'Up the republic!'

It would be foolish to ignore the ways in which Beckett's work is shaped by a profound alertness to the historyof the 20th century, argues Fintan O'Toole

As late as 1977, when Samuel Beckett's Shades and Not I were screened on BBC television, leading English anti-establishment TV dramatist Dennis Potter attacked what he saw as their obscurantism and their apparent irrelevance in the face of the human disasters of the gulags and the concentration camps. "Would Solzhenitsyn have understood? Would the Jews on the way to the gas chamber? Question: Is this the art which is the response to the despair and pity of our age, or is it made of the kind of futility which helped such desecrations of the spirit, such filth of ideologies come into being?"

The charge that Beckett's despair was the antithesis of positive political engagement was not new. The political left tended to see Beckett's work as a wallowing in gloom in which an absurd universe replaced the more tangible, and more changeable, real world. The Hungarian Marxist critic, Georg Lukacs, described Molloy as a depiction of "the utmost pathological human degradation". Bertolt Brecht was planning, at the time of his death in 1956, to write a counterblast to Waiting for Godot. In 1955, the grand old man of political theatre, Sean O'Casey, asked "Beckett? I have nothing to do with Beckett. He isn't me nor am I him . . . his philosophy isn't my philosophy, for within him there is no hazard of hope; no desire for it; nothing in it but a lust for despair, and a crying of woe."

Yet just five years after Potter identified Beckett with the moral deformities that created the gulags and the concentration camps, along came Catastrophe, written in 1982 as a direct response to the persecution of Václav Havel, to whom it is dedicated. In that play, the protagonist's appearance - whitened face and grey pyjamas - deliberately recalls images of concentration camp inmates, while the direct reference to Havel's plight implicates the entire spirit of Stalinism.

Yet the received wisdom about Beckett's apolitical or even antipolitical position was so strong that even the play's final gesture of defiance, in which the tormented protagonist raises his head and asserts the survival of his independent will, was described in reviews as "ambiguous".

Beckett complained angrily to his biographer, James Knowlson: "There's no ambiguity there at all. He's saying 'you bastards, you haven't finished me yet'." And if Catastrophe has an unambiguous political implication, why should we assume that, for example, the image of the master and slave, Pozzo and Lucky, in Waiting for Godot is any less directly political, or that the post-apocalyptic landscapes of Endgame or Happy Days do not emerge directly from the nightmares of the nuclear age? Beckett's political gesture in Catastrophe, in other words, has to alter the way in which his previous work is seen.
To see Beckett's work as having a political dimension is not, of course, to argue that it lacks other dimensions, too. The work is riven with existential concerns about time and memory and with post-religious anxieties about the nature of the human self in a godless world. Its form, especially in his plays, is metaphorical, indirect and deeply resistant to any kind of literalism, including that of an overtly political content.

It is certainly resistant to the crude demand for optimism that characterised much of the political criticism of the mid-20th century. In an essay on the painters Bram and Geer van Velde, Beckett praised their "solitary painting" with its concern for "the human condition" in contrast to those artists who make "processions towards a happiness like those of a sacrificial sheep". There is more than an element of self-description here, and Beckett's determination to avoid the collective pieties of movements and cultural demands for uplift undoubtedly placed him outside the realms of what was called political art in the post-war period.

But if it would be patently foolish to claim Beckett as a primarily political writer, it is no less obtuse to ignore the ways in which his work is shaped by a profound alertness to the history of the 20th century. In 1937, WH Auden and Stephen Spender published Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War in the Left Review, having sent out a questionnaire to virtually every leading British and Irish writer. Of the Spanish republic, they asked: "are you for/against/neutral?" Beckett's famous reply - "uptherepublic!" - is a perfect encapsulation of his relationship to politics. It is sufficiently playful and (for an Irish Protestant) knowingly ironic to avoid being recruited to a major public cause. But it is also sufficiently emphatic to make clear where he stood.

