the acorn and the oak

In mid-1970s, a social historian whose name memory is not serving to remember, remarked that the Beatles music in early1960s waved the final good-bye to family and home life, a social phenomenon that was the oak that grew out of the acorn that goes back to the Renaissance when Western subconscious developed anti-family attitudes. In Shakespeare the great man of the Renaissance we conspicuously find this dislike and even condemnation of family life. The root of Hamlet's problem is family life: uncle and step-father and mother, and the father who invloves him in a situation in spite of him. Hence Hamlet, "O cursed spite that I was born to set it right.". "Othello" is a play about rejection of husband-and-wife life. King Lear's daughters revolt to liberate themselves from parents' domination. "Macbeth" is about hatred of chilrden, although we don't know how many children Lady Macbeth had. "Romero and Juliet" is about the burden and tragic consequences of belonging to families.
Epilogue: On ground, Shakespeare the man, after a couple of years of marital life and commitment, waved good-bye to wife, home and three children and went down to live in London free from family

Your energy, love of literature, and indelible effect on your students is something we cherish. We love you all!


Dr Adnan Abdulla

from Professor Welch

Dear Siddeek

 You are truly quite an amazing epistolarian: one of the truly interesting letter-writers.

Yours ever
Bob

Eric Bentley and Arthur Miller

 Arthur Miller who died Thursady last at the age of 89--same vintage of Eric Bentley--
was on bad terms with him, and the two never talked to each other since
mid-l950s when Miller refused EB's extended hand to be shaken in an
elevator that got them together on their way to a formal lunch at the Dag
Hamersgold office in the UN when good old Dag was UN Secretary-General,
and he enjoyed a literary taste which made him pay tribute to
men-of-letters by inviting them to lunches, dinners and what-not. Dag
himself was a poet, though an unpublished one.
Reason of AM-EB rift is that the latter wrote an article in which he
gave the impression that Elia Kazan was instructing AM (and Tennessee
Williams) how to playwrite. TW also got cross with EB, but was less severe
in his rift with him. It was AM who instigated TW against EB.

taking care of a lot written on Beckett after his death

In a lively, colourful, highly informative and utterly indelible series of chats on theatre, literature and biographies, Eric Bentley, who welcomed me to a tea evening and two lunches at his Manhattan home in July 2004, cautioned me that a lot written about Beckett after his death is unreliable. The photo on the left was taken at Bentley's Manhattan residence. In the full photo, Professor Bentley is on my left, but I cut the photo for printing reasons. Looked at, the photo can be seen to contain a faint photo on the wall just on my left. The photo is that of Brecht sitting with Bentley. About to be photographed, I told Professor Bentley that I was going to be on his right, just to replace Brecht in the original photo. Our photo was snapped by Jay Broad, an LA-based theatre director who had directed on the stage Bentley's play, "Are You or Have You Ever Been?"

in the family

Twenty years ago, during Bush Sr war in Iraq in January 1991 when there was total black-out in the city, I used to while away the long hours of the night by gathering my nephews and nieces and recite to them scenes from plays. One night it was Hamlet night. I told the kids the encouter of Hamlet with his father's ghost. Next morning, Aya, my 2-year old niece told us over breakfast how in a dream she saw the ghost chasing her then suddenly Hamlet rushing to rescue her from the ghost

Beckett's Pozzo and My Son Ali

The other day son Ali preparing for end-of- year exams remarked that schools and exams were useless and therefore asked me and my wife to give him some convincing reasons to motivate him to study. We gave him some. But on the other hand this reminded me of Pozzo asking Vladimir and Estragon to give him a convincing reason why he should sit down. They try but in vain. "Try me again, " he says whispering to the twosome. Estragon says, "If you dont sit down you will have pneumonia." "No doubt you are right," says Pozzo and finally sits down

Dawn in Harlem and Wordsworth's Sonnet

The taxi driver, a Peruvian who has been in NYC since 1949, who was taking me from my Manhattan hotel, West Side Studios to John Kennedy Airport around 5 o'clock of the dawn of the 4th August 2004, drove through Harlem. Harlem at dawn, like Wesminster Bridge in Wordsworth's sonnet, is so quiet, friendly, peaceful and really beautiful. If I were a stage producer I would spend a million dollars on staging Harlem to arouse this sense in the audience about Harlem, just like Barry Jackson who spent 5 thousand pounds to produce the sunset in Bernard Shaw's CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND'S CONVERSION. The taxi driver played guide telling me about significant places in the area which included an office of President Bill Clinton on the third floor of a building. When he halted at the traffic light, I saw a building in the corner on which was written something to the effect of "A Worship Place for Jews, Christians and Moslems". Also I saw written, "We will be in your neighborhood soon." Indeed, it is a heart warming phenomenon to see the peoples of the world come to terms with each other. But, alas, the speech of de Sade at the very end of MARAT/SADE is also true when the Marquis shouts to the audience inside and outside the play, "You will never understand." He means humanity will never understand how to live in peace and harmony as mentioned in one of the lyrics earlier in the play. The motto of the play is this, "You will never understand." After Time Square incident in May, 2010, I join the Chorus in Aeschylus' ORESTEIA in its chant, "Cry sorrow, sorrow, yet let good prevail."

