The New Yorker magazine, highlight of the week’s mail, arrives to relieve the growing grimness of the daily news with another of its famously witty covers (which used to be worth framing until they started to stick address labels on them). This one’s entitled “Emergency Session”, by Roz Chast, best known for her quirky and neurotic cartoons. This cover is concerned with the art of writing – the person depicted could be a member of WOW, actually, reclining on the inflated pad floating nonchalantly in the calm ocean surf with busy bodies on the beach in the background – probably at the Hamptons. He’s dictating to a husky, bearded, frenzied ol’ secretary who is floating alongside wearing a snug-fitting innertube around his middle. Looks like Ms. Chast's subject might be a screenwriter, knocking off another episode of his hit sit-com, “The War Next Door.”

But it’s more likely Samuel Beckett, since there’s a feature essay on him in the issue and it appears he’s dictating his tragicomedy “Waiting for Godot”. Seems appropriate, in view of that strange play being described in French’s catalogue as, “the portrait of the dogged resiliency of man’s spirit in the face of little hope.” Well, maybe it could be that drifting so serenely at the seashore would inspire such lofty philosophizing, ‘though it would more appropriately be inspired by drifting in the waters at Coney Island, rather than the hopeless Hamptons.

Benjamin Kunkel, in his essay on Sam, claims that “Beckett’s writings constitute probably the most significant body of work produced by a Twentieth Century author.” He goes on to say that “Beckett, one of the most obscure writers of the last century has become all things to all people.”

Really? Could be, we never know who the boys are waiting for in the enigmatic Godot. But there’s nothing obscure about the juicy excerpt from MOLLOY, “the first book of the famous trilogy on which Beckett’s high reputation as a novelist exists” and which Kunkel uses to illustrate his point and which is certain to increase Sam’s readership a whole potful. Nothing at all mystifying there and probably as graphically sensual or erotically sensual graphically or sensually graphically erotical as anything written by Henry Miller.

Regarding Beckett’s more enigmatic stuff, Mr. Kunkel helps by informing us that the book, “Beckett After Beckett”, translates for the first time a letter in which Beckett proclaims “I can not write about . . . there’s nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” To which Gertrude Stein might have replied, “Pigeons on the grass, alas. Alas, Sam, pigeons on the grass. Alas.”

Ms. Stein’s amusing pigeons on the grass wordplay was visualized for the stage in “Four Saints in Three Acts”, with music by Virgil Thompson, and became a delightfully lyrical success with an all-black cast who, it was said, were preferred because they were able to handle Stein’s nonsense with a natural gracefulness.

I’ve always regretted that, when I spent a pleasant teatime visit in Gertrude Stein's home in Paris at the end of WWII, I failed to tell her how much I enjoyed that production of her Saints and how unique it was, visually. Yes, Alice B. and her notorious brownies were there!

I had been in Biarritz at the American University Drama Department to direct Gertrude Stein’s newest (and I believe final play) entitled, true to Stein’s style, “Yes, is for a Very Young Man”, but which was conventionally very lucid and plot-driven about the French Occupation.

Albert McCleery, a noted TV director at the time, had brought over with him from Manhattan, Guthrie McClintic (Katherine Cornell’s husband) to direct Maxwell Anderson’s “Winterset,” written in blank verse and a great success when he directed the original at the Martin Beck. He also brought Richard Whorf to direct Shakespeare’s “Richard the III” and Max Gorelick, one of Broadway’s most popular designers, to do the sets.

The whole purpose of the enterprise, was to develop good PR with the natives. I had met McCleery in London, after VE Day, while attending RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) as a result of the Armed forces inviting the troops, who were waiting to go home, to choose any university in Europe they’d like to attend.

But it was NO, for Gertrude Stein’s very young man. We were in rehearsal for a few weeks when she pulled it out from under us. No one knew why. I was on my way back home to the States, when I dropped by to tell her it was a dirty trick. But instead, I told her I was on the verge of calling her to tell her how hard we’d been working on her play and ask her to let us go on with it.

She said, “Why the hell didn’t you? I would have let you. I was mad at the army brass for stopping my visits to the camps.”

She was a great gal, loved to scold GIs for being smart-ass and always bragging about America. There’s a neat bust of her in the garden of the N.Y. Public Library.

I thought I had a small tome of her work to select a more meaningful quote than the famous pigeons, but a search through my poetry and oddments produced none. However, I did come across, “House of Incest” by Anais Nin, Henry Miller’s romantic liaison and femme fatale, who wrote pieces on erotica. According to production notes, “The antithesis of her, Miller’s brutal fiction shone a bright light on sexuality while Nin reveled in feminine mystique. The two ultimately became the literary lions of their age. Together, as two sides of a coin, they created for audiences ‘the artist’s life’ to which many aspire.” All sounds very quaint, today.

A charming coincidence . . . The New Yorker, same issue, announces in its theatre news a bio-play set in Paris in the 30s entitled, “Anais Nin: One of Her Lives” by Wendy Beckett (any relation to the author of “Krapp’s Last Tape”?), opened only a week ago at the Beckett Theatre on West 42nd Street. The Beckett Theatre is one of the new ones on theatre row. Possibly named after the never-heard-of-before author? Or Samuel himself, maybe?

I’m amazed to see that this copy of “House of Incest” is inscribed to Jim (to me!) and signed by the author. I’d forgotten I’d ever met her. It’s a tiny volume, only fifty pages. I don’t believe I’ve ever read it. I’ll take it to bed with me. It will have to be pretty salacious to compete with the excerpt from Samuel Beckett’s MOLLOY in The New Yorker. Erotica, eh?

(An hour later . . . not a bit! Exotic, yes . . . curious . . . mystifying . . . obtuse . . . strange.)

Regarding WOWs . . . not really so strange, Anais says, or rather, writes, “In our writings we are brothers, the speed of our vertigoes is the same. We arrived at the same place at the same time, which is not so with other people’s thoughts. The language of nerves which we both use makes us brothers in writing.”

Just thought you’d like to know.

Jim Buckley
California

Jim Buckley, a New York native, is approaching his 94th birthday and is still producing, writing, directing, acting, and designing sets for stageplays.