Samuel Beckett Is Closed

by Michael Coffey

  Theresa Cede, a thirty-nine-year-old who works in the telecommunications sector, was also at Bataclan with a friend when the terrorists burst in, shooting people standing near her on a balcony, according to a Bloomberg report. “I hid underneath the body of a man who was shot in the head. I was covered in blood,” Cede said. Another woman lying next to her was severely wounded. She said she miraculously escaped unharmed after police stormed the building. “I don’t know how many guardian angels I had looking out for me,” she said. All hell broke loose when four men, armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, entered the concert hall at around 9:30 p.m., forty minutes into the band’s set, after killing the bouncers, witnesses said.

  —Yes, in memory of the Borstal lad.

  —Drink up.

  —It’s finished.

  Utmost dim. Leastmost in utmost dim. Unworsenable worst.

  I have forgotten that story, to be perfectly honest, as they say throughout Donegal. Or it is not important. Or it is both forgotten and unimportant.

  Some of the hooded gunmen, with their faces covered by scarves, shouted in French: “All of this is your President’s fault,” while others spoke of France’s military intervention in Syria, according to witnesses. Benoit, one of the massacre survivors, who managed to escape with a friend, said: “I thought a loudspeaker had exploded, then the lights came up. The gunmen I saw had their faces covered by hoods and scarves.”

  —It lingers.

  This Casanovian analysis has stuck with me for a half-dozen years.

  But how would I know what I know?

  People hit the ground as panic and terror suddenly replaced the fun they were having.

  VI.

  —You know, the New York pitcher has a no-hitter going.

  Then I read this, further on in Worstward Ho: “Nothing and yet a woman.”

  Time and duration I wish to re-experience, where all the stories are.

  The four gunmen took hostages.

  —I thought you said it was rare? Is this history, will this be written in the books . . . or at least in your Daily News?

  —No!

  It is not totally abstract, Beckett’s language, and not by fault. Even this most mature and near-final work, a text that certainly is his most abstract, is, at the end, visited by a figure, a woman, and then, a child, and then, a man. They enter this arid wordscape, embodied, carnate, irreducible.

  But I can do so only through space. I walk through my spaces, ambulatory now, where time is condensed, but there is only so much space that is mine and as the stories empty the space the space disappears—white light, endless expanse beyond space that is nothingness. Language deteriorates.

  But three of the four gunmen detonated the bombs in their suicide belts, blowing up themselves and their hostages as the French special forces units attacked. The survivors among the hostages described a horrific “bloodbath” as the shootings began. One witness said: “It lasted ten or fifteen minutes. They reloaded their weapons, they were well equipped. They reloaded three or four times.”

  —Infield hit. Should have been ruled an error.

  —So much for the judges.

  —Umpires don’t make those calls, Sam. A guy upstairs, in the press box.

  —Always the guy upstairs.

  —He called it a hit, for Lillis.

  This is Being, indomitable, live and wriggling in a void. Against the abstraction I often see those dark, stooped figures—the figurative, literally, moving through, a kind of taunt to abstraction. I don’t know that Beckett wanted them there intellectually—he managed to get rid of the Auditor, the dark, djellaba-clad figure written into the original Not I, on technical grounds (insurmountable lighting problems on the dark stage). No: I think that Beckett definitely did not want them there, these figures. After all, he admired, in painting, absolute absences, as in Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings, and the absolute voids in Bram van Velde’s work. Or so he contended when a young man, and so he strived for as an older writer, these absences, but which, the more he managed the absences and the silences, the more he failed to stop the figures walking through, bringing presence, breaking silence. Godot never comes, true, but the Boy does, twice. One feels he will come every day, with promises of tomorrow.

  What has happened, at life’s halfway point? Beckett said of his Godot: “I wanted walls I could touch.” I am in this room now, not only empty but emptied. I am alone or this is an issue of mental health. I am so sorry. Those are the walls.

