"Another heavenly day,'' proclaims Winnie at the beginning of Happy Days, with what Samuel Beckett once described as a "kind of profound frivolity." Described alternately as Beckett's most cheerful work and his "song of rue," Happy Days premiered Sept. 17, 1961 at New York's Cherry Lane Theatre, directed by Alan Schenider. A long line of worthy actors have taken on the acrobatic narrative of the woman trapped in a mound of earth--including Ruth White, Brenda Bruce, Peggy Ashcroft, Billie Whitelaw, and Irene Worth. Like Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Happy Days explores Beckett's obsession with language, existence, memory, theatricality, and communcation (through the figure of Willie, behind Winnie's earthen mound).

- Jen Shook, Dramaturg

Happy Days Study Guide

ABBREVIATIONS USED:

SB = Beckett

PN = Production Notebooks

S = correspondence between Beckett & Alan Schneider

RH = Random House Dictionary, 2nd edition, unabridged

G = Gontarski

BC = Beckett Country

F = Fletcher, et al Student’s Guide

K = Knowlson, Frescoes

RC = Royal Court, London, production, directed by Beckett

SAMUEL BECKETT’S BIO:

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born to a middle-class Protestant family in County Dublin in 1906. Fascinated by gesture, he frequented the music hall and the Abbey Theatre, loved silent film comedians, and spent hours at the National Gallery of Ireland. Like his mentor James Joyce, Beckett refused to compromise in matters of censorship or of adaptation. Despite a nostalgia for his family and native landscape, he shunned Ireland’s restrictive morality to make a home in Paris. Decorated his work in the underground resistance during World War II, he responded, “You simply couldn’t stand by with your arms folded.”

In a burst of energy between 1946 and 1950 Beckett produced some of his best-known works, including the novel trilogy and En Attendent Godot (Waiting for Godot), writing in French for the discipline of the lesser-known language. He directed at least one production of each of his plays, keeping copious notebooks. Friends told stories of Beckett giving his coat to a total stranger without emptying the pockets. On a larger scale, he wrote letters on behalf of censored artists, and dedicated the play Catastrophe to the imprisoned Czech author Vaclav Havel. In protest to apartheid, performances of his plays were not allowed in apartheid South Africa.

In 1969, Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for “a body of work that, in new forms of fiction and the theatre, has transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation.”  He died after a long struggle with emphysema and other ailments in 1989.

ON HAPPY DAYS:

Happy Days opened at Cherry Lane Theatre, NY, Sun Sept 17 1961, directed by Alan Schneider, with Ruth White and John C. Becher. White won an Obie. (S 112)

Early working titles included: Great Mercies, Tender Mercies, Many Mercies. (G 73)

The music box song, “The Merry Widow Waltz” from Franz Lehar’s opera The Merry Widow, 1905, was chosen by Alan Schneider over Beckett’s other option, “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.”

For the “aborted” gestures, Beckett wrote in his Schiller production notebook: “Relate frequency of broken speech and action to discontinuity of time.” (PN 135)

“Sing”—“a term which Beckett has used to [Eoin O’Brien] several times, half apologetically, as being the only term that he could find appropriate to what he was trying to achieve in his prose.” (BC xvii)

A GLOSSARY:

(pages based on Grove Press edition)

8    “turns to bag”: SB directed Billie Whitelaw to look at bag affectionately before dipping in: “The bag is all she has. Look at it with affection. From the first you should know how she feels about it.” (PN 163-4)

10-11      “blind next…holy light…bob up out of dark”: Beckett to Schneider: “If she were blind there would be no more light, hellish or holy, no more objects (‘What wd. I do without them?’)…Light holy & to be missed in so far as a condition of seeing (which helps her through the day), hellish and not to be missed because emanation of the ‘hellish sun’ which is burning her. ‘Bob up out of dark’—dark of sleep shattered by bell.” (S 102)

13   Beckett to Schneider: “‘Old style’ and smile always provoked by word ‘day’ and derivatives of similar. There is no more day in the old sense because there is no more night, i.e. nothing but day. It is in a way an apologetic smile for speaking in a style no longer valid. ‘Old style’ suggests also of course old calendar before revision. ‘Sweet old style’ joke with reference to Dante’s ‘dolce stile nuovo.’” (S 102-3) Ruby Cohn points out that the “old style” can also refer to conventional Western drama.

