Samuel Beckett Is Closed

by Michael Coffey

  In the drawing room of the Greenes a heat blast incinerates the assembled, strewn now in heaps, gowns shredded and arms bleeding among the grounded chandeliers, a collapsed piano smoldering like a kiln, one string popping like a shot, another, and you can scratch the air as if it is plaster. Like that. What will accompany our young couple, let’s make them young, or will accompany any of us, at that last instant, as we know it, when the dust and nonsense hardens into glass?

  Behold the button-hook, weeping.

  Of tarnished silver pisciform it hangs by its hook from a nail. It trembles faintly without cease. As if here without cease the earth faintly quaked. The oval handle is wrought to a semblance of scales. The shank a little bent leads up to the hook the eye so far still dry. A lifetime of hooking had lessened its curvature. To the point at certain moments of its seeming unfit for service. Child’s play with pliers to restore it.

  Schubert accompanied Beckett at the very end, Der Winterreise. As did a handful of dear friends, his niece and nephew, his cigars and Irish whiskey, and stretches of recollected poems—Tennyson, Keats, Mallarmé, Yeats. Who was it told me that Yeats gets better as you approach the end, a tattered coat upon a stick? Yes, we might seek company, especially if many have fled, as they do, if we ourselves linger. The twenty-three-year-old Beckett left a trace in black ink in Du côté de chez Swann as the narrator rhapsodized about the little phrase of the Vinteuil Sonata: “Like the madeleine, hawthorns, etc. one of the 2 elements — The necessary portentous actual sensation — of participation” (my italics). Sixty years later, the dying Beckett was participating somehow in Yeats’s “The Tower,” aware of the clouds fading from sight at nightfall, birdsong approaching silence in the deepening shade—but the clouds.

  Here, an object is rendered up with a distinct music, an exalted diction, in shapes and letterforms arrayed against a tricky void. This worn silver object, in Ill Seen Ill Said, sits, gorgeous from his hand, against a landscape of stones, like “the stones of Connemara” of Lucky’s great monologue, another dolmen. But objects within objects, as inside a rough hovel of language this lovely instrument—a shimmering silver-handled button-hook—hangs. Near the center of an unchartable vastness it shimmers like a thought. A bit of light. When asked—at a dinner party in Dresden—what it is he wanted to create most, a young Beckett replied, “light in the monad.” After Leibniz.

  Beckett wrote Company first in English then in French and then back to English—in truth, it is three works: one for a French reader, from Editions Minuit, a John Calder version for the English reader, and a Grove Press version for the American, with the word-choice differences well mined by Beckett scholars. What was he looking for, wandering from one language to another, gleaning, gathering, sorting—company, from the Old French, compainie? Toward the end, in his nursing home, Beckett would occasionally borrow a television set on which to watch tennis and rugby. According to James Knowlson, “On one occasion, [Beckett] watched a programme about Bram van Velde, noting with emotion that, as he was being interviewed in a garden, Bram was carrying a copy of Beckett’s book, Compagnie.” What is it about Company, the first of three late novellas written in a burst when Beckett was in his seventies, that is so compelling? Perhaps what appears to be straight reminiscences of childhood brings Beckett (the boy) closer to us. J. M. Coetzee describes the prose as “suddenly more expansive, even, by Beckettian standards, genial.” Of the fifty-nine paragraphs in Company, forty-four of them describe the crawling about of a “dark figure” in a dark landscape who is taken up with “devising” and “imagining”; the other fifteen deal with a male child, walking the Dublin hills with his father, or from the shops with his mother, episodes that, for Coetzee, flicker with “a certain wonder and tenderness.” While family relations, often of an estranged nature, alternate, in fugue-like fashion, with a subject split into a voice and a hearer, there is the steady refrain not only of the punning word “lying” but the word company itself, which, with its adverbial form, companionable, appears thirty-seven times, all done “for company,” the entire exercise done for “company in the dark.” Is this the “company” of which Proust wrote, the company of art that makes death “less bitter, less inglorious, and perhaps less certain?” It is not fashionable to attribute such a romantic arrangement with death to Beckett, yet Coetzee, again, did not fail to notice a late Beckett letter in which he admits that, even “from the mind in ruins,” there is consolation in the thought that “true words at last” may be issued. “To this illusion,” wrote Beckett, then seventy-seven, “I continue to cling.”

