Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  The image of Mr Cogito under torture at the hands of the angels repeats the image of Marsyas tortured by Apollo. The gods believe they are omniscient as well as omnipotent; but in fact suffering as animal beings suffer, unable to escape the body in pain, is beyond their ken. Being powerless is beyond the powers of the gods.

  (It will not escape the reader’s attention that in the greater pantheon there is a god who responds to the charge of being above and beyond suffering by committing himself to suffering in a human way, without relief, unto death. This god, the Christian Jesus, has no presence in Herbert’s poetic universe.)

  In ‘Mr Cogito’s Eschatological Premonitions’, the ironic treatment of heaven – and by implication of all doctrines of salvation or perfectibility – has not been left behind, and the knife-turn of paradox is still central to its argument on behalf of the human right to feel pain. But in this late poem Herbert goes beyond the neat irony and lapidary perfection of such earlier pieces as ‘Report from Paradise’: in its last lines it opens out to a world (the path, the sea, the cave) as strange and beautiful and mysterious as the world we mortals live in, a world we cannot forget and cannot bear to leave (but must leave and must forget, for ever).

  There are several dozen Mr Cogito poems. As a personage Mr Cogito makes his first appearance in the collection Mr Cogito (1974), and he remains a strong presence in Report from a Besieged City. He starts his life as a self-deprecating mask (persona) for the poet, not too different in spirit and style from the wry but hapless little-man cartoon characters who flourished in Polish and Czech cinema of the Cold War years. A poem like ‘Mr Cogito’s Abyss’, about the abyss (‘not the abyss of Pascal / … not the abyss of Dostoevsky / … an abyss / to Mr Cogito’s size’) that follows Mr Cogito around like a pet dog, might be a fitting script for one of these cartoons.

  The risk a poet runs in investing too heavily in a persona of the stature of Mr Cogito was, I suspect, clear to Herbert from the beginning. ‘From Mythology’, a prose poem in the early collection Study of the Object (1961), spells out the danger. It presents itself as a potted history of religion, ironical in its dismissive brevity. Stage one: savages dancing around idols. Stage two: the Olympians (thunderbolts, creaking beds). Stage three: the age of irony; people carry around in their pockets votive statues of the god of irony, made of salt. ‘Then came the barbarians. They too valued highly the little god of irony. They would crush it under their heels and add it to their dishes.’

  The god of irony, believed by his devotees to be all-powerful, able to wither his foes with his knowing smile, turns out to be powerless against the barbarians. Worse than that: they relish him, or at least use him as relish. To translate the allegory baldly: the ironist can find himself participating in a morally degrading game with the powers that be in which, as long as he pretends not to be confronting them, they will pretend to take no notice of him. So much for irony, not only as a political strategy but as an ethical refuge, a way of life.

  If Mr Cogito is not to be crushed under the heel of the barbarian and used as a condiment, if the Mr Cogito poems are not to suffer the fate of being bought by high-ups in the regime as birthday presents for their wives, or even of finding themselves on the school syllabus, then Mr Cogito cannot just be Mr Zbigniew Herbert, homme moyen sensuel, rhymester and Polish citizen, viewed in the shrinking and distorting glass of irony. He must be more.

  In an important respect, Mr Cogito is like Don Quixote (with whom he is explicitly associated in the very first of the Cogito poems, ‘On Mr Cogito’s Two Legs’): he is a creature whose creator only gradually comes to realize how large a poetic weight he can bear. The Quixote of the first chapters of Book One of his adventures is a foolish old buffer. The Quixote of Book Two is larger than the pygmies who surround him, larger even than the knights of old who are his constant companions. ‘Mr Cogito Bemoans the Pettiness of Dreams’, near the beginning of the Cogito series, is a poem based on a common and rather petty trick: using the absence of material (the loss of inspiration) as the material of a poem. ‘The Envoy of Mr Cogito’, with which the series concludes, is one of the great poems of the twentieth century.

