Krapp's Last Tape" Author(S): S

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Crapp's First Tapes: Beckett's Manuscript Revisions of "Krapp's Last Tape" Author(s): S. E. Gontarski Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 6, No. 1, Samuel Beckett Special Number (Feb., 1977), pp. 61-68 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831019 Accessed: 24-04-2016 17:00 UTC

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THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, LIMA

Crapp's First Tapes: Beckett's Manuscript Revisions of Krapp's Last Tape

KRAPP'S LAST TAPE was written in a spurt. The earliest draft was begun February 20, 1958. By March 15, in a letter to Jake Schwartz, Beckett was already dispersing the preliminary typescripts, and by April 1 5, in another letter to Schwartz, Beckett noted that the play had been ac- cepted for production by Patrick Magee (to be played at the Royal Court Theatre with Endgame) and that publication was due in the forthcoming issue of Evergreen Review (that is, Summer 1958).1 In the letter of March 15, Beckett also discussed briefly the genesis of Krapp's Last Tape, noting that the play was composed directly on the typewriter from old notes and suggesting that the four typescripts offered were the only preliminary versions.2 The history of composition offered by Beckett, however, is slightly misleading. In addition to the type- scriptst at least three partial holograph versions existt two which antedate the earliest typescript and one which was written between Typescripts I and 11. All three holograph versionst perhaps the notes to which BeckeK referred, were written in a much bedoodled, 96-leaf, graph-paper notebook called by Beckett ETE 56 (an important notebook which in

1 This study was in part made possible by a travel grant from The Ohio State University Lima Campus Research Committee. Previously unpublished rnaterial used with permission of Samuel Beckett. Text quotations are from the Grove Press edition, Copyright t) 1958, 1959, 1960 by Grove Press, Inc.

2 The two letters to Jake Schwartz and the four typescripts of Krappws Last Tape are on deposit at the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, the staff of which was most helpful during my stay.

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addition to the notes for Krapp contains preliminary material for five other works: Fin de partie ["Scraps"], All That Fall, "Pim," "Wil- lie Winnie Notes," and Words and Music).3 Although Beckett called the Krapp's Last Tape notes "First Draft," the material actually represents three stages in the play's development. The first version, entitled Magee Monologue, and dated February 20, 1958, begins with a brief description of Krapp (called simply "A" at this stage) and the set. No mention is made of Krapp's comic a,zpearance nor the business with keys and bananas which appears late in the play's development. Writ- ten on the recto, this earliest version covers three and a half manuscript pages and ends with a younger Krapp on tape referring to himself as a "pioneer": "a moment in the life of all pioneers." The second version begins immediately thereafter, separated from the first by a line drawn across the page, with the voice of Krapp at thirty- nine (thirty-seven at this point) on tape and is fundamentally, although with fewer interruptions, the reminiscence as we have it finally. This second holograph stage (seven recto pages with revisions on the verso) was typed out by Beckett (four leaves) with minor changes and revised, stage three. He then returned to the ETE 56 notebook to reshape the play's opening, stage four, a holograph fragment which begins on the verso facing stage one and continues for two manuscript pages. This fourth stage begins with a set description and ends as Krapp commences to play the tape, that is, where stage two began. Typescripts 11, 111, and IV are then successive full versions, stages five, six, and seven. All the typescripts bear the same general date, March 1958, but Beckett evidently dated them after the play was completedr apparently for Jake Schwartz. Typescript 1, for example, bears the play's final title penned at the top along with the date, while Typescript 11 (six leaves) contains a penned preliminary title, "Crapp's Last Tape." Fur- thermore, in Typescript 11 the protagonist is still called A, the name changed only in an autograph revision to Crapp. Typescripts 111 (also six leaves) and IV (seven leaves) contain the final title typed at the head, although Typescript IV also contains the parenthetical word "Reel" following the title. Beckett at least contemplated calling the play Krapp's

3 The ETE 56 notebook is on deposit at the University of Reading Library, Reading, England, the staff of which was also most helpful during my stay.

