If, as Jean Anouilh suggested, Waiting for Godot is Pascal’s Thoughts as played by the Fratellini clowns, here the Becket-tian clowns have been brought low. In a sense, its three parts are Beckett’s sequel to the Trilogy. The protagonist is one Pim, toward whom, in Part I, the narrator is crawling; in Part II he is with Pim; Part III relates the journey away from Pim. Set in the primeval mud, How It Is ponders the eternal questions present in all Beckett works, but from the perspective of a nether world; pondering not only “how it is” but “how it was,” once, in a “life said to have been mine above in the light before I fell.”
After that, only fragments. In 1965 and 1966 four short works were written, all in French:
—Imagination morte imaginez
—Assez
—Bing
—Le Depeupleur
translated, respectively, as Imagination Dead Imagine, Enough, Ping, and The Lost Ones. It was three years before another short work—only twenty-four paragraphs in all, ranging in length from three to seven sentences each—appeared, also composed in French, Sans, which the author rendered in English as Lessness, rather than the more final, and more literal, Without.
In all probability, Beckett judged these later fictions harshly, and indeed, insofar as some of them were perhaps conceived as larger or more ambitious works, they represent “failures.” But they can be so measured only in terms of the absolutes by which Samuel Beckett judged his own work.
Cosmography
Since Niklaus Gessner’s 1957 doctoral dissertation on Beckett—the first full-length study of his work—there has been, during the intervening decades, a flood of criticism, probing not only the real meaning, but the sources, the influences, the symbols, the style, the method, ad infinitum, and—to Beckett no doubt—ad nauseum. If the present rate of exegesis continues— and there is no sign of its abating—it has been calculated that by the end of the century Beckett’s oeuvre will have been the subject of more scholarly probes than that of any other writer in the history of the English language with the exception of Shakespeare. And even Will may soon have to move over. A forbidding prospect. And yet, in all fairness, not altogether incomprehensible, for in all Beckett’s work there is a richness, an abundance of possibilities, a willful ambiguity which seems to cry for interpretation.
I have no intention of adding to the existing mass of exegetical material by voicing my own opinions about the works you are about to read. All of Beckett can be read without a Virgil at the elbow to guide and interpret. If a reader is familiar with Dante and Descartes, he will doubtless perceive resonances that one unfamiliar with those two authors will not. If one knows, for example, of Dante’s Belacqua, that Florentine lute-maker who was so lazy when alive that he failed to repent and make peace with God until the very last moment, and was therefore condemned to spend the equivalent of his earthly lifetime languishing in the shadow of a rock in Antepurgatory, one may appreciate Beckett’s Belacqua Shuah—a “sinfully ignorant” man “bogged in indolence, asking nothing better than to stay put”—all the more. But if one does not, the qualities of the latter-day Belacqua will still come through.
We could multiply such examples a hundredfold, for Samuel Beckett was both artist and artisan, a writer whose vision and inspiration, if one can use those weary terms, was matched by his craftsmanship. He was, too, a man of deep erudition, fluent in several languages, and the wealth of cross-linguistic references, the cognates and roots, the wordplays, the allusions—be they Biblical, historical, literary, or even internal (Molloy in the shadow of a rock, under which “I crouched like Belacqua, or Sordello, I forget which”)—all weave themselves effortlessly into the immense and marvelous tapestry of the work, from the earliest stories to the latest plays and short fiction. And the more a reader can seize and understand the several levels that often exist, the greater the pleasure. Still, one should be careful not to mistake the means for the end, and I maintain that to read Beckett with no advance preparation, no prior perusal of those who warn of the difficulties ahead or the dangers of missing the deeper meaning, is still the best approach. At the end of the Addenda to Watt is written, small but clear:
no symbols where none intended
Let us take the man at his word. In one of his letters to Alan Schneider, Beckett writes:
I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind. And to insist on the extreme simplicity of dramatic situation and issue. If that’s not enough for them, and it obviously isn’t, it’s plenty for us, and we have no elucidations to offer of mysteries that are all of their own making. My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin. . . .
The point to remember is that, with or without exegesis, Beckett is great fun. The danger is that if we overinterpret we’re liable to miss all the fun. For Beckett is one of the very few writers I have ever read who makes me laugh aloud, on almost every page, from work to work. That the laughter sometimes dies in the throat, that tears can well in close conjunction, is but further measure of his greatness.
Beckett’s decision to work “with impotence, ignorance, that zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable—as something incompatible with art” may have seemed a defeat initially, an admission that the “omniscience” and “omnipotence” which Joyce was striving toward were beyond his ken. And yet in the final analysis that terrain, hitherto ignored and unexplored, is precisely what gives his work its strength and universality. For in his dimming landscape, peopled with clowns and misfits, has-beens and ne’er-do-wells, the malformed and the deformed, those on the threshold of death or already on the other side (“I don’t remember when I died”), he has created a stark world far different from our own, hardly recognizable, a nether world, a purgatory, or perhaps Antepurgatory, having nothing whatsoever to do with us.
