Samuel Beckett Is Closed

by Michael Coffey

  She would even call for it. In the dark I would hear a mewing, unmistakably hers, mewing to me, give me a story was the translation, tell me a story, put me away. And I would, happily. To be asked for a tale, a rendition, with a decided purpose, as if asked for a tool, bring me the hammer, love, it was so pleasing. Of course, I will, dear. And to see her drop under in but a short while kept me in awe of the powers, not my own, but of language itself, and our human voice, something comes from somewhere shaping something that then is consumed, in these instances like a narcotic or a draught . . . what can it be but literature!

  Allegation: That Department interrogators improperly impersonated agents or other Department officers during the interrogation session. Finding: On several occasions, various Department interrogators impersonated agents and other Department officers. Technique: Authorized technique of Deceiving Interrogator Identity. Discussion: The interrogation chief agreed to stop the practice of impersonation. The Senior Supervisory Agent was pleased with the Chief’s rapid and thorough response.

  —Look! Play at home. . . . He’s out!

  As an adoptee myself, having wondered about my origins, who my parents were, for fifty years, and trying to figure this out while pursuing writing, I felt for this American writer. I was deeply curious about how this affected her practice. But I dropped it.

  One spring, it was spring cleaning, nothing but industry around my domicile, the one in which I lived in my early years, by the grace of some strange relations, perhaps my parents, I was never sure, only of Gramps I was sure, that’s what he told me, when I could understand such things, to call him. He and the others, there were two or three others, he was the oldest, I can hazard that without fear of contradiction, would busy about the brooms and mops and buckets and all manner of chemistry after the long winter of holing up indoors, beyond the blizzards.

  An interrogator must not pass himself off as a medic, man of god, or member of the Red Cross. To every technique, there are hundreds of possible variations, each of which can be developed for a specific situation or source. The variations are limited only by the interrogator’s personality, experience, ingenuity, and imagination.

  —We remain at love, then?

  I thought, that’s not “Why Beckett”—it is her story, not mine.

  The rooms were aired.

  Much of the information of value to the interrogator is information the source is not aware he has.

  II.

  —Where’s Coffey?

  I first heard of Samuel Beckett when I was a teenager living in a small town in upstate New York.

  My job was to stay out of the way, a skill I found easy to master.

  An individual’s value system is easier to bypass immediately after undergoing traumatic experience.

  —Ah, Joe Coffey had to go. He’s watching Sidney do the final scrub-up edits.

  —Joe did a nice job, once we got through the street scene and that bockety trolley.

  The world beyond, such as we understood the concept, came to us through the network evening news. I figure, in retrospect, that it was the fall of 1969, when Beckett’s play Breath had its premiere in the UK. It made the end of the half-hour newscast as a curiosity, as something outrageous and, I thought, it might just be fun.

  I would busy myself about the grounds, picking up branches and dead leaves and old bread bags and beer cans with their little drivel of honey-colored liquid inside. On one occasion, feeling particularly diligent, the day getting a little warm for my tastes, I decided to explore beneath the porch, the narrow space, dark and all dirt, a place that never saw the sun, where nothing grew. It was rank.

  Allegation: That a female military interrogator performed a “lap dance” on a detainee during an interrogation. Finding: On one occasion between October and January a female interrogator put perfume on a detainee by touching the detainee on his arm with her hand. Technique: Authorized, as mild, non-injurious physical touching.

  —Cutting that opening shot was key. Alan was distraught, Boris was a wreck, Joe was in a misery, for him, the damn thing was so fucked, pardon. We were all surprised at your fix.

  —My greatest contribution, I guess: “Cut!” Eisenstein doesn’t know what he missed.

