ELEUTHERIA
A play in three acts
By Samuel Beckett
Translated from the French by Michael Brodsky
Foxrock, Inc ./New York
© 1995 Les Editions de Minuit
English translation© 1995 Foxrock, Inc.
Published by permission of the Beckett Estate.
Introduction© 1995 S.E. Gontarski
Foreword© 1995 Martin Garbus
Translator's notes© 1995 Michael Brodsky
Published in the United States by:
Foxrock, Inc.
61 Fourth Avenue
New York, N.Y, 10003
Distributed by arrangement with Four Walls Eight Windows, Inc.
First printing May 1995
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a data base or
other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means,
including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
LIBRARY OF CosGRESS CATALOGING-Is-PusuCAnos DATA:
Beckett, Samuel, 1906
[Eleutheria. English]
Eleutheria/by Samuel Beckett
p. em.
ISBN 0-9643740-0-5
I. Title.
PQ2603.E378E413
1995
842'.914-dc20
95-5229
CIP
Text design by Raugust Communications
Printed in the United States
10 98 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOREWORD
By Martin Garbus, Esq.
The dispute between the Beckett Estate and
Foxrock over the publication of Eleuthena is a clash
of moral and legal values, personalities, cultures and
legal systems.
Under French law, there is substantial protection of an author's moral rights to control his own work during his life and after death; in America, there
is less protection . In America, because of the First
Amendment, there is an extraordinary commitment
to the free exchange of ideas; in case of doubt, we say
publish and let the reader judge the value of the art.
Under the laws of France, the executor of an
estate can decide which of the author's works can be
published, if the author's intention is unclear.
In France, if the executor wen t to Court, and
if the facts prove the author' s intention changed
and is unclear, the n the exe cuto r ' s single voice
could stop publication . I n America, more weigh t
would be given to the possible right of the public
to read the work.
Rosset, a close friend and confidant to Beckett,
was for thirty-three years the American publisher and
dramatic agent for Beckett's work. He was responsible for the publication of over twenty volumes of Beckett's works as well as for approving performances
of Beckett's works in the United States.
When Foxrock, the firm created to publish
Eleuthena by Rosset,John Oakes and Dan Simon , and
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SAMUEL BECKEIT
Jerome Lin don , literary executor of the Beckett Estate , failed to agree wh e ther and how the play should be published, I suggested three courses of
action . The first suggestion was that the two sides
in the dispute agree to appoint a third party or
appoin t two representatives to appoint a third party
to decide if the facts permit publication . Lindon
refused this proposal .
I then suggested that, i n addition to potential
third party arbitrators, there are groups of scholars
and theater people, including the Samuel Beckett
Society, that could play a role in resolving the dispute . Lindon refused to consider this possibility.
Finally, I suggested a variety of informal procedures. Lindon refused them all. This left us the option of resorting to more formal mediation of arbitration procedures, either in the United States or France. Lindon refused these as well.
I suggested that if we were to litigate we should
agree to a variety of neutral principles that reduce
the time, cost and rancor of a federal lawsuit. Lindon
refused to consider them. His only course continued
to be to threaten a federal copyright suit.
Rosset, Oakes and Simon hoped that if Lindon
saw a favorable response to the play he would permit its
publication and production . Accordingly, in New York,
in September of 1994, a private reading of the play was
arranged. Directed by Peter Craze of Britain, it was to
be put on at the New York Theatre Workshop, but
Lindon threatened to sue the theater, Rosset, the translator and the actors if the reading took place.
The Theatre Workshop, caught in the middle,
asked Rosset to post a $25 ,000 bond, which he could
not do.
ELEUTHERIA
v
Following the precedent set by John Houseman and Orson Welles when their premiere of Marc Blitzstein 's The Cradle Will Rock was canceled by the
WPA Theater Project on what was to have been its
opening night in 1936, Foxrock changed the venue
for the reading and, with a group of 13 actors and an
audience of approximately 100 invited guests, a reading was conducted that very same day of the theater cancellation in a rehearsal studio in the building
where Rosset lives.
Critics who saw the reading discussed the play's
substantial merits and its importance in the Beckett
oeuvre, and great interest in a future production was
aroused.
As a result of the reading and examination of
the manuscript, both in its original French and in a translation, letters were addressed to myself and to Foxrock from some of America's most important and creative
stage directors and theater owners. They stated a deep
interest in the play; more importantly, many of those
who wrote stated that they wished to produce Eleuthiria
and that its performance would constitute a m�or theatrical event. Rosset told all the directors in advance that they would have to obtain permission from the
Beckett Estate. Lindon received these letters and refused
permission and said he would not be persuaded by them.
