I can’t go on, I’ll go on

by Richard W. Seaver

Papa! they said, with one voice or nearly.

  Good evening, my children, said Mercier, get along with you now.

  But they did not get along with them, no, but stood their ground, their little clasped hands lightly swinging back and forth. Finally the little girl drew hers away and advanced towards him they had addressed as papa. She stretched out her little arms towards him, as if to invite a kiss, or at least a caress. The little boy followed suit, with visible misgiving. Mercier raised his foot and dashed it against the pavement. Be off with you! he cried. He bore down on them, wildly gesturing and his face contorted. The children backed away to the sidewalk and there stood still again. Fuck off out of here! screamed Mercier. He flew at them in a fury and they took to their heels. But soon they halted and looked back. What they saw then must have impressed them strongly, for they ran on and bolted down the first side-street. As for the unfortunate Mercier, satisfied after a few minutes of fuming tenterhooks that the danger was past, he returned dripping to the archway and resumed his reflections, if not at the point where they had been interrupted, at least at one near by.

  Mercier’s reflections were peculiar in this, that the same swell and surge swept through them all and cast the mind away, no matter where it embarked, on the same rocks invariably. They were perhaps not so much reflections as a dark torrent of brooding where past and future merged in a single flood and closed, over a present for ever absent. Ah well.

  Here, said Camier, I hope you haven’t been fretting.

  Mercier extracted the cake from its paper wrapping and placed it on the palm of his hand. He bent forward and down till his nose was almost touching it and the eyes not far behind. He darted towards Camier, while still in this position, a sidelong look full of mistrust.

  A cream horn, said Camier, the best I could find.

  Mercier, still bent double, moved forward to the verge of the archway, where the light was better, and examined the cake again.

  It’s full of cream, said Camier.

  Mercier slowly clenched his fist and the cake gushed between his fingers. The staring eyes filled with tears. Camier advanced to get a better view. The tears flowed, overflowed, all down the furrowed cheeks and vanished in the beard. The face remained unmoved. The eyes, still streaming and no doubt blinded, seemed intent on some object stirring on the ground.

  If you didn’t want it, said Camier, you had better given it to a dog, or to a child.

  I’m in tears, said Mercier, don’t intrude.

  When the flow stopped Camier said:

  Let me offer you our handkerchief.

  There are days, said Mercier, one is born every minute. Then the world is full of shitty little Merciers. It’s hell. Oh but to cease!

  Enough, said Camier. You look like a capital S. Ninety if a day.

  Would I were, said Mercier. He wiped his hand on the seat of his trousers. He said, I’ll start crawling any minute.

  I’m off, said Camier.

  Leaving me to my fate, said Mercier. I knew it.

  You know my little ways, said Camier.

  No, said Mercier, but I was counting on your affection to help me serve my time.

  I can help you, said Camier, I can’t resurrect you.

  Take me by the hand, said Mercier, and lead me far away from here. I’ll trot along at your side like a little puppy dog, or a tiny tot. And the day will come——.

  A terrible screech of brakes rent the air, followed by a scream and a resounding crash. Mercier and Camier made a rush (after a moment’s hesitation) for the open street and were rewarded by the vision, soon hidden by a concourse of gapers, of a big fat woman writhing feebly on the ground. The disorder of her dress revealed an amazing mass of billowing underclothes, originally white in colour. Her lifeblood, streaming from one or more wounds, had already reached the gutter.

  Ah, said Mercier, that’s what I needed, I feel a new man already.

  He was in fact transfigured.

  Let this be a lesson to us, said Camier.

  Meaning? said Mercier.

  Never to despair, said Camier, or lose our faith in life.

  Ah, said Mercier with relief, I was afraid you meant something else.

  As they went their way an ambulance passed, speeding towards the scene of the mishap.

  I beg your pardon? said Camier.

  A crying shame, said Mercier.

  I don’t follow you, said Camier.

  A six cylinder, said Mercier.

  And what of it? said Camier.

  And they talk about the petrol shortage, said Mercier.

  There are perhaps more victims than one, said Camier.

  It might be an infant child, said Mercier, for all they care.