  The not entirely transparent title of ‘The Envoy’ invites one to read it as an envoi addressed (Go) both to the collection of poems Mr Cogito and to the self who appears in it, at last unmasked. It can be read by itself, and even by itself its force is undeniable; but for its proper effect it needs to be read as the last of the Mr Cogito collection, looking back on its avatars and unmasking them in the cause of telling the truth. Reading it in this way, as a demand – indeed a command – to the self to persist in the faithful life even in the absence of any credible faith, one must be struck by its rhetorical grandeur and moral ferocity, not qualities one usually associates with Herbert, but potentialities that the reader may well have sensed from the beginning, behind the ironic masks.

  There is one strain notably absent from Herbert’s poetic oeuvre: the erotic. Of course poets are not obliged to write love poems. But all the evidence of Herbert’s essays on art and travel suggest a sensibility open to experience and acutely responsive to beauty. ‘Prayer of the Traveller Mr Cogito’, from the 1983 collection, though not a great poem in itself, is a heartfelt and palpably sincere prayer of thanks for the gift of life: ‘I thank you O Lord for creating the world beautiful and various and if this is Your seduction I am seduced for good and past all forgiveness’.

  But after the 1950s the erotic fades out of Herbert’s work, save in one late poem, ‘Oath’ (1992), which looks back with regret to beautiful women glimpsed and then lost, in particular a woman in a newsagent’s in the Antilles:

  for a moment I thought that – if I went with you –

  we would change the world

  I will never forget you –

  a startled flutter of lids

  matchless tilt of a head

  the bird’s nest of a palm.

  Regret at a life not fully lived, and doubt that his achieved work has compensated for that, become a gnawing theme in Herbert’s late poetry. Of course one might say that the Soviet empire made it hard for any of its subjects to live a full life – in other words, that history was more to blame than the man himself. But to so nagging and lucid a self-doubter as Herbert, shifting the blame is not an acceptable strategy. The hero of his poem ‘Why the Classics’ (1969) is Thucydides, who makes no excuses for his failure as a general during the Peloponnesian War: he faces his judges, reports the facts, and accepts his punishment. Herbert’s verdict on himself comes in a pair of poems, ‘Mr Cogito and the Imagination’ and ‘To Ryszard Krynicki – A Letter’ (both 1983) in which, crucially, he identifies his greatest virtue as a moral being – namely, his steady, undeceived vision of the world – as his principal limitation as a poet:

  he adored tautologies

  explanations

  idem per idem

  a bird is a bird

  slavery slavery

  a knife a knife

  death is death

  ‘Mr Cogito’s imagination / moves like a pendulum / it runs with great precision / from suffering to suffering’. For this Mr Cogito ‘will be counted / among the species minores’.

  ‘So little joy – sister of the gods – in our poems Ryszard,’ he writes to his friend Krynicki, ‘too few glimmering twilights mirrors wreaths ecstasies’. Or, as he puts it in an even more searingly personal poem, ‘memory too large / and a heart too small’ (‘A Small Heart’).

  Of course there is irony at work here. Poetry may tell a higher truth, but that does not mean it is exempted from having to tell elementary truths too, truths that stare us in the face. The poem that mocks Mr Cogito for confining himself to tautologies also implicitly invites us to ask, Yet who besides Mr Cogito was saying in 1956 that slavery is slavery?

  But irony can come wrapped in irony. The decision to become an ironist for life can, ironically, backfire; or, to recall the extended figure that Herbert uses in ‘A Small Heart’, the bullet tha
t you fired decades ago can go all the way around the globe and hit you in the back. The infallible but rudimentary moral sense that you pretended to disparage but really affirmed when you wrote the poem ‘The Knocker’ in the 1950s (‘my imagination / is a piece of board … I thump on the board / and it prompts me / with the moralist’s dry poem / yes – yes / no – no’) begins to sound very tired by the 1980s. Worse than that: what has been the point of a life spent thumping the same old board?

