Inspiring Dramatic Results

BOSTON —  Back in the days when audiences still fled his plays at intermission and critics called him a joke, Samuel Beckett woke up one morning at his home in Paris, much earlier than usual, and headed for the train station.

Alan Schneider, who had directed most of the Beckett productions in the United States, had been in town to meet with Beckett and was leaving. Beckett wasn’t sure exactly which train Schneider would be taking. Beckett waited on the platform for hours.

“I just wanted to say goodbye one more time,” he explained.

True, Beckett was a recluse. He shunned cocktail parties, journalists and photographers. He disregarded the opinions of critics. He wrote bleak, intense plays--as intense as his own thin, craggy face and penetrating stare. His characters were trapped in a barren landscape. They hardly moved. They were uncertain of their connections to their surroundings and to each other, lost in an illogical world of which they repeatedly failed to take measure. All they could experience was their own inevitable decay.

Because the world of Beckett’s plays is so stark and desolate, many assume that he was, too--aloof, cold and somber. But “No Author Better Served” (Harvard University Press), a newly published collection of 30 years’ worth of correspondence between Beckett and Schneider, reveals a different portrait of the writer. Edited by Maurice Harmon, professor emeritus of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College, Dublin, the letters show not only a demanding artist but also a kind and gentle man.

“He cared very intensely about the people who were in his life,” says Jean Schneider, the director’s widow. “And certainly Alan was one of them.”

Their correspondence began in December 1955, when Schneider was about to direct his first Beckett play, “Waiting for Godot.” He was 38, Beckett was 49. Schneider had been fascinated by a small production of “Godot” in Paris, attended by 12 people, five of whom walked out. The letters went back and forth until Schneider’s death in March 1984. (Indeed, Schneider was hit by a car while crossing a street to mail a letter to Beckett.)

In preparation for each new production, they would write to each other extensively. In a flat, messy scrawl, Beckett would answer Schneider’s questions and would offer not only detailed instructions on costumes, settings and tone, but even sketches and diagrams.

This epistolary dialogue reveals a playwright’s vision that gradually transformed our sense of the world and ultimately won the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature. The correspondence also shows Schneider’s importance in developing and implementing that vision.

Speaking at Boston College, which recently purchased the letters, Harmon said that in many ways Schneider was a catalyst to Beckett’s art. As an experimental playwright, Beckett was constantly entering new territory; Schneider not only followed him but also understood him and encouraged him.

“By all means, go on, Sam, do what you feel you should, write the way you want to, stretch everything the way you’d like,” Schneider wrote to him in 1961 after critics responded ambivalently to a production in Manhattan of “Happy Days.”

He told Beckett simply not to listen to those who said his work was not effective.

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According to actress Billie Whitelaw, who worked with Beckett and Schneider, Schneider was never one to question a playwright’s intentions. He preferred to present a play precisely as its author wished. No wonder he got on so well with Beckett, who wrote painfully detailed stage directions that often went on for pages.

Which isn’t to say that Schneider never had anything to offer.

In 1963, Beckett wanted three characters in “Play” to speak (tonelessly, from urns) whenever a light shined on them. Schneider had a suggestion. Though there was nothing in the stage directions to indicate such activity, Schneider asked what Beckett would think “of having the three people close their eyes each time the light goes out and open them the moment the light hits them?” That way, Schneider wrote, it would “be crystal clear that the light draws the responses from the people.”

“By all means,” Beckett replied.

A small thing. Still, as Harmon said, these letters show that “the general notion--that Beckett wrote his work in stone and never wanted any changes--simply is no longer acceptable. He knew what he wanted, and he was quite determined to get what he wanted. Nevertheless, he was open to suggestions and new ideas.”

From 1955 until his death, Schneider directed every Beckett premiere in the United States and some of the world premieres as well.

“I am in a peculiarly vulnerable position,” he wrote to Beckett in 1977, “because there is an entire cabal of avant-garde critics who feel that I have mesmerized you into some sort of permanent possession of your works.”

In fact, Beckett kept working with Schneider because he trusted him. At one point, he sent Whitelaw to America to work with Schneider on productions of “Rockaby” and “Enough.” Whitelaw was nervous: She had been trained by Beckett and had never been in one of his plays without him coaching her.

“You’ll be all right with Alan,” he assured her over the phone. “Don’t worry.”

Perhaps this trust allowed Beckett to learn more about the production of his art, Harmon speculates. “[In the letters, you can see that] Beckett becomes immensely more knowledgeable about the possibilities of the stage.

“When his first plays were put on, he would simply sit in the audience and watch, very often making comments under his breath. But, as time went by, he consulted, sitting in and advising and helping in various productions. Then (in Germany, France and England), he became a full-time director.”

Beckett and Schneider “jelled,” Jean Schneider says, “although they were so different in personalities. Alan was bubbling and outgoing, and Sam was reserved and withdrawn almost.” But they shared similar values: Both were obsessively devoted to their art, no matter how much money it made them. Often, in fact, Schneider (and Whitelaw) worked for Beckett for free.

Sometimes, “it used to cost me money,” Whitelaw says. “The pay would just about cover my parking fines, if that. You don’t work for Beckett or, not in my day, for money.”

But, Jean Schneider says, Beckett always had the welfare of his fellow artists at heart. She recalls that Barney Rosset, Beckett’s publisher and agent in the States, wanted to turn “Godot” into a film, to fill the cast with movie stars and have Schneider direct it.

“I really don’t want this to be done as a film,” Beckett told Schneider. “I did write it for the stage.”

Then he added, “Unless you need the money, Alan.”

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Given that Beckett, who died in 1989, never wrote a memoir or autobiographical essays, “No Author Better Served” is “by far the largest focus that we have on Beckett,” Harmon says. These letters tell “how he saw [his plays] on stage, his understanding of characterizations, of voices, of the pauses during the course of the play.”

In various letters, Beckett called his work impure, grisly and nefarious. But Schneider referred to the plays as “a kind of theatrical chamber music. In them, sounds and silences, cadences and rhythms, are selected, arranged, pointed and counterpointed--as would be the scenes and acts, the plots and counterplots, the characters and dialogue of more conventional playwrights.”

As early as 1960, Beckett wrote about his struggle to keep creating: “Apart altogether from interruptions I work with increasing difficulty--like writing on a pinhead with fading sight and trembling hand.” A letter from 1972 reveals that at times, even Schneider was a struggle for him. Frustrated by the director’s questions about “Not I,” Beckett wrote: “The remains of some convention seems to lie between us.”

But like his characters, Beckett would struggle on just when he thought he could not. In one letter commenting on their fight against critical adversity, he said to Schneider: “Courage, we’ll win.”

Five years later, it was Schneider’s turn to remind Beckett to ignore those who said his work had “no enduring value.”

“Every moment” of the plays, Schneider wrote, “will be equally true one hundred years from now.”