s I've felt I was born to be a West Coast writer. I just love it there and have fantasies about hanging out with Dave Eggers. I feel I'd notice things there, that I just don't here. In London, I'm just one of the crowd, staring at the ground, moaning and groaning."
What's keeping him here, then? "My wife, Rebecca," he says gloomily. "She's got a good job here and really doesn't fancy moving to America." But what about the For Sale sign outside the flat? "It's only an incremental move to Islington or Clerkenwell. You should never underestimate the power of inertia."
Not that you would count on inertia winning out indefinitely. A self-confident, single-minded only child with precious little baggage, Dyer is used to living by his own rules - both as a writer and in his everyday life - and to getting what he wants. He hasn't made too many compromises so far, and you can't see him making too many in the future. And even the ones he has made, he regrets.
"An editor said that one of the sex scenes in Paris Trance made him feel a bit queasy and would I take it out?" he says. "I reluctantly agreed, but I should have been a little bolder, a little more fearless."
When I get back to the office there's an email from Dyer. "I'd rather you didn't go into details of the sex scene I cut. My parents will probably read this, and I don't want to upset them." Whatever happened to bold and fearless?

Dyer on Dyer


"Laura's flight was at two in the afternoon. It was eleven in the morning now. He lay on her bed, head aching, holding a tissue to his bleeding nostril, watching her pack. The white dress, the red and gold one she had bought in Laos, the navy blue dress - all were folded neatly into her wheelie. It was like an awful inversion of a striptease but it was worse than that too, like watching her prepare things to take with her into the afterlife - the after-Venice life, the after-him life - and leaving him for dead."
This comes towards the end of the Venice part of the book, set during the 2003 Biennale. The bleeding nose is not the result of a fight but of excessive partying which Laura can take in her stride but which has proved a bit much for Jeff - he's not Mann enough, as a friend joked. They only met in Venice three nights previously and already time is running out. It also sets the scene for the second part of the book when Atman is sort of reincarnated in Varanasi. The two parts are connected not by plot but by dozens of little chimes and echoes.



Sunday, March 8, 2009

Beckett / Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett / In Godot we trust



In Godot we trust

As major new productions of Samuel Beckett's masterpiece Waiting for Godot open in Britain and on Broadway, David Smith argues that the playwright's genius lay in creating a work that, more than half a century on, still speaks to audiences, particularly in troubled times. Below, we speak to those involved in some landmark productions

David Smith, Imogen Carter and Ally Carnwath
Sunday 8 March 2009


T
wo homeless old men wait in a bare road with a single tree. They are in no particular time or place - nowhere and everywhere. Over two days they argue, get bored, clown around, repeat themselves, contemplate suicide, and wait. They're waiting for the one who will never come. They're waiting for Godot.


Vivian Mercier wrote in the Irish Times in 1956 that Samuel Beckett had "written a play in which nothing happens, twice". Fifty-six years after its first performance, a watershed in world drama at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris, nothing is still happening, twice - twice over. A new UK production of Waiting for Godot, with Sir Ian McKellen as Estragon and Patrick Stewart as Vladimir, began a national tour last week at the Malvern Festival Theatre and comes to the West End at the end of April. And an American revival, with Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin as the time-torn tramps, opens next month on Broadway.
Does theatre have a purpose when the world's financial system is in downturn, or rather recession, or rather depression? There may be a play to come that will dissect the avarice, incompetence and structural causes of the malaise. But often the most eloquent response is the most indirect. Man on Wire, the Oscar-winning documentary about Philippe Petit's high-wire walk between New York's Twin Towers in 1974, has been described as the most powerful 9/11 film yet made, precisely because it does not mention 9/11.
Waiting for Godot seems to have a unique resonance during times of social and political crisis. As a modernist existential meditation it can at first appear bleak: "They give birth astride of a grave," says Pozzo. "The light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." But it is also funny and poetic, and reveals humanity's talents for stoicism, companionship and keeping going.


Now it resonates again. Another towering human structure, capitalism, is trembling at the foundations. Where there was certainty, there is now doubt and angst. Consumerism is on the retreat, and the acquisition of material objects is a dead end. It is a moment for introspection and stripping down to bare essentials. There is no drama more stripped down and essential than Godot, whose mysteries Beckett refused to elucidate beyond "the laughter and the tears".
"It speaks to us in extremis," says Sean Mathias, director of the new UK production. "It's perfect timing to do it here because many individuals are affected by what's happening in the world with economics. The ground is shifting - for some dramatically, for others subtly - underneath our feet. When you have to rearrange your outside life - people worrying about their lack of money and all those kinds of things - it can't not have an effect on your inside life.



