[In the following essay, Mehta examines Ohio Impromptu as a modernist interpretation of the classic theatrical impromptu form.]

Beckett called his play an impromptu.¹ An impromptu in the theatre is a quite specific form in which the playwright—usually through the vehicle of a play within a play—attacks his critics, defends his practice, and, traditionally, lets his audience in on a few of the tricks and all of the tribulations of his profession. Molière's L'Impromptu de Versailles, for example, lays before us what appears to be a rather chaotic attempt to put together a play for Louis XIV. The performance is at hand, the play isn't written yet, the playwright's in extreme anxiety, and his actors not only reject their assignments but pelt their leader with critical abuse. The end result is a shambles, which, of course, itself becomes an entertainment, somehow magically plucked out of thin air, which the Sun King, by all accounts, found amusing. In the process, Molière has produced a hit, savaged his critics, and with casual generosity tossed his audience both an insight into the act of creation and, paradoxically, an affirmation of its mystery.

Beckett's impromptu draws from the same tradition and, unsurprisingly, crawls through the same hoops. The play offers us a play within a play (strictly, “a tale within a tale within a play”),² opens up the mechanics of its own creation, secretes a message for its critics, and lays bare sources of energy no different from its predecessor's—suffering, turmoil, chaos. In all of these respects it is as unprotective of authorial privacy as tradition demands. To the extent that it differs from its great forerunner, it does so by relinquishing the conjuring element, the magician's sleight of hand, with which Molière transmuted the struggle, terror, and bitterness of his vocation into a comedy of baffling perfection. The writer of Ohio Impromptu, in contrast, perhaps reflecting the difference between neo-classical and modernist notions of an artist's responsibility and limits, neither doffs nor reassumes the professional's mask, but rather makes explicit from beginning to end the connection between suffering in life and suffering in the creation of art.

This suffering is communicated to us in two ways—through the image we see and the words we hear. The visual image is that of two old men with white faces and long white hair, dressed in long black coats, sitting at one end of a long white table. On the table, which is roughly parallel to the audience, are an open book and a single, black, wide-brimmed hat. The bowed heads of both men are propped on their right hands; their left hands rest on the table. The Listener's face is hidden by his hand. At Beckett's request, his original American director, Alan Schneider, angled the table slightly toward the audience so that the Reader's face would be partially visible.³ Despite this adjustment, both men's eyes are shielded from the audience and from each other. The Reader reads from the book in front of him, twice turning a page with his left hand. The Listener knocks on the table twelve times, also with his left hand, to signal the Reader to repeat a passage or to read on. Aside from one instance when the Listener raises his left hand to prevent the Reader from looking up an earlier passage, these are the only movements until the very end of the play.

The initial impact of this image is that of an icon—an emblem of old age, loneliness, and inner desolation. The image's clarity of line and stark black and white scheme, its lack of detail, its formal modernist rigor, its monumentality and stillness, all reinforce its emblematic quality. What is important to note at this stage, before the words do their work, is that the iconic image is received in roughly the same way by the entire audience—a collective response to an allegory of suffering. Once the narrative takes hold, however, this response, in my view, begins to change, although the image remains fixed. Under the pressure of words and the passage of time, a group response to a near-abstraction starts to dissolve into individual reveries, private communings and personal projections that together constitute a form of co-creation.

Co-creation between author and audience is, of course, nothing new in theatre; it occurs with every performance of any play. Because the majority of writing for the stage, however, is “closed” in form, the audience must fight to insert itself, except for those rare, usually climactic moments when the writer stops controlling response and, as it were, invites the audience in. Beckett's late plays move purposefully in the opposite direction, until, with his impromptu and its near-perfect interplay of image and narrative, emblem and chaos, he achieves a work about authorship in which the author appears wholly absent—a sharp irony in this most self-revealing of fictions. To shave closer to the bone on the matter of co-creation, which I think is the work's primary conduit of power, it is necessary, then, to try to understand the ways in which image and narrative play upon each other, so let us for the moment turn away from the image to the second of the openings through which Ohio Impromptu releases suffering into the theatre—the words that we hear.