14   “you still have some of that stuff left”: Willie has Vaseline.     Schneider: “I assume that ‘Now the other’ at bottom of page refers to what I think it does.” Beckett: “Yes, what you think.” (S 93,95)

16   “My first ball! (Long pause.) My second ball!” SB at RC rehearsal: “The first is a pleasant memory, the second not so pleasant.” (PN 137)

16   tangles of bast: raffia (“fibrous twine used by gardeners also called ‘bass.’ Always gets into a tangle.”) (S 96)

17   newspaper: named as Reynold’s News, p. 62: once popular Sunday Irish paper. “Irish newspaper of the ‘thirties voiced conservative sentiments in a parochial manner, a characteristic given satirical treatment by Beckett in his reference to the Moscow notes of the Evening Herald.” (More Pricks than Kicks) “Irish journalists shared with the majority of their countrymen the religious and patriotic prejudices that limited their intellectual perception….” (BC 373)

18   setae: [see’ tee] (plural of seta) “stiff hair; bristle or bristlelike part” (RH)

21   “old joke”: existence: “the joke of being, said to have caused Democritus to die of laughter [“SB impressed by his remark ‘nothing is more real than nothing.’” note 104]. To be related also if you like to Nell’s ‘noting is funnier than unhappiness etc.’ Same idea as in Watt (the 3 smiles).”  (S 103)

27   qui vive: [kee’ veev] “who goes there?; on the qui vive: on the alert, watchful” [etym: “long live who? (whose side are you on?)” (RH)

29   “peace—to be left in peace—then perhaps the moon—all this time—asking for the moon.” : Beckett to Schneider: “to demand the impossible. And of course echo of ‘night of the moon.’ In the hellish sun moon means coolness & freshness.” (S 104)

29   emmet: ant

29   “Has like a little white ball in its arms”: egg sac

30   formicate: Beckett to Schneider: “to swarm, speaking of ants, or to have the sensation on one’s skin of ants swarming. The eggs contain the promise of swarming (devouring) ants to come. This should be remembered in Act II when she no longer has arms to defend herself with.” (S 103)

32   enumerate: “to name one by one, specify, as in a list.” (RH)

33   derisive: mocking, contemptuous

34   Willie: “Sucked up?” Beckett to Schneider: “Willie feels ‘fucked up,’ not ‘sucked up.’ His surprise is at the s.” (S 95)

34   gossamer: gauze; thin light fabric; something … delicate; fine filmy cobweb (RH)

38   temperate: moderate (in temperature or self-restraint)/torrid: oppressively hot, scorching; passionate (RH)

38-39 “I hope you caught something of that, Willie…”: Beckett to Frau Schultz: Winnie has “crises of loquaciousness.” (PN 177)

39   shiver: “break or split into fragments” (RH)

39   musical-box: “It is a prop of her inward life.” (SB in RC) (PN 178)

40   “No, here all is strange.”…Beckett commented that this is perhaps the key direction of the play—Winnie’s sense of strangeness.

41   squander: “spend or use extravagantly or wastefully” (RH)

41   Apostrophic: apostrophe=“a digression in the form of an address to someone not present, or to a personified object or idea: “O Death where is thy sting?” (RH)

42   “Shower (rain). Shower & looker [sic: Cooker] are derived from German ‘schauen’ & ‘kuchen’ (to look) [kuchen: to peer]. They represent the onlooker (audience) wanting to know meaning of things. That’s why she stops filing, raises head and lets ‘em have it (‘And you, she says…’).” (S 95)

43   drivel: childish talk, nonsense (RH)

43   “old ditty full of tinned muck”: ditty: “a sailor’s bag, a kind of ‘hold-all’” (S 103); muck: filth (RH)

43   tosh: nonsense; bosh (RH)

50   ergo: therefore

53   boon: blessing, benefit

54   sunderings: divided parts

54   gouge: a beveled chisel (or hole made by gouging) (RH) 

55   Mildred: Winnie’s name in an earlier draft

55   legends: table, chart listing/explaining symbols used

56   wantonly: maliciously, uncalled-for; deliberate (RH)

57   “Sadness after intimate sexual intercourse one is familiar with of course. (Pause.) You would concur with Aristotle there…”: “omne animal post coitum triste est is usually attributed to Galen” (F 152)

60   “pink fizz”: “echoes Willie’s toast to her ‘golden…[hair]’ from first act. For RC production, SB changed first act text to match “The last guest gone.” (PN 131): pink champagne? the cocktail “pink fizz” = champagne + grenadine (F 153)

60   bumper: Beckett to Schneider: “brimming glass. Drink a bumper, toss off a brimming glass. It’s the ‘happy days’ toast.” (S 96)

60   zephyr: a gentle mild breeze; (Lit.) the west wind (RH)

61   “What’s that on your neck, an anthrax?”: “a malignant carbuncle that is the diagnostic lesion of anthrax disease in humans” (ME: malignant boil or growth) (RH)

62   Reynolds’ News: see note p. 17

63   jizz: Dublin slang: “denotes liveliness or a spritely air” (BC 255)

63   dire: dreadful, terrible; urgent (RH)

LITERARY ALLUSIONS:

(pages based on Grove Press edition)

Beckett (and his characters) draw upon a number of writings, both well-known and lesser-known. For Happy Days, these references include the following:

10   “Woe woe etc.” Hamlet Act III Sc. 1:“… O woe is me To have seen what I have seen, see what I see.”      