"This play speaks about what it is to be human at the most animal and spiritual level, so subtly that it's like a big beautiful poem or piece of music. It doesn't lecture you, it's not polemic, it's not coarse. It's written so subtly that its lessons are almost biblical. It teaches you in a very gentle, intelligent way and I think it's very relevant today."
Landmark productions of the play in the past half century have touched a nerve, or been designed as a catalyst for change, in troubled societies all over the world. An all-black Godot in South Africa implied a wait for the end of apartheid. Productions in California's San Quentin prison and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina captured a restless present and yearning for renewal.
Susan Sontag's production in a Sarajevo under siege in 1993 was dubbed "Waiting for Clinton". She said simply: "Beckett's play, written over 40 years ago, seems written for, and about, Sarajevo." There were objections that its world view was too pessimistic for people already in despair. She replied that not everyone, even in a war zone, craves popcorn escapism. "In Sarajevo, as anywhere else, there are more than a few people who feel strengthened and consoled by having their sense of reality affirmed and transfigured by art."
It might have been about Sarajevo, but it is about all the other places, too. Like Shakespeare, Godot is a receptacle into which audiences can pour their preoccupations. Even a great work such as Arthur Miller's The Crucible operates on two discernible levels: the literal story of the Salem witch trials, and the metaphorical narrative of McCarthyism. But Beckett is taut and unyielding, his art abstract, his conclusion opaque. An explanation would be an intrusion. Who, or what, is Godot? Whatever you want it to be.
Sir Tom Stoppard, who first saw it in Bristol in the late 1950s, says: "The play is a universal metaphor precisely because it wasn't designed as being a metaphor for anything in particular. The true subject matter of Waiting for Godot is that it's about two tramps waiting for somebody. It's not the case that the true subject matter is in the metaphor. Plays which are designed to be a metaphor for particular correlatives have, I imagine, a very short lifespan. And then of course, there's the writing and the humour.
"On one level Godot is like a long poem. Certainly it doesn't need to gain strength from its time and place; it has its own strength. It's one of the few plays that really stand the test of time because there's just nothing spare in it. When plays and books go off like fruit, the soft bits go first. Godot doesn't really have any of those."
If it is like anything, Godot is a piece of music, reaching beyond the literal. Ronald Pickup, who worked with Beckett in the 1970s ("it was like meeting Mandela or Gandhi"), recalls: "One of the great discoveries I had working with him was his huge sense of rhythm. When we follow the sheer music - because, along with everything else, he's a great poet - the play flows and eddies and twists and turns and stops and sweeps quite beautifully."


Pickup, who plays Lucky in the new British production, adds: "It is simply so tuned to people in any situation, whether in Sarajevo, or here in London in the recession, or in Zimbabwe with everything that's going on there. There is so much to instantly relate to without even having to make an effort. It leaps off the stage and is hugely emotional and compassionate and funny. You forget it's a metaphor and just engage with it."
Beckett stayed true to his writing. A recurring theme emerges from those who worked him: he had no wish to "explain" the metaphor, to clear up the mystery of Godot's identity. Sir Peter Hall, who directed the British premiere at the Arts Theatre in 1955, and has come back to the play four times since, recalls: "He didn't operate like that. It was practicalities: he would say, Estragon and Vladimir are like a married couple who've been together too long, they grow old day by day. If you said to Sam, 'What does that line mean?' he'd take the book and say, 'What does it say?' That's quite a good thing for a dramatist to do.
"It's fairly obvious Godot can be anything you want. The great thing Beckett did was to say there is such a thing as metaphorical theatre. Godot's a metaphor for religions, philosophy, belief, every kind of thing you can think of, but it never arrives. We do die, however - this we know. But Sam didn't talk about death, he didn't give lectures about what his play meant."
Director Anthony Page, currently rehearsing the new Broadway Godot, worked with Beckett when he directed Britain's first uncensored version of the play in 1964. "Beckett didn't want to theorise," he remembers. "He said he'd written the play without knowing what was going to come next. He just wrote it, hearing these voices. He simply wanted to communicate the tone of the voice, what was happening between the characters. He said that the laughter and the tears were all that mattered."
Neither of the new productions will attempt to spin a directorial interpretation around the crashes of the City or Wall Street. For the text is the perfect statement of futility and redemption, of lying in the gutter but looking at the stars, and audiences who seek the pattern of their own fears will find it for themselves. A hundred years from now, the recession, it must be hoped, will be in the history books, but Vladimir and Estragon will still be on a stage somewhere - still waiting for Godot.
 Waiting for Godot is on tour until 25 April then at Theatre Royal Haymarket, London SW1, from 30 April.


