Ruby Cohn (1922-2011)
By Elin Diamond
Renowned theater scholar and Beckett specialist,
Ruby Cohn died in Oakland, CA, on Tuesday, 18th October 2011,
after a prolonged struggle with Parkinson's disease. She was 89.
Ruby Cohn was Professor of Comparative Drama at the University
of California, Davis where, for thirty years, she was a member
of the Comparative Literature, Theater, English, and French departments,
and taught courses on modern and experimental drama, Shakespeare's
legacies in modern drama, dramatic genres and on Samuel Beckett
and his contemporaries. In earlier years, starting in 1961, Ruby
Cohn was a professor of Language Arts at San Francisco State University,
where she launched a comparative literature program and also joined
a student strike to bring ethnic studies to the curriculum. Refusing
to teach her courses on campus, Cohn resigned in protest in 1968.
In 1969, she joined the faculty of the theater school of the California
Institute of the Arts before moving to U.C. Davis in 1972. A recipient
of Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, Ruby Cohn was named by
her colleagues a "Faculty Research Lecturer," the highest honor
accorded the University. She retired from U.C. Davis in 1992,
yet continued to teach and write. At her death Ruby Cohn was the
author or editor of over twenty monographs and anthologies, among
which was the first of many influential books on Samuel Beckett
and on modern and contemporary U.S., British and continental drama.
Born Ruby Burman on August 13, 1922, in
Columbus Ohio, she later moved with her family to New York City,
and while in high school, saw the Federal Theater in action, including
Orson Welles' Voodoo Macbeth. A graduate of Hunter College,
she joined the WAVES during World War II and learned to install
radar on battle ships and became an accomplished marksman. She
soon returned to Europe and took her first doctoral degree at
the University of Paris, reveling in Paris's genial postwar ferment.
One cold January night in 1953 she attended the first public performance
of an obscure play called En Attendant Godot (Waiting
for Godot), a work that would establish the reputation of
"absurdist" theater in Paris with its heady mixture of Sartrean
alienation, linguistic experimentation, music hall antics, and
an emphatic refusal to pander to conventional theater audiences.
Back in the U.S. Ruby Cohn took a second doctorate at Washington
University, St. Louis, where her husband, the microbiologist Melvin
Cohn, taught (they were amicably divorced in 1962). This time
she wrote her dissertation on Samuel Beckett, which she developed
into her first book, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut
(1962).
In the Irish-born, French-speaking Beckett,
Ruby Cohn found a poet, novelist, and dramatist of stabbing wit
and formal daring, one whose field of philosophical and literary
reference encompassed the entire Western tradition. Samuel
Beckett: the Comic Gamut was not only the first full-length
study of Beckett; it also set a high intellectual bar for the
vast industry of Beckett criticism that followed. With its epigraphs
in French (Descartes) and English (Shakespeare), the book's thirteen
chapters interweave careful analysis with biographical, translation
and publishing information all of which illuminate and frankly
explain Beckett's paradoxes and arcana. Throughout, Cohn homes
in on Beckett's words and the peculiar forms they take, sometimes
matching his punning wit with her own. In the chapter, "Watt Knott,"
Cohn notes Beckett's comic couplings of, and puns on, names: "Cream
and Berry, the hardy laurel, Rose and Cerise, Art and Con," and
wryly adds in a footnote: "Con [is] a French obscenity (as I learned
through its homonym Cohn)…." Beckett's credo of failure--"to be
an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail"--was, for Ruby Cohn,
testimony of his commitment to explore, through the discipline
of art, the ludicrous ironies of human striving, the sham of sexual
love, and, as Beckett himself famously put it, "the expression
that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to expres,
no desire to express, together with the obligation to express."
That obligation betokened, Cohn felt, Beckett's
deep humanity and she never wavered from that fundament. The critic's
job was not to import structures of value or theories of meaning
to the text, but to read and interpret with acuity, accuracy,
and imagination. Literary theory bored and angered her, but she
read a great deal of it and read everything ever written on Beckett,
no matter by whom. She walked out of bad theater performances
sooner than she closed another scholar's book. Her scholarly integrity
is on view in her conscientiously trilingual bibliography for
The Comic Gamut (her French was fluent, her German quite
good), and in this way too she set a standard for Beckett research
and criticism, although few had her comparatist's skill in languages.
As Beckett's canon unfolded, so did Cohn's:
Casebook on Waiting for Godot (1967), Back to Beckett
(1974), Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism (1975),
Just Play: Beckett's Theater (1980), Disjecta: Miscellaneous
Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (1984), From Desire
to Godot: Pocket Theater of postwar Paris (1987), and finally
A Beckett Canon (2001). This latter is a beautiful book,
written in the leisure of retirement, a rumination on the Beckett
canon as it unfolds chronologically. It begins: "Having read nothing
by Beckett, I fell in love with his En Attendant Godot
in 1953, when it was performed at the short-lived Théâtre de Babylone
in Paris." She promises not "to impose coherence upon the many
threads of Beckett's tapestry" but rather writes for an engaged
reader, "and I imagine her/him as one who has been drawn to Beckett
in print or performance, and who is curious about other facets
of his oeuvre." In other words, a reader very like Cohn herself
starting on her Beckett journey in 1953.
Even when Beckett was not her obvious subject,
his astringent forms influenced her taste in other dramatists,
and she was determined to give full exposure to the best modern
American and British drama in her Edward Albee (1969),
Currents in Contemporary Drama (1969), Dialogue in
American Drama (1971), and Modern Shakespeare Offshoots
(1976), New American Dramatists 1960-1990 (1991). In
the 1990s, living half the year in London, she concentrated on
British theater in her books Retreats from Realism in Recent
English Drama (1991), Anglo-American Interplay in Recent
Drama (1995). In these years, she particularly admired the
formally adventurous work of Caryl Churchill.
Ruby Cohn's lifelong effort to join the
immediacy of theater performance to the careful analysis of dramatic
texts made her an eager if exacting theater-goer. She developed
warm friendships with the experimental directors and actors who
worked on Beckett's texts, especially Joseph Chaikin and Herbert
Blau, and she supported the Mabou Mines experimental theater company,
when, with Beckett's permission, founding member Frederick Neumann
adapted eight of Beckett's nontheatrical prose works for the theater.
Ruth Maleczech of Mabou Mines notes, "Ruby would put her finger
on things very clearly. There was a level of trust between her
and the company [and] she was interested in what we did even when
it wasn't Beckett." This would certainly hold true of Joan Holden's
San Francsico Mime Troupe of which Ruby Cohn was a faithful supporter.
Fiercely opinionated and capable at times
of quite memorable rebukes, Ruby Cohn was also memorably committed
to her students who benefited from her scholarship and lucid criticism,
and to her legions of friends on whom she lavished her concern
and loving attention. Ruby Cohn is survived by all these people
and by her goddaughter Polly Richards and her family.
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