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Thursday 4 December 2008

Crossing continents

Lloyd Evans on the trend among British authors to sell their archives to the United States

There are fascinating snippets of correspondence. A letter from Samuel Beckett is written in dense blocks of script like armies of marching ants. He suggests that Joyce’s play Exiles, which Pinter was directing, should be produced ‘with voices abnormally low and from a distance... The key to the production is apartness.’ That note would apply equally well to Beckett’s own works. In a letter sent to Pinter in 1988 Arthur Miller likens Mountain Language to ‘Yuan era (Chinese) plays ...it has lodged in my mind like an emblem or brand or a moment of a dream ...Spring has finally come here and we are planting the vegetables which Inge at least enjoys eating.’

Best of all is a typewritten draft of ‘The Queen of all the Fairies’, a bizarre adolescent memoir which opens with a deliciously sour portrait of east London. ‘The River Lea flowed with its deluge of dead dogs, stinking tin cans and stewed cut-throat rats in a gutter round the belly of Hackney.’ It continues for several pages in this vivid strain and then soars into an extraordinary Biblical coda. ‘We see them coming, the Barbarians. They are here with us now. Let them lead us to the scaffold, we shall spy the spider, motionless, outlasting their engines of doing and acting and forcing. We shall sing the ballad of “Eskimo Nell” to the Gods. Let them all come.’

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