In one of Beckett’s late plays, we encounter a haunting figure. A prematurely old woman with famished eyes sits rocking in a rocking-chair. A voice speaks, telling her the story of a woman whose vain hope of human contact led her to the rocking-chair in which her mother ‘sat and rocked … till her end came’ (CDW, p. 440). There she sat down and rocked herself,
saying to the rocker
rock her off
stop her eyes
fuck life
stop her eyes
rock her off
rock her off (CDW, p. 442)
The play ends with these lines.
‘Fuck life’ is not a sentiment ever likely to win assent from biographers. Obviously and by definition, biography can hardly accommodate it. Biography is necessarily affirmative. The assumption that life has value, that individual lives deserve monuments, substantial and often bulky tributes, is intrinsic to the genre. Furthermore, the life that has value is specific in kind. It is life as it has already been lived, life as grasped in retrospect. That the subject of the biography might for instance be a writer who conceives of his or her art as a criticism of life, as a mode of speculation, an enquiry into prospects not retrospects, makes no difference to biographical discourse. It is presumably better to have biographies of, say, Swift, Blake, Rimbaud, Artaud and Woolf than not to have them. Yet one might argue all the same that, however close or sympathetic their biographers to these writers, biography necessarily sets its face against the most urgent admonitions of their art. In this respect, modern biography might even seem to have repeatedly collided with modern art, stoutly resisting its implications.
‘Fuck life’: Siân Phillips in Rockaby at the Barbican Pit, London, 2006.
This has been precisely the case with Samuel Beckett. The biographies proceed in the opposite direction to his writings. For reasons that still puzzle us, Beckett’s art repeatedly turns towards minima. James Knowlson’s widely and rightly lauded, authorized, vast and fact-crammed life amounts to 872 pages. At 646 pages, Anthony Cronin’s competitor volume is hardly much more modest. On the one hand, Knowlson and Cronin’s biographies are essential reading. Indeed, they complement each other, Cronin’s grasp of the Irish Beckett and his imaginative feeling for the miserable extravagance of his subject leavening Knowlson’s awesome meticulousness, his exemplary scholarly care. I am humbly indebted to both throughout this short account. On the other hand, it seems to me to be well worth trying to write something more like a minimalist life of Beckett, by way of closing the gap between the biographical project and his own. What does Beckett’s life look like if narrated in more Beckettian terms?
Beckett wrote of humanism that it was ‘a word that one reserves for the times of the great massacres’ (DI, p. 131). He repeatedly stripped his characters of the attributes held most to distinguish man as lord of creation. His works resound with indictments of humanist self-aggrandizement. He sees humanism as rooted in a will to be pleased with oneself. His jibes at its expense range from the scathing to the comic to the more or less mildly ironical. ‘It’s human,’ says the Unnamable, ‘a lobster couldn’t do it’ (TR, p. 375). Yet, at the same time, he never seriously lapses into the brutal repudiation of common humanity that so marred the work of certain contemporaries, like Céline (whose novels Beckett much admired). He merely understood very well that humanism has little to do with human beings. So what happens if one forsakes the familiar humanist conspectus and tries to write a biography of Beckett without automatically and everywhere placing the self-evidently treasurable, unique human being at its centre? What happens if we conceive of Beckett as, rather like Giorgio Agamben, re-imagining ‘the human thing’? I hope to provide at least one possible answer to these questions in what follows.
