Inner Workings

by J. M. Coetzee

  ALTHOUGH WATT, WRITTEN in English during the war years but published only in 1953, is a substantial presence in the Beckett canon, it can fairly be said that Beckett did not find himself as a writer until he switched to French and, in particular, until the years 1947–51, when in one of the great creative outpourings of modern times he wrote the prose fictions Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (‘the trilogy’), the play Waiting for Godot, and the thirteen Texts for Nothing.1

  These major works were preceded by four stories, also written in French, about one of which – ‘First Love’ – Beckett had his doubts. (He might also have queried the ending of ‘The End’: usually a master of restraint, Beckett indulges here in an uncharacteristic dip into plangency.)

  In these stories, in the novel Mercier and Camier (written in French in 1946), and in Watt, the outlines of the late-Beckettian world, and the procedures by which Beckettian fictions are generated, begin to become visible. It is a world of confined spaces or else bleak wastes, inhabited by asocial and indeed misanthropic monologuers helpless to terminate their monologue, tramps with failing bodies and never-sleeping minds condemned to a purgatorial treadmill on which they rehearse again and again the great themes of Western philosophy; a world that comes to us in the distinctive prose that Beckett, using French models in the main, though with Jonathan Swift whispering ghostly in his ear, was in the process of perfecting for himself, lyrical and mordant in equal measures.

  In Texts for Nothing (the French title Textes pour rien alludes to the orchestral conductor’s initial beat over silence) we see Beckett trying to work himself out of the corner into which he had painted himself in The Unnamable: if ‘the Unnamable’ is the verbal sign for whatever is left once every mark of identity has been stripped from the series of antecedent monologuers (Molloy, Malone, Mahood, Worm and the rest of them), who/what comes when the Unnamable is stripped too, and who after that successor, and so forth; and – more important – does the fiction itself not degenerate into a record of an increasingly mechanical stripping process?

  The problem of how to concoct some verbal formula that will pin down and annihilate the unnamable residue of the self and thus at last achieve silence is formulated in the sixth of the Texts. By the eleventh text, that quest for finality – hopeless, as we know and Beckett knows – is in the process of being absorbed into a kind of verbal music, and the fierce comic anguish that accompanied it is in the process of being aestheticised too. Such is the solution that Beckett seems to arrive at, a makeshift solution if ever there was one, to the question of what to do next.

  The next three decades will see Beckett, in his prose fictions, unable to move on – stalled, in fact, on the very question on what it means to move on, why one should move on, who it is that should do the moving on. A dribble of publications continues: brief quasi-musical compositions whose elements are phrases and sentences. Ping (1966) and Lessness (1969) – texts built up from repertoires of set phrases by combinatorial methods – represent the extreme of this tendency. Their music happens to be harsh; but as the fourth of the Fizzles of 1975 proves, Beckett’s compositions can also be of haunting verbal beauty.

  The narrative premise of The Unnamable, and of How It Is (1961), is held onto in these short fictions: a creature constituted of a voice attached, for reasons unknown, to some kind of body enclosed in a space more or less reminiscent of Dante’s Hell, is condemned for a certain length of time to speak, to try to make sense of things. It is a situation well described by Heidegger’s term Geworfenheit: being thrown without explanation into an existence governed by obscure rules. The Unnamable was sustained by its dark comic energy. But by the late 1960s that comic energy, with its power to surprise, had reduced itself to a relentless, arid self-laceration. The Lost Ones (1970) is hell to read and was perhaps hell to write too.

  Then, with Company (1980), Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), and Worstward Ho (1983), we emerge miraculously into clearer water. The prose is suddenly more expansive, even, by Beckettian standards, genial. Whereas in the preceding fictions the interrogation of the trapped, geworfen self had had a mechanical quality, as though it were accepted from the beginning that the questioning was futile, there is in these late pieces a sense that individual existence is a genuine mystery worth exploring. The quality of thought and of language remains as philosophically scrupulous as ever, but there is a new element of the personal, even the autobiographical: the memories that float into the mind of the speaker clearly come from the early childhood of Samuel Beckett himself, and these are treated with a certain wonder and tenderness even though – like images from early silent film – they flicker and vanish on the screen of the inner eye. The key Beckettian word ‘on’, which had earlier had a quality of grinding hopelessness to it (‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’) begins to take on a new meaning: the meaning, if not of hope, then at least of courage.