The chthonic powers the ancient Greeks believed in were the factors that determined people's fate, and in certain cases their tragedy. In the final scene where the woman comes to take away the son in Ibsen's JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN, the woman, asks how come she could know that the son was there, she explains that it was the chthonic forces told her so. Because I am so immersed in tragic drama, my brother in Iraq told me when he visited me in Jordan in summer 1997 that the dampness which spread on the wall in the living room of my house which I left back in Mosul, Iraq and which he is living in, formed an image of someone looking like Shakespeare. As the frost was playing its tricks on the window in ST Coleridge's FROST AT MIDNIGHT, the dampness in my house was working similarly. Coleridge associates the frost work on the window at midnight with the fate of his infant son Hartley. So is the dampness in my house associated with my wife Maysoon's fate. It was in that house where in 1988 I enacted with my late wife Maysoon the final scene of THE WINTER'S TALE where the the Queen, presumed dead, comes back to the King.

In my letter this morning, I mentioned Marquez. Association of ideas led to Garcia which is his second name. Garcia reminded me of the following: In January 1963, my address and photo were published in the pen pal section of TEEN SCREEN magazine. Angelo Garcia, the son of Cuban refugee living in the Bronx initiated with me a penpalship. Five years ago, I came across Andy Garcia in the movies. I would like you to share me the mystery that Angelo (born early 1940s) and Andy (b early 1950s) are brothers. In 2001, after seeing BLOOD OF A POET starring Andy Garcia, I sent a letter to Andy Garcia c/o Columbia Pictures and the letter was returned to sender as addressee was not located. When I was in New York last July, I looked up Angelo Garcia in NYC telephone directory. I got three Angelo Garcias. Two of them didn't respond and the third number gave me a message in Spanish which I couldn't understand. Had it not been that I am in a hurry I would have told you about my visit to Actor's Studio last July. A trainee there, who let me in, pointed at the chair where the late Marlon Brando used to sit and how one day he stood up and thrusted himself at Eli Wallach intending to estrangle him. Later I tried to reach Eli Wallach but the answering machine said that he couldn't be reached.

Circa Spring 1983 in Exeter, England, my Northaptonian girl-friend Frances Boulton and I were on our way to a dinner. Our hostess was Japanese Akiko and the date for dinner was 7 o'clock. We were like a couple of God's innocent lambs walking in the streets from Frances' s residence in Haldon Road to St Thomas Avenue where Akiko lived, and we were to arrive on time. After crossing the bridge over the River Exe, I eyed a pub by the river. For me, passing a pub when seeing one was a thing impossible--a thing I had in common with Zoe daughter of Augustus John, the celebrated Welsh painter to whom Thamas Hardy, Lawrence of Arabia, Dylan Thomas and Bernard Shaw, among many others, sat to be painted. Zoe was describing to me while we were in the Vic Inn, Exeter sipping Canadian Club rye whiskey, the way to her residence. Zoe said to me, "On the left-side corner of the road you will pass a pub--that is, if you could pass it." Zoe was a stage director, and she invited me to her place because I talked a lot about modern drama. When Frances became aware of my smelling my way into the pub (Cf: "Let him smell his way to Dover," as one of the Lear daughters says after blinding Gloucester), she pleaded me not go in as we only had a couple of minutes to reach Akiko's. As much as I knew my way to the pub, I knew my way to Frances's palate. I invited her to a double sweet martini on the rocks, and she didn't say, no, whereas I rushed to my pint(s) of lager. We reached Akiko's at 8, exactly an hour too late. She received us with a concealed frown. As we sat down to eat, her boyfriend, a Vietnamese, dropped in. After dinner, the Vietnamese turned out to be a Chinese calendar expert. He told Akiko she was born in the year of the snake, and Frances in the year of the boar and I in the year of the monkey. On our way back, Frances was reviewing the years of our births. She commented that Akiko with her small, beady and rolloing-around eyes really looks to have been born in the year of the snake, and that Frances herself was really born in the year of the boar because all her life she dashed into things and people and here she concentrated her eyes on me meaning me, and that I was really born in the year of the monkey due to my theatrics and love of drama and dramatics.

