and stopping to rest under colour of admiring the view. I’ll never have
anyone like him. (cited in Damned to Fame 165)It was just a few months later that Bill Beckett collapsed with a heart at-
tack: within a week he was dead. “I can’t write about him,” Beckett wrote
MacGreevy, “I can only walk the ¤elds and climb the ditches after him” (166),
and more than ¤fty years later he told his biographer: “After my father’s
death I had trouble psychologically. The bad years were between when I had
to crawl home in 1932 and after my father’s death in 1933. I’ll tell you how it
was. I was walking down Dawson Street. And I felt I couldn’t go on. It was
a strange experience I can’t really describe. I found I couldn’t go on mov-
ing” (167).
The acute sense of guilt that produced this paralysis is not surprising
when we consider that at the time of his death Beckett père could not know
that his son would ever emerge from the bad phase he was in, a phase that
gave his mother so much pain. And it is the son’s guilt about this situation
that is the subject of Embers. The sea-sound is forever linked to the dying
embers, white world, and “no sound” that greets Bolton’s “Please! please!”
Beckett has written a searing play about what Dante called the “great re-
fusal.”
Information, Please
The question remains: what did Beckett gain by presenting this autobio-
graphical drama of ¤lial guilt as a radio play? If, as we have seen, Embers is
closely allied to such of Beckett’s later ¤ctions as Company, which shares
many of its actual images and incidents (and a similar case could be made
for Krapp’s Last Tape and The Unnamable, both of them written just a few
years before Embers), why was Beckett so adamant in refusing to let his plays
“for voices, not bodies,” be staged or so much as read in front of a live audi-
ence? Why his insistence that “to ‘act’ it is to kill it”?
The answer cannot be that radio gave Beckett the best possible vehicle for
“skullscape” or “soulscape,” for certainly Company and Krapp’s Last Tape are
soulscapes too. Nor is it enough to say, as Beckett does of his radio plays, that
the “whole thing com[es] out of the dark.” Rather, I would like to suggest that
the “radio-activity” of Embers, as of Words and Music, Cascando, and Rough
for Radio I and II that followed in its wake, is that its sounding of disembod-
ied voices makes it the perfect vehicle for the dance of death that is its sub-
ject. The dialectic of sea-sound/no sound, within which the sound of hooves,
of a water drip, of stones grinding against one another cannot “drown” the
Acoustic Art in Beckett’s Radio Plays 117