ignoring the complex time shifts: in the present of the play’s opening, Addie has long
been dead. Kalb also refers oddly to Ada as Henry’s “companion” rather than what
she so evidently is—his wife—and the two, as I will suggest later, by no means merely
“reminisce about old times.”
- Samuel Beckett, letter to Barney Rosset, his U.S. publisher (Grove Press),
27 August 1957, cited in Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, as frontispiece; and in
Everett C. Frost, “A ‘Fresh Go’ for the Skull: Directing All That Fall, Samuel Beckett’s
Play for Radio,” in Directing Beckett, ed. Lois Oppenheim (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997), 191. - John Pilling, Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 98.
- Embers, in Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Press,
1984), 91–104, see 96. All references to Embers are to this edition. For an interesting
discussion of mediumistic evocation in Embers in relation to Yeats’s Words upon the
Window-Pane, see Worth, “Beckett and the Radio Medium,” 196–208.
12.Embers, 93. Although my reading here and throughout is based on the Beckett
Festival recording in conjunction with the text, I use the text as score, since Beckett
indicates what the quality of voice is meant to be. Such scoring has its problems; it
is not quite true to the actual experience of hearing a work a single time (or even
several times) on the air. Following Beckett’s written text allows me to reread, recon-
sider, and compare passages in nonlinear ways. But since presumably Beckett would
have wanted us to study a given recording, not just listen to it once, the use of text as
score, in conjunction with the recording, is not, I hope, a violation of his purpose. - See my “Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New Poetry,” Critical In-
quiry 9, no. 2 (December 1982): 415–34; rpt. in Gontarski, On Beckett, 191–206. - Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, 85. Zilliacus argues that the Henry-Bolton
parallel is more convincing than the father-Bolton one, “because it leaves the play
more coherent.... Henry’s father, whether he committed suicide or not, found a way
out: his story has been ¤nished. Henry, like Bolton, has to go on: the Bolton story is
doomed to remain un¤nished because Henry himself is not ¤nished.” Cf. Ludovic
Janvier, Pour Samuel Beckett (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1966), 126, 129; John
Fletcher and John Spurling, Beckett: A Study of His Plays (London: Eyre Methuen,
1972), 97. - Wicher, “ ‘Out of the Dark,’ ” 10. Again, Ruby Cohn follows Hersh Zeifman’s
lead in taking the characters to be “embers of the Christian faith, with an implied
equation between Henry-Bolton-victim Christ and father-Holloway-savior Christ”;
see Cohn, Just Play, 85, and cf. Hersh Zeifman, “Religious Imagery in the Plays of
Samuel Beckett,” in Ruby Cohn, ed., Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 90. - Samuel Beckett, Company (New York: Grove Press, 1980), 18.
- H. Porter Abbott, Becket t Writing Becket t: The Author in the Autograph (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 17. - Charles Grivel, “The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth,” in Wireless Imagina-
Notes to Pages 106–118 283