The value of Beckettian minimalism obviously raises certain questions for his biographers. But so too does the nay-saying drive with which I began, and from which it is inextricable. Fuck life:
MRS ROONEY: It is suicide to be abroad. But what is it to be at home, Mr Tyler, what is it to be at home? A lingering dissolution … I beg your pardon? MR TYLER: Nothing, Mrs Rooney, nothing, I was merely cursing, under my breath, God and man, under my breath, and the wet Saturday afternoon of my conception. (CDW, p. 175)
Beckett’s characters curse a great deal. They excoriate the ‘shitball’ or ‘old muckball’ on which they find they have no alternative but to live. They have little or no time for ‘the execrable frippery known as the non-self and even the world’ (CDW, p. 222, CSP, pp. 31–2). ‘Christ what a planet’ (CDW, p. 183): here life is an ‘endless winter year after year’ (CDW, p. 393), and ‘the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery’ (TR, p. 13). In Endgame, Hamm describes a madman
who thought the end of the world had come. He was a painter – and engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I’d take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness! [Pause.] He’d snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes. (CDW, p. 113)
Beckett does not offer charming pictures of herring fleets. Recent commentators on Beckett have sought to emphasize rather less gloom-inducing and more contemporary aspects of his work, like technology and the body. Yet for all the quality of much of the commentary, it is hard to deny that Beckett’s true interest is in the madman’s ashes, or what Walter Benjamin described as the pile of our debris that grows constantly skyward.1
But there is even more trouble in store for the biographer. Beckett’s characters are not only unenthusiastic about life. They are also dismissive of life-writing. This is peculiarly evident in the four Stories. They tell us that, properly speaking, life is an ‘inenarrable contraption’ (TR, p. 115). To write autobiography is to write something other than one’s history:
I have always spoken, no doubt always shall, of things that never existed, or that existed if you insist, no doubt always will, but not with the existence I ascribe to them. (CSP, p. 35)
When it comes to telling stories, the narrators of the Stories run up against rudimentary obstacles that ought to be enough to unnerve the jauntiest and most self-confident of biographers. The simplest representational tasks are fraught with difficulty: ‘But the faces of the living, all grimace and flush,’ says one narrator, ‘can they be described as objects?’ (CSP, p. 38). The shape one gives a life seems arbitrary (‘nonsuch perhaps, who cares’, CSP, p. 60). ‘I don’t know why I told this story’, says the narrator of ‘The Expelled’, ‘I might just as well have told another’ (CSP, p. 63). How could a biography that took this sentence as its epigraph conceivably go on? As the narrator of ‘The Calmative’ makes ironically clear, the true function of life-writing is not to give us life but to screen us from it, to act as a calmative or tranquillizer, to provide us with the illusion of having bearings where there are none. One particular Beckettian figure suggests that life-stories should consist of facts and be efficiently recounted. But they should also be ‘positively fairy-like in places’. This clears the ground so that we may turn our attention to more important matters, ‘thighs … arses, cunts and environs’ (CSP, pp. 72–73).
Beckett seems to have set little or no store by biography as a serious mode of knowledge. Drink, sex, games, social life, daily routines: little is to be gleaned from such pedestrian themes. They are the means by which the biographer presumes to extract ‘the picture of the artist’s individuality’ whilst in fact reducing it to a ‘cartoon’ (DI, p. 61).2 But Beckett also clearly accepted that biographies get written. The effort to resist capture in a modern biography was bound to prove singularly futile. Thus when, in 1971, Deirdre Bair asked him for permission to write his life, he responded with generous indifference. He would, he said, neither help nor hinder her. At the same time, he knew it would be as well to authorize a biography by a trustworthy scholar with an established reputation. So when the self-dubbed ‘fledgling biographer’ Knowlson approached him again in 1989, the year of his death, even whilst insisting that ‘his life was separate from his art’,3 Beckett agreed to his request. More specifically, as Knowlson himself candidly informs us, his subject replied with a single sentence: ‘To biography of me by you it’s Yes’.4 This recalls his response when asked for his view of the Spanish Civil War: ‘¡UPTHEREPUBLIC!’.5 He had a habit of twisting formal phrases out of true, as though part of him were rebelling against the very terms to which he was consenting. Whilst not an indication of recalcitrance, his message to Knowlson serves as a modest injunction: do not look for me in the usual places, for I shall not be found there.
How, then, might one re-imagine the life of a writer apparently so sceptical of the truth-content of biography, in terms respectful of that scepticism? Still more problematically: how might one re-imagine the biography of a man who so often appears to loathe the bios? How does one write a fuck-life? How does one write a fuck-life of a writer whose works (and characters) repeatedly appear to say ‘Fuck life-writing’? From 1928 to 1930, in somewhat desultory fashion, Beckett taught at what has been one of the great educational institutions in history, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. The École Normale’s conception of intellectual life for much of the twentieth century has no parallel in the contemporary Anglo-American world, and is almost incomprehensible to it. That is why English and American intellectuals have been so awed by its alumni. Though he was not an alumnus himself, normaliens have repeatedly thought of Beckett as one of themselves. Like many others, they have also thought of him as an imaginative writer unusually close to the traditions of continental European philosophy, of which, in the twentieth century, the École Normale was probably the most significant crucible.
