Stephen Dillane in First Love

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Stephen Dillane

Samuel Beckett's First Love was written in French in 1946 and remained unpublished for 24 years. It is a short and brutal piece, reputedly autobiographical but savagely misogynistic and occasionally grimly, fleetingly funny. Read by Stephen Dillane, this BBC Radio 4 production will be broadcast on Tuesday, February 27, 2001, 2:15-3:00pm GMT (9:15-10:00am GMT).

Background

BBC Radio 4

Welcome to Sarajevo

BBC Radio 4

Sunday February 25, 2001

Diary of a programme maker

This week BBC Radio 4 broadcasts a dramatised reading of Samuel Beckett's extraordinary and little-known short story, First Love. Read by Stephen Dillane, the dramatisation includes interviews with people who knew the author well. Producer Rebecca Stratford describes how she first came across this darkly comic and shocking piece which offers a rare 'portrait of the artist as a young man.'

Planning

I first stumbled upon Samuel Beckett's extraordinary and little-known short story, First Love, on an appropriately damp evening in a gloomy fringe theatre in London. Watching Katherine Mendelsohn's interpretation I was immediately struck by the darkly comic and shocking story, and by the text's evocation of Beckett's Dublin.

The only Nobel Prizewinner to have an entry in Wisden Cricketer's Almanac - Samuel Beckett

Billie Whitelaw in Beckett's Happy Days

Samuel Beckett wrote his semi-autobiographical First Love in French in 1946, but it remained unpublished until 1970 - allegedly to protect its subjects. Nearly 30 years later, Beckett finally translated the piece into English in 1973. It is an astonishing text partly because it prefigures much that distinguishes his later stage-work.

In that fuggy theatre it occurred to me that the prose poetry of the piece would make mesmeric radio. It could be made all the richer by exploring the autobiographical resonances of the story too. With Katherine, we proposed the idea as an unusual afternoon play for Radio 4.

Research

Once the programme had been commissioned, the most crucial question was who should read it. First Love focuses on a first love affair, and the primary loves that influenced Beckett's life and writing - his dead father, his delight in language, and his profound need for isolation. The 39 year old narrator looks back to when he was 25 and talks about the eviction from his childhood home, his life as a vagrant in Dublin and his meeting with his first love, 'Lulu'. He tells of their romance by the canal, of the room proffered by Lulu and glumly taken, and of his final departure.

To capture this extraordinary story, we needed a young actor, preferably with a Dublin lilt, but also somebody who could bring out the black humour of the piece, as well as following its complex intellectual journey.

After much discussion, Katherine and I felt that Stephen Dillane - the actor seen recently in the West End in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing - would be ideal. Stephen has a deep interest in Samuel Beckett's work, and recently appeared in Katie Mitchell's celebrated production of Endgame.

Interestingly, music was very important to Beckett, particularly Schubert. After much digging, we found that the song referred to in the text was by Schubert. This unexpected choice caught our imagination and we decided to ask an Irish actress to come in and record some of the phrases of the song.

London

We then began the process of planning which interviews to include in the programme. Our first interviewee, the publisher of First Love, John Calder, was an obvious choice. He first met Beckett in the 1950s when Waiting for Godot was on in London. He then wrote to Beckett at home in Paris to ask him if he could publish him in England, but his letter arrived one day after an approach from the publisher Faber.

According to Calder, it was only when Faber decided that Beckett's work could be construed as obscene under the then censorship laws, that Calder was able to publish him. He explained to us that Beckett had initially been very reluctant to sign on the dotted line, as he had said that he would much rather be friends, and felt that it was very hard to be friends with your publisher. So began thirty years of collaboration between the two men.

We also spent a fascinating day with James Knowlson, Beckett's authorised biographer. He first read First Love in manuscript in a railway station in Paris, where in the 1980s he spent long nights drinking with the writer, before returning to the University of Reading with Beckett's texts to put in the University archive. His insights proved invaluable.

Billie Whitelaw, Beckett's actress and muse, also spoke movingly about their friendship and the times she spent with him in Paris, walking the streets together and sitting on a bench in the lunatic asylum near his home, watching the inmates go to and fro.

Dublin

Our last stop was Dublin to talk to the academic Declan Kiebard. First we went to find the bench where much of the story is set, and where the narrator meets his 'first love'. Dodging the surprisingly heavy mid-morning Dublin traffic, we wandered the length of the icy Grand Canal, getting our bearings. Just beyond a lock, surrounded by trees, we found the iron bench, and spoke to Declan there about this area of the city as 'a lover's walk', and the fact that this is also the bench which Beckett mentions in Krapp's Last Tape.

That evening we drove south of the city to Greystones, where Beckett and his family spent their summers, just down the coast from their home at Fox Rock. Now, Greystones is in the process of being swallowed by the commuter belt, but then it was a fishing village, where affluent Protestant Dublin families played golf and tennis. Here Samuel Beckett walked the hills and swam in the sea with his father William, to whom he was very close. And it is here that his parents are buried and where the opening of First Love is set.