Because “narrative” carries various meanings, depending on genre and context, I limit my use of the term here to mean the fictions that Beckett's characters create in their respective plays. The dramatic action comes to a temporary halt and a character embarks on a story, a fiction. One thinks of Hamm's stories in Endgame, Pozzo's in Godot, the Holloway story in Embers, and so on. Ludovic Janvier has called these stories “the holes through which the past and lived experience emerge.”⁴ By the time we get to the late plays, we have nothing but holes—the stories have swallowed their contexts, the fictions have become all. In Not I, for example, every word Mouth speaks is her fiction, her story of She—corrections, amendments and all—although there are six sounds, four laughs and two screams, that are problematic, that might lie outside the fiction. In That Time, all the words are the anonymous old man's fictions about himself and his past, with the only emanations from present time once again coming nonverbally, in the sound of the character's breathing. In both plays, Beckett lays out the process of fictionalizing with what feels like a kind of purposeful overtness. The desolation of the characters' lives, their clinging to authorship to survive, to displace the desolation into third person or second person narratives, their need for those narratives to supply them with what their lives did not—sanity, order, meaning, rest, wholeness, escape from the void without and the void within—all this is rendered with a transparency that enables an audience to grasp the essentials immediately—intuitively and emotionally, if not conceptually. As a result, the spectator passes easily through the fiction-making framework of these plays to fasten on the horrors of the lives on view. The breakneck pace of the one, the panting urgency of the other, combined with the vividness and specificity of the scenes that are evoked—tears on a palm, catatonia in a courtroom, humiliation in a library, the search for a childhood sanctuary—touch off deep responses in viewers. Ironically, if Not I in particular can be said to harbor a weakness, it might lie precisely in the fluency and power of such reactions. For Beckett went to great lengths in that play to elicit feeling from his female surrogate's desperate effort to think of “the right story, the right word which will end the misery.”⁵ I suspect that in performance this claim on our hearts is only partially honored, undermined by the very obviousness of Mouth's need to find fictions, overwhelmed by the very power of the fictions she finds. This is not to say that the plays are not stirring—they could hardly be more so—but only to suggest that the texture of experience that is their residue might not match the complexity of their structures and ends.

Trailing Not I by a decade, Ohio Impromptu unveils a narrative less transparent and more complex than those in any of Beckett's late plays, with the possible exception of Footfalls. Here is a summary, which uses language from the narrative wherever possible. The Reader reads the Listener a story about a certain He who lost a loved one—whether through death or abandonment is unspecified, although the line “my shade will comfort you” suggests the former.⁶ He moved away from the dwelling he had shared with the departed, although warned by the “dear face” in dreams not to do so. In his grief, He paced an island known as the Isle of Swans, presumably the one of the same name in the middle of the Seine, dressed in his habitual “long black coat” and “old world Latin Quarter hat.” He could not sleep—“his old terror of night laid hold on him again.” One night a man dressed in a “long black coat” “appeared to him,” said he had been sent by the “dear name” “to comfort” him, produced “a worn volume” and proceeded to read to him. Of the content of this reading we are told nothing, other than that it was a “sad tale.” His reading done, the spectral visitor “disappeared.” This scene was repeated “from time to time,” always after dark. Finally one night, the visitor told He that he would not come again. This time “he did not disappear,” although “dawn [was] at hand.” The two men, He and his ghostly companion, sat on in silence. The Reader on stage than reads his final words, “Nothing is left to tell,” and closes the book we see before us. The Reader and Listener “lower their right hands to table, raise their heads and look at each other, unblinking. Expressionless.”

This is a summary of a set of interlocking narratives, carrying within them the seed of infinite regression, presented under the rubric of a framing play, Ohio Impromptu. I would like to focus on just one point of interest here. Everything to do with content seems unknowable; and everything to do with form, shape, or structure is clear.

In the matter of content, for example, whose is the “dear face”? Male or female? Dead or alive? Are there two at all? If so, how can “my shade” duplicate the dreamer, our suffering He? Following from which, the phrase “where we were so long alone together,” repeated four times in five sentences, might carry a meaning other than that of romantic convention, suggesting rather a bifurcation of self, one part of which has died. What causes He's “extremity” and his “old terror of night”? Why do the comfort-bearer's visits suddenly cease? Who wrote the “sad tale”? Who wrote the story we are overhearing? That none of these questions appears answerable suggests that the omissions are, of course, deliberate; that they exploit the zone of impotence and ignorance that Beckett has claimed as his domain;⁷ that by offering the least directive or circumscribed projection surface possible they invite the broadest spectrum of private response from the multiplicity of life experiences in the audience; and that by refusing to posit order where there is none to be found, they force attention to shift from an unbearable past to the attempt to create a bearable present.

On the matter of form, perhaps a single instance, having to do with the kinship between outer and inner fictions, will suggest the play's structural lucidity. The outer fiction takes about twenty minutes to read and appears to center on He's immediate suffering following his departure from a site of union—whether with another or with a former self. The inner fiction, the one the shade reads to He, is much broader, lasting “the long night through,” and all we are told of it is that it is unhappy. However, ingesting the identical appearance of all characters seen and described, the identical positions “head in hands,” the identical “worn volume,” and the identical atmosphere of night and despair, the spectator is certain that the stories too must match—and so they do. It quickly becomes apparent that the outer reading, picked up midstream, has been underway for a long time (“Little is left to tell” is the play's opening line), and that “page forty paragraph four,” describing “the fearful symptoms” experienced by He “when his heart was young,” came and went so long ago that, to Reader's astonishment, the author of his text has nearly forgotten that such horrors had ever occurred (“after so long a lapse that as if never been”). From which it is clear that what has been read and is being read, of which we are offered only the final moments, is one reimagining of the entire life's history—from spring to deepest winter—of a human being, whoever that person might be, whether one, several, or all of the five figures in explicit configuration and the infinitely greater numbers implied. The two stories, inner and outer, now shift into alignment. They both begin the moment the shade starts reading to He. The beginning that we hear, the beginning of Ohio Impromptu, is but a sliver of the inner whole, cut from its very end, the tail of the tale. The inner encloses the outer, we see the shape, and yet the shape is all we see. We know little of the content of the outer story, other than that it is a story about the life-cycle of a story. Of the inner one we know even less. But we do know that there is but one life at issue, that it has been on the whole a miserable mess, and that the entirely specific attempt to reinvent it through a series of cascading fictions is both the controlling formal principle of Ohio Impromptu and the core of its emotional charge.

