“In the next sentence,” he said, “you’re literally right. In French I spelled it out, said ‘travelling expenses’ all right. But maybe we can make it a bit tighter here, just say something like, ‘it was to get me going’ or ‘it was to get me started.’ Do you like either of them at all? ...”
On we went, phrase by phrase, Beckett praising my translation as prelude to shaping it to what he really wanted, reworking here a word, there a whole sentence, chipping away, tightening, shortening, always finding the better word if one existed, exchanging the ordinary for the poetic, until the work sang. Never, I am sure, to his satisfaction, but certainly to my ear. Under Beckett’s tireless wand that opening passage soon became:
They clothed me and gave me money. I knew what the money was for, it was to get me started. When it was gone I would have to get more, if I wanted to go on.
During those long but edifying sessions, there were low moments and high, but for Beckett, faced with going back over a text he had left behind some years before, from which he had progressed to other levels and other considerations, it was too often painful. Finally, in response to one particularly long moment of despair, I blurted, “But Mr. Beckett. You’re crazy! Don’t you realize who you are? Why . . . you’re a thousand times more important than . . . than Albert Camus, for example!” Searching for superlatives, I had grasped at this French writer who, at least at the time, was world famous. Camus had not yet won the Nobel Prize, but he was clearly headed for it, and readers and critics alike clamored for each new work, a response in total contrast to the virtual silence that greeted, and had always greeted, each new Beckett publication.
At that youthfully enthusiastic but obviously outlandish declaration, Beckett gazed compassionately across the table, his gaunt, hawklike features mirroring a response midway between disbelief and pity. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Dick,” he shook his head sadly. “No one’s interested in this . . . this rubbish,” and he gestured contemptuously toward the untidy pile of manuscript pages on the table beside him. “Camus!” He laughed. “Why, Camus is known even on the moon!”
I took that bit of hyperbole as a statement not necessarily of admiration but of simple fact. “Wait,” I remember admonishing, “just wait.” For if there was one conviction I had held unfailingly since my first encounter with Beckett’s work, it was that, sooner or later, the world would catch up and give proper recognition to Samuel Beckett. As he shook his head slightly, doubtless thinking me but a step or two from Saint-Anne’s, the local loony bin, I remember thinking: “It’s true. He doesn’t believe. He really is convinced he’ll go on writing, completely unrecognized, till the end of his days.”
And yet it was not as though Beckett’s assessment was based solely on his own predilection for pessimism. After all, the man had been writing since he was twenty-two or -three, and here he was, pushing fifty, with no more than a handful of faithful friends and fanatics caring about his work. What, in fact, had he accomplished after more than twenty years of effort?
Following his 1929 contribution to Our Exagmination . . ., that laudatory harbinger of Finnegans Wake, and his co-translation into French of the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section of that same work the following year, Beckett published, also in 1930, a long, original poem, Whoroscope, a ninety-eight-line work whose appended explanatory notes exceeded even those with which T. S. Eliot had, eight years before, adorned The Waste Land. A year later he published a monograph on Proust which, while brief and often youthfully iconoclastic, contains pages of brilliance and originality which, to me, revealed more about Proust, or at least certain facets of Proust, than did far longer and weightier tomes read years later. The 1932 harvest is relatively meager: a segment of the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women —still unpublished—printed in transition No. 21, in March of that year; and, in December, a story, “Dante and the Lobster,” printed in Edward Titus’s This Quarter. In addition, some splendid translations of poems by André Breton, Paul Eluard, and René Crevel, also in This Quarter.
Before the end of 1932, Beckett had apparently finished Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and was looking for a publisher. But in vain. He resumed his efforts on that score in a letter to George Reavey in Paris—Beckett was back living in Dublin by then—dated October 8, 1932:
The novel doesn’t go. Shatton and Windup thought it was wonderful, but they couldn’t, they simply could not. The Hogarth Private Lunatic Asylum rejected it the way Punch would. Cape was écoeuré in pipe and cardigan and his aberdeen terrier agreed with him. Grayson has lost it or cleaned himself with it. Kick his balls off. They are all over 66 Curzon St. W. 1.
