THEATER CHRONICLE
287
interludes. Archie's disgust with life, his abysmal carelessness, cover every
activity he can conceive of. He chases women, we are told, but romance
or even the merest sexual exaltation is impossible for him. "Have you
ever had it on a kitchen table? Like a piece of meat on a slab." This
utterly nihilistic fornicator likes, dredging up old tin cans from the
well of his experience, to generalize too: "Either they're doing it, and
they're not enjoying it. Or else they're not doing it and they aren't en–
joying it." Archie has a gross and tenacious passion for crude reality.
This is not particularly a virtue in his case, nor even a mark of insight;
it is a grotesque dividend from his failure to care. He is not a great
villain, but a small one given to meaningless love affairs and petty dis–
honesties. Archie does not assassinate the king, he cheats on his income
tax,
and while he
fears
nothing he does vaguely
worry
about the ghost
of the tax collector who haunts his sleep.
A number of notes are struck in the play; not all of them are inter–
estingly developed, but a curious excitement comes at every point from
the mere attempt to make contemporary noise on the stage. The oily,
jangling entertainer threatens; allegory and premonition cling to him like
the smell of his costumes, the grease on his hatband.
Endgame
by Samuel Beckett is pure disgust, with no other element
mixed in. It is a white, covering, freezing snow, nearly unbearable.
Utter desolation and hatred of life; ashes, ash cans, blindness, death,
slavery, empty tyranny, ghostly giggles, bareness, meanness, starvation.
This work has the power to terrify. In sheer pain you go on scene after
a:ene, from nothing to yet another nothing. "Ah the old questions, the
old answers, there's nothing like them!" Where one understands the
meaning the relief is such that a smile comes involuntarily. "Use your
bead, can't you, use your head, you're on earth, there's no cure for
that!" and
-A
flea! Are there still fleas?"
"On me there's one."
"But
humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him for
the
love of God!"
The relief lasts no longer than the batting of an eye. The pitiless
misery continues. Is it good or bad art? Complete, merciless, it has
asort of therapeutic beauty and truth, like the sight of an open grave.
k would be presumptuous to say that this misery and disgust are not
eoough. Indeed it is all too much, the end of the line, and overpowering
iI
the purity of its deathly summations.
Elizabeth Hardwick
