Talking to Strangers

by Paul Auster

His fullness more purpose,

  His blowing a renewal,

  His death, a cramped spilling

  Of rash measure and miles.

  To the roses no tears:

  Which flee before the race is called.

  And to man no mercy but his will:

  That he has had his will, and is done.

  The mercy of truth—it is to be truth.

  (from “The Last Covenant”)

  In one of the supplementary chapters of The Telling, “Extracts from Communications,” she speaks of the relationship between the writer and his work in a way that seems to express her aspirations as a poet. “If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth. If, in writing, truth is the quality of what is said, told, this is not a literary achievement: it is a simple human achievement.” This is not very far from the spirit of Ben Jonson’s assertion that only a good man is capable of writing a good poem. It is an idea that stands at one extreme of our literary consciousness, and it places poetry within an essentially moral framework. As a poet, Laura Riding followed this principle until she reached what she felt to be “a crisis-point at which division between craft and creed reveals itself to be absolute.” In the making of poems, she concluded, the demands of art would always outweigh the demands of truth.

  Beauty and truth. It is the old question, come back to haunt us. Laura Riding sacrificed her poetic career in a choice between the two. But whether she has really answered the question, as she appears to think she has, is open to debate. What we do have are the poems she left behind her, and it is not surprising, perhaps, that we are drawn to them most of all for their beauty. We cannot call Laura Riding a neglected poet, since she was the cause of her own neglect, but after close to forty years of absence, the return of these poems strikes us with the force of an archaeological miracle: a vanished city unearthed from the sands of time.

  1975

  From Cakes to Stones

  A note on Beckett’s French

  Mercier and Camier was the first of Samuel Beckett’s novels to be written in French. Completed in 1946 and withheld from publication until 1970, it is also the last of his longer works to have been translated into English. Such a long delay would seem to indicate that Beckett is not overly fond of the work. Had he not been given the Nobel Prize in 1969, in fact, it seems likely that Mercier and Camier would not have been published at all. This reluctance on Beckett’s part is somewhat puzzling, for if Mercier and Camier is clearly a transitional work, at once harking back to Murphy and Watt and looking forward to the masterpieces of the early fifties, it is nevertheless a brilliant work, with its own particular strengths and charms, unduplicated in any of Beckett’s six other novels. Even at his not quite best, Beckett remains Beckett, and reading him is like reading no one else.

  Mercier and Camier are two men of indeterminate middle age who decide to leave everything behind them and set off on a journey. Like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, like Laurel and Hardy, like the other “pseudo couples” in Beckett’s work, they are not so much separate characters as two elements of a tandem reality, and neither one could exist without the other. The purpose of their journey is never stated, nor is their destination ever made clear. “They had consulted together at length, before embarking on this journey, weighing with all the calm at their command what benefits they might hope from it, what ills apprehend, maintaining turn about the dark side and the rosy. The only certitude they gained from these debates was that of not lightly launching out, into the unknown.” Beckett, the master of the comma, manages in these few sentences to cancel out any possibility of a goal. Quite simply, Mercier and Camier agree to meet, they meet (after painful confusion), and set off. That they never really get anywhere, only twice, in fact, cross the town limits, in no way impedes the progress of the book. For the book is not about what Mercier and Camier do; it is about what they are.

  Nothing happens. Or, more precisely, what happens is what does not happen. Armed with the vaudeville props of umbrella, sack, and raincoat, the two heroes meander through the town and the surrounding countryside, encountering various objects and personages: they pause frequently and at length in an assortment of bars and public places; they consort with a warm-hearted prostitute named Helen; they kill a policeman; they gradually lose their few possessions and drift apart. These are the outward events, all precisely told, with wit, elegance, and pathos, and interspersed with some beautiful descriptive passages (“The sea is not far, just visible beyond the valleys disappearing eastward, pale plinth as pale as the pale wall of sky”). But the real substance of the book lies in the conversations between Mercier and Camier:

  If we have nothing to say, said Camier, let us say nothing.

  We have things to say, said Mercier.

  Then why can’t we say them? said Camier.

  We can’t, said Mercier.

  Then let us be silent, said Camier.

  But we try, said Mercier.

  In a celebrated passage of Talking about Dante, Mandelstam wrote: “The Inferno and especially the Purgatorio glorify the human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking, the foot and its shape … In Dante philosophy and poetry are forever on the move, forever on their feet. Even standing still is a variety of accumulated motion; making a place for people to stand and talk takes as much trouble as scaling an Alp.” Beckett, who is one of the finest readers of Dante, has learned these lessons with utter thoroughness. Almost uncannily, the prose of Mercier and Camier moves along at a walking pace, and after a while one begins to have the distinct impression that somewhere, buried deep within the words, a silent metronome is beating out the rhythms of Mercier and Camier’s perambulations. The pauses, the hiatuses, the sudden shifts of conversation and description do not break this rhythm but rather take place under its influence (which has already been firmly established), so that their effect is not one of disruption but of counterpoint and fulfillment. A mysterious stillness seems to envelop each sentence in the book, a kind of gravity, or calm, so that between each sentence the reader feels the passing of time, the footsteps that continue to move, even when nothing is said. “Sitting at the bar they discoursed of this and that, brokenly, as was their custom. They spoke, fell silent, listened to each other, stopped listening, each as he fancied or as bidden from within.”

