—There’s a lot of futility in this game. These lads cannot defend their wicket, as we say, at all. And they can barely get the ball out of the pitch when they do make a strike.
I came to love these Texts for Nothing pieces so much that I read them over and over and convinced myself that I was a quite superior reader. As I read them, silently to myself, they sounded like poetry, comedy, philosophy. I looked around for audio recordings of these beauties. But there was only a little of Jack MacGowran—just a portion of one of the thirteen pieces—and some performances by Bill Irwin that, alas, went unrecorded.
Dad’s quiet today, as always, then he’s not. Listen to the light, now, I hear. You’ve always loved light.
The team decided to take me back to the cold room. Maybe it wasn’t so cold for somebody wearing regular shoes, underwear, and a jacket like the interrogators, but it was definitely cold for a detainee with flip-flops and no underwear. “Talk to us!” XXXX shouted.
—It’s the Mets, Sam.
I was on my own.
This one room.
“I am ready to cooperate unconditionally,” I told him.
III.
–Perhaps no runs will be made, then what?
I decided I would record all thirteen of the Texts for Nothing and put the audio files on the Internet.
I love you, Father.
Allegation: That military interrogators improperly used sleep deprivation against detainees.
—We can’t presume anything. They played for ten hours last month. One game went twenty-three innings.
Let the Beckett Estate come after me for copyright violation. But I was stymied by the very first text, which begins, “Suddenly, no, at last, long last.” I couldn’t convincingly render that reversal, almost a deletion, despite many takes—how to negate one utterance with another within six words and then carry on believably?
Then Father says, Why? For fuck’s sake, did he really? Ghosts are like that, lurking at the margins, in dreams, in the silence beneath overheard conversations, and then, as in a dream and often in a dream, you get delivery of a query: it shows they have been watching, and we call it caring.
Finding: Some detainees were subjected to cell moves every few hours to disrupt sleep patterns and lower the ability to resist interrogation. Each case differed as to length and frequency of cell moves. Technique: Neither sleep disruption or deprivation is an authorized FM 34-52 technique.
—It’s charming, in its way. The struggle. Trudging back to their bench trailing the bat. Something grand about it. The crowd is enjoying it, or am I wrong?
—They are connoisseurs of losing, Sam.
—An acquired taste.
I tried Text 3: “Leave, I was going to say leave all that. What matter who’s speaking, someone said what matter who’s speaking. There’s going to be a departure . . . ” What emphasis or intonation to put on the first “leave?” I was over my head. Text 4: “I’ll describe the place,” writes Beckett, and then, “that’s unimportant.”
Because you brought me to ball games, I say. Because you told me about Louis-Schmeling. Let’s remember Louis-Schmeling, my father. Tell me about tuning in to the fight on a summer’s night on the blighted farm during the Depression, you were a boy, hating farming, wanting somewhere else, something else, excited about the world’s conflicts, there was importance in the air, there was Roosevelt cheering us on (“We need your muscles, Joe, against Germany”)—and here you were rooting for Joe, a negro from the South with two stones for hands to pummel a Nazi to death, as he said he wished to. And you wished it, too. Tell me again, Father, about your mix of disappointment and thrill when the fight ended in two minutes, the German squealing on the canvas, the stadium roaring, the nation roaring, you could hear it all on the radio, McCarthy was it calling the blows—some Irishman. I loved that, Father, you were but a boy.
Technique: The exact parameters of sleep deprivation technique remained undefined until Commander established clear guidance on the use of sleep adjustment. With the Commander’s guidance, sixteen-hour interrogations were repeated in a twenty-hour cycle, not to exceed four days in succession.
For the next seventy days I wouldn’t know the sweetness of sleeping: interrogation twenty-four hours a day, three and sometimes four shifts a day. “If you start to cooperate you’ll have some sleep and hot meals,” they used to tell me repeatedly.
Recommendation: No disciplinary action is required. The allegation should be closed.
—I certainly will not have another right now, thank you. I’d nod.
—You’d miss nothing.
—Will no one win? What then?
—They play to the end. Timeless, this sport. No clock.