  The spirit of these last writings, optimistic yet humorously sceptical about what can be achieved, is well captured in a 1983 letter of Beckett’s: ‘The long crooked straight is laborious but not without excitement. While still “young” I began to seek consolation in the thought that then if ever, i.e. now, the true words at last, from the mind in ruins. To this illusion I continue to cling.’2

  Though it is not a description he would have accepted, Beckett can justly be called a philosophical writer, one whose works can be read as a series of sustained sceptical raids on Descartes and the philosophy of the subject that Descartes founded. In his suspicion of Cartesian axiomatics Beckett aligns himself with Nietzsche and Heidegger, and with his younger contemporary Jacques Derrida. The satiric interrogation to which he subjects the Cartesian cogito (I am thinking, therefore I must exist) is so close in spirit to Derrida’s programme for exposing the metaphysical assumptions behind Western thought that we must speak, if not of Beckett’s direct influence on Derrida, then of a striking case of sympathetic vibration.

  Starting out as an uneasy Joycean and an even more uneasy Proustian, Beckett eventually settled on philosophical comedy as the medium for his uniquely anguished, arrogant, self-doubting, scrupulous temperament. In the popular mind his name is associated with the mysterious Godot who may or may not come but for whom we wait anyhow, passing the time as best we can. In this he seemed to define the mood of an age. But his range is wider than that, and his achievement far greater. Beckett was an artist possessed by a vision of life without consolation or dignity or promise of grace, in the face of which our only duty – inexplicable and futile of attainment, but a duty nonetheless – is not to lie to ourselves. It was a vision to which he gave expression in language of a virile strength and intellectual subtlety that marks him as one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century.

  (2005)

  14 Walt Whitman

  IN AUGUST OF 1863 Private Erastus Haskell of the 141st New York Volunteers died of typhoid fever in Armory Square Hospital, Washington, DC. Shortly thereafter his parents received a long letter from a stranger.‘I was very anxious [Erastus] should be saved,’ the stranger wrote,

  and so were they all – he was well used by the attendants . . . Many nights I sat in the hospital by his bedside . . . – he always liked to have me sit there, but never cared to talk – I shall never forget those nights, it was a curious and solemn scene, the sick and wounded lying around in their cots . . . and this dear young man close at hand . . . I do not know his past life, but what I do know, and what I saw of him, he was a noble boy – I felt he was one I should get very much attached to . . .

  I write you this letter, because I would do something at least in his memory – his fate was a hard one, to die so – He is one of the thousands of our unknown young American men in the ranks about whom there is no record or fame, no fuss about their dying so unknown, but I find in them the real precious and royal ones . . . Poor dear son, though you were not my son, I felt to love you as a son, what short time I saw you sick and dying there.

  The letter was signed ‘Walt Whitman’, wit
h a Brooklyn address.1

  Writing letters of condolence was just one of the duties that Whitman took upon himself as a Soldiers’ Missionary. Doing the rounds of the hospitals in Washington, he brought the soldiers gifts of fresh underwear, fruit, ice cream, tobacco, postage stamps. He also chatted to them, consoled them, kissed and embraced them, and if they had to die tried to ease their dying. ‘I never before had my feelings so thoroughly and (so far) permanently absorbed, to the very roots, as by these huge swarms of dear, wounded, sick, dying boys,’ he wrote. ‘I have formed attachments in hospital, that I shall keep to my dying day, & they will the same, without doubt.’2

  Between 1862 and 1865, Whitman by his own count ministered to some one hundred thousand men. Though his interventions were not universally welcomed – ‘That odious Walt Whitman, [come] to talk evil and unbelief to my boys,’ wrote one nurse – he was nowhere denied entry. One might wonder whether in our day a middle-aged man, a reputed pornographer, would be allowed to haunt the wards, drifting from the bedside of one attractive young man to another, or whether he would not soon find himself hustled to the door by a couple of aides.3

