Chapter 20 of Deirdre Bair’s Beckett biography begins:
In the fall of 1954, Beckett received a letter from the warden of Luttringhausen Penitentiary in Germany, telling him that a convict had done a German translation of Waiting for Godot and was in the process of casting and performing the play. The warden said the play had changed one of the most troublesome prisoners into a cooperative, scholarly individual, and he asked if Beckett would be willing to correspond with the prisoner to answer some questions raised by the translation. Beckett agreed immediately. Several letters passed between them, and Beckett was impressed with the convict’s intelligence and sensitivity. When the play was performed, both the warden and the convict wrote detailed accounts to Beckett, telling him how it had affected all the prisoners, and how it stirred much discussion and comment, as each man found a personal meaning in the play. They invited Beckett to visit, and he wrote a sincere letter in reply, stating that he would if ever he were in Germany again, but he thought the possibility an unlikely one. In his reply, he returned the courtesy and invited them to Paris, should they ever have the opportunity. Little did he dream anything would come of it.
Intriguing, and I was looking forward to “Beckett Meets Some Cons,” but the story peters out amusingly and somewhat in the manner of an absurdist drama such as Beckett himself might have written. The following winter one of the inmates, having been released from prison, violated the terms of his parole and walked, hitchhiked, and rode in freight cars to Paris to meet with Samuel Beckett. It was the very fellow who had translated and staged Waiting for Godot at the prison. He wasn’t dressed for winter weather and arrived in Paris half-starved in addition to half-frozen. He didn’t know how to contact Beckett so went to the theater of Roger Blin, the actor and director who had first staged Waiting for Godot a couple years earlier. Bair then writes, deadpan though I think it’s quite funny:
Blin took him backstage while he tried to contact Beckett by calling several bars in Montparnasse, as there was still no phone at the rue des Favorites [the street on which Beckett lived]. When he failed to reach Beckett, he borrowed a heavy jacket and took the convict out for dinner. He wanted to give him money for a hotel room, but the man had no identity papers and was afraid to try to register without them, so Blin took him to his apartment.
The next day was very wintry. Blin left the convict alone in his apartment and set out to find Beckett. When he soon succeeded, and had explained to Beckett the situation, the renowned creator of theatrical vagabonds flatly refused to meet the criminal runaway. Bair suggests the refusal had little to do with the man’s social status—Beckett was famously reclusive and hated meeting anyone new. But it seems the “sincere” letter he’d written the prison was pro forma. He never expected to be taken up on the offer and directed Blin to tell the man that he (Beckett) had left Paris for an extended period. He also gave Blin a “substantial” sum of money to turn over to the man to get him on his way.
Perhaps not that surprisingly, the man had other ideas. He rather liked Paris, the more so since the most obvious alternative was returning to Germany, where he was wanted for violating parole. Moreover, he’d been given warm clothes, a place to stay, and a meal at a nice restaurant. These theater people might have been bohemian outsiders but they weren’t as outside as he was. Blin had a squatter and didn’t like it.
For a few days, he endured this arrangement. Somehow, though, he learned, while stewing over what to do, that the man’s criminal offense had been a violent one. Blin had been deprived of his ease and convenience and now he feared for his safety, too. With trepidation, he determined to evict his guest. But then, arriving home after his work day at the theater, intending to perform the unpleasant task, he discovered his apartment vacated. There was a note from the ex-con explaining that he could not abide the Paris cold and was headed to the south of France.
“He thanked Blin graciously for his hospitality,” concludes Bair, “but made no mention of Beckett.”
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