Samuel Beckett Is Closed

by Michael Coffey

  “Germany is horrible,” he writes to—. “I can’t imagine anything worse than the mental marasmus, in which I totter & sweat for months. It has turned out indeed to be a journey from, and not to, as I knew it was, before I began it.”

  I have already died. I am no more. No one notices.

  Ismaël Omar Mostefaï made contact with the extremists in Syria after traveling through Turkey in late ٢٠١٣. The twenty-nine-year-old was identified by DNA taken from one of his fingers found at the scene of the deadliest of the Paris attacks. Mostefaï is thought to have returned early in 2014.

  —In a normal game there’s more scoring. But the pitchers Lary and Larsen are both sharp today. They’ve hardly walked a man. You know, the four balls. . . .

  —Aye, the discordant four among this game of threes and multiples of three—three strikes, and three bases, right? But four balls make a walk and four bases make a run, am I right?

  If a journey from is a journey to you have Beckett. Can I assert that? I do say I may have learned, at the very least, after these months of reading him, that that is true. How liberating to think that this is progress! Life is not a line but a kind of wandering circle—Oh how I love, in a late work, Ill Seen Ill Said, the description of an old woman’s cabin as “a roughly circular whole . . . as though outlined by a trembling hand.”

  I’m not going to be the one to tell them. Once I say so, it is suicide. The myth of living is as strong as the measure of it, and co-extensive. I am dead inside but the only one to know it. Hence the liberty of delusions.

  Mostefaï’s DNA was already in France’s national DNA databank because he had been arrested and convicted of a string of petty crimes while growing up in the Paris suburb of Courcouronnes, although he was never jailed. He was flagged as a potential security threat in 2010 after being radicalized in Chartres, a cathedral town southwest of Paris, reportedly by a Belgian imam. Mostefaï moved to Chartres to join one of his brothers who ran a shisha bar there, a municipal official said. Mostefaï lived in a modest terraced house with his wife and daughter, his parents, two of his brothers and his two sisters, but left for Algeria in 2012. His trace was picked up when he entered Turkey the next year. His brother Houari Mostefaï, thirty-four, was arrested and questioned after turning himself in to police on Saturday when he learned that his brother was one of the attackers.

  —You might work out some musical counterpoint to this game. Some charts.

  —Let it remain a sport is best. Why are we standing?

  —Seventh inning stretch. Some American president got up and stretched during the seventh inning and now we all do it—and sing this song. Speaking of music.

  —They cut to this tune I think in A Night at the Opera, from Verdi to this.

  —It’s playing at the Thalia uptown, near Buster’s hotel.

  —Nothing like standing to renew one’s regard for sitting.

  Beckett’s journey went on, and this turns up perhaps my central question, which quite possibly covers the critical waterfront that Van Hulle mentioned: what was Beckett traveling from (those “demented particulars”) and what was he traveling to (a revolutionary literary abstraction)? That is both tender and simple in concept. We all have a story; we all want a story, a narrative, a something something. Don’t we want Beckett to be based in something, to mean something, whether it be his “particulars” or an aesthetic goal—and isn’t Beckett’s very evasiveness on those scores part of what fascinates? On the one hand, as he wrote, “Life alone is enough. I wanted a story. That was my mistake.” On the other, the need to express, and the comfort in the pursuit of rational inquiry, or at least, of its ritual: “The same old questions, the same old answers. There’s nothing like them.”

  One thing I pretend to know is that my beloved has come back. There she is, identical in every trace. But an impostor. Captive to Capgras? I know it. Does she? I cannot say. Still, her visible presence is a comfort. And there is one miraculous gift in this otherwise fraudulent resurrection: all my stories are new to her. Fresh snow.

