IX.

—That fellow’s very deft.

For Beckett, the high priest of failure—“fail better,” “like none other dare fail,” “better worse,” “say nohow on”—what are we to make of the works he abandoned?

The remainder is comedy.

After we played a few games—we shot baskets into his hoop, fooled around online, and then played with his remote-control cars, we got on his bed and looked out his window, which had a view from high up of the Hudson River and the highway that runs along it.

—Roy McMillan. One of the best at his position.

—Hoovers everything up.

—One out to go.

Did Beckett’s abandoned work, of which there are a dozen or so—abandoned plays, radio scripts, essays, poems, translations, and a few prose pieces—not fail enough? Did they fail the test of failure? Else why abandoned? Did they edge toward success, or some facile form of failure, or were they abandoned because their ambitions for failure were too grand, the failure envisioned unattainable or the execution too poorly conceived?

What’s left over is comedy. It is strictly human. Henri Bergson said that.

Coming down the highway were nothing but EMS vehicles and fire trucks. We turned on the TV and had trouble finding a station that was working but then found CNN and we sat watching. I got butterflies in my stomach.

—So what do you make of this filmmaking, Sam?

—The movie part of it. The camera moving, the eye. It changes possibilities. Narrator on a dolly.

—Next stop, Hollywood!

Or were there landscapes of failure that Beckett considered too dark to traverse, prompting retreat? An afternoon in the Beckett archive at the University of Reading reading the six pages of his abandoned prose work “Long Observation of the Ray,” from 1976, written in English in his small, slanted hand and a series of typewritten drafts, suggests to me that there is indeed a place too dark for Beckett. This elaborately schemed piece—meant to cover nine “themes” in precise mathematically determined packets of sentences, with a structure described by Steven Connor, one of only two scholars who have written on “Long Observation,” as proceeding in “exactly equivalent increment(s) and diminishment(s), consisting of one sentence referring to each” of the nine themes . . . followed by “a sequence of three sentences referring to” the nine themes, “followed by similar sequence of six, nine, six and three sentences,” concluding with another sequence of one sentence each “from the nine themes,” was worked on by Beckett for over the span of a year before being dropped. “Long Observation of the Ray” attempts to describe the play of light (from a lantern) within a hermetic spherical chamber six feet in diameter, and how the light can be made to wash with equal intensity the entire surface from an identical distance, which is required for the intensity to remain constant. Beckett encounters and fiddles with many of the epistemological and technical problems this scheme presents. He is trying to hold constant a closed system with the light source not biasing what it illuminates. The second essay on this mysterious piece, by David Houston-Jones, hints at a possible reason.

“An animal which laughs,” Bergson said, of us. The comic occurs in the absence of feeling, Bergson said. “Laughter has no greater foe than emotion,” he said. But laughter has a social function—it “stands in need of an echo.” We don’t manage too badly, eh Didi, between the two of us?

Andrew came in. Oliver and I chewed gum. Dad showed up. Dad talked to Andrew for a while and then Dad asked Andrew if he had any whiskey. Andrew did, and Dad soon had a glass in his hand.

—I wrote Jackie a note. Not an idea in my head but I can see something . . . with Jackie MacGowran in it.

—Jack’s been very busy, hasn’t he?

—Yes, blessedly. He’s a danger to himself at all times, but when idle, it worsens. He despairs.

—He’s one of the best. He couldn’t do Film?

—Just too many commitments, I’d have loved it, but I’d have been sent home in a box.

“Beckett’s later work,” writes Houston-Jones, “is preoccupied with a world running down to zero.” Beckett’s interest is in “what survives the disappearance of the human species.” The work is “rooted” in William Thompson’s formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, according to which energy in a closed system is gradually lost, resulting in stabilization at absolute zero. Beckett’s abandoned piece, Houston-Jones proposes, emerges as a picture of “human survival in informational form.” This is Beckett perhaps trying to design an object that can realize in some fashion James Maxwell’s thought experiment, in which the Second Law is refuted by having a door through which slowing and therefore cooling particles can be exchanged for accelerating and therefore warming particles within, keeping energy constant. Beckett’s sphere and lantern and ray arguably have a go at this. But given the concerns of the late Beckett work, I might side with Steven Connor who sees “Long Observation” as Beckett’s attempt to remove the theatrical from art, and from theater, to purify its abstraction. To get at what? Toward being? The shape of being?

I said to her, tell me a joke. I said to her, make it funny. I said to her, let’s be light, the light in our future. The light ahead. I said to her, you see it, don’t you? Close your eyes, you will see it. I said to her, if you can see it, tell me about it. Be my echo, I will hear it, you back to me. You back to me.

It was still morning. I always thought drinking was something grownups did to celebrate, like New Year’s or a birthday, not the collapse of buildings or whatever this was. They were calling it a terrorist act on TV. America had been attacked. Maybe you did drink to that. Dad borrowed Andrew’s cell phone because he had to make some calls, he said, and Andrew was on the land line. I had to help Dad work the cell, since he was bad at technology. I wondered if most adults were drinking somewhere.

—The camera destroys space. It invades it. Radio makes it disappear, but the camera moves through it.

—And can recreate it, wouldn’t you say. Potemkin?

—Constitutes it somehow. Moving collage. Montage. Take space and ravage it and then put it on a wall, on a screen. The possibilities are not endless, but far beyond the stage set.

—Liberating?

