Thus commenced Beckett’s decade-long “frenzy of writing,” all of it in French—Mercier et Camier, En attendant Godot and Malone muert (in the same year), Molloy, L’Innommable, Fin de partie, Textes pour rien, as well as the central postwar texts, La Fin, L’Expulsé, Premier Amour, and Le Calmant, and his foundational essay on the Dutch painter Bram van Velde. Interestingly, the very first work of this period was a short story, titled “Suite.” Beckett wrote twenty pages in English, before switching to French. In the end, the story was titled “Le Fin.” In le fin, one could argue, was Beckett’s beginning.
Other paradises follow, though sometimes the purgatorial might be more accurate. Might. . . . Watt’s ordered world might give some peace, as the system under which the novel’s world operates has a logic if not a rationale. Watt understands where he is in an order that is imposed from without, and it takes him from station to station, literally: one day he arrives, by rail, in a village; endures his term of service at the house of Mr. Knott, to which he walks; and returns, by foot, to the same station, presumably his life over as a character but perhaps to begin anew in some dimension. This comic masterpiece, written under extreme duress, by hand, in six notebooks while in hiding from the Nazis in occupied France, is itself a stop on the Beckett Paradise Local.
Mallarmé dared not break the glass, his idealized surface of beauty, for fear of falling through eternity, and so turned his back on it. He too, looked for another window, the other window. A strong, no-nonsense glazier (with his son) lurked throughout Beckett’s only three-act play, never produced.
“This time, then once more I think, then perhaps a last time, then I think it will be over, with that world too” appears on the second page of the first book in the trilogy, Molloy, and is almost perfectly realized by the end of book three, The Unnamable, but for the fact that neither this world nor “that world”—Beckett’s life and the one of his imagination, respectively (presumably)—come to their foreseen end. Quite to the contrary: after 414 pages and 162,000 words, the schema has failed to arrive at “nothing more.” For in the work’s now famous final words—“you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”—Beckett discovered, and this in 1950, an aesthetic credo that secured the moral ground enabling art to continue after Auschwitz.
Dear incomprehension, it is thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end.
In 1949, Theodor Adorno, in his essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” argued that the value of artistic activity was based upon the presupposition of intellectual progress, and that the barbarism of the Holocaust was clear disproof of that supposition, and therefore that “poetry after Auschwitz” was no longer tenable . . . till Beckett came along a year later and said we will go on, even if we can’t, because we must.
VIII.
. . . windows, what haven’t I imagined in the way of windows in the course of my career, some opened on the sea, all you could see was sea and sky, if I could put myself in a room, that would be the end of the wordy-gurdy, even doorless, even windowless, nothing but the four surfaces, the six surfaces, if I could shut myself up, it would be mine, it could be black dark, I could be motionless and fixed, I’d find a way to explore it, I’d listen to the echo, I’d get to know it, I’d get to remember it, I’d be home, I’d say what it’s like, in my home, instead of any old thing . . . there’s no end to me.
That trilogy.
“. . . windows . . . there’s no end to me . . .” is from very near the end of The Unnamable, where the narrator might as well be Samuel Beckett, because the futility expressed with respect to a career spent imagining openings, doors and windows, and the hypothetical turn inward, to “if I could shut myself up” in a “black dark” and get to know it, is exactly what Beckett did for the rest of his writing life. No more wanderers, no more Watts taking trains or A and C meeting on a road or Moran and son on a detective’s hunt. No more expectant waiting, as if the without can deliver morsels or messages to the within. Rather, for the most part, closed spaces, lightless interiors, the entrapment of consciousness by memory, the isolated voice in a void, one single disembodied breath. Even the old woman in Ill Seen Ill Said, despite her two windows, is pinioned in place, trapped in what Scott Hamilton calls “an archeoastronomy,” with megalithic alignments and planetary rhythms structuring the text.
