OF NUANCE AND SCRUPLE

AT CERTAIN TIMES in literature, a particular writer seems to embody the dignity and solitude of the entire profession. Henry James was “the Master” not only or even mainly by virtue of his gifts but because his manner of life, his style, even on trivial occasions, expressed the compulsive ministry of great art. Today there is reason to suppose that Samuel Beckett is the writer par excellence, that other playwrights and novelists find in him the concentrated shadow of their strivings and privations. Monsieur Beckett is—to the last fibre of his compact, elusive being—métier. There is no discernible waste motion, no public flourish, no concession—or none that is heralded—to the noise and imprecisions of life. Beckett’s early years have an air of deliberate apprenticeship (he was at the age of twenty-one acting as secretary to Joyce). His first publications, the essay on “Dante . . . Bruno . . . Vico . . . Joyce” of 1929, the 1931 monograph on Proust, a collection of poems issued in 1935 by the Europa Press—a name symptomatic—are exact preliminaries. Beckett charts, in regard to his own needs, the proximate attractions of Joyce and Proust; he is most influenced by what he discards. In “More Pricks Than Kicks” (London, 1934), he strikes his own special note. War came as a banal interruption. It surrounded Beckett with a silence, a routine of lunacy and sorrow as tangible as that already guessed at in his art. With “Molloy” in 1951 and “Waiting for Godot,” a year later, Beckett achieved that least interesting but most necessary of conditions—timeliness. Time had caught up; the major artist is, precisely, one who “dreams ahead.”

Henry James was representative through the stately profusion of his work, through the conviction, manifest in all he wrote, that language, if pursued with enough fastidious energy, could he made to realize and convey the sum of worthwhile experience. Beckett’s sparsity, his genius for saying less, is the antithesis. Beckett uses words as if each had to be extracted from a safe and smuggled into the light from a stock dangerously low. If the same word will do, use it many times over, until it is rubbed fine and anonymous. Breath is a legacy not to he squandered; monosyllables are enough for weekdays. Praised be the saints for full stops; they keep us prodigal babblers from penury. The notion that we can express to our deaf Selves, let alone communicate to any other human beings, blind, deaf, insensate as they are, a complete truth, fact, sensation—a fifth, tenth, millionth of such aforesaid truth, fact, or sensation—is arrogant folly. James clearly believed the thing was feasible; so did Proust, and Joyce when, in a last, crazy fling, he spread a net of bright, sounding words over all of creation. Now the park gates are shut, top hats and rhetoric molder on empty benches. Saints above, sir, it’s hard enough for a man to get up stairs, let alone say so:

There were not many steps. I had counted them a thousand times, both going up and coming down, but the figure has gone from my mind. I have never known whether you should say one with your foot on the sidewalk, two with the following foot on the first step, and so on, or whether the sidewalk shouldn’t count. At the top of the steps I fell foul of the same dilemma. In the other direction, I mean from top to bottom, it was the same, the word is not too strong. I did not know where to begin nor where to end, that’s the truth of the matter. I arrived therefore at three totally different figures, without ever knowing which of them was right. And when I say that the figure has gone from my mind. I mean that none of the three figures is with me any more, in my mind.

Beckett’s reductio of language—“Echo’s Bones,” the title of his early book of verse, is a perfect designation—relates to much that is distinctive of modern feeling. “It was the same, the word is not too strong” exhibits the tense playfulness of linguistic philosophy. There are passages in Beckett nearly interchangeable with the “language exercises” in Wittgenstein’s “Investigations;” both stalk the vapid inflations and imprecisions of our common speech. “Act Without Words” (1957) is to drama what “Black on Black” is to painting, a display of final logic. Beckett’s silences, his wry assumption that a rose may indeed be a rose but that only a fool would take so scandalous a proposition for granted or feel confident of translating it into art, are akin to monochrome canvass, Warhol statics, and silent music.

