Samuel Beckett Is Closed

by Michael Coffey

  What is the sense of linking Saint-Lô to Balbec in this fashion? Where is the connection, between Proust and Beckett, Balbec and Saint-Lô, dare I say Paris and Dublin? Indeed, where is the sense? Perhaps I should fabricate one. Or perhaps the connection is plainly and clearly what it is—one great writer while young reading another great writer’s work, skipping over no doubt many of the travelogue details of northwest France and the channels and seas, little knowing that some of the words—particularly the place-names that Proust went to such lengths to plumb and vivify—would be words and places that would enter his life with dramatic force only fifteen years later. After three years on the run from the Nazis, when the war ended, Beckett volunteered for the Irish Red Cross and spent eight months in the rubble of Saint-Lô, helping to build and provision a hospital on the edge of what he called “the capital of ruins.”

  When did Watt leave? Why does he give over to a “slow minute rain of tears?” Is he headed whence he came?

  The American sculptor Robert Smithson, from Paterson, NJ, never went to art school or college—he was self-taught. Scholar Ann Reynolds argues in her book on Smithson for what she calls a “morphological” approach to his drawing and sculpture, morphology being a study of forms and their survival through various recontextualizations, whether spatial, temporal, or material. Smithson himself said that early on he began to understand things “relationally”—seeing, for example, “a container as a fragment” of something not located in any one place or even time or identified with one material. Reynolds’s cataloguing of Smithson’s personal library after his death in 1973 shows that he owned more books by or about Beckett than by or about any other author (with Nabokov a close second). I am indebted to Daniel Katz for his essay on Beckett and Smithson in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, which steered me to Ann Reynolds, and which came at a fortuitous time: I could not understand how Marcel’s Balbec could lead to Beckett’s Saint-Lô.

  The other window.

  The morphology of mothers and sons, or landscape and history, or the relation of the real to the imagined.

  VI.

  When I was in the university rooms, in Antwerp, doing a workshop on Ill Seen Ill Said, the facilitators divided us into small groups of four, seven or eight groups in all, each group being provided with a short excerpt from the late prose work, written when Beckett was seventy-five. Each group’s job was to divide its snippet among its members, each person in the group taking a sentence or a phrase, and repeating it aloud or silently, for the purpose of exploring the phrase, understanding its possibilities, physically, musically, semantically, before rejoining the group and seeing to the snippet’s integration into a reconstitution and recital of the Beckett text, which each group performed in separate parts of the room.

  As Marcel is steered toward the bar car on the railway, by family and medical staff, in order to overcome his anxiety about leaving his mother, Beckett, arriving in Saint-Lô having visited his mother in Dublin after his years of being on the run during the war, returns, for the Irish Red Cross, to a ravaged France, and does not go back straightaway to his partner, Suzanne, his wife-to-be, at their apartment at rue des Favorites, but instead to a blasted landscape that had been pounded by Allied bombing for months, from June to September 1944, and Beckett does so in order to help in the recovery.

  My snippet was “At the other window” from the opening page of Ill Seen Ill Said—sentences seven, eight, and nine of Ill Seen Ill Said were given to our group on a piece of paper: “At the other window. Rigid upright on her old chair she watches for the radiant one. Her old deal spindlebacked chair.” The four of us conferred.

  Beckett was well suited to the task facing the Red Cross—bilingual, able to drive a vehicle, familiar with the French terrain, and possessed of deep reserves of empathy, and clearly a sense of duty, evinced by his service in the French Resistance and renewed by the chance of helping an effort originating in Ireland, which had remained neutral during the war. What is “relational” about these two experiences, Marcel’s fictional one, Beckett’s historical one, as both figures converged upon northwest France with perhaps similar fears and anxieties that took similar forms, or dissimilar but morphologically related ones?