To the extent that the preceding argument persuades at all, it is perhaps not irrelevant that the play's hidden content and crystalline shape both turn out to have the identical effect: they compel viewers to focus on the action taking place in front of them. In comparison with, say, audiences for Not I and That Time, the audience at Ohio Impromptu does not sink as easily through the work's fiction-making surface to fasten on the specific horrors of the life on view. Rather, by foregrounding the fragmented self and its desperate attempt at survival, and by refusing any particulars of this self's situation, Beckett forces us into a divided response. On the one hand—as at funerals, when we grieve as much for ourselves as for the dead—we feel an irrational sense of melancholy, touched off by the interplay of image, voice, and story of typical loss. On the other, we feel fascination and dread as we watch the fictional world of the infernal past overlap and fuse with the here-and-now world on stage before us.

It is often said, both in the criticism on the play and in post-production conversations with audiences, that this dialectic between what is seen and what is heard, between the situation inside the fiction and the situation on the stage, is at the heart of Ohio Impromptu's power and mystery.⁸ While there is much mystery in the play, the conversation between levels of fiction or, more precisely, between fictions and fiction-making does not seem to me to contribute to it. Much like Didi's doggy doggerel in Godot, a song in the shape of a downward spiral from which there is no escape, the infinite regression of authors and audiences in Ohio Impromptu demonstrates no more than “the same old scene of sorrow”: the chaos within the trapped self and the irremediable impulse to free and reconstitute that self through fiction.⁹ But, because the ontology that compels such fictions is, for Beckett, in permanent control of the human condition, it follows that the fictions, quests for the twinned grails of order and meaning, will inevitably fail—and, equally inevitably, reconstitute, try again, fail again, and so on, until breath leaves body.¹⁰ This, in my view, is exactly the situation in Ohio Impromptu, which, as suggested earlier, is part of a larger fiction-making that has neither a beginning nor an end.

The opening carries no sense of fresh embarkation. We come upon the story midstream, a page is turned to get to the play's first spoken word, and the first related event is clearly also part of an ongoing narrative.

The play's conclusion, on the other hand, carries a powerful sense of closure, with the facing heads, uncovered eyes, and enigmatic mirror image delivering an ending of catastrophic finality.¹¹ The play has ended. This particular fiction has ended. But the encompassing fiction and the need to sustain it have not. To make sure we receive this—intuitively, subconsciously, in our very fibre (“I hope my piece may work on the nerves of the audience not on its intellect”¹²)—Beckett makes us live through the ending twice.

The first time is in the collapse of the story within the story. The internal Reader, He's ghostly visitor, reads his “sad tale through” one final time, closes his book, and finally says “I have had word from—and here he named the dear name—that I shall not come again. I saw the dear face and heard the unspoken words. No need to go to him again, even were it in your power.” For me and the performers I have worked with, this is a difficult moment. If the “dear face” is understood solely as a loved one, then this enigmatic withdrawal of comfort and the devastations that follow must be ascribed to the heart's mystery, the unknowable origins of personal failure, and left at that. And for most of the audience the matter probably rests there. It is possible, however, to think about the play's quintet in another way, which does not preclude the former, but rather encompasses and enriches it. Consider the following: the shade of the “dear face” is visually a mirror-image of He; the shade's announcement just quoted is delivered in his own words, not those of his “sad tale,” which is now over, the book closed; this is the only point at which the outer Listener interrupts the inner pas de deux by asking for a repeat; the Reader's repeat (in the outer text) says “Saw the dear face …,” whereas the shade had said “I saw the dear face …,” the only occasion in the play when a repeat is not a repeat, suggesting that the Reader, too, is an emissary from the same source; and the shade is the sole user of the word “I.” Consider further that both the shade and He communicate with the “dear face” without language, in “unspoken words”; and that the ruthless “No need to go to him again, even were it in your power” can evoke sundering forces larger than those of love's demise or weakening personal volition. What I am proposing, in brief, is not only that the “dear face,” He, their ghostly familiar, the Listener and the Reader can all be seen as fragments of a single self, but that what is possibly at issue here is the unexplained, because inexplicable, failure of the creative faculty, the death of an artist.

What am I to say? I said.
Be yourself, they said, stay
yourself. Myself?
I said. What are you insinuating?
[Yourself before, they said.] Pause. [And after.]
Pause.
[Not during? I said.](13)

During death, in other words; “stay yourself” as you were in the extinguishing instant; while “What are you insinuating?” mocks the very notion of a unitary “self” as something amusingly antique, if not actually obscene. If Beckett hung on to anything from this mercifully abandoned early stab at the Ohio commission, I suspect it was to his need to expose the uncertainty and terror of his life as a writer—with death of the spirit and disintegration of self his nightly hauntings—and that it was this need above all that led him to the impromptu, a form constituted by such exposures, as his vehicle of choice.