But with a difference. There is in Beckett a formidable inverse eloquence. Words, hoarded and threadbare as they are, dance for him as they do for all Irish bards. Partly this is a matter of repetition made musical; partly it springs from a cunning delicacy of to and fro, a rhythm of exchange closely modelled on slapstick. Beckett has links with Gertrude Stein and Kafka. But it is from the Marx Brothers that Vladimir and Estragon or Hamm and Clov have learned most. There are fugues of dialogue in “Waiting for Godot”—although “dialogue,” with its implication of efficient contact, is painfully the wrong word—that come nearest in current literature to pure rhetoric:

VLADIMIR: We have our reasons.

ESTRAGON: All the dead voices.

VLADIMIR: They make a noise like wings.

ESTRAGON: Like leaves.

VLADIMIR: Like sand.

ESTRAGON: Like leaves.

Silence

VLADIMIR: They all speak at once.

ESTRAGON: Each one to itself.

Silence

VLADIMIR: Rather they whisper.

ESTRAGON: They rustle.

VLADIMIR: They murmur.

ESTRAGON: They rustle.

Silence

VLADIMIR: What do they say?

ESTRAGON: They talk about their lives.

VLADIMIR: To have lived is not enough for them.

ESTRAGON: They have to talk about it.

VLADIMIR: To be dead is not enough for them.

ESTRAGON: It is not sufficient. Silence

VLADIMIR: They make a noise like feathers.

ESTRAGON: Like leaves.

VLADIMIR: Like ashes.

ESTRAGON: Like leaves.

Long silence

A topic for future dissertations: Uses of silence in Webern and Beckett. In “Textes pour Rien” (1955), we learn that we simply cannot go on speaking of souls and bodies, of births, lives, and deaths; we must carry on without any of that as best we can. “All that is the death of words, all that is superfluity of words, they do not know how to say anything else, but will say it no more.” I look, says Beckett, “for the voice of my silence.” The silences that punctuate his discourse, whose differing lengths and intensities seem as carefully modulated as they are in music, are not empty. They have in them, almost audible, the echo of things unspoken. And of words said in another language.

Samuel Beckett is master of two languages. This is a new and deeply suggestive phenomenon. Until very recently, a writer has been, almost by definition, a being rooted in his native idiom, a sensibility housed more closely, more inevitably than ordinary men and women in the shell of one language. To be a good writer signified a special intimacy with those rhythms of speech that lie deeper than formal syntax; it meant having an ear for those multitudinous connotations and buried echoes of an idiom no dictionary can convey. A poet or novelist whom political exile or private disaster had cut off from his native speech was a creature maimed.

Oscar Wilde was one of the first modern “dualists” (the qualification is necessary because bilingualism in Latin and one’s own vulgate was, of course, a general condition of high culture in medieval and Renaissance Europe). Wilde wrote beautifully in French, but eccentrically, to display the rootless elegance and irony toward fixed counters that marked his work and career as a whole. Kafka experienced the simultaneous pressures and poetic temptations of three languages—Czech, German, and Yiddish. A number of his tales and parables can be read as symbolic confessions by a man not fully domiciled in the language in which he chose, or found himself compelled, to write. Kafka notes in his diary for 24th October, 1911:

Yesterday it occurred to me that I did not always love my mother as she deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it. The Jewish mother is no “Mutter,” to call her “Mutter” makes her a little comic. . . . For the Jew, “Mutter” is specifically German. . . . The Jewish woman who is called “Mutter” therefore becomes not only comic but strange.

But the writer as linguistic polymath, as actively at home in several languages, is something very new. That the three probable figures of genius in contemporary fiction—Nabokov, Borges, and Beckett—should each have a virtuoso fluency in several languages that Nabokov and Beckett should have produced major works in two or more utterly different tongues, is a fact of enormous interest. Its implications so far as the new internationalism of culture goes have hardly been grasped. Their performance and, to a lesser degree, that of Ezra Pound—with its deliberate sandwiching of languages ant alphabets—suggest that the modernist movement can be seen as a strategy of permanent exile. The artist and the writer are incessant tourists window-shopping over the entire compass of available forms. The conditions of linguistic stability, of local, national self-consciousness in which literature flourished between the Renaissance and, say, the nineteen-fifties are now under extreme stress. Faulkner and Dylan Thomas might one day he seen as among the last major “homeowners” of literature. Joyce’s employment at Berlitz and Nabokov’s residence in a hotel may come to stand as signs for the age. Increasingly, every act of communication between human beings seems an act of translation.

