Four Men Shaking by Lawrence Shainberg

Author:Lawrence Shainberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2019-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

Stunned with disbelief, I wrote to thank him and, riding the wave of my excitement, asked if I could one day meet him directly. Again I didn’t expect an answer and again I was wrong. He wrote that he’d be pleased to see me if and when our paths cross, adding, “Any chance you’ll be in Europe soon?”

As it happened, the British version of Brain Surgeon was scheduled to be published a few months later, and I was set to do publicity in London. Amazingly enough, Beckett wrote that his schedule would take him to London at the same time for rehearsals of a production of Endgame that he himself would direct.

Thus it was that a few months later, a day after I arrived in London, sleeping off my jet lag in the early afternoon, the phone rang in my London hotel room.

“Hello, Mr. Shainberg. Sam Beckett here.”

He was cordial on the phone and even more cordial later that day when, at his invitation, I met him at his hotel. I was seriously nervous, but the first surprise on meeting him was the speed with which—greeting me, for all the world, as if honored by my visit—he put me at my ease.

This was London’s Hyde Park Hotel. A small, comfortable room with a single bed, an upholstered easy chair, and a dressing table with a small upholstered bench in front of it. No sign of its occupant except a brown corduroy jacket on the bed, a carry-on bag in the corner, and, on the dressing table, a notebook, several small medicine bottles, and four books. From across the room I could see Dante and, just beneath him, Endgame, in the same softcover edition I had brought with me and reread on the plane coming over. Beckett directed me to the easy chair, poured Irish whiskeys for both of us, took a seat on a corner of the bed, and plied me with questions: How was my flight from New York? How long will I be in London? How is my book doing? Do I still see the surgeons I wrote about? What about the patients? How are they doing now?

His Irish accent was pronounced and musical. This was as close to small talk as I’d ever get with him. I was not so calm that I did not fix with obsession on the iconic face I knew so well from his book jackets. I felt a sort of disbelief when I asked him, as I’d ask most any old-friend-writer I saw all the time, “How’s your work going?”

Though I asked casually, the question was anything but trivial to him. A long pause ensued. He closed his eyes for a moment and, in a gesture I’d soon learn was habitual with him, a sign that he’d sunk into concentration, put his long middle finger over the space between his nose and upper lip. Later on, when we established a correspondence, I’d often imagine him thinking like this just before he wrote me.

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