BECKETT WAS TRANSFORMED as a writer by the second World War and the Holocaust and it is no mere biographical accident that he really found his voice in their aftermath. His activities as a member of the French Resistance, and his decision to work after the liberation of France in the Irish-run hospital at Saint-Lô in Normandy were not the actions of a man detached from his times. Saint-Lô, for example, was a place where human decrepitude, despair and suffering were not abstract philosophical questions. It had been so heavily bombed by the Allies that just 3,000 people from its pre-war population of 13,000 survived in the ruins from which bodies were still being unearthed.

That Beckett did not consider politics and history to be irrelevant to his plays is obvious when one considers a simple question. Why did Beckett choose director Alan Schneider as his primary American interpreter? It was certainly not because Schneider's American premiere of Waiting for Godot was a great success. It was, on the contrary, a disaster. Nor did the relationship stem from previous personal contacts. The two men met for the first time in Paris in 1955.

Beckett knew nothing of the director and reluctantly agreed to meet him for half an hour, "making it very clear that even that amount of time was accorded to me out of duress". So what made Beckett, almost from the very beginning, overcome his suspicion and place such implicit faith in Schneider?
Their correspondence does not answer this question and neither, in any direct way, does Schneider's autobiography, Entrances. But, in Entrances, Schneider does mention that the main subject of their first conversations seems to have been his own early life: "We talked for hours - my early life in Russia seemed particularly to intrigue him." It seems reasonable to suggest, therefore, that the basis for Beckett's trust was not Schneider's record as a director (about which, of course, he knew nothing) but the way his life had been touched by the terror and turmoil of the 20th century.

FOR ALAN SCHNEIDER was also Abram Leopodovitch Schneider, a child of the Russian revolution, born in Kharkov in December 1917, just weeks after the Bolshevik seizure of power, and raised in Rostov in the midst of the cataclysmic civil war. His parents were physicians and, as Rostov changed hands, his father was inducted into the service first of the Whites and then of the Reds.

Schneider's earliest memories, as recorded in Entrances, are of hiding in the cellar while soldiers of one or other army searched their house and shot his pet dog. The Schneiders were also Jewish. His mother's sister, Celia, died in Auschwitz. He himself was the victim of a serious anti-Semitic attack as a 10-year-old child in Maryland, where his family settled after they fled Russia.

These, presumably, are the kinds of things that Schneider and Beckett discussed during their first encounters in Paris in 1955 and that formed the bond between them. This, after all, is the same Beckett whose friend and fellow member of the circle of James Joyce in Paris, Paul Leon, had died in a concentration camp in 1942; whose oldest French friend, Alfred Peron, had survived Mauthausen only to die shortly after its liberation from the ill-treatment he had received there; who explained his decision to join the French Resistance rather than remain in the safety of neutral Ireland by his outrage at the Nazis, "particularly in their treatment of the Jews" and the fact that they were "making life hell for my friends".

TO LOSE SIGHT of the fact that Beckett might have identified more closely with Schneider's experiences of the great upheavals of the century than with his potential as faithful interpreter is to misunderstand, not just the relationship between them, but the whole relationship between Beckett's strange, apparently timeless plays, and the fierce contingencies of history.

Beckett was never indifferent to politics. He did not allow his plays to be performed in apartheid South Africa. He made large contributions to Amnesty International and also contributed financially to Index on Censorship. He instructed that all the Polish royalties for his work be paid to his Polish translator, the dissident Antoni Libera, who used them to fund underground publications and to help jailed writers. He signed a petition against the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981. His biographer, James Knowlson, records Beckett's private disappointment that the aesthetic forms in which he worked did not allow him to write directly about political issues.

Yet, in a broad but important sense, he did. Beckett's politics are the politics of the body and of the voice. In his novels and plays, the body is immobilised, imprisoned, isolated, contorted, driven, cut up into its component parts, made almost to disappear. People keep speaking, even when there is no one to hear them, defying the silence that surrounds them. In both of these respects, the work is realistic.

As the 20th century recedes in time, people will look back on Beckett and nothing will be more obvious than that he reflects the barbarity of his times just as accurately as, say, Goya's Disasters of War reflects the early 19th century. It will be all too clear that what happens to the human body in his work is what happened to tens of millions in a cruel century. And perhaps just as clear that that voice that keeps speaking in spite of it all is a voice of great compassion.