Thus imagined, Ohio Impromptu links itself as closely to the radio plays, Words and Music and Cascando, as it does to other works from the late group, for, though sharing many of the latter's tonal and formal qualities, it is focused less on recalling the particularity of textured lives than on baring ever more nakedly the self-dissolving terrors of the act of writing. Harking back to a two-decade-old template, then, something like the following pattern might emerge. The Listener plays the role of Opener in Cascando, his paired knocks standing in for “I open … And I close.”¹⁴ The Reader plays Voice, whose first word in Cascando was “—story. …”¹⁵ The shade plays a role analogous to Music, for though he, too, reads from a book, his nightly reading “at the same hour with the same volume” has the soothing power of an ideal, never heard by any but He. I take the fact that only the shade is honored by the word “I” as an acknowledgment of his closeness and secure access to the source of selfhood, creativity and comfort, the “wellhead”—a privileged position echoed in Words and Music, where Music is presented as truer to instinct and feeling than Words.¹⁶ The power at the center of creation, felt strongly as female, though never asserted as such, shines from the “dear face,” defined in Ohio Impromptu by absence (“when his heart was young”), then sustained presence, then again absence (at play's start), then intermittent presence (through shade), then crushing—because final—absence. He, accordingly, assumes the role of the poet, the central consciousness, revealed not during the years of strength, when He and the “dear face” were “alone together,” “so much shared,” but rather precisely at his time of impotence, helplessness, and vulnerability, when the forces he summons can do no more than repeat the story of his abandonment, failure, and approaching oblivion.

All of which is not to claim exact correspondences between works separated by twenty years. Music, for example, is seen in the radio plays as a force external and parallel to Voice, whereas here, perhaps reflecting Beckett's increasing precision of awareness about his means, Voice appears to create Music, the irony being, of course, that since Music remains the animating principle, the sole bringer of creativity, comfort and “shade,” Music, in effect, creates Voice. It is possible that there are other discrepancies and refinements as well, but the resemblances are striking enough to suggest that many of the same issues are at stake and that, despite differences of tone and medium, they are being worked out in roughly the same way.

Returning now to the first part of the play's double ending, the collapse of the inner fiction, the shade delivers his fateful message, the two sit on in silence and all sound and movement cease. In this tableau, which we see in mind's eye, and which has already given birth to the one that we will see in the flesh, the play's first true mirror image is established—two ashen figures who, separate, embodied a victory of will and imagination over the night, but, melted together, may not speak, hear, imagine, or feel. If Beckett abandons us to our own devices to plumb the unknowable origins of personal and creative failure, he leaves us in no doubt about the cost of such failure. The Reader describes to his Listener from his text the consequences of the death of its parent, also, paradoxically, their joint creation, the inner text: “they sat on as though turned to stone. Through the single window dawn shed no light. From the street no sound of reawakening. … Buried in who knows what profounds of mind. Of mindlessness. Whither no light can reach. No sound. So sat on as though turned to stone.” What is being evoked is a living death of silence and darkness, which, however much longed for as “rest, sleep, no more stories, no more words,”¹⁷ is also the unbearable ending, in James Knowlson's words, the “end of creativity, the failure of that impulse to drag oneself compulsively forward”¹⁸—in short, the death of the spirit. Having spelled out once, in words, the consequences of the failure of the stories we make up for ourselves and about ourselves, Beckett, like an aerialist whose partner has just fallen to her death, repeats the act, this time in silence. The collapse of the inner fiction immediately precipitates the collapse of the outer one. The Reader reads “Nothing is left to tell,” and makes to close the book. The Listener knocks and forces a repeat. The Reader reads the final phrase out again and closes the book. And then, in one of the play's most extraordinary moments, the Listener knocks again. Knowing that the fiction has failed and that “Nothing is left to tell,” the Listener makes a last desperate plea that seems to me the precise equivalent of the Rockaby Woman's “More.”¹⁹ Only after he is met with silence does he finally drop his hand, raise his eyes and merge with what has finally become his double. This is the second explicit mirror image in the play and the only embodied one. The third is the reflection between the pair we see and the pair we imagine; while the implicit ones stretch endlessly in both directions, outer and inner, reverberating through narratives within narratives within narratives.²⁰ Engulfed by frozen figures, we stare at the two before us, now turned to stone themselves, buried in their own mindless regions of silence and darkness. It is “a scene of desolation and absence.”²¹

No conclusion could feel more final. And yet, all that we have experienced so far—the structure of interlocking narratives, the theme of the interdependence of life and art, the beginning that is no beginning and that so solicits an ending that is no ending—collude to deny suffering its longed-for surcease. Seemingly, Opener, Voice, Music, and Consciousness resemble the living dead, absent though present (“he did not disappear”). Seemingly, “the dear face,” “the dear name” will speak “the unspoken words” no more, leaving He alone, unitary, “one,” and therefore inert—as both writer and lover, which are perhaps the same. And yet, what have not perished are physical existence, the realities that give rise to fiction, and, therefore, the necessity for fiction. The “one” will still be prey to guilt, grief and memory, for the conditions of his life have not changed. His old “terror of night” will lay hold on him again. Again he will sit “trembling head in hands from head to foot,” until the “dear name” sends another to comfort him. Another Reader will appear, another self-division will promise rescue, another life story will begin (“this time … it's the right one”), and that final knock may turn out to be not so final after all, sounding many more times, until the final silence drowns it out.²²