G[eorge Richard] Wilson Knight (1898-1985), Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds, the eminent Shakespeare critic (although he preferred the word, interpreter) and author of over 40 books mainly on Shakespeare, at the top of which is the 1930 THE WHEEL OF FIRE the manuscript of which he himself carried and took to TS Eliot's office at Faber Publishers, London, where Eliot sent for sandwiches for lunch, and later Eliot wrote a Preface to the book, and whom I visited in Exeter, England when he was living in Caroline House (Caroline is mom's name) which he inherited from his elder brother Frank Jackson Knight himself Emeritus Professor of Classical Literature, University of Exeter and translator from the original Greek into English of the first Penguin Classic Virgil's THE AENEID and both brothers died at late ages confirmed bachelors, told me one day that Oedipus, the greatest tragic person, met the end of an extremely happy man, as the gods in the end call him to join them. Dick, as G Wilson Knight preferred to be addressed when intimacy came in, told me that in Shakespeare's tragedies--even in KING LEAR--there is triumph, and he also told me that he was willing to forgive and laugh with anyone even an enemy, but when he mentioned Hitler, he excepted him saying,"I can laugh with Macbeth, but not with Hitler". And he added that he was a great believer in and practicer of masturbation because masturbation made the person inflict the harm on himself/herself, and so it is cruelty against onself rather than on the others, and that the Marquis de Sade became an amiable nice person during his long imprisonment when he practiced masturbation and not sex which included hurting the others, and G Wilson Knight also told me that if the Israelis and the Arabs sat together and masturbated they would resolve their conflicts and live in peace with each other. Otherwise, he said to me,(and that was shortly after I had recited to him Shylock's speech, If you tickle us, don't we laugh, if you pinch us, dont we cry and if you hurt us don't we revenge), "Let Israel write in big letters on it borders Shylock's words, 'If you tickle us don't we laugh, if you pinch us don't we cry, and if you hurt us don't we revenge.'" He concluded saying, " I am myself one-eighth Jewish."


In Spring 1972 in the University of Leeds, I heard Knight lecturing and his topic was "Masturbation and Mysticism" which he later included as a chapter in a book he published entitled, NEGLECTED POWERS.

What made me think of G Wilson Knight today was your mentioning KRAPP as part of a double bill with THE NEW TENANT, plus I had already read an essay yesterday on Krapp (and Beckett himself) as masturbator

As you have some years ago enjoyed reading Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina, have you enjoyed Peter Brook's recent New York production of "The Inquisitor"? By the way, Dostoyvsky's The Brothers Karamazov is my desert island book, especially Father Sozima's speeches about faith and patience, and the theartics of the father Fyodor Karamazov who, when hearing news of his first wife's death, sometimes weeping audibly in toilets of pubs, sometimes talking to himself and sometines running in the street shouting joyously towards the sky, "Now, you have liberated your creature, O Lord."

Now Peter Brooks is back to New York with his new production of Dostoyvsky's "The Grand Inquisitor". Did you, in 1964, see in New York, Brooks's production of Peter Weiss's "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Clinic of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade?" I have auditioned it while In Mosul, Iraq in 1973 on Caedmon LP Records, and the speeches of the the Marquis spoken by Patrick Magee are spellbinding. No wonder, Beckett wrote parts with Magee's mellifluous melodious voice in mind. Do you have among the Mabous Mines troupe a member who speaks so sweetly as does Magee in his "I hate nature" speech in Weiss's above play?

In spring 1991, going back to college, fresh from 33-day Bush, Sr war with Iraq, I taught students Strindberg's The Dance of Death. During consulting references for preparing my lectures, I saw a still of Laurence Olivier doing the captain's dance in the play. In my own peculiar ways I demonstrated to the students a replica of the way Olivier has lifted his left leg, put his hands around his hips, and tightened his lips, which methought was the definitive version of that unforgettable dance. You directed Dance, I would wish to have an envisioning of the way you made your actor do that unique dance

More than once, Pinter declared that Beckett was his mentor, and that Beckett was the greatest prose writer in the twentieth century. I believe otherwise. I personally relish Pinter's dialogue more than Beckett's. The Birthday Party's Goldberg speaks in such a fascinating, spell-binding and breath-taking way that I can find only in Beckett's Hamm and Pozzo who I think are Beckett's greatest creations. The rest of Beckett is quicksand

The following is not out of malice against anyone, it is sheer art for art's sake.


Here's a million $$ idea

A staging of Sam's Endgame. In the dialogue, repeated throughout the play, we have:

Hamm: What's happening, what's happening?

Clov: Something is taking its course.

I will stage the scene like this:

Before Hamm speaks the above, Clov moves around until his back is to the audience. Hamm has a hunch that something is going to happen. Concerned and intense, he begins to say:

What's happening, what's happening?

In the middle of the speech, Clov takes off the first shoe and it whizzes past Hamm, with Clov saying:

Something is taking its course.

When Hamm says the second "what's happening?", Clov takes off the second shoe and throws it at Hamm, and while Clov is throwing the shoe, he says the second: "Something is taking its course"

Bush's shoes have placed an added significance to Estragon's boots in Waiting for Godot. From now on, Waiting for Godot audiences will take in a new light, Vladimir's remark to Estragon, "Boots should be taken off everyday"