What begins as an arguably pastoral pursuit—men walking on a country road toward (or from) villages, observed by our narrator from a rocky promontory, the sea to his east—evolves into a search for this observer, Molloy, by Jacques Moran, who, in coming across a shepherd, his flock (of black sheep), and a sheep dog, glimpses, for perhaps the last time in all of the Beckett world to come, a coherent, rational, purposeful community that, for a moment, he longs to be part of: “Take me with you, I will serve you faithfully,” Moran wants to say but does not. In the second volume, the story centers on and is issued from Malone’s room—“not a room in a hospital, or in a madhouse . . . [but] an ordinary room”—and Malone dies there, while writing of dying and telling his three stories and rendering his promised inventory before expiring in his late eighties, only to give way, in the final volume, to an unnamable creature of sorts, a single thorax, with a vacuole at either end, and one unlidded eye, a large worm with human consciousness—“it’s like slime, paradise . . . urinous and warm.”
Inspired by the darkness and the fire he sensed in his mother’s room, Beckett brought fire to his inner landscape but in the end, it only exposed more darkness. There was no way out, so he stayed in, and murmured, a voice murmured, and there was the echo, a voice echoed, measuring the volume of the void. The darkness was coming, was always coming. You can see it, in the prose of Malone Dies, certain passages linked by scholar Conor Carville to Beckett’s appreciation of the play of light and dark in interiors of Dutch and Flemish art. Windows often, most famously in Vermeer, but also in the work of Brouwer and ter Borch, played a spectral illumination across the homely features of domestic life, dignifying private moments of mysterious or perhaps inaccessible consciousness. Beckett must have been moved by this—he saw Dutch paintings in the early 1930s in Dublin and London, and in his 1936–37 trip to Germany.
This site—“urinous and warm”—in The Unnamable, is not the last paradise imagined by Beckett, but the last from which human agency, in the form of a body, has not all but vanished. Thereafter, in the plays and prose, fragmentation, disembodiment, imprisonment, mechanization, leading to a pronomial cleansing are the order, and, for all intents and purposes, the final (dis)order. Bodies, such that they are, actors in part, lack the human agencies that characterize real life, and neither represent nor stand in for an individual otherwise cavorting in the plausible world, like, say, Henry V or Christy Mahon. Rather, bodies, such that they are, actors in part, are the site of an enactment in which something only faintly recognizable to our experience occurs, something so faint and deep it is hardly ever reached or is summoned so seldom as to elicit a shock when touched, the proverbial raw nerve. There is a mouth, detached, floating in the dark, in Not I, and screaming; three heads atop three urns in Play, allowed to speak only when the spotlight is on them, trying to mount an argument; a woman half-buried in a heap of sand trying to look at the bright side, tending to her grooming while packing a handgun in Happy Days. Bodies, not being wholly there, have been subjected to a kind of debridement of identity, that is, the surgical (in this case theatrical) removal of foreign material and dead tissue from a wound in order to prevent infection and promote healing (arriving perhaps, at last, at the mysterious “surgical quality” that Wylie sees in Murphy).
He asked his friend Tom MacGreevy to recommend a book on Dutch painting. But in studying further the Flemish light he discovered a world of dark. He argued (to MacGreevy) that Caravaggio did not pioneer chiaroscuro, the Dutch did. Beckett saw the shadows in the sunshine, whether in Holland or Rome or Malta—or Dublin. In Malone Dies, in a scene out of Dutch genre painting, Sapo remained alone by the wind
ow, the bowl of goat’s milk on the table before him, forgotten. It was summer. The room was dark in spite of the door and window open on the great outer light. Through these narrow openings, far apart, the light poured, lit up a little space, then died, undiffused. And Beckett, true to eventual playwright form, adds a character to his interior—Lambert joins Sapo at table—but it is of no help: There they sat, the table between them, in the gloom, one speaking, the other listening, and far removed, the one from what he said, the other from what he heard, and far from each other. . . . [T]he earth shown strangely in the raking evening light, glowing in patches as if with its own fires, in the fading light. Beckett tried to bring the light, tried to bring light to the monad, and gave it his best, before working his way to the conviction that there was another place to look, at the other window or, as he told Billie, “inward.”