Not that the virtues of normaliens were always unrelieved. One of Beckett’s contemporaries, Robert Brasillach, was executed as a Nazi collaborator. Another, a friend of Beckett’s, Georges Pelorson, became a prominent figure in the Vichy regime. But what I want to stress here is the normaliens habit of writing lives that are non-lives. Sartre’s memoir of Merleau-Ponty scarcely mentions a single fact of the kind that we would usually associate with a life. Canguilhem’s life of Cavaillès mentions facts only where they seem part of a life conceived of as a project of thought.6 Given what I shall say later of the importance of the ambience of the École Normale Supérieure for understanding Beckett, these might seem to be the obvious models to follow. But there is at least one patent difficulty with this line of argument. How does one write an intellectual biography of Beckett without simply producing yet another critical monograph, a chronological and consecutive reading of his works? There are many of these already. I’ve written one myself.7
Faced with this dilemma, I have chosen a slightly different expedient, which I hope offers its own kind of illumination (or chiaroscuro), but which also corresponds to my own particular understanding of Beckett’s project. In ‘First Love’, the narrator succinctly declares that ‘it’s always the same sky and never the same sky’ (CSP, p. 38). This seems to me to express a paradox that is central to Beckett’s art. As the narrator of ‘The End’ suggests, the universal muck is not ‘embodied in’ particular muck. It is never known otherwise than in and as mucky particularities. This means that it is never fixed and final. At the very least, there is always the possibility of adding to it, as the same narrator says when he speaks of a ‘little kingdom’ contrivable in its midst (a kingdom to which there would be a further mucky addition, in that he also speaks of shitting on it, CSP, p. 98). In Krapp’s Last Tape, Krapp speaks of
separating the grain from the husks…. The grain, now what I wonder do I mean by that. I mean … [hesitates]… I suppose I mean those things worth having when all the dust – when all my dust has settled. (CDW, p. 217)
Krapp’s self-correction, his shift from generality to his own particular condition, insists on the specificity of difficulty, suffering and waste. This shift is not untypical of Beckett’s characters. Again and again, the ‘life’ with which they struggle or against which they set their face turns out to be, not a universal expressed in a particular form, but a particular form taken for a universal one.
In other words, there is no universal bios to loathe. As Foucault above all instructed us, the bios is always historical. There have been many life-haters. But since they have known life only in and as particular historical occasions, they have always hated particular historical versions of life, even when they have asserted the opposite. There are times when the compulsion to stare at Benjamin’s growing pile of debris is well-nigh unmasterable. There are others when it can seem negligible. Beckett produced his œuvre within historical cultures quite different to ours. That is why we goggle at him with such exceptional fascination.
What I want to do here, with such dismal vividness as I can muster, is write an intellectual life of Beckett, but also to situate it in relation to a succession of discrete contexts. The contexts will historicize and perhaps in some degree explain the desire to have done with life, to ‘Throw up for good. Go for good…. Good and all’ (WH, p. 8), however lacking in finality or ironically couched that desire may be. On the one hand, then, I ask what particular forms of historical life could lead to the resounding ‘Fuck life’ of Rockaby, bearing in mind that the words are uttered by a particular character in a particular play, but that they also form part of a sustained and elaborated consistency, and are therefore more than just a ‘point of view’, and certainly more than an ‘opinion’. On the other hand, I aim to write a minimalist biography that reduces what most people would think of as Beckett’s life to a thin trickle between historical circumstance and art. This will not appeal to all tastes. But to those who wish to find out more, for example, about Beckett’s relationships with Nancy Cunard or Alan Schneider, I thoroughly recommend Knowlson and Cronin. So, too, I shall seldom guess at Beckett’s psychological states, other than as they are deducible from his writings. In intention, at least, like my minimalist approach, this constitutes a form of fidelity both to Beckett’s own prioritization of his art, and to its methods.
At the same time, it by no means cuts the Gordian knot. The very agreement to write a biography, however far concerned to shrink the story itself and avoid any relapse into ‘a wealth of filthy circumstance’ (TR, p. 63), makes it impossible to quite disregard the man who lived. The question is rather how to establish a complex network of connections and disconnections between history, life and art. Some aspects of Beckett’s life – his wanderings in Germany in 1936–7, for example, or in Vichy France in 1942 – seem to bring it close to the world of the works. Others seem to have little directly to do with it. Similarly, in certain respects, Beckett was and remained an example of the respectable Anglo-Irish and therefore in large part English middle-class virtues. It is impossible to ignore this self-deprecating, reticent, disciplined, conscientious, diligent, implacably well-mannered, dauntingly forbearing person, not least because he appears in large measure to have been the origin of the myth of ‘Saint Sam’ amongst a generation of scholars who made his acquaintance. Since Steven Connor’s ineffably bright and zestful deconstruction of the foundations of that myth, however, we have been less inclined to subscribe to it without caveat.8 Much is sometimes made of Beckett the cricketer (the only Nobel Prize winner to have his name in Wisden). But gentleman Beckett was obsessed with his antithesis, the tramp. Look straight at the works themselves, and there is a great deal of material that – even insisting on the detachment of writer from narrator or character – simply does not square with the myth at all: the superciliousness and arrogance perceptible in the early writings, for example; the hysterical rage in the Trilogy; the extreme and sometimes murderous forms of violence from Molloy to All That Fall to How It Is and beyond.