Finally, Foxrock had me prepare papers to file
in Federal Court copyright action in the United States
District Court in New York, seeking an injunction and
declaratory judgment that the play could be published and performed. Lindon had threatened, if the book were published, to sue bookstore owners and
book distributors in the same way that he threatened
the publishers of this book and the New York Theatre
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SAMUEL BECKETT
Workshop that had offered to house the reading of the
play. However, at this point, the publishers decided to
bypass legal action and to proceed with the "publication" of Eleuthiria in a limited edition.
Rosset proposed this limited not-for-sale edition
in order to make the book available to at least some of
the people most interested in Eleuthiria. The publishers
were taking a risk and they knew it, but the decision was
made to publish. They were very aware that censorshi
p
of their efforts could come about through either governmental court action or expensive, time-consuming litigation. They went ahead. Thus, the forthcoming
publication of the free edition of Eleuthena was announced. A normal, commercial edition had been announced previously, but this new plan superseded it.
At that point, Lindon, apparently realizing the
true determination of his American oppone n ts,
agreed to Foxrock's publication of Eleuthena. He had
done nearly all he could to prevent its publication ,
and seeing that it was futile, wrote to Rosset:
... [A] s I see you are staunchly bent on publishing your
translation, I bring myself to grant you that publication right for the United States which you have been asking me for two years ... The one thing I am sure of is
that Sam would not have liked us to fight against each
other about him in a public lawsuit. My decision - I
should say: renouncing- is essentially due to that.
And so, this edition at long last brings to the
public the text of an importan t play that for too
long has been read only by a handful of privileged
scholars.
We hope and believe this edition will eventually lead to the play's performance.
The play's title , Eleu thbia, is a Greek word
meaning "freedom."
INTRODUCTION
By S.E. Gontarski
"Perhaps it is time that someone were simply nothing"
-Victor Krap
In his catalogue of the Samuel Beckett papers
at the University of Texas ' s Humanities Research
Center, Carlton Lake calls attention to the curious
publishing history of the work Samuel Beckett wrote
just after. World War II as he turned to writing in
French: "Along with Watt and Mercier et Camier one of
the more long-drawn-out publishing histories in
Beckett's career is that leading up to Nouvelles et textes
pour rien" (i.e., Stories and Texts for Nothing) .1 Indeed,
this was a period in Beckett's creative life when the
time between composition and publication was unusually protracted. Watt, for instance, written mostly in the south of France during the Second World War
and completed in 1945, did not see print for some
eight years after its completion . It was rejected by
more publishers than even Beckett could remember
before being published by the group Beckett called
the "Merlin juveniles" in collaboration with Maurice
Girodias's notorious Olympia Press in 1953. Beckett's
short story "Suite" (later "La Fin" or "The End") was finished in May 1946. It was published almost immediately in the July 1946 issue of Les Temps Modernes.
Beckett expected the second half of the story to appear in the October issue, but Simone de Beauvoir considered the first part complete in itself and refused to publish the second. Beckett argued that print-
Vlll
SAJ1UEL BECKETI
ing half the story was a "mutilation," but Mme. de
Beauvoir remained adamant, and it was some nine
years before the complete story appeared. Beckett in
fact wrote four French stories, nouvelles, in 1946, and
he expected that they would appear quickly in book
form from his first French publisher, Bordas, which
would publish his own ti anslation of Mu rphy in 194 7.
By December of 1946 Beckett could write with some
confidence to his English friend and agent, George
Reavey, "I hope to have a book of short stories ready
for the spring (in French) . I do not think that I shall
write very much in English in the future. "2 But Bordas
dropped plans to issue both Mercier et Gamier and the
four stories, Qu atre Nouvelles, when sales of the French
Murphy proved disastrous. When Beckett finally found
a second French publisher willing to take on the
whole of his creative backlog, Les Editions de Minuit,
in 1950, he hesitated and finally withheld much of
the earliest writing in French, Mercier et Gamier, one
of his four stories, "First Love," and his first full-length
play written in French, Eleu theria. The remaining
three nouvelles of 1946 were finally published in
France by Les Editions de Minuit in 1955 and in the
U. S. by Grove Press in 1967, both in combination
with 13 Texts for Nothing. Both Mercier et Gamier and
"First Love" were eventually published as Beckett
yielded to pressure from his publishers: 1970 in
French and 1974 in English .
