However much anyone who writes poetry would wish to read at a public meeting, it is still print which has the authority and status chiefly to attract them. The typical successful poet first appears in weeklies like the Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator, the New Statesman and the Observer, and later has a collection (usually only about 56 pages long) published in a hardback volume by a reputable publisher: that is, one who publishes a wide range of other books besides poetry.
Space in journals like those mentioned is naturally limited (some of them one suspects use poetry to fill up awkward column-ends) and usually the literary editors, quite justifiably from their point of view, prefer to print poems by poets who have already made some sort of a name for themselves. Like everyone else in poetry, they too have what appears to others as eccentric taste in their choice of which poems to print: some even appear to have no policy at all. It is inevitable therefore that anyone unknown should be rejected very often, however good he is: but at the same time every literary editor wants to discover superb poems by an unknown, and this at least keeps them reading through everything they receive.
After rejection by the national recognised weeklies and magazines, the great mass of those now writing what they call poetry are faced with three alternatives: to pay for publication themselves in one form or another, or to stop writing, or to write only for themselves.
There are many organisations of one sort or another which exploit the vanity of writers and the apparently desperate need of many of them to see themselves in print. A glance at the small ads column of several of the weeklies will discover two or three often cunningly-worded requests for poems. Enquiries in answer to these advertisements usually reveal that they are inserted by jobbing printers who want the author to pay the complete cost of a limited edition of varying degrees of sumptuousness, or magazines which will print every poem sent to them provided that the poet pays a fee and takes out a year’s subscription to their usually-duplicated organ. Rather more subtle is the advertiser who asks for your poems, writes back enthusiastically for more, and then says that he will prepare a tape-recording of them for submission to editors and radio companies all over the world: the poems to be read by a professional actor, who will, of course, require a fee of three guineas. . . .
All these organisations take money out of poetry, feed off it, rather than contribute towards its wellbeing, and are in the same class as those poetry competitions which take far more money in entrance fees than are required to cover the cost of prizes and judging. Yet every edition of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook contains a warning to authors never to pay for publication of their work: admittedly, until this year, this warning appeared side by side with advertisements which were nothing if not attempts to extract money from authors by means of an appeal in one form or another to their vanity.
For the writer who does not want to pay someone else to print his work there is what might be regarded as the last resort of the unpublished: starting his own magazine. This can apparently be regarded by the poet’s conscience as not exactly paying for his own work to be published, and this method, sometimes the way many good ‘little’ magazines have started, now seems very popular indeed. Usually it is not print the contributing writers see themselves in first, but duplicated typewriting. The cost of such a magazine, perhaps at first as thin as eight pages, is relatively cheap, and by his third issue the editor might feel confident enough (and possess enough backing from poets similarly frustrated by other magazines) to go to a small printer and have perhaps a twenty-four page edition indifferently printed for about sixty pounds or so. Whether all the five hundred copies he receives for this will ever reach readers depends on the size of the circle of his friends and acquaintances, and also on the stage at which it becomes too embarrassing for him to sell to strangers.
The country is dotted with little groups of friends who have started magazines in this way. Each group believes fervently that it alone represents the way English poetry is going, and that within twenty or at most thirty years copies of their little magazine will be eagerly sought by collectors as rarities: and each poet imagines that it will be for his one poem that each issue will be sought as the fascinating and revealing early work of a great writer who was then unknown and neglected.
They may be right, of course: a number of examples of this happening can be found in the history of English literature. And a small proportion of the magazines do go on to become something very good. But there is a paradox here: they only really become good when they start to solicit contributions from established writers from outside their own small circles. Otherwise they remain narrowly parochial, and their editors are forced to print poems for the very reasons for which they (with far less justification) viciously attack the editors of larger magazines: partiality, namedropping, or slavish following of fashion: publishing friends or allies for reasons which are nothing to do with the quality of the actual poetry.
And the greatest paradox of all this jostling and scrambling to get into print is that, of all writing, poetry is the one field where the satisfaction lies in the writing itself rather than in the publishing or in being paid: no great audience reads poetry, no poet has ever made a living out of his work. By definition, once a poet makes communication with an audience more important than expression of his own self, then his work becomes something different which, whatever else it deserves to be called, does not deserve the name of poetry. True poetry is written for the poet’s sake, and for no other reason: though of course he is pleased if it later finds an audience, this must be incidental to him. Young poets who are discouraged from writing because they are not published are neither true poets nor deserve encouragement.
[On Beckett]
A review of Happy Days (Faber) from the Spectator, 20 July 196220
What does it mean? he says —What’s it meant to mean? – and so on – lot more stuff like that – usual drivel. . . . And you, she says, what’s the idea of you, she says, what are you meant to mean?