  BRUSSELS — Warning of a “serious and imminent” threat of a Paris-style terrorist attack, the authorities in Belgium on Saturday shut down the Brussels subway system, canceled soccer games and advised citizens to avoid public places amid a security lockdown across the Belgian capital. The United States Embassy in Brussels urged Americans “to shelter in place and remain at home.” A statement on the embassy website on Saturday advised that “if you must go out, avoid large crowds.” The security alert followed the discovery of weapons in the home of a Brussels resident arrested in connection with the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13. The weapons were found on Friday in Molenbeek, the heavily immigrant Brussels borough where at least three of the Paris attackers, all Belgium residents from Moroccan immigrant families, had lived. The borough has seen a series of police raids over the past week as the authorities sought to uproot a suspected support network behind the carnage in Paris. Adding to alarm over Belgium’s role as a center of Islamic extremism, the Turkish authorities on Saturday arrested a Belgian national of Moroccan ancestry, described as an Islamic State militant, at a luxury hotel in Antalya, along with two others. They identified the Belgian as Ahmad Dahmani, twenty-six, and said he was trying to illegally cross the border into Syria. As the Belgian government’s threat analysis unit raised the country’s threat level to 4, the highest possible, for the Brussels region, rumors of heavily armed terrorists in a car and bomb threats created a mood of deep foreboding in the city, which is home to not only Belgium’s government but also to the headquarters of the European Union and NATO.

  —I am not going back to the Brittany, I can assure you.

  —The clientele or the . . .

  —A mix of toughs and bank managers.

  —We’ll stick to the Emerald Isle, then, or the Blarney Stone. When do you return?

  —Looks like Friday week.

  —And then what?

  —I’ve cleared the decks. To Ussy and see if anything stirs in the bramble.

  —Godot and the novels keep doing well, at Grove at least.

  —I may be spent at last!

  In Germany, Beckett wanted to see modern paintings and sculpture, abstract and expressionist, and had to hunt them out and finagle introductions and permissions to gain access. He wanted to meet artists and collectors—he was not there to buy but to look. During this time, Hitler and his minister of culture, Joseph Goebbels, were orchestrating an assault on artistic expression and they did so with relish, even staging a major art show of work designated as “degenerate art” (Entartente Kunst) that toured the country for three years. Paintings were burned, paintings were auctioned off; artists were “shamed”; supporters of the wrong kind of art lost jobs. Beckett tried to buy a monograph on a sculptor he admired, Ernst Barlach, but the book had been banned, copies confiscated. Ever persistent, Beckett tried to buy a copy directly from the publisher, whom he phoned. Reinhard Piper told his caller that it was not possible to fulfill the order and said so, according to Beckett, in a “very terrified tone.” From October 2, 1936, to April 2, 1937, twenty-six weeks, Beckett traveled throughout Germany—Hamburg, Lübeck, Luneburg, Hannover, Brunswick, Wolfenbüttel, Hildesheim, Berlin, Halle, Weimar, Erfurt, Naumburg, Leipzig, Dresden, Freiburg, Bamberg, Staffelstein, Ban, Würzburg, Nürnberg, Regensburg, Munich—looking at, looking for, art. Consider the nerviness of this. Beckett, alone, was in a place where art was dangerous, where art, however degraded, mattered, livelihoods and lives in the balance. He was a demanding critic who knew what he was looking for: he condemned the work of one painter for the sin of having perspective in the painting—“the optical experience post rem, a hideous inversion of the visual process, the eye waiving its privilege,” he said of Max Klinger.

  But I cannot trust a stranger with my stories, much less an impostor. And that’s where literature comes in, the standard trove. To my “love” I give
Scheherazade’s “The City of Brass”:

