Samuel Beckett Is Closed

by Michael Coffey

  Where we are is where we are not. A thousand little signs tell us so, relentlessly. Subject and object and what, where. The heart of Western philosophy, if it has a heart, is where subject ends and object begins—or where two subjects, each the other’s object—share an ontology, if they do. Marcel in À la recherche strived to extend himself, as subject, into everything that entered him—smells, sights, sounds, loves, architectures, landscapes—and thereby recoup his own past, his own self, by colonizing the other, the object, the present. Beckett’s sympathy for this approach may have been exhausted by 1930 after his summer of heavy reading of Proust, for thereafter, for many years, he strived to reject the authenticity of work that did not present images from which the self was excluded nor had access, spatially or temporally. And so a great literary revolution commenced, contrary to every literary presupposition of his time.

  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.

  Masterpieces concerning closed places of entrapment in which beings circulate, concerning beings crawling to and fro, following mysterious rhythms or unattributable commands, developing a degenerative syntax that aimed to end expression somewhere short of assertion, in the land of negation, steadily issued from Beckett’s practice. What, if anything, this solved for him, is anyone’s guess. He was never able to remove beings entirely, nor was he ever able to sanction them. In the cold, bleak expanses of language there was always some detectable warmth, if only a trace, in the distance, at the horizon, perhaps, often a boy or an old woman, wavering in the chill, still at large, strung in some contingency.

  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.

  Even the other window had a window.

  Observation. Chamber. Inlet-outlet. Constant intensity. Faintness. Cross-section. Constant length. Saltatoriality. Extinction-occultation.

  PART THREE

  What is at the other window? One may well ask—if there is anyone left at this point. I may be talking to myself, the theater emptied. Just as well, if indeed the case. No, not just as well, less than that.

  This window.

  Perhaps a kind of looking at everything. That’s what Beckett meant to do in the doomed “Long Observation of the Ray,” that closed sphere inside of which a shutter would open and close, emitting the ray of light that would systematically scan every inch of the sphere’s inner surface, like an eye inside an eye, or the Eye of Film observing the Object of same, Buster Keaton, not through space but from within. In, always in, Beckett wrote at some point, never out. Through with out.

  Consider imprisonment, what inmates call being “inside.” Beckett was very conscious of imprisonment. Not only did he look out over his desk in his Paris apartment at the nineteenth-century hub-and-spoke Santé prison, but he dealt with real prisoners—and sympathetically—as actors of his plays, as correspondents. And of course, as he asserted on many occasions, he felt himself imprisoned in his body, and went on to imprison character after character in all manner of systems of restraint, whether a hill of dirt, at the end of a rope, in a wheelchair, among countless examples in the prose and theater. Murphy even ties himself up.

  · · · · · ·

  I have considered several schemes in my attempt to justify the foregoing and bring this chronicle to a rightful close, loose ends tied. But nothing sang. The most promising I reclaimed just this morning—it had gone out with the coffee grounds. In that it involved a dying actor imparting his wisdom to a young man resistant to but perhaps ready for enlightenment, it had possibilities, I thought, fictive, theatrical. A cliché, perhaps, but those can be welcome in a cold world. Despite my doubts—I feared that anyone who had gotten this far in the book would be displeased at something traditional and anyone who would like such a thing had long ago left—I am giving it a second chance. Let me be its lone proponent.

  The dying actor—I have the late David Warrilow in mind—will share life and life-in-the-theater lessons with a young man whose past is unknown to me and therefore to the reader. I have assigned the young man to be in the older man’s employ for a period of three years, and not just any years, but the very last of the actor’s life.

  I have titled the little set piece after the Beckett work that has emerged as my favorite, both for its sentimentality—it includes tender scenes from a Dublin boyhood—and for its aesthetic rigor, its courageous and unpretentious mix of the personal and the abstract, all devised “for company.”

  · · · · · ·

  For Company

  GERALD, A young man.

  DAVID, An old man.

  MARGARET, A middle-aged woman, bartender.

  MARIE, A nurse.

  VOICE

  Scene 1

  A city bar, late afternoon.

