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Robert Scanlan is Professor of the Practice of Theatre in the English Department at Harvard University and a world authority on Samuel Beckett. He’s also an extremely nice guy who is great to talk to the way it’s great to talk to anyone about something they love. Both a long-time director and academic, Dr. Scanlan was interviewed in his Cambridge office one afternoon and discussed his favorite writer’s importance, one great play, and what it’s like to meet Samuel Beckett for coffee.

So I want to talk about Godot, which is about to finish its run on Broadway, with Nathan Lane and John Goodman—who said it was the hardest thing he’s ever done. But first off: you knew Becket?

I knew him quite well. The last eight years of his life. We met in January ’81 while I was on a leave in Paris, working with Mabou Mines on an adaptation of one his prose pieces for the stage. So I wrote him a little note and had no idea where to leave it so I left it with his publisher. And three or four days later I got a phone call from him. It was this first of all surprisingly high pitched voice and it just said my name you know “Robert Scanlan” in English and I said “well, yeah” -completely baffled. “This is Samuel Beckett” at which point I start fumbling the phone.

When did you meet?
Our first face-to-face meeting was a couple of days later. We met near his apartment at a little café where he frequently met people, in the lobby of Hotel PLM St. Jacques. So I got there early, ridiculously early, and I was sitting in the lobby looking out on the street as best I could through the windows, and he showed up behind me. Directly behind me. I have no idea how he got there—but suddenly he was there, like an apparition.

Was he very Beckett-looking?
He was wearing a tan suit, without a tie, very natty-looking clothes. But I was struck by the delicacy of his bone structure—his jaw in particular. When you see pictures of him, you’re struck by that eagle look. But instead I noticed his jaw. This delicate jaw, and his wrists. He also had very long fingers. He was an extremely thin person, very tall but very thin.

Does his look help his icon status?
Well, for a reclusive man who hid from publicity I think he’s got one of the most astonishingly well-photographed faces in the world. Though he hated cameras and as a result, whenever he knew someone was taking pictures of him he got very stern. So the look is really unique to when a camera’s around. When a camera was not around, he was a very funny, humorous guy with a lot of very gentle charms. That was pretty much the way it was.

But his iconic status comes from his massive genius and that fact that I think people can pretty confidently say is the single most important writer of the second half of the 20th century. I know of no other writer who hasn’t been profoundly influenced by him. And certainly none in the span of time I’m talking about. And that extends well beyond writers. Visual artists. Musicians. Composers…

Right. I once asked Ken Vandermark, a jazz musician [won the MacArthur], what he was listening to and he said “I’m actually reading a lot of Samuel Beckett.”

[laughs]

Well that’s true of lot of us. You just constantly go back to it as a kind of psychological bible.  It’s interesting you were talking to a jazz player, because jazz is really an instantaneous transcription of consciousness itself. And that’s what Beckett’s specialty was. He brought to writing, to prose writing, that sense of being able to get so deep at the very texture of consciousness itself that he was transcribing it directly.



Yeah. The void.

Once he got that close to what is really the living texture of what we call ourselves—there’s no one it doesn’t apply to. We’re all working with that material. That’s all we got. No matter what we do outward, it all comes from that. And that kind of inner privacy with ourselves, with what we call ourselves—that’s what he was such an extraordinary expert at, and every word he wrote illuminated it and let us all have access to the same space.

Yeah.

So in a funny way he’s completely solipsistic. He’s the most lonely man that ever lived. Certainly all his characters are horrifically isolated, people dying of loneliness, and at the same time it’s one of the great secrets—it’s almost like mystery—is that that becomes the touchtone of the greatest universality possible. In a funny way he’s the best known person because he seemed to be able to crawl inside every single other being’s head.

You mentioned that he often sent you  notes. What were they like?

They were brief. He tended to use this little notepad, and these little note squares that said Samuel Beckett on them. But he never failed to answer a letter or to write a little note for my students on an opening night. And I have my tiny pile of Beckett letters. But they’re not big or important. He wrote long letters to a lot of people, but mine are very courteous, usually full but brief answers to whatever I was inquiring about, and mainly just logistics: Can you meet me at this place? Will you be in town at this time?

OK-time for one of two big ones: Why is Beckett so important today? You could argue that he’s hard to read yet his work is more quintessential than he ever.