In order to grasp Beckett’s parallel, mutually informing virtuosity, two aids are necessary: the critical bibliography gathered by Raymond Federman and John Fletcher (“Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics,” to he published later this year by the University of California Press) and the trilingual edition of Beckett’s plays issued by Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt in 1963–64. Roughly until 1945, Beckett wrote in English; after that, he composed mainly in French. But the situation is complicated by the fact that “Watt” (1953) has so far appeared only in English and by the constant possibility that work published in French was first written in English, and vice versa. “Waiting for Godot,” “Endgame,” “Molloy,” “Malone Dies,” “The Unnamable,” and the recent “Têtes Mortes” first appeared in French. Most of these texts, but not all, have been translated by Beckett into English (were some of them conceived in English?), usually with alterations and excisions. Beckett’s bibliography is as labyrinthine as Nabokov’s or as some of the multilingual œuvres Borges lists in his “Fictions.” The same book or fragment may lead several lives; pieces go underground and reappear much later, subtly transmuted. To study Beckett’s genius seriously one must lay side by side the French and English versions of “Waiting for Godot” or “Malone Dies,” in which the French version must probably has preceded the English, then do the same with “All That Fall” or “Happy Days,” in which Beckett reverses himself and recasts his English text into French. After which, quite in the vein of a Borges fable, one ought to rotate the eight texts around a common center to follow the permutations of Beckett’s wit and sensibility within the matrix of two great tongues. Only in this way can one make out to what degree Beckett’s idiom—the laconic, arch, delicately paced inflections of his style—is a pas de deux of French and English, with a strong dose of Irish tomfoolery and arcane sadness added.

Such is Beckett’s dual control that he translates his own jokes by altering them, by finding in his alternative language an exact counterpart to the undertones, idiomatic associations, or social context of the original. No outside translator would have chosen the equivalences found by Beckett for the famous crescendo of mutual flyting in Act II of “Waiting for Godot”: “Andouille! Tordu! Crétin! Curé! Dégueulasse! Micheton! Ordure! Archi . . . tecte!” is not translated, in any ordinary sense, by “Moron! Vermin! Abortion! Morpion! Sewerrat! Curate! Cretin! Crritic!” “Morpion” is a subtle borrowing from the French, signifying both a kind of flea and a game analogous to Vladimir’s and Estragon’s alignment of insults, but a borrowing not from the French text initially provided by Beckett himself! The accelerando of outrage conveyed by the cr-sounds in the English version springs from the French not by translation but by intimate re-creation; Beckett seems capable of reliving in either French or English the poetic, associative processes that produced his initial text. Thus, to compare Lucky’s crazed monologue in its French and English casts is to be given a memorable lesson in the singular genius of both languages as well as in their European interaction. A wealth of sly precision lies behind the “translation” of Seine-et-Oise, Seine-et-Marne into Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham. The death of Voltaire becomes, appropriately yet with a distinct shift of stress, that of Dr. Johnson. Not even Connemara stays put; it suffers a sea change into “Normandie on ne sait pourquoi.”

