by André Alexis
The end of all travel is to be nowhere.
* * *
1 I was born in a nursing home in St. Ann’s, Trinidad, in 1957. I moved to Canada in 1961. On my return to Trinidad, in 2009, I became aware of an inexistent “André Alexis,” one who had not left Trinidad, had not abandoned his extended family or the ground that had given birth to him. I became most vividly aware of this other André Alexis when, in a public washroom in a shopping mall, a man asked me if I were from Belmont. I answered that my father was from Belmont but that I had been born in St. Ann’s. He told me how much I looked like someone from Belmont and he wanted to discuss my origins. I cut the conversation short and left the washroom feeling how curious it was that someone trying to pick me up should know this thing about my origins simply by looking at my face — a face I have, after all, seen often in mirrors. He could place me in the neighbourhood where my father was born.
2 In some versions, it’s said the Soucouyant must also count each grain as she picks them up.
3 There is another link between The Turn of the Screw and The Death of Ivan Ilych, but this one is serendipitous. When the narrator of The Turn of the Screw first sees the ghost of her predecessor, it is while looking across at the other side of a small pond facetiously referred to as “The Sea of Azov.” The Sea of Azov is, of course, just above the Black Sea. The Ukraine is on one side of it and Russia on the other. So, if you’re inclined, you could imagine The Turn of the Screw’s Governess looking across at the Russian provinces in which Ivan Ilych lived his death. As I said, it is serendipitous. But it is amusing to imagine that one story haunts the other, as one sensibility is haunted by another.
4 The translation used is by Louise and Aylmer Maude, revised by Bernard Guilbert Guerney for his anthology A Treasury of Russian Literature. Guerney did not extensively revise the Maudes’ translation, but his is the one recommended by Vladimir Nabokov. The translation by Anthony Briggs (Penguin, 2006) strikes me as less convincing. The 2009 translation by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear in the collection The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories (Random House) is very good but perhaps faithful to a fault, in that some of its sentences make for so-so English.
5 I’ve often wondered why ghosts are white. The idea that a white sheet floating in air could stand in for a ghost is amusing but, also, a little odd. Why should black people, for instance, turn white when they die? Are there no dark-skinned ghosts? Are African ghosts white? And yet, I suppose if you take into account the blood leaving the surface of the skin and the whitening effected by carbolic, you’re on the road to seeing the dead as white or whitish. Perhaps the whiteness of a ghost is the end point of our imagination. We see people losing their colour and so understand that the ghost is that entity from which all colour has gone.
6 My mother, born in 1933, remembered seeing her first dead body in 1945, in Trinidad, where she was born. It was the body of her uncle, and she recalled the ice used to keep the corpse from rotting and the smell of carbolic soap. They used lavender in Trinidad to hide bad odours, but they buried her uncle before he had begun to stink and so she had no memory of any specific scent. My father recalled the ice, but he also remembered the use of chlorinated lime, quicklime being used to disinfect any leakage from the dead bodies lying in.
7 I can find no particular name for this feeling. “Atopy,” the Greek word, is almost right, if you take it literally. Topos is the Greek for “place.” So, Atopy — as an English word — should mean, literally, nowhere-ness. But the word atopy has come to refer to originality, a thing or person so unusual as to be thought of as coming from no known place. (Curiously, atopy also refers to a predisposition to skin rash brought on by exposure to dust mites, dander, insect venom, and other common irritants.) If we try to make a word using Latin, we start with nusquam (“no place”). But any English word from nusquam (like, say, “nusquamness,” which sounds like a town in British Columbia, or “nusquamity,” which is awkward) is difficult to imagine as part of common speech.
8 There is an added irony here: in the story, Tolstoy has Ivan Ilych mortally wound himself precisely while he is trying to create a home for his family.
SAMUEL BECKETT,
OR ON RECONCILIATION
After my breakup with K, I was bitter and disappointed, and I wrote poetry:
On certain days, torn apart and wounded,
the silence between us caustic enough to scald
metal, I would find reason to walk by your home.
On those days, the flowers in your back garden,
the sight of Echinacea, made me cough
as if I had swallowed the plants whole
and could feel, fingers on throat,
their unwilling passage down.
On these days, I’d brace myself against
your peremptory affection,
Your dark eyebrows tamed by your index finger.
How had I managed to fall in love with such a cold cup of lye?
Was it the cup or the lye that seduced me?
And let me just say, now those days are gone,
they were not the worst between us.
I think I understand this will to poetry. For one thing, K is a poet, so poetry was my way of speaking to her, though she was no longer there. For another, poetry is — at times — a means of exhausting hurtful emotions, or turning them to ash. The process isn’t efficient, nor immediately effective, however. So, looking for further distraction, I went to Pages and bought, though I couldn’t really afford them, the four volumes of Samuel Beckett’s Collected Works, edited by Paul Auster.
