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August 3, 1997
An Outsider in His Own LifeBy MORRIS DICKSTEIN
From the beginning, Samuel Beckett's sense of utter isolation was profound
Read the First Chapter
More on Samuel Beckett from The New York Times Archives
SAMUEL BECKETT
The Last Modernist.
By Anthony Cronin.
Illustrated. 645 pp. New York:
HarperCollins Publishers. $30.
t's not hard to guess why Samuel Beckett's latest biographer, Anthony Cronin, portrays him as ''the last modernist.'' When ''Waiting for Godot'' opened in London in 1955, Kenneth Tynan remarked, ''It has no plot, no climax, no denouement; no beginning, no middle and no end.'' If modernism liberated the writer from conventional storytelling and ordinary psychology, Beckett's novels and plays took modernism just as far as it could go. But ''Godot'' was an evening's entertainment compared with what followed. Like the anorexic sculptures of his friend Giacometti, Beckett's work grew ever more austere and minimal, halting at the point of disappearance while retaining much of its hypnotic power. Like the man himself, whose gaunt figure, courteous mien and aversion to publicity became legendary, Beckett's writing took literature as close to silence as we can imagine.
Though Beckett lived until 1989, he belongs chronologically (and spiritually) to a much earlier era. Born in 1906, he fits in easily with writers like Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, Henry Miller, Witold Gombrowicz, Henry Roth, Nathanael West and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. They were all second-generation modernists who arrived on the scene in the late 20's or early 30's, shortly after Eliot, Joyce, Kafka and Proust had written their major works. Caught between the anxieties of influence and the uncertainties of political and economic crisis, they turned toward a dark, acrid and mocking humor that became one of the great literary vehicles of the Depression years.
Beckett seemed to be the last of this generation, not only because he carried on so long but also because he was late in finding his own voice. It was not until after the war that he made his wholly original synthesis of Proust's explorations of memory, Joyce's linguistic virtuosity and learned whimsy, the Surrealists' fascination with dream logic and Eliot's and Kafka's profound sense of sterility and blockage. These writers were in the air in 1928, when Beckett arrived in Paris and quickly attached himself to the circle around Joyce and Eugene Jolas's avant-garde magazine, Transition. The elements of Beckett's vision could already be found in his grim little 1931 book on Proust, where he evoked the deadening effect of habit as the only defense against time and mortality. He arrived early at an extremely bleak view of life and a sense of the peculiarity of his own detached and morbid temperament. But the fiction and poetry that followed were too cerebral and, at the same time, too directly autobiographical to make much of an impact. He probably accumulated more publishers' rejections than any other great 20th-century writer. Had Beckett died by 1945, like some of his colleagues in the French Resistance, his early work would have been among the minor curiosities of Irish literature.
Anthony Cronin's ''Samuel Beckett'' arrives hard on the heels of James Knowlson's ''Damned to Fame,'' an exhaustive biography authorized by Beckett himself, which profited from five months of revealing interviews shortly before his death. But if ''Damned to Fame'' was a definitive piece of scholarship by a leading authority, Cronin's biography is a work of real novelistic flair by an Irish writer who knew both Beckett and his Dublin associates, including intimate friends like the poet Tom MacGreevy and favorite actors like Jack MacGowran and Patrick Magee, for whom Beckett wrote ''Krapp's Last Tape.'' Of Magee, Cronin writes, ''He was gray-haired but ageless and could combine debility with menace, as Beckett characters with their suppressed violence often do.'' Beckett's Irish milieu -- the family dynamics and old friendships, the educational scene, the social and moral attitudes, the physical setting -- comes through strikingly.
Knowlson usually writes as Beckett's advocate, seeing his life in hindsight as a steady advance toward a great literary career, but Cronin, relying heavily on Beckett's letters and early fiction, is more attentive to the byways, hesitations and failures as they were experienced at the moment. Knowlson's matchless sources sometimes give him the advantage. Thanks to the chance discovery of a previously unknown cache of letters, he shows how the mainsprings of ''Endgame'' lay in the agonizing months Beckett spent at the bedside of his dying brother. But Cronin's vigorous narrative, deft characterization and fine flashes of critical insight make Beckett more accessible to the general reader.
One virtue of this new biography is its shrewd and convincing portrayal of the many stages of Beckett's transformation from a quirky, self-conscious regional writer to a more universal one: from his genteel upbringing in a Protestant suburb of Dublin to the beginnings of his academic career as a French teacher at Trinity College; from his early years in Paris attending upon Joyce to his wanderings and frustrations in the 1930's; from the wartime escape to Roussillon, the village in the Vaucluse where he wrote ''Watt,'' to, finally, the creative breakthrough in a few intense years of writing immediately after the war.