That’s a great question. That’s a great question. That’s a great question because, really, for a long time he was the perfect person to emerge after the disaster of World War Two. And when I teach Beckett, I always point out to current students for whom that’s a pretty distant event, the idea of what it must have been like to have just survived the second world war. Fifty million dead over the course of the previous five or six years. That’s staggering, on a global scale, and everybody was in a sort of survivor shock. And not least of course, but most famous, was the opening up of the death camps and the revelation of the Holocaust. That’s indelibly engraved in people’s minds and memories, but in fact, that was just a fraction of the slaughter. But in fact, fifty million, if you count both combatants and non-combatants, that’s a ton of dead people, and a really bewildering sensation. Because first there was the euphoria that the war was over, then second, that wave, which took decades, and is probably still in progress, that sense of absorbing so much pain and grief. The Beckett work immediately was really the first postwar expression that clearly was on that wavelength. I mean, it was just saturated with a sense of gloom and death, and mourning that had to be done.

Godot is inarguably gloomy.

Waiting for Godot has that sense of being in an almost nuclear-devastated landscape. It was never the subject, directly, but it certainly captured its moments, post-nuclear, post-Holocaust, post-World War Two. It’s one of the bleakest things ever written, basically, but a very close tracking of the very process of dying. Which is so huge, really, as a conception, that it’s not just the individual dying but the whole culture dying. Which a lot of people had the overwhelming sense that that was in the air. It’s a great question only because that moment is gone, historically. At the same time we’re all dreading that maybe it’s just around the corner. So modern consciousness, by which we can say, the consciousness of the second world war, is still coping with that, we certainly dread it, every time something like 911, that’s the kind of horrors that are daily taking place in Iraq, we try to expose them, make sense of them, stuff like that. “I don’t know” or “I know it’s not quite the same.” We’ve actually caught onto something deeper and more transcendent than what was an immediate correlation at the time. It fascinates me.

What’s it like teaching Godot now?

My students are of the generation that’s just completely fresh with respect to Beckett’s tale, but it just seems to speak to them as almost nothing else does. It goes right in. My Beckett seminars are over-subscribed, I always get far more people trying to get in than can and when they get in there, I’m just astounded by how deeply people can act.

And I’d love to just think it’s because I’m a great teacher, but it’s because I have great material. I do believe that it’s probably closer to what I said earlier, that Beckett really discovered expressive access to a part of human life that really hadn’t been fully expressed till he came along, or at least, we hadn’t made pathways where we can walk right up to what I call the texture of consciousness itself. And the texture of consciousness has got to be a physiological thing itself, that place in the brain where cells are firing off neurons and things. I frequently describe it in class as a kind of Saint Elmo’s Fire just shimmering over an organic brain. So that’s actually what we call ‘our self,’ so the mystery of being able to stir these imaginative landscapes but also just the process of his writing, to suddenly be able to really retread in there and touch them. That’s like a permanent link between peoples’ abilities to understand themselves and to express themselves.

I’m a theatre professor, primarily, and when I get to go back to doing Beckett, I’m never happier. It’s like I’m home again! Partly because I just had the incredible privilege of actually directing Beckett’s work while I could consult with him.

I heard a story about Beckett actually showing up to shut down a performance at Big Green, [Dartmouth]. He was involved in most productions, right?

He was very involved. I mean, he cared enormously that we get the plays right. And he hated nothing more than boneheaded misunderstandings of his plays, or even worse, distortions of his work that were presented with his name on it. He was such a meticulous craftsman that the idea of sabotaging or ruining his work through ineptitude, or worse yet, incompetence. He was pretty impatient with boneheaded people!

Yeah. I dated a Dartmouth girl and she—

I saw him sputtering mad on some occasions, when he saw people sort of manhandling his plays. I was involved in several of the big controversies around his work, because I was the literary director of the American Repertory Theatre at the time, or at least some of the time when I knew him, and I had been called in during the big controversy that they had with the theatre with Beckett, when Beckett himself tried to stop a production. He would have done it, too, he was hopping mad. And he finally just relented when he realized that to take full legal action he personally would have to show up, and that was just out of the question, him showing up in a courtroom. So he just dropped it.

But he was pretty disgusted that he was deprived of his rights, by what seemed to him an impossible demand on himself. But yeah, he was very animated, and very engaged. Here’s one example: It’s not very flattering to Dustin Hoffman, but he had asked me once when the Lincoln Center Godot was about to come up what I thought of Dustin Hoffman, and I remember Dustin Hoffman from when he was an unknown but brilliant actor with the London Theatre Company. And I said, he’s brilliant, he’s terrific, a great actor. And Beckett says, “I don’t know about that, I don’t think I’m gonna let him do Godot,’ and I said why not? At which point he just knocked me down by saying, ‘Well, I didn’t like him in The Graduate.’ The very notion of Samuel Beckett in a movie theatre watching The Graduate, it’s like a dislocation in my brain!