There is nothing sentimental in the Beckett theater, where the past is foreign and dead. But the same cannot be said of the Beckett prose, in which fond or bittersweet or painful remembrances of his childhood are decidedly present, or in the letters, where expressions of love and attentive condolences abound. The four volumes of letters are where this other world—the historicized and personal world of one Samuel Barclay Beckett—is most clearly on display. Fintan O’Toole, in his review of the final volume of the letters in the New York Review of Books, asserts that Beckett remained a performer, even in his private letters, a bit of a disservice I think, especially when seen in the light of those expressions of support for the grieving, so supremely and carefully crafted. Beckett was a great writer writing on the occasion of our greatest loss, absence being his constant company. He cannot be faulted for his eloquence and originality.
So we have the great closed works of the 1960s and ’70s, the continuation of the series, for in Beckett’s mind, there was a series—when he agreed to have the incomplete and perhaps unfinished Watt published, he conceded that “it has its place in the series,” in the development of his work. Everything had a place, as Beckett seemed to be always striving for something and was endlessly inventive in trying new approaches, building on past failures, as he would perhaps state it. As light gave way to dark and space gave way to cramped interiors, Beckett searched for something elemental, recognizable, an abstraction perhaps that made sense of itself and was co-extensive with its occasion. At times, what is visible is the substrate of presentation. These works are hermetic and beautiful—Imagination Dead Imagine, Eh Joe, Enough, Breath, Lessness, Ping, The Lost Ones, Not I, Footfalls, Ghost Trio, Company, Rockaby, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho, written from 1965 to 1981. I would also include, by way of honorary mention, the severest of these efforts, the ultimately abandoned “Long Observation of the Ray.”
To director and friend Alan Schneider upon the death of Schneider’s father:
November 19th 1963
My very dear Alan
I know your sorrow and I know that for the likes of us there is no ease for the heart to be had from words or reason and that in the very assurance of sorrow’s fading there is more sorrow. So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us strength to live on and on with our wounds.
Ever
Sam
What is it to close the window and look no longer outward but inward? Is Being being inspected? Why are we not evident without?
To which Schneider responded:
I shall never be able to tell you what your letter meant to me—especially as it happened to come the day president Kennedy was killed.
Because “its dimensions are its secret & it has no communications to make,” as Beckett wrote approvingly of Cézanne’s landscapes.
Birth was the death of him.
IX.
Its dimensions are its secret and have no communications to make. Beckett made this point about Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings in a letter to MacGreevy in 1934.
Observation. Chamber. Inlet-outlet. Constant intensity. Faintness. Cross-section. Constant length. Saltatoriality. Extinction-occultation.
Years later, Beckett would make no secret of dimensions and would in fact communicate them with withering exactitude, both in the course of his prose works and in his stage directions. Not that he didn’t find the going rough at times. His love of mathematics on occasion proved unrequited. He goofed badly, for example, in calculating the surface area of the “flattened cylinder” in The Lost Ones (1970), which would have placed 200 people and multiple ladders in a closed space no larger than an oil barrel. What Beckett thought he was designing was an interior space closer to the capacity of an oil storage tank, such as those one sees near seaways and ports.
Observation. Observation. Observation. Chamber. Chamber. Chamber. Inlet-outlet. Inlet-outlet. Inlet-outlet. Constant intensity. Constant intensity. Constant intensity. Faintness. Faintness. Faintness. Cross-section. Cross-section. Cross-section. Constant length. Constant length. Constant length. Saltatoriality. Saltatoriality. Saltatoriality. Extinction-occultation. Extinction-occultation. Extinction-occultation.