Of course, to stress resistant features is not necessarily to discredit a hagiography. Quite the reverse: on the whole, they tend to make it more credible. Threats to saintliness raise the stakes. ‘Oh it is not without scathe’, says Moran, ‘that one is gentle, courteous, reasonable, patient, day after day, year after year’ (TR, p. 127). All the same, we are bound to wonder how far Beckett might have doggedly sustained a public persona quite distinct from the turbulent drives that were partly his inspiration, not least in order to protect their privacy. This is the implication of a quotation that he copied from Céline’s Mort à Crédit, and that was clearly precious to him:
L’essentiel c’est pas de savoir si on a tort ou raison, ça n’a vraiment pas d’importance….Ce qu’il faut c’est décourager le monde qu’il s’occupe de vous … Le reste c’est du vice.9
In any case, as he himself says of the Dante he so revered, who wants to love Beckett? ‘We want to READ’ him (or see him performed, DI, p. 81).
That a writer with sensitivities as exquisite as Beckett’s should have been cast into tumult is hardly surprising, given his historical experience. But here we encounter another problem. If Beckett seems to dissuade us from making smooth transitions back and forth between life and works, is the same not true, a fortiori, of transitions between works and historical contexts? Beckett asserted that a ‘high, solitary art’ was ‘not to be clarified in any other light’ than its own (DI, p. 145). He insisted on ‘the acute and increasing anxiety’ of any explicatory ‘relation’ (DI, p. 149). The artist who ‘stakes his being’, he wrote, ‘is from nowhere, has no kith’ (ibid.). This statement might seem to invalidate historical as much as biographical exegesis. Beckett was surely one of the great abstract modernists. To seek to bring his works back to historical fact is to tug in the opposite direction to his own. One might even argue that his direction is liberating, mine, imprisoning.
But freedom and constraint are not mutually exclusive. They define each other and are inseparable companions. Knowlson has exhaustively shown how many details from Beckett’s life are present in his work. This does not comprehensively disprove Beckett’s claim that life and art are distinct. But it hardly exactly bears it out, either. ‘The danger is in the neatness of identifications’, exact parallels: to affirm a precise correspondence between life and art may be a ‘soothing’ activity, ‘like the contemplation of a carefully folded ham sandwich’ (DI, p. 19). The correspondences are nonetheless not insignificant. What is true of the traces of biography in Beckett’s art is also true of the traces of history. They neither allow us to establish a hard-and-fast relation between the works and historical circumstance nor absolutely deny the possibility of any such relation.
Indeed, in his writing about art, Beckett himself does not altogether eschew historical reflection. When, in his review of Albert Feuillerat’s book on Proust, he argues that Feuillerat seeks to restore to order the ‘grave dissonances’ and ‘deplorable solutions of continuity’ in Proust’s great novel, he knows (and says) that these were the consequence of the First World War (DI, p. 63). Feuillerat’s project is cosmetic, a scholarly endeavour to give a respectable appearance to a lacerated novel, to paint over historical scars. Or take a tiny poem:
Saint-Lô;
vire will wind in other shadows unborn through the bright ways tremble and the old mind ghost-forsaken sink into its havoc (CP, p. 32)
The theme appears to be spiritual chaos. But Saint-Lô is not just a place where personal disaster struck, like T. S. Eliot’s Margate Sands (‘On Margate Sands./I can connect/ nothing with nothing’).10 Beckett’s poem even functions as a critique of that kind of modernist indifference to the historical meaning of location. Saint-Lô is the capital of the département of La Manche in Normandy, and it was there that Beckett worked with the Irish Red Cross in 1945, the Vire being the river that runs through the city. In 1944, at the time of the Allied invasion of France, Saint-Lô had been a crucial objective in the breakout from the ‘Normandy pocket’ in which the attacking forces found themselves. Initially, they faced terrain that everywhere favoured the Germans. Past Saint-Lô, on the other hand, there would be much more freedom for manoeuvre. Hitler had therefore wanted the town stoutly defended. Allied progress was slow and bitter, and Saint-Lô suffered almost total devastation.11 This was so much the case that some wished to leave the ruins intact, as historical testimony. Beckett’s poem is partly about external ‘havoc’ (a word which originally referred to the battlefield).12 It even appears to respond to the debates about the future of Saint-Lô, turning, like the Vire, in a prophetic direction. At all events, ‘Saint-Lô’ presents the inner catastrophe as clearly determined by and inextricable from the outer one. It is about the relationship between the world of the mind and the historical world.