  This is the pessimistic question that Herbert asks in poem after poem as he looks back over his life. But is it the right question? There is an alternative way of understanding why it is that, looking back from the 1980s, a poet like Herbert should feel exhausted and defeated. As long as slavery was slavery – under Stalin, under Gomulka – Mr Cogito knew his way (and knew his vocation). But when slavery modulated into subtler forms of servitude, as in the reform era presided over by Gierek, when shops were suddenly stocked with imported goods bought with borrowed money, or even more markedly when Poland made its entry into the world of globalized consumerism in 1989, Mr Cogito’s power to do justice to a new reality failed him. (This is hardly a damning charge: who among the world’s poets has measured up to the challenge of late capitalism?)

  Mr Cogito’s monster

  lacks all dimensions

  it’s hard to describe

  it eludes definitions

  it’s like a vast depression

  hanging over the country

  it can’t be pierced

  by a pen

  an argument

  a spear. [‘Mr Cogito’s Monster’]

  There is one further quality of his hard-to-describe monster that Mr Cogito might have mentioned: that it has somehow managed to transcend, or at least get beyond, good and evil, and is thus out of reach of the dry moralist’s yes/no. To the monster all things are good in the sense that all things are consumable, including the ironist’s little salt artefacts.

  15. The Young Samuel Beckett

  In 1923 Samuel Barclay Beckett, aged seventeen, was admitted to Trinity College, Dublin, to study Romance languages. He proved an exceptional student, and was taken under the wing of Thomas Rudmose-Brown, Professor of Romance Languages, who did all he could to advance the young man’s career, securing for him on graduation first a visiting lectureship at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, then a position back at Trinity College.

  After a year and a half at Trinity, performing what he called the ‘grotesque comedy of lecturing’, Beckett resigned and fled back to Paris.1 Yet even after this let-down, Rudmose-Brown did not give up on his protégé. As late as 1937 he was still trying to nudge Beckett back into the academy, persuading him to apply for a lectureship in Italian at the University of Cape Town. ‘I may say without exaggeration,’ he wrote in a supporting letter, ‘that as well as possessing a sound academic knowledge of the Italian, French and German languages, [Mr Beckett] has remarkable creative faculty’. (pp. 524–5)

  Beckett felt genuine fondness and respect for Rudmose-Brown, a Racine specialist with an interest in the contemporary French literary scene. Beckett’s first book, a monograph on Proust (1931), though commissioned as a general introduction to this challenging new writer, reads more like an essay by a superior graduate student intent on impressing his professor. Beckett himself had severe doubts about the book. Rereading it, he ‘wondered what [he] was talking about’, as he confided to his friend Thomas McGreevy. It seemed to be ‘a distorted steam-rolled equivalent of some aspect or confusion of aspects of myself … tied somehow on to Proust … Not that I care. I don’t want to be a professor’. (p. 72)

  What dismayed Beckett most about professorial life was teaching. Day after day this shy, taciturn young man was required to confront in the classroom the sons and daughters of Ireland’s Protestant middle class, and persuade them that Ronsard and Stendhal were worthy of their attention. ‘He was a very impersonal lecturer,’ reminisced one of his better students. ‘He said what he had to say and then left the lecture room … I believe he considered himself a bad lecturer and that makes me sad because he was so good … Many of his students would, unfortunately, agree with him’.2

  ‘The thought of teaching again paralyses me,’ Beckett wrote to McGreevy from Trinity in 1931 as a new term approached. ‘I think I will go to Hamburg as soon as I get my Easter cheque … and perhaps hope for the courage to break away’. (p. 62) It took another year before he found that courage. ‘Of course I’ll probably crawl back with my tail coiled round my ruined poenis [sic],’ he wrote to McGreevy. ‘And maybe I won’t’.3

  The Trinity College lectureship was the last regular job Beckett held. Until the outbreak of war, and to an extent during the war too, he relied on an allowance from the estate of his father, who died in 1933, plus occasional handouts from his mother and elder brother. Where he could find it, he took on translation work and reviewing. The two pieces of fiction he published in the 1930s – the stories More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) and the novel Murphy (1938) – brought in little in the way of royalties. He was always short of money. His mother’s strategy, as he observed to McGreevy, was ‘to keep me tight so that I may be goaded into salaried employment. Which reads more bitterly than it is intended’. (p. 312)

  Footloose artists like Beckett tended to keep an eye on exchange rates. The cheap franc after the First World War had made France an attractive destination. An influx of foreign artists, including Americans living on dollar remittances, turned Paris of the 1920s into the headquarters of international modernism. When the franc climbed in the early 1930s the transients took flight, leaving only diehard exiles like James Joyce behind.

