VI.

When I was in the university rooms, in Antwerp, doing a workshop on Ill Seen Ill Said, the facilitators divided us into small groups of four, seven or eight groups in all, each group being provided with a short excerpt from the late prose work, written when Beckett was seventy-five. Each group’s job was to divide its snippet among its members, each person in the group taking a sentence or a phrase, and repeating it aloud or silently, for the purpose of exploring the phrase, understanding its possibilities, physically, musically, semantically, before rejoining the group and seeing to the snippet’s integration into a reconstitution and recital of the Beckett text, which each group performed in separate parts of the room.

As Marcel is steered toward the bar car on the railway, by family and medical staff, in order to overcome his anxiety about leaving his mother, Beckett, arriving in Saint-Lô having visited his mother in Dublin after his years of being on the run during the war, returns, for the Irish Red Cross, to a ravaged France, and does not go back straightaway to his partner, Suzanne, his wife-to-be, at their apartment at rue des Favorites, but instead to a blasted landscape that had been pounded by Allied bombing for months, from June to September 1944, and Beckett does so in order to help in the recovery.

My snippet was “At the other window” from the opening page of Ill Seen Ill Said—sentences seven, eight, and nine of Ill Seen Ill Said were given to our group on a piece of paper: “At the other window. Rigid upright on her old chair she watches for the radiant one. Her old deal spindlebacked chair.” The four of us conferred.

Beckett was well suited to the task facing the Red Cross—bilingual, able to drive a vehicle, familiar with the French terrain, and possessed of deep reserves of empathy, and clearly a sense of duty, evinced by his service in the French Resistance and renewed by the chance of helping an effort originating in Ireland, which had remained neutral during the war. What is “relational” about these two experiences, Marcel’s fictional one, Beckett’s historical one, as both figures converged upon northwest France with perhaps similar fears and anxieties that took similar forms, or dissimilar but morphologically related ones?

I now recall that we each were asked to choose a portion of this text with which we felt comfortable. You could choose the same phrase as another in the group, or you could all choose an overlapping phrase. In the end, we all, in our group, chose separate phrases. I chose “At the other window.” A scholar in our group, a professor in Canada, chose “the radiant one.” The remaining two, for whom English was not a first language, chose “rigid upright on her old chair” and “old deal spindlebacked chair,” respectively, each delighting visibly in the Anglo-Saxon clacking of his phrase. As I stood at my window, in those university rooms, and repeated, with varying emphases, my phrase, “At the other window,” and my Canadian colleague lay upon the hardwood floor in spread-eagle, eyes closed, intoning softly, “the radiant one, the radiant one,” and my two other colleagues standing at right angles to each other, looking, one east, one south, working through their phrases so that the spondaic “upright” from the one speaker made rough insert into the dactylic “spindlebacked” from the other, I felt very still. In the swirling world, four thousand miles from where I would be sent were I to die, here in this room among two dozen Beckett scholars, I am unmoving, yet looking out a window at a public, historic Belgian sky, itself unmoving, like a photograph. And this was a still piece we were sampling, written in French and English almost simultaneously, and finished, both of them, in January 1981.

The record does not show if Beckett had beer and brandy in Saint-Lô to help, but you can bet he savored something along those lines after years of deprivation. And although, as his biographer attests, Beckett was anxious to get back to his writing, his witnessing of such devastation and misery, homes reduced to rubble, possessions destroyed, the wards full of TB patients, he was deeply affected. And morphologically, you cannot argue that Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett did not both respond with exalted forms of language, though Beckett did so much more tersely, with his four-line, twenty-two-word 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.

Lawrence Harvey, in his seminal early study of Beckett’s poetry, remarked upon the “brief and unadorned perfection” of “Saint-Lô” and its “harmony of easy phonetic flow appropriate to the gentle course of the meandering stream” of the river Vire, which flows through Saint-Lô on its way to the English Channel. The mysterious “shadows unborn through the bright ways” comes from where, if not the dark effluent of those who, thanks to merciless aerial bombing, will never be born, perhaps a nod here to Shelley’s war-inspired lyrical drama Hellas, in which “shadows . . . unborn” are “cast on the mirror of the night”:

The army encamped upon the Cydaris
Was roused last night by the alarm of battle,
And saw two hosts conflicting in the air, —
The shadows doubtless of the unborn time,
Cast on the mirror of the night.