  I now recall that we each were asked to choose a portion of this text with which we felt comfortable. You could choose the same phrase as another in the group, or you could all choose an overlapping phrase. In the end, we all, in our group, chose separate phrases. I chose “At the other window.” A scholar in our group, a professor in Canada, chose “the radiant one.” The remaining two, for whom English was not a first language, chose “rigid upright on her old chair” and “old deal spindlebacked chair,” respectively, each delighting visibly in the Anglo-Saxon clacking of his phrase. As I stood at my window, in those university rooms, and repeated, with varying emphases, my phrase, “At the other window,” and my Canadian colleague lay upon the hardwood floor in spread-eagle, eyes closed, intoning softly, “the radiant one, the radiant one,” and my two other colleagues standing at right angles to each other, looking, one east, one south, working through their phrases so that the spondaic “upright” from the one speaker made rough insert into the dactylic “spindlebacked” from the other, I felt very still. In the swirling world, four thousand miles from where I would be sent were I to die, here in this room among two dozen Beckett scholars, I am unmoving, yet looking out a window at a public, historic Belgian sky, itself unmoving, like a photograph. And this was a still piece we were sampling, written in French and English almost simultaneously, and finished, both of them, in January 1981.

  The record does not show if Beckett had beer and brandy in Saint-Lô to help, but you can bet he savored something along those lines after years of deprivation. And although, as his biographer attests, Beckett was anxious to get back to his writing, his witnessing of such devastation and misery, homes reduced to rubble, possessions destroyed, the wards full of TB patients, he was deeply affected. And morphologically, you cannot argue that Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett did not both respond with exalted forms of language, though Beckett did so much more tersely, with his four-line, twenty-two-word poem “Saint-Lô” —

  Vire will wind in other shadows

  unborn through the bright ways tremble

  and the old mind ghost-forsaken

  sink into its havoc.

  Lawrence Harvey, in his seminal early study of Beckett’s poetry, remarked upon the “brief and unadorned perfection” of “Saint-Lô” and its “harmony of easy phonetic flow appropriate to the gentle course of the meandering stream” of the river Vire, which flows through Saint-Lô on its way to the English Channel. The mysterious “shadows unborn through the bright ways” comes from where, if not the dark effluent of those who, thanks to merciless aerial bombing, will never be born, perhaps a nod here to Shelley’s war-inspired lyrical drama Hellas, in which “shadows . . . unborn” are “cast on the mirror of the night”:

  The army encamped upon the Cydaris

  Was roused last night by the alarm of battle,

  And saw two hosts conflicting in the air, —

  The shadows doubtless of the unborn time,

  Cast on the mirror of the night.

  I look out the window, in this still piece, not so ill seen, not so ill said, which Stan Gontarski has said marks the end of Beckett’s traveling narratives and commences the final decade of “closed space stories,” and wonder if I have arrived. Is this the stillness of terminus, the peace of arrival, of destination? I wonder: is this a question prompted by physically embodying a snippet of text with other people? Is this presentational theater, not representational? Am I now me and not playing me?

  Beckett’s response to a vanished world, with heaped masonry and damaged citizens left in shocking local evidence of civilization’s collapse into violence, is exceedingly spare, his poem built as if by a language under rationing, twenty-two words in thirty syllables. Marvelous—for we m
ust also live in another world, the more so if the one is filled with suffering and fear—is Marcel’s highly aestheticized, voluble response to seeing a world of the imagination, in this case the “Balbec” of his mind, “almost Persian in style,” a place until then only experienced through avid perusals of train schedules and place names, destroyed by actual experience. Having boarded his longed-for 1:22 out of Paris, and after the euphoria of alcohol wore off and his fantasies about milkmaids and the golden-haired fellow passenger who alights at Saint-Lô, Marcel is repulsed upon arriving in Balbec by the fact that the cathedral does not sit high upon “a rugged Norman cliff” above the roaring Atlantic, as he had imagined, but is twelve miles inland at the convergence of two tram lines and opposite a billiard hall.

  It felt so entirely other—new, strange, thrilling, like falling in love—that I entrusted myself to this other. And in its possession, there as I said it—the other window, the other window, while standing at another window indeed, in Antwerp—I saw it was myself in the other window, not in reflection, but in the square of beyond. The self I had been working on for two years was expanding into being, was even being born—an extension of interiority. With my book of stories now behind me, with no notice in the consumer press, I had found something or it had found me. We had made it, through nerve-wracking queues in JFK and Schiphol, tense, jagged, jet-lagged vigils at baggage carousels waiting for our hapless little Victorinox family to wobble toward us and then all of us through narrow streets with the taxi drivers of, presumably, the new Europe, to the sanctum of our like-minded community, there to advance our work on the writer for whom nothing was more real than nothing.