  Whitman kept notes on his Washington experiences, later working these up into newspaper articles and lectures, which in 1876 he published in a limited edition under the title Memoranda During the War. This in turn became part of Specimen Days (1882). Not everything in the Memoranda comes from first-hand experience. Though Whitman gives the impression that he witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s theatre and provides a dramatic description of the event, he was not in fact there. But he did believe he enjoyed a special relationship with Lincoln. Both men were tall. Whitman was often present when Lincoln passed through the streets and was convinced that, over the heads of the crowd, the elected leader of the people recognised and nodded back to the unacknowledged legislator of mankind (like Shelley, Whitman had elevated ideas about his calling).

  As a young man Whitman had been much impressed by the new science of phrenology. He took the standard phrenological test and came out with high scores for Amativeness and Adhesiveness, middling scores for language skills. He was proud enough of his scores to publish them in advertisements for Leaves of Grass.

  In phrenological jargon, amativeness is sexual ardour; adhesiveness is attachment, friendship, comradeship. The distinction became important to Whitman in his erotic life, where it gave a name and in effect a respectability to his feelings for other men. It also gave body to his conception of democracy: as a variety of love not confined to the sexual couple, adhesiveness could constitute the grounding of a democratic community. Whitmanian democracy is adhesiveness writ large, a nationwide network of fraternal affection much like the loving comradeship that he witnessed among young soldiers marching out to war, and that he detected in his own heart when he tended them afterwards. In the preface to the 1876 Leaves of Grass he would write: ‘It is by a fervent, accepted development of comradeship, the beautiful and sane affection of man for man, latent in all young fellows . . . and by what goes directly and indirectly along with it, that the United States of the future . . . are to be most effectually welded together, intercalated, anneal’d into a living union.’4

  To Whitman, adhesiveness was not simply amativeness in sublimated form but an autonomous erotic force. The most attractive feature of Whitman’s dreamed-of United States is that it does not demand of its citizens the sublimation of eros in the interest of the state. In this it differs from other nineteenth-century utopias.

  Whitman was not only highly adhesive but, if one goes by what he wrote, highly amative too: ‘I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself, / I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.’ The question of exactly what physical form his amativeness took has exercised Whitman scholars more and more openly of late. (LoG, p. 65)

  In the postwar years Whitman formed significant attachments to younger men, among which two stand out: with Peter Doyle, a conductor on the Washington railway; and with Harry Stafford, a printer’s apprentice. The relationship with Doyle – who was near illiterate and according to Whitman thought Leaves of Grass ‘a great mass of crazy talk and hard words, all tangled up without sense or meaning’ – seems to have caused Whitman considerable anguish. In a coded notebook entry Whitman admonishes himself:

  Give up absolutely & for good, from this present hour, this feverish, fluctuating, useless undignified pursuit of [Doyle] – too long (much too long) persevered in – so humiliating . . . Avoid seeing her [sic], or meeting her, or any talk or explanations – or any meeting, whatever, from this hour forth, for life.

  (In the course of censoring his papers, Whitman painstakingly erased culpable masculine pronouns and substituted the feminine.)5

  The attachment to Harry Stafford appears to have been more tranquil – Whitman was nearly forty years Stafford’s senior. Whitman was accepted by the Stafford family: he stayed as a paying guest on their farm, where he could at leisure practise his morning ritual of a mudbath followed by a dip in the spring, all accompanied by loud singing.

  If one reads the so-called Live Oak poems of 1859 autobiographically, there would also appear to have been an important attachment in the late 1850s, one that brought Whitman to realise that his feelings towards other men could not forever be kept private:‘An athlete is enamoured of me, and I of him, / But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me eligible to burst forth, / I dare not tell it in words, not even in these songs.’ (LoG, p. 132)

  In the form in which they survive in manuscript, the twelve Live Oak poems tell the story of this attachment. But when it came to publication Whitman lost his nerve and distributed them, out of order, among a larger set of poems entitled ‘Calamus’, which, broadly speaking, celebrate adhesiveness more than amativeness.