I look out the window, in this still piece, not so ill seen, not so ill said, which Stan Gontarski has said marks the end of Beckett’s traveling narratives and commences the final decade of “closed space stories,” and wonder if I have arrived. Is this the stillness of terminus, the peace of arrival, of destination? I wonder: is this a question prompted by physically embodying a snippet of text with other people? Is this presentational theater, not representational? Am I now me and not playing me?

Beckett’s response to a vanished world, with heaped masonry and damaged citizens left in shocking local evidence of civilization’s collapse into violence, is exceedingly spare, his poem built as if by a language under rationing, twenty-two words in thirty syllables. Marvelous—for we must also live in another world, the more so if the one is filled with suffering and fear—is Marcel’s highly aestheticized, voluble response to seeing a world of the imagination, in this case the “Balbec” of his mind, “almost Persian in style,” a place until then only experienced through avid perusals of train schedules and place names, destroyed by actual experience. Having boarded his longed-for 1:22 out of Paris, and after the euphoria of alcohol wore off and his fantasies about milkmaids and the golden-haired fellow passenger who alights at Saint-Lô, Marcel is repulsed upon arriving in Balbec by the fact that the cathedral does not sit high upon “a rugged Norman cliff” above the roaring Atlantic, as he had imagined, but is twelve miles inland at the convergence of two tram lines and opposite a billiard hall.

It felt so entirely other—new, strange, thrilling, like falling in love—that I entrusted myself to this other. And in its possession, there as I said it—the other window, the other window, while standing at another window indeed, in Antwerp—I saw it was myself in the other window, not in reflection, but in the square of beyond. The self I had been working on for two years was expanding into being, was even being born—an extension of interiority. With my book of stories now behind me, with no notice in the consumer press, I had found something or it had found me. We had made it, through nerve-wracking queues in JFK and Schiphol, tense, jagged, jet-lagged vigils at baggage carousels waiting for our hapless little Victorinox family to wobble toward us and then all of us through narrow streets with the taxi drivers of, presumably, the new Europe, to the sanctum of our like-minded community, there to advance our work on the writer for whom nothing was more real than nothing.

Scholar Peter Boxall points to a wondrous vision sketched out by Beckett in his early, mannered, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, the long-abandoned and then posthumously published novel. “As the narrator puts it,” writes Boxall, quoting Beckett liberally, “when gazing at the ‘abstract density’ of the ‘night firmament,’ this coming together in the dark sky of the seen and the unseen mirrors the movement of the ‘mind achieving creation.’ If the sky is ‘seen merely,’ [the narrator] thinks, it appears as ‘a depthless lining of [the] hemisphere,’ a ‘crazy stripling of stars’; but if one is alert to the unseen that is threaded through the seen sky, the hidden orbits that pass silently through it, it becomes a figure for the ‘passional intelligence’ which ‘tunnels, surely and blindly,’ through ‘the interstellar coalsacks of its firmament in genesis. . . . The inviolable criterion of poetry and music,’ [the narrator] thinks, ‘is figured in the demented perforations of the night colander.’ The night sky contains within it the unseen, ‘incommunicable’ elements of poetry and music, which withhold themselves, but what are nevertheless ‘there,’ like an ‘insistent, invisible rat, fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art surface.’ ”

“In a street detonation, windows in a building fly outward thanks to the vacuum created behind the blast,” said the inspector. All air rushes into a vacuum, to vanquish, lessening itself in the process, until a steady state is reached.

“Astral incoherence of the art surface,” that’s Beckett at twenty-six years old. That’s a young man deeply troubled by the fact that we are all of what we see and we see so little, who is keen to deduce what we don’t see from what we do. Beckett would continue, for six decades, to test the limits of what it is possible to see or say or say is seen and then to see or say what can be said or seen of those limits, which toward the end, became his sole subject.

I was a steady state, co-extensive and co-existent with what I could see, immortal, for now.

The first paradise really runs him ragged.