A Piece of Monologue

Written between 2 October 1977[1] and 28 April 1979 it followed a request for a “play about death” by the actor David Warrilow who starred in the premiere in the Annex at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club,[2] New York on 14 December 1979.

Diffuse light fades up on a room in which a white-haired old man – identified simply as Speaker – stands motionless facing a blank wall.

The linguistic discipline and repetition of precise phrases lends a ritualistic quality to these sequences which end in reduced light as he lastly "turns wick low."

He looks at specific marks left on the wall and remembers a photo of his father, one of his mother, one of them on their wedding day – Perhaps what he refers to right before the end as “the dead and gone” [6] – and one of “He alone” [7] which is likely one of himself – yet another, with his parents and possibly others of “the dying and the going.” [6] These pictures have been “ripped from the wall and torn to shreds” [8] though not in a single emotional scene, as with the character O in Film, but rather over a period of time and then swept “under the bed with the dust and spiders.” [8] (Beckett manages to create a sense of their presence haunting the room.

Or, more accurately, the attempt to speak of this specific event and renounce it from memory is the most significant behaviour represented in the narrative.” [10] The text fragments from this point on.

The action does progress somewhat however: in the first mention of the funeral the grave is empty, in the second the coffin is “out of frame” [9] and in the third the coffin is “on its way.” [6] “[One] of Freud’s theories that had an impact on Beckett because it reinforced his own experience was that the agony of birth induced a primal anxiety in human beings.” [11] Beckett claimed to have remembered his time in utero along with his own painful birth.

This is an important moment and one that caused Beckett major problems when he came to adapt the piece into French since “no similar word is vocalised in this way in French.” [12] This resulted in his omitting whole passages and “reduced the piece to a free version, shorter, entitled Solo.” [12] “Parting the lips is both a condition for and a result of pronouncing the plosive consonant “b”; thrusting the tongue forward, more precisely, pushing it out through the parted lips and teeth, describes in turn the action involved in pronouncing the sound “th”...

[16] And there are the multiples of six: six references to loved ones, six descriptions of the pictures which once adorned the now blank wall the speaker faces, six steps in the ritual” [17] and six uses of the word ‘birth’, three included in the expression – or a slight variation of the opening line: “Birth was the death of him.” “The isolated man in A Piece of Monologue … has ruthlessly cut himself off from his past, ‘exorcising’ his ‘so-called’ loved ones by removing their photographs, tearing them up and scattering them ...

As he destroys the photographs that reduce his once-loved mother and father to grey voids, and him to another, he tries to obliterate the memories that connect him with life and intimacy.

Hovering as Old Father Time in his shroud, he is ‘waiting on the rip word’ [6] ... to avaunt his ‘so-called loved ones’ and his ‘ghastly grinning’ [5] self.

"[19] The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (p 365) proposes that ‘love’ is the “rip word” because his ripping the photographs of his “loved ones” from the wall “fails to bring about the consummation desired.” This demonstrates the multiple possibilities of interpretation that make Beckett so richly challenging to anyone attempting to reach fixed conclusions regarding specific meanings.

Not with it now within reach.” [21] The day afterwards he did however sit down and attempt a piece with the opening words: ‘My birth was my death.’ Written in the first person singular; it was provisionally entitled ‘Gone’.

“It broke down … after a few thousand groans” [22] but he considered it salvageable and returned to it in January 1979 when Martin Esslin wrote to him to ask if he had an unpublished work that could appear in The Kenyon Review.

He added a set of stage directions to what had been up till then simply a monologue and, on his seventy-third birthday, he posted copies to both Esslin and Warrilow.

[1] A few days after Beckett began work on ‘Gone’ he arranged for his whole house to be painted “grey like the proprietor” and, on his return from a trip to Germany seeing the walls now bare and uncluttered, he chose to let them remain that way.

As James Knowlson puts it in Damned to Fame (p 650): “Life here emulated art, or at least echoed the mood that inspired it.” The oxymoron "Birth was the death of him" evokes a fusion of the two events.

Today, when digital technologies accentuate the process of the externalisation of memory begun with the invention of written language, these plays are more relevant than ever.