BECKETT
MAY 2002
Departure on 12.05 around 09hoo for Ussy-sur-Marne.
We are leaving the motorway at Ferté-sous-Jouarre.
At the 1st big crossing a small road leads to the left towards Ussy.
We cross a bridge over the Marne.
We stop to contemplate the spectacle of the river if dreamlike.
On both sides of the Marne parapet reflecting a sky where come and go large white vessels, — before our eyes a paradise country.
We’re not entering Ussy. – We immediately take the direction of Vergers de Molien.
So we leave the village, we pass under the railway bridge and we take the country road to a crossroads where we can read “rue Samuel Beckett”.
We follow for a hundred meters and we arrive in front of an isolated house, well closed on the outside by a surrounding wall.
The door was open.
A black dog, used to these unusual visitors, barked furiously.
On the left, in the shade of a small shed, a married couple engaged in gardening work.
A house of simplicity inversely proportional to the universal renown of its former tenant.
On the surrounding wall, a gray plaque informs the passer-by that Beckett lived here from 1953 to 1989.
Its biographer Bair teaches us that the writer, the most important playwright of the twentieth century loved the landscape of Seine-et-Marne which descends in soft ripples towards the two rivers giving vast panoramas which seem flat, with only at away, sometimes, a small hill.
The vines which it abounds will give good wines which border the walls of hundreds of kilometers of cellars, in the east of Epernay.
Beckett had wanted to live on green, flat land, but neither too green nor too flat.
There are dirt roads, all like the ones he loved in Ireland, where he can once again take long walks without meeting a living soul.
Beckett who wanted to flee from Parisian tensions with Suzanne took around June 1951 to rent this cramped house located in a region he liked and which he had gotten to know thanks to the Polish Jewish painter Hayden who had just settled in Reuil-en -Brie.
Reuil-en-Brie is a few kilometers from Ussy. No one here could tell us about Hayden’s house.
Not everyone we spoke to had a memory of Hayden.
We also didn’t find, like Ussy’s for Beckett, a Hayden street.
Hayden seems completely forgotten in Reuil-en-Brie. And yet he’s a great painter.
When he was depressed, exhausted, damaged in morale, it was here in Ussy that he came back to recharge his batteries.
Unimaginable that the theater of total suffering, of the absurd could have emerged here, in this country where silence, peace, the grandeur of the landscape, the beauty of the earth combine to make it a vast haven of rest and oxygen. – A huge sky that looks over fields that we can see vanishing on the horizon. – we can follow the undulation of fields of wheat to the point where the horizon stops drawing its ultimate limes.
Godot’s text appeared in 1952.
Since then it has been translated into fifty different languages.
Always the same sinister Godot, as sinister as some of Zadkine’s sculptures.
If it is important to talk about Hayden, it is even more important to highlight the myth of Modern Art that he lived in his complicated relationship with Bram van Velde.
He considered this painter as his metaphysical brother and yet he expressed himself in a very critical way towards him in the letters to Georges Duthuit in 1949 where he described Bram as a failed painter.
Far too complicated to go into detail on this controversy here – just point it out.
Let’s finish this short digression with this thought of Fritz Mauthner who seems to have captivated Beckett:
“The highest forms of language are laughter and silence.” – a silence he found in Beethoven’s 7th symphony.
