Pinter, Harold

playwright

(Vidéo) [ENG] Harold Pinter raconte ses anecdotes sur Beckett puis lit un extrait de "L'Innommable"

Artesquieu · May 4, 2021 · partial coverage

• Harold Pinter
• Samuel Beckett
• The Unnamable
• Molloy
• Malone Dies
• The Caretaker
• Paris
• recollection

Coverage note: full (about twelve minutes; YouTube auto-generated captions without punctuation)

Core ideas

Meeting Beckett in Paris, 1961. Pinter recalls meeting Beckett in Paris in 1961, when The Caretaker was being produced there: Beckett came into the hotel walking very quickly, with a quick handshake, extremely friendly, and drove his little Citroën "from bar to bar" through the whole evening. They ended up eating onion soup at four in the morning; Pinter, overcome by alcohol, tobacco and heartburn, lay down on the table and fell asleep. Forty-five minutes later Beckett came back with a tin of bicarbonate of soda he had searched all of Paris to find, which "worked wonders".

A letter from 1954. Pinter reads a paragraph from a letter he wrote at 24, which he still agrees with: he wants no philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds or answers "from the bargain basement"; Beckett is "the most courageous, remorseless writer going", who does not flog a remedy or revelation, leaves no stone unturned and "brings forth a body of beauty".

The trilogy and The Unnamable. He thinks Beckett's major achievement is the trilogy of the 1950s (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable), and reads the end of The Unnamable: a voice that is not the narrator's own, that speaks of "my sins", of an indictment, of a door and a silence, ending on "you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on".

Excerpts