  Gerald: Excuse me. Anyone sitting here?

  David: Oh. [Pause.] Only my . . . shades.

  Gerald: Excuse me then.

  David: No, not at all. I am done with them [waving his hand as if in banishment]. Join me!

  Gerald: Thanks, I’m just in for a quick one. But I have to put this bag down. [Adjusts the stool, sits.]

  David: What’s in the bag?

  Gerald: Books, mostly.

  David: No bullion? Silver? Precious metals?

  Gerald: Just this satchel. [Pause.] Oh [to the bartender] . . . let’s see. A bottle of Bud.

  David: And I’ll have another. I’d take three olives this time, if you please.

  Margaret: Oh, I do mean to please.

  David: Margaret, tell me, what do you think of . . . [straightening his lapel] middle-aged Irish guys?

  Margaret: I don’t.

  David: You know, neither do I. Anymore.

  [Pause.]

  David: So, what’s in the bag?

  Gerald: Couple of French writers. [Rooting around in his shoulder bag.] And this sandwich, it seems. Ham.

  [They both sip from their drinks.]

  David: [Wincing.] Don’t say that.

  Gerald: What?

  David: Ham.

  [Long pause, sirens sound without.]

  David: Les écrivains, eh? I’ve known a few.

  Gerald: Barthes. Beckett. Blanchot.

  [Long pause.]

  David: [With his teeth removes one by one the olives from a toothpick, chews, swallows.] Do you want to know which of the three I have met?

  Gerald: [Hesitant.] Sure. Can’t hurt.

  David: [Smiling broadly as he brings his martini glass to the lip.] All of them!

  Gerald: Really.

  David: Paris. I spent several years there.

  Gerald: Doing what?

  David: Theater. But it is Sam I really knew.

  Gerald: My lucky day. My essay is supposed to be on Beckett and politics.

  David: [Feigning anger.] No politics today. [Stentorian voice.] Let Rome in Tiber melt. Kingdoms are clay, in the
end. [As before.] I can’t stomach it. I’m sick enough.

  Gerald: Sorry to hear that. [Long pause] Did you work by any chance with Beckett, in the theater?

  David: Yes, young man, I did.

  Gerald: Godot?

  David: Krapp. And a few of his lesser-known pieces. Late pieces.

  Gerald: That was in Paris?

  David: Paris, London. Would you believe . . . Ohio. And not far from here, over on the Bowery. And the Public. That was a long time ago. . . . Would you . . . ? [Summoning the bartender with a raised empty glass.]

  Gerald: Well . . . no, I shouldn’t.

  David: A pint of stout for the young man, no? No? Ah, well. Another Beefeater for me, then. Make it a Gibson this time . . . if you please.

  Margaret: I’m out of onions, darling.

  David: You have failed me [Pause.] Margaret, meet—may I ask your name?

  Gerald: Gerald.

  David: Margaret, meet Gerald.

  Gerald: And your name is . . . ?

  David: I’m David.

  Gerald: Pleased to meet you.

  Scene 2

  Gerald, sitting on a high stool, alone, center stage.

  In this fashion I met David. I would know him intimately for the next three years, the last three years of his life. I would become his employee—his assistant, his nurse, his company as he battled his disease. In the course of this friendship, I would learn something about death and dying and art. That is, I would learn about death and dying and art through his experience, as recounted in long sessions, on occasion (but with diminishing frequency) in taverns and coffee shops, and in his rooms on Sheridan Square, the rent-stabilized apartment he kept with two cats and his books and prints and memories. I endeavored in my off hours to record his spoken thoughts, our conversations, as best I could reconstruct them, culminating in what you will hear. I never wrote my paper.

  Dialogue is a polite way to have a conversation with yourself, otherwise a certifiable tic, David told me one day as we walked through Washington Square Park, where he favored the afternoon sunshine, wrapped in scarves, even in summer, giving him the old comfort of the theater: he was as if in costume.

  Is it very old, I asked him, dialogue?

  The Greeks, my boy, he said. Socratic. Old enough for you?