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Last Reel. Both Typescripts 111 and IV use the name Krapp throughout. Typescript IV, however, although very close to the printed version, was not the final typing. BeckeK thus wrote at least seven stages of this play within three weeks, each heavily revised. But although the play was written quickly, the intricacies of matter and method were not all present from the first. Krapp's Last Tape, as Ruby Cohn has argued of Fin de partie, was "revised into rightness."4 Through seven preliminary versions Beckett exploited the technical and dramatic potential of the tapes, amplified and universalized Krapp's conflict, and orchestrated the tone of the play from the singular pathos of stage one to the final patho-comedic ensem- ble. Early in the play's development, between the first two stages, Beckett realized the dramatic possibilities of the tape recorder. The first version of Krapp is formally different from the other six. It opens familiarly with A's searching for a tape. He clumsily knocks one off the table, grows angry, and sweeps tapes and ledger violently to the floor; we have our first glimpse of the emotional Krapp. This outburst was originally fol- lowed, balanced perhaps, by a comic routine in which Krapp discovers that the table, less tapes and ledger, is unsteady, moves it about to steady it, and takes it out of what Beckett calls at this early stage, "the zone of light." Curiously, inexplicably, the light follows. Finally, he sits and listens to a tape of himself at thirty-one, "being in the third decade of the Ram,"5 a tape whose theme, as identified in the ledger, is simply " Passion ." Krapp at thirty-one is our most hopeful and naive Krapp: he apparently sees himself heroically, as a pioneer, and makes direct appeals to Providence, to the "all-merciful Providence," for the strength to drink less and "What would help me more than anything, I think, is a . . . a fuller . . . more . . . engrossing. . . sexual life. (Pause. Enthusiastic!) Intercourse!" The tape dramatizes directly young Krapp's aspirations and resolutions, h is "yelp to Providence." And the dominant emotion of

4 Ruby Cohn, "The Beginning of Endgame," Modern Drama, IX (December 1966), 319-323.

5 The allusion to Aries, Beckett's own astrological sign, would have been an interesting inclusion had it remained. It is the first sign of the Zodiac, usually representing beginning, birth, creativity, the original cause, each of which would have provided an additional ironic commentary on Krapp's failures. And Beckett struggled with this Murphy-like allusion, eliminating it in stage one, reintroducing it briefly to stage six (Ts-lil), and finally excising it in this same version. As the age of the youngest Krapp was made less precise, the astrological reference, potentially autobiographical, was eliminated.

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this first version is pathos, the comedy of character and situation as yet undeveloped. The original plan evidently was to have Krapp listen to a tape or probably a series of tapes made at earlier birthdays. Beckett's first fundamental change was to alter this design and collapse at least two tapes into one, creating a third Krapp, an intermediary between young and old Krapp who would summarize and evaluate much of the taped information which formed the core of stage one. The technical change was a brilliant stroke; a single tape then could capture more than one block of time, more than one level of character. Beckett could present his protagonist at three different stages simultaneously, a sort of triple spatial pattern: Krapp at sixty-nine listening to Krapp at thirty-nine (earlier thirty-seven) summarizing a tape made ten or fifteen years earlier. The result is a juxtapositioning of elements commenting on each other like a cinematic montage, a model of theatrical compactness and concentration, and another of Beckett's theatrical innovations. Moreover, presenting three stages of Krapp simultaneously, Beckett intensified the dramatization of a central theme: the inability of the self to perceive itself accurately in the present. Krapp-69 sneers at Krapp-39 who in turn laughs at young Krapp. At each stage Krapp sees the fool he was, not the fool he is. A second significant revision in the Krapp's Last Tape manuscripts concerns Krapp's sexuality. Through three drafts of the play Krapp prayed for a fuller sex life. He uttered the word intercourse with en- thusiasm. And the name of the woman with whom young Krapp lived, off and on, also had sexual overtones: she was first Belacqua's Alba (H-2), then Murphy's Celia (Ts-l), then Furry! But in an autograph revision to Typescript 1, Beckett reversed himself and altered Krapp's conflict from physical or psychological inadequacy to the inability to control his desires, that is, the inability of mind to control body, spirit to control flesh. Once Beckett reversed himself, Krapp's appeal for a "Less exhausting" (Ts-l), then "Less wearing" (Ts-ll), and finally a "Less engrossing" (Ts-lil) sex life further develops what may be Beckett's most persistent theme, the Cartesian conflict of intellect and emotion, the attempted resolution of which has consumed Krapp's life. Krapp's at- tempts to reduce his sexual activity and thus to compromise and com- mingle the poles of human character are further mirrored in the celibate ledger entry, "Farewell to Love," and his desire to drink less. In Type- script 11 Krapp's struggle to control his desires was further dramatized with the addition of the opening scene with keys, bananas, and drink, a