  The anchor, or news reader, was Walter Cronkite, by then famously war- and assassination-wearied. Near the end of his broadcast, he presented news of a play by an Irish playwright that, from curtain to curtain, lasted half a minute, nothing but a pile of junk on stage, a cry, and one inspiration of breath, and one breath out. The theater patrons were angry, said Uncle Walter. The playwright had won the Nobel Prize the year before, so they expected an exalted night at the theater, not a short glimpse of rubble. The world and beyond was coming apart, this seemed clear to Walter Cronkite. He said, “And that’s the way it is,” at which he arched his eyebrows a bit, which said to me, “C’mon, people, we’ve seen worse.”

  I peered across the expanse of the understory, might I say eight by eighteen feet or so, for it was a nice porch, the finest feature of the house, on which rockers rocked and the newspaper was left by the boy every morning. I was sure that things, light things, paper and leaves, had blown in beneath the porch, and they should be fetched and disposed of just as those out in the open, should they not? I took my own counsel and decided yes, they should, Gramps would approve. So down I went, on all fours, and then to a belly crawl, like a soldier advancing beneath enemy wire. The dark was complete or would have been complete but for the dim light around the borders, allowing one, that is, me, to dimly make out objects.

  Finding: During the month of March a female interrogator approached a detainee from behind, rubbed against his back, leaned and touched him on his knee and then shoulder and whispered in his ear that his situation was futile, and she ran her fingers through his hair. Technique: Authorized, act used to highlight futility of the detainee’s situation. Discussion: Chief stated that he specifically directed the interrogator to go to the PX and purchase rose oil with the intent of rubbing a portion of the perfume on the detainee’s arm to distract him. The interrogator admitted to using this approach. At the time of the event the detainee responded by attempting to bite the interrogator, lost his balance, fell out of his chair, and broke a tooth. Organizational response: The interrogator was not disciplined for rubbing perfume on the detainee since this was an authorized technique.

  —An inning with no runs. Marvelous stuff. And here’s another go.

  —More of the same, likely. Though I will tell you that the Houston pitcher, back in ’56, did something no one else has ever done or will ever do in the history of the game.

  —That bad?

  —Not at all: he threw a perfect game, and in a World Series, our championship series, the equivalent of. . . . The Ashes. He was a Yankee then. Woke up with a hangover and then went out and let no batter get on base, with everything on the line, twenty-seven straight outs. Hadn’t happened in thirty years.

  —So this man’s a great drinker. And a great bowler?

  In 1974, I got away from the Catholic university I was attending in order to spend my junior year abroad studying Irish literature and history in Dublin. Beckett—and Joyce and Yeats—were colossal figures in dirty old Dublin, and we all had our work cut out for us—none of us had any idea of the dramatic and very public career of Yeats the poet, or of the magnificence of Ulysses and Portrait and Dubliners, or of the mystifying Beckett, still alive and living in Paris. We read his first novel, Murphy, his collection of stories, and the imposing trilogy—or, as Beckett preferred them to be called, Three Novels. Murphy and the book of stories weren’t sold to us as great literature; and the three novels were more of a curiosity, as far as I could tell. The Irish seemed more enamored of Flann O’Brien than Samuel Beckett at that time. We students were encouraged to take our measure of the Irish literary tradition in and about Dublin—we visited the Martello Tower, Sandymount Strand, Dav
y Byrne’s Pub, and 7 Eccles Street, all sites in Ulysses. There were Yeats plays on at any given time in our stay, and we saw several, all fairly awful—but there were no Beckett plays. However, in the common room at the school I attended there was a hi-fi and several “Irish” records—the Chieftains, the great tenor John McCormack, and a Caedmon recording of an actor named Jack MacGowran reading Beckett texts.

  Indeed, in the dark beneath the porch, a few cans and what looked to be a half-bale of advertising circulars, crumpled and huddled together, loomed into view. And then a kind of gray lump with a stick rising above it, till it disappeared, the stick did, into the studs holding the porch flooring together. I advanced. Imagine the alarm of recognizing the neighbor’s cat or what looked like the neighbor’s cat, Tom. I fled but only inside myself. My mind, or what I consider such, recoiled back down the length of me to the soles of my feet but I did not move. Then my mind bobbed up again, to the surface, to the front of me, having left in its path a knotted stomach. I decided to make a noise, to wake old Tom. But Tom was dusty, Tom did not stir, Tom was not asleep or hiding, the stick was his tail.