Our world.
RICHARD SEAVER
Part I
Early Works
(1929-1946)
Fiction
Dante and the Lobster
Nineteen thirty-two was an important year for Samuel Beckett. At the end of the preceding year he had, after teaching four terms at Trinity College, resigned his post, having decided for whatever reasons—the reports are conflicting— that teaching was not for him. In the summer of 1932 he went back to Paris and re-immersed himself in the teeming literary life of the period.
He moved into the Trianon Hotel on the rue de Vaugirard, and for several months wrote both poetry and prose, as well as translating several of the surrealist poets—Breton, Eluard, and Crevel among them. His short story “Sedendo and Quiescendo” appeared in Eugene Jolas’s transition; another short work of prose was published in The New Review; and, most important, “Dante and the Lobster” came out in Edward Titus’s This Quarter.
Several critics have tended to dismiss all the early Beckett as too “schoolish” and “self-conscious,” or quite simply too clearly under the inescapable influence of James Joyce. This story in itself suffices to refute that contention: while it is admittedly a harbinger of greater things to come, it stands by itself as a first-rate work of fiction. A. Alvarez, with whom I do not always agree on the subject of Beckett, is perfectly accurate in terming it “a minor masterpiece.” Like so many later Beckett-heroes yet unborn, the protagonist of “Dante and the Lobster,” Belacqua Shuah, named after Dante’s Belacqua, is more than vaguely reminiscent of Gon-charov’s Oblomov. He is afflicted with many of the ills, mental and physical, that will attend virtually all of Beckett’s subsequent heroes, from Watt to Molloy, from Mercier to Krapp, from Murphy to Malone. In its language “Dante” is simple and straightforward; in its attention to detail, exquisite; in the artist’s willful intrusion into the work (“Let us call it Winter, that dusk may fall now and a moon rise”), an anti-illusionist stance that will pervade all that follows; and in its conclu
ding lines a vision of both the terrain and the method that Beckett has taken as his own.
Two years after “Dante and the Lobster” first appeared, Belacqua’s adventures were further perpetuated in volume form with the appearance of More Pricks Than Kicks in 1934, a collection of ten stories of which “Dante and the Lobster” was the first.
IT was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first of the canti in the moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward. Blissful Beatrice was there, Dante also, and she explained the spots on the moon to him. She shewed him in the first place where he was at fault, then she put up her own explanation. She had it from God, therefore he could rely on its being accurate in every particular. All he had to do was to follow her step by step. Part one, the refutation, was plain sailing. She made her point clearly, she said what she had to say without fuss or loss of time. But part two, the demonstration, was so dense that Belacqua could not make head or tail of it. The disproof, the reproof, that was patent. But then came the proof, a rapid shorthand of the real facts, and Belacqua was bogged indeed. Bored also, impatient to get on to Piccarda. Still he pored over the enigma, he would not concede himself conquered, he would understand at least the meanings of the words, the order in which they were spoken and the nature of the satisfaction that they conferred on the misinformed poet, so that when they were ended he was refreshed and could raise his heavy head, intending to return thanks and make formal retraction of his old opinion.
He was still running his brain against this impenetrable passage when he heard midday strike. At once he switched his mind off its task. He scooped his fingers under the book and shovelled it back till it lay wholly on his palms. The Divine Comedy face upward on the lectern of his palms. Thus disposed he raised it under his nose and there he slammed it shut. He held it aloft for a time, squinting at it angrily, pressing the boards inwards with the heels of his hands. Then he laid it aside.
He leaned back in his chair to feel his mind subside and the itch of this mean quodlibet die down. Nothing could be done until his mind got better and was still, which gradually it did and was. Then he ventured to consider what he had to do next. There was always something that one had to do next. Three large obligations presented themselves. First lunch, then the lobster, then the Italian lesson. That would do to be going on with. After the Italian lesson he had no very clear idea. No doubt some niggling curriculum had been drawn up by someone for the late afternoon and evening, but he did not know what. In any case it did not matter. What did matter was: one, lunch; two, the lobster; three, the Italian lesson. That was more than enough to be going on with.
Lunch, to come off at all, was a very nice affair. If his lunch was to be enjoyable, and it could be very enjoyable indeed, he must be left in absolute tranquillity to prepare it. But if he were disturbed now, if some brisk tattler were to come bouncing in now big with a big idea or a petition, he might just as well not eat at all, for the food would turn to bitterness on his palate, or, worse again, taste of nothing. He must be left strictly alone, he must have complete quiet and privacy, to prepare the food for his lunch.