  Perhaps for strategic reasons, Whitman liked it to be thought that he had affairs with women. He even circulated rumours of children he had fathered out of wedlock in New Orleans and elsewhere. Women certainly found him attractive; and it is hard to believe that the poet of ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ was ignorant of the pleasures of heterosexual sex:‘Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn, / Undulating into the willing and yielding day, / Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweetflesh’d day.’ (LoG, p. 96)

  The erotic passages in Leaves of Grass, particularly passages of narcissism and exhibitionism, where humorous sallies are easily mistaken for boasting, troubled many of Whitman’s friends, not least Ralph Waldo Emerson, the older contemporary to whom Whitman owed most. Emerson saw Whitman’s genius from the first, and stood by his protégé even when Whitman shamelessly used Emerson’s name to promote his book. But Emerson’s mild advice that Whitman tone down the sex for the 1860 edition was ignored.

  What surprises us about contemporary responses to Leaves of Grass is that it was the apparently heterosexual sex, rather than the homoeroticism behind the Calamus poems, that gave offence, and that eventually provoked the Boston district attorney to threaten action unless the 1881 edition was purged.

  By this time Whitman had a considerable following among gay intellectuals, particularly in England: on a tour of the United States, Oscar Wilde visited Whitman and came away with, he claimed, a kiss fresh upon his lips. The essayist John Addington Symonds pressed Whitman to admit that the veiled subject of the Calamus poems was a love affair with a man. But Whitman, more, one suspects, out of canniness than out of fear, refused. The poems, he replied frostily, would bear no such ‘morbid inferences – [which] are disavow’d by me & seem damnable’.6

  Were readers of Whitman’s day then more tolerant of sexual love between men than we usually give them credit for, as long as it did not proclaim itself too blatantly? Was the poet of the body electric tacitly recognised as gay? ‘I am the poet of the woman the same as the man . . . / I am he that walks with the tender and growing night, / I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night. / Press close bare-bosom’d night – press close
magnetic nourishing night! / Night of south winds – night of the large few stars! / Still nodding night – mad naked summer night.’ (LoG, p. 49)

  In an afterword to a reprint of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, David Reynolds makes fun of Anthony Comstock, the campaigner against indecent literature, who denounced the heterosexual sex in the 1881 edition while ignoring the Calamus poems. How, Reynolds asks, could Comstock have missed what today seems an obvious homosexual substrate? ‘The answer would seem to be that same-sex love was not interpreted in the same way then as it is now.’ ‘Whatever the nature of [Whitman’s] relations with [young men], most of the passages of same-sex love, in his poems were not out of keeping with then-current theories and practices that underscored the healthiness of such love.’7

  Reynolds reiterates this position in his book Walt Whitman:

  Although Whitman evidently had one or two affairs with women, he was mainly a romantic comrade who had a series of intense relationships with young men, most of whom went on to get married and have children. Whatever the nature of his physical relationships with them, most of the passages of same-sex love in his poems were not out of keeping with then-current theories and practices that underscored the healthiness of such love.8

  In similarly cautious vein, Jerome Loving, in his 1999 biography, writes that Peter Doyle ‘may or may not have been Whitman’s lover’. ‘It is impossible to know the intimate details of their relationship.’ Of Harry Stafford, Loving writes: ‘Today our views of Whitman’s relationship with [Stafford] may reflect . . . the current interest in Whitman’s possible homosexual tendencies more than the actual facts.’9

  Both Reynolds and Loving seem to me to treat the question too simply. What Loving calls ‘the intimate details’ and Reynolds somewhat more delicately ‘the nature of [Whitman’s] physical relationships’ with young men can refer to only one thing: what Whitman and the young men in question did with their organs of amativeness when they were alone together. If Comstock can be treated as a figure of fun, it is because he stupidly missed the amative content underlying the lofty adhesive locutions of the Calamus poems.