This exchange is from Samuel Beckett’s latest play, in the first act of which the main character, Winnie, is embedded up to above her waist in a scorched, grass-covered mound on a desolate plain. Her husband, Willie, very occasionally speaks to her from behind the mound, usually to read titbits from Reynolds News. It is so hot that Winnie’s parasol catches fire. There is no night, and times to sleep and wake are indicated by a bell. There are doubts about the earth’s gravity and atmosphere being what they were. Death no longer exists, it seems, nothing grows and a live ant is a source of great interest. The remarks quoted above were made by the last people to stray past the mound, some time in the indefinite past. Winnie’s optimism is indomitable: every day is a happy one for her.
In the next and last act Winnie is buried up to her neck and can move only her eyes; every time she shuts them the bell sounds to wake her. Her optimism is hardly less (though she has abandoned prayer) and her husband’s appearance in front of the mound and his abortive attempt to reach her make this another happy day for her.
Happy Days occupies a place in Beckett’s dramatic works somewhat similar to that of The Unnamable in his novels. One could, if one needed to, believe in the predicament of Hamm, the blind and paralysed old man in Endgame, just as one could believe in those of the bedridden Molloy and Malone. The apparently arbitrary immobilisation of Winnie in the mound, however, is as difficult to accept as that of the limbless Unnamable in his jar of rags and sawdust. The difference is that in this latest play the real situation is not made explicit, whereas in The Unnamable Beckett makes it quite clear that he is speaking about the writer’s condition. Whatever wider applications to the human situation this novel’s characters and symbols may have, they are primarily used to convey a statement about the writer’s constant struggle to embody truth in a vehicle of fiction and by means of the imprecise tool of language: ‘Saying is inventing,’ as Molloy says. [...]
The writer’s condition is clearly what Happy Days is about, to anyone wh
o knows The Unnamable; but to anyone who doesn’t it is just about a woman stuck in a mound. Quite properly (within his form), Beckett does not provide links in the play for his levels of meaning. This confirms again for me that drama is not the best form for Beckett’s own peculiar vision, particularly not for dealing with those processes of the mind in which he is especially interested. And really his reputation as a dramatist is out of all proportion to his achievement as a novelist, for which latter I believe him to be worthy of the most serious consideration and the highest praise.
This said, it is not too much to conclude that Happy Days is interesting mainly as a gloss on The Unnamable. It is also a refinement of some of the ideas in that novel, and unusual in Beckett’s work in that it has a woman as its leading character.
Happy Days seems as well to be an answer to those who have mistaken Beckett for a pessimist: Winnie goes on saying what she has to say, considering optimistically how much worse things could be, just as the writer went on working in spite of all difficulties and lack of initial encouragement. Beckett’s is not a literature of despair: as Camus pointed out, even to say that everything is meaningless is a meaningful statement, and a real literature of despair would be a silent literature and therefore a contradiction in terms.
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A review of Murphy and Watt (Jupiter Books) from the Spectator, 13 December 1962
Some explanation (but certainly no excuse) is needed for reviewing two novels written respectively twenty-five and twenty years ago: Murphy was published here in 1938, but only a few hundred copies were sold before the rest were destroyed during the Blitz, and Watt has only been available here in a limited edition printed in France. The importance of the republication in paperback of Samuel Beckett’s first two novels is that this should now make general the conviction of most of those who have already read all his novels that Beckett is the finest prose stylist and most original novelist now living, and that, interesting as his plays are, they are no more than dramatised footnotes to the novels.
Murphy is the most nearly conventional of Beckett’s novels, and the best introduction to his work [...]. It is set chiefly in London, where Murphy is part of a ring of lovers, each of whom loves someone who does not return the love: ‘Love requited,’ as one character observes, ‘is a short circuit.’ Murphy short-circuits to Celia, a prostitute whom he persuades to give up work in exchange for a promise that he will look for work. This he does very reluctantly, for his real desire is to live only in his mind (Murphy tries to act according to the philosophy of Geulincx, a follower of Descartes, who believed that the mind was quite separate from the body) and Celia all too tangibly reminds him of the existence of the body. Eventually he finds a job in a mental hospital where he lives alone in an attic and can transcend his body by sitting naked for hours strapped by scarves to a chair: only then can he come alive in his mind.
By no means a difficult or obscure novel, Murphy does demand close, attentive reading and occasional reference to a good dictionary (often this is comically rewarding, as when, for example, the second element of triorchous is found to mean ‘testicle’). It is one of the funniest novels ever written, and many of its sequences (the chess game against a mental patient who plays all his pieces but for two pawns out and back again without Murphy being able to do anything about it, the scene where Murphy consumes 1.83 cups of tea whilst paying for only one) are quite hilariously original.