Sarajevo, 1993

Haris Pasovic

Produced Susan Sontag's staging in the besieged Sarajevo in 1993. Now director, East West Theatre Company in Bosnia.
"Susan Sontag came to Sarajevo in 1993; her son David was reporting on the war, and she offered to help in whatever way she could. Her decision to stage Waiting for Godot helped make history: the production brought so much media attention to Sarajevo. Ultimately it was the journalists who saved Sarajevo and the production of Waiting for Godot played a role in that. At one point the Washington Post referred to the play as "Waiting for Clinton" and we were very happy with this connection.
"Susan initially wanted to stage Beckett's Happy Days, but when I explained that what we were doing in Sarajevo was waiting, she decided on Waiting for Godot. At that time, people really thought it was just a matter of time before somebody would rescue the city. It was outrageous that, at the end of the 20th century, on live TV, the world could see daily bombardments of the city, and do nothing. Every single day we thought that our Godot would come and every night we understood that he wouldn't.
"The production featured three different couples playing Vladimir and Estragon, one all-female, one all-male and one mixed. I liked this staging because it suggested that the couple's plight was universal. People risked their lives coming five to 10km on foot to the theatre because there was no public transport. We performed by candlelight because there was no electricity. Trying to find candles was a major problem, as was the malnourishment of all of our actors. Susan stole rolls for them from her hotel breakfast. Yes, it was a struggle to put on the show, but it brought our message to the world."

Imogen Carter


New Orleans, 2007

Wendell Pierce

Starred as Vladimir in the Classical Theatre of Harlem's outdoor production in New Orleans, 2007.
"My family lost everything to Hurricane Katrina, so when Christopher McElroen, the director of the Classical Theatre of Harlem, asked if I was interested in performing in his production of Waiting for Godot - set in post-Katrina New Orleans - I immediately accepted. Chris had seen a photograph of two guys floating on a door during the floods which immediately reminded him of Gogo and Didi [Estragon and Vladimir] and inspired him to direct Waiting for Godot
"Initially, we performed on a New York stage flooded by 15,000 gallons of water. Later, in collaboration with the artist Paul Chan and Creative Time, we mounted the production outdoors in New Orleans's ninth ward, surrounded by square miles of homes that had been destroyed. The show was not only commemorative but also cathartic; it allowed us to grieve and to rebuild.
"People identified Godot as FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] in its lack of response to the crisis. But we knew that Godot also symbolised our very existence which had disappeared; our neighbourhood was no longer there, and we feared it would not return. After Katrina, many survivors were asking 'Should I give up?' and Waiting for Godot offered the answer, 'We must go on.'
"I remember another pertinent line from the play: 'At this moment, at this place and time, all mankind is us; let us do something while we have the chance.' The audience's reaction was stunned silence - it was like a prayer recited on hallowed ground. A classic such as Waiting for Godot speaks across generations directly to each audience member.
"We've lost an understanding of the role that the arts can play in our communities, but years from now, when kids ask 'What did you do when we lost the city of New Orleans?', I'll feel proud to say I performed a play that gave hope to thousands of people and honoured those we had lost." 
IC

France, 1991

Bruno Boussagol 

Directed a rare all-female production for Brut de Béton Theatre Company at the Avignon festival in 1991
"I put Waiting for Godot on the same level as the Greek plays: it asks questions of theatre that are extremely difficult to resolve. I chose only to use women in my 1991 production for Avignon because I was convinced that female actresses introduce a range of acting possibilities that is broader than for men. When putting on Waiting for Godot, you are very limited in your possibilities, because Beckett specified how it should be played. So using just female actresses was an enormous step. Perhaps, because the actor is a woman, there is an anomaly that is consistent with Beckett, a writer who is completely unexpected and unpredictable. The Beckett estate said I didn't have the right to do it, so then it became a question of principle. For me, no writer can impose his view on a production. So I launched a case to put the production on in Avignon and it was the first time in the history of the French theatre that a director has had his production upheld by the law.
"The play was boycotted by the press, but the audience was full and no one walked out or complained; there was lots of applause. I believe that I was truer to Beckett than lots of other directors. I wanted to try to recapture the atmosphere of when Waiting for Godot was first put on. There was a real shock, an intellectual shock to the public." 
Ally Carnawath