In the little video they have on the Godot Broadway website, Nathan Lane said the play’s first poetic and strange, but later  realized he has these conversations every day, all day.  Why was Godot so important then and so important now?

It was the first play that had that new style. And he stumbled onto that style. My theory is that Godot comes out of the prose. It’s actually not just a theory of mine; it’s actually pretty well supported by things Beckett himself has said over the years. Because when he dove into Malloy and Malone Dies, it was partly the relief of no longer being a hunted Résistance fighter; with the German occupation over he suddenly went back to his apartment and he had this huge release of creative energy. He had this hunch about how to proceed, and it paid off. He followed this thing and he wrote like a maniac for six years. But he wrote these two huge novels, Molloy and Malone Dies, nonstop, night and day. And at the end of Malone Dies, before he started the third one, The Unnamable, he suddenly just popped out this play. So Godot was like a huge relief.

Like how Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was done as a break from the Ruben Salazar story.

He described it himself as coming back into the light, from the dark of the novels. So my sense is that what became impenetrable—because when you’re writing prose you’re actually working with a blind dead-end, that inner texture of your mind, there’s nothing there, you’re always working in the dark—and the fundamental thing is that the problem in prose is where the hell is this voice coming from? That’s an ontological problem, but actually the same problem we have, if we push really hard, on who the hell are we? And who’s talking when we listen to ourselves? And who’s listening? But in fact, the inner texture of our own sense of self is a voice that’s talking to us, and that immediately splits into two, so there’s a mystery at the source of our self. We have the ability to not only talk to ourselves. But listen.

And that’s the beginning?   

That’s the birth of the two-character play in Beckett’s form. That’s Didi and Gogo. Basically they’re the two halves of a single self that talk and listen, and the ability to hold converse with yourself is Beckett’s kind of… he stumbled on to this brilliant use of the theater as a way of actually staging that mystery at the heart of consciousness. And I don’t think anybody else ever did. I mean, great dramatists have always had a hunch about that—Lear and his fool for instance, clearly that sense of the huge poet’s mind figuring out that there’s some dialogue going on here that I can stage. But Beckett really distilled it in modern terms: we really are just two bums in a void, that’s what the self is, actually. It’s a totally blank landscape. But the problem, aesthetically, changes from “Where the hell is that voice coming from?” to “What the hell do we do?” And that’s a major shift. It’s a major shift. And that’s why the theater is actually a way out of the impasse of the prose. Actors, when they show up on stage, they’ve solved this problem of ‘Who are we and where are we?’ – they’re there!

My old pal Steve Rosen, when he got Spamalot, actually moved closer to the [Shubert] theatre, which I thought was so weird.

The problem then changes to the one which is even closer to the way we actually live, which is “What the hell do I do next?” And “what’s all this adding up to?” “What am I here for, and what do I do?” That’s the basic principle of dramaturgy, period. It’s also the basic problem of every individual life: “What am I going to do with myself? And what do I do next?”

And in fact, that play is governed by those things that govern us all. It’s governed by the notion of a day; our consciousness is actually biologically conditioned to function in a series of days. And if we try to extend our consciousness beyond a day, we can’t. We can do it maybe a little bit, but then we just collapse into unconsciousness. We literally have to sleep every 24 hours. These are mysteries, actually, that Beckett has perfectly encapsulated, and the fact that we just go out and we have acts that are days, and they happen to us more than we shape them. And they happen because they start—lo and behold the sun rises, our eyes open, we awake—and that’s exactly what the basic pattern of that play is. And now what? And that’s exactly what they keep saying all the way through that play: Now what? What do we do next? What do we do now? What are we here for? It’s that weird, wonderful thing of Waiting for Godot.

Who is the legendary main character?

A lot of people have speculated about who is Godot and all the rest of it, and one of the most amusing things that happened to me when I first met Beckett was that he solved that problem instantly, the first time he mentioned the play. Because he pronounced it God-ot, and that’s the Irish pronunciation of that name. And he always meant it to be the pun and a little diminutive name for God. It’s so self-evident that people have stumbled over themselves trying not to reach that conclusion, but it’s clearly what it is. And to hear Beckett say it ended up putting the whole problem behind me. Solved, you know? The word precisely because of that kind of mocking diminutive that it becomes, but the deeper, underlying ache that’s in there—you’re actually waiting for this guy to show up. He did mean that, no question about it.

And when someone asks your source—
Sam.

Written by Cole Louison