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Krapp's Last Tape 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 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Modern Literature This content downloaded from 193.227.175.117 on Sun, 24 Apr 2016 17:00:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms S. E. GONTARSKI 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. 61 This content downloaded from 193.227.175.117 on Sun, 24 Apr 2016 17:00:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms S. E. GONTARSKI 62 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 repre- sents 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. This content downloaded from 193.227.175.117 on Sun, 24 Apr 2016 17:00:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE MAKI NG OF KRAPP'S LAST TAPE 63 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 appar- ently 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. This content downloaded from 193.227.175.117 on Sun, 24 Apr 2016 17:00:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 64 S. E. GONTARSKI 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 simultane- ously, 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.
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