Modern Mind

deeper feelings too. It opened a longing for something, whetherit was latent masochism or latent homosexuality or a sneaking lust for violence – whatever it was, the very popularity of Genet’s work showed up the inadequacies of bourgeois life much more than any analysis by Sartre or the others.
Our Lady of the Flowers
(1946) was written while Genet was in Mettray prison and details the petty but all-important victories and defeats in a closed world of natural and unnatural homosexuals.
The Maids
(1948) is ostensibly about two maids who conspire to murder their mistress; however, Genet’s insistence that all the roles are played by young men underlines the play’s real agenda, the nature of sexuality and its relation to our bodies. By the same token, in
The Blacks
(1958) his requirement that some of the white roles be played by blacks, and that one white person must always be in the audience for any performance, further underlined Genet’s point that life is about feeling (even if that feeling is shame or embarrassment) rather than ‘just’ about thought. 47 As an erstwhile criminal, he knew what Sartre didn’t appear to grasp: that a rebel is not necessarily a revolutionary, and that the difference between them is, at times, critical.
    Samuel Beckett’s most important creative period overlapped with those of Camus and Genet, and in this time he completed
Waiting for Godot, Endgame,
and
Krapp’s Last Tape.
It should be noted, however, that both
Endgame
and
Krapp’s Last Tape
received their world premieres in London. By then, Paris was slipping. Born in 1906, Beckett was the son of well-to-do Protestants who lived at Foxrock, near Dublin. As Isaiah Berlin watched the October Revolution in Petrograd, so Beckett watched the Easter Rebellion from the hills outside the Irish capital. 48 He attended Trinity College, Dublin, like James Joyce, and after a spell at teaching he travelled all over Europe. 49 He met the author of
Ulysses
in Paris, becoming a friend and helping defend the older man’s later work (Joyce was writing
Finnegans Wake). 50
Beckett settled first in London, however, after his father died and left him an annuity. In 1934 he began analysis at the Tavistock Clinic, with Wilfred Bion, by which time he was writing short stories, poems, and criticism. 51 In 1937 he moved back to Paris, where he eventually had his novel
Murphy
published, by Routledge, after it had been rejected by forty-two houses. During the war he distinguished himself in the resistance, winning two medals. But he also spent a long time in hiding (with the novelist Nathalie Sarraute) in Vichy France, which, as several critics have remarked, gave him an extended experience in waiting. (When he came back, Nancy Cunard thought he had the look of ‘an Aztec eagle about him.’) 52 Beckett was by now thoroughly immersed in French culture – he was an expert on Proust, mixed in the circle around
Transition
magazine, imbibed the work of the symbolist poets, and could not help but be affected by Sartre’s existentialism. All of Beckett’s major plays were written in French and then translated back into English, mostly by him but occasionally with help. 53 As the critic Andrew Kennedy has said, this experience with ‘language pains’ surely helped his writing.
    Beckett wrote his most famous work,
Waiting for Godot,
in less than four months, starting in early October 1948 and finishing the following January. It was, however, another four years before it was performed, at the Théâtrede Babylone in Paris. Despite mixed reviews, and his friends having to ‘corral’ people into attending, it was worth the wait, for
Godot
has become one of the most discussed plays of the century, loved and loathed in equal measure, at least to begin with, though as time has gone by its stature has, if anything, grown. 54 It is a spare, sparse play; its two main characters (there are five in all) occupy a stage that is bare save for a solitary tree. 55 The two central figures are usually referred to as literary tramps, and they are often cast wearing bowler hats, though the stage directions do not call for this. The play is notable for its long periods of silence, its repetitions of dialogue (when dialogue occurs), its lurches between metaphysical speculation and banal cliché, the near-repetitions of the action, such as it is, in the two halves of the play, and the final nonappearance of the eponymous Godot. In its unique form, its references to