Today we honor Samuel Beckett - which to me is sort of like talking about Gay Pride and Black History Month. Shouldn’t every day be about Gay pride in some intrinsic way just as every month should be about Black history? I think each day, at some point, one should stop and give a little tip of an imaginary bowler to Beckett.
When I had my loft in TriBeCa for over a decade back in the 1990s and early 2000s, I kept a tattered page from his Endgame framed in my bathroom to read each morning as I woke and tipped that imaginary Beckett bowler to him.
HAMM (angrily): Keep going, can’t you, keep going!
CLOV: You’ve got on with it, I hope.
HAMM (modestly): Oh not very far, not very far. (He sighs.) There are days like that, one isn’t inspired. (Pause.) Nothing you can do about it, just wait for it to come. (Pause.) No forcing, no forcing, it’s fatal. (Pause.) I’ve got on with it a little all the same. (Pause.) Technique, you know. (Pause. Irritably.) I say I’ve got on with it a little all the same.
CLOV (admiringly): Well I never! In spite of everything you were able to get on with it!
HAMM (modestly): Oh not very far, you know, not very far, but nevertheless, better than nothing.
CLOV: Better than nothing! Is it possible?
HAMM: I’ll tell you how it goes. He comes crawling on his belly –
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I have worn this imaginary bowler that sits up here atop my head even now as I type this sentence ever since I was in my late 20s and discovered Beckett in - well, I was going to say “in earnest,” but I think I have approached reading him in every way I could conceive of approaching it except earnestly. I don’t think Sam ever tried himself to understand the importance of being earnest. That’s one of the reasons this bowler fits me. I put more store in kindness and honesty. One can lie earnestly. Or is that what acting is itself: the earnest lie? The playwright gives the actor the context of a deeper truth which indeed depends on it.
The photo of him above is one of my favorites of him, this brilliant man who was so damn sexy and not afraid to be chic. Chicness seemed to be part of what was intrinsic to him. The photo is a bonus image today because it doesn’t fit any of our RUBRICS even though it is rather a dare to STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS. His work can be enigmatic and challenging but there is something so clarifying about images of him because there is nothing enigmatic about his sense of style. There was a kind of curated, angular sensuality to him. Come to think of it, it can seem that he, instead of writing, curated words until they formed a kind of angular sensuality all their own.
(TO SEE THE CURATED IMAGES OF BECKETT AND THE CURATED QUOTES, SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. THANKS.)