Samuel Beckett Is Closed

by Michael Coffey

  We’d imagine something not forcing us out of town, no towering infernos, no rising tides, no threats of a cyclone, for that would do little to bring on sleep. Rather, a journey of exploration, from point A, which we love, our city home, to point B, which we love, mountains and trees and back roads. “The soft hills of my first home,” my beloved once wrote, on her birthday it was.

  The brothers in the block felt bad for me. I was dreaming almost every night that I had received mail from my family. I always passed on my dreams to my next-door neighbors, and the dream interpreters always gave me hope, but no mails came.

  —And misery hates pity.

  Larry mentioned this to me at the Marlton Hotel lounge, as if it was a common thing to understand, and yet I realized at that moment that I had no idea how to be free of “Beckett’s convoluted, self-mocking sentences” or the economy of his comic timing (Vladimir: “I can’t go on like this.” Estragon: “That’s what you think.”).

  One step leads to another, follows upon another, a wise way to go forth in life, I read it on a manhole cover—one thing followed by another is about as complex as it need be if you are lucky and not greedy, and we were not greedy, very lucky.

  “I dreamt that you got a letter from your family,” was a common phrase from brothers in the block.

  IV.

  —You’ll have to excuse my dental whistle: wobbly molar.

  I wanted to be astute enough to detect the illogic of the most innocent of expressions and the surprising logic of same (Clov: “I’ll leave you.” Hamm: “No!” Clov: “What is there to keep me here?” Hamm: “The dialogue.”).

  So set out.

  Allegation: That military interrogators improperly used duct tape to cover a detainee’s mouth and head.

  —Do you want to see someone over here, a dentist? Judith could arrange it.

  —It’s an abomination in there, like a vandalized graveyard—a bevy of broken stonework.

  It is hard not to imitate, I told Larry. Look, I did the following, writing under the influence of Mr. Beckett: One spring, it was spring cleaning, nothing but industry around this house, the one in which I spent my early years, by the grace of some strange relations, perhaps my parents, I was never sure, only of Gramps I was sure, that’s what he told me to call him, when I could understand such orders and follow them. There it is—the hesitant, lilting, uncertain voice, nostalgic for some vanished simplicity—but the real thing, the Beckett tone, is everywhere unmatchable.

  We walk to the west one hundred yards or so to where the mighty Hudson River courses by us headed south, and we take a right, or so I narrate, and walk up that river, bearing north, step after step—and then I switch gears, and we are at our garage up on Houston Street, yes, near the piers, my love, and we settle into the seats of our carriage, and adjust them, and tune to a radio station, depending, something obscure, like jazz, or corny, or brazen political talk, or guys talking about cars, unless the locals are playing. This we do without leaving the bedsheets, the pallet, or the hooked rug, depending on our fortunes. Lessens our footprint, and frees our minds, gives us cars and travel and a country home, as if we had them, and what’s the difference?

  Finding: Sometime in October duct tape was used to “quiet” a detainee. Technique: Unauthorized.

  —That inning took less than five minutes.

  —They all seem in a hurry. Up and down, get me home.

  —I prefer to think of the precisions on display.

  —Have it your way, Sam. But I hope you get to see a home run.

  The Unmatchable, then, from Texts for Nothing, 2, since I need it: Above is the light, the elements, a kind of light, sufficient to see by, the living find their ways, without too much trouble, avoid one another, unite, avoid the obstacles, without too much trouble, seek with their eyes, close their eyes, halting without halting, among the elements, the living. Unless it has changed, unless it has ceased. The things too must still be there, a little more worn, a little even less, many still standing where they stood in the days of their indifference. Here you are under a different glass, not long habitable either, it’s time to leave it. You are there, there it is, where you are will never long be habitable. Go then, no, better stay, for where would you go, now that you know?

  One of the joys of such travel is looking into other people’s homes. I do remember, as a boy sitting in the backseat of some Packard or Plymouth, folks up front, driving around, looking into other people’s homes. Mother was particularly sharp at this. Look at those curtains! Or, Do they have to burn every light? I would peer in as homes passed by and as an exercise of mind imagine in a flash all that I saw being intimate with my experience, what it was like to play in the lee of that porch or gambol about the slope of that hill or be within that cellar from which a warm light glowed or on that tar roof, near the chimney stack, warm to my palm, looking into my own bedroom, on the third floor, private, remote, full of sports equipment and toy cars and seeing there a version of myself asleep. These exercises as a youth developed in me a gift for spitiromancing, as in reading homes, from the Greek—spiti, house—and I noticed as the years passed and I embarked on these passages the powerful sense, as home after home passed, of something very familiar, as if I had been there once in the deepest way, knew the smells or the damp or the sound of the furnace kicking on in that very home and where to find the cookies and the 3-in-1 oil and where the light switch was in my room and in every room, on the right as I walked into the bathroom, with my knuckle.