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scene which not only introduced a comic tone to offset the early pathos, but was also a thematic thread as Krapp tries locking away one of the objects of his desire. In Typescript 111 the banana acquired its obvious sexual significance as Beckett twice added "caresses banana," altered in Ts-lV to "strokes banana." With the addition of the banana sequence the focus of the play's opening is on Krapp's desire for physical sensation and sensual gratification. When he turns to the tapes consequently, he begins a selective retrospect; his most abiding concerns are the dark nurse and the affair in the punt, both of which suggest Krapp's sensual interest. In fact in Typescript 111 Beckett entertained the possibility of making Krapp's ad- vances to the nurse more overt: "when I was ingenuous enough to try and pat her on the bottom she threatened to call a policeman." And at sixty-nine Krapp still has the need to satisfy his sexual appetite, but the appetite is now purely sensual, his desire to merge sex and intellect, light and dark is now gone, a desire dramatized in two key scenes: the confrontation with the dark nurse and the affair in the punt. His relations with the whore Fanny finally seem comic and grotesque, with at least the suggestion of anal relations, a parallel to Krapp's name and constipation. At sixty-nine (even the age is suggestive) Krapp's sexuality is not a vaginal beginning, a birth, but the scatological end. He accepts Fanny not in Iyric or cosmic terms, but carnally. Finally, as Krapp strokes the autoerotic bananas and relives two of his sexual ex- periences, he does achieve, vicariously and with the help of the erotic bananas, a limited gratification. After repeatedly listening to the account of the affair in the punt and trying to tape his current tirade, his mood dramatically shifts; his last words are, "Lie down across her." His final motionless stare may signal not death, but a post-coital emptiness. The play then, as Beckett shaped it, became a study of recurrent failure more universal than personal sexual inadequacy. Krapp is a man who struggled against the fundamental cacaphony of human character, a beaten man who now curses his younger selves at least in part for the decision to abandon love, but Krapp never acquires the self-awareness to see the similarities between young and old Krapp, the self-awareness which might have given him a tragic dimension. The struggle for order and intellect, the struggle against desire is now half-hearted; he accepts Fanny, but locks away his bananas and times the intervals between drinks. Krapp persistently fails to mingle and harmonize human nature, to achieve at least a personal memorable equinox. And his desire for an

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artificially achieved order, the imposition of human mind on to natural chaos, is waning. The tapes, once neatly catalogued and indexed, now ing.sit strewn on the floor, the last tape incomplete and hypnotically revolv-

As Beckett has recorded in his production notebook, Krapp's consum- ing lifelong struggle has been to reconcile spirit and flesh, symbolically the light and dark sides of his nature, and Beckett sharpened the light/ dark imagery in revision. In stage four Beckett developed the light/dark contrast in Krapp's face and clothing. The face was now pallid with a purple nose, a drinker's snout. His clothes were black and white, the boots, especial Iy, surprisingly white. The harshness of the setting was heightened in revision. In stage four, Krapp sat in "strong light. Rest of stage in shadow." In this same version "shadow" was altered to "darkness." In Typescript 11 Beckett specified white light, "strong white light." To the description of the dark nurse a sharply contrasting white uniform was added in Typescript 1, "all white and starch." And between Type- script IV and the printed version Beckett specified a white dog, so that the black ball is given to a white dog. As Beckett notes in his production notebook for Krapp's Last Tape, ". . . if the giving of the black ball to the white dog represents the sacrifice of sense to spirit the form here too is that of a mingling."6 And Krapp's reservations about the offering were stated more precisely as late as Typescript IV. "I wish," he notes con- cluding the scene, "I had kept it."

Finally, two more patterns of revision are evident in Beckett's manuscripts for Krapp's Last Tape. First, Beckett reinforced the similarities among the three Krapps. Character consistency was apparent from the second version. Krapp at sixty-nine still has the aspirations of young Krapp: "Scalded the eyes out of me reading Effie again . . .; Could have been happy with her, up there on the Baltic, and the dunes"; "Went to Vespers"; "Sometimes wondered in the night if a last effort mightn't . . ." Krapp's romantic and religious hopes persist. In revision Beckett reinforced the similarities between Krapps to clarify the recurrent, cycli- cal pattern. In Typescript 11 Beckett has Krapp pull from his pocket an old envelope, and we soon learn that Krapp, like Winnie, is a creature of