From the unpublished “Long Observation of the Ray”:

More than with the weakness itself the struggle is with the constant degree of weakness. Latent early this adversary could not fully emerge till late. Before the mind even weaker then than before and knowing it. Weakened by struggle with other adversaries earlier to emerge. The eye strains henceforward for greater weakness however little or less. And so perhaps fails to see what but for this preoccupation it might have seen.

So faint that in less utter darkness it might pass unseen it grows no fainter! Colourless no trace of yellow white faint white. Ashen waver through the air ending in ashen blur. Jaggedness as though the dark opaque in patches. Whether faintness due to that of inexhaustible source. Or to nursing some finite blaze.

Make it funny, you said. Let’s be light, you said. The light in our future. You make me Narcissus. Narcissus, you say. Tell me a story, we say. Tell me about the dog that ran away. Tell me about the family dog that ran away, that ran away. Ha-ha-ha how to write laughter. You can’t write laughter you can only run away. You ran away. I fell for it.

Dad took me home. On the way, Dad got money out of the ATM on Christopher Street, which took quite a while. Dad seemed proud of himself to have thought of getting some cash, like the banks were gonna run out. Then we went to our apartment, where Dad got on the phone again. He reached Mom, who was on her way—on foot, to get Alison up at Dalton. We watched TV for the rest of the day. We ate spaghetti that night. The Yankee game was canceled. After dinner we watched O Brother, Where Art Thou? in the den, although Dad and Mom went to the kitchen a lot. Mom drank a lot of wine; Dad drank beer. They had the radio on in there.

—I wouldn’t go that far. Haven’t you read your Sartre? Come now . . .

—Mais oui.

—It’s a figment, Dick.

—Freedom, you mean?

—Mean? Let’s stick to the match. That man is bowling fast.

How else explain the fluctuant structure and pulse of “Long Observation of the Ray”—that regular increase and decrease in the size of sentence units equally distributed across a set of nine themes, a kind of metabolic rhythm approaching a steady-state—than to say it is intended as a model for eternal being, at whatever the cost. That is, not an accretive narrative that resolves itself, not at all; and not a system that winds itself down to an end; but a sort of machine, with its intensities, exposures, and frequencies set in such a way as to pertain forever, defeating entropy. Is this what failed Beckett, this machine he had built? Or did the prospect of its succeeding horrify him? Endless system survival, a horror show? I don’t know. David Houston-Jones called the abandoned work, its mere six pages, “a monument to extinction.” But I believe Beckett said no to this once he faced it. A monument to extinction Beckett never built, even if he’d drawn up the plan. But this is provisional.

I said to her, it doesn’t matter, whether we are interred or burned or buried at sea. Light is our future. Rising. Show me the light, tell us of the light, I said to her. I said to her, my beloved, we’ve only so many sentences left, we might start to savor them a little bit, conserve, conserve. Suddenly—no!—at last, at long last, you begin to speak. You are good at this. Go on. Change my tune.

I went to bed late, knowing school was canceled for the next day. Nothing was moving, no work for the grownups. In the morning, Dad had to run—I mean jog—up to 14th Street to find a newspaper. “US ATTACKED” it said on the front page of the Times. Dad said, “Nothing will ever be the same.” So did Mom. So did everyone, so I guess they knew. The next day, everyone was on the phone all day. The city had a horrible smell.

—Pop to shortstop! That should do it. Macmillan . . . game over, Mets win.

—[Clapping] No ninth try for the . . . Metropolitans?

—The home team doesn’t bat if it’s ahead in the ninth inning.

—A mercy.

For the record, the nine themes: observation, chamber, inlet-outlet, constant intensity (inexhaustible source), faintness, cross-section (lantern), constant length, saltatoriality, extinction-occultation. The noun “saltatoriality” is not a word, though Beckett glossed it as “erratic transfer from one blank to another.” “Saltatorially” is a word, an adverb, describing how active processes are ensured in sodium channels in the nervous system. Had Beckett’s narrative interest brought him here, to neuronal salt transfers? These are dark workings indeed, in which the “Long Observation of the Ray” takes place within a spherical chamber with an inner light source of no dimension. And yet none of this can be seen, as the sphere is closed.

Someone said, you cannot stay here. None could stay there and could not continue. Describe the site, it is not important. A flat plain, then a mountain, no, a hill, wild, so wild. Enough. The summit a kind of marsh, with heath to the knee, sheep paths, mud tracks, my life, a scribble, a scramble barely visible, ruts deepened by rains, effaced by rains.

Dad always said I had a great nose for smells and for describing them. Tar and floor polish for the skunk smell in Connecticut. That was a good one. For the Ground Zero smell—they were calling it ground zero—it was harder. I tried but I’d never smelled these smells before, except maybe for a wet campfire like we made once in the Adirondacks. But it also smelled like when Oliver and I once lit a plastic straw with a match.

—Curtain, then. Now what, Dick?

—There’s a second act, game two, in about twenty minutes. So what do you think?

Traffic is slow. Traffic is stop and go. Be prepared to stop.

Or best not to stay the wanderer even if. Worse yet to wander on, even if. For better or worse, wander on.

At the bottom of one of these I was lying, out of the wind. Couldn’t see shit, didn’t want to—the valleys, distant lakes like blue coins out there, the sea on its shelf. I should not have begun so, but as it goes, I had to start.

We weren’t supposed to go outside much, because of the air. And lots of people thought there might be follow-up attacks, since they couldn’t tell how many “cells” were in the country. It was like they were talking about a sickness.

—[Lighting a small cigar] We’ll stay on.

Be prepared to go.

Someone said so, perhaps the same person who made you come.

Everywhere looking for cells.