  People have been forever talking, I offer, putting on David’s very own brand of weary acceptance of eternal truths. No end to it, I say, misquoting Vladimir, who said just the opposite. By then, I’d boned up on my Beckett, the plays particularly . . . for the sake of the job, which, for the most part, was to provide an amiable audience.

  That’s what you think, said David, quoting Estragon precisely, turning it to his own end. In Beckett, he went on to say, it really does never end—always a voice comes to one, even in the dark. And the voice is heard. Beckett can’t shake that other, he said. He may even love the other, he said. David would look at me sadly sometimes.

  [Gerald gets off stool, walks back and forth slowly on stage right.]

  Sam was fond of counting, David said to me, as he counted the squirrels he could attract to our bench in the park with his bag of chestnuts. He said there were 104 squirrels in the park. Sam was fond of counting breaths, he added. Five million a year.

  [Pause.]

  Fifty million a decade.

  [Pause.]

  Three, four hundred million, you have nothing to complain of, he said.

  In such fashion did our afternoons often pass.

  [Returns to stool.]

  At stool! [Scanning for a laugh, in vain.] Sixteen volumes contemplated at stool. That was Beckett’s summer, David told me, sometime in the 1930s, I think. Reading all of Marcel Proust in French, to write an essay. I’ve read it, the essay, not the novel. It is both simple and . . . unfathomable. David agreed with me.

  Love consumes its object, David told me. From Proust, he said. Beckett learned that from Proust.

  I told him that that was very sad. In fact, I told him it was very fucking sad. Here’s this guy dying of AIDS, and he tells me that love consumes its object? I could see it, running up his neck and face and forehead.

  No, dear, he said, you don’t get it: love wins.

  You want to know another thing about love, he asked me. I must’ve nodded. The only hope of freedom is the negation of the will, he said, the suspension of all desire. You become a pure subject of knowing, beyond the determinations of time and space. It’s Schopenhauer.

  I think I said something like, “wow.” And then probably, “what do you mean?”

  He said: In the presence of your beloved you are free, to think about other things. Your memories. In the absence of the beloved you are imprisoned. You only think about him, or her. Nothing else. You hardly exist.

  Proust? I asked. No, no, he said. Another. I can guess who he meant.

  Scene 3

  A bedroom—bed against one wall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on walls left and right of bed, window off to stage right. Night-stands either side of bed, ranked with jars, glasses with straws, and pill bottles. Circular throw rug on floor at end of bed. Two chairs to left of bed.

  Gerald [seated]: You know Marie is coming in an hour.

  David [abed]: Marie. Marie? Marie!

  Gerald: Yes, your Marie. To change you.

  David: Reaching your limit, Gerald?

  Gerald: I don’t do stomas well, David. I’m sorry.

  David: I don’t laugh anymore. And I’m sorry.

  Gerald: David?

  [Lights fade.]

  [Voiceover, recorded, David.] Yes, this is my voice, disembodied, at last. One thing that struck me, I don’t know exactly when, about Beckett that is, is that the works displayed what I call the external mind. The works were not the interior mind, at all, but how the mind externalized itself amidst language and furniture and light and dark. I think he was ever striving to see the mind at work. Of course, this became endlessly fascinating—and frustrating—to him. To work with his productions, his forms, and find, here’s the voice, there’s the body, but what’s this, what’s that . . . another voice? In the dark? Another body? In the dark? Where are they from, are they part of my mind, my being? Or have I wandered out? Have they, has it, wandered in? What is in? What is out? Look at the works, I ask you. See them as extensions of mind, the mind taking its course. Only in Beckett nothing is false, if he could manage it, as he tried, no matter how simple, no matter how enriched by impoverishment the settings. He wrote more and more sparely. Till the end, still searching for the one word, were there one word, in any language, for the complex mystery of . . . Venus rising, whitening the stones.

  [Lights up, bedroom.]

  David: Can you fix this straw?

  Gerald [adjusts straw]: Marie is downstairs. I should let her up.

  David: You may [drinking]. The more the merrier.

  Gerald: She makes three.

  David: A multitude! Now . . . a constant ray of light—

  Gerald: I thought you said it blinked on and off. Shuttered.

