A book
that changed
me
Waiting for Godot taught me the difference between being smart and being intellectual
Samuel Beckett was irreverent yet profound, and able to sustain my interest despite nothing happening. I was mesmerised
Nicholas Lezard
Sunday 10 August 2014
W
hisk yourself back in time, if you will, to 1978. A young man, fresh from success at his O-levels, has decided he wants to do English at A-level. It should involve, surely, little more strenuous activity than reading books, which he’d be doing anyway; and besides, he knows the language, so it will be a break from the other A-levels he has elected to do, viz French and German. And then, too late for him to back out even if he had wanted to, he is handed a reading list for the summer holidays.
I cannot now remember that whole reading list; as the memory of those days recedes in the distance, I remember only two: Middlemarch and Waiting for Godot. Middlemarch I had vaguely heard of. And there had been a school production of Waiting for Godot a year or two beforehand, with an intriguing-looking poster, but if anyone thought that I, as a 13- or 14-year-old boy, was going to stay after school to watch a play, then they must have been nuts.A couple of years later, that is, by the time of these particular summer holidays, I was coming round slowly to the idea of culture as a desirable thing, despite some concerted efforts by certain teachers to put me off. I was a conscientious young man; but also, unfortunately, an indolent one. (Plus ça change, you might say.) This meant that it took a large part of the summer holidays before I got round to doing any of the reading I was meant to do, although I had spent a lot of them worrying about it. In the end, I had a week left.
Reader, you cannot imagine the effect it has on the adolescent mind of having to read Middlemarch in a week. I thought 120 pages a day would be a doddle; but 120 pages of densely printed Victorian prose, about lives I was not even remotely familiar with, were not. I managed it, but it was a pale, exhausted and trembling hand that picked up the – thankfully – scanty pages of Godot.Almost immediately I felt even more comforted. There were only five characters; and one of them the author hadn’t even bothered to name. This boded well. As did the first line of the stage directions: “A country road. A tree. Evening.” Three words, two words, one, like a countdown; or, if you prefer, a little hint of the way Beckett was to strip down his own works to their bones.
From the first page, I was mesmerised and astonished. Here was a mind that seemingly took everything and nothing seriously at the same time. I can still recall my impressions from the very first page on: the oddness of the name Estragon, yet its strange harmony with Vladimir; the dry wit of the stage directions (“he broods, musing on the struggle”); the strange mixture of comedy and menace – how Vladimir says “(admiringly) A ditch!” when he learns that Estragon slept in one, and then asks “And they didn’t beat you?” “Beat me? Certainly they beat me.” Something in the tone made it clear that this was not to be referred to again – but not to be forgotten either.
The line “Our being born?” as a suggested answer to the proposal “Suppose we repented” struck a chord with the kind of adolescent who considers “I never asked to be born” an acceptable rebuke; as did the breezy evocation of suicide (“Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first”); and then the first big belly laugh of the play: “The Bible … I must have taken a look at it.”
In short, I was hooked. Here was an author who was irreverent, scatological, yet profound; and also completely uninterested in the conventions of literature yet able, just through language, to sustain our interest despite nothing actually happening. As I discovered more of Beckett – both through my own efforts and those of the kind of inspirational, sympathetic English teacher you used to get so often (hello, Richard Jacobs, if you’re out there) – I followed him through his own journey, and by the time I was writing about him at university I was reading the texts – Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho – as they were published. And as I discovered the details of his life, first from the semi-authorised biography by Deirdre Bair, I realised that not only was his work exemplary, so was his life. Here was someone who had purged himself of vanity, both his own and the world’s; a man of unimpeachable integrity in both work and life.
To say Godot changed me is in one sense perhaps not strictly accurate. For it would not have spoken to me so directly if I had not already been in a state to receive it. Beckett is regarded by many as a fiercely intellectual author, but I suspect that is because some people don’t know the difference between being smart and being intellectual. I later discovered that Beckett was indeed fiercely intellectual, but that he had left the academy behind him, loathed the obfuscation of jargon, and was certainly never the kind of posturing intellectual who gets asked their opinions for the television networks. But from my exposure to Beckett at just the right age, I also ended up learning about, and learning to love, Dante, Joyce, Proust, and every conceivable spin-off or tangent from those great authors. And I suppose that it’s because of Godot that I do what I do for a living. And these days, I even like the occasional Victorian novel.
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