  Another survivor said: “Everyone was cowering and running from the shots. It was chaos—there were so many people. Then twenty to thirty shots were fired, randomly. I was walking on bodies, there was blood everywhere.” Thomas, twenty-seven, described “rivers of blood” as he rushed toward the exit. “The aim was to attack and kill. Every time someone moved, we heard shots.” Dozens of survivors hid in the balcony and then climbed onto the roof, escaping into a nearby apartment where they found refuge while waiting for hours for authorities to secure the area.

  —I don’t want sound in the film, Dick. I think I am dead certain on that. What do you think?

  —Buster’s a silent film star. That’s justification enough for me—for the silence.

  — Sidney thinks some sound will reinforce the distinction, between Eye and Object. The more I think on it the more I hear only silence. Other than the “shhh,” of course, at the start. I think the images have a sheer beauty, a strangeness.

  He wrote to his early art pal Thomas MacGreevy about the Cézannes he saw in London in the 1930s. “Cezanne seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expression whatsoever.” Beckett was taken with the “unalterable alienness” between landscape and the gaze in Cézanne, which, tellingly, he configured as “the 2 solitudes.” He found the space between them an “impassable immensity,” and lamented to MacGreevy how there was “nothing of the kind” in Constable or Turner, in whose works “the landscape shelters or threatens or serves or destroys . . . nature is really infected with ‘spirit.’” Few have looked as deeply into Beckett and painting as Mark Nixon, who is a professor at the University of Reading, which houses a massive Beckett archive. A major focus of his scholarship is the six months Beckett spent in Germany in the dark winter of 1936–37. Beckett was there to look at art and perhaps lick his wounds from a disastrous romantic summer, where he fell for an American woman named Betty Stockton, who spurned him, and then found solace with a married childhood friend who was back visiting Dublin, creating a small scandal.

  Absence—such fun to play with . . . in the abstract! But when the beloved has vanished, what does one do? Does anyone know? Tell me the story. Tell me what it is. I don’t know that I have any stories left. Won’t living be enough? It is not enough. It is nothing.

  Auralie hid in a room in the concert hall for more than two hours. She said: “We could hear everything going on. It was as though people were being tortured, butchered.” John, who was among those who climbed the roof to escape, mentioned one steward who rushed to open a door amid the gunfire, allowing people to escape onto the roof. John said: “There were several children on the upper floor, I had a kid and woman next to me. I was one of the first to get out, then we pulled people up one by one onto the metal roof—around sixty of us.” Daniel Psenny, a journalist at Le Monde who lives behind the concert hall, allowed the survivors to take shelter in his apartment as the massacre went on nearby. “I heard a noise,” he said, “like firecrackers, and I told myself it was just in the film I was watching. But the noise was loud, so I went to the window. I saw men lying on the ground, blood. I realized it was something serious. Everyone was running onto the street. I had images of 9/11 in my head.”

  —It works, Sam, it really does. A film about film titled Film. I think it will knock people’s socks off.

  —What com
es off next?

  —Hard to say. But if nobody here can score a run we’ll be here forever.

  —Life everlasting, in a ball grounds.

  —Could be worse, I suppose.

  —At least the plumbing works.

  —I brought a pint of whiskey . . . in case of inclement weather.

  —May it resume its kind offices, should the need arise.

  —Amen.