  Allegation: That a female military interrogator wiped “menstrual blood” on a detainee during an interrogation. Finding: In March a female interrogator told a detainee that red ink on her hand was menstrual blood and then put her hand on the detainee’s arm. Technique: Authorized, act used to highlight the futility of the detainee’s situation. Discussion: The female interrogator is no longer in military service and has declined to be interviewed. According to the Chief’s deputy, the incident occurred when a detainee spat in the interrogator’s face. According to the Chief’s deputy, the interrogator left the room crying. She developed a plan to psychologically get back at him. She touched the detainee on his shoulder, showed him the red ink on her hand and said she was menstruating. The detainee threw himself on the floor and started banging his head.

  —A champion drinker, they say, but really a rather average pitcher . . . bowler . . . except for that one day. He was king.

  —And the deaf may hear and the dumb may speak. Plenty of hope . . . if not for us. Good Kafka . . .

  —This kid here’s a local boy, the one batting, Kranepool. When I said kids I meant him. He came up at seventeen. There’s a blast!

  —Now there, Dick. It’s just the long out. He doesn’t look like an athlete. A golfer maybe, a duffer you’d see wading the dimples at Carrickmines.

  I can still recall MacGowran’s richly comic Irish accent, and the way he dove through texts that looked banal on the page and made them funny, sad, vital. “I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month. Then it will be the month of April or of May. For the year is still young, a thousand little signs tell me so. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I shall survive Saint John the Baptist’s Day and even the Fourteenth of July, festival of freedom. Indeed I would not put it past me to pant on to the Transfiguration . . . ” The scorn in MacGowran’s voice in “festival of freedom” and the impatience with the character’s likely persistence in hanging on was shocking to me, yet I found myself laughing. At least, when I left Dublin, if I had not seen a Beckett play, I had his voice. The voice he liked, at least one anyway, was that of Jack MacGowran, whom Beckett would help until the hard-drinking actor’s death, in New York, at age fifty-four, assistance that was extended to MacGowran’s widow. “Happy to waive performance royalties anytime and anywhere for the benefit of Jackie’s Gloria,” Beckett wrote.

  I touched his side, old Tom, where I used to rub him. He was hard as a suitcase. I reversed field. I found Gramps and told him there was a dead cat under the porch. He looked at me with pity and told me to fetch him the rake and a burlap bag. I didn’t say “Tom.” It wasn’t Tom. She used to like that story. Oh, we were young then—the more detail, the better. Tom was dusty, yes. Hard as a suitcase, yes. Use the language, go ahead, use it all up.

  Allegation: The interrogators improperly played loud music and yelled loudly at detainees. Finding: On numerous occasions, detainees were yelled at or subjected to loud music during interrogation. Technique: Authorized—Incentive and Futility—acts used as reward for cooperating or to create futility of not cooperating. Discussion: On a few occasions detainees were left alone in the interrogation booth for an indefinite period of time while loud music played and strobe lights flashed. The vast majority of yelling and music was accomplished with interrogators in the room. The volume was never loud enough to cause any physical injury. Futility technique included the playing of loud electric guitar and the reciting of doggerel over a monotonous beat. Organization response: None. Recommendation: The allegation should be closed. Recommend the development of specific guidance on the length of time that a detainee may be subjected to futility music.

  —These are excellent seats, Dick. I must thank you.

  —Judith did it. Barney didn’t have a clue, but Judith can get anything off anyone.

  —I’ll attest to the persuasions of Miss Schmidt. She is Grove Press, no offense.

  —I’ll tell her.

  —You can admire the geometry of the game from here, that diamond shape, as you call it, its outer boundaries there in white lime is it, or chalk, and the blue wall closing it all in. The game has a spatial beauty, in its proportions. But if we were over there [pointing far to his right] that geometry would collapse, visually. It would look like a runway.

