I first met Conor in primary school, I think it was in fourth class, so we would have been both around ten, making him my oldest friend. I met his wife Judy around ten years later, she was studying art in Crawford Art School in Cork and she hired me to give a reading of some of my poems. These would have been my first attempts, more like scribbles. I remember some members of the audience walking out, one very dramatically in any case. Another 'writer', of course.
That would have been over thirty years ago now!
Well, we have kept in touch all through the years and we have only one man to thank for that. That would be Samuel Beckett!
It is no secret now that Conor and Judy have, through their incredible toil and persistence, made a career from, largely, their interpretations, or vision, of his writings. Over the many years, I have seen most of their productions. My wife Laura used to complain, just a little, that any time we went to the theatre it was just to see Beckett. Indeed, it got so bad that one year, after meeting Conor after a performance in a pub in Dublin, I told him that we had to stop meeting like this, as it was becoming very difficult to distinguish Conor from the Beckettien figures which he embodied upon the stage and his 'real' self!
Well, in two weeks I go down to our home town of Cork to meet them again, this time at Judy's very generous invitation, in order to attend the second How It Is symposium, which is to be held in the Crawford Art Gallery in the city centre on the 14th of June.
I participated in the first conference which they held in the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris last year. That was an incredible experience to be able to participate in celebrating Beckett's great novel Comment c'est/How It Is with Conor and Judy and some established luminaries such as Daniela Caselli ( Beckett's Dantes , Manchester University Press, 2005). Gare Saint Lazare Players along with Stephen Dillane and Mel Mercier had just performed their incredible staging of part 1 of the novel in The Everyman Theatre in Cork earlier in the same year, which I had the opportunity to see, and were celebrating their three year engagement with the project by gathering together some of the many people, such as myself, who had also been engaging with this particular work by Beckett and had something significant to contribute.
I presented je la dis comme elle vient - The Appearance of the Homeric Muse in Comment c'est /How It Is somewhat to the incredulity of some of those present. What I was proposing was a completely superficial reading of the novel, that is to say in a phenomenological fashion. So, taking the invocation as an actual invocation, believe it or not, and seeing were this sort of reading would take us...
Well, I am still at it. I am currently working on the third chapter of the book, a work in progress, in which I am treating part 2 of the novel which is in fact a comparative study of Beckett's magnum opus and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
But, that is another story, possibly taking place next year!
http://garestlazareireland.com/how-it-is
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