  This notion of time, of course, is directly related to the notion of timing, and it seems no accident that Mercier and Camier immediately precedes Waiting for Godot in Beckett’s oeuvre. In some sense, it can be seen as a warm-up for the play. The music-hall banter, which was perfected in the dramatic work, is already present in the novel:

  What will it be? said the barman.

  When we need you we’ll tell you, said Camier.

  What will it be? said the barman.

  The same as before, said Mercier.

  You haven’t been served, said the barman.

  The same as this gentleman, said Mercier.

  The barman looked at Camier’s empty glass.

  I forget what it was, he said.

  I too, said Camier.

  I never knew, said Mercier.

  But whereas Waiting for Godot is sustained by the implicit drama of Godot’s absence—an absence that commands the scene as powerfully as any presence—Mercier and Camier progresses in a void. From one moment to the next, it is impossible to foresee what will happen. The action, which is not buoyed by any tension or intrigue, seems to take place against a background of near total silence, and whatever is said is said at the very moment there is nothing left to say. Rain dominates the book, from the first paragraph to the last sentence (“And in the dark he could hear better too, he could hear the sounds the long day had kept from him, human murmurs for example, and the rain on the water”)—an endless Irish rain, which is accorded the status of a metaphysical idea, and which creates an atmosphere that hovers between boredom and anguish, between bitterness and joc
ularity. As in the play, tears are shed, but more from a knowledge of the futility of tears than from any need to purge oneself of grief. Likewise, laughter is merely what happens when tears have been spent. All goes on, slowly waning in the hush of time, and unlike Vladimir and Estragon, Mercier and Camier must endure without any hope of redemption.

  The key word in all this, I feel, is dispossession. Beckett, who begins with little, ends with even less. The movement in each of his works is toward a kind of unburdening, by which he leads us to the limits of experience—to a place where aesthetic and moral judgments become inseparable. This is the itinerary of the characters in his books, and it has also been his own progress as a writer. From the lush, convoluted, and jaunty prose of More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) to the desolate spareness of The Lost Ones (1970), he has gradually cut closer and closer to the bone. His decision thirty years ago to write in French was undoubtedly the crucial event in this progress. This was an almost inconceivable act. But again, Beckett is not like other writers. Before truly coming into his own, he had to leave behind what came most easily to him, struggle against his own facility as a stylist. Beyond Dickens and Joyce, there is perhaps no English writer of the past hundred years who has equalled Beckett’s early prose for vigor and intelligence; the language of Murphy, for example, is so packed that the novel has the density of a short lyric poem. By switching to French (a language, as Beckett has remarked, that “has no style”), he willingly began all over again. Mercier and Camier stands at the very beginning of this new life, and it is interesting to note that in this English translation Beckett has cut out nearly a fifth of the original text. Phrases, sentences, entire passages have been discarded, and what we have been given is really an editing job as well as a translation. This tampering, however, is not difficult to understand. Too many echoes, too many ornate and clever flourishes from the past remain, and though a considerable amount of superb material has been lost, Beckett apparently did not think it good enough to keep.

  In spite of this, or perhaps because of this, Mercier and Camier comes close to being a flawless work. As with all of Beckett’s self-translations, this version is not so much a literal translation of the original as a re-creation, a “repatriation” of the book into English. However stripped his style in French may be, there is always a little extra something added to the English renderings, some slight twist of diction or nuance, some unexpected word falling at just the right moment, that reminds us that English is nevertheless Beckett’s home.

  George, said Camier, five sandwiches, four wrapped and one on the side. You see, he said, turning graciously to Mr Conaire, I think of everything. For the one I eat here will give me the strength to get back with the four others.

  Sophistry, said Mr Conaire. You set off with your five, wrapped, feel faint, open up, take one out, eat, recuperate, push on with the others.

  For all response Camier began to eat.

  You’ll spoil him, said Mr Conaire. Yesterday cakes, today sandwiches, tomorrow crusts, and Thursday stones.

  Mustard, said Camier.

  There is a crispness to this that outdoes the French. “Sophistry” for “raisonnement du clerc,” “crusts” for “pain sec,” and the assonance with ‘mustard’ in the next sentence give a neatness and economy to the exchange that is even more satisfying than the original. Everything has been pared down to a minimum; not a syllable is out of place.

  We move from cakes to stones, and from page to page Beckett builds a world out of almost nothing. Mercier and Camier set out on a journey and do not go anywhere. But at each step along the way, we want to be exactly where they are. How Beckett manages this is something of a mystery. But as in all his work, less is more.