6 A photo-facsimile of this manuscript page is published in James Knowlson, Light and Darkness in the Theatre of Samue/ Beckett (London: Turret Books, 1972). I am indebted to Professor Knowlson's discussion of the Library. light/dark imagery in Krapp's Last Tape. The production notebook itself is on deposit at the University of Reading

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habit, preparing for his birthday tapes in the same way for at least thirty years. Even Beckett's tinkering with middle Krapp's age from thirty- seven to thirty-nine suggests the strengthening of comparison. Second, Beckett carefully adjusted the tone of his play, deepening Krapp's pathos and simultaneously offsetting or undercutting that pathos with comedy. Beckett adds in Typescript IV that Krapp's walk is "laborious" and that twice he "heaves a great sigh." Krapp's outburst of song, h is sentimental return to boyhood, a paral lel to old Miss McGlome's song, is enfeebled as Beckett changes "Brief burst of rau- cous song" (Ts-lil) to "Brief burst of quavering song" (Ts-lil). And the song itself is somber. Also in Typescript 111 Krapp no longer "feels" in his pockets for keys; he "fumbles." But the pathos of Krapp's situation was highlighted most as Beckett increased his protagonist's isolation. The Winehouse where Krapp at thirty-nine drank was originally peopled at least with unfamiliar faces. In revision Beckett excised even these strangers as Krapp notes, "Not a soul." In the second stage, while Krapp waited in the park for his mother to die, the park was more active, more alive: "Quite a number of people I got to know then, I mean by appearance." In Typescript IV, Beckett altered the scene: "Deserted spot it was," and in the printed version, "Hardly a soul." Old Krapp too sat in a more active park in earlier drafts: "Sat in the park in the middle of the brats and skivvies" (Ts-l). In the final version, old Krapp notes, "Not a soul," a phrase which virtually becomes a refrain in the final version, again strengthening the parallels between Krapp at thirty-nine and sixty-nine. And finally, to Krapp's "Past midnight. Never knew such silence," Beckett added, "The earth might be uninhabited" (Ts-lil). Krapp's world is finally at least as deso- late as Hamm's or Winnie's. But pathos does not dominate. The emotional and dramatic intensity of the play are increased as Beckett makes Krapp simultaneously more pathetic and more comic. As Krapp's isolation grows, as his lifelong failure becomes more apparent, Beckett also develops the play's comedy. The comic routine with keys and bananas is added as a whole to Typescript 11, the same typescript in which Beckett began to increase Krapp's isolation. Also in Typescript 11 Beckett exploited the comic potential of Krapp's having forgotten the definition of viduity. At first Typescript 11 reads, "comes back with volume of the Concise Oxford . . . Iooks up viduity, reads, closes dictionary." In an autograph note Beckett adds, "or Johnson's dictionary and quotes example." But Johnson's

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definition must have been disappointingly curt and straightforward. In Typescript 111, Beckett again notes within the text, "quotes definition if possible." The definition itself appears as an autograph emendation to Typescript IV. And finally, the play's most overtly comic touch is introduced in stage four, the holograph fragment in which Beckett reworked the opening of Krapp. His protagonist began to look more like Emmett Kel Iy or 01 iver Hardy than a scholar/lover: "trousers too short for him," "Surprising pair of white boots, size ten, very narrow and pointed," "Pallid face. Purple nose." The final masterful patho-comic balance was achieved through careful revision. Although Krapp's Last Tape, like many other Beckett works, was written quickly, and the initial image of an old man listening to tape re- cordings made at earlier birthdays remained constant through seven versions, the complex pattern of the play, the tone and tempo, the possibilities of the tape recorder, and Krapp's fundamental conflict were not immediately apparent. The play was shaped through revision to its final form. It was not simply the product of a sudden flash of inspiration, but a series of flashes and some painstaking revision. The amount of stylistic revision and the attention to the most minute detail is astounding. But perhaps what is most remarkable about the Krapp's Last Tape preliminary versions is not only their reconfirmation of Beckett's literary craftsmanship, but also his remarkable theatrical sense, his ability to exploitthefulidramaticintensityandcomplexityfromWhatotherwise might have been a rather static, almost trite, at least extraordinarily sentimental situation. The pattern of an old man examining his past is certainly not new, but Beckett's method of telling the story, his technical achievement, is an accomplishment worthy of the artist who has made plays and stories about nothing.

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