  Nixon has edited the German Diaries, six notebooks found in a trunk upon Beckett’s death by his nephew. The diaries are handwritten, mostly accounts of the books Beckett read and the art he saw and his own agonies over writing. He also coolly observes the slowly constricting grip of the Nazis. It is chilling to read the young Irishman recording what it is like to listen to Hitler’s harangues on the radio in 1936. Why is Beckett there, a rather lost young man though no doubt a brilliant one, already having passed through academia with great honors as well as an apprenticeship with James Joyce, to whom he was clearly helpful? Why has he wandered into Nazi Germany, torrid as it was with demagoguery, hatred, and censorship? Beckett is there alone, his former ties to a Jewish Dublin family, the Sinclairs, who had a home in Kassel, now done with—Beckett had been in love with the Sinclairs’ daughter, Peggy, but she died at twenty-three of tuberculosis. Beckett befriends a bookseller, Axel Kaun, and a few others. And is, in the main, miserable. But he reads dozens of books, mostly popular fiction, and sees hundreds of paintings, most of them not nearly so popular, in fact considered by the state officially “degenerate,” and writes about it all in the German Diaries. He also wrote letters—to MacGreevy mostly, but also to the woman I thought, for a time, had a child with Beckett. But if that was the case, either she did not tell him that the baby was his, did not know the baby was his, told him the baby was not his, or there is suppressed correspondence.

  Her words began to diminish. In number. Their numbers lessened, elaborate phrases—“Mightn’t you find it in your heart, in the fullness of time, to make an appointment for us with the adjustor, before rack, then ruin?”—gave way to series of locutions less involved, less wordy, but did I notice, did I mark it, did I make an appointment for us with the adjustor, or the physician, or the social office, or summon all our friends? I did not. I was telling stories, you were asking for them, I did not listen to you. All I listened for was your “puh.” And now I hear it no more. In your absence . . . —my syntax my suffers. Miss I mean. Relief to. Said it. Have said it.

  A Belgian parking ticket found inside a rented Volkswagen turned an investigation of seven dead suicide bombers into an international manhunt for a cell of up to twenty terrorists involved in the Paris attacks. In the hours after the wave of coordinated attacks that left 129 people dead on Friday night, French police reassured Parisians that all of the ISIL terrorists had either blown themselves up or been killed. But the investigation was turned on its head when officers examined the Belgian-registered black VW Polo left parked near the Bataclan concert hall, where eighty-nine people had been murdered. A parking ticket inside the car was from the Molenbeek suburb of Brussels, notorious as a crucible of Islamic fanaticism. It led to the discovery that the car had been rented by the brother of one of the dead terrorists, and the realization that more jihadists may have been involved. By Sunday night seven men were in custody, another was being urgently hunted and intelligence agencies feared up to five more men could be involved. As well as the VW Polo, police found a black Belgian-registered SEAT Leon abandoned in the suburb of Montreuil, three miles from the locations of the attacks. Inside the SEAT were three Kalashnikov assault rifles, five magazines of bullets and eleven empty magazines. A third Belgian car, a gray VW, was stopped by French police at Cambrai, near the Belgian border, on Saturday morning, but police found nothing suspicious, took the occupants’ names and allowed them to carry on. It was only later in the day that the VW Polo was linked to Belgian Salah Abdeslam, whose older brother Ibrahim was among the seven terrorists who died in the attacks.

  —Ah! Did you see that? Hit by the pitch.

  —If he’s blocking the wicket he’d be out, at Portora sure.

  —He gets a base and a run scores, in this game!

  —We should drink to that, Mr. Seaver.

  —Hear! To Ron Hunt, our all-star.

  —Sláinte.

  The letters from Germany to Beckett’s Dublin friend, now living in America, pregnant with child, betray no sense that the child is theirs. What the letters do contain, those that are published at least, is that Beckett is miserable and unable to write. And yet he writes to her with his signature concision, and he is indeed in Nazi Germany (“All the lavatory men say Heil Hitler. The best pictures are in the cellar.”). A Beckett letter of November 14, 1936, begins with this paragraph: “Congratulations.” The editors of the voluminous Beckett letters—perhaps the last great epistolary correspondence we will know—gloss this “Congratulations” with a footnote: “SB’s reference is not known.” After his congratulatory opening line (or word), Beckett added: “Praised be the day before evening. Or not at all.”

  It is not good to talk to one’s self, however captive that audience. Love is an auditor, but not much of an editor. I don’t want to hear myself. It becomes too familiar. And suspect. I move in and out of coherence, like a radio signal going in and out, mixing formats and accents and playlists. It becomes . . . senseless.