  Scholar Peter Boxall points to a wondrous vision sketched out by Beckett in his early, mannered, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, the long-abandoned and then posthumously published novel. “As the narrator puts it,” writes Boxall, quoting Beckett liberally, “when gazing at the ‘abstract density’ of the ‘night firmament,’ this coming together in the dark sky of the seen and the unseen mirrors the movement of the ‘mind achieving creation.’ If the sky is ‘seen merely,’ [the narrator] thinks, it appears as ‘a depthless lining of [the] hemisphere,’ a ‘crazy stripling of stars’; but if one is alert to the unseen that is threaded through the seen sky, the hidden orbits that pass silently through it, it becomes a figure for the ‘passional intelligence’ which ‘tunnels, surely and blindly,’ through ‘the interstellar coalsacks of its firmament in genesis. . . . The inviolable criterion of poetry and music,’ [the narrator] thinks, ‘is figured in the demented perforations of the night colander.’ The night sky contains within it the unseen, ‘incommunicable’ elements of poetry and music, which withhold themselves, but what are nevertheless ‘there,’ like an ‘insistent, invisible rat, fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art surface.’ ”

  “In a street detonation, windows in a building fly outward thanks to the vacuum created behind the blast,” said the inspector. All air rushes into a vacuum, to vanquish, lessening itself in the process, until a steady state is reached.

  “Astral incoherence of the art surface,” that’s Beckett at twenty-six years old. That’s a young man deeply troubled by the fact that we are all of what we see and we see so little, who is keen to deduce what we don’t see from what we do. Beckett would continue, for six decades, to test the limits of what it is possible to see or say or say is seen and then to see or say what can be said or seen of those limits, which toward the end, became his sole subject.

  I was a steady state, co-extensive and co-existent with what I could see, immortal, for now.

  The first paradise really runs him ragged.

  VII.

  There were many windows in Beckett’s early work.

  His first paradise, in his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, runs him ragged indeed.

  He could not help but notice the many windows—fenêtres—in his long summer-long slog twice through À la recherche du temps perdu in preparation for writing his study of Proust in 1930. Although no windows appear in Beckett’s list of eleven “fetishes,” those physical world phenomena that trigger “elements of communion,” such as the madeleine, he admits that his list is not complete, and mentions specifically “a certain cluster of three [that are] specially significant.”

  Written in Paris in the summer of 1932, and at 80,000 words Beckett’s longest work, Dream of Fair to Middling Women is word-drunk and naughty, rife with what Lawrence Harvey judged to be a “self-conscious verbal horseplay” that all but destroyed the work—perhaps no wonder it went unpublished in the author’s lifetime. In it, we are treated to a paradise, asserted by the narrator and of course imagined by Beckett, on behalf of Belacqua Shua, the antihero of the book, who in the beginning is masturbating, soon after is seduced by a woman, only to end up, face in hands, in the rain, in Ballsbridge, about to be hustled forth by the Dublin gardai. But along the way, Belacqua strives to build his redoubt of the mind, Beckett’s first paradise.

  Marcel, Proust’s narrator, writes Beckett, “is transported successively to Balbec, Doncières, and Combray by the twilight perceived above the curtains of his window . . . ” In Moncrieff it is this, however awkward the translation:

  If as I came downstairs I lived over again the evenings at Doncières, when we reached the street, in a moment the darkness, now almost total, in which the fog seemed to have put out the lamps, which one could make out, glimmering very faintly, only when close at hand, took me back to I could not say what arrival, by night, at Combray, when the streets there were still lighted only at long intervals and one felt one’s way through a darkness moist, warm, consecrated, like that of a Christmas manger, just visibly starred here and there by a wick that burned no brighter than a candle. Between that year—to which I could ascribe no precise date—of my Combray life and the evenings at Rivebelle which had, an hour earlier, been reflected above my drawn curtains, what a world of differences! I felt on perceiving them an enthusiasm which might have borne fruit had I been left alone and would then have saved me the unnecessary round of many wasted years through which I was yet to pass before there was revealed to me that invisible vocation of which these volumes are the history.

