It is impossible to throw a stone in Paris these days without hitting a poster of the angular, wild-eyed giant of 20th-century literature — Samuel Beckett. For a man who didn't grant interviews, didn't accept his Nobel Prize in person and never saved anything ever written about him, the late playwright, novelist and poet would have been horrified to see what's happening in the French capital this year.
Marking the centenary of his birth, the Festival Paris Beckett kicked off last month, and will continue to run for the next nine (a sardonically fitting interval of time for someone obsessed with the Jungian notion of the incomplete birth). Scattershot throughout the city are numerous events, including dance, music, opera, expositions, lectures, screenings and panel discussions.
Theatre highlights include the lesser known Le Dépeupleur (The Last Ones), the play that, because of its timing, won Beckett the 1969 Nobel Prize. Performances at Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet run from Nov. 9 to Dec. 9.
Drawing inspiration from the Beckett poems Comment Dire and Something There is Irish Chamber Choir of Paris and Lachrimae Consort's world premiere performance on Nov. 8 of music by French composer Dominique Probst and Irish composer Jane O'Leary.
Irish artist Katie Holden's three-month residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais will culminate in an installation exhibit on Dec. 5 influenced by Beckett's “bleak, melancholic sensibility.”
In the new year, the sweeping exhibit titled Samuel Beckett will involve various artists rigging off Beckett's works at the Centre Pompidou from March 14 to June 25, 2007.
So why, exactly, is the City of Light hosting a tantric tribute to an Irish-born man of letters? It would seem that despite the dislocated characters and timeless, placeless plays, Paris is the epicentre of all things Beckett. One of France's national treasures, the dark-minded writer made Paris his home for more than 60 years. It is also the place where he drank with the tutelary James Joyce, was stabbed in the chest by a pimp (with the improbable surname of Prudent), and where he is buried, alongside his former tennis partner and French wife, Suzanne Descheveaux-Dumesnil, in Cimetière du Montparnasse.
Beckett wrote his most celebrated works in French (and then translated them back into English), published his only lengthy critical study on Proust, and was decorated with the Croix de Guerre for his efforts during the resistance in occupied France. Théâtre de Babylone on boulevard Raspail where En attandant Godot premiered in 1953 is long gone, but Beckett's Paris, with its black winding river and grey roofs, is still as gloomfully compelling for those of us on the other side of the tombstone.
Although his most celebrated work is a play in which “nothing happens, twice,” Beckett lived in one of the most lively neighbourhoods in Paris. A walk to Montparnasse along rue Froidevaux leads to Au Gai Chagrin, a beautifully arcane bookbindery where stacks of books in various stages of completion can be seen through the giant atelier windows. Owner Evelyne Fortin remembers seeing a “tellement vivante” Beckett lurking around the neighbourhood.
Turning up the leafy street that flanks the western wall of Cimetière du Montparnasse is the unassuming façade of 11 bis rue Victor Schoelcher, where French existentialist and writer Simone de Beauvoir once billeted Beckett (although the Irishman and his hostess were said to have squabbled when she vetoed the publication of the second part of his story La fin in her and Sartre's magazine, Les Temps Modernes).
At the top of this tranquil street, boulevard Raspail leads to Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain. Though it appeared five years after the writer's death, with its seamless removal of the barrier between inside and out, this gallery housed in a glass-box structure by Jean Nouvel is as pared down as Beckett's bony prose.
Left off Raspail is Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris's other cemetery. Here you don't have to navigate the throngs of backpackers in search of Jim Morrison's grave.
Serene and ordered (a result of planning by Napoleon himself), it is the resting place of many of France's intellectual and artistic luminaries, including Beckett, Sartre, Baudelaire and de Maupassant, as well pop icon Serge Gainsbourg.
If you walk a couple of blocks and look up, there is no way of missing the hulking skyscraper around the corner from the cemetery. What better symbol for a writer who profoundly explored human intellectual dislocation than that of Tour Montparnasse. The seventies behemoth office tower (recently found to be full of asbestos) was so loathed by Parisians that construction of skyscrapers in the city centre was banned two years after its completion. But, unlike its beautiful and popular older sister, no one's lining up to get a glimpse. Instead, an elevator whisks you up to the top floor of the building where there is arguably the best view of Paris, if not, in part, because you happen to be standing inside the ugliest blight on the city's skyline.
Back down at rue du Montparnasse, Le Falstaff, with its dim lighting, far-reaching beer menu and classic brasserie fare, was one of Beckett's favourite watering holes. The surrounding warren of streets, including the adjacent rue Delambre, are lined with Breton crêperies typical of the neighbourhood, and are well worth sitting down for a crepe and a glass of wine. And, through one of the brasserie windows, you might just see a festival poster, the unflinching eyes of Beckett staring back at you.
Special to The Globe and Mail.
