Samuel Beckett's formidable work merits no place on a shortlist of Irish
writers inspired�as Frank O'Connor, Sean O Faolain, or Liam O'Flaherty had at
one time however ambiguously or briefly�by republicanism. Beckett risked his
life for his ideals even as much of what he wrote challenges their adequacy
amidst so much doubt, destruction, and desolation�caused by each other, by our
mortality, and by the absence of a caring deity. Still, the appeal by Beckett to
a vision of humanity trapped amidst ruins of its own making sustains a reader's
interest long after ideologically motivated authors' lesser publications have
been marred by obsolete value systems, economic fallacies or political regimes'
falls from favour. Three books that I have read over the past month, in my
effort to learn more about an author whose texts I have studied but not always
understood, illuminate various ways for those of us less intelligent than
Beckett to enter into the labyrinths he drew on page and stage.
If you seek to understand how a product of the Irish Protestant middle
class a century ago managed at an early age to overthrown any certainty brought
about by such an upbringing, Anthony Cronin's massive biography of Beckett,
The Last Modernist (London/New York: HarperCollins, 1997) offers
surmises to this and hundreds of other puzzles in the reticent Foxrock native's
life. For a man who so esteemed silence, the impossibility of words to match our
inner experiences and their outer raiments, the herculean effort gone into
cleaning out the Augean stables, the poring through every scrap penned by
Beckett, results in an extraordinarily thorough but never exhausting account
ranging six hundred closely printed pages.
As an adopted Dubliner, and as a working writer for fifty years, Cronin
adds here to his earlier successes that pondered literary failure, or at least
mediocrity, in what passed for bohemian life in the Irish capital of the postwar
decade, 1945-55, Dead as Doornails, and in his life of Flann
O'Brien/Myles na gCopaleen/Brian O Nolan, No Laughing Matter. Both of
these have been reissued recently, and I recommend them to readers curious about
how talent can drown its sorrows in too much whisky and its potential in too
much talk with too little discipline. While this pair illustrates many anecdotes
riotously rendered, the cumulative effect of the two accounts makes for sobering
cautionary tales, and how the ghost of Joyce lingered long over last
century.
How Beckett managed to extricate himself from the early dominance of Joyce
when the two met and depended upon each other however fleetingly in Paris makes
for engrossing storytelling. What I noted most of all was how Cronin, through
scouring Beckett's records, depicts an author doggedly crippled by maladies
mostly psychosomatic, by imagined fears, by phobias befitting indeed his future
characters. It takes until 1950 or so for this writer, now in his mid-forties,
to begin to enter into the period, after �the long siege in the room,' where he
could come out of his shell and wrestle with his demons. Having fought, at first
for the French Resistance (if his rather circumspect accomplishments fell less
than dazzlingly in the Hollywood sense, his danger was no less real and the fate
of his comrades no less fatal) and then against his interior desolation, he only
then could become, well into middle age, the leader of the avant-garde we know
him as, the creator of Godot and Endgame, Krapp and Malone,
Molloy and Worm, Winnie and Gogo.
In this brief overview of Cronin's tome, I have little room to quote at
length. But, for anyone needing an excellent pr�cis of what Beckett achieved,
chapters 23 and 24 in my estimation serve as a thoughtful and by no means
uncritical survey of how Beckett set up scaffolds, erected his plots, and then
demolished as much of the structure as the work could stand and still
survive.
Of course, his later rather dead-end prose such as How It Is
and his tinier plays, or dramaticules, produced as the 1960s and 70s found him
caught within the expectations of comedians, scholars, analysts, and audiences,
the productions shrank as he seemingly had less to say and less support for
their spatial and linguistic gaps. As Beckett, at the start of his career, noted
of Joyce, the elder Irishman strove to cram the whole of existence into the
written word, while his successor sought to eliminate as much of the words and
still capture the whole of the same human condition. Two contrasting approaches,
intersected by the love of language, the compulsion to manufacture it, and the
doubt in any higher purpose than that of the artist driven to create and depict
and narrate.