—No one losing would be an excellent terminus—a draw, as it were. Scoreless even a better draw.
I happen to think place is most important, not that Beckett doesn’t—he goes on in Text 4 to give an “unimportant” description of “place,” but he gives it: “The top, very flat, of a mountain, no, a hill, but so wild so wild.” Enough. He adds “Enough.” But it is not nearly enough for me, per usual. Beckett was either all inflection or no inflection. He was either theater or mathematics. I laughed at myself and my little iPhone audio files and deleted them—there’s a reversal for you. I had before me the cut pages of my Calder and Boyars edition of Texts for Nothing. I had arrayed the pages on the floor so as to not to have to hear on the recording the sound of my amateurish turning of those pages: a waste.
You gave me the word once, Father. You were gone, but I was alone and scared. I was in some county the name of which you would know and I would not. I was on my own, driving in a car south of the Hall of Fame, where we had visited when I was but a Little Leaguer, and you had shown me the exhibit, earnestly, all the exhibits, bats and balls and gloves in some magical town devoted to a pastime. But was it past? I had gone there again. You know I bought an umbrella? Why does anyone buy an umbrella? For protection!
In 1992, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a twenty-two-year-old Mauritanian, was completing his degree in electrical engineering at the University of Duisberg, Germany. He was living there with his Mauritanian wife. In 1992, the US Department of the Army issued Field Manual 34-52 on Intelligence Interrogation, a 177-page document that laid out the purposes, techniques, approaches, rationales, and permissible limits of interrogation. Less than a decade later, the strategies in this Field Manual would serve to make a brutal nightmare of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s existence. Fear-Up Approach (Harsh): In this approach, the interrogator behaves in an overpowering manner with a loud and threatening voice. The interrogator may even feel the need to throw objects across the room to heighten the source’s implanted feelings of fear. This technique is to convince the source he does indeed have something to fear, that he has no option but to cooperate. Then convince the source that you are his best or only hope in avoiding or mitigating the object of his fear, such as punishment for his crimes. The fear-up (harsh) approach is usually a dead end.
—That’s not American, Sam. We go for the win!
—And still lose.
—It is brutally hot, don’t you think?
— Let’s watch. How awful to miss the rare success.
—I don’t dare go. My bladder’s the matter. I am quite your senior, need I remind you.
—It’s a long trough in there, right through this tunnel, to the right. But go now, mid-inning. Men pissing their pilsner.
—Ever thus. I’m off.
When you read the whole of Beckett, even if you think you are caught going nowhere, you are going somewhere. Whether in Watt’s house, in the inescapable cylinder of The Lost Ones, waiting interminably by a tree, on a country road, of an evening, or on the road with A and C in Molloy, you have a momentum if not a particular destination. Though many stories recur throughout the entire oeuvre, they are all childhood memories of one Samuel Barclay Be
ckett, born April 13, 1906, in the family home, Cooldrinagh, in Foxrock, County Dublin. For all the literary abstraction that seemed to be the terminus of Beckett’s work—his next-to-last prose work, Worstward Ho, is a steady pulse of ingenious lexical negations—he never forgot the intimate tales of his own life, not tales, always, but always sensations, of being a child, of being at his mother’s knee, staring up into the fierce face of May Beckett, or of walks, often hand in hand, with his father, Bill, through the Dublin hills, or having an adventure story read to him in the early evening, seeing the ships at sea or the mountain cairns or hearing “the consumptive postman” whistling on his rounds. These memories are Beckett at his most lyrical, and for all the severity and blasted landscapes that mark his plays and many of the later texts, the lyrical found purchase everywhere. No matter how abstracted the literary affects, Beckett is always writing from the source material of his own life. Indeed, his famous revelation, walking on the Dún Laoghaire East pier in 1945, he wrote, and then corrected to a shorter pier south of there, and corrected again to “my mother’s room”—was that it was his self that would be his topic or at least the occasion for his explorations of the conditions and the impulse for expression. Beckett told Lawrence Harvey in 1962 that “Being is constantly putting form in danger,” and that there was no form of expression Beckett knew of that didn’t violate being “in the most unbearable manner.” From his earliest writings, form could barely contain him—Proust, his first published book (at twenty-four), was “more a creative encounter between one great writer and another” than a critical monograph, wrote John Pilling. And then there are the crazy stories that made their way into More Pricks Than Kicks, pieces that showed a restless brilliance at war with conventional language and form. Beckett, not unlike Proust, considered being, or self itself, to be “the real originator of disorder,” as the helpful Pilling puts it. Although it is not uncommon to see passages such as the well-known sucking-stone incident in Molloy cited as evidence of the self’s gallant (if absurd) attempt to render some order in the world, the larger point of Beckett’s work seems to be that Being is going to thrash form at every turn. It’s not that form is oppressive to Beckett—it is as beloved as routine!—and that’s what makes Beckett funny, that contradiction, that paradoxical accommodation.