Beckett: not the place one would go for solace, you’d think.
But Samuel Beckett is one of the reasons I have spent so much of my life writing. His work has always brought me solace, and when I began to read through the novels, two things brought pleasure as well as consolation. First, there were the words: infundibular, gehenna, absterge, podex, narthex. Reading the novels (Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, How It Is), I was reacquainted with words that had stayed with me (gehenna, absterge, podex) and words that had not (narthex . . . I still can’t recall its meaning without a dictionary, and I looked it up just the other day). Second, Beckett’s work is filled with descriptions of place, with hills, fields, woods, and seashores. So much so that the novels themselves feel like a country to which I have citizenship.
And, feeling at home, I read two thousand pages in a fortnight.
Reading Beckett, I was not distracted from anger or grief. Rather, I was exposed to a suffering (Beckett’s) that had consequences for my own, a suffering that brought about a confrontation with my own emotions, and it’s in that confrontation that I found distraction and solace and the beginning of something else . . . a reconciliation.
____
In a collection of essays called The Broken Estate, the literary critic James Wood writes often about “the real.” The “real” is, he implies, the touchstone for all writers. Even the Surrealists, in Wood’s account, start from the “real” world, and their literary effectiveness is dependent on their readers’ familiarity with it. That is, readers, having the real world before them, can appreciate unusual versions of it. For Wood, Surrealism is a kind of funhouse mirror. This idea is, I think, the least convincing aspect of The Broken Estate. To begin with, Wood’s versions of “real” and “realism” aren’t stable. He uses the words to mean very different things. But he also ignores that, in their quest to represent the world, writers (all artists, really) respond to other representations of the world at least as deeply as they respond to the “real” world itself. These other representations are as important — at times more important — for the creation (and appreciation) of a work of art as the “real” world is.
It was on a road remarkably bare, I mean without hedges or ditches or any kind of edge, in
the country, for cows were chewing in enormous fields, lying and standing, in the evening silence.
— Molloy (Collected Works, Vol. 2)
For writers, like myself, who have been influenced by Samuel Beckett, the situation is something like this: I know that Beckett’s version of landscape leaves out more than it includes — necessarily, since the simplest view contains a million details. At the beginning of Molloy, when the narrator describes a near encounter on a “bare” road, he uses a handful of nouns to represent the vast countryside he is describing: cows, fields, hills, sea, dew, sky. It’s an affecting and beautiful
description of Ireland, and I think it has influenced both how I look at landscape and what I choose to include when I describe one.
Though I grew up in Canada (Ottawa, mostly, but also Petrolia, Ontario), and though my descriptions of landscape include elements that Beckett’s do not, there has been, from the moment I first read Molloy, something irreducibly Beckettian about my world and about my representations of the world. Of course, “Beckettian” is not a simple designation. I’m reminded of an anecdote told by Israel Horovitz. Horovitz was in Paris to give a reading of his poetry. He had not invited Beckett, because Beckett did not go to public readings. But when Beckett found out about the reading, he asked Horovitz to read him, privately, a poem. The poem Horovitz read included the line “Our love lives within the space of a quietly closing door.” Having read the line, Horovitz said
— Oh, shit!
Beckett asked him what was wrong.
— I stole that line from you, said Horovitz.
— I never heard it before in my life, said Beckett.
Horovitz quoted from Beckett’s poem “Dieppe,” which ends with the line “the space of a door that opens and shuts.”
— Oh, yes, that’s true, said Beckett
but then he suddenly said
— Oh, shit!
— What’s the matter? asked Horovitz.
— I stole it from Dante me-self, Beckett answered.
Yes, exactly. We take from the artists we admire.
And so, to a certain extent, it is with Beckett’s landscapes as well. His way of looking and representing comes from Dante, who comes from Virgil, who comes from Homer, who comes from some anonymous poet who travelled and sang for his (or her) living, and so on. However far back one goes, there is never the world-in-itself, never the simply real. There is always an artistry. Writers come from somewhere and that somewhere includes innumerable depictions of somewhere else.
Still, representing the world, as opposed to the emotions, is almost a technical matter. The task is to create a credible and vivid impression of a world, without boring the reader. What one learns from Beckett or Dante or whomever is a way of discriminating in kind as well as number of details. Had I been more deeply influenced by Dostoyevsky, say, my version of landscape would have been more melodramatic — rain, cloud, mist obscuring the day when one of my characters meets his or her obscure fate. More influenced by Hardy, my landscape would become a character: sullen, dark, almost overbearing; more influenced by Homer, landscapes are repetitive, simple, talismanic.
For a writer, the world is an aesthetic proposition as much as it is a thing to touch.