Ohio Impromptu, then, like the other plays in the late group, shows a small slice of a lifelong process of fictionalizing. From this perspective, it differs from Not I, say, only in that while the latter shows failure within a fiction (“try something else … think of something else …,” says “she”), the later play dwells on failure at its end, at the dark place between the crumbling of one construction and the rising of another.²³ What is constant is that Beckett's forsaken ones live only when trying to reimagine themselves and their histories through stories.

Stepping away now to look at the fictions' guiding shapes, we see a narrative structure organized by an interlocking pattern of straight lines, spirals, and circles. Stories within stories evoke the spiral's paradoxical qualities of both entrapment and movement—inward and downward as we fall ever closer to the fires of personal chaos in He, he's He, and so on; and, simultaneously, outward and upward as we sense our own ontological shakiness, mere figments in the enclosing nightmares of other Listeners, other Readers, other audiences. Circularity emanates from the bitter cycle of fiction's collapse, rebirth, and re-collapse. And lastly, the linear drive, critical to the narrative's power in performance, explicitly tracks He's attempt at salvation from the genesis of his fiction to its crushing end, while implicitly lowering us into that great river of self-mythologizing that sweeps humanity across its instant in the light.

Finally in a position to examine the interplay between image and narrative in Ohio Impromptu, we see how the image's iconic cast begins to break down under the acid of the encroaching fiction. As the story takes hold, what had first appeared an emblem of suffering, perceived in roughly the same way by a collective audience, is claimed by the unique responses of individual spectators to the melancholy tale they hear. Because the image is itself unchanging, because it blocks its characters' eyes from the spectator's gaze and so cancels any subjectivity that might oppose the spectator's own, and because its physical arrangement—heads in hands—so perfectly mirrors the narrative's imagined scene, the visual tableau becomes both a screen and a transparency. Its stillness enables the audience to flow through it to He, the locus of emotion; its physical presence redelivers to the audience the imagined moment in the flesh. Our mind's eye sees He tremble, but our eye sees L, who is He in all but movement, so we brush aside the abstraction and claim L for ourselves, each spectator in his or her own way. The image has gathered into itself the narrative's turbulence of content and, in so doing, bound the spectator's imagination to the immediacy of live action in present time.²⁴

Ohio Impromptu thus exemplifies a process common to most of the late works: the way the iconic visual image becomes the armature around which is spun both the deepening textures of the verbal narrative and the intensifying emotional projections of the audience. This dual process functions much like the camera that bores in on the impassive Joe in Eh Joe: by creating a web of personal association around an enigmatic core, it concentrates meaning, intensifies feeling and, ultimately, makes each play a creation of the individual spectator.²⁵ The more unchanging the image, and the less idiosyncratic the narrative, the more freely do the spectator's associations flow toward the stage. As a consequence, what began as a visual abstraction and an account of a typical loss ends as a profoundly personal experience of the basic dilemmas of life.

I would like to close by revisiting two related issues, the matter of the impromptu, on the one hand, and, on the other, the gathering of specialists for whom Beckett fashioned his offering.

To stage a comedy for this kind of an
audience is no joke. These are not
easy people to amuse or impress.
They laugh only when they feel like it.

L'Impromptu de Versailles²⁶

This is my life. No stores but mine.
No more figures.
Thalia, for pity's sake a leaf of thine ivy.

How It Is²⁷

I think that there are two core energies that drive playwrights who, for whatever reason, at whatever point in their journeys, are drawn to the impromptu's fire. One is the need to expose as nakedly as possible the personal and professional mess that somehow enables a work's creation; and the other, equally desperate, is the opposite need to shield that exposure by using as Thalia's leaf the work itself. The pressure upon the work, therefore, is to reveal without revealing and conceal without concealing.

The interconnections between the horrors of Molière's life and certain of the satirical elements in his plays, L'Impromptu very much included, have been documented.²⁸ Perhaps one example, the “cream tart” incident, will give the flavor of the connection. The Duc de la Feuillade, who assumed himself the model for a stage marquis in Critique de l'Ecole des Femmes, one whom Molière had rendered absurd in that play's famous “cream tart” passage, encountered the playwright a few days later in the royal antechamber. When Molière bowed to him, “the nobleman seized Molière's head with both hands and ground it against his coat buttons, yelling ‘Cream tart, Molière, cream tart!’ A Molière with his periwig askew and his face streaming blood, slinking off through the passageways of the Louvre; an infidel Molière taking advantage of his misdirected popularity to inject all manner of poison into the minds of his audience; a mountebank who has got himself into the Temple of Taste by simple burglary—such is the specimen that was beginning to take shape. Something had to be done about it.”²⁹ That something, of course, was L'Impromptu.