  David: No, constant but intermittently occultated.

  Gerald: Oh.

  David: What’s that look?

  Gerald: Occultated?

  David: As in eclipsed. The sun doesn’t go out in an eclipse, does it?

  Gerald: No. Come on up, Marie!

  David: That’s right, no, something gets in the way, of the sun, but it is still there. Occultated. So! We have a story, a narrative, that is reduced to volume, light, surface. You see?

  Gerald: I don’t see.

  David: It is the monad. He did it. Sam brought a light to the monad—as in Leibniz. He is imagining the afterlife. Or imaging it is better.

  Gerald: Not exactly heaven. [Sounds offstage, footsteps upstairs, growing closer.] Hi, Marie.

  David: Marie, we are in here!
/>   [Lights fade out for a minute; return, bedroom.]

  Gerald: You should eat a little. David? You should eat something. [Pause.] Marie’s left. Do you want the news on?

  David: Was I hungry? Did she—

  Gerald: Yes. You’ve had your potion.

  David: I reckoned, so. [Pause.] I am quite thin, now, aren’t I?

  Gerald: Too thin.

  David: I like the look of my . . . bones. I like the feel of them. My . . . infrastructure. Did you know, that the bones are the last thing to go?

  Gerald: How cheery.

  David: And Patrick my dear departed in yonder urn . . . he is nothing but bone. Ash of bone. [Pause, with resolve.] No! I will not eat. On strike! You understand it’s a time-honored practice in Ireland. He who can stand the most suffering, wins.

  Gerald: I don’t think you mean that, David.

  David: That suffering is . . . [pondering]? I . . . don’t. I don’t. I really don’t think that. Thank you, Gerald.

  Scene 4

  Bedroom, faintest light. Lump in bedding, David alone on his back in the dark. Asleep. His voice, recorded, slowly, bemusedly, but with exhaustion evident.

  When I was ten years old . . . I played the boy in Godot. It was a prison production. With a famous touring company . . . blessed by the playwright himself. The company, it was a Midlands tour, came to the prison in our very own town. My father . . . my father was the superintendent. The company consisted of . . . four actors . . . one of whom was also the director. Nothing else. No one else. No lighting man. No stage manager. No set designer. And no Boy. Understandably, no one in a prison population raises his hand to be a boy. I came to understand this later. I came to understand, later, that at other tour stops, a boy was found in . . . the local church group or a nearby school or a pub, a potboy. I am making this part up. I don’t really know where the other boys came from. At ten, I was all boy, if rather slight and small—not one of my father’s favorites. He preferred the company of real men, or his idea of real men. I mean, even his toy soldiers made the grade. He played with them at night. If play is the right word. In his study, drinking his gin and storming his . . . Thermopylae. Small lead men in lead skirts with drawn daggers brandishing shields. I would listen through the door and hear only silence . . . broken by the hollow clack of his trench lighter . . . snapping open and then the pop of the wheel striking the flint. As he inhaled, the silence hollowed even more. As if he was . . . swallowing the silence, feeding on it. [Long pause.] I was scared of the ball, all balls. I was scared of all balls regardless of size. I tried them all. Ducking away from those soccer balls, light but walloping. And the heavy rugby balls, like bloody sodden roasts, and then, but once, with the prettily stitched cricket ball I said enough to the master, and paid for it with my behind. Whereafter he attempted to teach me to address a teeny golf ball and I could not make contact in any sense of the word so that was too much an embarrassment . . . at Stafford Castle, in the wind. I could hear his shouts. In the wind. The only balls I did like were billiard balls, let me say that. Cool to the hand, the little groups of them . . . brightly colored, distinguished by solids and stripes, each with its own color and number, and all to one master, the creamy white cue ball. The slate-grounded green felt, the beveled, forgiving bumpers and the six holes would always, in the end, return . . . unharmed . . . what they had taken under . . . with a sound like . . . soft thunder, ending in a clack. Father wouldn’t allow me near the pool table, however, which dominated his study like an indoor Panzer. “It’s a man’s game,” he said. “You might rip the felt.”