  The rain was falling gently, as from the fine rose of a watering pot. Mercier advanced with upturned face. Now and then he wiped it, with his free hand. He had not had a wash for some time.

  Summary

  of two preceding chapters

  I

  Outset.

  Meeting of Mercier and Camier.

  Saint Ruth Square.

  The beech.

  The rain.

  The shelter.

  The dogs.

  Distress of Camier.

  The ranger.

  The bicycle.

  Words with the ranger.

  Mercier and Camier confer.

  Results of this conference.

  Bright too late.

  The bell.

  Mercier and Camier set out.

  II

  The town at twilight.

  Mercier and Camier on the way to the canal.

  Vision of the canal.

  The bicycle.

  First bar.

  Mercier and Camier confer.

  Results of this conference.

  Mercier and Camier on the way to Helen’s.

  Doubts as to the way.

  The umbrella.

  The man in the frockcoat.

  The rain.

  Camier hears singing.

  Mercier and Camier run.

  The umbrella.

  The downpour.

  Distress of Mercier.

  At Helen’s.

  The cockatoo.

  The Kidderminster.

  The second day.

  The rain.

  Disappearance of sack, bicycle and umbrella.

  The archway.

  Mercier and Camier confer.

  Results of this conference.

  Departure of Camier.

  Distress of Mercier.

  Mercier and the children.

  Return of Camier.

  The cream horn.

  Distress of Mercier.

  The fat woman.

  Mercier and Camier depart.

  Rain on Mercier’s face.

  The Expelled

  Beckett once told John Fletcher that the three 1946 stories later published together in volume form—“The Expelled,” “The Calmative,” and “The End”—might also have been called “Prime,” “Death,” and “Limbo.” I have read them a dozen times; singly and collectively they rank, in my opinion, among the finest short works of fiction of the twentieth century. They are so taut, both in language and concept, so funny and yet so incredibly sad, so beautifully conceived and adapted to the exigencies of the short-story form, that I marvel at them continually, as one might marvel at three near-perfect gems.

  All three are first-person narratives; the narrator/intruder/ironic commentator of earlier Beckett fiction has withered away and disappeared, leaving only three nameless protagonists to tell their own tales as best they can. I think, perhaps wrongly, of all three as one and the same; only the situations differ.

  In the first a man is thrown out of a house where he lived, expelled for some unexplained reasons, and the story relates his efforts to find new lodgings. He falls in with a cabman he has engaged to help him in his search, the cabman befriends him and takes him home to his house, or rather his stable, whence the narrator makes his escape at first light.
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  “The Calmative” begins with the unforgettable line, “I don’t know when I died,” and from that post-mortem point the nameless narrator, who judges that he died old—“about ninety years old, and what years, and that my body bore it out, from head to foot”—decides to fill the void by telling himself a story.

  It is his own story he tells, of a hopeless voyage through forest and town, until he can go no more and falls, “first to his knees, as cattle do, then on my face,” in the midst of a throng who ignore him but, politely, are careful not to walk on him. The temptation to remain on the friendly stone (“well, indifferent”) is strong, but even in death the calm which the mind desires refuses to come, and he is, at the last, up on his feet, heading west, since the sea lies east.

  The hero of “The End” is tossed out of what appears to be a home, perhaps an asylum, in any event a refuge of some sort, and spends the rest of the story searching for another shelter, alternately finding momentary relief in a cave, a cabin in the mountains, a shed, and finally in an abandoned boat to which he affixes a casketlike lid. There, in his makeshift tomb, he conjures up a liquid world on which to float the boat, creates a vision filled with calm memories of his father and childhood, and prepares to drown by swallowing his calmative. Then:

  The sea, the sky, the mountains and the islands closed in and crushed me in a mighty systole, then scattered to the uttermost confines of space. The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.

  It is in these stories Beckett’s prose assumes a new leanness even as the vision broadens and darkens. As Beckett has found a new language, so he has found his true landscape within the confines of his own mind. Henceforth narrator and protagonist become one, that extraordinary “I” whose name will be, alternately, Molloy or Malone or the Unnamable, Didi or Gogo or Krapp, and who over the next thirty years will tell some of the most powerful, moving, and heart-rending stories ever told.

