Now wait just a minute — is it Godot or Godeau? Incredibly, it’s both

Chapman University Professor Mark Axelrod is not waiting for Godeau anymore.

Yes, that spelling – Godeau — is correct. He’s a character in the Honoré Balzac play
Mercadet, the Good Businessman
that Axelrod translated from French into English and which was published this month by Black Scat Books as
Waiting for Godeau
.

But that other fellow, the elusive Godot from Samuel Beckett’s legendary
Waiting for Godot,
has a part in this story, too. Years ago Axelrod translated the Balzac play in the course of conducting research for his Ph.D. dissertation in comparative literature. He was intrigued that Balzac’s work included a character named Godeau, reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s Godot from
Waiting for Godot
. But it was more than a bit of a name-game thing. There was this: Beckett’s Godot famously never shows up. Balzac’s Godeau arrives only at the very end of the play, remains offstage and is never actually seen.

They are very different plays, Beckett being a master of absurdist drama and Balzac a pioneer of realism. Unlike
Waiting for Godot
, which is gearing up for a new production on
Broadway
,
Mercadet
is lighter fare. Still, Axelrod wondered about the old Godeau and Godot question.

“It was hard for me to believe that you could have these two distinctive characters whose names are almost the same and who never appear but are talked about, and for the one to have not been influenced by the other,” says Axelrod, who teaches writing in the Department of English and is director of the
John Fowles Center for Creative Writing
.

In fact, Axelrod eventually asked the playwright himself. Through connections with the Irish poet Brian Coffey, he struck up a correspondence with Beckett that continued for years and included occasional meetings. “Once I felt comfortable” Axelrod says he penned a letter asking Beckett point blank whether he knew the
Mercadet
play. As was Beckett’s custom, he replied in a short note on a post card that he had not read the play.

But Axelrod still wonders.

“I suspect that maybe somewhere along the line Balzac’s name came up, in conversation, or someone talked about Balzac’s character. Maybe Beckett kept it back here somewhere,” Axelrod says, gesturing toward his head with a shrug and a smile. “I think it would be okay if he had, but maybe he didn’t want to admit it.”

Still, there’s just enough mystery that the publisher of the new translation couldn’t resist releasing the translated play with that wink of a title —
Waiting for Godeau
.

And the Beckett note to Axelrod? It’s reproduced on the title page of the book, waiting for readers to draw their own conclusions.