BECKETT SAMUEL Typed Letter Signed

Sale 1912 - Lot 257

Price Realized: $ 5,750

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500

EXPLAINING WAITING FOR GODOT<\t>BECKETT, SAMUEL. Typed Letter Signed, to Desmond Smith, responding to his inquiries concerning a Canadian production of Waiting for Godot and explaining its themes and characters. With two holograph corrections. 1 1/4 pages, single 4to sheet; usual folds.<\t>Paris, 1 April 1956

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". . . The trouble with most commentators is their failure to see the wood for the trees. Do try and see the thing primarily in its simplicity, the waiting, the not knowing why, or where, or when, or for what. If there are obscurities of detail their elucidation will never be in terms of a system of symbols. It is not in any sense a symbolic work. The point about Pozzo, for example, is not who he is, or what he is, or what he represents, but the fact that all this is not known, so that for a moment he can ever be confused with Godot. It is essential he should not be specified. It might even be said he does not know himself who or what he is, and it seems to me that it is only out of a great inner dereliction that the part can be played satisfactorily. Confusion of mind and of identity is an indispensable element of the play and the effort to clear up the ensuing obscurities, which seems to have exercized most critics to the point of blinding them to the central simplicity, strikes me as quite nugatory . . ."<