  Discussion: In his testimony, the Chief testified that he had a situation in which a detainee was screaming resistance messages and potentially provoking a riot. At the time of the incident there were ten detainees in the interrogation section and the Chief was concerned about losing control of the situation. He directed the MPs to quiet the detainee down. The MP mentioned that he had duct tape. The Chief says he ultimately approved the use of the duct tape. The MP then placed a single strand of duct tape around the detainee’s mouth—this proved ineffective.

  —Beyond the boundary, you mean? Is that six runs?

  —Six? No, one, plus the runners on base ahead of him, bases loaded, as we say.

  —Is it rare, beyond the boundary?

  —Is it rare in cricket?

  —It’s a wondrous thing, to clear the boundary. To be wished.

  —The record here is sixty-one in a season, four in a game.

  Where would you go, now that you know, now that you know that where you are is no longer habitable? Where would you go if there is nowhere to go? Or if you know of nowhere to go? Such questions—they might be statements, or guesses, or even entertainments—are so common in Beckett’s work as to be implied. How old were you when you first looked up the word aporia? To each his own, I was nineteen or twenty and reading, I can’t remember, Murphy or The Unnamable. I looked the word up in my college dictionary, we all got college dictionaries as graduation presents in those days, and I even brought mine to Ireland, a young chap from a small town bringing his words across the sea. Aporia: an internal irresolvable conflict. Yes, it was The Unnamable, the shattering ending, a near auto-asphyxiation, but an escape: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

  I wound my way into other people’s homes. My beloved thrilled to this tack, as each time, I suppose, it held the promise of a revelation. For my past she did not know like the gospels, and with each telling some new juicy bit might emerge, some inconsistency even, or a glittering facet she’d call “gold.” Wending, perhaps winding, wiling my way, in any event, like an orphan child, into one household after another, every feature of which attests to a missing attachment, something uncoupled, unmet, an armature waiting for its hook, a plug dangling from an appliance. There was the big family that took me in—did I fancy the elder daughter? There was the bigger family that took me in—didn’t I marry the elder daughter? There was the biggest family that took me in—why
did I not marry the elder daughter? There was the orphaned elder daughter I ran from. There were the parents who went off to die, those parents who took me in sight unseen. Gold?

  The detainee was yelling again. This time the MPs wrapped a single strand of duct tape around the mouth and head of the detainee. This proved ineffective. Fed up and concerned that the detainee’s yelling might cause a riot in the interrogation trailer, the Chief ordered MPs to wrap the duct tape twice around the head and mouth and three times under the chin and around the top of the detainee’s head. According to an FBI agent, he and another FBI agent were approached by the Chief who was laughing and told the agents that they needed to see something. When the first agent went to the interrogation room he saw that the detainee’s head had been wrapped in duct tape over his beard and hair. According to the first agent, the Chief said the interrogator had done so because the detainee refused to stop “chanting” passages from the Koran. Organizational response: The Chief was verbally admonished by a female commander. He did not receive any formal discipline. There is no evidence that duct tape was ever used again on a detainee.

  —What I love about team sport is that it has meaning only by consensus.

  —I don’t follow you, Sam.

  —Smart. What is today’s attendance at this match?

  —They’re still coming in. These seats here will be filled soon I’d guess. Maybe twenty thousand. There’s a second game.

  —Assuming that this one finds closure. Boxing’s a different matter, I always thought. Kind of the heart of every sport.

  —I suppose.

  —Like chess. Your boy Fischer sacrificed his queen to win a match—hardly a consensus move. His own.

  And Beckett did go on, he wasn’t lying. Plays, stories, poems, novels, novellas, radio plays, film scripts, TV scripts, essays, reviews, thousands upon thousands of letters. It is true, he did not reach his aporia until after the war—he finished L’Innommable in 1950, the English translation came a few years later. The book, really the three novels, marked the end of Beckett as novelist, no matter various publishers’ efforts in later years to frame later short prose pieces as “novels.” He honored his own achievement by never writing long-form prose again. The stasis or stalling within that form meant the death of it for him, but not the death of Being. What followed was not silence of course—as much as Beckett may have wished for it he always knew he was incapable of it—but a surprising variety, an inventiveness, and a new interest: literary abstraction. Lawrence Harvey, a professor of English at Dartmouth, became a good friend of Beckett’s while writing his essential study, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. It was Harvey, in his notes on his conversations with Beckett in Paris, who wrote that Beckett thought Being was a great challenge to form. Harvey felt that Beckett was “anti-form, if form is considered to be order.” Beckett favored a “disordered form, a broken form. . . . Being is chaotic, the opposite of ordered form,” wrote Harvey.

  At moments—and this is, ironically, my crowning success—my beloved will be asleep. I can sense the stillness, her weight evenly distributed on the bedsheets or on the pallet or the rug, deadweight warm but cooling. So she is out, and there I am, even when convinced of my triumph, feeling a need to go on. Rather, an inability to stop, since the story, no matter how poorly constructed, is alive and wriggling and will not itself be put down. And there I tell my secrets, ah yes. And then I tell my secrets. These are dark fears, I admit, that come to the surface in a quiet room with no auditor. Oh, I have confessed more truths to an empty confession box than one occupied by dear Father Norm. I suppose I was speaking with God, but He never said a thing, so I could allow myself to think He was otherwise engaged. In the morning, with light slivering in and slowly revealing our soft bedscape, my beloved still asleep, I will carry on if indeed I had ever stopped. I will go on, with prepared remarks, to usher her into the day. Something familiar and warm.