I’ll be here till I die, creeping along genteel roads on a stranger’s bike.
One notes, with astonishment, that last, prophetic sentence, for though Beckett was soon to leave his native Ireland forever, he, like Joyce before him, in a very basic sense never left it; rather he took it with him. How many Beckett characters spend their nov-elistic lives “creeping along genteel roads,” wandering over those “fields and hedges” outside Dublin that Beckett knew so well and that he had wandered so many times alone, and as a young man with his father? The prophecy is complete, in fact, even down to the recurrent “bike” with which so many Beckett heroes cope— riding is generally beyond their dimming strength—in work after work.
In such a letter, too, one sees, more clearly than in a good deal of the early fiction, that side of Beckett which, when it finds its ease, will produce those startling, totally original works of the forties and fifties: the mordant, earthy humor which, in the works of his youth, is often overwhelmed by considerations of Art and technical experimentation.
In 1933, following the sudden death of his father in early summer, Beckett moved to London, there to pursue, with the help of a very modest inheritance, his literary career. Chatto and Windus—the “Shatton and Windup” who had a year before turned down Dream of Fair to Middling Women —partly redeemed themselves by contracting to publish Beckett’s collection of short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks. While publication did not garner him instant recognition, there were several reviews, and notably a very favorable notice in The Bookman, on the basis of which the magazine commissioned him to write several reviews for them, including critical assessments of Dante, Sean O’Casey, and Ezra Pound. The Bookman also published, in their August, 1934, issue, a Beckett short story entitled “A Case in a Thousand.”
Beckett lived in London until the end of 1935, and despite the appearance of occasional poems and pieces, progress seemed slow. It was, as Beckett remarked to John Fletcher, a bad time “in every way, psychologically, financially. ...” The sole light in the darkness was the publication, in the autumn of 1935, of a volume of poems, thanks again to the enterprise of his friend George Reavey. At first Beckett contemplated calling the collection simply Poems (as, later, there would be a theatrical work called, simply, Play), but later he decided the title was too pretentious! In a letter to Reavey dated May 23, 1935, written from London, Beckett notes: “Not Poems, after all, but Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates. C’est plus modeste.” Thirteen poems in all, of greatly varying length, published in an edition of 200, in a plain “putty-colored” wrapper.*
The next two years were Wanderjahre for Beckett, with the points of rest between journeys London, Dublin, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden. . . . He worked sometimes during that period on a play about Samuel Johnson—his first known foray into the theater—but could never get it right, or to his satisfaction, and he jettisoned the manuscript. The other work was Murphy, the precise date of whose composition remains somewhat of a mystery: some critics claim it was written between 1933 and 1935, others say it was done in 1934; still others assert it was conceived in London but actually written between the end of 1935 and late 1936, in Dublin. In any case, the author was hoping that, through its publication, his stagnating literary career might be revived. Reavey began circulating the manuscript, on both sides of the Atlantic, and rejections flowed back with alarm
ing regularity. Virtually every British publisher rejected it. In the United States, Simon & Schuster, which had written evincing interest in Beckett’s work, had first crack, and were presumably baffled. An editor at Houghton Mifflin went so far as to suggest that, if the novel were radically cut and surgically mended in about a dozen places, there might be hope for it. Viking, perhaps through Joyce, who genuinely liked the work, considered it, and politely declined. (Beckett, sensitive to the possibility that Viking might be swayed by Joyce’s recommendation, asked Reavey to make sure that Joyce “not move in.” However badly he wanted the book published in America, he wanted it published on its own merits.) When in midsummer of 1937 Doubleday-Doran turned Murphy down, Beckett reacted in verse, in a letter to Reavey dated August 6:
Oh Doubleday Doran
Less Oxy than moron
You’ve a mind like a whore on
The Way to Bundoran.
Finally, however, through the help and recommendation of Herbert Read, the firm of Routledge & Son, Ltd., reversed the trend and decided to take on the novel. The author received an advance of £25 which, if it seems trifling by today’s standards, was not all that small in the 1930s, for literary novels and works which the publishers judged—rightly or wrongly—as not “immediately remunerative.”
