Letters About Beckett

      Between Professor Ruby Cohn and myself there was an internet correspondence for one year during which I used to write her about ten letters per week, and she would respond briefly and succinctly, sometimes with a phrase or even a single word, and not to all the letters. Of course, this is natural and normal, for her being the eminent scholar that she is and I the upstart anonymous Beckett fan that I am, I didn't expect her to respond to me at all. It is usually the protege who follows after the mentor as we find in what happened between Gorky and Chekhov, and the result was Gorky's elaborate, vivid and highly literary and intellectual letters against Chekhov's brief and dull letters, not that Gorky was suprerior to Chekhov, quite on the contrary, Chekhov to Gorky was like Joseph Conrad to W Somerset Maugham, but as I said it is the protege who follows after the mentor. This is what happened bewteen you and me, Sir, when I wrote you an email on a Beckett topic two months ago, and you haven't replied. After all, you are Chekhov, and I am Gorky, and so I shouldn't expect any reply from you even when the subject is Beckett who is your very cup of tea, I still, nonethless, remain, Sir,

Basing on the above, enclosed herewith please find a draft of My Letters About Samuel Beckett to Ruby Cohn, by Arab of Beckettia which I intend to have published as a book shortly. In case you choose, Sir, to feedback your opinion and tips, or give me a piece of your mind or just remain silent, please do so on this email address

Thanking you very much, I remain

Sincerely

Siddeek Bakr Tawfeek

Arab of Beckettia

What do you do?

     In an e-mail circa 3 years ago, you mentioned, if memory serves, that you were going to Nova Scottia to see dear friends and look at the ocean. In 1979, one day, my London friend Caroline Murphy told me she was going to Norfolk, north of London. "What are going there for?" I asked, and she said, "To look at the trees."


In Endgame we have this dialogue:

Hamm: Where're you going?

Clov: To the kitchen.

Hamm: What do you do in the kitchen?

Clov: I look at the wall.

Hamm: What do you see on the wall, naked bodies, MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSEN?

Clov: I see my light dying.

Your remark, "look at the ocean," Caroline's "look at the trees," and Beckett's, "look at the wall" are all poetic equally. If this isn't poetry, then there isn't poetry in the world. No wonder you considered Beckett as the greatest poet of the 20th century.

Keats and Byron

     
      In evening of 5th, November 1979, I went to see Shaw's You Never CanTell at the Lyric-Hammersmith, London. The usher, Caroline Murphy whom I befriended later, wondered how could Shaw interest foreigners because, she thought, his themes, humour and issues are so domestic and local that they appealled only to British people. Caroline, as you could tell from her surname, Murphy, was originally Irish and he had a paper on Shaw's Major Barbara which contributed to his promotion to professership. He always praised Shaw and when I pointed to him one day that Eric Bentley advocated Shaw, AlWakil lamented the situation that with the exception of Bentley and very few scholars Shaw was undervalued and victimised. AlWakil one day praised Shaw by saying that "The Don Juan in Hell" scene in Shaw's Man and Superman read like a Mozartian symphony, speaking in Arabic: اصلا جنك دتسمع موزارت. AlWakil championed Shaw because Shaw's socialism and anti-Britishism appealled to AlWakil's communism But AlWakil always struck to be knowledgable of English literature. When we were 4th year finalists, he introduced to the curriculum the subject of Oral Test and he told us that at the end of the year he was going to test us. "In what?", we asked, and he said, "Any English literature book." So we, about 60+ students went our ways, each choosing a book, and at the end of the year, we, one by one, went to sit for a test before him and each one of us had read a book in English literature. My book was Shaw's St Joan. The questions AlWakil put to me about St Joan and Shaw showed someone in the know Indeed, I fail to recall that AlWakil spoke one complete English sentence. It was all Baghdadi, in fact, Hillawi vernacular he spoke formally in-class, sprinkled, when the occasion arose, with technical terminology like rhyme, rhythm, blank verse, alexandrine, irony, etc ... But Wordsworth left no man he knew in London without reciprocated hard feelings, and, finding that there was no friend around, he went to live in seclusion in the Lakes District. Conversing on the same topic with AlWakil one morning, Al-Wakil commented in Arabic. By the way, AlWakil, even in class when I was his student, hardly spoke in English. He spoke in Arabic even when teaching us Beowulf and Chaucer. Only technical terminology like: simile, metaphor, alliteration, caesura, allegory, allusion, etc ... he said them in English, usually writing them on the black-board rather than actually pronouncing them. He said about Wordsworth ليش هوا خلا واحد ما اتناوشا Keats and Byron reciprocated hate and despise. They quarrelled over--among many things--Pope whom Keats detracted and Byron praised. They were both self-conscious of their social backgrounds. Keats, the grass-root man attributed, mainly unfairly, Byron's popularity by saying, "You see what it is to be 6 foot and lord", and Byron teased Keats by saying, "Poetry is the provenance of the nobleman".