The first thing to do was to lock the door. Now nobody could come at him. He deployed an old Herald and smoothed it out on the table. The rather handsome face of McCabe the assassin stared up at him. Then he lit the gas-ring and unhooked the square flat toaster, asbestos grill, from its nail and set it precisely on the flame. He found he had to lower the flame. Toast must not on any account be done too rapidly. For bread to be toasted as it ought, through and through, it must be done on a mild steady flame. Otherwise you only charred the outside and left the pith as sodden as before. If there was one thing he abominated more than another it was to feel his teeth meet in a bathos of pith and dough. And it was so easy to do the thing properly. So, he thought, having regulated the flow and adjusted the grill, by the time I have the bread cut that will be just right. Now the long barrel-loaf came out of its biscuit-tin and had its end evened off on the face of McCabe. Two inexorable drives with the bread-saw and a pair of neat rounds of raw bread, the main elements of his meal, lay before him, awaiting his pleasure. The stump of the loaf went back into prison, the crumbs, as though there were no such thing as a sparrow in the wide world, were swept in a fever away, and the slices snatched up and carried to the grill. All these preliminaries were very hasty and impersonal.
It was now that real skill began to be required, it was at this point that the average person began to make a hash of the entire proceedings. He laid his cheek against the soft of the bread, it was spongy and warm, alive. But he would very soon take that plush feel off it, by God but he would very quickly take that fat white look off its face. He lowered the gas a suspicion and plaqued one flabby slab plump down on the glowing fabric, but very pat and precise, so that the whole resembled the Japanese flag. Then on top, there not being room for the two to do evenly side by side, and if you did not do them evenly you might just as well save yourself the trouble of doing them at all, the other round was set to warm. When the first candidate was done, which was only when it was black through and through, it changed places with its comrade, so that now it in its turn lay on top, done to a dead end, black and smoking, waiting till as much could be said of the other.
For the tiller of the field the thing was simple, he had it from his mother. The spots were Cain with his truss of thorns, dispossessed, cursed from the earth, fugitive and vagabond. The moon was that countenance fallen and branded, seared with the first stigma of God’s pity, that an outcast might not die quickly. It was a mix-up in the mind of the tiller, but that did not matter. It had been good enough for his mother, it was good enough for him.
Belacqua on his knees before the flame, poring over the grill, controlled every phase of the broiling. It took time, but if a thing was worth doing at all it was worth doing well, that was a true saying. Long before the end the room was full of smoke and the reek of burning. He switched off the gas, when all that human care and skill could do had been done, and restored the toaster to its nail. This was an act of dilapidation, for it seared a great weal in the paper. This was hooliganism pure and simple. What the hell did he care? Was it his wall? The same hopeless paper had been there fifty years. It was livid with age. It could not be disimproved.
Next a thick paste of Savora, salt and Cayenne on each round, well worked in while the pores were still open with the heat. No butter, God forbid, just a good foment of mustard and salt and pepper on each round. Butter was a blunder, it made the toast soggy. Buttered toast was all right for Senior Fellows and Salvationists, for such as had nothing but false teeth in their heads. It was no good at all to a fairly strong young rose like Belacqua. This meal that he was at such pains to make ready, he would devour it with a sense of rapture and victory, it would be like smiting the sledded Polacks on the ice. He would snap at it with closed eyes, he would gnash it into a pulp, he would vanquish it utterly with his fangs. Then the anguish of pungency, the pang of the spices, as each mouthful died, scorching his palate, bringing tears.
But he was not yet all set, there was yet much to be done. He had burnt his offering, he had not fully dressed it. Yes, he had put the horse behind the tumbrel.
He clapped the toasted rounds together, he brought them smartly together like cymbals, they clave the one to the other on the viscid salve of Savora. Then he wrapped them up for the time being in any old sheet of paper. Then he made himself ready for the road.
Now the great thing was to avoid being accosted. To be stopped at this stage and have conversational nuisance committed all over him would be a disaster. His whole being was straining forward towards the joy in store. If he were accosted now he might just as well fling his lunch into the gutter and walk straight back home. Sometimes his hunger, more of mind, I need scarcely say, than of body, for this meal amounted to such a frenzy that he would not have hesitated to strike any man rash enough to buttonhole and baulk him, he would have shouldered him out of his path without ceremony. Woe beti
de the meddler who crossed him when his mind was really set on this meal.
He threaded his way rapidly, his head bowed, through a familiar labyrinth of lanes and suddenly dived into a little family grocery. In the shop they were not surprised. Most days, about this hour, he shot in off the street in this way.
The slab of cheese was prepared. Separated since morning from the piece, it was only waiting for Belacqua to call and take it. Gorgonzola cheese. He knew a man who came from Gorgonzola, his name was Angelo. He had been born in Nice but all his youth had been spent in Gorgonzola. He knew where to look for it. Every day it was there, in the same corner, waiting to be called for. They were very decent obliging people.
He looked sceptically at the cut of cheese. He turned it over on its back to see was the other side any better. The other side was worse. They had laid it better side up, they had practised that little deception. Who shall blame them? He rubbed it. It was sweating. That was something. He stooped and smelt it. A faint fragrance of corruption. What good was that? He didn’t want fragrance, he wasn’t a bloody gourmet, he wanted a good stench. What he wanted was a good green stenching rotten lump of Gorgonzola cheese, alive, and by God he would have it.
He looked fiercely at the grocer.
I can’t go on, I’ll go on Page 5