Cronin's energy never flags. I happily measured how well he paces his own
story. Godot appears only about 2/3 of the way through, and Cronin never stints
on the earlier, more embarrassing malingering of the younger Beckett that
presaged his rise to fame and irritated his naturally reclusive nature. His
generousity, often remarked upon by those who knew and/or studied him, left many
in his debt. Winning the Nobel Prize in 1969, he escaped on an extended holiday
and gave away the prize money to a list of deserving up-and-coming writers. One
bought a sports car with her windfall. Cronin, as one who knew and at least once
offended Beckett, offers a counterpart to Damned by Fame, which
appeared (as biographers often find) immediately prior to his own volume in
1996. James Knowlson, the keeper of the Beckett archive at the University of
Reading (where a year's concentration and cash can earn you a MA in Beckett
Studies), brought out the authorised biography, with more of the typical
trajectory beloved by screenwriters, with Beckett's earlier, more derivatively
jaunty, Joycean, or jejune scribblings preparing the way for a blossoming into
challenging, disturbing, and, yes, humorous sketches of frailty, despair, and
hope.
For Cronin, Beckett's less a secular saint than a hypochondriacal mum's boy
who, after coddling and a preparation for respectability, lived the life of the
Irish exile (who kept decamping to London and even Dublin often enough) and
finally had to grow up, support himself, and push his resources to plumb the
darkness within. He took in a lot of drink along the way and into many a wee
hour and dawn. Out of this, he made stunningly evocative prose, for my tastes
some of the best in the 20th century in English, full of cadences that, in the
restricted French that he chose so as to limit himself to a harsher diet than
that afforded the luxuriant Hiberno-English consumer, ghosted Irishisms,
summoned English at its best, and shone through French.He inspires us lesser
mortals by proving that we too can overcome our lesser natures--and
perform.
Gary Adelman, a professor at the University of Illinois, offers a
much-needed serial explication of the later prose in Naming Beckett's
Unnameable (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP/ London: Associated University
Presses, 2004) He writes engagingly and accessibly, thankfully for a scholar.
Often overshadowed by Martin Esslin's mislabelling of Beckett as among the ranks
of the existentialist-inspired "theatre of the absurd" of Ionesco, Sartre, and
mid-century French rivals, the fictions Beckett hammered out of his skull onto
paper from 1946-50 that became known as the "trilogy" of Molloy, Malone
Dies, and The Unnameable announces a spectacular performance of
its own. He wrote Godot as a witty break from the rigours of forming the last
book of these three, so you can imagine how difficult this process might have
been!
Many readers shrink from the trilogy. As it progresses, narratives break
down like their successive narrators, driven into inarticulation as they are
goaded by an unseen force to tell their descents, more and more distant from our
quotidian world, into encounters with themselves, doppelgangers, and pursuers
bent on overtaking the tellers themselves to continue the tale. Yet, if read at
a rush and then a stroll, depending on the mood you set for yourself, it
constructs in your mind a scenario gripping enough to eliminate the distractions
of, in my case, bomb scares on the Belfast-Dublin train and endless delays at
Newry one dreary, typically Beckettian, longish day.
Adelman, clearly honed by decades in the classroom, attacks the prose and
chips away at its edifice. He uncovers the lineaments of care and craft to argue
for�beneath the experimental narrative style�redemption within. I agree here,
contrary to many who have delved into the same shafts, that Beckett cannot be
placed totally within the atheist camp. He, like Joyce, wavered. Adelman looks
hard at the bleak inscapes of the Unnameable to face, in his critique, a partial
account of a Holocaust survivor. I had known of Adelman's argument in its broad
terms in an article he had published earlier before I read The
Unnameable. When I encountered Beckett's final installment, after which he
could truly go no further (How It Is being I think an aborted try), I
tested Adelman's reading against my fresh one. It works for some of the novel,
but as the narrative itself fractures, one narrator is not enough to address the
impact of the Shoah. Adelman realises that his efforts to extract strivings for
the sacred out of what many readers have determined to be godless texts has its
limits, and he appeals to Kafka for support, a similarly tenuous figure for the
past century's spiritual seekers and deniers.
I add here that Beckett appeals to prisoners. Like Kafka's K in the Castle,
or Josef on Trial, or Gregor Samsa's Metamorphosis, the wrenchings physical and
mental undergone by fragile humans under pressure had early inspired San
Quentin's inmates to stage Beckett's plays. Rick Cluchey, ex-convict there,
became one of Sam's trusted interpreters of his works, and at the prison a Drama
Workshop produced his plays. They apparently were filmed, but only sporadically
surface on video, unfortunately. I note from the premier Beckett website,
http://home.sprintmail.com/%7Elifeform/Beck_Links.html, that his
early novel
Murphy is on audiotape in part from this prison workshop,
�at no costs to prisons'. Hearing Beckett, as with Joyce, on tape I recommend as
a both entertainment and education, cheering any commute!