San Quentin, 1962 & 63

Rick Cluchey

Played Vladimir in two productions in San Quentin Prison in 1962 and 1963. One of the pioneers of theatre in prisons, after parole he worked with Beckett. Now runs Theatre in Prisons
In 1957, the San Francisco Actors Workshop put on Waiting for Godot in San Quentin Prison. It was highly anticipated - the Actors Workshop was probably the greatest American theatre at the time. I was an inmate, but I didn't see it: my sentence was life without parole for a violent armed robbery, and they wouldn't unlock my cell after dark. My cell partner came back from seeing it; he kept me up all night, everyone was high on the experience. I remember him saying "everyone was puzzled until one guy came in with a rope around his neck and another guy whipping him and guess what his name was? Lucky!" That spoke to everyone in the audience.
In 1962, we set up the San Quentin Drama Workshop and staged Waiting for Godot in a boxing ring. Having the most wicked of sentences, I needed something to relieve the despair.
In prison, you're in limbo, trapped in the greyness of your own uniform of flesh. Waiting for Godot resonates with the incarcerated because it depicts a vacant landscape and characters imprisoned within themselves, but with great humour. Beckett approved of our work at San Quentin and we later became great friends. He told me that, when he fled from the Gestapo with his wife in 1941, they spent many nights in abandoned prisons, and I'm sure that influenced his work in some way: empty prisons are full of ghosts. 
IC

South Africa, 1976

Benjy Francis

Directed and starred as Pozzo in an all-black production at the Market Theatre, Cape Town, 1976. Now director of Afrika Cultural Centre, Johannesburg.
"Before I staged Waiting for Godot, Beckett had refused to let anyone perform his play in South Africa because he was so opposed to apartheid. When I began work on the show, I became the Market Theatre's first resident black director; until then, blacks couldn't work in the theatre and mixed-race audiences were forbidden.
"I deliberately had an all-black cast, but I didn't intend to create the "Waiting for the end of apartheid Godot": I wanted to depict my own struggle under apartheid. The desolation and boredom in Waiting for Godot was reminiscent of what we were going through in the Seventies. Political movements were banned and there was a conspiracy of silence that echoed in Beckett's work.
"It was very difficult for me to walk on stage as Pozzo with a whip and my slave, Lucky, tethered to me by ropes. That image was very provocative in South Africa, as it graphically depicted the master-servant relationship engendered by apartheid. In fact, I wasn't even supposed to play Pozzo, but the original actor couldn't leave home following the Soweto riots of June 1976, which saw hundreds killed and postponed the opening of my show by several weeks.
"Ultimately, Waiting for Godot is a very positive play, which talks about the resilience of human beings. The tree was central to my staging; when it started to sprout leaves in act two, that sent a powerful message to oppressed people - it suggested new life and resolution, an image of hope against all the desolation. Every night, the show received standing ovations. Its impact was monumental: Waiting for Godot provided a powerful metaphor of our struggle which allowed me to get past the censor and speak to my people." 
IC



Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Leonardo Padura / Top 10 Cuban novels



Leonardo Padura's top 10 Cuban novels

Hemingway and Hijuelos are here, but the author of the Havana Quartet also looks beyond the Cuba we think we know to introduce some of the island's more hidden literary treasures


Leonardo Padura
Wed 4 Mar 2009 13.05 GMT

Leonardo Padura was born in 1955 in Havana and lives in Cuba. He has published a number of short-story collections and literary essays but international fame came with the Havana Quartet, all featuring Inspector Mario Conde. Like many others of his generation, Padura had faced the question of leaving Cuba, particularly in the late 80s and early 90s, when living conditions deteriorated sharply as Russian aid evaporated. He chose to stay.

Cuba is a country of poets. It would almost be too easy to select 10 poets or books of poetry that play a key role in the short history of Cuban literature. But there are excellent – and diverse – Cuban novelists, too few of whom are available in English translation. The 10 I've picked here will hopefully give some idea of both the country's literary tradition, and its imaginative life.

Street Art
Havana, 2015
Photo by Triunfo Arciniegas

1. Explosion in a Cathedral (El siglo de las luces) by Alejo Carpentier (1962, trans. John Sturrock)

I am convinced that this is the highpoint of the Cuban novel, the perfect fiction and supreme expression of stylistic and conceptual ambition in narrative prose. In this account of the impact of the French Revolution in the Caribbean, the theme is the tragic destiny that awaits all revolutions: the failure of their grand aims and the perversion of their beautiful ideals.

