PARTISAN REVIEW
57
viewers, intense enthusiasm in avant-garde circles. Marya Mannes
wrote a representative notice: "I doubt whether I have seen a
worse play. I mention it only as typical of the self-delusion of
which certain intellectuals are capable, embracing obscurity, pre–
tense, ugliness and negation as protective coloring for their own
confusions." Norman Mailer wrote two reviews for the newly
founded
Village Voice.
The first was a scornful attack, the second,
a week later, a grudging admission that the play had something
after all. He added, however, that he still believed that "most of
the present admirers of
Godot
are ... snobs, intellectual snobs of
undue ambition and impotent imagination, the worst sort of
literary type, invariably more interested in being part of some
intellectual elite than in the creative act itself."
This peculiar emphasis on what was considered to be the
effeteness and self-deception of both Beckett and his admirers was
characteristic at the time, and was only gradually moved to the
fringes of cultural history as a die-hard position of know–
nothingism when the years passed and Beckett's genius and his
enormous influence on younger writers became evident to nearly
everyone. The phenomenon of course resembles the various stages
of reaction to Joyce and more broadly to modem art and litera–
ture in all their successive movements. In this case an idea of
dramatic procedure was being violated; the theater, which was
supposed to be an emotional matter, to present images of action,
was being employed for inaction, and its tradition of completions
and endings was being flouted by an almost intolerable irresolution.
These things more than the play's ostensible "content," its melan–
choly view of human power and possibility, were what so dis–
turbed conventional minds (or minds which like Mailer's had large
areas of conventionality).
If
Waiting for Godot
is now widely accepted as the greatest
dramatic achievement of the last generation, some would say the
greatest imaginative work of any kind during the period, it is
obviously because its once radically new form has with time been
assimilated into educated consciousness, becoming at last a kind of
norm itself. Diderot once wrote that "if one kind of art exists, it is
difficult to have another kind," and Alain Robbe-Grillet has de-