  The grandees and officers of the Khallif Abboulmelik ben Merwan tell him how King Solomon used to confine Jinn in copper vessels by stopping them with lead sealed with his signet. Talib ben Sehl speaks of a place in Africa where such vessels are frequently found, and the khalif sends him for some, together with Abdulaziz ben Merrwan, the governor of Cairo, the khalif’s own brother. An old sheikh, Abdussemed, son of Abdulcuddous es Semoudi, serves as guide, and the journey requires two years. The expedition, astray in a desert, arrives at a gruesome, high castle of black stone, surrounded by a thousand steps, with a door of gleaming China steel and a dome of lead. This is recognized as a landmark on the way to the City of Brass, which in turn is but two months from their destination. The walls are inscribed with verses telling the vicissitudes of fortune and the passing of glory into dust. “The world,” one reads, “is like unto the vain dreams of the dreamer, the mirage of the desert which the thirsty take for water; and Satan maketh it fair for men even unto death.” The writer’s kingly majesty and happiness were obliterated, the verses declare, by a plague that smote his city and which neither his army nor his wealth could stay. Continuing, the expedition reaches a horseman of brass on a high hill, who, when his hand is rubbed, revolves and points the way.

  Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said on Saturday that the threat level had been raised because of “information, relatively precise, of a risk of an attack similar to the one that unfolded in Paris.” Potential targets included commercial centers, public transport, shopping streets, and large public gatherings, Mr. Michel said. “We recommend to the people to respect all safety instructions and to stay informed via official announcements,” he added, advising people to discount a fog of rumors and unconfirmed reports. A railway station under the headquarters of the European Union’s executive offices was sealed off early Saturday and all traffic on the Brussels metro system was stopped.

  —The seats I find hard.

  —With nothing to lance, I won’t complain.

  —A refreshment?

  —It’s Friday; why not. Out to East Hampton for the weekend?

  —Barney and Christine are there already, but I’m staying on at Houston Street, with Alan. Sidney and I are going to the Frick and the Modern Art Sunday morning. Joe Coffey’s taking us ’round in his Morgan.

  Beckett’s German sojourn began in the northern port city of Hamburg on the second of October 1936, he having arrived via boat from Cork. He read Celine’s Mort à crédit on the passage. Hamburg offered him artists—their work and their selves. He met and liked painters Karl Kluth and Willem Grimm, Karl Ballmer, and Eduard Bargheer, a man he described as “appallingly alive and possessed.” He was shown around Hamburg’s art world by, it seems, a covey of women, ranging from a schoolmistress and several widows to a woman who apparently had little interest in the Irishman with a herpes sore on his lip. Still, Beckett enjoyed Hamburg, its churches and cemeteries, but mostly the art. He was impressed by the works of Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde. He wrote dutifully each night about what he had seen during the day.

  They come to a brazen pillar containing, sunken to his armpits, an Afrit that had been the demon within the idol of a king who once defied Solomon. The king having been defeated in a prodigious battle—involving armies of birds, serpents, beasts, and Jinn—his Afrit had been sealed in this column to the Day of Judgment. He miserably points the way to the City of Brass, and the company moves on. Then they behold its walls, which are of black stone, with two towers of Andalusian brass that gleam from a distance like fires. A man sent around on a camel takes three days and finds the wall one block. They climb a hill and gaze down into the city, descrying lofty palaces, domes glittering, running streams, orchards, and flowering pleasances; but all is still, save for the hooting of the owl in the markets, the wheeling of birds above the gardens, and the croak of ravens in the streets. Inscriptions on the walls warn of the vanities of time. A ladder is constructed and a man mounts. When he reaches the top he stares, then claps his hands, crying out, “By Allah, thou art fair!” casts himself into the city, and is dashed to pieces.

  A police hotline for information about his whereabouts has received hundreds of calls but none have provided the authorities with enough information. The Belgian news media has speculated that he may be dead. Mr. Dahmani, the Belgian national arrested in Turkey on his way to Syria, is suspected of having been “in contact with the terrorists who perpetrated the Paris attacks,” said a Turkish official who spoke on condition of anonymity, in line with government protocol. He arrived in Turkey from Amsterdam on November 14 — the day after the Paris attacks.

  —No, the Guggenheim Museum was enough. An hour there was more than enough. Peggy has all the good stuff.

  —Have you been to Venice? You should go, not to die . . .

  —No. I sent Suzanne for the opening of Oh les beaux jours at the festival there—and well-received it was. But no, I don’t walk on water.

