Dave Hannigan: Beckett's classic themes of futility and dread made him a good fit for the New York Mets

Irish Times

11 hours ago

On a Friday afternoon that was unusually cool and breezy for the last day of July, two men sat just to the left of home plate at newly opened Shea Stadium. They were watching the New York Mets entertain the Houston Colt 45s. One was a diehard
baseball
fan eagerly explaining the intricacies of the action as it happened, the other an interested foreign observer sampling
America
's curious national pastime for the first time.
'Would you like to go now?' asked Dick Seaver after the Mets closed out a 3-0 victory in the opener of a double-header.
'Is the game over then?' replied
Samuel Beckett
.
'Not yet,' said his friend, who then spelled out how the two teams would soon return to the field for a second match, making up a postponed fixture from earlier in the season
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'So, there's a whole other game,' said Beckett. 'Then we should stay. We don't want to leave until it's over, do we?'
Few things are more Beckettian than enduring a day and night double-bill of the Mets, the worst team in baseball in the sultry summer of 1964, taking on the 45s, their closest rivals for that unwanted title. Who better equipped to savour nearly six hours of action between two mediocre outfits with nothing to play for than a writer whose work explores themes of futility, patience and existential dread. Concepts close to the heart of every long-suffering Mets fan. Of course, as the only
Nobel Prize
winner to also feature in Wisden, the
cricket
bible, any contest revolving around a bat and ball was bound to hold his attention.
Samuel Beckett in Paris in 1960, long after his days as a gifted sportsman. Photograph: Ozkok/Sipa/Shutterstock
'Beckett listened intently as I droned on, at one point he said he got the general idea,' wrote Seaver, whose seminal 1952 essay about the unacknowledged greatness of the Irish writer is credited with breaking him in America. 'As the game progressed, he asked key questions, wondering why, for instance, when a batter hit the ball so weakly he nonetheless ran as if his life depended on it. And why in the world on what you called a passed ball, the batter didn't run, just stood there. Balls and strikes he understood immediately and was especially impressed by the blue-suited umpires, who acted with such histrionic authority.'
Beckett had come to New York for the shooting of his screenplay for the experimental short called Film, whose only line of dialogue is a solitary 'Ssshh!' and which starred Buster Keaton. By that point in his own career, the one-time silent movie icon was alcoholic, broke and apparently not interested in engaging with the famous playwright. In a neat turning of the tables during one visit to Keaton's hotel room, the Irishman tried desperately to make conversation but the actor whose slapstick he had grown up watching on the big screen was too preoccupied with a New York Yankees game on television.
In his one and only visit to the United States, Beckett hung out in an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village after shooting each day, the air conditioning rendering relief from the clammy humidity of Manhattan in high summer. He propped up the bar in Martell's on Third Avenue and although notorious for disliking doing press, gave a couple of interviews. He explained to one reporter on set that: 'The picture is about a man's self-perception.'
He flew out to the Hamptons in a claustrophobic four-seater private plane not designed for somebody with long legs like his. A far more bucolic place back then than it is now, he played tennis there and complained about the inferiority of the clay court to grass.
Samuel Beckett packed a lot into his only trip to the United States. Photograph: John Minihan
Tennis was one of many sports in which Beckett excelled at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen where he boxed, swam, golfed and played cricket. An avid sportsman at Trinity College, he was once a zealous seven-handicapper renowned for trying to squeeze 72 holes into a day at Carrickmines Golf Club, where he regularly lost money to Jim Barrett, the teaching pro. His interests ran the gamut, from chess to motorcycle trials around Donnybrook on his trusty AJS (Albert John Stevens) bike.
His footnote in Wisden was earned by two appearances in first-class cricket, batting left-handed for Trinity against Northamptonshire on tours of England in 1926 and 1927. Billeted in rural
France
three decades later, not long after his stint in the Resistance fighting the Nazis in the second World War, he used to bring up cricket when occasionally ferrying an oversized youth named Andre Rene Roussimoff to school. The kid grew up to gain global celebrity of his own as Andre the Giant, the wrestler with a starring cameo in The Princess Bride, a movie that reached a much wider audience than Beckett's obtuse Film.
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As the July evening wore on at Shea Stadium and the floodlights kicked in, his failing eyesight made tracking the flight of the ball more difficult. Still, whenever a batter sent one deep, Beckett rose to his feet, ushered his glasses up onto his head, and squinted into the night sky, desperate to trace the trajectory and to see if it stretched into a hit or was snaffled by an outfielder's glove for an out.
'Perhaps I should come to see the Mets more often,' he said to Seaver after the home side won the second game 6-2. 'I seem to bring them good luck.'
He never made it back to the ballpark. The Mets finished the season in last place.