B&B

Prologue

I condemn Brecht the politician who is dead, but salute Brecht the theatre-man who will never die .

Body

In Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, written and produced in 1945, if you go to the scene where Azdak enters being pulled with a rope, abused and treated as a dog, you will wonder if this scene was not the stuff Beckett's Pozzo-Lucky entrance scene is made of!

I salute Beckett and Brecht the theatre-men who will never die

"Brothers in battle--a band of one blood", says the anonymous poem Beowulf, and I say that Becket and Brecht--the irony that their names are close in sound and have the same initial churnes the irony thicker--have a bond of art that brings them together, no matter how we, readers and critics, try to ignore it. Brecht's Mother Courge, written and produced in 1939, closes with the theme of waiting. Mother courage waits for her son to return one day, and we know that her son, like Godot, will not return to her because we saw him being executed. Isn't the theme of Mother Courage awaiting in vain her son who is dead, and her waiting, therefore, is a false pointless and purposeless act, the stuff Beckett made his Waiting for Godot of!

Epilogue

Dear Professor Fehsefeld, quoting Estragon speaking to Vladimir, I say: "To who else should I tell my nightmares if not to you?"

Mr.Wallach and the Actors' Studio

          In an interview where Eli Wallach accounts for his relation with Marilyn Monroe, he says that in an off-the-set conversation with MM while making The Misfits, he said to her, "Let me show you who I really am; let's go the beach"

During my NYC visit in July 2004, and while on my way to visit the Actors' Studio at W 44, I thought I was going to an area that was sealed by NYPD, and only pre-arranged visits could be made. I arrived there, and where did I find myself? In a desolute avenue where it took me five minutes to find a passer-by to hold my camera and snap it for a photo of myself standing at the entrance of the Actors' Mecca. Thank God, a van belonging to the neighbours opposite the Studio stopped and two men came out to unload their shopping. One of them, who couldn't make head or tail of my hyper-excitement took my photo. I could get inside the Studio when a trainee arrived . He allowed me only 2 minutes, during which I looked around. The trainee pointed at a chair and a desk were a lecturer or instructor would sit facing his audience. He told me that a few months ago before he died, Marlon Brando was sitting there one morning when Eli wallach came in and started talking what sounded to Brando stuff and nonsense that Brando with his bulky belly stood up and rushed towards Wallach and hurled him away, calling him names. After getting Wallach's phone number in NYC, I dialed and the other side which was the answering machine said to me, "Mr Wallach regrets that he cannot respond to calls on this number."

A New Way to Pay Old Debts

Date: Monday, May 24, 2010, 9:54 AM

     During later Jacobean and early Caroline times there flourished domestic drama, sometimes called city tragedy or city comedy, a good example of which there is Philip Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts whose villain protagonist Giles Overreach has been a popular and highly actable character since 1625 when the play was first staged to-date. Overreach is a mix of Tamburlaine, Shylock, Barabbas and Richard III. In his vengeance over his neighbour, he plans to lame his cattle by breaking their legs. Overreach is a character that led to Alfred Jarry's grotesque protagonist Ubu Roi in latter nineteenth-century Paris.