THE appearance of this translation of Eleutheria means that an acceptable English version of Beckett's first full-length play is now available. It was first published in English in New York last year in a rough beast of a translation whose multiple monstrosities were comprehensively dealt with by Gerry Dukes in these pages at the time. The appearance of that translation (and the play's simultaneous publication in the original French) were the upshot of another dispute between publishers of a kind which has become all too familiar since Beckett's death.
Eleutheria was written in January and February, 1947, almost two years before Godot, and was initially offered for publication and production on the same terms as the later play. Soon, however, Beckett withdrew it from the market and adamantly refused to allow its publication thereafter.
There is no mystery as to why he did not want Eleutheria to be published: while of very great interest as his first attempt at a full-length drama, it is deeply flawed, and no doubt was an embarrassment to its author. It is in many ways startlingly unlike every other play Beckett wrote; even his much earlier dramatic fragment, Human Wishes, is a lot closer to the work of the dramatist we know.
It features, by Beckett standards, a cast of thousands (actually 17) and contains elements of naturalism that he was never to venture again. Perhaps its most innovative feature is the division of the stage into two self-contained halves, in one half of which virtually nothing happens, while the play's ostensible "action" takes place in the other (the status of the two halves is interchanged in the second act); the device ought to be dramatically very effective.
The first act is set in the house of the bourgeois Krap family (a pregnant name), which, like many such a family, is worried about the behaviour of its son and heir. In this case the son, Victor, has taken himself off to a rundown apartment and is refusing to hold any communication with his progenitors and other relatives, lover and family friends. This first act - the most naturalistic - contains enough mordant humour, genuine eccentricity and, in the character of Krap pere, enough of an authentically monstrous quality, to work.
It is in the second and third acts, when we are introduced to Victor, that the trouble lies. The effect is rather as if Godot had actually turned up in act two of the later play. Victor has abandoned life, and by definition, therefore, has nothing to say. What we get instead is a host of audience surrogates, all of whom circle around him and debate his case.
Particularly unfortunate, perhaps, is the presence of an Ophelia figure who merely suffers passively in an all too conventional mode. Eventually, Victor does make a coherent statement, in which he declares, in the play's most Beckettian moment, that he will use his life and what little freedom he has obtained (eleutheria is the Greek word for freedom) "to rub my chains one against the other ... That useless little sound will be my life."
The situation, in which, among other things, a Chinese torturer is introduced to get Victor to speak, to some extent foreshadows that of some of Beckett's later plays, where speechless, uncomprehending figures are forced to speak, to understand, to join the human race. But in these, the situation is handled with infinitely more skill; here, the play lapses into self-consciousness and would, I imagine, be rather trying to watch.
It is not the self-consciousness as such that is the problem: both Godot and Endgame are highly self-conscious in theatrical terms. Here, though, it is the wrong kind of self-consciousness, the kind that seeks solace in incorporating the audience in its own excessive self awareness, almost revenging it on the audience. To the extent that the play does work, it works because of one's wonder that so exacerbated an apperception can generate drama of any kind; not that it is done well, but that it is done at all. And this sense of futile effort against impossible odds is perhaps the highest tribute, in Beckett's terms, that one can pay to it. Later, he would learn to "fail better".
The present translation, by Barbara Wright, Professor of French at TCD, is delicate and felicitous in catching the appropriate tone of a play that Beckett himself never wanted to translate and that is probably the last substantial work by him that was still awaiting publication. It remains only to see it on stage, and that, in all probability, will not be long in coming.