How Beckett
was
Karl
Orend
21 August 2003
Full story displayed
Anne Atik
HOW IT WAS
A memoir of Samuel
Beckett
129pp. Faber. £30.
0 571 20910 6
Lois Gordon
READING "GODOT"
214pp. Yale
University Press. £18.50 (US $26).
0 300 09286 5
Frederik N. Smith
BECKETT'S EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
219pp. Palgrave. £40 (US $65).
0 333 92539 4
Ruby Cohn
A BECKETT CANON
417pp. University
of Michigan Press. $65; distributed in the UK by
Plymbridge. £37.
0 472 11190 6
Samuel Beckett, who began with the most intellectual
and allusive of styles, heavily influenced by James
Joyce, underwent a kind of epiphany at the end of the
Second World War. This resulted in part from his
experiences in the French Resistance and his work with
the Red Cross building a hospital at Saint-Lô in
Normandy. They brought a man whose whole life had been
tied up with learning into contact with the pain of
ordinary people, and to a profound questioning of the
role of the writer as witness to suffering
humanity.
Arguably, the shift was already under way after
Beckett’s travels in Hitler’s Germany in 1936–7. Not
long after this Beckett went to the offices of Jack
Kahane, owner of Obelisk Press, seeking translation
work, and crossed the path of Henry Miller, a man who
surprisingly had much in common with Beckett. Miller
advised Beckett to move away from Joyce and his method
and to strike out on his own. Perhaps a seed took root.
Whatever the exact sequence of events, Beckett came to
see the kernel of his own method in reduction, a shift
away from complex expression and self-conscious
virtuosity – the aesthetic of achievement. He told his
biographer James Knowlson that his “own way was in
impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and taking away, in
subtraction rather than adding”. He felt a keen affinity
with others who did the same, such as the sculptor Pala,
whose studio in the banlieue he once visited for
hours, asking only, “When did you begin reducing?”.
Beckett’s move into the French language was a strand of
his quest for purity. With a more limited vocabulary,
free from the more vigorous or playful aspects of
English, and to a degree shored up by the formality of
French, his work increasingly suggests the inability of
language to convey the depth of human suffering.
The critical industry that has grown up around
Beckett has reached epidemic proportions. Beckett
studies have encompassed the whole panorama of critical
responses since the late 1950s. Few critics seem to be
aware that they might take a hint from the author
himself, and his disdain for academic prose. He declared
– “I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in
exegesis of any kind . . . . We have no elucidations to
offer of mysteries that are all of their own making”. By
largely keeping silent Beckett has left everyone free to
invent his or her own interpretation of the work. One of
the most important factors in changing the focus of
Beckett studies in recent years has been the appearance
of reliable biographical studies by Knowlson and Anthony
Cronin ( TLS , September 27, 1996). This has
helped the rediscovery of Beckett as a man, as opposed
to an intellectual, and caused a re-evaluation of his
indebtedness to other arts, especially music and
painting. It also draws renewed attention to Beckett’s
acute awareness of history and religion. The latter path
has in recent years become the most rewarding for
research.
In the late 1950s, Beckett met the
artist Avigdor Arikha, twenty-three years his
junior. They were to become close friends. When the
artist married Anne Atik, a poet who worked at the Paris
Review , she became part of Beckett’s circle. The
couple offered the older writer a refuge where he could
talk about those aspects of his life that gave him
solace, particularly art and music. Drawing from her
memories and from notes taken throughout the 1960s and
late 70s, Anne Atik has produced an elegant and highly
personal memoir, How It Was , richly illustrated
with drawings, photographs, manuscripts and letter
holographs, which will be a valuable addition to every
Beckett collection.
Atik draws attention to the importance of Beckett’s
visual culture, and emphasizes the central place of
music in his private life, and with it the musicality of
his prose and personal diction. We see Beckett moving
towards an appreciation of deep feeling expressed simply
in all art forms – rejecting the architecture of Bach
and the heavy orchestration of Mahler and Wagner,
favouring the simplicity of German Lieder and chamber
music, particularly Schubert. He feared erudition that
swamped the authenticity of a work. Beckett recited
poetry often, paying particular attention to rhythm and
pronunciation, ranging from Walther von der Vogelweide
and Keats to Shakespeare and Yeats. Atik also reiterates
the importance of the Bible to Beckett’s culture. He
read it in four languages, and along with it a
concordance and the Book of Common Prayer. The
differences in translations of the Bible are briefly
outlined, as are the traces of its cadences and stories
found in Beckett’s work. His fascination with Joyce,
Dante, Johnson and others are all elucidated, but Atik
throughout insists on Beckett’s refusal to
intellectualize, dissect, or analyse works which touched
him deeply. Though some of Atik’s conclusions are open
to debate, her book is both enjoyable and informative.
