And to-day, Madam?
Mrs W.
(with a start). I beg your pardon?
Miss C.
And to-day, Madam.
Mrs W.
To-day is not yet over, Miss Carmichael.
Silence.
Mrs W.
I know they are dead, their deaths are come to the notice of my mind.
Silence.
Mrs W.
When my father, Mr Zachariah Williams, died, on the 12th of June, seventeen hundred and fifty-five (old time), at twelve at night, in his eighty third year, after an illness of eight months, in full possession of his mental faculties, I knew at once he was dead. He died, and at once I knew he was dead. I wept, because one weeps, when one’s father dies. I remember turning, that morning, with tears in my eyes, whose vigour even then was beginning to abate, the pages of his pamphlet: An Account of an Attempt to Ascertain the Longitude at Sea: with a Table of the Variations at the most Remarkable Cities in Europe.
Silence.
Mrs W.
But it did not come to the notice of my heart until the Christmas following.
Silence.
Miss C.
‘Death meets us everywhere, and is procured by every instrument and in all chances, and enters in at many doors; by violence —’
Mrs W.
What twaddle is this, Miss Carmichael?
Miss C.
I am reading from my book, Madam.
Mrs W.
I did not suppose you were inventing it.
Miss C.
‘By violence and secret influence; by the aspect of a star and the stink of a mist —’
Mrs W.
The stink of a mist?
Miss C.
Yes, Madam, the stink of a mist.
Mrs W.
Continue, continue.
Miss C.
‘Of a mist; by the emissions of a cloud and the meeting of a vapour; by the fall of a chariot and the stumbling at a stone; by a full meal or an empty stomach; by watching at the wine or by watching at prayers; by the sun or the moon; by a heat or a cold; by sleepless nights or sleeping days; by water frozen or water thawed; by a hair or a raisin —’
Mrs W.
A hair or a raisin?*
Miss C.
Yes, Madam, a hair or a raisin.
Mrs W.
How do you suppose death enters in by a hair, Miss Carmichael?
Miss C.
Perhaps a horse-hair is meant, Madam.
Mrs W.
Perhaps so indeed. I know if death would be content to enter into me by a horse-hair, or by any other manner of hair for that matter, I should be very much obliged to him.
Miss C.
‘By a hair or a raisin; by violent exertion or by sitting still; by severity or dissolution; by God’s mercy or God’s anger; by everything in Providence and everything in manners, by everything in nature and everything in chance.’
Silence.
Mrs W.
Brown for a guinea.
Miss Carmichael rises.
Mrs W.
I say: Brown for a guinea.
Miss C.
I hear you, Madam.
Mrs W.
Then answer me. Is it Brown or is it not Brown?
Miss C.
Brown or Black, Madam, it is all one to me.
Mrs W.
Is it possible she reads and does not know what she reads.
Miss C.
I read so little, Madam, it is all one to me.
Mrs W.
Turn to the title page, my child, and tell me is it Brown.
Miss C.
(turning to the title page). Taylor.
Notes
Part I
Dante … Bruno. Vico… Joyce. Beckett’s first non-juvenile publication appeared in 1929 in both book (Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress: Paris, Shakespeare and Company) and periodical (transition 16–17). Those indispensable Beckett bibliographers, Federman and Fletcher, quote Beckett on the idiosyncratic punctuation of his title: ‘From Dante to Bruno is a jump of about three centuries, from Bruno to Vico about one, and from Vico to Joyce about two.’ The subject was suggested by Joyce, but Beckett dispensed the proportions — almost half the essay expounding Vico, a bare nod offered to Bruno, and parallel admiration accorded to Dante and Joyce.
Le Concentrisme. This untitled, unpublished manuscript was long believed missing, and it is now on permanent loan to the Beckett Collection of the University of Reading Library. The typescript is undated, but 1930 seems probable, after Beckett’s two Parisian years as lecteur at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, which considers itself very superior indeed. Normalian hoaxes are not infrequent, and in that spirit Beckett invents Jean du Chas, who shares his own birthdate, April 13, 1906, as well as his affection for darkness, solitude, negation, and crisp epigrams. The famous ennui of Waiting for Godot is predicted comically in the Chasien motto: ‘Vat’embêter ailleurs’ which Beckett has translated (in a personal letter): ‘Feck off.’ Beneath the brittle surface of Le Concentrisme, Beckett nevertheless gropes towards an esthetic. (The sterile academic attitude links die Jean du Chas of Concentrisme to a minor character of the same name in Beckett’s 1932 Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Alive and sociable, the latter du Chas is a Parisian in Dublin.)
Excerpts from Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Beckett’s first novel exists in typescript in the Baker Memorial Library of Dart mouth College, New Hampshire. Written in a Paris hotel in 1932, Dream follows its reasonably awake protagonist Belacqua from Dublin to Vienna, Paris, and back to Qublin. Beckett’s first sustained fictional effort harbors his own esthetic cogitations. The Dream’s anonymous, self-flaunting narrator enunciates the first group of excerpts, a through e. A pseudo-Chinese tale implies that musicians have an easier task than writers in controlling their material within a closed system, and an astral rhapsody hails an irrational art. The narrator complains about the protagonist Belacqua who may ‘drop a book’; he in turn meditates on a transparent style. In a dialogue with his Vienna love’s father (Irish in spite of his mock-Chinese title of Mandarin), Belacqua espouses incoherent art. Above all, Belacqua indulges in an interior monologue about art, which forecasts Beckett’s French fiction, with its ‘punctuation of dehiscence’.