(Ophelia’s “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!” speech)

14   “Oh fleeting joys etc.” Paradise Lost. [Book X, 741-742]

“…O fleeting joys Of paradise, dear bought with lasting woe.”   

15   “Ensign crimson…pale flag.” Juliet’s lips: Romeo and Juliet, Act V Sc. 3

“… Beauty’s ensign yet   Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.”

26   “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.”

Cymbeline, Act IV, Sc. 2.

“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

Nor the furious winter’s rages’

Thou my worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”      

(Ruby Cohn remarks: “Like Romeo, the prince of Cymbeline address a living woman who looks like a corpse, and Winnie turns their words to her own situation—a living woman who is half in her grave.” PN 145)

31   “Laughing wild…”

Thomas Gray: On a Distant Prospect of Eton College.

“And moody madness laughing wild

Amid severest woe…”    

(Gray/SB echoes in theme:

“Alas regardless of their doom, The little victims play!

No sense have they of ills to come, Nor care beyond today.” (G 67)

“To each his suff’rings: all are men, Condemned alike to groan…

Thought would destroy their paradise. No more, where ignorance is bliss, ‘Tis folly to be wise.” (G 68))

32   (originally “happiness” in stead of “paradise.”)

 Omar Khayyam.

“A book of verses underneath the bough,

A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou (?)

Beside me singing in the wilderness,

Ah wilderness were Paradise enow.”

33   uppermost: “No one will get this reference, tant pis. It is to a line of Browning ‘I’ll say confusedly what comes uppermost.’” (“Paracelsus”) (S 95-96)

“I say confusedly what comes uppermost.

But there are times when patience proves at fault,

As now: this morning’s strange encounter—you

Beside me once again!”   reminded by “You again!”? (PN 149)

“The revolver is called ‘Browning—Brownie’—not because there is a weapon of that name—but because it is always uppermost. If the line was by another poet the revolver wd. be called by the name of that other poet. (S 103)

34   “Young & … foolish”: W.B. Yeats, “Down by the Salley Gardens,” Crossways, 1889:

“Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;

She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;

But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,

And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;

But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.” (PN 138)

34   “sorrow keeps breaking in”: Oliver Edwards to Dr. Johnson (Boswell’s Life of Johnson): “you are a phil.[ospher], Dr. J. I have tried too in my time to be a phil; but I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” (PN 146)

40   “No, like the thrush or the bird of dawning, with no thought of benefit, to oneself or anyone else.”     Hamlet, Act I, SC. 1

“some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes

Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,

The bird of dawning singeth all night long.”        

SB to Frau Schultz at Schiller-Theater: Winnie “is kin to the thrush.” (PN 150)

49   “Hail, holy light!” Paradise Lost, Book III, Line 1.

“Hail, holy light! Off spring of heaven first-born.”

50   “Eyes on my eyes. (Pause.) What is that unforgettable line?” (She’s forgotten it—SB in RC replaces with “brief dream”: “When the outer help wears out, she goes back into herself… a kind of inward meditation” said SB at RC rehearsal (PN 130)) “Byron C.H. Waltz in Brussels” in SB’s Royal Court a.c.: Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, stanza xxi: “soft eyes look’d love to eyes that/ spake [changed to] looked/again” … Byron’s note: “on the night previous to the action [ the battle of Waterloo] a ball was given at Brussels.”

“There was a sound of revelry by night,

     And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then

Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright

     The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;

A thousand hearts beat happily; and when

     Music arose with its voluptuous swell,

Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spake again,

     And all went merry as a marriage bell;

But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!” (PN 130-1)

51   “’Beechen green’: Keats’s ‘beechen green and shadows numberless’ and of course referring back to ‘horse-beech’ … under which she sat on Charlie Hunter’s knees.” (S 95). Ode to a Nightingale.

“In some melodious plot

Of beechen green and shadows numberless…”     

“where but to think is to be full of sorrow” (G 70)

53   damask: “of the pink color of the damask rose” (RH);Twelfth Night Act II, Sc. 4.

“…She never told her love,

But let concealment, like a worm I’ the bud,

Feed on her damask cheek.”   

57   “What are those exquisite lines?” “Go forget me etc.” Charles Wolfe (1791-1823).

“Go, forget me—why should sorrow

O’er that brow a shadow fling?

