With Ruby Cohn

Following year, July 2005, I visited Ruby Cohn at her London studio. We left the studio as the maid was tidying up the place, and we went to a restaurant where we had lunch. While walking, I told her we looked like "Violet and Sebastian, Sebastian and Violet", as Violet Venable, in Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer, describes how stylish and elegant she and her son Sebastian appeared in posh restaurants


Ruby was suffering from hard hearing, and as if she had a hunch that she was saying good-bye to intellectual life, she told me, after returning to her studio from the Italian restaurant, to help myself to any of the books available there. I choose one volume only and that was Deirdre Bair's SB Biography. At that time, there was a staging of Miller's Deat of a Salesman at the Lyric Theatre-Shaftesbury, London and I thought of going together, but she told me she had seen it, didn't like it and advised me against going to see it. She advised me to go and see a Beckett double bill in a fringe theatre which I couldn't locate, so I went to see Salesman which proved Ruby was right. Ruby told me a lot of things about her Beckettian life, and I asked her about the first French Godot in Paris directed by Roger Blin in 1953, she told me that the first Godot she saw was the 1956 one in London, and she went to see it with her then-husband. She also told me that Suzanne, Mrs Beckett, had two entrances to the Beckett residence, one for his visitors who included all the English-language speaking ones, and another entrance for her visitors who were all French-language speaking ones. Therefore, Ruby concluded, she never met Suzanne