Achilles and his heel, Odysseus and his bow, Agamemnon and his bathtub, Oedipus and his Sphinx, Agave and her son's decapitated head, Hamlet and his Ghost, Macbeth and his Witches, Lear and his daughters, Othello and his handkerchif and Estragon and his boot. A boot is suggestive of soldiers, and Beckett's use of the boot in "Waiting for Godot" is a then-fresh reflection of Nazi troops witnessed by Beckett and wife Suzanne walking in Paris streets. Only God knows what made stage director JoAnne Akalaitis think of transferring "'Tis Pity She's a Whore" from early seventeenth-century Italy to mid-twentieth-century Italy during times of il Duce Mussolini! Nowadays, Ms Akalaitis is staging of Euripedes' "The Bacchae" where Agave, besides Euripedes' other heroine Medea, are two of my favourite dramatic characters. My other heroine is Karla Zachanasian whom Ms Akalaitis staged in an opera version of Durrenmatt's "der besuch ulter dame ("The Visit"). Who would forget Meda in the last scene riding her chariot and with her frenzy laughter departs for her father the sun god. Only Pozzo's two exits at ends of two acts of 'Waiting for Godot" could compare to such a spectacular exit. When Agave, drunk to the brim, realises her tragedy of sucking the bones of her slaughtered (by her and her intoxicated wowen-friends) son's head, like an Arab sucking bones of a lamb's head, only Don Quixote, when looking at the mirrors and realising the fool he was, can compare, and Karla Zachanasian taking with her the coffin in which dead Anton lies is a scene with which only King Lear carrying dead body of his daughter Coredlia can compete


Aeschylus and Sophocles are greater poetry writers than Euripedes, but Euripedes is the better theatre writer. Of the three great Greeks, I relish Euripedes most

With pseudo-cadences of Hamm's interrogative remark: "Do you think we are beginning to mean something?", I say: Do you think that I need psycho-analysis due to--among other symptoms that may have been detected--my perverse taste for such stage women characters as Agave, Medea, Lady Macbeth, Madame Arkadina, Clara Zachanasian, Amanda Wingfield, Violet Venable and Martha, who are robust with dramatic vitality, whereas Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona and Cordelia who, as much as they suffer, suffer from dramartic anemia? Our mutual dear Beckett went to see a psychiatrist in London because at the time, ie 1930s, psycho-analysis was prohibited in his home-town Dublin due to religious reasons for psycho-analysis was deemed to be an act of interfering in God's creation of the soul, exactly as plastic surgery was interfering in God's creation of the body. The London psychiatrist cautioned Beckett that psycho-analysis could damage the patient's genius. Hence, in the final analysis, perversion is good for the genius as "fresh air is good for the appetite", as Pozzo informs Vladimir and Estragon




PS One is to imagine Beckett's dilemma--typical of the poor man--how the doors of hope were shut to his face both in heaven (in Dublin) and on earth (in London), and no wonder he replaced "Our Father, thy will to be done on earth as it is in heaven", with Hamm's shout in frenzy, "The bastard--He doesn't exist"

The Iraqi journalist hurling shoes at a dignitary is a theme that is not new to Iraqis, as, in 3,000 BC, Gilgamesh the hero of The Epic of Gilgamesh, killed the Heavenly Bull, son of the goddess Ishtar, dined and wined over it, then, in defiance, out of spite and teasingly, he hurled at Ishtar one of the bull's shins

Abdul-Aziz Al-Jumeili, an Iraqi poet and author appeared on TV the other day and related his 4-year detention in prison, first at Abu Ghraib, near Baghdad, then removed to Kuba Prison nicknamed by its inmates for its horror, Ivan the Terrible Prison. Part of Abdul-Aziz's torture, like that of the Marquis de Sade in prison, was his deprivation of stationery, and because, like the Marquis de Sade, he was a compulsive writer, Abdul-Aziz, like the Marquis de Sade, resorted to writing on his underwear where he composed in classical Arabic metric verse, a 600-line of Mohammed's biography

Two American soldiers waiting under a palm tree in Baghdad or anywhere else in Iraq. There is a boot on the stage. A boot is indicative enough that soldiers are around. It's Estragon's boot, and the two soldiers waiting under the palm tree are Vladimir and Estragon--drafted into the army as Elvis Presley was drafted into the army in Germany in early 1960s. The play is Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The opening scene has for its background music a very popular Iraqi songs titled, "Over the palm tree, ...." [Fog al-nakhal]. Let your Arabic interpreter, wish he/she were Iraqi, help you with the song, or maybe one of these days, I myself come over to Manhattan and do the job

In the newspaper Munthir (our philanderer Munthir Al-Habeeb) used for a table cover when we sat to eat eggplant tapsi in his villa in Baghdad in 1994, I read the news of John Osborne's death. From Osborne's play title, LOOK BACK IN ANGER (1956), theatre historians borrowed the word anger to christen a new era of British theatre. Kenneth Tynan's remark, "I doubt it if I could love anyone who did not wish to see LOOK BACK IN ANGER", made Sir Laurence Olivier rush to see it, and after the show Sir Laurence said to Osborne, "In your next play, have me in mind", and the result was Osborne's second play (which I taught in Mosul University in 1977 and in Mustansiyah in 1993), THE ENTERTAINER whose protagonist Archie Rice Olivier played on both stage and screen

"We all fell from Gogol's overcoat," commented Chekhov with reference to Gogol's short story titled THE OVERCOAT which Chekhov considered the short story from which all subsequent Russian authors learned how to write short stories. I shall never forget the scene when the tailor puts the overcoat on the client and tells him to go out of the shop and walk in the street, and once the client steps out, the tailor rushes upstreet to have a look at the back of the client and see how the client looks walking wearing the overcoat the tailor is so proud of having tailored. Likewise, one can say that all subsequent British playwrights after Osborne: Harold Pinter, John Arden, Arnold Wesker, Robert Bolt, Edward Bond and Tom Stoppard in their plays respectively, THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, SERJEANT MUSGRAVE'S DANCE, THE KITCHEN, A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, SAVED and ROSENGRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD fell from Osborne's LOOK BACK IN ANGER