German Letter of 1937. Dated July 9, 1937, this unusually explicit critical statement is found in typescript in the Baker Memorial Library of Dartmouth College. Axel Kaun, an acquaintance encountered during Beckett’s 1936 travels in Germany, suggested that Beckett might translate poems by Joachim Ringelnatz, pseudonym of Hans Bottkher (1883–1934). Seaman, window-dresser, librarian, minesweeper captain, and postwar cabaret comedian, Ringelnatz the poet did not attract Beckett. Dismissing him as a Rhyme Coolie, Beckett then articulated a virtual credo (which he now dismisses as ‘German bilge’). By correcting a very few (mainly typographical) errors of Beckett’s typescript, Martin Esslin has rendered the whole letter intelligible, and his translation follows:
Dear Axel Kaun,
Many thanks for your letter. I was on the point of writing to you when it arrived. Then I had to go on my travels, like Ringelnatz’s male postage stamp, albeit under less passionate circumstances.
It would be best if I told you immediately and without beating about the bush that Ringelnatz, in my opinion, isn’t worth the effort. You will surely not be more disappointed to hear this from me than I am to state it.
I have read through the 3 volumes, have selected 23 poems and have translated 2 of these as samples. The little they have of necessity lost in the process can naturally only be evaluated in relation to what they had to lose, and I must say that I have found this coefficient of loss of quality very small, even in those places where he is most a poet and least a rhyme coolie. It does not follow from this that a translated Ringelnatz could find neither interest nor success with the English public. But in this respect I am totally incapable of arriving at a judgement, as the reactions of the small as w
ell as the large public are becoming more and more enigmatic to me, and, what is worse, of less significance. For I cannot free myself from the naive alternative, at least where literature is concerned, that a matter must either be worthwhile or not worthwhile. And if we have to earn money at any price, let’s do it elsewhere.
I have no doubt that as a human being Ringelnatz was of quite extraordinary interest. But as a poet he seems to have shared Goethe’s opinion: it is better to write NOTHING than not write at all. But even the Grand Ducal Councillor would have allowed the translator to feel himself unworthy of this high Kakoethes. I should be happy to explain to you my disgust with Ringelnatz’s rhyming fury in greater detail, if you feel inclined to understand him. But for the time being I’ll spare you. Perhaps you like funeral orations as little as I do.
I could also perhaps advise you of the poems I’ve selected and send you the sample translations.
I am always glad to receive a letter from you. So please write as frequently and fully as possible. Do you insist that I should do likewise in English? Are you are bored by reading my Geman letters as I am in writing one in English? I should be sorry if you felt that there might be something like a contract between us that I fail to fulfill. An answer is requested.
It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it — be it something or nothing — begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. Or is literature alone to remain behind in the old lazy ways that have been so long ago abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralysingly holy in the vicious nature of the word that is not found in the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence? An answer is requested. I know-there are people, sensitive and intelligent people, for whom there is no lack of silence. I cannot but assume that they are hard of hearing. For in the forest of symbols, which aren’t any, the little birds of interpretation, which isn’t any, are never silent.
Of course, for the time being we must be satisfied with little. At first it can only be a matter of somehow finding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words. In this dissonance between the means and their use it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All.
With such a program, in my opinion, the latest work of Joyce has nothing whatever to do. There it seems rather to be a matter of an apotheosis of the word. Unless perhaps Ascension to Heaven and Descent to Hell are somehow one and the same. How beautiful it would be to be able to believe that that indeed was the case. But for the time being we want to confine ourselves to the mere intention.
Perhaps the logographs of Gertrude Stein are nearer to what I have in mind. At least the texture of language has become porous, if only, alas, quite by chance, and as a consequence of a technique similar to that of Feininger. The unfortunate lady (is she still alive?) is doubtlessly still in love with her vehicle, albeit only in the way in which a mathematician is in love with his figures; a mathematician for whom the solution of the problem is of entirely secondary interest, indeed to whom must the death of his figures appear quite dreadful. To bring this method into relation with that of Joyce, as is the fashion, strikes me as senseless as the attempt, of which I know nothing as yet, to compare Nominalism (in the sense of the Scholastics) with Realism. On the way to this literature of the unword, which is so desirable to me, some form of Nominalist irony might be a necessary stage. But it is not enough for the game to lose some of its sacred seriousness. It should stop. Let us therefore act like that mad (?) mathematician who used a different principle of measurement at each step of his calculation. An assault against words in the name of beauty. In the meantime I am doing nothing at all. Only from time to time I have the consolation, as now, of sinning willy-nilly against a foreign language, as I should love to do with full knowledge and intent against my own — and as I shall do — Deo juvante.