I was in love so-called and about to make a big decision. I was in trouble. I summoned you somehow, in the car driving south, like Aeneas his father’s ghost. I said to the small compartment of air in the car, Father would know the county, and there you were, beside me, your left arm extended over the back of the driver’s seat, behind me, as was your style when riding shotgun, it let you sit up, over your gut, it helped you breathe, and you gave me your approval. You said, Wyoming. We are in Wyoming County. I took your word. Irishmen always know their counties, wherever they are, and I welcomed your approval, with some tears, it is true, which made you disappear, embarrassed you were, but I took your word, and cried, and now I have other voices in my life. Tears, I have found, silence the old voices. Perhaps it makes them sad, the old voices. And they are far beyond being sad. They have not returned merely to hear us weep, the old voices, they take silence.
In 1992, Mohamedou Ould Slahi interrupted his studies to join the insurgency against the Communist-led, Russia-backed government in Afghanistan. The US opposed this government as well. Slahi was trained in Khost and swore an oath of allegiance to al-Qaeda. My goal was solely to fight against the aggressors, mainly the Communists, who forbid my brethren to practice their religion. Slahi has said that after the Communists withdrew from Afghanistan, the mujahedeen began to fight among themselves—to wage Jihad against themselves, he put it—so he decided to return to Germany. In 2000, after more than a decade living in Germany and Canada, Slahi returned home to Mauritania, where he found himself under suspicion in connection to the Millennium Plot to bomb LAX, which was foiled by sharp-eyed US Customs agents in Port Angeles, Washington, on December 14, 1999. In 2000 and through the first eight months of 2001, Slahi was detained and interviewed several times—by Senegalese police, Mauritanian authorities, and the FBI—regarding the Millennium Plot. He was questioned again, less than three weeks after 9/11, by the FBI—regarding the Millennium Plot. At last he was declared innocent. But in late November 2001, Slahi was questioned again and taken by the CIA to Amman, Jordan, where he was interrogated for seven and a half months. Mohamedou Ould Slahi has not been home to Mauritania since, unless you call Guantanamo Prison home, where he has been since August 2002. His 122,000-word diary, handwritten in English—his fourth language—was edited by human rights activist Larry Siems and published by Little, Brown in 2015. [Slahi was finally released in October 2016. –Ed.]
—Is Barney happy with the film?
—I know he’s thrilled. Getting you and Keaton together is triumph enough. But he thinks it’ll do well in the festivals. As do I.
—It got toward something, I do think that. Buster was a great pro. I’m not sure anyone else could have done as well. He never flinched.
In 1981, journalist Larry Shainberg, out of the blue and with no introduction, sent Beckett a copy of a book he’d written, on brain surgery. Shainberg, with whom I had a drink recently, in the old style, in the lounge of a hotel, said he was surprised that the Nobel Prize winner, known to be a very private man, responded. Indeed, Beckett was quite interested in Shainberg’s book. “Where do they put the skull bone while they are working inside?” Shainberg was a lucky guy. Beckett agreed to meet him in London, where Endgame was in rehearsal with Rick Cluchey’s San Quentin players. Shainberg was invited to the theater and got to see Beckett in his milieu, greeting well-wishers and longtime collaborators like Billie Whitelaw, Alan Schneider, and Irene Worth. Shainberg was very moved by the Beckett he saw “incarnate.” He found the experience “inspiring and disheartening, terrifying, reassuring, and humbling in the extreme.”
