Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment

by Samuel Beckett

  D. — But Masson’s declared purpose is now to reduce these maladies, as you call them, to nothing. He aspires to be rid of the servitude of space, that his eye may ‘frolic among the focusless fields, tumultuous with incessant creation’. At the same time he demands the rehabilitation of the Vaporous’. This may seem strange in one more fitted by temperament for fire than for damp. You of course will reply that it is the same thing as before, the same reaching towards succour from without. Opaque or transparent, the object remains sovereign. But how can Masson be expected to paint the void?

  B. — He is not. What is the good of passing from one untenable position to another, of seeking justification always on the same plane? Here is an artist who seems literally skewered on the ferocious dilemma of expression. Yet he continues to wriggle. The void he speaks of is perhaps simply the obliteration of an unbearable presence, unbearable because neither to be wooed nor to be stormed. If this anguish of helplessness is never stated as such, on its own merits and for its own sake, though perhaps very occasionally admitted as spice to the ‘exploit’ it jeopardized, the reason is doubtless, among others, that it seems to contain in itself the impossibility of statement. Again an exquisitely logical attitude. In any case, it is hardly to be confused with the void.

  D. — Masson speaks much of transparency — ‘openings, circulations, communications, unknown penetrations’ — where he may frolic at his ease, in freedom. Without renouncing the objects, loathsome or delicious, that are our daily bread and wine and poison, he seeks to break through their partitions to that continuity of being which is absent from the ordinary experience of living. In this he approaches Matisse (of the first period needless to say) and Tal Coat, but with this notable difference, that Masson has to contend with his own technical gifts, which have the richness, the precision, the density and balance of the high classical manner. Or perhaps I should say rather its spirit, for he has shown himself capable, as occasion required, of great technical variety.

  B. — What you say certainly throws light on the dramatic predicament of this artist. Allow me to note his concern with the amenities of ease and freedom. The stars are undoubtedly superb, as Freud remarked on reading Kant’s cosmological proof of the existence of God. With such preoccupations it seems to me impossible that he should ever do anything different from that which the best, including himself, have done already. It is perhaps an impertinence to suggest that he wishes to. His so extremely intelligent remarks on space breathe the same posses-siveness as the notebooks of Leonardo who, when he speaks of disfazione, knows that for him not one fragment will be lost. So forgive me if I relapse, as when we spoke of the so different Tal Coat, into my dream of an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence and too proud for the farce of giving and receiving.

  D. — Masson himself, having remarked that western perspective is no more than a series of traps for the capture of objects, declares that their possession does not interest him. He congratulates Bonnard for having, in his last works, ‘gone beyond possessive space in every shape and form, far from surveys and bounds, to the point where all possession is dissolved.’ I agree that there is a long cry from Bonnard to that impoverished painting, ‘authentically fruitless, incapable of any image whatsoever’, to which you aspire, and towards which too, who knows, unconsciously perhaps, Masson tends. But must we really deplore the painting that admits ‘the things and creatures of spring, resplendent with desire and affirmation, ephemeral no doubt, but immortally reiterant’, not in order to benefit by them, not in order to enjoy them, but in order that what is tolerable and radiant in the world may continue? Are we really to deplore the painting that is a rallying, among the things of time that pass and hurry us away, towards a time that endures and gives increase?

  B. — (Exit weeping.)

  III

  Bram van Velde

  B. — Frenchman, fire first.

  D. — Speaking of Tal Coat and Masson you invoked an art of a different order, not only from theirs, but from any achieved up to date. Am I right in thinking that you had van Velde in mind when making this sweeping distinction?

  B. — Yes. I think he is the first to accept a certain situation and to consent to a certain act.

  D. — Would it be too much to ask you to state again, as simply as possible, the situation and act that you conceive to be his?

  B. — The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint.

  D. — Why is he obliged to paint?

  B. — I don’t know.

  D. — Why is he helpless to paint?

  B. — Because there is nothing to paint and nothing to paint with.

  D. — And the result, you say, is art of a new order?

  B. — Among those whom we call great artists, I can think of none whose concern was not predominantly with his expressive possibilities, those of his vehicle, those of humanity. The assumption underlying all painting is that the domain of the maker is the domain of the feasible. The much to express, the little to express, the ability to express much, the ability to express little, merge in the common anxiety to express as much as possible, or as truly as possible, or as finely as possible, to the best of one’s ability. What—

  D. — One moment. Are you suggesting that the painting of van Velde is inexpressive?

  B. — (A fortnight later) Yes.

  D. — You realize the absurdity of what you advance?

  B. — I hope I do.

  D. — What you say amounts to this: the form of expression known as painting, since for obscure reasons we are obliged to speak of painting, has had to wait for van Velde to be rid of the misapprehension under which it had laboured so long and so bravely, namely, that its function was to express, by means of paint.

  B. — Others have felt that art is not necessarily expression. But the numerous attempts made to make painting independent of its occasion have only succeeded in enlarging its repertory. I suggest that ven Velde is the first whose painting is bereft, rid if you prefer, of occasion in every shape and form, ideal as well as material, and the first whose hands have not been tied by the certitude that expression is an impossible act.