Few of Beckett’s works, whether short or long, can be read in exactly this way. But, as we shall see, they are frequently marked in similar fashion by a biographically rooted historical consciousness, if often sporadically, fleetingly or here and there. It is such a historical consciousness on which this mini-biography will focus, rather than one that is the end-product of a more or less sophisticated, more or less novelistic psychologism (to which, we should add, Beckett himself was never remotely drawn).13 At the same time, however, for all the ostensibly ahistorical character of much of Beckett’s writing, it is above all via his works that the historical connection makes itself felt. To some people, this was always obvious. Many of those alive when Beckett was writing, particularly after 1945, believed that he had an unusually profound grasp of the zeitgeist, and a power of conveying it unrivalled by any other contemporary artist. By now, however, it has become possible to give historical specificity and substance to that conviction; that is, we are by now far enough removed from the zeitgeist in question to get the measure of its historical closure. Indeed, like Yeats’s, Joyce’s and Woolf’s before him, Beckett’s death seemed both historical and logical, in that it was concurrent with the end of an era. If Beckett’s works cannot simply be ‘matched up’ with historical contexts on the ham sandwich model, they are streaked by historical turmoils and the emotions provoked by them. Historical symptoms and effects weave their way across the rocky, unforgiving Beckettian surface like intermittent lodes of ore. Beckett’s life took place in the small passageway between history and writing. I shall describe it accordingly.
‘Total devastation’: wartime damage to Saint-Lô, Normandy, August 1944.
That suggests that this short critical life will be somewhat patchy. It will indeed: here patchiness or intermittency becomes a method in itself. My book seeks to avoid resorting to global categories: the emphasis chiefly falls on discrete and discontinuous historical particulars. Beckett rejected the ‘monde romancé that explains copious[ly] why e.g. Luther was inevitable without telling me anything about Luther, where he went next, what he lived on, what he died of, etc’.14 I heed this rejection, even though I do not always conform exactly to its terms. Beckett wrote of the ‘narrational trajectory’ of Proust’s Recherche that it was less like ‘a respectable parabola’ than ‘the chart of an ague’ (DI, p. 64). This life of Beckett aims to be such a chart. It therefore adduces history here and there, in fits and starts, as appearances and disappearances. It is a book of historical spasms, seizures, flushes and shivers, fevers and cold sweats. The Beckettian ague in large measure corresponded to the great agon of the world contemporary with it. But agues can be almost sprightly. They have their own intense, hectic vitality. Patchiness will therefore be the rule. This is the case, not least in that this book simply leaves out many aspects of Beckett’s life. Beckett distrusted all efforts to frame one sort of material with another quite distinct from it. They were threatened, he wrote, by ‘the temptation to treat every concept “like a bass dropt neck fust in till a bung crate”, and make a really tidy job of it’ (DI, p. 19).15 It is hard to avoid that trap. But I hope nonetheless to narrate Beckett’s life, not as a compte rendu of pre-formed schemes, but as a recherche, a search, in all the complexity of ‘its clues and blind alleys’ (DI, p. 65).
Beckett’s work involves such a search. More precisely, I take it to be an exploration of the possibilities of the ‘event’ from the vantage-point of the historical ‘remainder’. I explained those two terms in my book Beckett and Badiou. That book might seem to point in a very different direction to this one. In fact, they are the same book. But Beckett and Badiou gives priority to the event, and is therefore necessarily abstract. This book is chiefly about the remainder, and is therefore an exercise in historical materialism. Together, however, they mimic the condition of our post-Derridean culture as trenchantly diagnosed by David Cunningham.16 Under this condition, the historical world is hardly thinkable save on the basis of a transcendental principle which it has in fact determined from the start. We have no means of confronting, let alone proceeding on the basis of own acute and inescapable sense that we are everywhere and always historical beings. This paradox is decisive for the circle which the contemporary world seems condemned to tread. But what better to instruct us in the art of treading circles than the life and works of Samuel Beckett, after Dante and Joyce, perhaps the great master of the purgatorial form in art.