Go, forget me—and tomorrow

Brightly smile and sweetly sing.

Smile—though I shall not be near thee;

Sing—though I shall never hear thee.”   

58   “I call to the eye of the mind”: W. B. Yeats, At the Hawk’s Well:

“I call to the eye of the mind, A well long choked up and dry

And boughs long stripped by the wind, And I call to the mind’s eye

Pallor of an ivory face, Its loft dissolute air,

A man climbing up to a place, The salt sea wind has swept bare.”

“Gontarski notes: The allusion to Yeats re-emphasizes the disjunctions between the ideal and the real which is at the core of Hamlet’s problem as well as that of Keats’s narrator. Yeats’s life-long pursuit of universal order, of harmony between imagination and reality, a harmony epitomized by the dancer in whose image artist and work of art fuse, serves as an ironic contrast to the disjunction, permanent and irreparable, between Winnie and Willie.” (G 71)

60   “What are those immortal lines?”: Again she’s forgotten them; SB replaces with “brief dream”…. RC: SB: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Lament” (referring to “I can do no more. (Pause.) Say no more.”:

“Oh world! O life! O time!

On whose last steps I climb,

Trembling at that where I had stood before;

When will return the glory of your prime?

No more—Oh, never more!” Posthumous Poems, 1824 (PN 131)

61   “Flowers…That smile today.”

Herrick. To the Virgins to make much of Time.

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old time is still a-flying,

And this same flower that smiles today

Tomorrow may be dying.”

ON BECKETT:

“I want neither to instruct nor to improve nor to keep people from getting bored. I want to bring poetry into drama, a poetry which has been through the void and makes a new start in a new room-space…There are no easy solutions.”—Samuel Beckett

“Thus mankind can despair of ever knowing reality. All philosophizing was a mere up and down between wild despair and the happiness of quiet illusion.”—Fritz Mauthner

“…writing is not about something; it is that something itself.”—Samuel Beckett

“And moody madness laughing wild Amid severest woe”—Thomas Gray 

“The key word in my play is ‘perhaps.’”—Samuel Beckett

“…to be is to be perceived.”—Bishop Berkeley

“Only those fools who understand and wish to be understood feel the insufficiency of language.”—Fritz Mauthner

“…art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not makes clear.”—Samuel Beckett

“Nothing is more real than nothing.”—Democritus

“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”—Samuel Beckett

“As Martin Esslin has written, if an artist in despair, such as Beckett, finds ‘that at the core of existence there is nothing, then the very act of saying so contains the artist’s and the world’s redemption.’”—(G 141)

“Beckett is uninterested in theorizing because he is uninterested in absolutes. The world discloses itself to him as a purgatory in which the only absolute is ‘the absolute absence of the absolute’.”… “The greatest art, Beckett claimed in the serious conclusion to a spoof lecture, is both ‘perfectly intelligible’ and ‘perfectly inexplicable’. It communicates by means of metaphor and image but preserves a strangeness about it that makes it difficult, at times impossible, to read in any meaningful sense. … the hieroglyphic enables him to keep faith with the dualism that has been basic to his thinking…. marriage of form and content… ‘Structure’ is therefore not so much an external framework or skeleton as an internal intertwining, a living thing” (K 242-3)

The artists asks “rhetorical questions without an oratorical function” [SB Les deux besoins 1938]. “The impulse towards art originates in a ‘hell of irrationality’ that can only be tempered by ‘the series of pure questions’ which constitute the art work.” (K 249)

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain upon silence and nothingness.”—Beckett (G 139)

When Beckett finally gave in to his publisher to write a foreword, it read simply: No symbols where none intended.

“habit is a great deadener”—Beckett (Not I)

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Barnard, G. C. Samuel Beckett: a new approach. NY: Dodd, Mead, & Co, Inc., 1970.

Brater, Enoch, ed. Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context. NY: Oxford University Press,, 1986.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Samuel Beckett. NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985.

Cohn, Ruby. Just Play: Beckett’s Theater. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Fletcher, John, Beryl Fletcher, Barry Smith, & Walter Bachem. A Student’s Guide to the

Plays of Samuel Beckett. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1978.

Gontarski, S. E. Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study. Columbus, OH: Ohio state University, 1977.

Gussow, Mel. Conversations With and About Beckett. NY: Grove Press, 1996.

Harmon, Maurice, ed. No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett

and Alan Schneider. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Knowlson, James, and John Pilling. Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama

of Samuel Beckett. NY: Grove Press, Inc. 1980.

Knowlson, James, ed. Happy Days: Samuel Beckett’s Production Notebook. NY: Grove Press, Inc., 1985.

O’Brien, Eoin. The Beckett Country. Dublin: The Black Cat Press,1986.