LA Grange:
“Do you seriously claim that you weren't the marquess in The Criticism?”
MOLIèRE:
“Of course I was; exactly like me. With that business in scene five about cream puffs. ‘Cream puffs, I hate them, ugh! Cream puffs: they're detestable!’ If it wasn't me, who else was it?”(30)

Molière thus not only avenges the assault through mimicry, but, by reminding his court audience of it, perversely relives his humiliation in public. Feeding his audience's greed and voyeurism with pieces of himself, the writer lays bare a reality that every actor instinctively knows—the cannibalistic nature of performance. That L'Impromptu as a whole is not about personal retaliation, but rather has to do with Molière's will to establish his particular brand of comedy in the teeth of a hostile tradition, does not dim the view from our perspective—that of a writer calling attention to the necessary linkage between the torments of his life and his effort at professional survival.

How, then, is privacy regained? What about the leaf? Molière appears to shed it when he closes even the slight distance between writer and actor, they here being one, and, further, insists on playing in his own name. But this final step is an illusion. What seems an ultimate unveiling is in fact the first creative act, the first move toward the construction of the art object which, on one level, and one only, will mediate between author and audience. For as soon as Molière steps onto a stage, he is, of course, no longer Molière. He is Molière playing Molière. In the scene quoted, he is Molière playing Molière playing a marquis hostile to Molière. A moment later, when fellow-actor Brécourt, playing a friendly marquis, is insufficiently eloquent in his defender's tirade, Molière shows him how to do it, in effect becoming Molière playing Molière playing both the hostile marquis and Brécourt playing a friendly marquis, with this last playing two other marquis within the tirade. Such a dizzying spiral of voices, bodies, accents, and attitudes spinning from a single performer restores magic, Eros and art to the stage, reifying imagination into a habitation that is neither author nor audience but the place where they meet. In the process, the work displaces the confessional. But, for all that, what is important to suggest here is that the confessional's suffering does not evaporate. The very obsessiveness with which life's outrage is relived (“If it wasn't me, who else was it?”), the savagery with which its titled demons are painted in, the childlike directness with which relief is sought, all point to the compulsion to hold nothing back, to reveal all. This is the substratum of the impromptu, the tone that informs it, the energy that drives it, and the turbulence that renders its titular promise of impulsive action a generative if not a literal truth.

I willingly offer up my plays, my face, my gestures, my words, my tone of voice. I sacrifice my tricks of the trade for them to use as they will. I have no objections to whatever they take, if only the audience likes it. But in yielding all this to them I reserve the rest as my own property.

Molière playing Molière in L'Impromptu de Versailles³¹

Circling back now from the furthest of the great impromptus to the nearest, I suggest that suffering in Beckett's play is similarly autobiographical in origin, similarly embodied in alter egos, and similarly eruptive in forcing exposure of working method and craft. Two threads of grief intertwine, the first seeming to recall personal matters, perhaps from as long ago as five decades before the writing, the second reliving the nightly torment of creation in present time and space, the shared room and moment of actor and audience.

Consider Deirdre Bair's account of Beckett's state in the winter of 1933, the year that brought the deaths of his father, William, and the cousin whom he had loved, Peggy Sinclair.

Beckett would awaken in the middle of the night, drenched with perspiration, his heart pounding erratically, unable to breathe or to extricate himself from the blind panic which threatened to suffocate him. He tried to avoid sleeping because he was afraid to dream. … Finally the night tremors became so severe that Beckett could relax only if Frank slept in the same bed, to hold and calm him. …³²

Compare with:

In this extremity his old terror of night laid hold on him again. After so long a lapse that as if never been. … White nights now again his portion. As when his heart was young. No sleep no braving sleep till—(turns page)—dawn of day. … One night as he sat trembling head in hands from head to foot a man appeared to him and said, I have been sent … to comfort you.

Ohio Impromptu

It is an axiom of criticism that however fine the seeming parallel between a writer's life and his work, the assertion of unequivocal cause-and-effect relationships should be regarded with profound skepticism. Perhaps the most one can say here is that, given the resemblances between the quoted passages as well as the increasingly evident pattern of autobiographical reference in Beckett's work as a whole,³³ it might be reasonable to suppose that the deaths of people he loved in his youth contributed in some way to the emotional field of this intensely personal play. Among the many lost ones would have to be included Joyce, he of the black hat and long black coat, with whom Beckett paced the Isle of Swans.³⁴ The gender-neutral “dear face” and “dear name” thus become incomparably evocative mediums for the passage of longing and loss from present to past to present—both for the writer and for the audience, with each recall carrying the intensity and particularity of individual history and memory.

If this scalding encounter with “temps retrouvé,” the first of the play's two spines of suffering, is experienced in much the same way by the specialists at the premiere and by the general audiences that followed, being no more than an awakening of their common humanity, the second, which stems from the collapse of the creative act, seems directed more pointedly at the former group. Earlier I invoked certain similarities between Ohio Impromptu and the radio plays of the 1960s, Cascando in particular. Consider the following excerpt from that work.