  The world is an infinite set of independent monads, which are indestructible and inimitable. They are in motion, but one monad cannot affect another. There is no causality, everything is pre-established. And all things are “perpetual living mirrors” of every other. This was Gottfried Leibniz’s seventeenth-century idea, which impressed the young Beckett, who visited the Leibniz house in Hannover in 1937. In a letter to MacGreevy, Beckett described Leibniz as “a great cod, but full of splendid little pictures.”

  If Being is the greatest threat to form, what form does Being deserve? The answer to this question, though it is not so much an answer as a settlement, is arrived at over time, and is coincident, nearly, with the end. Body, mind, social relations, family, are unidirectional and accretive. You are a different person for your history. You have your company. Your avec elles.

  To deliver the object, in the light of language, and its colors and sounds, and to do so within one, within an object, within a language, call it a book, is to create and behold. Behold. . . . It is the beautiful, pure minimum of what we can do. Note pure, as Beckett said of Schubert’s Rosamunde Quartet, “pure spirit,” an exquisite reduction.

  According to John Pilling, as a young man, Beckett, in Proust, “must have been gratified to encounter a kindred spirit who had fearlessly pursued the unconventional, and nowhere, perhaps, is this more true than in the matter of what constitutes a person’s essential being, which is central to Beckett’s work, and is the goal of Proust’s also.” In Watt, a decade after the Proust essay was written, “ . . . the inadequacy of language to account for phenomena in the visible world” becomes the principle subject, according to Tom Cousineau. In between these two book-length expressions, Beckett wrote his letter to Axel Kaun, saying that the only thing for a writer to do was to tear a hole in the surface of the language, a kind of violent revolt.

  Consider that odd object in Watt.

  Then we have the septuagenarian, in his final decade, writing his closed-space pieces, and hurtling toward, according to some, a cauterizing literary abstraction but which might be something else—not a simple abstraction, but a putative concreteness, a “nohow on” in a lightless chamber—that Being, that form, that truth. Beckett contradicted this point, in an interview in Vogue, of all places, 1970, but I don’t believe it: “Perhaps,” he said to John Gruen, “like the composer Schonberg or the painter Kandinsky, I have turned toward an abstract language. Unlike them, however, I have tried not to concretise the abstraction. . . . ” I think he never stopped trying; he only may have demurred at the notion of having succeeded.

  IV.

  That odd object in Watt.

  The blues and the abstract truth.

  No, the other object. I mean the other object. The other object.

  “Stolen Moments,” written in 1960 by Oliver Nelson, is a sixteen-bar composition derived from blues in C minor. The tune consists of three melodic ideas, in eight bars, six bars, two bars, that extend the basic blues form. For contrast, there are three solos, each twelve measures in length—by Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, and Bill Evans—I count them off, ninety-six beats, eight to the bar, standing in my kitchen.

  Not in Watt, Molloy. The one that flummoxed me. Confused I was. It was silver, too, like that other object. There was little silver in my childhood, very little, mostly Melmac on our table, plastics. An older world had silver in it,
that older world of silversmiths and tin-knockers.

  Let musical ideas, wrote Nelson, determine the form and shape of the composition. Being, form. Perhaps this work of mine is not in a literary form, per se, or not solely. Perhaps life is a song, not a story, and has movements, da capo, themes and variations, and perhaps little in the way of narrative drive. “A story is not compulsory, just a life,” says the voice in Texts for Nothing 4.