  It is altogether too wordy for paradise, and too physically busy, as Belacqua/Beckett cannot avoid heavily engaging the body in delivering periods of “beatitude” to the mind. Belacqua spends three months seeking to make himself captive, “as never before,” somewhere south of Vienna. It involves escalading a hole he is in, a depression “scooped out of the world,” thereby sheltering himself from the winds, waters, and visibility from beyond his ramparts. But it is a bustling place. Although “lapped in a beatitude of indolence,” wanting nothing, he is accompanied by “the shades of the dead and the dead-born and the unborn and the never-to-be-born . . . a silent rabble, a press of much that was and was not and was to be and was never to be, a pulsing and a shifting as of a heart beating in sand.” The whole thing turns into a place “dim and hushed like a sick-room, like a chapelle ardente”—a candlelit chapel where a body lies in state—“thronged with grey angels.” One might more readily opt for the sanctuary of a pub.

  Of course, Beckett could not have known that he, too, would waste many years—fifteen, till the summer of 1945—before his own “revelation” in his mother’s little house across the road from Cooldrinagh, his childhood home. Beckett told both Jim Knowlson and Richard Ellmann about this moment of insight into his own work—that he finally understood that the darkness he had long struggled to suppress could be illuminated with the “light of understanding and the fire,” as he later put it in Krapp’s Last Tape. This scene in his mother’s room—shorn of detail in Beckett’s telling—is fully imagined by Jo Baker in her recent novel about Beckett, A Country Road, a Tree. Baker puts a window in the scene, in what is by far her best passage. She has Beckett seeing his reflection in the window of his mother’s room, beyond which is the Tudor-style house in which h
e was born. He sees his darkness framed, we may conclude, against a backdrop of his boyhood, the house, the larches, the place he loved his father in. Baker’s speculation is both bold and reasonable. Beckett, in his Proust essay, was alert to “un corps incandescent,” what Gontarski and Ackerley in The Grove Companion gloss as “the screen between [the narrator] Marcel’s consciousness and the object it perceives,” or, as Beckett has it in an earlier work of his own, “the zone of evaporation between damp and incandescence.” Between himself in one place, through a window, through a darkness to another object, not darkness is perceived but incandescence, “the light of understanding and the fire.”

  Murphy’s mind—the subject of Beckett’s second novel—is a different shot at paradise. He does a sensible thing, given how overrun was the mind of Belacqua in his bunker, how ineffective the evasive maneuver. Murphy, now a Londoner rather than a footloose, absurd ladies’ man, isolates himself in a garret, dedicates himself (sort of) to one woman (sort of), and straps himself to a chair in order to decommission the body. It is a more straitened paradise, surely, not yet vacant, but more scant of inhabitants. In the end, rather than driveling in the Dublin drizzle under the watchful eye of the constabulary, à la Belacqua, Murphy (no first name, as none for Malone or Molloy, men of few words) rocks in a chair to which he is tied, the body under arrest, as it were, or out of service, the mind free to roam unbidden by corporeal want or dictates. This is all laid out in the extraordinary first chapter of Murphy, which details the seven scarves that bind him, naked, to the rocker, in the corner of his room, “of northwest aspect,” in West Brompton. Cleverly, his body is reduced to perspiring as he rocks through shadow, through light, the sweat tightening his thongs. With the rhythmic rocking, Murphy’s body is given pleasure till it becomes “appeased,” setting free his mind. And the life of the mind gives him more pleasure, “such pleasure that pleasure was not the word.” Sadly, and in its way exposing the failure of his precautions or perhaps his resolve, the phone in his garret, for there is one, left over from the previous tenant, a harlot, for whom the phone was “useful in her prime, [and] in her decline . . . indispensable,” he must answer it, so as not to alert the landlady, who would eventually come running should the “crake” and “rail” of the ringer disturb. Such is paradise in West Brompton, but a good try.