“Stories and Texts for Nothing,” recently published by Grove Press, is a case in point. This collection of three short fables and thirteen monologues is a cat’s cradle. The stories seem to have been written in French in 1945 and are related to both “Molloy” and “Malone Dies.” The monologues and stories appeared in Paris in 1955, but at least one had already been published in a magazine. The English edition of this book, under the title of “No’s Knife, Collected Shorter Prose,” includes four items not included by Grove Press, among them “Ping,” a weird miniature interestingly dissected in the February issue of Encounter. The Grove edition is, as has been noted elsewhere, compliment to Beckett’s austere pedantry in matters of dating and bibliography. The few indications given are erroneous or incomplete. This is a fascinating but minor work. Slight if only because Beckett allows a number of influences or foreign bodies to obtrude. Jonathan Swift, always a ghostly precedent, looms large in the dirt and hallucinations of “The End.” There is more Kafka, or, rather, more undisguised Kafka, than Beckett usually allows one to detect: “That’s where the court sits this evening, in the depths of that vaulty night, that’s where I’m clerk and scribe, not understanding what I hear, not knowing what I write.” Joyce is very much with us, Irish ballad, end of winter’s day, horsecab and all, in “The Expelled.” We read in “The Calmative” that “there was never any city but the one” and are meant to grasp a twofold unity, Dublin-Paris, the venue of the great artificer and now of Beckett himself.

But although these are fragments, four-finger exercises, the essential motifs come through. The spirit shuffles like a ragpicker in quest of words that have not been chewed to the marrow, that have kept something of their secret life despite the mendacity of the age. The dandy as ascetic, the fastidious beggar—these are Beckett’s natural porsonae. The keynote is one of genuine yet faintly insolent amazement: “It’s enough to make you wonder sometimes if you are on the right planet. Even the words desert you, it’s as bad as that.” The apocalypse is a death of speech (which echoes the rhetorical but no less final desolation of “King Lear”):

All the peoples of the earth would not suffice, at the end of the billions you’d need a god, unwitnessed witness of witnesses, what a blessing it’s all down the drain, nothing ever as much as begun, nothing ever but nothing and never, nothing ever but lifeless words.

Yet sometimes in this kingdom of ashcans and rain “words were coming back to me, and the way to make them sound.”

When that pentecostal dispensation lights, Beckett literally sings, in a low, penetrating voice, awesomely cunning in its cadence. Beckett’s style makes other contemporary prose seem flatulent:

I know what I mean, or one-armed better still, no arms, no hands, better by far, as old as the world and no less hideous, amputated on all sides, erect on my trusty stumps, bursting with . . . old prayers, old lessons, soul, mind, and carcass finishing neck and neck, not to mention the gobchucks, too painful to mention, sobs made mucus, hawked up from the heart, now I have a heart, now I’m complete. . . . Evenings, evenings, what evenings they were then, made of what, and when was that, I don’t know, made of friendly shadows, friendly skies, of time cloyed, resting from devouring, until its midnight meats, I don’t know, any more than then, when I used to say, from within, or from without, from the coming night or from under the ground.

The laconic wit of “soul, mind, and carcass finishing neck and neck” would by itself signal the hand of a major poet. But the entirety of this eleventh monologue or murmuring meditation is high poetry, and seeks out Shakespeare with distant, teasing echo (“where I am, between two parting dreams, knowing none, known of none”).

Beckett’s landscape is a bleak monochrome. The matter of his singsong is ordure, solitude, and the ghostly self-sufficiency that comes after a long fast. Nevertheless, he is one of our indispensable recorders, and knows it, too: “Peekaboo here I come again, just when most needed, like the square root of minus one, having terminated my humanities.” A dense, brilliantly apt phrase. The square root of minus one is imaginary, spectral, but mathematics cannot do without it. “Terminated” is a deliberate gallicism: it signifies that Beckett has mastered humane learning (these texts bristle with arcane allusions), that he has made an academic inventory of civilization before closing the lid and paring himself to the bone. But “terminated” also means finis, “Endgame,” “Krapp’s Last Tape.” This is terminal art, making most criticism or commentary a superfluous vulgarity.

The vision that emerges from the sum of Beckett’s writings is narrow and repetitive. It is also grimly hilarious. It may not be much, but, being so honest, it might well prove the best, most durable we have. Beckett’s thinness, his refusal to see in language and literary form adequate realizations of human feeling or society, make him antithetical to Henry James. But he is as representative of our present diminished reach as James was representative of a lost spaciousness. Thus there applies to both the salutation spoken by W. H. Auden in Mount Auburn cemetery: “Master of nuance and scruple.”