  Molloy had stolen a little silver from Lousse. One object in his haul eluded my understanding, as to its utility. It had value I was convinced, even if no purpose for it could be discerned, by me. So lovingly described was this object I had never seen that I saw: “It consisted of two crosses, joined, at their points of intersection, by a bar, and resembled a tiny sawing-horse, with this difference however, that the crosses of the true sawing-horse are not perfect crosses, but truncated at the top, whereas the crosses of the little object I am referring to were perfect, that is to say composed of each of two identical Vs, one upper with its opening above, like all Vs for that matter, and the other lower with its opening below, or more precisely of four rigorously identical Vs, the two I have just named and then two more, one on the right hand, the other on the left, having their openings on the right and left respectively. But perhaps it is out of place to speak here of right and left, of upper and lower. For this little object did not seem to have any base properly so-called, but stood with equal stability on any one of its four bases, and without any change of appearance, which is not true of the sawing-horse. This strange instrument I think I still have somewhere, for I could never bring myself to sell it, even in my worst need, for I could never understand what possible purpose it could serve, nor even contrive the faintest hypothesis on the subject. And from time to time I took it from my pocket and gazed upon it, with an astonished and affectionate gaze . . .”

  If technical facility is a metaphor for comprehensibility, as composer Morton Feldman said, what is comprehensibility a metaphor for? She said she wanted to have an egg this morning. There is only one thing to be done with the request for an egg. Or two, I guess. It is supremely comprehensible. Lyricism without melody, the unmediated contemplation of sound, and the avoidance of dramaticism through the use of understated dynamics, are all evident in Feldman’s work. As is the concept of form as a length of time with few divisions or incomprehensible divisions or at best arbitrary ones, such that the piece is kept going without the demands of necessity, thereby either exposing the fallacy that artworks should grow organically or proving that they should. Like various minimal artists, this work rejects the tendency to see the parts as more important than the whole, agreeing with . . . Donald Judd! . . . that, “The thing is to be able to do different things and yet not break up the wholeness that a piece has.” That is, to have it all and nothing at all. Nonetheless, the wind still fills the trees for me when I think of god. Tears still fill my eyes when the wind comes around to rally each treetop into harmony with my simple swing of thought, which is more swing than thinking as I swing around and rally as well to a dissolution into something larger, like a voice lost in a choral chant, a note in a symphony, a body absorbed in a crowd. I am the sound I make, a sound incarnate. John Cage, early in his career, extracted essential information about objects by hitting each with the same piece of wood and listening.

  What becomes of consciousness at the moment of explosion? Say one explodes one’s self, atomizing the body in a concussed flash. What was once arguably an object in a millisecond is radiated in spray and flung viscera, many objects, many fluids, thrown into a suspension of scorched air. Do thoughts and images and words we have known accelerate outward? We handle objects on our tour—ale glasses at the Duvel Historium in Bruges, silver pendants at the gift shop in Ghent—and hear the bomb ticking. In a moment we might be raining in the square.

  “To and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow”—who is it that knows inner shadows from outer shadows? This is the Caravaggio light of Beckett’s imagination, life always half in shadow and half in a thin, dying light. Borders, liminalities, crossed and recrossed, “as between two lit refuges whose doors once nearly close, and once turned away from gently part again.” You wonder: two lit refuges. Is it this life that is lived between them? Morton Feldman was a natural fit for Beckett since he was the exact opposite artist, a kind of tongue-and-groove orientation. Feldman believed that his material, music, was in itself born perfect and without a history, whereas Beckett, of his material, understood how freighted language was with history, and worked from a disordered and discredited wordshed toward what he hoped, however in vain, might find a more perfect accommodation eventually, knowing that failure, like a friend, awaited him. Feldman asked Beckett for a libretto. He got “Neither” from which “to and fro in shadow” and “two lit refuges” come. Feldman’s one-act opera for a single soprano and orchestra sustains an oscillation between things or the idea of things, more accurately a space between sound barriers he’s established, where two opposites co-exist, each still a refuge.

  We hole up in our hotel and look out the window not so dark, see the ancient roofs in ranks, the softly stirring treetops, and a distant circus wheel slowly rolling through time. There is no other window, we have only this one window. We perch on the sill and the shouts come up with the birdsong, finches, we think.

  Despite Feldman’s belief in the perfection of the musical form, he envied a painting’s smears, drip, erasures—the painter’s touch. “We only have Beethoven’s logic,” he said.