The Dublin bench where the narrator meets his "first love"

The Redford Protestant Cemetary near Dublin

We charged around in the fast fading light to find the graves. A modern cemetery, full of well-manicured gravestones bore no fruit until we asked in the local shop, where we chanced upon the local undertaker. Apparently, we had been searching in the Catholic cemetery and it was the more remote Protestant cemetery up on the hill that we needed. Negotiating our way round JCBs, we finally found the now over-grown gates to the charming Redford Protestant Cemetery, and the simple, beautiful grave of Beckett's father:

Yes, as a place for an outing, when out I must, leave me my graveyards and keep you to your public parks and beauty spots. But my father's yard was … too remote, way out in the wilds of the country on the side of a hill, and too small, far too small, to go on with.

Editing

Back in London, we found editing such extraordinary material a horrible challenge. But Stephen Dillane's haunting rendition of the text brought to life the full poignancy of the experience. And so 'there it is', to paraphrase Mr Beckett, 'either you love or you don't'.

The Independent (UK)

Sunday March 4, 2001

Beckett [with all the rude bits taken out]

First Love Radio 4

by Nicholas Lezard

The latest Radio 4 afternoon play to make one sit up and take notice was a reading of Samuel Beckett's novella, First Love. This was interspersed with reminiscences and observations by Beckett's English-language publisher, John Calder, the sublime Billie Whitelaw, James Knowlson, his authorised biographer, and an academic, Declan Kiberd. The reading, by Stephen Dillane, was unusual in that it did not assume the heavy portentousness that creeps into so many readings of Beckett. He took it at a conversational level, almost chatty; yet this worked very well.

What did not work so well was the way the text had been edited. I had better warn you about this: I am going to be quoting lots of Beckett from now on, and using very rude words. If either of these bother you, avert your gaze.

A word about Beckett adaptations. They don't normally happen. His estate protects his plays fiercely, and in my view entirely justly, on the grounds that Beckett knew best; First Love is not even a play. But the presence of Knowlson gave it the imprimatur of official assent.

Given that the slot for the afternoon play is 45 minutes, it is reasonable, then, to cut some of First Love, which would take about an hour and 15 minutes to read out otherwise. Here then, as a public service, is some of what they cut. Omissions are indicated by square brackets.

"You have only to put your feet on my knees, she said. I didn't wait to be asked twice, under my miserable calves I felt her fat thighs. She began stroking my ankles. I considered kicking her [in the c--t]."

"And the next day (what is more) I abandoned the bench, [less I must confess for her sake than on its, for the site no longer answered my requirements, modest though they were, now that the air was beginning to strike chill, and for other reasons better not wasted on c--ts like you] and took refuge in a deserted cowshed marked on one of my forays."

These sentences also omitted, entirely: "What constitutes the charm of our country, apart of course from its scant population, and this without the help of the meanest contraceptive, is that all is derelict, with the sole exception of history's ancient faeces. These are ardently sought after, stuffed and carried in procession. Wherever nauseated time has dropped a nice fat turd you will find our patriots, sniffing it up on all fours, their faces on fire."

"Give me a chamber-pot, I said. But she did not possess one. [I have a close-stool of sorts, she said. I saw the grandmother sitting on it, sitting up very stiff and grand, having just purchased it, pardon, picked it up, at a charity sale, or perhaps won it in a raffle, a period piece, and now trying it out, doing her best rather, almost wishing someone could see her.]"

"I thought I was all set for a good night, in spite of the strange surroundings, but no, my night was most agitated. I woke next morning quite worn out, my clothes in disorder, the blanket likewise, and Anna beside me, naked naturally. One shudders to think of her exertions. I still had the stewpan in my grasp. It had not served. [I looked at my member. If only it could have spoken!] Enough about that. It was my night of love."

They also supplied, as the text did not, the song that Lulu/Anna sings to the narrator. (Cue poignant warbling.) What the real First Love has to say about the song, and song in general, is expressed in one of those audaciously long and rhythmic sentences so latterly popularised and lifted by the likes of David Foster Wallace and his ilk, a litany of exhausted and eventually breathless ennui which ends with the words "this sentence has gone on long enough".

And while it is true to say that pretty much every sentence of Beckett's is identifiable as one of his and no one else's, so in a sense cutting them from a work does it less of a disservice than you may think, actually cutting the sentence itself does, sadly, amount to an act of vandalism towards his talent. "He can't write a sentence that is not musical," as Knowlson remarked on the programme itself. To underline this, we then had the testimony of Billie Whitelaw, who described how, in rehearsal, they actually conducted each other through her speech.

John Calder publishes the complete text of First Love at a cost, to you, of a mere pounds 3.

Read the book!
	USA	UK
Books Please note that the book is available, but an audio book of the BBC performance is not available.

This page was last updated on May 10, 2001.

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