The erroneous dimensions written into The Lost Ones nonetheless held a secret, and, whether consciously or not, the actor David Warrilow found it. As he worked through the real-math practicalities of staging the prose work, and Beckett’s miscalculation surfaced (to be subsequently corrected in both the French and English texts), a miniaturization of the theatrical space may have occurred to Warrilow, resulting in his legendary Mabou Mines presentation of The Lost Ones, which featured a naked Warrilow moving half-inch-high human figures within an open cross-section of a cylinder, perhaps only a little smaller than an oil barrel. Audience members were given opera glasses with which to magnify their view of the severely miniaturized set. They sat, having been asked to remove their shoes, on a rubberized floor, consistent with Beckett’s description of the interior of the cylinder: “Floor and wall are made of solid rubber or suchlike.” Beckett did not authorize this 1975 production at the Theater for a New City in New York, but it was described to him. He liked what he heard, and liked Warrilow when they met three years later in Berlin. Shortly thereafter, Warrilow, according to James Knowlson, “took his courage in both hands and asked Beckett directly if he would write a play for him”—about death. A Piece of Monologue was the result.
Observation. Observation. Observation. Observation. Observation. Observation. Chamber. Chamber. Chamber. Chamber. Chamber. Chamber. Inlet-outlet. Inlet-outlet. Inlet-outlet. Inlet-outlet. Inlet-outlet. Inlet-outlet. Constant intensity. Constant intensity. Constant intensity. Constant intensity. Constant intensity. Constant intensity. Faintness. Faintness. Faintness. Faintness. Faintness. Faintness. Cross-section. Cross-section. Cross-section. Cross-section. Cross-section. Cross-section. Constant length. Constant length. Constant length. Constant length. Constant length. Constant length. Saltatoriality. Saltatoriality. Saltatoriality. Saltatoriality. Saltatoriality. Saltatoriality. Extinction-occultation. Extinction-occultation. Extinction-occultation. Extinction-occultation. Extinction-occultation. Extinction-occultation.
It is a badge of honor among graying members of the 1970s downtown art scene in New York to be able to say they saw the Warrilow performance on the Bowery (the theater is still there) during its two-week run. The house was only two or three dozen at capacity, but with music by Philip Glass, and direction by Mabou Mines cofounder Lee Breuer, those in the know knew to be there and were. I was not there. I was most likely making my way through the new Jack Kerouac biography in my dorm room in the Midwest, or rooting for the Mets to make a late season run. But I have since seen the one film of Warrilow’s performance, and it brings me back to what Beckett said about Cézanne long ago. No dimensions, no communications, from a Cézanne landscape, even Cézanne portraits. The young Beckett ardently admired Cézanne because he had a “sense of his incommensurability not only with life of such a different order as l
andscape but even with life of his own order, even with life [ . . . ] operative in himself.” In The Lost Ones, à la Warrilow, the landscape, or the mise-en-scène, is incommensurate with our understanding of self and space. It does not pretend to be a place for us.
Observation. Observation. Observation. Observation. Observation. Observation. Observation. Observation. Observation. Chamber. Chamber. Chamber. Chamber. Chamber. Chamber. Chamber. Chamber. Chamber. Inlet-outlet. Inlet-outlet. Inlet-outlet. Inlet-outlet. Inlet-outlet. Inlet-outlet. Inlet-outlet. Inlet-outlet. Inlet-outlet. Constant intensity. Constant intensity. Constant intensity. Constant intensity. Constant intensity. Constant intensity. Constant intensity. Constant intensity. Constant intensity. Faintness. Faintness. Faintness. Faintness. Faintness. Faintness. Faintness. Faintness. Faintness. Cross-section. Cross-section. Cross-section. Cross-section. Cross-section. Cross-section. Cross-section. Cross-section. Cross-section. Constant length. Constant length. Constant length. Constant length. Constant length. Constant length. Constant length. Constant length. Constant length. Saltatoriality. Saltatoriality. Saltatoriality. Saltatoriality. Saltatoriality. Saltatoriality. Saltatoriality. Saltatoriality. Saltatoriality. Extinction-occultation. Extinction-occultation. Extinction-occultation. Extinction-occultation. Extinction-occultation. Extinction-occultation. Extinction-occultation. Extinction-occultation. Extinction-occultation.
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