  The three novels: I remember thinking they were all one novel, I thought they talked about each other, but I swear that this was not an approved way of looking at Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable at that time (though now it is). There was no biography yet. Beckett was lumped in with existentialists—with Sartre, Ionesco. I read more about an obscure Flemish philosopher named Geulincx, not knowing quite why, and boned up on Dante, not his Inferno or Paradiso but Purgatorio, because Beckett favored a character there named Belacqua, a paragon of indolence who enjoyed the fetal position at all times, preferably in the lee of a boulder. Dante was fond of Belacqua also. Back at my Catholic university for my senior year, an acting company from San Quentin came to campus and put on Beckett’s Endgame. A guy doing life played Hamm. The audience coughed throughout the performance. Our professor said to us after, over schooners of beer in a nearby pub, it was “manifestations of discomfort” in the crowd. I found the play hilarious—even if it was about the end of the world.

  There’s a power to story and words, the old tenor and vehicle, don’t let me belittle that notion. At a memorial for my beloved’s mother, where the departure of a real being is marked by memories brought forth by the invited and the sponsors, a simple song was sung, beautifully, so beautifully, in a fine Fifth Avenue church on a fine spring morning or afternoon, I don’t recall, but in daylight, sure it was. And the singer sang some song, swaying up there where the pulpit stood useless and barren. She sang, “Was it real? Was it real? Was it real? Yes it was, yes it was, yes it was.” Don’t know why that rips at me so, tears came, come. I shared this with my beloved, though the tale is not fit for service as nocturnal narcotic, but only in the daylight, over sweet rolls, once, on a special day, and at other times over the cracker, many times over the cracker. It was a nice memory, my crying, for me, and the sentiment. I was fond of it. For if it was real, whatever it is and whatever was means and whatever real is, and if you can ask it that question and affirm that yes, it was so, then it’s a life. And that’s what a memorial is all about—an afterlife in expression.

  Allegation: That military interrogators improperly used extremes of heat and cold during their interrogation of detainees. Finding: On several occasions during 2002 and 2003 interrogators would adjust the air conditioner to make the detainee uncomfortable. Technique: Authorized, per Secretary Memorandum. Discussion: Many interrogators believed the detainee’s comfort in the hot climate of his homeland caused a differing in opinions regarding the use of air conditioning units in the interrogation booths. They stuffed ice cubes in hi
s shirt.

  The camp was locked down the whole day. Around 10 p.m. I was pulled out of my cell and taken to the X building. The room was extremely cold.

  —Once a stage manager . . .

  —I did learn that much, I learned a lot from Alan Schneider. It’s a problem. For which perspective are we staging the play, I asked. He said that was his job, mine was from which perspective. Well I’m helpless there—let’s put another leaf on the tree, now let’s take it off—that sort of thing.

  At the Beckett Conference in Phoenix, I heard a paper delivered on Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, thirteen beautiful prose pieces composed in the early 1950s, as Beckett wound down from the brutal but brilliant period of postwar creativity, a “frenzy of writing,” one biographer called it, in which Beckett wrote his most famous works—Godot, Endgame, and the novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. What caught my attention in this paper was that the habitually self-derogating Beckett actually liked these pieces. “Some of the little Textes pour rien of 1951 are all right I think,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. He said in another letter, “They are worth publishing.”

  Ghosts are real, by which I mean they are real people. They have distinct voices, like real people do. You can hear them. They have a presence. You can see them, and feel them, and smell them, decked out in their unique fashion, whether sackcloth or linen or leisure wear, their voices modulated by their physiques. They can crop up anywhere. My father, I can hear him now, can hear his silence in this particular moment, looking from afar, inviting me in, interested, interested, such is love.

  I was just shaking. I made up my mind not to argue anymore with the interrogators. I’m just going to sit there like a stone, and let them do the talking. Many detainees decided to do so. They were taken day after day to interrogation in order to break them. I am sure some got broken because nobody can bear agony the rest of his life.