  Who looks in the window?

  then no sound

  then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither

  unspeakable home.

  V.

  Timelessness in the pauses, eternity.

  Marcel took the 1:22 out of Paris bound for Balbec.

  That’s what director Walter Asmus is talking about—hours and hours of silence he might have in his next Godot. The misery in the music, he said. No belly laughs for Walter. Pain, discomfort.

  Marcel got drunk on the train on the beer and brandy recommended by his doctor. Those were the days. . . . Even his grandmother, with whom he was traveling, approved, fearing for his nervous condition.

  But in the space around ourselves, once to smithereens, therefrom the same silences, therein the same eternity? A question. What becomes of Being in unbecoming? What is sensed in the moment of detonation, the exothermic, supersonic acceleration of matter and memory? The Self Express, an instant of everywhere, transcending, through heat-release, its own objecthood. A familiar terror, yes, recalled in our bones, we were there on entry, at the start, before the words, before the light, really, at the instant of forming, imagine.

  Marcel repaired to the bar car as soon as the train was under way. At the first stop, already bright with drink, he clambered back into the compartment with his grandmother, exclaiming too loudly how pleased he was to be going to Balbec, how splendidly he expected everything to go off, and how comfortable all the stewards and attendants made him feel! He wanted to travel again, soon, and he had just started. His grandmother suggested he take a nap. Instead, Marcel effused about the sun peeking in over the drawn curtain of the window and thought its light on the polished oak of the door and the cloth of the seat was like an advertisement for a life shared with nature.

  But how does it read now? What to make of the gardens? That’s where Watt goes after losing his mind in the house of Mr. Knott. Once he is expelled by the machinery of succession at the house of Mr. Knott, where once he displaced he is now the displaced, and Watt must leave, it is the inevitable way. Watt’s room had but one window, no other. Watt ends up in what seems an asylum, others say it is an asylum, walking in its gardens, talking to Sam, Sam who may have been telling the story all along, others say it might be Sam telling the story all along, talking of gardens, pavilions, mansions, boars breaching fences. They, Sam and Watt, find a hole in the fence dividing garden from garden, they touch each oth
er, groom each other, they dance energetically, Sam with Watt, Watt with Sam, and the sun shines bright upon them, and the wind blows wild about them. Somehow—ping!—they are joined by Mr. Knott, by Arthur, by Graves, hard by the house of Mr. Knott. Boom!

  Marcel fell in love with a woman at a station stop; she was selling coffee and cream on the platform. He fell in love with the village of hers partially visible down the gorge beyond the tracks. Life would have seemed an exquisite thing, he thought, if only he had been free to spend it, hour after hour, with her, to go to the stream, to the cow, to the train with her, to her thoughts, with her, and thereby be initiated into the delights of the country. Alas, as she came toward him, the train began to leave the station. Oh, well, he then busied himself composing a ravishing picture, a single canvas, as it were, of a sun-splashed village, as he lurched from one side of the coach to the other to capture the glorious perspectives unfolding as the train made its way through the valley. Of course, Marcel, after his most certain session in the bar car, may have been reading the whole time, one never knows the precise landscape of a journey, since it all docks in the mind for inspection, textual or otherwise. Marcel managed to imagine a brief friendship with another traveler, artistic, golden-haired, who proposed to take him on his own journey but who instead bid him farewell beneath the Cathedral of Saint-Lô and set out westward toward the setting sun. Proust’s Balbec is a fictional village, based on a real one, Cabourg, near the Atlantic coast at Normandy. Saint-Lô is not a fictional village, though it became quite unreal in the summer of 1944.

  From Watt’s single window, no other window, he could see a handsome racecourse, an oval. It could be a picture on the wall like the picture on his wall. Another picture. Or the picture on his wall could be a window, the other window. Whatever Watt sees in each vista, whether framed by a window or framed by a picture frame, he sees it no more and yet takes it with him, something of it, to perhaps tell Sam, in his words, about “the very fine view of the race-course” or the nothing yielded by the “painting, or coloured reproduction.”