  D. — But might it not be suggested, even by one tolerant of this fantastic theory, that the occasion of his painting is his predicament, and that it is expressive of the impossibility to express?

  B. — No more ingenious method could be devised for restoring him, safe and sound, to the bosom of Saint Luke. But let us for once, be foolish enough not to turn tail. All have turned wisely tail, before the ultimate penury, back to the mere misery where destitute virtuous mothers may steal stale bread for their starving brats. There is more than a difference of degree between being short, short of the world, short of self, and being without these esteemed commodities. The one is a predicament, the other not.

  D. — But you have already spoken of the predicament of van Velde.

  B. — I should not have done so.

  D. — You prefer the purer view that here at last is a painter who does not paint, does not pretend to paint. Come, come, my dear fellow, make some kind of connected statement and then go away.

  B. — Would it not be enough if I simply went away?

  D. — No. You have begun. Finish. Begin again and go on until you have finished. Then go away. Try and bear in mind that the subject under discussion is not yourself, not the Sufist Al-Haqq, but a particular Dutchman by name van Velde, hitherto erroneously referred to as an artiste peintre.

  B. — How would it be if I first said what I am pleased to fancy he is, fancy he does, and then that it is more than likely that he is and does quite otherwise? Would not that be an excellent issue out of all our afflictions? He happy, you happy, I happy, all three bubbling over with happiness.

  D. — Do as you please. But get it over.

  B. — There are many ways in which the thing I am try
ing in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said. I have experimented, as you know, both in public and in private, under duress, through faint-ness of heart, through weakness of mind, with two or three hundred. The pathetic antithesis possession-poverty was perhaps not the most tedious. But we begin to weary of it, do we not? The realization that art has always been bourgeois, thugh it may dull our pain before the achievements of the socially progressive, is finally of scant interest. The analysis of the relation between the artist and his occasion, a relation always regarded as indispensable, does not seem to have been very productive either, the reason being perhaps that it lost its way in disquisitions on the nature of occasion. It is obvious that for the artist obsessed with his expressive vocation, anything and everything is doomed to become occasion, including, as is apparently to some extent the case with Masson, the pursuit of occasion, and the every man his own wife experiments of the spiritual Kandinsky. No painting is more replete than Mondrian’s. But if the occasion appears as an unstable term of relation, the artist, who is the other term, is hardly less so, thanks to his warren of modes and attitudes. The objections to this dualist view of the creative process are unconvincing. Two things are established, however precariously: the aliment, from fruits on plates to low mathematics and self-commiseration, and its manner of dispatch. All that should concern us is the acute and increasing anxiety of the relation itself, as though shadowed more and more darkly by a sense of invalidity, of inadequacy, of existence at the expense of all that it excludes, all that it blinds to. The history of painting, here we go again, is the history of its attempts to escape from this sense of failure, by means of more authentic, more ample, less exclusive relations between representer and representee, in a kind of tropism towards a light as to the nature of which the best opinions continue to vary, and with a kind of Pythagorean terror, as though the irrationality of pi were an offence against the deity, not to mention his creature. My case, since I am in the dock, is that van Velde is the first to desist from this estheticized automatism, the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living. No, no, allow me to expire. I know that all that is required now, in order to bring even this horrible matter to an acceptable conclusion, is to make of this submission, this admission, this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of relation, and of the act which, unable to act, obliged to act, he makes, an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation. I know that my inability to do so places myself, and perhaps an innocent, in what I think is still called an unenviable situation, familiar to psychiatrists. For what is this coloured plane, that was not there before. I don’t know what it is, having never seen anything like it before. It seems to have nothing to do with art, in any case, if my memories of art are correct. (Prepares to go.)

  D. — Are you not forgetting something?

  B. — Surely that is enough?

  D. — I understood your number was to have two parts. The first was to consist in your saying what you — er — thought. This I am prepared to believe you have done. The second —

  B. — (Remembering, warmly) Yes, yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken.

  5. Henri Hayden, homme-peintre

  On me demande des mots, à moi qui n’en ai plus, plus guère, sur une chose qui les recuse. Exécutons-nous, exécutons-la.

  Gautama, avant qu’ils vinssent à lui manquer, disait qu’on se trompe en affirmant que le moi existe, mais qu’en affirmant qu’il n’existe pas on ne se trompe pas moins.

  Il s’entend dans les toiles de Hayden, loin derrière leur patient silence, comme l’écho de cette folle sagesse et, tout bas, de son corollaire, à savoir que pour le reste il ne peut qu’en être de même.

  Présence à peine de celui qui fait, presence à peine de ce qui est fait. Oeuvre impersonnelle, oeuvre irréelle. C’est une chose des plus curieuses que ce double effacement. Et d’une bien hautaine inactualité. Elle n’est pas au bout de ses beaux jours, la crise sujet-objet. Mais c’est à part et au profit l’un de l’autre que nous avons l’habitude de les voir défaillir, ce clown et son gugusse. Alors qu’ici, confondus dans une même inconsistance, ils se désistent de concert.