Travelling to Saint John, shortly after I had broken with K, I wrote
By morning light,
the trunk of a young beech
rises from the black ground
like whitish smoke.
I am on a train,
alone, between
Matapédia and Campbellton.
Now, if it is true that what I see of my world is influenced by Beckett’s way of seeing, is it also true that my feelings are Beckettian? It’s one thing to organize the visual world based on another’s example, but it’s a little unnerving to contemplate Beckett’s influence on my emotional self. Is my unhappiness not my own, then? Am I miserable, when I am miserable, according to another’s misery?
No, I don’t think so. Though I feel close to certain aspects of Beckett’s world view, Beckett and I are among the millions and millions whose minds naturally incline to the dark. Besides, as humans, we’re inheritors of an unshakable privacy. My emotions and my world are my own, until I’ve represented them. It’s only then that I can see them as “Beckettian,” only then that I can say, “Look, this turn of phrase — ‘the trunk of a young beech’ — sounds like it comes from Molloy or Krapp’s Last Tape,” though, of course, Beckett never saw the land on the way to Campbellton: the grey-blue water, the small houses on one bank looking over at the houses on the other shore, the bleached light of a winter morning in New Brunswick.
This mix-up of private and represented (my emotions and my writing of them) is something that happens often as I read Beckett. His is a work I’m able to lose myself in. And, I suppose, this lostness in Beckett casts an interesting light on Israel Horovitz’s embarrassment at the thought he had stolen from Beckett. An emotion of his own, something deeply personal, had been unwittingly expressed with an image taken from Beckett. It must have felt as if his deepest self were not quite his.
Beckett responded, kindly and with great wit, by pointing to Dante.
But was Horovitz comforted, I wonder, by the thought that the image (“an open door”) had come “first” from Dante?
____
I read through Beckett’s Collected Works with women and “love” in mind.
It’s difficult to tell from Beckett’s fiction what his attitude to women was. It’s probably impossible. The mixture, in fiction, of psyche and intellect is different from author to author. We can’t say when Beckett was being serious, or joking, or half-joking. Fiction is the kind of play that requires all strata of consciousness, but it takes from the strata in different proportions from one work to the next.
Still, there are “women” in Beckett’s fiction and, in general, they are not like the “men.” Where Beckett’s men are wary, mistrustful, impotent, unsure of the line between love and sex, his women are optimistic, sexual, long-suffering, and hopeful. At times, the struggle between the sexes is cast as a struggle between metaphysical ideals (which the men pursue) and the demands of the world (which the women accept).
To stay with the “men”: there is in Beckett’s work a hyper-consciousness of the body in decline. His male narrators live to either note or chart the body’s decay: teeth go missing, feet hurt, walking becomes difficult without crutches, locomotion impossible without a bicycle, sexual arousal an inconvenience. It’s little surprise, then, that the descriptions of sexual intimacy in his work are not joyous. But there are also, in all the “male”-narrated works, meditations on love and intimacy. In fact, horror of the body, or the body’s failings, often presage or accompany moments of metaphysical longing. This passage from the story “First Love” is exemplary:
But man is still today, at the age of twenty-five, at the mercy of an erection, physically too, from time to time, it’s the common lot, even I was not immune, if that may be called an erection. It did not escape her, naturally, women smell a rigid phallus ten miles away and wonder, How on earth did he spot me from there? One is no longer oneself, on such occasions, and it is painful to be no longer oneself, even more painful, if possible, than when one is. For when one is one knows what to do to be less so, whereas when one is not one is any old one irredeemably. What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.
“First Love” (Collected Works, Vol. 4)
What goes by the name of love is banishment . . . ?
Naturally, given my anger and grief and longing for K, I found this passage striking for its revelation of love as banishment. But it’s even more striking in the context of Beckett’s work. Despite this passage’s insinuation that homelessness (or alienation from the self) is an unwanted consequence of loving, Beckett’s w
ork is filled with narrators who long for nothing less than this very banishment, this escape from the self. Murphy, protagonist of the novel Murphy, seeks to escape the prison that is his body for a kind of pure empyrean of soul and nothingness. A number of the other narrators (Molloy in particular) express disgust with the “self” they are stuck with. So, in the context of Beckett’s work, this passage could be read as a contradiction, perhaps even as the expression of a secret longing for the “un-self-ing” that comes with lust.
But wait. Let’s go back to that passage from “First Love,” to break it down a little. The narrator says:
1. Men can not avoid desire.
2. Women are attuned to desire.
3. When desiring, a man is no longer “himself.”
4. Being other than oneself is painful because
a. being oneself is something one is used to and, thus, something one can do something about. It is a curable condition.
b. being someone else, someone other than oneself means being no one in particular or “any old one” and how is one to live then?