  1975

  The Poetry of Exile

  A Jew, born in Romania, who wrote in German and lived in France. Victim of the Second World War, survivor of the death camps, suicide before he was fifty. Paul Celan was a poet of exile, an outsider even to the language of his own poems, and if his life was exemplary in its pain, a paradigm of the destruction and dislocation of midcentury Europe, his poetry is defiantly idiosyncratic, always and absolutely his own. In Germany, he is considered the equal of Rilke and Trakl, the heir to Hölderlin’s metaphysical lyricism, and elsewhere his work is held in similar esteem, prompting statements such as George Steiner’s recent remark that Celan is “almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945.” At the same time, Celan is an exceedingly difficult poet, both dense and obscure. He demands so much of a reader, and in his later work his utterances are so gnomic, that it is nearly impossible to make full sense of him, even after many readings. Fiercely intelligent, propelled by a dizzying linguistic force, Celan’s poems seem to explode on the page, and encountering them for the first time is a memorable event. It is to feel the same strangeness and excitement that one feels in discovering the work of Hopkins, or Emily Dickinson.

  Czernovitz, Bukovina, where Celan was born as Paul Anczel in 1920, was a multilingual area that had once been part of the Habsburg Empire. In 1940, after the Hitler-Stalin pact, it was annexed by the Soviet Union, in the following year occupied by Nazi troops, and in 1943 retaken by the Russians. Celan’s parents were deported to a concentration camp in 1942 and did not return; Celan, who managed to escape, was put in a labor camp until December 1943. In 1945 he went to Bucharest, where he worked as a translator and publisher’s reader, then moved to Vienna in 1947, and finally, in 1948, settled permanently in Paris, where he married and became a teacher of German literature at the École Normale Supérieure. His output comprises seven books of poetry and translations of more than two dozen foreign poets, including Mandelstam, Ungaretti, Pessoa, Rimbaud, Valéry, Char, du Bouchet, and Dupin.

  Celan came to poetry rather late, and his first poems were not published until he was almost thirty. All his work, therefore, was written after the Holocaust, and his poems are everywhere informed by its memory. The unspeakable yields a poetry that continually threatens to overwhelm the limits of what can be spoken. For Celan forgot nothing, forgave nothing. The death of his parents and his own experiences during the war are recurrent and obsessive themes that run through all his work.

  With names, watered

  by every exile.

  With names and seeds,

  with names dipped

  into all

  the calyxes that are full of your

  regal blood, man,—into all

  the calyxes of the great

  ghetto-rose, from which

  you look at us, immortal with so many

  deaths died on morning errands.

  (from “Crowned Out…,” 1963, translated by Michael Hamburger)

  Even after the war, Celan’s life remained an unstable one. He suffered acutely from feelings of persecution, which led to repeated breakdowns in his later years—and eventually to his suicide in 1970, when he drowned himself in the Seine. An incessant writer who produced hundreds of poems during his relatively short writing life, Celan poured all his grief and anger into his work. There is no poetry more furious than his, no poetry so purely inspired by bitterness. Celan never stopped confronting the dragon of the past, and in the end it swallowed him up.

  * * *

  “Todesfugue” (“Death Fugue”) is not Celan’s best poem, but it is unquestionably his most famous poem—the work that made his reputation. Coming as it did in the late forties, only a few years after the end of the war—and in striking contrast to Adorno’s rather fatuous remark about the “barbarity” of writing poems after Auschwitz—“Todesfugue” had a considerable impact among German readers, both for its direct mention of the concentration camps and for the terrible beauty of its form. The poem is literally a fugue composed of words, and its pounding, rhythmical repetitions and variations mark off a terrain no less circumscribed, no less closed in on itself than a prison surrounded by barbed wire. Covering slightly less than two pages, it begins and ends with the following stanzas:

  Black milk of dawn we dr
ink it at dusk

  we drink it at noon and at daybreak we drink it at night

  we drink and drink

  we are digging a grave in the air there’s room for us all

  A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes

  he writes when it darkens to Germany your golden hair Margarete

  he writes it and steps outside and the stars all aglisten he whistles for his hounds

  he whistles for his Jews he has them dig a grave in the earth

  he commands us to play for the dance

  Black milk of dawn we drink you at night

  we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany

  we drink you at dusk and at daybreak we drink and we drink you

  death is a master from Germany his eye is blue

  he shoots you with bullets of lead his aim is true

  a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete

  he sets his hounds on us he gives us a grave in the air

  he plays with the serpents and dreams death is a master from Germany

  your golden hair Margarete

  your ashen hair Shulamite

  (translated by Joachim Neugroschel)

  In spite of the poem’s great control and the formal sublimation of an impossibly emotional theme, “Todesfugue” is one of Celan’s most explicit works. In the sixties, he even turned against it, refusing permission to have it reprinted in more anthologies because he felt that his poetry had progressed to a stage where “Todesfugue” was too obvious and superficially realistic. With this in mind, however, one does discover in this poem elements common to much of Celan’s work: the taut energy of the language, the objectification of private anguish, the unusual distancing effected between feeling and image. As Celan himself expressed it in an early commentary on his poems: “What matters for this language … is precision. It does not transfigure, does not ‘poetize’, it names and composes, it tries to measure out the sphere of the given and the possible.”