John Calder, British publisher of much of Beckett, is ideally placed to
provide his own determinedly secular reading of SB. I have my arguments about
some of his stubborn persistence in removing God from Beckett to leave that
Sartrian �god-shaped hole' but after all, Beckett is notoriously and
delightfully difficult to pin down and resists easy categorisation about the
presence or absence of the deity in his fictions and dramas and other
unclassifiable prose. Calder's exegesis gains added conviction from the
closeness between author and publisher for so long.
The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett (London: Riverrun/Calder, 2001)
remains hard-to-find and on the pricey side for a slim volume. Yet, if you can
wrangle it in a library or find it cheap, it deserves a place by your side for
the few days it may take to sink into your soul. Calder explores philosophical,
ethical, and religious sources for Beckett's early writings, and compares his
own musings to those of Beckett on these matters. The resulting conversation of
sorts between SB and Calder invites us to consider our own responses to human
suffering, as limned in Beckett's creations and as influencing Calder himself as
he became friends with SB.
While I disagree with some of Calder's
readings, I fully support his aims, and stress that this is an excellent
advanced study that deserves an audience and incites a reader to return to
Beckett for direction as well as out into the world to act as SB would. If this
sounds like Calder makes SB a guru, so be it. For many otherwise in danger of
meeting the tautological fate of many of SB's tormented characters, we can learn
to read Beckett as a direction out of our own self-imprisonent towards
selflessness.
I've read a shelf-load of Beckettiana, and I admit that this book,
overlooked and not easily found, remains among the two or three to turn to after
or during encounters with the primary texts. Not recommended as an introduction
or primer (if you're starting from scratch, try Hugh Kenner's Student's
Guide to SB); you must get your own bearings and learn to respond on your
own terms to SB first. But, for a boost and a reminder of the challenges
within--and I might add against reductive--existentialism, Calder gives us a
heartfelt, eloquent, and accessible study of a man he knew well and, like many
of us, loved for his inspiring humanism.
Where would I start, if eager to take on Beckett outside of or despite the
curriculum? Certainly, Krapp's Last Tape provides a tender one-act that
can introduce many of the author's themes. Written to be dramatised by the Irish
actor Pat Magee, we can now see this and the other 18 plays and dramatic
fragments on a four-DVD set, Beckett on Film. Details can be found via
the website above, which can link you to a fine support site by the Irish makers
of this ambitious series. For those of us who can rarely see any Beckett
on stage, let alone the rarer works, this offers a lifeline and an invaluable
method to get a sense of how lighting, timing, and blocking took up so much of
the later author's energy as he supervised so many of the productions of his
work in the 1960s and 70s, if at the drawback of creating fewer original
efforts. He couldn't let go of his progeny.
Godot and then Happy Days should come before the grimmer
Endgame. Unlike when I read The Unnameable, I advise that you keep free
of criticism the first time around. This isn't Shakespeare, where you might need
a list of dramatis personae to keep track of who's who before the curtain rises.
You lack the complicated plots and the expository set-ups that the Bard offers,
as for Beckett it's pretty much a reductive form, with few characters and
limited development. This is not to say that these lack complexity, only that
their minimalist surface for a modern audience may be less daunting than
Shakespeare's four hundred years after his era for his audiences is for
ours.
For prose, Murphy's a bit juvenile, but starts his own voice
hemming. In Watt, you can hear the mature Beckett gain confidence.
Then, on to the Trilogy. How It Is, as I hinted before, is so devoid of
salvation that it may cause you to commit that mysterious sin against the Spirit
that Jesus warned mysteriously of in the Gospels. The Shorter Prose,
1929-89, offers his Nouvelles, or the four stories that also found Beckett
coming out of the four year �siege in the room' into life again in post-war
France. The thirteen Texts for Nothing can be bracingly gripping,
despite an all too perfect collective title. After, I'd check with that Hugh
Kenner book for help, visit that website, read Cronin or at least consult it,
and learn to think on your own about an author whose works, Calder warns, have
been written about only a bit less than Shakespeare, Marx, Milton, Freud,
Proust, and Kafka. Not to mention Joyce. Good company, however, you'd agree.