  There were not many steps. I had counted them a thousand times, both going up and coming down, but the figure has gone from my mind. I have never known whether you should say one with your foot on the sidewalk, two with the following foot on the first step, and so on, or whether the sidewalk shouldn’t count. At the top of the steps I fell foul of the same dilemma. In the other direction, I mean from top to bottom, it was the same, the word is not too strong. I did not know where to begin nor where to end, that’s the truth of the matter. I arrived therefore at three totally different figures, without ever knowing which of them was right. And when I say that the figure has gone from my mind, I mean that none of the three figures is with me any more, in my mind. It is true that if I were to find, in my mind, where it is certainly to be found, one of these figures, I would find it and it alone, without being able to deduce from it the other two. And even were I to recover two, I would not know the third. No, I would have to find all three, in my mind, in order to know all three. Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little. That is to say, you must think of them for a while, a good while, every day several times a day, until they sink forever in the mud. That’s an order.

  After all it is not the number of steps that matters. The important thing to remember is that there were not many, and that I have remembered. Even for the child there were not many, compared to other steps he knew, from seeing them every day, from going up and coming down, and from playing on them at knuckle-bones and other games the very names of which he has forgotten. What must it have been like then for the man I had overgrown into?

  The fall was therefore not serious. Even as I fell I heard the door slam, which brought me a little comfort, in the midst of my fall. For that meant they were not pursuing me down into the street, with a stick, to beat me in full view of the passers-by. For if that had been their intention they would not have shut the door, but left it open, so that the persons assembled in the vestibule might enjoy my chastisement and be edified. So, for once, they had confined themselves to throwing me out and no more about it. I had time, before coming to rest in the gutter, to conclude this piece of reasoning.

  Under these circumstances nothing compelled me to get up immediately. I rested my elbow on the sidewalk, funny the things you remember, settled my ear in the cup of my hand and began to reflect on my situation, notwithstanding its familiarity. But the sound, fainter but unmistakable, of the door slammed again, roused me from my reverie, in which already a whole landscape was taking form, charming with hawthorn and wild roses, most dreamlike, and made me look up in alarm, my hands flat on the sidewalk and my legs braced for flight. But it was merely my hat sailing towards me through the air, rotating as it came. I caught it and put it on. They were most correct, according to their god. They could have kept this hat, but it was not theirs, it was mine, so they gave it back to me. But the spell was broken.

  How describe this hat? And why? When my head had attained I shall not say its definitive but its maximum dimensions, my father said to me, Come, son, we are going to buy your hat, as though it had pre-existed from time immemorial in a pre-established place. He went straight to the hat. I personally had no say in the matter, nor had the hatter. I have often wondered if my father’s purpose was not to humiliate me, if he was not jealous of me who was young and handsome, fresh at least, while he was already old and all bloated and purple. It was forbidden me, from that day forth, to go out bareheaded, my pretty brown hair blowing in the wind. Sometimes, in a secluded street, I took it off and held it in my hand, but trembling. I was required to brush it morning and evening. Boys my age with whom, in spite of everything, I was obliged to mix occasionally, mocked me. But I said to myself, It is not really the hat, they simply make merry at the hat because it is a little more glaring than the rest, for they have no finesse. I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself. But perhaps they were simply being kind, like those who make game of the hunchback’s big nose. When my father died I could have got rid of this hat, there was nothing more to prevent me, but not I. But how describe it? Some other time, some other time.