2. Cecilia Valdés Or El Angel Hill (Cecilia Valdés) by Cirilo Villaverde (1882, trans. Helen Lane)

This is considered to be one of the best examples of 19th century realism and romanticism in Spanish and the finest evocation of Cuban customs of that era. Its characters departed the novel's pages long ago to become prototypes of what it means to be Cuban. The most beautiful and tragic love story ever written in Cuba, it also encompasses the horrors of the African slave trade and gives full literary expression to the city of Havana. It is the classic.

3. Three Trapped Tigers (Tres tristes tigres) by Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1967, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine & Donald Gardner)

This is the book which created a literary language of Havana. It's a kind of cathedral of words, and no translation could do it full justice, but readers throughout the world have enjoyed Cabrera Infante's fiction thanks to his wit and the stories he welds together in an unrivalled portrait of 1950s Havana nightlife, the golden age of Cuban music and the city. Once you've read this, Havana will never look the same again.

4. Paradiso by José Lezama Lima (1974, trans. Gregory Rabassa)

Admired rather than read or valued, and in many ways poetry rather than fiction, Paradiso is one of the most influential novels in the Spanish language. Written in a completely different register to the baroque of Carpentier or colloquial of Cabrera Infante, the author's mastery of language has created a whole school of "Lezamian" writers. In Paradiso, as in any poet's novel, the way the story is told is more important than the story itself and the digressions much more than mere anecdotes. It is a magnificent exercise in style.

5. The Lost Steps (Los pasos perdidos) by Alejo Carpentier (1953, trans. Harriet de Onís)

Carpentier yet again: we could also include in this list his 1949 novel The Kingdom of This World (1957), which gave birth to the aesthetic of "the real and marvellous from America". As in all his work, Carpentier's perspective is universal: he uses the journey of a western intellectual to the heart of the South American jungle to narrate the physical possibility of going back in time to the origins of civilisation. Its great merit, however, is the way it makes us feel the vicissitudes experienced by the novel's musician protagonist, who understands that individuals have no choice but to accept the time and history fate has dealt them.

6. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)

This is, of course, the best-known novel about Cuba by a non-Cuban author. And that's fair enough: thanks to The Old Man and The Sea Hemingway was awarded the Nobel prize, the gold medal for which still sits in the famous shrine to Our Lady of Charity at El Cobre, the Caribbean version of the Virgin Mary who is Cuba's patron saint. Although it merely recounts the story of a fisherman who after eighty-four days of "bad luck" finally makes a big catch, the novel is also about man's willpower and spirit of endurance. A beautiful fable for the human condition.

7. Temporada de ángeles (1983), Lisandro Otero; A Season For Angels, not translated.

Another great Cuban novel that is not set in Cuba: it goes back to the English Industrial Revolution, the beheading of Charles I and rule by Oliver Cromwell. It too makes a critique, from a literary perspective, of the fate of the great ideals of justice, freedom and equality. And of the perversity of politicians.

8. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Óscar Hijuelos

Hijuelos was born in Cuba but has lived in the United States from childhood and wrote this Pulitzer-prize winning work in English. Significantly, it is a novel created from all the stereotypical features that have gone into the construction of the image of Cubans for foreigners: their music, dancing, passion as lovers and romantic, rebellious spirit. Although there are more important novels written in Cuba from a literary point of view, the great international success of The Mambo Kings and its nostalgic portrait of a Cuba that is more dream than reality, make it a necessary player in the field of the Cuban novel.

9. Antes que anochezca (1990), Reinaldo Arenas; Before Night Falls, trans. Dolores M. Koch (1993)

A novel in every sense of the word, even though the raw materials are more or less real episodes from the more or less real life of its author, Reinaldo Arenas, one of the most intense, maudit, and visceral of Cuban writers. Arenas wrote and published this heartrending work just before his lonely and equally heartrending death in freezing New York. Its style, exuberance and rage are the stuff of great fiction, as was its author.

10. El negrero (1933), Lino Novás Calvo; The Slave-trader, not translated

This novel doesn't take place in Cuba, but mainly in the slave-trading centres on the coasts of Africa and in the boats that transported their human cargo to the island: the Africans who have contributed so much to Cuba's economic, cultural, religious and ethnic riches. The Slave-trader (the story of Pedro Blanco from Málaga, one of the last slave-traders from the middle of the 19th century) is a wonderful novel that, alongside Faulkner's, inspired Gabriel García Márquez and Juan Rulfo, the creators of the Latin American magical-realist novel.

Translated by Peter Bush