Friday, Sep. 29, 1961
Winnie's Wake
Happy Days (by Samuel Beckett) pursues the playwright's favorite thesis that life is slow death. The setting is a scorched plain, blazing with light. Throughout Act I, Winnie, the so-year-old heroine, is buried up to her waist in a mound of earth; throughout Act II, she is buried up to her neck. So much for action and plot. For subplot, her husband Willie scuttles in and out of a hole behind the mound, and, keeping his back to the audience, leafs through a yellowed newspaper.
Under these static circumstances, the play is not the thing, or even a play. Essentially, Happy Days is a monologue by a compulsive talker. A strident school bell signals the times when Winnie must wake and sleep; in between comes the terrible recess of endurance, the "happy day" to be survived. She utters a prayer, sings a song, chews the nostalgic cud of memory. Actress Ruth White, though she plays her role with more gallantry than Beckett's morgue-attendant austerities call for, stars vocally: she croons, keens, gurgles, fumes and screams at her all-but-silent partner. A bottomless black shopping bag provides the day's events. Finding a toothbrush, she brushes her teeth punctiliously. She swigs some pink pep medicine, kisses an evilly glinting revolver and dons a perkily feathered hat. "These things tide one over," she says. Her talkfest acquires a haunting reflective cadence as it flows between the vapid ("Keep yourself nice, Winnie, that's what I always say") and the apocalyptic ("Do you think the earth has lost its atmosphere, Willie?"). The falling curtain leaves her with plenty yet to say.
Beckett's message must be picked up in fragments, like shards around a ruin. He is an elegiac host at civilization's wake, taking for his text Cyril Connolly's "It is closing time in the gardens of the West. From now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair." The quality of Beckett's despair assays high; it is the quantity that is suspect. There is so much of it, and most of it is unearned. His characters are not scarred by life, but scared by life into a paralysis of will. By claiming total irresponsibility for their lives ("One can do nothing''), they all but forfeit the compassion they might arouse for their sorrows. Their self-pity stifles pity.
The Beckett branch of the avantgarde, which includes such playwrights as Eugene lonesco (Rhinoceros) and Edward Albee (The Zoo Story), might be labeled the New Exquisites. The Old Exquisites (e.g., Oscar Wilde and the fin-de-siecle dandies) were anti-bourgeois snobs. They were too pure for the philistine middle class. The New Exquisites are anti-life snobs. Life is not pure enough for them. Several times in Happy Days, Winnie scrutinizes the handle of her toothbrush and reads the words "fully guaranteed . . . genuine pure." She and the New Exquisites are bitter because life is not fully guaranteed and genuinely pure. Their plaint is that life is fraudulent, corrupt, conformist, lonely, sad and beastly. The Old Exquisites proclaimed art for art's sake. By finding life devoid of ends and meanings, the New Exquisites proclaim art for the artist's sake as the only alternative and the only affirmation.
Out of his esoteric sensibility, Wilde fashioned the personal snob symbol of the green carnation. Out of his esoteric sensibility, Beckett has fashioned the snob symbol of the ashcan lids under which two of his characters live in his play Endgame. Fashions in snobbery change, but the green carnation and the ashcan lids are interchangeable as disengaged scoffing at the everyday business of living.
Dramatically, from Waiting for Godot to Krapp's Last Tape, Beckett has been striding towards anti-theater. With sparsity of character, bleakness of setting, poverty of action and ellipses of language, he has been pursuing the doctrine that "less is more." With Happy Days, he has reached the point where less is least.
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