10 C

Circa July 2004, the coach I was travelling in from New York to Boston passed by Salem Connecticut where Arthur Miller was living. Now I remember that Miller said about Osborne's LOOK BACK IN ANGER that it was the only modern British play worth seeing. In an interview in one of my dvds titled TENNESSEE'S SOUTH which I watched the other day, Tennessee (his friends jokingly called him 10 c) Williams says that anger (in general and not only in the Osbornian sense) is the most deeply rooted---deeper than love -- emotion in the human heart. 10 c concludes the programme by saying that he believes that God does exist and that he prays to Him almost every night and he says that God hears him and listens to him but he doesn't care about him

Dame Judi Dench for whose 7-minute-screen-time role as Queen Elizabeth in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE won an Oscar, directed in the 1980s Osborne's LOOK BACK IN ANGER. In an interview conducted on the mobile telephone while she was in a taxi on her way to the Aldwych Theatre, London, Dame Judi told the interviewer that the only thing that she misses in her life is not fame and fortune and glory and popularity but her dear husband who died 5 years ago

Son Ali, a first year Dentistry student in Sanaa, Yemen, is a geography genius. Yesterday night, while reading about your Lithuanian background, I couldn't locate Lithuania, so told the wife to dial Ali, and asking him where Lithuania is on the map, he gave a tirade from which I could catch that Lithuania is a poor country liberated from the USSR in 1989 and it is situated between Poland and Sweden. Because Ali knows about my immigration project, he thought I was thinking of going to Lithuania, so he exclaimed: "What would you do in Lithuania!", a remark that reminded me of Hemingway's Killimanjaro dead leopard which no one knew what it was doing in those altitudes

Akalaitis' 'Tis Pity She's a Whore

In an interview JoAnne Akalaitis says she usually doesn't direct plays she already knows. Likewise, I, during my career from assistant lecturer in 1974 to assistant professor in 2000, teaching drama to students majoring in English, never taught a play I had read before, never repeated teaching it afterwards. During this over a quarter century, I taught plays from Aeschylus' Oresteia to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead . Sometimes, however, in the course of preparing or delivering my lectures, I discovered new things, some of which I would tell to students and some, being sexual, political, religious or social taboos, I kept to myself. Now, in January 2000, while teaching Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, I began to discover a major sexual taboo. In fact, Shakespeare wrote the play on the wake of his emotional crisis with his mistress who was one of Queen Elizabeth's maids, and thus Shakespeare was so bitter about womankind, and he looked at women not as the fairest creatures but as female animals, and he considered love not as a noble emotion which elevated man above the beast, but as a beastly practice. Thus, thoughout the play, there are references and allusions to and imagery of animal functions and organs of the human body. Shakespeare uses in the play for his mouthpiece to air his attitdues, the foul-mouthed Fool Thersites who swears, curses, plasphemes with an ugly rhetoric and a dismaying eloquence. In this play, Shakespeare tries to deliver the message that the Trojan war was not because of honor, dignity, love and beauty, but because, and here Shakespeare couldn't and therefore didn't use the word, but Akalaitis could and did at the final curtain of her production of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, when a banner appears on the stage written on it the word Shakespeare wanted to use but couldn't, but Akalaitis used: C.U.N.T.

As you know that, since my MA thesis on him in 1971 and until his death in 1989, I used to see Samuel Beckett in my dreams. In one of those dreams, I asked him about his method of writing, and he told me that he used symmetry, and I asked him whether the element of reversal came in into his writing, and when he was about to answer, my wife stirred in bed and I woke up without knowing his answer, and I was so furious that I suppressed in my heart a cry like that of Tennessee Williams' Maggie the Cat, a cry, Maggie describes that everbody all over the Delta could hear. Now, basing on the element of reversal, I have some ideas more infuriating perhaps than your memorable landmark 1984 Endgame production. I think of producing Happy Days in a reversed order, ie the play unfolds like this: Act 2, Curtain, Act 1, Curtain, Act 3: Dumb show with Winnie, liberated from the mound, doing a ballet dance to a bar from Beckett's favorite musician, Schubert. In keeping with Beckett's spirit, Winnie's liberation from the mound is the liberation brought about by death, and to enhance this concept, it would be perfect that the music bar should be Schubert's Death and the Maiden used by Beckett in another play. So my added Act 3 of Happy Days shall all be typically Beckettian

an email to JoAnne Akalaitis

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

I am attracted to eccentrics and find me bored by rational, wise, common-sense personalities. Would you please refer me to a psychiatrist to cure me from my deep passion and profound admiration of the following: Marquis de Sade, Rasputin, Mussolini, Al Capone and Charles Manson? I hardly find a thing to attract me to the personal habits and ways of such wise guys as Plato, Christ, Shakespeare, Abraham Lincolin and Winston Churchill. I love naughty enfant terribles and femme fatal. I find white-collar well shirt-stuffed people dull and boring. It is for this reason, and not for his cantos, I love Ezra Pound. I neither care nor mind what each of these naughty guys fights for fights against, the importnat thing is the naughtiness