  I got up and set off. I forget how old I can have been. In what had just happened to me there was nothing in the least memorable. It was neither the cradle nor the grave of anything whatever. Or rather it resembled so many other cradles, so many other graves, that I’m lost. But I don’t believe I exaggerate when I say that I was in the prime of life, what I believe is called the full possession of one’s faculties. Ah yes, them I possessed all right. I crossed the street and turned back towards the house that had just ejected me, I who never turned back when leaving. How beautiful it was! There were geraniums in the windows. I have brooded over geraniums for years. Geraniums are artful customers, but in the end I was able to do what I liked with them. I have always greatly admired the door of this house, up on top of its little flight of steps. How describe it? It was a massive green door, encased in summer in a kind of green and white striped housing, with a hole for the thunderous wrought-iron knocker and a slit for letters, this latter closed to dust, flies and tits by a brass flap fitted with springs. So much for that description. The door was set between two pillars of the same colour, the bell being on that to the right. The curtains were in unexceptionable taste. Even the smoke rising from one of the chimney-pots seemed to spread and vanish in the air more sorrowful than the neighbours’, and bluer. I looked up at the third and last floor and saw my window outrageously open. A thorough cleaning was in full swing. In a few hours they would close the window, draw the curtains and spray the whole place with disinfectant. I knew them. I would have gladly died in that house. In a sort of vision I saw the door open and my feet come out.

  I wasn’t afraid to look, for I knew they were not spying on me from behind
the curtains, as they could have done if they had wished. But I knew them. They had all gone back into their dens and resumed their occupations.

  And yet I had done them no harm.

  I did not know the town very well, scene of my birth and of my first steps in this world, and then of all the others, so many that I thought all trace of me was lost, but I was wrong. I went out so little! Now and then I would go to the window, part the curtains and look out. But then I hastened back to the depths of the room, where the bed was. I felt ill at ease with all this air about me, lost before the confusion of innumerable prospects. But I still knew how to act at this period, when it was absolutely necessary. But first I raised my eyes to the sky, whence cometh our help, where there are no roads, where you wander freely, as in a desert, and where nothing obstructs your vision, wherever you turn your eyes, but the limits of vision itself. It gets monotonous in the end. When I was younger I thought life would be good in the middle of a plain, and I went to the Lüneburg heath. With the plain in my head I went to the heath. There were other heaths far less remote, but a voice kept saying to me, It’s the Lüneburg heath you need. The element lüne must have had something to do with it. As it turned out the Lüneburg heath was most unsatisfactory, most unsatisfactory. I came home disappointed, and at the same time relieved. Yes, I don’t know why, but I have never been disappointed, and I often was in the early days, without feeling at the same time, or a moment later, an undeniable relief.

  I set off. What a gait. Stiffness of the lower limbs, as if nature had denied me knees, extraordinary splaying of the feet to right and left of the line of march. The trunk, on the contrary, as if by the effect of a compensatory mechanism, was as flabby as an old ragbag, tossing wildly to the unpredictable jolts of the pelvis. I have often tried to correct these defects, to stiffen my bust, flex my knees and walk with my feet in front of one another, for I had at least five or six, but it always ended in the same way, I mean with a’loss of equilibrium, followed by a fall. A man must walk without paying attention to what he’s doing, as he sighs, and when I walked without paying attention to what I was doing I walked in the way I have just described, and when I began to pay attention I managed a few steps of creditable execution and then fell. I decided therefore to be myself. This carriage is due, in my opinion, in part at least, to a certain leaning from which I have never been able to free myself completely and which left its stamp, as was only to be expected, on my impressionable years, those which govern the fabrication of character, I refer to the period which extends, as far as the eye can see, from the first totterings, behind a chair, to the third form, in which I concluded my studies. I had then the deplorable habit, having pissed in my trousers, or shat there, which I did fairly regularly early in the morning, about ten or half past ten, of persisting in going on and finishing my day as if nothing had happened. The very idea of changing my trousers, or of confiding in mother, who goodness knows asked nothing better than to help me, was unbearable, I don’t know why, and till bedtime I dragged on with burning and stinking between my little thighs, or sticking to my bottom, the result of my incontinence. Whence this wary way of walking, with the legs stiff and wide apart, and this desperate rolling of the bust, no doubt intended to put people off the scent, to make them think I was full of gaiety and high spirits, without a care in the world, and to lend plausibility to my explanations concerning my nether rigidity, which I ascribed to hereditary rheumatism. My youthful ardour, in so far as I had any, spent itself in this effort, I became sour and mistrustful, a little before my time, in love with hiding and the prone position. Poor juvenile solutions, explaining nothing. No need then for caution, we may reason on to our heart’s content, the fog won’t lift.