The book finally appeared in 1938, and although one can say that Beckett was far more fortunate in the timing of its publication than were his compatriots James Joyce and Flann O’Brien, both of whom published novels the following year—Joyce’s Finnegans Wake appeared in May, 1939, and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds on September 3, just as Germany was invading Poland—it was hardly to be expected that an abstruse albeit comic novel dealing with a number of basic philosophical problems would make much of an impact on the world. History was moving in inexorably, and a whole new problem was posed almost overnight: survival.
When war finally did break out, Beckett was back in Dublin visiting his mother. But rather than wait to see how events would turn, he hurried back to Paris—after years of nomadlike hotel living he had, in 1938, found a small apartment in the somewhat remote 15th arrondissement—apparently preferring, as he declared later to Israel Shenker, “Paris in war to Ireland in peace.” If the remark seems glib, the fact is that Beckett, I would strongly suspect, had, after years of wandering, finally found a home.
In the early months of the war, Beckett spent much time with Joyce, who considered the holocaust a world-wide vendetta against him, or rather against the just-published Finnegans Wake. After the Joyces moved south in December, Beckett remained behind, with very limited funds and little possibility of earning any. He had, with the help of Alfred Péron, already begun to translate Murphy into French, and as he reported to Reavey in December, 1939:
I . . . scarcely go out. I have been working hard at Murphy and only four chapters to translate. Another month should see it finished . . . and then I think it as a French roman at last.
Six months later, as the Germans routed the French and Belgian armies and moved steadily on Paris, Beckett joined the exodus south, stopping to see the Joyces at St.-Gerand-le-Puy. It was to be the last time he would ever see the author of Ulysses. Beckett made it to the southern coast of France, mostly by foot, from where, after a month or so, he made his way back to occupied Paris, doubtless for the same reasons that had prompted his return to Paris from Dublin the year before. Shortly thereafter, Beckett joined the Resistance. Although he evaded most questions about his wartime activities in the Underground, and tended to dismiss them as “boyscout stuff,” he was in fact an active member of a group whose code name was GLORIA S.M.H., of whose eighty agents only twenty—including Beckett—survived. During the first year or two of the war, he also finished translating Murphy into French, though the possibility of publication was obviously almost nil.
Beckett’s friend Alfred Péron, with whom he had collaborated in translating the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” episode into French, was also a member of the GLORIA group. On the morning of August 16, 1942, Péron was arrested by the Gestapo and, as Lawrence Harvey reports, Péron’s wife sent Beckett a telegram which, had it been detected by the proper authorities, in itself could have done the author in: “Alfred arrested by the Gestapo. Please take necessary steps to correct the error.” Beckett, rightly, took the telegram, which arrived at 11 A.M., as a warning. By mid-afternoon he was on the move. For the balance of the month and throughout September he moved from place to place in Paris until, by mid-October, he and his friend Suzanne Dumesnil, who would later become his wife, had procured false papers and crossed over into the unoccupied zone. They settled in the town of Roussillon in the Vaucluse—Sade country—and for the next three years eked out a living by performing whatever odd jobs could bring in a little food or money.
It was during this bleak time that Beckett also wrote Watt, from 1942 to 1944. Richard Coe calls it “one of the most difficult and at the same time brilliant novels that Beckett has written.” Beckett himself says that it was “only a game, a means of staying sane, a way to keep my hand in.” The apparent contradiction is only superficial. For the author it doubtless was therapeutic, an exercise to keep the mind trim and alert, as exercise would an athlete deprived of his normal environment. There is, in the endless permutations and mathematical explorations, a gamelike quality. But there is also notable progress artistically from Murphy to Watt. The language, less mannered though still shot through with echoes of the academic—Beckett was too much the scholar, albeit a defrocked one, to give it up entirely— is closer to that which in the coming decades would become so clearly and uniquely his own stark poetry, with the infallible rhythms and feeling for language. Here too the construction is much more complex and musical than in any of the earlier work. Watt is divided into four parts, but not in the order one might expect:
As Watt told the beginning of his story, not first, but second, so not fourth, but third, now he told its end. Two, one, four, three, that was the order in which Watt told his story. Heroic quatrains are not otherwise elaborated.