When criticised why he kept company of thieves, prostitues and evil-doers, Jesus Christ replied that he came to reform the evil, and as the good need no reform, he kept company with the evil. Likewise, I am fascinated by the evil because they tell me more about human nature and the human mind in a way the good do not. Evil people are "round" characters, whereas good people are "flat" chatracters

I love villains in literary works because they are tough, foul-mouthed, bold daring, unafraid of life and have a dramatic flair that is to my liking. I find the following dull and therefore I am not attracted to them: Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, Othello, whereas I love madly these naughty boys and girls: Medea, Agave in Euripedes' BACCHANTES, Richard III, Barrabas Jew of Malta, Shylock who speaks the play's best speeches, Thersites in Shakespeare's TROYLUS AND CRESSIDA, Pozzo and Hamm, Goldberg in Pinter's BIRTHDAY PARTY, Weiss' de Sade in Marat/Sade and others whose cynicism, curses, swears and railings against people and human nature and the supernatural I relish as you do your Irish breakfast

The play is the thing, Hamlet says, and I say: naughtiness is the thing. I neither care nor mind what my villains fight for or against, what I am after is their dramatic flair and eccentricity and originality. I prefer the three Metford sisters to the three Marys, Mata Hari to Mother Tereasa, Lady Macbeth to Cordelia, and again as Hamlet says: Villain[s], damned villain[s], and what else! Shall I couple hell?

Pozzo and Hamm, my personal heroes due to their cynicism and scoffing (heroic because they are cynical and cynics because they are heroic) are what mainly attracts me to Samuel Beckett, the rest is quicksand, and because I am a passionate reader of biographies (three excellent reads has Beckett), and biographic writings (his letters to Alan Schneider collected by that Irish TCD professor and your would-be 4-vol collected letters and the conversations by and and about him collected by Mel Gussow), Beckett was lucky in my loving him

SB admired--like me, of course, intellectually-- the Marquis de Sade and his two characters, Pozzo and Hamm, the only villains in the entire works of SB, are obliquely modelled upon some de Sadean attributes. No wonder SB, the timid, coy, meek person he was, indeed the true tsaddik, came under a slight infulence of de Sade because SB suffered Nazi atrocities during WW2. During my visit to him in his office at the University of Reading, Professor John Pilling, the well-established Beckettian--Becketteer, to use Ruby Cohn's coinage of the word--told me a lot about SB's friend Paul Leon who was murdered by the Nazi who were assisted by a Catholic priest. The incident is mentioned in James Knowlson's most recent masterpiece, BECKETT REMEMBERING/REMEMBERING BECKETT. Pilling also told me that SB and wife Suzanne were sought by the Gestapo. In response to my question why shouldnt there be a study of this section of SB's life, Pilling told me there wasnt sufficient documents, and SB himself never elaborated on the subject

In late 1999, I wrote good old Hughie a letter and he didnt respond. Kenner was a Pound expert and I asked him about Caid Ali in one of Pound's longer poems. To PAIDUMA representative in Jordan, Mohammed Shaheen, Ii wrote a letter telling him about my letter to Kenner, and Shaheen informed me that Kenner was in a coma. Later in 2000 in a letter to me, Ruby Cohn broke the news that Kenner had died. Kenner's first book on Beckett in early 1960s is to me still lovably readale. I still read and re-read with relish Kenner's account of his visiting Beckett in his Paris flat, and how, with his head being full of memories of Beckett's Murphy's bicycle, Kenner stumbled on a a rust-stricken bicycle abandoned in Beckett's flat's backyard. My latest re-reading of Kenner's book was during my visit to Ulster University-Coleraine, N Ireland where I was received by Robert Welch, Dean of Faculty of Arts, editor of THE OXFORD COMPANION TO IRISH LITERATURE, and my Leeds University-England supervisor in my MA thesis THE ATTEMPT AT FAILURE: A STUDY OF SAMUEL BECKETT'S PLAYS in 1972. During the last two decades, I have come to prefer biography to criticism, and writers' personal lives to their writings, and if I were given the choice between spending a day with Hamlet or Shakespeare, I would choose Shakespeare, and I therefore agree with George Tabori who died recently in his raising the rhetorical question: Who'd spend a weekend with Hamlet?


