T.H. White’s book is funny, curious, strange, and full of sadness. Of all the tellings of the Arthurian legends, I think it is the best. But it is not just a telling of the Arthurian legends: it is one of the best books about education, too.
SAMUEL BECKETT
1906–1997
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett was born in a suburb of Dublin in 1906. Like his fellow Irish writers Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats, Beckett came from a Protestant, Anglo-Irish background. He studied Romance languages—mainly French and Italian—at Trinity College, Dublin, and became a teacher of English in Paris. He returned to Ireland in 1930 to teach French at Trinity College but he resigned after a year and began a period of restless travel in London, France, Germany, and Italy.
He settled in Paris in 1937 and was there when war broke out. He joined a resistance unit in 1941 but, when other members of his unit were arrested in 1942, he escaped to the unoccupied zone of France and there he spent the rest of the war, supporting himself as a farm worker. He returned to Paris in 1945 and lived there until his death in 1997.
He began to write, first poems and novels, then plays, in the 1930s. Nothing was published until 1951 when, after many refusals, the novel Molloy appeared. It was a modest success, prompting the publisher to bring out Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953). During January 1953 Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (in French, En Attendant Godot) was produced in Paris. It was an astonishing success, and Beckett’s rise to world fame began.
Waiting for Godot ran for a year in Paris and was then produced—in Beckett’s own English translation of his French original—in London, New York, and elsewhere. The play was at first highly controversial, provoking outraged responses on the part of some critics (and audiences), and frantic, nearly hysterical praise on the part of others.
As the curtain rises a bare stage is seen, with a single, blighted tree. Two men, no longer young, talk together. They are waiting for Godot, or so they say. They have no positive evidence that Godot is coming or even that he exists. They are waiting just the same.
Two other men enter. One leads the other by a rope around his neck. He bullies and torments his slave. The slave does not object. The slave’s name is Lucky. The tormentor, Pozzo, and the slave leave the stage, and the first two men remain, waiting for Godot.
In the second act Pozzo and Lucky return. Now Pozzo is blind. The rope that connects him to Lucky is shorter. Again all four men talk. They do not remember having met the day before. But was it the day before, or the year before, or many years before? One thing has changed: the tree now has leaves on it. Pozzo and Lucky leave the stage. The first two men remain. They talk; they entertain each other. It is a very human thing to do while they are waiting for Godot. The curtain falls.
Indignant viewers claimed that nothing happens in the play. Defenders of Beckett replied: What happens in any life? That was not quite the point. Beckett, in all of his works, has tried to reach down below the ordinary superficialities.
It is not that the human condition is one of waiting. It is that the human condition is not comprehensible by human beings. We are thrown into existence, as it were, but we had nothing to do with it. We did not choose to be born. Are we glad we were born? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And once we are here, what are we to do? Various goals can be sought, but wise men and poets have been telling us for ages that these are not worth seeking: pleasure, wealth, power, fame. What then should we do? Entertain and also take care of one another—and wait for Godot?
Estragon and Vladimir, the two leading figures in Waiting for Godot, have often been referred to as tramps. But Beckett does not call them tramps; they simply refer to themselves as men. They are merely two human beings, and theirs is the most basic of human situ-ations: they are in the world but they do not know why. They wait for Godot; perhaps he will be able to tell them. They meet Pozzo and Lucky, who are journeying, seeking, chasing a goal that they do not understand and cannot describe. Is their kind of life any better? Is anything better, really, than to wait for Godot? And if he does not come …
Other plays by Beckett include Endgame (1957), Krapp’s Last Tape (1959), Happy Days (1961), and Play (1963). The last is primordially simple. Less is more, Beckett implies in everything that he wrote.
Samuel Beckett received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He disliked public appearances, and so although he accepted the prize, he did not go to Stockholm to receive it, for fear of having to make a speech. That would have been too many words.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
1907–1988
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Born in Missouri in 1907, Robert A. Heinlein was educated at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. The author of many books over many years, he is probably best known for Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), about a visitor from Mars who spends a long period of time on Earth and tries to teach Earthlings, among other things, to be more relaxed in their attitudes toward sex. This book was and still is very popular; it made Heinlein a “famous” writer whose subsequent publications were chosen by book clubs. This was a shame, as Stranger in a Strange Land is not the best book by Heinlein, and his subsequent books, obsessed as they are with Heinlein’s conception of good sexual relations, are worse, although they sell in large numbers.
The best books by Heinlein appeared during the middle of his career, after he had published a number of juvenile space-fiction novels—juvenile because they were for young readers, and juvenile in the other sense, too—and turned to the consideration of some serious ideas made concrete in fictional form. One of these was Farnham’s Freehold (1964), about a family that survives a nuclear holocaust and realizes that it has inherited the Earth—as far as it knows there are no other people alive. This is a traditional science-fiction conceit, but in Heinlein’s hands it works well. The last half of the novel, in which the family discovers that it is not after all alone in the world—and discovers, too, that the reality of who else has survived is much more terrible than the loneliness of being the only ones—is both fine and weird.
Another wonderful short Heinlein novel from his middle period is The Door into Summer (1957), which is the only novel I ever read through twice at one sitting. It is short, and I started it one afternoon and finished it in two or three hours. But then I wanted to check the beginning to see if I had missed a salient fact, and so I turned back to the first page with the intention of reading the first chapter over again. Instead I read the whole book through for the second time that day. You cannot do this with a book that is not very good.
I think Heinlein’s best book is The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), the action of which takes place on the moon during a four-or five-year period coinciding with the third centennial of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War. The book’s major event is the rebellion of the Earth’s Moon colonies and the subsequent war between the Earth and the Moon, which the Moon wins, despite its more limited material resources, because it has one great natural “weapon” on its side—gravity. How this happens—how delightfully this works—I leave it to you to discover.