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'All things come to an end': A last meeting with Samuel Beckett

Award winning writer Mark Axelrod recalls a poignant final lunch with Beckett

By
MARK AXELROD
,
Irish America Magazine Feature Writer

Published Thursday, May 28, 2009, 3:50 PM
Updated Thursday, July 23, 2009, 6:11 PM

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'All things come to an end': A last meeting with Samuel Beckett | Entertainment in Ireland and Around the World | IrishCentral




Read more: Mark Axelrod, Paris, Jerome Lindon, Roger Blin, France, Seine River, Chapman University, California, John Calder, Morocco
Legendary Irish playwright Samuel Beckett
Legendary Irish playwright Samuel Beckett

“But when were you last in Ireland?” I asked.

‘68, he said, for a funeral. And then in a transition that wouldn’t have been a stain upon his craft, he said his mother was dead, and his brother was dead, and Blin was dead and so was Jack Yeats. 

And one could see the furrowed frown in his forehead as he held his hand to his head, thinking, perhaps repeating thoughts, or losing them, within the confines of time, time in the Vaucluse, Rousillon, with his wife, with others, time with Watt. The furrowed frown. 

Through some set of verbal perambulations he came to talk of his early work, how he couldn’t make it as a teacher since he felt he knew no more than his students. A last ditch writer, he called himself. No one took his work, no one looked at it. 

No one till Lindon, till Jerôme Lindon took his work. Without reservations. How fortunate he was, he said, to have found him, and how lucky he was to have found Roger Blin. And John Calder. How lucky I was, he repeated. How lucky he was. How lucky they were I thought, but he would have never said that. Never.

It’s somewhat difficult to reconstruct the scene, seen so many years ago now, two decades on, now after his centenary. I tend to think of how that meeting ended. Of what things I took away with me the last time I met Beckett. 

And I vividly remember two moments: first was his response to my simple-minded question: “What are you planning to write next?” acknowledged with the sublimely succinct answer, “All things come to an end.” With that statement there was nothing more to be said, nothing less. No symbols where none intended. It was over. One needed no redacteur to understand that, and yet hearing the words come from him rendered me depressed and sullen, rendered the day depressed and sullen. 

At the end of that chat, I suggested that, perhaps, he needed to go, to leave, to do whatever he needed to do since I didn’t want to take up any more of his time. He nodded, picked up his glasses, paid for the coffees and we both headed for the door.

The other moment was more sanguine.  I recalled from our first meeting that he smoked Dutch cigars. Small ones. Small ones that came in a yellow cardboard box the brand of which escapes me. Holland stokjes or something of the sort. The ones he placed on the table when he arrived. As it was nearing his birthday, I had bought several boxes of those cigars to give to him as a present, as a gift and before he walked out of the café I told him I had something for him. 

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'All things come to an end': A last meeting with Samuel Beckett | Entertainment in Ireland and Around the World | IrishCentral


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