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From my experience, and I always make Beckett a household issue with my family--Mrs James Knowlson envyed me for this--it is a bliss to have an invalide in the family. It gives you the feeling that you are living with Beckett who was a sickly person what with stab wounds by that Parisian apache to suffering from constipation and cataracts. How is work in progress of the Samuel Beckett Letters project. By the way, do you think there is an academic and/or monetary gain for me in publishing my LETTER ON SAMUEL BECKETT TO RUBY COHN, signed by me as Siddeek Bakr Tawfeek, the Arab of Beckettia, a copy of which I sent you over three years ago. Because I expect there will be copyright problems with the addressee, Ruby Cohn, I will render the letters into passages or paragraphs and entitle the work MY SAMUEL BECKETT DIARIES and I will change my name from Siddeek Bakr my first two names into Sadique Becker, retaining the same initials SB and with Becker I will keep even nearer to Beckett and at the same time keep closer to my intellectual mentor Sade whom Beckett also admired and even tried his hand at translating one of his novels

Today, August 25th is 58th anniversary of death of May Beckett, our Sam's mother. May was an iron willed woman whose metal withstood Sam's hammers. No wonder Sam made a lot of his characters have names beginning with the letter M, May's initial and the letter is No 13 in the English alphabet. Shawqi Abdul-Amir, an Iraqi who met Beckett in mid-1970s told me that he had a chat in French with Sam during which, Sam, looking intense, said that he wrote WAITING FOR GODOT as, to use TS Eliot's expression, "an objective correlative" to a crisis he was going through caused by a row with his mother May

In Islamic history, circa AD 7th century, Telha, a Moslem fighter came back home defeated in battle. Before stepping into the house, his mother instead of welcoming him, picked up a staff and brandished it at him ordering him to go back and fight until either to come back victorious or dead. Later he fell dead in battle. There are, after all, mothers stronger than May Beckett, Samuel Beckett's mother

President Barak Obama's inaugural address lasted 18 minutes, the duration between Billie Whitelaw's stage presentation in early 1973 of Samuel Beckett's Not I in New York City which lasted 19 minutes and the London presentation which lasted 17 minutes. When SB learned that it lasted 19 minurtes in New York he ordered Whitelaw to cut it down to 17 in London where I saw it at the Royal Court Theatre in the evening of 16th January 1973




There are money-minded people, there are sex-minded people, there are religion-minded people, there are politically-minded people, I am a Beckett-minded person, as once I knew that Obama's inaugural address lasted 18 minuets, it flashed in my mind that this address lasted between New York's and London's Not I. I think I have a Beckett idee fix, ie, Beckett fixation, like the mother fixation Norman Bates, the hero of Hitchcock's Psycho, played by Anthony Perkins had, and as fixation, whether a mother fixation as in Norman Bates' case or a Beckett fixation as in my case, is a mental disorder, I therefore am in need of psycho-therapy. I wonder if this happens to every Beckettian, or, to use Ruby Cohn's term, Becketteer!

Like many an Iraqi scholar and student, SB's plays have always been dear to me and ever present in my mind, hence here's my ad-libbed Hamm-Clov dialogue






[Scene: Saddam and Deputy Tariq Aziz in a hide-out during the American-Iraqi liberation war leading to Saddam's long-awaited downfall on April 9th 2003, co-inciding on 138th anniversary of end of American civil war on Palm Sunday April 9th 1865]



Saddam: The Americans have forgotten us

Aziz: Forgotten us! You exaggerate

Saddam: I mean here in the vicinity of our hide-out

Aziz: But they bombard us from time to time

Saddam: Then the Americans haven't forgotten us

No one has experienced WAITING as did the Iraqis, hence we LIVED WAITING FOR GODOT not simply READ about it. For over three decades, I for one--among the Iraqis--was waiting impatiently for Saddam's downfall, and this downfall like a long-awaited Godot did arrive, but in seems that the chthonic powers wouldn't let us rejoice the arrival of the Iraqi GODOT

> Here's an answer to you query about SB's popularity among Iraqi students which you raised in your first e-mail message two weeks ago. Ever since we. Iraqi students in the University of Baghdad were introduced in late spring, 1967 to SB's WAITING FOR GODOT--and I pride myself in getting to know SB before James Knowlson who discovered him in 1969--our love of him has been growing over the years and from one generation to the other, as if he was a guru whose followers grow in number in the course of time. Amidst the atrocitiers on-going currently in Iraq, we Iraqis--scholars as well as laymen--pride ourselves in LIVING the Absurd whereas the rest of the world READS in books and SEES on stage the Absurd, ie other people's fiction is our reality, their intellectual luxury is our mental agony, their book reading, university lecturing and play staging are our street fights, suicide cars exploding and kidnapping and killing. Hence SB's credibility, reality and the truth among us, not READ on the page or SEEN on the stage, but LIVED on ground

1--In a recent NOT I staging I read about in THE BECKETT CIRCLE which you once edited, the Auditor is made a Twareq look-alike. Twareqs are bedouin Arabs living in the Algerian Sahara (Desert). The recent V[olkes] W[agen] model is subtitled Twareg, ie desert rover, as the Arabic word, tawreq means rovers or roamers. The name Twareq (twareq is plural of tareq) is from Tareq ben Ziad, the Arab captain who crossed the sea from Tangier to Spain en route what later came to be named after him, Gibraltar which is a spoiled English version of the original Arabic: Jabal Tareq which translates as: Mount of Tareq. Present-day Saddam's Deputy Tareq Aziz, imprisoned in Baghdad since Saddam's fall on 9th April, 2003, is named after that Arab Captain Tareq ben Ziad, and Deputy Aziz named his first-born son, Ziad so that the son's name is Ziad Tareq who is currently in Jordan, pleading--through Pope Benedict XVI, among many another world VIP--for his father's release