  Migrations of artists are only crudely related to fluctuations in exchange rates. Nevertheless, it is no coincidence that in 1937, after a new devaluation of the franc, Beckett found himself in a position to quit Ireland and return to Paris. Money is a recurrent theme in his letters. His letters from Paris are full of anxious notations about what he can and cannot afford (hotel rooms, meals). Though he never starved, he lived a genteel version of a hand-to-mouth existence. Books and paintings were his sole personal indulgence. In Dublin he borrows £30 to buy a painting by Jack Butler Yeats, brother of W. B. Yeats, that he cannot resist. In Munich he buys the complete works of Kant in eleven volumes.

  Among the jobs that Beckett contemplated were: office work (in his father’s quantity-surveying firm); language instruction (in a Berlitz school in Switzerland); school teaching (in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia); advertising copywriting (in London); piloting commercial aircraft (in the skies); interpreting (between French and English); and managing a country estate. There are signs that he would have taken the position in Cape Town had it been offered (it was not); through contacts at the then University of Buffalo, in the state of New York, he also drops hints that he might look kindly on an offer from that quarter (it did not come).

  The career that he fancied most of all was in cinema. ‘How I would like to go to Moscow and work under Eisenstein for a year,’ he writes to McGreevy. (p. 305) ‘What I would learn under a person like Pudovkin,’ he continues a week later, ‘is how to handle a camera, the higher trucs of the editing bench, & so on, of which I know as little as of quantity surveying’. (p. 311) In 1936 he sends a letter to Sergei Eisenstein:

  I write to you … to ask to be considered for admission to the Moscow State School of Cinematography … I have no experience of studio work and it is naturally in the scenario and editing end of the subject that I am most interested … [I] beg you to consider me a serious cinéaste worthy of admission to your school. I could stay a year at least. (p. 317)

  Despite receiving no reply, Beckett informs McGreevy he will ‘probably go [to Moscow] soon’. (p. 324)

  How is one to regard plans to study screenwriting in the USSR in the depths of the Stalinist night: as breathtaking naivety or as serene indifference to politics? In the age of Stalin and Mussolini and Hitler, of the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War, refer
ences to world affairs in Beckett’s letters can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

  There is no doubt that, politically speaking, Beckett’s heart was in the right place. His contempt for anti-Semites, high and low, comes out clearly in his letters from Germany. ‘If there is a war,’ he informs McGreevy in 1939, ‘I shall place myself at the disposition of this country’ – ‘this country’ being France, Beckett being a citizen of neutral Ireland. (p. 656) But questions about how the world should be run do not seem to interest him much. One searches the letters in vain for thoughts on the role of the writer in society. A dictum he quotes from a favourite philosopher, the second-generation Cartesian Arnold Geulincx (1624–69), suggests his overall stance toward the political: Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis, which may be glossed: Don’t invest hope or longing in an arena where you have no power.

  It is only when the subject of Ireland comes up that Beckett now and again allows himself to vent a political opinion. An essay by McGreevy on J. B. Yeats provokes him to a fit of ire. ‘For an essay of such brevity the political and social analyses are rather on the long side,’ he writes.

  I received almost the impression … that your interest was passing from the man himself to the forces that formed him … But perhaps that … is the fault of … my chronic inability to understand as member of any proposition a phrase like ‘the Irish people’, or to imagine that it ever gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever … or that it was ever capable of any thought or act other than the rudimentary thoughts and acts belted into it by the priests and by the demagogues in service of the priests, or that it will ever care … that there was once a painter in Ireland called Jack Butler Yeats. (pp. 599–600)

  McGreevy was Beckett’s closest and most faithful correspondent outside his family. James Knowlson, Beckett’s biographer, describes McGreevy as