The style of Beckett’s first novel is excellent, but it is not original, not that spare, tense, lapidary use of language which is at once precise and definitive yet easily accommodates the fantastic and the grotesque. It was in Watt that this superb individual style was evolved, a purification of English diction comparable only with Eliot’s similar service to poetry in the twenties: and it is all the more remarkable in that it was achieved during the war when Beckett was in hiding from the Germans in the Vaucluse and had no library to which to refer.
Watt is the key work for a proper understanding and appreciation of all Beckett’s later novels and plays: in some ways it is also his greatest. It has a narrative progression rather than a plot. Watt is on a journey to take up a post as a servant to a Mr. Knott; he arrives, displaces his predecessor, serves his term, and is in turn displaced; the book ends with Watt again on a journey. Like Murphy, Watt tries to behave according to a philosophic system: this time one based on Wittgenstein. And, again like the first novel, Watt is very funny (‘“Larry will be forty years old next March, D.V.,” said the lady. “That is the kind of thing Dee always Vees,” said Mr. Hackett’), but there is also a bitterness in the humour which looks forward to the novel trilogy and to Waiting for Godot.
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A review of How It Is (Calder) and Play, Words and Music and Cascando (Faber) from the Spectator, 26 June 1964
The work of Samuel Beckett is a vast architecture of exploration, each part standing on the achievement of its antecedents, each part starting from the closing premise of its immediate predecessor. The Unnamable took Beckett into an impasse which he has now shown with his latest novel, How It Is, not to be as closed as it appeared.
This novel is the nearest any writer has ever come to the accurate literary transcription of a man’s thoughts in all their chaotic complexity, with all their repetitions and hesitancies: conscious mind continually diffused by the inconsequential, illogical, irrational interjections of the subconscious. In order to succeed with this remarkable technical effect, Beckett has had to limit, simplify, and refine both situation and action.
His narrator tells of a journey, crawling through mud, in three parts: before meeting Pim (another old man), with Pim, and after Pim. His repetitious concern with the minimum essential physical acts of moving, eating and excreting are chaotically mingled with random recollections of the past, more or less pointless speculations, and his personal relationships with Pim and some others whom he may or may not meet later.
As in The Unnamable, the first-person narrator merges with the author (although not until a much later point in the new novel) and breaks the fiction of storytelling:
that wasn’t how it was no not at all no how then no answer how was it then no answer HOW WAS IT screams good there was something yes but nothing of all that no all balls from start to finish yes this voice quaqua yes all balls yes only one voice here yes mine yes when the panting stops yes
Cascando, a radio play printed with another, Words and Music, in the same volume as Play, makes a similar point about the writer’s condition (the paradoxical uselessness and necessity of writing) and, by extension, about the human one:
. . .all I ever did. . . in my life. . . with my life. . . saying to myself. . . finish this one. . . it’s the right one. . . then rest. . . sleep. . . no more stories. . . no more words. . . and finished it . . . and not the right one. . . couldn’t rest. . . straight away another. . . to begin. . . to finish. . . saying to myself finish this one. . . then rest. . . this time. . . it’s the right one. . . this time . . . you have it. . . and finished it. . . and not the right one. . . couldn’t rest. . . straight away another. . .
How It Is is difficult, even exhausting, to read: it is written in short paragraphs, so set that none runs over on to the next page; it is without punctuation of any kind, and it is hard to see what is gained from this. The book is often boring, but this is inherent in the nature of what Beckett is doing. It has been suggested that it helps to read the book aloud, but it added nothing for me.
Beckett seems to me to be exploring a cul-de-sac, and while I cannot help admiring both his integrity and his dedication in breaking new ground therein, I deeply regret at the same time that he has abandoned on the way those incidental qualities of language and intellectual exuberance and wit which so magnificently characterise his first two novels, Murphy and Watt. But let us be very sure of one thing: Samuel Beckett is out there in front, this is certainly the way the novel is going. No writer need cover this particular ground again, but it is his example (towards truth and away from storytelli
ng) which makes it clear that almost all novelists today are anachronistically working in a clapped-out and moribund tradition.
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A review of No’s Knife (Calder and Boyars), Eh Joe and Other Writings (Faber) and Beckett at 60: A Festschrift (Calder and Boyars) from the New Statesman, 14 July 1967
In 1954 Harold Pinter wrote in a letter to a friend:
‘The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, way outs, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He’s not fucking me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me any wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy, he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not, he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful.’
The writer who inspired such violent, total respect is Samuel Beckett, and Pinter, thirteen years later, has apparently not bettered this description of his feelings since he contributes the quote to Beckett at 60, which is in some ways a rather embarrassing volume in celebration of the Irish writer’s birthday.
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