This Day in Literary History (Beckett Wins, Mailer Loses, Nobel Prize)

October 23, 1969—The committee deciding the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded it to Samuel Beckett, a 63-year-old Irish expatriate who liked to let his cryptic novels and plays do his talking for him.

By giving it to someone who hardly cared a fig for the attention, the Swedish Academy annoyed Norman Mailer, an extraordinarily voluble 46-year-old American who frittered his considerable energies away on misconceived novels, vanity film projects and quixotic political posturing (such as in the image accompanying this post, showing him in the middle of a 1969 mayoral campaign in New York City that was already choking with candidates).

In an interview in today’s issue of The Wall Street Journal, Philip Roth offers a mordant morsel of wisdom about the Swedish Academy and its award that, one wishes, Stormin’ Norman might have taken to heart: “I don’t expect anything from them. And they usually reward my expectations.”

In the winter of 1981, I covered for my college paper Mailer's appearance at the university’s school of the arts. I marveled not only at the glittering images and phrases that sprang spontaneously from him, but also his ironic send-up of his own well-known ego. After he finished writing his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), Mailer related, he felt like “the biggest thing since Tolstoy—maybe even bigger than Tolstoy.” Re-reading it not so long later, he loathed it.

Mailer must certainly have felt in Tolstoyan territory when he got wind of a rumor that he was up for the Nobel Prize. The writer he emulated perhaps the most, Ernest Hemingway, had tried for a similarly weighty treatment of love and war in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and, 14 years later, he received the coveted prize.

When it came to the Nobel, Mailer might have had second thoughts about anything Tolstoyan. Amazingly, the Swedish Academy never presented the award to the great Russian novelist, even though he wrote for at least a decade after the awards were first presented. (Something, it was later revealed, having to do with the writer’s “"theoretical anarchism and mystical Christianity.")

Most authors, when snubbed by the group, confine their disappointment to their circle of friends. “You were my second choice,” John O’Hara write to his dear friend (and ’62 laureate) John Steinbeck.

Not Mailer, though. In The Prisoner of Sex, his argument with feminism published two years later, he opened with a vignette that, by almost any stretch of the imagination, would have to be called off-topic: i.e., the rumor that he was up for the Nobel Prize.

At first, the rumor set off the predictable Pavlovian response: “After twenty-one years of public life, he [there it is again, that Henry Adams-style use of the third person, thereby circumventing the usual observations—like here!—about the author’s egotism] had the equivalent of a Geiger counter in his brain to measure the radiation of advancements and awards in the various salients, wedges, and vectors of that aesthetic battlefield known as the literary pie."

Mailer then claimed that it was best that he didn't receive the award, as it would have "incarcerated him into a larger paralysis.” Do you believe him? I don’t.

Over the last 50 or so years, we Americans have gotten used to revelations about behind-the-scenes doings of Presidential campaigns, of the Supreme Court, even papal elections. In contrast, the deliberations of the Nobel committee seemed a closely held secret of some inner sanctum.

I was wrong—I just hadn’t looked that far or read enough. (Thereby undoubtedly confirming that group’s snotty dismissal of the “insularity” of American writers and the readers who keep them together, body and soul!) Then I came across this New Yorker article, from 11 years ago, by Michael Specter. It turns out that the six-person committee that makes recommendations for the finalists to the larger Swedish Academy has periodic brouhahas that explode into the open in the Scandinavian press.

And, if Mailer ever had occasion to look back on his regrets before he died nearly two years ago, he could have taken solace in his loss of the Nobel by considering that some laureates—even of recent years—are generally considered substandard, including playwright Dario Fo.

Theater Review: “Waiting for Godot,” from the Roundabout Theatre Co.

If you've ever taken a poetry or creative writing class, you’ve probably heard “a poem is not supposed to mean but be” until you’re sick out of it. Why, however, does the term apply only to poetry? Since when did poetry become esoteric and the drama become accessible?

If we asked ourselves this, we could save ourselves a million arguments over Waiting for Godot—though the downside is that it might well put thousands of English teachers out of work across the country.

The Roundabout Theatre production shows why questions about the meaning of Samuel Beckett’s landmark tragicomedy are almost irrelevant. Without doing mass violence to Beckett’s text, director Anthony Page and his dream team have found a different Godot than the one that twisted you into a pretzel with its cryptic allusions.

So sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. As we surely all know by now, we don’t know where we’re going in this world anyway, right?

In their terrifying yet hilarious quest to fill the hours of a meaningless day, waiting for an agent of change who may or may not appear, tramps Vladimir and Estragon face the same Sisyphean task that consumed Laurel and Hardy as they struggled to move a piano up an impossibly high hill.

This is a different Godot than you could ever imagine on the printed page. If only they’d told us that this was not merely about metaphysics, but about metaphysical vaudeville.

Beckett was explicit in his directions about how he wanted his set to look: barren, mirroring his characters’ spiritual emptiness. But that minimalist setting is probably far better suited to the relatively intimate confines of the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre than to the company’s more spacious Studio 54, where this is staged.

So, in probably its only significant departure from the playwright’s wishes, set designer Santo Loquasto fashioned a massive rock formation—one that looks like it could have easily fit into Planet of the Apes—not surprising at that, since both works have been interpreted as post-nuclear-apocalyptic.

Harold Pinter glimpsed in Godot a beacon for the kind of play he would perfect: one not just dependent on a text of words, but a subtext of submerged emotion that comes through in pauses and other physical expressions. Such theater calls for actors of the highest order, and the Roundabout certainly found them in its two principals, Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin.

Flamboyant characters have often provided Lane with his most famous roles (e.g., Max Bialystock in The Producers, Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner, and Albert in The Birdcage), but just as frequently opens up opportunities for counterproductive exhibitionist impulses.

As Estragon, however, the more physical member of the homeless pair, Lane reins in his inner ham, allowing the audience to perceive the full humanity of his sad-faced clown. He invests even Estragon’s lowest moments with a desperately vaudevillian energy.

“Let’s go kill ourselves,” he says, tugging on Irwin’s arms, in the same almost insanely cheerful manner that Mickey Rooney urged Judy Garland, “Let’s put on a show!” In his priceless routine trying to fit on a shoe, Lane stands Darwin on his head, locating in his character not so much a struggle for existence as a struggle with it. It might be the best job I’ve seen the actor do on stage or screen.

In past performances, Irwin made his name with expert miming. Here, his Vladimir, in contrast with Lane’s Estragon, is a man of words—one he fancies himself the brains of the outfit.

In a weird stentorian accent, John Goodman is all bombast as Pozzo—a driver of men (literally so, pushing around his slave) who, by the end of the performance, has had his world turned upside down over the course of only 24 hours—further confirmation of Beckett’s rueful view of mortality.

The only false note I found in the play was John Glover, as the slave Lucky, who seemed to be resorting to every means of histrionics (all kinds of mugging and braying) in order to steal every bit of attention in his comparatively short time on stage.

The post-show “talk-back,” moderated by Roundabout dramaturg Ted Sod, featured a discussion with Professor Annette Saddik of the New York City College of Technology on Beckett. It included plenty of fascinating details about the unusual early history of this show, including the fact that:

* It was performed in France, where the Irish-born playwright lived for years—and where he had served in the Resistance during WWII.

* When it premiered in the U.S., it opened not on the traditional home of the avant-garde, New York City, but in Miami—where it was advertised to senior citizens as, according to one just brilliant PR flack as “the laugh riot of two continents.” (This claim prompted the immortal response from one wag: “Was one of the continents Antarctica?”)

* The play was probably best received in its most unusual staging, at San Quentin. (Beckett believed the play was received especially well by prisoners because they knew all about waiting.)

* Beckett confessed to possessing “little talent for happiness.”

* His belief in the randomness of existence was ratified by his 1938 stabbing by a pimp who afterward said he had no idea why he committed this deed.

Sod and Saddik brought the house down, though, when they related a quiet, refined, subtle comment about the play to Lane by the one and only Elaine Stritch: “Oh, Nathan, if the play isn’t funny, it’s going to be a long f-g night!”

Leave your fears at the stage door, because the two hours and twenty minutes will fly by. And speaking of flying, that’s what’s happening with time right now, because Waiting for Godot only plays July 12. I urge you to see the brilliant entertainment that, more than three decades before Seinfeld, was the real, original “show about nothing.”