Modernism/modernity

I fell in love with Beckett's work even before I met him personally and had the "real," once-and-for-all "coup de foudre," in the late 1950s, through my work as Drama Script Editor, Radio, in the BBC in London . . .

Beckett was already famous in England for Waiting for Godot & Endgame on the stage (1953 & 1957) & his first radio play All That Fall, an instant classic on the Third or cultural Programme (1957). As in the case of Harold Pinter, he too still unfamiliar to the general public except for the radio plays we had commissioned from him, the Department was trying to convey the widest & deepest nature of Beckett's "voice" by broadcasting readings from his earlier & then little-known prose works . . .

We soon became close friends and colleagues, and until I moved to Paris some years later he used to write to me every day if we didn't meet. I knew and greatly valued his works already, but it was encountering him in person that was the great epiphany of my life. The 18 years difference in our ages didn't come into it. I was so much in awe of his genius, goodness, and beauty that it never crossed my mind that we might become emotionally attached . . .

At our first business meeting in Paris, I experienced my first real "coup de foudre," intensified by further professional meetings later in London & Paris, & though nothing was said about it, it was clear to both of us that something of importance in our lives had happened. I was too awestruck to imagine developments, & was thunderstruck when he phoned me out of the blue while I was directing a radio play in a studio in Broadcasting House in London & invited me out to dinner. It was obvious at once that we were natural soul- and mind-mates, & about then that he started writing to me, & I replying, almost every day. It was not until a few years later that we got around to discovering that we were also natural body-mates as well.

(From Samuel Beckett: A Memoir, by Barbara Bray) [End Page 887]

I met Barbara Bray [see fig. 7] in 1996 but it was only after Walter Asmus and myself, as the organizers of the Beckett in Berlin 2000 festival, invited her to read "Dante and the Lobster" at Berlin's Akademie der Künste, that we became friends. During our meetings, not unlike Samuel Beckett, she satirized the efforts of academics to help tout le monde comprehend his work, preferring via activa, convinced that the best way to disseminate his message was to let his words and images speak for themselves. She was visibly very fond of and attached to "her" theatre, the Dear Conjunction Company, a Paris-based troupe which she founded in 1991 with actors Trish Kessler and Les Clack. Playing mostly to English-speaking audiences of expatriates and visitors, by then they had produced Beckett's shorts and Krapp's Last Tape as well as the works of mostly British authors, including Harold Pinter who was the company's official patron. I invited them to produce Krapp's Last Tape and Pinter's Ashes to Ashes at a festival in Cracow in 2002 and we were thinking of joint projects in the future.

The stroke Barbara suffered one evening in late 2003, shortly after a Dear Conjunction performance, radically changed her life. Partly paralyzed, she had to come to terms with the fact that the rest of her life was to be spent in a wheelchair. After staying in hospital for several months she was placed in a nursing home near Gare de l'Est. Barbara vehemently opposed the prospect of staying there indefinitely and eventually her strong will prevailed and she was able to return to her studio in Rue Seguier after it had been adapted to the needs of a handicapped person.

During my visits to the nursing home as early as 2004 I started taping our conversations about her past, something I noticed she could cope with incomparably better than with her present. Her long-term memory was intact: she...