Beckett, Death and Dad: 'To be always what I am - and so changed from what I was.'

When gloom hangs heavily over a long wet February, what better remedy - or rather complement - than some Samuel Beckett.  Happy Days, currently playing at the Young Vic and starring Juliet Stevenson as the sunken yet unyielding Winnie, is both miserable and mesmerising.  I love Beckett, not for anything that generally happens - or doesn't happen - on the stage, but rather what happens to yourself afterwards.  His words and situations 'set in': like 'weather forecasts and breakfasts' as Withnail and I's Uncle Monty would have it. You're left feeling more mortal than seems possible, chipping away a little at Goethe's assertion - stolen later by Freud and then Damien Hirst - that "it is quite impossible for a thinking being to imagine non-being, a cessation of thought and life."

Juliet Stevenson as Winnie, buried up to the waist in the first half of the play, up to the neck in the second. 

So, walking away from the theatre, cold drizzle gently triggering the graver synapses, I began to think of my dad.  Dez, floored by a massive heart attack, dying and then rising in the back of an ambulance: "What the fuck are you doing?" he said, as a paramedic with a defibrillator tore him back from an apparent waterfall of bliss to a plodding mortal coil.  He went on to live for another seven years, a life where he descended slowly but surely into a Winnie like immobility.

Samuel Beckett

He was a big man, full of contradiction and charm, aggression and kindness, hilarity and uniqueness.  Flawed?  Yes.  But then who isn't?  Certainly not me.  Towards the end of his life I stopped speaking to him for eighteen months - a question of blood that never mattered to me, and that mattered to him, only in the way that he thought it mattered to me. But thankfully we were reconciled for the last year of his life.  Like Winnie, what seemed to keep him going was speech.  It's already been noted that Beckett's Winnie twists Descartes' most famous axiom into 'I speak, therefore I am'. And so too with Dez. Chattering endlessly, repeating the same tales - unlike Winnie he was aware of the repetition and irony, and acknowledged that.  Instead of a handbag he had a guitar which he would use to pick out the opening notes to Lynard Skynard's 'Sweet Home Alabama', dreaming of rock and country music and a country that he would never visit.  Instead of Winnie's 'old style' for him it was the old music, and a love - or strange tolerance - of bad television like Dog The Bounty Hunter. Using bread crumbs to befriend a mouse in his assisted flat, and then shooting at it with a toy gun, he would laugh raucously, and then ('smile off' as Beckett's stage directions would have it) rant at his predicament.  Active, both in work and play, before his heart went part-time, he was angry that he had been cut down too soon.  And he sensed Winnie's heartbreaking line all too well: "To be always what I am - and so changed from what I was."          

Dez

I spoke to him on the telephone a few weeks before the end. As I walked through the streets of Dublin he sounded better than he had for a long time.  I told him that I would be in North Wales in November and he suggested a few drinks in Liverpool - perhaps he was on the mend, I thought - but no, he'd stopped taking the life-stifling but death-preventing drugs that were just about keeping him going.  He slipped away on a cold November night and a week later I was back in Wigan for his funeral.  

At the time of the funeral, prompted by a footballing friend - one who looks uncannily like a young Beckett - I was giving the playwright's 'Trilogy' of novels a go.  Though not yet up to the third of those books as I took the train north, I would, a few months down the line come to the devastating close of The Unnamable.  When I did, I immediately thought of Dez and his last years. Pessimism tempered with a smile - one of his many tattoos featured the Grim Reaper, the words 'I'm a comin' scrawled beneath; anger giving way to acceptance before the cycle began again; and a remedy, that if you follow it to its true conclusion reveals Samuel Beckett's strange compassion.  What else could Winnie or Dez do?  What else can we do?

    

You must go on.

         

I can't go on.

I'll go on.