It is a circular construction, with the protagonist departing on some unknown voyage or quest as the novel opens and, as it ends, buying a ticket for “the end of the line.” Nothing is changed, all is changed. But in between, Watt’s mind, which one critic has labeled the true hero of the novel, has undergone all manner of change, during his service on the ground floor of Mr. Knott’s house, then on the floor above, and, finally, at the end of the line, where in an asylum the broken mind attempts to reconstruct the details of the voyage to a fellow inmate, Sam, who records the unclear events as best he can. Lacunae and uncertainties abound, as well they might, for
it is so difficult, with a long story like the story that Watt told, even when one is most careful to note down all at the time, in one’s little notebook, not to leave out some of the things that were told, and not to foist in other things that were never told, never told at all.
What is more, both Sam and Watt are inmates in a mental asylum, presumably for cause, at least by outside standards, which increases the chance of inaccuracy, either in the telling or the recording, by a factor each will have to judge for himself. Add to that the fact that Sam and Watt get together only on days when the weather is right for both, and as Sam likes the sun and Watt the wind, few and far between are the times they meet. Thus the narrative Sam assembles takes him several years.
The opening pages of Watt, some of the most humorous that Beckett wrote—and so visual they clearly presaged the theater yet to come—rival the best and most effective sections of Murphy. But soon, in among the general hilarity and mad antics, intimations of darkness and pain appear, with ever-increasing force. If till now in Beckett’s work the mask of comedy has prevailed, with the pedant’s pointer in hand, that of tragedy impinges from here on, by slow degrees. With Watt, there is a discernible change, both in tone and content, doubtless due, in whole or in part, to the painful events to which Beckett was witness.
If the setting of Watt
is still recognizably real and Irish— trains and trams; benches and canals; ditches filled with long wild grass, foxgloves, and hyssop; porters with milk cans and station-masters with keys—elements of mystery, imponderables, intrude into the everyday, rational world wherein, with bags in hand, Watt sets out on his journey. What begins as a straightforward, third-person account in the style of Murphy soon moves to other levels, other concerns. If what Murphy sought, and ultimately found, was the peace of nonbeing, from this point on Beckett’s characters—in stories, novels, and plays—are all errant pilgrims, in search of a meaning which, like the ultimate center of the circle, constantly eludes them. Watt is the first in that unforgettable gallery of willful wanderers who, by their very impotence and lack of success, touch and move us as few figures in modern literature ever have.
At the end of Watt, it might be noted, Beckett has offered Addenda of “unincorporated” material which offer further insights and possibilities (“change all the names”) and which could have prolonged the novel, if not indefinitely, at least well beyond its present length. Beckett’s footnote—a sure sign of the unrepentant scholar—to the Addenda reads: “The following precious and illuminating material should be carefully studied. Only fatigue and disgust prevent its incorporation.” The attitude is typical. Yet how else is one to deal with the cul-de-sac into which the word and world have driven us? Watt, notes Michael Robinson, is “the suffering Cartesian condemned to define the universe in rational terms. However, Watt’s only aid in the task of rendering phenomena acceptable to the mind is language: Watt is the opening of Beckett’s struggle to subdue language into revealing both the instantaneous and the verifiably true.”
When the war ended Beckett was approaching forty. As soon as he was able, he went back to Ireland to visit his mother, stopping on his way to leave his only copy of Watt with Reavey, who was still acting as his agent. Watt began to make the rounds of the English publishers, much as Murphy had almost a decade before, and with similar results. If Murphy had been hardly the kind of reading the public wanted as war clouds gathered, so Watt seemed hardly the kind of novel publishers were interested in as the clouds lifted. After about three years of trying, Reavey gave up and, at Beckett’s request, returned the manuscript to him in Paris. Given all the ground it had covered in its various submissions, and the fact that it was an only copy, the miracle is that the typescript survived until it was finally published in 1953, by us “Merlin juveniles.”
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