  “Nolde’s Christus and Kinder, clot of yellow infants, long green back of Christ (David?) leading to black and beards of Apostles. Lovely eyes of child held in His arms. Feel at once on terms with the picture, and that I want to spend a long time before it, and play it over and over again like the record of a quartet.” As winter came on, Beckett, with a festering finger and a most inconveniently located boil (“between wind and water”), moved from Hamburg to Berlin, where his experience darkened with the century’s. This is where the “trip” became “a failure.” But also where he met a young bookseller, Axel Kaun, in letters to whom he famously articulated his aesthetic.

  Eleven others do the same. Finally the old Sheikh Abdussemed, committing himself to Allah, ascends and gazes likewise, while all fear for him, but he turns and cries, “Have no fear, for God hath averted me from the wiles and malice of Satan.” What he had seemed to see were ten beautiful maidens beckoning, and below, a lake; but when he bethought himself, this illusion disappeared. Doubtless it was an enchantment devised by the people of the city. Walking to the towers of brass, the sheikh discovers two gates of gold without visible opening, but a brazen horseman carries in his outstretched hand a notice to turn twelve times the pin in his navel. This done, the gates open with a noise of thunder.

  “There is no record of the Belgian authorities having warned Turkey about Dahmani—which is why there was no entry ban,” the official said. He added: “Had the Belgian authorities alerted us in due time, Dahmani could have been apprehended at the airport.”

  —This is actually very pleasant, Dick. It is nice that the field empties between changing sides. For a moment, we are all looking at an open meadow.

  To Axel Kaun: “It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through—I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.”

  The sheikh finds in the guard room men sitting dead but wearing keys, with which he opens the principal gate, whereupon those of the expedition, crying “god is most great!” go into the silent city. The inhabitants are sitting in their shops and homes with shriveled skin and rotted bones; the markets are sumptuous with silks and pearls; the palace is magnificent. Tablets admonish of the passing of the glories of the world.

  VLADIMIR: One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) It’s a reasonable percentage. (Pause.) Gogo.

  —But I could do without the bloody organ.

  Beckett’s aesthetic of failure was born in German cities that would be bombed to smithereens during the next eight or nine years—it is where he may have begun to “[fix] an existence on the threshold of solution,” as Nixon surmises in the last line of his book on the German Diaries, quoting
Beckett in a letter to Simone de Beauvoir.

  Visiting the various rich pavilions, the company carries off as much wealth as it can.

  ESTRAGON: What?

  VIII.

  —This Houston team is most cooperative, soft taps around the pitch, or the infield, is it?

  It was not easy for Beckett to fail at writing.

  And they see in the palace, on a great couch, a fair damsel, embalmed with exceeding art, guarded by two slaves—a white having a mace and a black with a sword—between whom stands a tablet recounting the past glories of the kings of the world and naming the damsel, Tedmureh, daughter of the Kings of the Amalekites; seven successive years of drought had destroyed her realm.

  I was ten years old when the towers fell downtown, about a mile from my school.

  —It’s like a game of pepper.

  —You’ll have to translate. Et pas en Francais.

  I mean to say it was hard for him to fail. He was a brilliant linguist, named a lecturer in French at Trinity College at age twenty-four; he wrote works and thousands of letters in English, French, and German to friends, publishers, theater people, and could also speak Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; he could read music. Beckett was so gifted it was up to him to sabotage his own scholarly career, and he did—after publishing a brilliant book on Proust, he left the academy behind, deeply disappointing his mentor at Trinity—and his mother.

  “When,” the text makes known, “we despaired of succor, we displayed all our riches and things of price and, shutting the gates of the city, resigned ourselves to the judgment of our Lord and committed our affair to our Master. Know, O though who comest to this place, that she whom thou seest here was not deluded by the world and its frail delights.” The governor of Cairo begins making copies of all the tablets and loading as much as possible on his camel.

  Our teacher, Susan, was talking about our big trip that year, to Williamsburg, when the principal came in, Phil. It was a nice day, real blue out, and all of us were still in our summer mode and so not into school and homework.