Enough of that. We are disturbed here, in our nest, quite often. We are of the world, in it, and what we can control here—the blinds, the linens, I will call them linens, our toilette and array of unguents, reading material, and, to some considerable extent, not to be discounted, our moods, are all that we can do against a brute, indifferent world. Certainly a disinterested world, with no rooting interest in our fate, but an uninterested world as well. I trend in a certain direction, once I get going. When my beloved remarked at how I so often struggled like a blind man to find the right word for something—carmine, say, for the color of that single drop of blood beaded on the eye socket of a trap-caught mouse in the foyer—I determined to find the word for that which describes me: “pedant,” she said, “look no further, you’re a pedant.” To return to those outer phenomena that disturb us—the pounding of mysterious demolitions and constructions that go on beyond our doors, the civil torment, the traffic, the boom of detonations connected to road work, the weed-whacking of a neighbor, and the other guy’s fucking beagles, down the street, barking at imagined attackers. I think of Bachelard in these instances, and succor my beloved with such an anecdote, that the good Parisian first thought in his process of mind that woodpeckers, say, working on a nearby tree with a woodpecker’s intensity, were but the sounds of a garden worker. And so, when his neighbor insists on banging nails hours on end in some construction, he sees him, too, as a garden worker.
In Mauritania, there is slavery still. In Mauritania, there is torture in the prisons, still. In Mauritania, ninety percent of the land is desert. In 1981, Mauritania abolished slavery. Only in 2007 did Mauritania pass a law criminalizing the owning of another person. In 2012, CNN reported that ten–twenty percent of the population, in Mauritania, remained enslaved. In Mauritania, the population is about four million. In Mauritania, the literacy rate is fifty percent. People live on a dollar and a half a day, in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.
—A face of granite, eyes of a sad hound, that Buster.
—That’s good, Dick, very good. Now you’ve made me think of o
ur old Kerry Blue, though . . . Mother put her down. Buster . . . good name for a dog.
—Some things last forever.
—I’ll quote you.
From all that I have read, if you got to know Samuel Beckett, you liked him—he was good company in his quiet way. Both shy and relaxed, funny and strict, he was always good-hearted, except when crossed by bumbling or censorious publishers and theater agents. He always had his good reasons for being unpleasant. To know Beckett, or to know his work, as Shainberg became well aware, is also to risk falling under the spell of his style. “Writers with Beckett too much in mind,” Shainberg wrote, “can sound worse than the weakest student in a freshman writing class. . . . ”
That’s my woodworker working on the acacia tree, thinks Bachelard, a method for obtaining calm when things disturb me. This helps us. For some years we would access the traveling theme, “deep travel” our friend Tony calls it, and he would know—his father was a long time in jail—though for us it was deeper than that, deep as sleep, where true travel happens, not something that settles for, say, awareness. No. I could put my beloved to sleep by Peekskill. Where we would begin is on our front step, then one-two-three to the sidewalk.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi was born on New Year’s Eve, 1970, the ninth of twelve children. His father was a nomadic camel trader, who died when Mohamedou was a boy but after the family had moved to the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott. Today, nearly half the country lives in Nouakchott. By the time he was a teen, Mohamedou had memorized the Koran. He loved soccer, and particularly the German national team. He won a scholarship to study in Germany.
—I do think The Tramp would’ve been too lovable. Don’t you?
—Too pitiable, perhaps.
“[I]n the wake of one of Beckett’s convoluted, self-mocking sentences,” wrote Shainberg, “one can freeze with horror at the thought of any form that suggests ‘Once upon a time,’ anything, in fact, which departs from the absolute present. But if you take that notion too far you lose your work in . . . the belief that you can capture both your subject and your object in the instant of composition: ‘Here I am, sitting at my desk, writing Here I am, sitting at my desk.’”
Samuel Beckett Is Closed Page 3