Throughout this fascinating memoir, Beckett is
profoundly human, capable of weeping at the Lord’s
Prayer and slipping into closed silence when his
feelings ran too deep to express; his learning worn
lightly, yet an intrinsic part of the man. This is
juxtaposed with a profound concern for others and great
generosity.
Beckett moved closer and closer to silence and yet
subverted all the genres he worked in. Ihab Hassan wrote
in The Literature of Silence : Henry Miller and
Samuel Beckett that both these writers became
practitioners of a kind of anti-literature in which
language eventually exhausted its power to express.
Hassan remarks of Beckett that “his silence, despite its
grim, satiric note, has something in common with the
silence of holy men, who after knowing pain and outrage,
reach for a peace beyond human understanding”. Despite
their obvious differences both these writers filled
their books with biblical allusions and an intense
concern with human suffering, and both have characters
who identify closely with Christ and God. Miller was
supposed to have been born on Christ’s birthday and
Beckett claimed to have been born on the day of Christ’s
death. His religious upbringing and study inform
Beckett’s entire corpus. This, and his knowledge of
world religions, particularly Buddhism, has formed an
important theme in Beckett studies in recent years. Mary
Bryden, who also played a central role in discussing
Beckett’s relationship to music, gave us the notable
Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (1998). There
have been at least two conferences dedicated to this
theme, as well as a handful of books.
Lois Gordon follows the trend of many recent Beckett
critics by underscoring the religious overtones in
Beckett’s work. However, her book Reading “Godot” is
much more than it might at first seem. It aims to put
Beckett’s major dramatic work in historical,
philosophical, biographical and literary context, and in
so doing it may open up a whole new area of debate.
Written in a highly literate style, this book is
important reading for everyone interested in Beckett.
Its emphasis on Beckett’s relationship to Freud, French
literature and the socio-cultural history of the 1930s
and 40s allows us to see Waiting for Godot as a natural
outcome of Beckett’s confrontation with his own psyche.
The identification of his characters with Christ and
Cain and Abel is explored, as are Beckett’s own
existential dilemma and the complex nature of his
relationship with God.
Gordon examines Godot in terms of artistic
composition, dream states, visual impact, design and
philosophical context. I believe Beckett would have
admired her ability to do so without pretension. She,
like Beckett himself, has come to wear her learning
lightly and is able to rejuvenate our thinking about
this, his most famous work. The exploration of Beckett’s
milieu in the 1930s may still prove a deeply rewarding
avenue of research. One of Beckett’s fellow contributors
to transition – the novelist, poet and philosopher
Michael Fraenkel, whose work Beckett probably knew – is
a good example. Fraenkel was obsessed with the spiritual
death of modern man and the difficulty and pain of
living in the modern age.
Frederik N. Smith, like Lois Gordon and Anne Atik, is
at pains to stress the literary influences on Beckett,
an area which has sometimes been seen simplistically, or
ignored in favour of the philosophical. Following
up insightful early comments by Edwin Muir
and Kenneth Rexroth about Beckett’s connection
to eighteenth-century literature, Smith shows, in a
convincing and detailed study, that Beckett was
extremely familiar with this literature and returned to
it all his life. As he moved away from Joyce’s method,
Beckett sought a way to maintain his own originality in
the face of the literary voices that echoed in his
mind. Smith argues that he faced a problem that had
already haunted the eighteenth-century authors he
admired, particularly Johnson, Swift and Sterne – how to
be original, given the weight of tradition. Beckett,
like Pope, felt that the essential nature of the great
artist was his heroic struggle in the face of life’s
tragedy. Stimulating, meticulously researched, Beckett’s
Eighteenth Century is the first book-length study
of Beckett’s involvement with eighteenth-century
literature and argues convincingly that part of his
originality is derived precisely from his study of these
writers.
Beckett studies gained its first real impetus back in
1959 when Ruby Cohn devoted an issue of Perspective to
his writing and declared his importance in the face of
some opposition. Over the decades Cohn has modified her
early views on Beckett, but always remained a potent
force in interpreting his work. Sometimes condemned for
her so-called Humanist stance, Cohn refuses to impose
coherence on the many strands of Beckett’s life,
personality and work. A Beckett Canon is intended for
those who have been drawn to his work in print or
performance and want to explore it further. With no
thesis to uphold, the book proceeds chronologically
through Beckett’s published and unpublished works.
Cohn’s approach is intensely personal, the fruit of
decades of research, and her book provides a unique
resource to accompany and enrich our reading of
Beckett’s books and scripts. Providing context and
informed discussion and interpretation both of
well-known and obscure or unpublished texts, Ruby Cohn
is to be praised for her inclusiveness. Although some
may disagree with her interpretations
and chronology, every serious Beckett scholar will
want to own this book. Extensive attention has been paid
to manuscript holdings in university collections and the
resulting study is the first book to attempt to
encompass the entire body of Beckett’s oeuvre. It
will be invaluable to specialists, but also remains
a readable and inviting volume, an essential
reference for those less familiar
readers.