But these publishing difficulties, hiatuses, hesitations, instances of self-doubt and self-censorship pale before the intractable difficulties surrounding
the publication of Beckett's first full-length play,
Eleuthhia, published only in 1995, nearly half a century after its writing. If the publication history of Watt,
ELEUTHERIA
ix
Mercier et Gamier, and "Premiere Amour" is curious,
the history of Eleuthena is curio user. As with Mercier et
Gamier and his four Stories, Beckett was at first eager
to have Eleuthena performed and published. He saw
Eleuthena as part of a sequence which reflected a certain continuity to his writing. On july 8, 1948, for example, he wrote to George Reavey, "I am now typing, for rejection by the publishers, Malone meurt [Malone
Dies], the last I hope of the series Murphy, Watt, Mercier
& Gamier, Molloy, not to mention the 4 nouvelles &
Eleuthena. "3 Malone Dies was not, of course, the last of
the series. Ano ther play followed shortly the reafter, En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) , completed in january of 1949, and a third French novel, L'innommable (The Unnamable) , completed a year
later. Alo n g wi th Molloy a n d Malone D i e s, The
Unnamableformed part of what Beckett called "the
so-called Trilogy."
Eleuthenawas begun on january 18, 1947 as a
retreat from the problems caused by the prose Beckett
had been writing at the time . As he told his first biographer Deirdre Bair in 1972, "I turned to writing plays to relieve myself from the awful depression the prose
led me into . Life at the time was too demanding, too
terrible, and I thought theatre would be a diversion . "4
By February 24 he had completed a draft of the threeact play, and by late March 194 7 he had turned over a typescript (which he always made himself, mindful
perhaps of the errors and changes introduced into
James joyce's work by various typists) to Toni Clerkx,
sister of Bram and Geer van Velde, who would for a
time function as Beckett's literary representative in
France, and who was responsible for placing Murphy
with Bordas. And in fact Mme . Clerkx managed to
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SAMUEL BECKETI
interest Jean Vilar at the Theatre Nationale Populaire
in the play, but Vilar wanted Beckett to cut it to one
long act. When Beckett refused, Vilar dropped his
interest. By the fall of 194 7, Mme. Clerla told Beckett
that she could no longer represent him and still have
time for her own writing, and so Beckett's live-in companion an d future wife , Suzann e D e sch eve aux
Dumesnil, began to circulate his work among producers and publishers.
By January of 1949, Beckett had completed a
second French play, En attendant Godot (Waiting for
Godot) ,
written again "as a relaxation to get away from
the awful prose I was writing at the time," this time
presumably Molloy and Malone meurt (Malone Dies) ,
an d th at p l ay to o was c i rc u l a t e d by M m e .
Descheveaux-Dumesnil-without success, until she
saw a production of August Strindberg's Ghost Sonata
performed at the Gaite Montparnasse in early spring
of 1950. The play, staged by Roger Blin , a disciple of
Antonin Artaud, had impressed her, and she dropped
the typescripts of both plays at the box office for Blin
to consider. Blin had heard of Beckett from the Dada
poet Tristan Tzara. He was interested in the plays even
though "he frankly did not understand Waiting for
Godot, but he liked it. He decided that he should probably begin with Eleuthbia because it was more traditional, and to his mind easier to cope with ."5 But finally economics entered the decision-making process, and as Blin noted, "Eleu thbia had seventeen characters, a divided stage, elaborate props and complicated lighting. I was poor. I didn 't have a penny. I couldn 't
think of anyone who owned a theater suitable for such
a complicated production. I though t I ' d be be tter
off with Godot because there were only four actors
ELEUTHERIA
Xl
and they were bums. They could wear their own
clothes if it came to that, and I wouldn ' t need anything but a spotlight and a bare branch for a tree."
With such decisions, then, was theater history shaped.
In October of 1950 Suzanne Descheveaux
Dumesnil, still systematically and assiduously making
the rounds of French publishers, delivered the typescripts of three novels, the "so-called trilogy," Molloy, Malone meurt and L 'innommable, to the desk of Georges
Lambrich, an editor at Jerome Lindon 's Editions de
Minuit, a house rapidly gaining a reputation among
the Paris avant-garde . By November, Beckett had a
French publisher, and the publication of Molloy was
scheduled for January of 1951 (although it was finally
delayed several months) to be followed shortly thereafter by Malone meu rt. Blin had been making some headway with the production of Waiting for Godot. He
had interested Jean-Marie Serreau in the play just as
Serreau was opening his Theatre de Babylone, and
Blin had gotten a small grant from the French Ministry for Arts and Letters to produce the play. Jerome Lindon had seen copies of the two plays and had