SAMUEL BECKETT’S birth certificate gives the date of his birth as May 13, 1906, but he insists that he was born on Good Friday, April 13 of that year. That date is too symbolically apposite to be contradicted. The Friday the thirteenth stands for ill luck that man suffers but does not earn, and the Good Friday for God’s suffering on behalf of human redemption.
But it has been suggested that the day after, Holy Saturday, is Beckett’s true symbolic date. His best-known play, Waiting for Godot, which lowbrows used to sneer at but which has now become as popular as any item in the stage repertory, presents two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, who wait ‘with a large measure of despair and a small measure of hope’ for an enigmatic redeemer who never arrives. This is not to suggest that this is a Christian play, despite the allusions to the thieves who were crucified with Christ and the tree by which the tramps have been told to wait. But the symbols of Christianity are drenched in suggestive richness, and it is convenient to invoke them when trying to attach a meaning to the play. The tramps wait on the Saturday that comes after Good Friday, but that Saturday obstinately refuses to become Easter Sunday. All they, and we, can do is to wait, even though we can be pretty sure that the waiting will not be rewarded. Life is a wretched grey Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
And who is the Godot who never comes? To say he is the God of the Old Testament, or Christ bringing redemptive eau, is too easy. He may be someone more sinister. It is well-known that Beckett, travelling by Air France, heard the announcement ‘C’est le capitaine Godot qui vous parle’ and wanted to leave the aircraft. That anecdote seems to make the author as absurd as his characters, but the term absurd has to be invoked when dealing with Beckett. His absurdity is of a special kind. In his book The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus spoke of that ‘divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints’ which makes man’s situation on earth an absurd one. Like Sisyphus, we roll the stone up the hill only to see it roll down again. We live in a void of action and are led to despair or rebellion or, in extreme cases, to a kind of religious rehabilitation. If Camus’s book makes a full philosophical statement about the absurdity of the human condition and suggests an existential way out of it – the way of choice – it is the task of Beckett merely to show men and women unable to choose, stuck in what he calls the merde universelle, absurd but, through their hanging on to the last human endowment, which is language, somehow noble in their absurdity.
Beckett, though an Irishman born in the Dublin district of Stillorgan (the place sounds as appropriate as his elected birth date), is a French writer – one who, according to the late Jean-Paul Sartre, has written the most distinguished French prose of the century. The roots of his thinking are French. If we read his early book on Proust, we will see him praising a quality in that master which was to become his own. Proust refused to wrench the phenomena of the world into a logical order. He rejected a chain of cause and effect, the making of the world intelligible. In other words, things are inexplicable; the scientific mirror lies; we know nothing. Beckett learnt his aesthetic from Proust; in his works – plays and novels alike – he gets down to the stripping off of illusion, showing what is left after the dissolution of shape, colour, habit and logic.
Beckett’s turning himself into a French writer had a good deal to do with his distrust of the Irish literary temperament. If we read his novel Murphy, written in English, we see a tendency to the lush and romantic which sooner or later had to be expunged:
The leaves began to lift and scatter, the higher branches to complain, the sky broke and curdled over flecks of skim blue, the pine of smoke toppled into the east and vanished, the pond was suddenly a little panic of grey and white, of water and gulls and snails.
In other words, a mistrust of words, highly dangerous phenomena resounding with false echoes, had to lead to an abandonment of English and at length to silence. Beckett moves towards the vacuum. Other writers, especially Irish ones, have glorified the plenum. In the greatest Irish prose writer of the century, James Joyce, we meet more than a plenum, we meet a plethora.
Beckett’s association with Joyce is well known. Both Irish exiles in Paris, they admired the shape of each other’s mind. They were a foil to each other, shared talk and silence, drank equally, meaning too much. Joyce’s daughter Lucia fell in love with the young handsome Beckett, who failed to reciprocate and brashly stated that his visits were to see her father, not her.
The devotion to Joyce was extreme. Joyce was proud of his small feet, and Beckett tried to make his own feet as small in homage. The over-tight shoes were not merely a homage; they were a mode of self-excruciation wholly in keeping with the Beckettian view of the world as a place of pain. But the association with Joyce and the extravagant devotion have misled some people into thinking that Joyce and Beckett – though both Irish avant-garde writers exiled to Paris – were after the same thing. They were not. Joyce willed language into becoming reality – the Real Presence in the symbolic bread. But Beckett learnt from him to distrust language while, paradoxically, seeming to affirm that language was all humanity had.
Moreover, Beckett was never the same kind of Irishman as Joyce. The family was originally French Huguenot, and Beckett’s elected exile in France was no more than a kind of belated repatriation. He went to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, and to Trinity College, Dublin, great Protestant establishments both. If free-thinking Joyce never quite threw off the Catholicism of Clongowes and University College, Beckett had none of that accumulation of guilt and Jesuitry to lose. Renegade Irish Catholics like Brendan Behan never quite understood the kind of Irishman Beckett was and still is. They assumed a convivial bibulosity in a man who was naturally given to temperance and shocked by excess. Catholic Irishmen grow fat and sedentary. Beckett was always something of an athlete, a tennis-player and cricketer. He is the only Nobel Prizeman to be listed in Wisden. Sunday travellers on Air France have observed him skim lightly over the literary section of his Sunday paper and become absorbed in the sports pages.
Rightly given less to philosophical pessimism than to a realistic disillusionment, Beckett was heard once on the verge of admitting that life might have some good in it. That was on a sunny day at Lord’s. But the characters in his plays and novels do not even have the consolation of being able to read the cricket scores. The Molloy trilogy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable present the last gasp of human despair qualified by a dogged determination to survive. The characters have nothing to live for, but they are not suicidal. Malone ends with ‘Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’ The curious thing about these monologues of desolation is that they are not depressing. There is even a kind of exhilaration in their rhythms. The human condition, which is always presented as terminal, is absurd. We ought not to be entertained, but we are.
The later works of Beckett move ever closer to impotence and silence. Fin de Parti, or Endgame, shows Hamm and Clov and others playing out their final phase of irritable senility in dustbins. Happy Days shows Winnie buried up to her waist in rubbish but still clinging to the particularities of her handbag. Come and Go with its three female characters limited to a 120-word text, prepares for Breath, which lasts for 30 seconds. Not I is a scrap of monologue given to an illuminated mouth. The mouth then shuts for ever. Dr George Steiner has praised this logical conclusion – the inarticulate vacuum – as Beckett’s contribution to the literary situation which has to prevail after Auschwitz. There are not words left to express the horror of the twentieth century. We have to opt for silence. Dr Steiner has said all this very eloquently.
Beckett’s own view of his art is a modest one. ‘My characters have nothing. I’m working with impotence, ignorance… My little exploration is that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable – a something by definition incompatible with art.’ Of his own life, he says that it is ‘dull and without interest. The professors know more about it than I do… Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile.’ This writing he calls ‘a stain upon the silence’. We ought not, in celebrating his eightieth birthday, to embarrass him by mentioning his kindness to his fellows in the damnable craft, his courtesy, his courage under pain, difficulty and danger. There is, he would say, nothing to congratulate him for. Let me then mutter inaudible thanks and then opt for the silence which he has so notably stained.
The Times, 1986