  Armed police operations continued on Sunday. Two of the seven suicide bombers from Friday’s attacks were Frenchmen living in Brussels, and one of the seven men being held was also French and living in the Belgian capital. Salah Abdeslam, twenty-six, became Europe’s most wanted man when French police issued an international arrest warrant for him, warning the public that he is dangerous and therefore “do not intervene yourself.” He and his two brothers appear to be at the heart of the terrorist cell behind the attacks.

  —There’ll be a while to see the edits in process, right? You don’t have to decide now?

  —Suzanne is arranging for a Moviola and Alan will send us a cut to look at, next month. And Barney’s to be over and we can watch it together. I despair.

  —Two hot dogs, right here! Chien chaud, Sam.

  If Beckett was engaged in a sublimated exchange with his pregnant friend, then how to explain his letter’s dive into talk of toilet paper, equating its sheets with book pages, and of his creative production, as he saw it, six-inch square laxatives, sheet by sheet, in the “Beckett Bowel Books . . . 1000 wipes of clean fun.” Is he dramatically debasing himself in a private correspondence with a married woman he might have stained? Beckett is ostensibly talking about a publisher, George Reavey, and about being published generally as some sort of vile excretion, and he is in a rant. But further in his letter he turns more somber and talks about how “flattered” he is. “It is only from the highest unities that a third can be negligently carved away and the remainder live. The amoeba’s neck is not easily broken.” He concludes with, “I can’t read, write, drink, think, feel, or move.”

  There once was a psychiatric patient who said only one word: “tan.” Not bad, for one word: a color, a sign of health, of leisure perhaps, of gainful employ perhaps, out of doors—plenty of Vitamin what’s it? Something one does to animal skin. There once was a patient who was convinced she had died.

  With seven suicide bombers dead, seven others under arrest and one man on the run, fifteen men have so far been linked to the Paris attacks. But Belgian intelligence officials have suggested that up to twenty people may have been part of the terrorist cell that planned the attacks, meaning a total of six people could be on the run. According to the Belgian business newspaper L’Echo, the Belgian security services estimate that twenty people participated “near or far” in the Paris attacks. A Syrian passport found beside one of the Paris suicide bombers has raised the possibility one of the attackers may have masqueraded as an asylum seeker to infiltrate Europe. The passport found after the a
ttack at France’s national stadium was used to enter Greece less than two months ago along a route used by hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants this year. The French authorities said the passport was fake.

  —Through six of our innings, not that bad, eh. Hour and a half. You fine?

  Hegel, I guess. Leibniz I know not. Beckett, when in Germany, never mentions Brecht, according to Mark Nixon. Isn’t that strange?

  I read to myself of medical mysteries. Cotard Delusion, Capgras Syndrome. All neurological disorders.

  Bearing the name of Ahmad Almohammad, twenty-five, the passport was used by an asylum seeker who registered on the island of Leros on October 3. He reached Leros after his makeshift boat from Turkey carrying seventy migrants foundered off the coast and he was picked up by Greek coast guards. He then reportedly applied for asylum in Serbia on October 7 before traveling on to Croatia, Hungary, Austria, and then, it is believed, France.

  —I am grand, Dick, excellent kill of an afternoon—still gloriously in its throes.

  “Dear—, I am writing to you in a pub.”

  Delusions of non-existence.

  A US intelligence official told CBS News it did not contain the correct numbers for a legitimate Syrian passport and the picture did not match the name.

  VII.

  —Up and down, up and down, three up, three down.

  To —: “The trip is being a failure.”

  Missing body parts.

  A French suicide bomber who blew himself up during the attack on the Bataclan concert hall is believed to have trained at an ISIL terrorist camp in Syria.

  —I’m not sure if this is going by quickly or slowly. Lots of zeroes out there on the tote board. That’s elegant.