2--In the television staging of QUAD which I saw in England as part of the 1981 BBC-2 TV Beckett Plays Festival, the four hooded figures were Moroccan look-alikes. They were reminiscent of the hooded man who gets stabbed in the market-place in Alfred Hitchcock's THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, the 1956 Hollywood film whose action at the beginning is set in Morocco where James Stewart and Doris Day are touring

Circa 1976 in a bookshop in the city of Mosul, modern Iraq, where Jonah in the ancient city of Nineveh, Mesopotamia, just across the River Tigris, once dwelt, I bought a book written in Arabic on Samuel Beckett containing, among other things, a photo-copy of a post card from Samuel Beckett to Suhail Bedee Bishruie, then American University in Beirut, Lebanon Professor of English Literature, and currently a Maryland University Professor next door to you. Bishruie and his colleagues planned a birthday party for SB and wrote him a request to do so. In a reply characteristic of him, Beckett wrote to Beshruie to the effect of "I kneel to you to excuse me from this." Lois, get hold of Bishruie in Maryland to get from him that SB post card to include it in your collection of the correspondence of SB. Rush to Bishruie as, according to word I have heard, he was seen walking on two crutches on the Maryland beach due to old age. My MA supervisor in my thesis on SB's plays, Leeds University, UK in 1971, Robert Welch currently Dean of Faculty of Arts, University of Ulster-Coleraine, N Ireland, editor of Oxford Companion to Irish Literature and father-in-law of the actor who played Lucky in Sir Peter Hall's August 2005 production of Waiting for Godot, told me during my visit to him in July 2005 that Bishruie had visited him a couple of weeks ago, and that they agreed to co-author a book on Irish literature

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."

"To a biography of me, I say 'Yes'", finally Beckett said to James Knowlson who had been persisting to procure the Jameson Irish whiskey drinker's long-delayed consent to write his biography. Likewise, to your suggestion for a chat on things Beckettian by e-mail, I say, 'Yes' immediately, without delay, as Hamlet promises his father's ghost. The irony is that Hamlet was not 'apt' in fulfilling his commitment and crrrrrrrritics (Beckett's spelling of critics in WAITING FOR GODOT) usually associate Hamlet with delay. In July 2005 I went to Reading and met Knowlson and wife Elizabeth and they invited me to a chicken lunch at the Senior Common Room, College of Arts, University of Reading, and a few days later they invited me to a garden high tea at their home where Elizabeth prided herself on having been kissed by Beckett in his Paris flat. I did good readings in Reading at the Beckett Archive, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading Library where Julian Garforth works as a Beckett Researcher. Among the things I read was Anne Attik's book HOW IT WAS where she, running out of adjectives in the English language to describe how Beckett was a good-hearted soul, she resorts to the Hebrew language to borrow the word tsaddik to desribe him. Tsaddik in Hebrew means the veracious the truthful, the rightuous and the sincere. The Arabic language, being a sister Semitic language of Hebrew, has the same word meaning the same as in Hebrew, with a slight spelling varaition, and my name Siddeek is this word in Arabic. What thickened the coincidence is that the name of the secretary at the Beckett Archive is Verity Andrews and Verity means the veracious, the truthful and the sincere, ie the English version of Hebrew tsaddik and the Arabic version of siddeek. After reading about Beckett being tsaddik in Attik's description, I rushed to Verity and told her that her name and my name and Beckett as described in Hebrew by Anne Attik are the same and one thing. Here endeth the first part of things Beckettian for the time being on my part


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You remember Keats' poem that runs: "When I have fears that I will cease to exist", etc... What's the poem about? I think fear of disaster goes back originally to Noah who lived under the fear that is symbolised by the deluge, hence he built a ship. I think the Noahian fear of imminent menace is part of the human psyche, collectively and indivisually. This fear of imminent menace is coupled with the sense of nearing to the end. "Nearly finished", says Christ on the cross, and when asked about the end (alsaa'a) Mohammed brought his index and thumb to the point they nearly touched and he said, "As near as this". No playwright portrays this hunch of fear of coming to the end like Harold Pinter does in whose plays there is always the menace of losing what one possesses. There is no guarantee that the woman who is in your bed tonight will stay as she is in the following morning. There is no guarantee that one will retain his health, money and social life as they are now. In Metamorphosis Franz Kafka depicts this theme when he makes his character Gregor Samsa transform from a human into a cockroach. On the other hand, when Adam and Eve were dismissed from Eden, they thought it was going to be a couple of hours, days no longer. It was Cain who after 70 years discovered it was going to be a long story so he ordered music and dance and festivity to while away the time till going back

Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams, Welshman, Communist and author of Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, enlarged and re-titled, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht was Professor of English Literature in Univesity of Cambridge in early 1950s when among his students was Omar Pound, son of Ezra Pound, poet, Fascist and provoker. Hussam AlKhatib, a Palestinian who lives in Ann Arbor for the benefits of democracy and works over here in Doha for the profits of petrodollars, was also a student of Williams'. He told me that one day Williams invited him and other students to his Cambridge rooms where when they first entered they saw Williams at the sink washing with his hands his blue collar blouse