What do I open?
They say, he opens nothing, he has nothing to open, it's in his head.
They don't see me, they don't see what I do, they don't see what I have, and they say, he opens nothing, he has nothing to open, it's in his head.
I don't protest any more, I don't say any more,
There is nothing in my head.
I don't answer any more.
I open and close.
[Voice and Music are heard briefly, in sequence.]
They say, That is not his life, he does not live on that.
They don't see me, they don't see what my life is, they don't see what I live on, and they say, That is not his life,
he does not live on that.
Pause
I have lived on it … till I'm old.
Old enough.(35)

As I understand this passage, the writer, speaking through Opener, a surrogate for one of Beckett's several fragments of self, is spelling out how he creates and lives, they being one. Confessing to a poetics of nullity (“There is nothing in my head”), Beckett can only channel Voice and Music, themselves stand-ins for the variety of verbal and non-verbal forces that visit and use the poet. If one admits passagework from later in the play and from its companion-piece, Words and Music, one sees a composite portrait of a near-helpless consciousness, disclaiming paternity of its disruptive wards,³⁶ desperately attempting control,³⁷ able to influence little in the way of tone, style or direction in whatever words or sounds emerge,³⁸ and inevitably failing to achieve its dreamed-of end—the story that finally will be “the right one,” that will “finish,” that will deliver the longed-for silence, “no more stories … sleep. …”³⁹ Since the stories in both plays describe unnamed quests, since the “control” figures, Opener and Croak, become heavily invested in them, and since both end badly—with the nearly dead Croak withdrawing in disarray from fiction's end in Words and Music; and with the fictional protagonist, himself an obvious projection of Opener, drifting out to sea to certain death at narrative's unfinished finish in Cascando—it is a strong presumption that the fiction in each case is the writer's own, an account of his existence, as lived at the moment of imagining, and therefore that story-telling and life (diminishing together) are indivisible (“I have lived on it … till I'm old”).

Ohio Impromptu, too, is focussed on the collapse of the creative act, which blankets the work in a ritualistic tonality of regret and grief. It, too, grasps at fiction to both defend against and enter life. It, too, contains a cluster of fragments of the self, five this time rather than three. But, drawing on Beckett's twenty more years of the “same old words same old scraps millions of times,”⁴⁰ gaining authority from the entry into nether worlds, the repeated breachings of the Stygian boundary common to the late works, the play presents an experience of failure far profounder than the one the somewhat schematic and therefore directive structures of the earlier works could encompass.

For example, Ohio Impromptu presents, in my view, not one fiction but three, and gives us in addition a dual (embodied and imagined) rather than a singular perspective on them. The first fiction has already failed when the play opens. We encounter, at length, the consequences of that failure—He's change of residence, his courting of unfamiliarity, his pacing of the Isle of Swans, his guilt, his night terrors. This section occupies four of the play's eight pages. The second fiction then starts and, for a while, succeeds. The emissary appears and, “with never a word exchanged,” consciousness and memory, self and self-creation grow “to be as one.” An episode of comfort, it is afforded a bare page and a half. This fiction, too, collapses. The birth of the third fiction, as suggested above, is not shown, but implied, along with its predictable trajectory. Six and a half pages, in short, out of a total of eight, zero in on the experience of chaos and suffering. Beckett underlines the experience of fiction's failure by making us live through it three times: first in the collapse of the play's opening fiction and then twice more in the collapse of the second—the verbal rendering of the imagined scene, followed by the nonverbal embodiment, in present time and space, of that scene itself. Finally, the writer multiplies our exposure to his own incapacities by repeatedly stopping his narrative to relive its most insupportable moments. Of Listener's six interruptions of the story of his surrogate life, three bare his helplessness to prevent his story's/life's extinction (Little/Nothing “is left to tell”); two jerk, puppet-like, on treacherous memory's strings—the advent that promises solace, followed by the vanishing that withdraws it; and one broods on the bitterness of the mind's permanent separation from its ideal (“Then turn and his slow steps retrace”). In sum, the play's controlling structures—the phoenix-like cycle of flaming fictions, the twice-stressed collapse of the central story (the only one shown us from start to finish), and the ruthless fingering of the writer's failures throughout—in combination present a self-portrait of the artist as a tormented being, at the mercy of forces outside his control, capable of nothing except an awareness of his own incapacity. It is this awareness that I think is the play's subject, and, since it is also the tonality that admits the void around the central pool of light, subject and experience blend, summoning up another of those unabstractable works—works that are the thing itself—so characteristic of this particular playwright.

We are at last in a position to speculate on what Beckett might have been trying to say to the assembled scholars and practitioners in Ohio. In the impromptu's best tradition, according to which the writer's failure to create becomes the creation, Beckett might have been saying: this is what I try to do; this is why I need to do it; this is how I fail to do it; and, critically, this is what the failure feels like. I sense no condescension here, no jokes, no scanting of the scholarly enterprise. On the contrary, unlike Molière, whose fear of his carnivorous peers drove him to re-cover his nakedness in the glittering garment of a sealed and perfect entertainment, Beckett leaves himself exposed up to the bitter end. Ohio Impromptu thus becomes a true gift of the self, claiming no special knowledge or insight, offering just those “scraps” that are available to it, seeking no justification, promising no relief.