  Pride and Ego-Up Approach: This approach is most effective on sources with little or no intelligence, or on those who have been looked down upon for a long time. It is very effective on low-ranking enlisted personnel and junior grade officers, as it allows the source to finally show someone that he does indeed have some intelligence. The source is constantly flattered into providing certain information to gain credit. The interrogator must take care to use a flattering, somewhat-in-awe tone of voice, and to speak highly of the source throughout this approach. This quickly produces positive feelings on the source’s part, as he had probably been looking for this type of recognition all his life. Officer: “You know, sometimes we arrest people for the wrong thing, but it turns out they are involved in something else!” Source: “When are you going to stop playing this game on me? Every time there is a new suspicion, and when that turns out to be incorrect, I get a new one, and so on and so forth. Is there a possibility in the world that I am involved in nothing?” Officer: “Of course; therefore, you have to cooperate and defend yourself. All I am asking is that you explain some shit to me.”

  —Another is out. The whole side, a succession of small failures . . . leading to nothing.

  —Nothing is more real than nothing, if I may quote you.

  —Democritus was the tip of the spear there.

  —You know, even a good hitter makes an out seven out of ten times.

  —Handsome odds!

  —Witness that failure, Sam. Kranepool, striking out. . . .

  —Kraaannne-pooool.

  Samuel Beckett produced consistently original work for sixty years, bracketed on each end by a poem: the award-winning “Whoroscope” in 1930 and 1989’s near-deathbed “Comment Dire,” or “What Is the Word?” (seem to glimpse –/ need to seem to glimpse –/ afaint afar away over there what –/ folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what –/ what –/ what is the word –// what is the word). None of the work could have been written by anyone else. Even the undisciplined, precocious, anxious early stories, when Beckett did not know he would make a career as an author (he thought he might work for Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow) bear his mark. During those six decades his work changed in many ways as he ran through genres and forms, exhausting them all, but ever going on, inexhaustible himself, clearly, to the very end. Reception of his work, harsh and dismissive early on, when received at all—the publisher rejections of his early works numbered in the dozens—evolved into an industry, critical, popular, academic, political, philosophical, and even medical. Keeping up with his challenging production was one thing, and praise came from interesting quarters throughout (Adorno’s essay on Endgame) as did ridicule (John Updike parodied Beckett’s How It Is in the New Yorker). But serious scholars, aware that Beckett had become a colossal figure, did their best to co-opt him, or at least situate him within various movements that suited one purpose or another. Beckett was ill-served by these attempts, however well-intentioned, as surely many of them were.

  I will give her a favorite, from both our childhoods, from Stevenson’s Garden of Verses. My bed is like a little boat, I say quietly, nurse helps me in when I embark. She girds me in my sailor’s coat and starts me in the dark. At night, I go on board and say, Good-night to all my friends on shore. I shut my eyes and sail away and see and hear no more. And sometimes things to bed I take, as prudent sailors have to do. Perhaps a slice of wedding-cake, perhaps a toy or two. All night across the dark we steer, but when the day returns at last, safe in my room, beside the pier, I find my vessel fast. My beloved will awake, either hungry or inclined to play.

  Allegation: That military interrogators improperly chained detainees and placed them in a fetal position on the floor. Finding: On at least two occasions, detainees were “short shackled” to the eyebolt on the floor in the interrogation room. Technique: Unauthorized. Discussion: Short-shackling is the process by which the detainee’s hand restraints are connected directly to an eyebolt in the floor requiring the detainee to either crouch very low or lay in a feta
l position on the floor. One agent stated that she witnessed a detainee short-shackled and lying in his own excrement. There was no documentation, testimony, or other evidence corroborating another agent’s recollection that one of the detainees had pulled out his hair while short-shackled. Organizational response: None. Recommendation: The allegation should be closed. No evidence to adequately assign responsibility for these actions was found.

  —I think there is a lot to explore in containment.

  —How so, Sam?

  —I can’t eat these, I regret to say. My teeth. I’ll suck the salt off them.

  —You mean like Robbe-Grillet, writing only about objects?

  —Christ, no.

  Beckett was sixteen years old when the Irish Free State was formed, in 1922, and he died just as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. In the duration of his adult life there were two world wars, a genocide in Europe, a cultural revolution, in France and elsewhere, and the attainment of a country’s presidency by a playwright and friend, Václav Havel (he wrote a play for Havel, Catastrophe). Now that he has been dead a quarter century, Beckett is being exhumed from the many movements that claimed him for their own. Early on, he was able to shake off these claimants himself, denouncing the romantic poetry of Ireland in an early review and, much later, responding to a reporter’s question, Do you consider yourself an English writer? with “Au contraire.” But in postwar France, his work was critically situated in such a way that proved difficult to controvert, it took such a hold. It has taken decades to do so.