  Pas trace des grandes périclitations, des remises debout sous la trique de la raison, des exploits du tempérament exclusif, des quintessentialismes á froid, de tous les recours et subterfuges d’une peinture en perte de références et qui ne visent plus au fond à faire plus beau, aussi beau, autrement beau, mais tout bonne-ment à sauver un rapport, un écart, un couple quelque diminués qu’en soient les composants, le moi dans ses possibilités d’agir, de recevoir, le reste dans ses docilités de donnée. Pas trace de surenchère, ni dans l’outrance ni dans la carence. Mais l’acceptation, aussi peu satisfaite qu’amére, de tout ce qu’a d’insubstantiel et d’infime, comme entre ombres, le choc dont sort l’oeuvre.

  Ceci à condition, devant ces paysages et natures mortes, de sentir (pluôt que de voir) combien est fragile leur touchante assurance de formes familières et tout l’équivoque de ces arbres qui abandonnent aussitôt partis, de ces fruits qu’on dirait victimes d’une erreur de distribution. Il s’en dégage un humour à peine perciptible, à peine triste, comme de celui qui de loin se prête une dernière fois aux jeux d’un fabuleux cher et révolu, un risolino à l’Arioste. Tout est reconnaissable, mais à s’y méconnaître. Etrange ordre des choses, fait d’ordre en mal de choses, de choses en mal d’ordre.

  La hantise et en même temps le refus du peu, c’est peut-être à cela qu’un jour on finira par reconnaitre notre cher vieux bon temps. De ce peu d’où l’on se précipite, comme de la pire des malédictions, vers les prestiges du tout et du rien. D’inoubliables artifices l’attesteront. Mais qu’il se soit trouvé, tranquillement sans espoir au milieu de tant de ruades, un peintre pour ne pas fuir, pour endurer d’un soi tel quel et d’une nature imprenable les mirages, les intermittences et les dérisoires échanges et pour en soutirer une oeuvre, à la famélique mesure de l’homme et de son bouillon de culture Chartier, c’est ce dont pour ma part, devant les toiles de Henri Hayden, je ne m’étais pas assez étonné, ni avec de fraternelle affection. Le voilà, cela au moins, chose faite.

  6. Hommage à Jack B. Yeats

  Ce qu’a d’incomparable cette grande oeuvre solitaire est son insistence à renvoyer au plus secret de l’esprit qui la soulève et à ne se laisser éclairer qu’au jour de celui-ci.

  Da lá cette étrangeté sans exemple et que laissent entière les habituels recours aux patrimoines, national et autres.

  Quoi de moins féerique que cette prestigieuse facture comme soufflée par la chose à faire, et par son urgence propre?

  Quant aux repondants qu’on a bien fini par lui dénicher, Ensor et Munch en tete, le moins qu’on puisse en dire est qu’ils ne nous sont pas d’un grand secours.

  L’artiste qui joue son être est de nulle part. Et il n’a pas de frères.

  Broder alors? Sur ces images éperdument immédiates il n’y a ni place, ni temps, pour les exploits rassurants. Sur cette violence de besoin qui non settlement des déchaíne, mais les bouleverse jusqu’au déla de leur horizons. Sur ce grand réel intérieur oú fantômes morts et vivants, nature et vide, tout ce qui n’a de cesse et tout ce qui ne sera jamais, s’intégrent en une seule évidence et pour une seule deposition.

  Enfin sur cette suprême maîtrise qui se soumet à l’immaîtris’ able, et tremble.

  Non.

  S’incliner simplement, émerveillé.

  Homage to Jack B. Yeats

  High solitary art uniquely self-pervaded, one with its wellhead in a hiddenmost of spirit, not to be clarified in any other light.

  Strangeness so entire as even to withstand the stock assimilations to holy patrimony, national and other.

  What less celt than this incomparable hand shaken by the aim it sets itself or by its own urgency?

  As for the sureties kindly unear
thed in his favour, Ensor and Munch to the fore, the least one can say is that they are no great help.

  The artist who stakes his being is from nowhere, has no kith.

  Gloss? In images of such breathless immediacy as these there is no occasion, no time given, no room left, for the lenitive of comment. None in this impetus of need that scatters them loose to the beyonds of vision. None in this great inner real where phantoms quick and dead, nature and void, all that ever and that never will be, join in a single evidence for a single testimony. None in this final mastery which submits in trembling to the unmasterable.

  No.

  Merely bow in wonder.

  7. Henri Hayden

  Cinquante années de peinture d’une indépendance et d’une gravité exemplaires, c’est ce que vient de nous offrir la rétrospective Hayden au très beau Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.

  De ce grand peinture solitaire nous avons l’honneur de présenter aujourd’hui un ensemble de gouaches récentes. Leur beauté est le fait d’un artiste qui a su, toute sa vie et comme peu d’autres, résister aux deux grandes tentations, celle du réel et celle du mensonge.

  8. Bram van Velde

  ‘La vie — éerit Pierre Schneider, dans son bel essai sur Corbière — est une faute d’orthographe dans le texte de la mort.’ Il en est heureusement de plus sérieuses. Celles dont voici les laves. Balayés les repentirs. Peinture de vie et de mort. Amateurs de natron, abstenez.

  9. Pour Avigdor Arikha