On the assumption, now, that professional writers do not write for coteries, how might such a self-reflexive perspective resonate with a general audience, which possesses neither knowledge of nor interest in such matters? The answer, I suggest, might lie in abandoning the artificial separation I set up earlier between the play's two spines of grief. For if the losses in Beckett's life probably struck the play's originating spark, they are not, I think, the source of its main current of feeling. That stems from his, and our, awareness of our existence in time. As the years pass, it is less the fear of departures that torments us than our weakening bond with the departed in our slipping memories and wavering imaginations. A kind of second loss that encloses the first and enlarges upon it, such failures of will and memory are experienced not only as a betrayal of loved ones but as a dissolution of the self, a severing of our links to the world. Looked at in this way, He's grief at the loss of the “dear face” and his, Listener's, Beckett's and our corresponding need to recreate our lives with the “dear face” through the silent narratives we inscribe in our hearts and that the play embodies in books, symbols of the writer's presence, are no more than mirrorings in art of lifelong human activities. Suffering is unremarkable; it is assumed. In the effort to deal with it, we all put on the artist's mantle and walk his bitter path. So perhaps Ohio Impromptu is a simple play, available to even the untutored in the house.

Notes

1. This article is based on a paper delivered at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago, December 27, 1995.

2. Ruby Cohn, quoted in Beryl S. and John Fletcher, A Student's Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1978/1985) 255.

3. A Student's Guide, 256.

4. Interviewed by Emmanuelle Klausner, Journal of Beckett Studies 4 (1): 116.

5. Maurice Blackman, “The Shaping of a Beckett Text: ‘Play,’” Journal of Beckett Studies 10: 89.

6. Samuel Beckett, Ohio Impromptu, in Three Plays by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1984) 14. All subsequent quotations are from this edition, 11-19. Because of the play's brevity, I have omitted further page references.

7. Israel Schenker, “Moody Man of Letters,” The New York Times, 6 May 1956, section 2, p. 3.

8. See Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: repetition, theory, and text (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) 131-33; Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) 125-38; S. E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) 175-78; Verna Foster, “Beckett's Winter Tale: Tragicomic Transformation in Ohio Impromptu,” Journal of Beckett Studies 1 (1 & 2): 67-75; Linda Ben Zvi, Samuel Beckett (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), 174-76.

9. Keir Elam, “Dead heads: damnation-narration in the ‘dramaticules,’” in John Pilling, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 161.

10. See Wolfgang Iser, “When is the End Not the End? The Idea of Fiction in Beckett,” in S. E. Gontarski, ed., On Beckett: Essays and Criticism (New York: Grove Press, 1986) 55-56.

11. Catastrophic in the colloquial, not the Aristotelian sense. There is, I think, no reversal here, merely the issue of an attempted authorship that could not end otherwise.

12. Samuel Beckett, quoted in Enoch Brater, “Dada, Surrealism, and the Genesis of Not I,” Modern Drama 18 (March 1975), p. 53. This statement (about Not I) and others like it, as well as Beckett's record as a director speak to his need to elicit unmediated levels of response from his audiences.

13. The final lines of Beckett's subsequently discarded first attempt at Ohio Impromptu. Quoted in Pierre Astier, “Beckett's Ohio Impromptu: A View from the Isle of Swans,” in On Beckett, 397.

14. Samuel Beckett, Cascando, in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), 297.

15. Ibid.

16. Samuel Beckett, Words and Music, in The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 294.

17. Cascando, p. 297.

18. James Knowlson, Light and Darkness in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett (London: Turrett Books, 1972), p. 35.

19. Samuel Beckett, Rockaby in The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 440.

20. For a discussion of the sense of equivocal identity associated with the mirror gag, see Nicola Ramsey, “Watt and the significance of the mirror image,” Journal of Beckett Studies 10: 21-36.

21. John Pilling, “Review article: ‘Three occasional pieces’ by Samuel Beckett,” Journal of Beckett Studies 10: 162.

22. Cascando, 301.

23. Samuel Beckett, Not I, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 382.

24. For an excellent treatment of the tension in Beckett's visual imagination between image as allegory and image as direct expression of “honest” suffering, see Dougald McMillan, “Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts: The Embarrassment of Allegory,” in On Beckett, 29-45.

25. For a similar view of narrative, see Elin Diamond, “Refusing the Romanticism of Identity: Narrative Interventions in Churchill, Benmussa, Duras,” Theatre Journal (October 1985): 273-86.

26. In One-Act Comedies of Molière, Albert Bermel, trans. and ed. (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1965) 99.

27. Cited in McMillan, 43.

28. See Ramon Fernandez, Molière: The Man Seen Through the Plays (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958).

29. Fernandez, 105-6.

30. L'Impromptu de Versailles, 108.

31. L'Impromptu, 117.

32. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), 174-75.

33. See, for example, McMillan, op. cit., and Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts.

34. Jonathan Kalb, Beckett in Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 49.

35. Cascando, 300.

36. Cascando, 302.

37. Words and Music, 287-94.

38. Ibid.

39. Cascando, 304.

40. How It Is, cited in Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing …, [vii].