With cordial greetings Should I return the Ringelnatz volume to you? Is there an English translation of Trakl?
Les Deux Besoins. Written in 1938, this unpublished essay is found in typescript in the Baker Memorial Library of Dartmouth College. More tersely (and correctly) phrased than the German letter of the previous year, it continues Beckett’s research into the imperatives of art, even while it mocks such research. A zoological image from Flaubert, a geometrical diagram, a pre-Socratic anecdote, and parallel scorn for science and theology — these disjunctive paragraphs succeed one another in Beckett’s plea for an irrational, interrogative art.
Part II
A. Other Writers.
Pieces written for publication in specific periodicals, this occasional criticism displays Beckett’s unusual range of mastery — music, painting, French, German, Italian, and Irish literature. Spanning the decade in which he shifted domicile and language, the diversity of material sports a unity of (arrogant) tone, whose limpidity contrasts with the earlier esthetic explorations. These pieces defend the artist against reductive rational criticism.
Schwabenstreich. Spectator March 23, 1934.
Proust in Pieces. Spectator June 23, 1934.
J. B. Leishmann’s translation of Rilke’s Poems. Criterion July, 1934.
Humanistic Quietism. Dublin Magazine July-September, 1934.
Recent Irish Poetry. The Bookman August, 1934 (under the Pseudonym Andrew Belis).
Ex Catbezra, Papini’s Dante, The Essential and the Incidental. The Bookman Christmas, 1934.
Censorship in the Saorstat. Commissioned by The Bookman, this essay was written in 1935. After The Bookman ceased publication, Beckett sent it to his Paris agent George Reavey for transition, but it remained unpubished. The typescript is in the Baker Memorial Library of Dartmouth College. Ireland lurks behind the titular Saorstat, derived from Old Testament Saor or Zoar, an iniquitous region redolent of drunkenness and sexual indulgence. An Imaginative Work. Dublin Magazine July-September, 1936. Intercessions by Denis Devlin, transition April-May, 1938. Intercessions by Denis Devlin, transition April-May, 1938. Contemporary with Les Deux Besoms, this review also phrases artistic compulsion as ‘need’.
MacGreevy on Yeats. Irish Times August 4, 1945.
Part II B. Self
Unlike self-conscious pieces intended for publication, Beckett’s letters on aspects of his work are unguarded. For sundry reasons, a few of these letters have reached print and are here reprinted, with his permission.
The Possessed. Published anonymously in T.C.D. (the Trinity College, Dublin, weekly) on March 12, 1931, this verbal romp is Beckett’s rebuttal to an unfavorable review of a performance of Le Kid, a parody of Corneille’s Le Cid, written by Beckett and the French exchange student, Georges Pelorson. Le Kid appears to be lost, but Beckett’s parody of a drama reviewer proves that clichés live on.
On Murphy. This excerpt from a letter to his old friend Thomas McGreevy, July 17, 1936, is quoted in Samuel Beckett by Deirdre Bair: New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
On Murphy. This excerpt from a letter to his agent George Reavey, November 13, 1936, is quoted in Samuel Beckett by Bair
.
On works to 1951. This letter to Jerome Lindon, his French publisher, was first published in English translation in Beckett at 60: London, Calder and Boyars, 1967. Original French version appeared in Beckett, eds. Bishop and Federman: Paris, L’Herne, 1976.
On Endgame. These excerpts from letters to Alan Schneider, Beckett’s American director, were first published in Village Voice, March 19, 1958.
On Play. This letter to the late George Devine (1910–66) was published in Samuel Beckett: an exhibition, by James Knowlson: London, Turret Books, 1971. Devine founded London’s English Stage Company and directed several Beckett plays at the Royal Court Theatre. ‘Jocelyn’ is Jocelyn Herbert, designer, who designed the sets.
On Murphy. Sighle Kennedy wrote Beckett in connection with her dissertation on Murphy, subsequently published as Murphy’s Bed (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1971), where this letter appears.
On Endgame. These questions and answers appeared in the program of Beckett’s 1967 production of Endgame (in German) in West Berlin’s Schiller Theater Werkstatt.
Part III
Geer van Velde. This paragraph was written for a 1938 exhibition of the Dutch painter’s work at the London Gallery of Peggy Guggenheim.
La Peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon. Written shortly after the end of World War II and Beckett’s return from Dublin to France, this essay was commissioned by Cabiers d’art in connection with separate exhibitions of the work of the Dutch brothers. It is Beckett’s first publication in French, and it points forward to his French creative work: the subtitle and epigraph refer to the joke of Nagg in Endgame, le tu est la lumière du dit, et toute presence absence’ permeates his Trilogy. Like Mercier and Camier, who were conceived a year later, the two painter brothers walk toward the same horizon. Like Molloy, Beckett on Bram van Velde finds that words cancel each other. And one is again reminded of Molloy by Beckett’s description of Geer’s painting: Ici tout bouge, nage, fuit, revient, se défait, se refait. Tout cesse, sans cesse.’ — a description dismissed as literature’. And Verbal assassination’ is Beckett’s verdict on his account of these similar, divergent painters.
Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment Page 16
