• DOI:10.1353/TSL.0.0023
• Corpus ID: 161370974

Samuel Beckett Meets Buster Keaton: Godeau, Film, and New York

@article{Friedman2009SamuelBM,
  title={Samuel Beckett Meets Buster Keaton: Godeau, Film, and New York},
  author={Alan Warren Friedman},
  journal={Texas Studies in Literature and Language},
  year={2009},
  volume={51},
  pages={41 - 46}
}

• A. Friedman
• Published 15 February 2009
• Art
• Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Unlike millions of his compatriots, Samuel Beckett never wanted to come to America not even New York. According to Alan Schneider, his American director, Beckett assumed that New York "would be too loud and too demanding, too many interviews and cocktail parties. He preferred the quiet of Paris and his country retreat" ("On Directing Film" 66). In the late 1930s Beckett famously said that he preferred France at war to Ireland at peace, and proved that he meant it by serving in the French Resistance during World War II, service that was subsequently acknowledged when Charles de Gaulle awarded him two medals. Yet, like Joyce's Gabriel Conroy, who also looked to the continent for culture, language, and values, Beckett reluctantly determined in 1964 that "The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward" crossing the Atlantic to spend "one of the hottest and most humid Julys on record" (Bair 574) in the Big Apple. Beckett later wrote that he enjoyed New York ("Letter to Mary Manning") and recalled his weeks there as exciting (letter to Alan Schneider, 12 Feb 1971, in No Author 248) including the experience of watching the young expansion Mets baseball team win a doubleheader (Knowlson 466). But he never returned to this country, perhaps deciding that his one venture here, or the long journey, was sufficient to last a lifetime. Beckett and Buster Keaton traveled curiously converging paths that led to their meeting on the occasion of their equally reluctant visits to New York to work on Film, Beckett's only movie script. Beckett had admired Keaton from his adolescence in Dublin, when he had often gone to see his movies as well as those of Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers. James Knowlson, Beckett's authorized biographer, cites the influence on Beckett of a number of Keaton films, noting specifically that the "unsmiling protagonist" of Go West1 (1925) "resembles a Beckett hero, lost and alone in the world" (Damned 71). In the mid-1930s Beckett, shaped in part by his movie-going adolescence, determined to become a cinematic photographer; he wrote a long