Externally Beckett's life was uneventful. His temperament was phlegmatic -- one of his lovers, the mercurial Peggy Guggenheim, called him Oblomov, a byword in Russian literature for inertia. Even his courageous work for the Resistance in Paris and Provence, for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1945, seems to have demanded little concrete action, though in Paris he risked grave danger just before he fled. (Many members of his group were denounced and arrested, and barely 20 out of 80 survived the war.) But the drama of his life was elsewhere, in the struggle with his inner demons: his Swiftian ambivalence toward the body, his preoccupation with decline and incapacity and his sense of utter isolation. The very act of writing stirred deep conflict, which he once described as the paradox of the artist for whom ''there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.'' In the closing words of ''The Unnamable,'' his most intransigent novel, Beckett put this paradox more succinctly: ''You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.''
Depressive, uncomfortable in his skin despite early success as an athlete, ill at ease with all but a handful of people he trusted, Beckett had a sense of being his own double, an outsider in his own life. He was haunted by a feeling of absence, captivated by the notion of never having been born, which he picked up from a lecture by C. G. Jung. (In the mid-30's, a host of psychosomatic ailments drove him into almost two years of analysis.) Few writers have achieved such purity of expression within so limited a range. Right from the beginning, he saw birth and death as part of a single continuum, with life itself as little more than a futile stay of execution, a long day's dying. ''They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more,'' Pozzo says near the end of ''Godot.'' Vladimir echoes him: ''Down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps.'' Yet Beckett could make light of his own dark disposition, as when someone at a cricket match remarked that it was ''the sort of day that makes one glad to be alive,'' and he demurred: ''Oh I don't think I would go quite so far as to say that.''
This was the positive side of Beckett's detachment, the residue of Irish humor that enabled him to see himself as a character, uncompromising, unworldly, a modern Cassandra wary of all consolation. Beckett's earliest fiction, full of learned allusion, was transposed from his own seemingly directionless life. He stumbled under the weight of his own erudition. His breakthrough was the discovery of how much he and his characters did not know, how little they could understand or explain. After 1945, as Cronin shows, Beckett moved beyond self-portrayal to a modernist impersonality, devising abstract identities that ''could be revelatory without being self-revealing.'' Just as Prufrock stood in for Eliot, Beckett himself was replaced by a surrogate, the ''Beckett man,'' Cronin calls him, more a voice than a fleshed-out character, on which he performed endless variations. Molloy, Moran and Malone in his fiction, Vladimir and Estragon in ''Waiting for Godot,'' Hamm and Clov in ''Endgame,'' Krapp in ''Krapp's Last Tape'' were masks remote from his actual life, removed from any life as we know it, but closer to his inner experience, especially the feelings of forlorn hope, bitter regret, unresolved need and inexorable decline. Even his turn to writing in French was another hair shirt, a daring simplification, a way of escaping the allusive manner of Joyce and distancing himself from his own rich linguistic grounding in English. ''You couldn't help writing poetry in it,'' he complained.
But as Beckett's genius emerged, there was a world of difference between the interminable first-person monologues of his fiction, which played into his solipsism, and the crisp antiphonal patter of his plays. Even at their breathtaking best, as in ''Molloy,'' the desolation of the novels will always be hard to swallow. But the characters in Beckett's plays have a mesmerizing vitality and low humor despite their stripped-down lives. (''Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,'' Nell says in ''Endgame.'') His tramps descend from vaudeville routines; their timing, their physical business, even their silences come from silent comedy. These bickering couples are acting out rituals of dependency and disconnection that, as both biographies show, had deep roots in Beckett's life, especially his relations with a series of women he could neither live with nor live without, starting with his censorious mother and continuing with his wife, Suzanne.
Beckett's ability to write sustained fiction deserted him as he was struggling to complete ''How It Is'' in 1960, though there are some later prose pieces of astonishing beauty, like the autobiographical ''Company'' (1980). His plays came more and more to resemble the desolate monologues of his fiction, with only one speaker, sometimes only one actor not speaking but simply listening to a disembodied voice on tape or simply in the mind. The slowly fading image of Billie Whitelaw rocking herself to death in ''Rockaby'' (1980), accompanied only by the sound of her own recorded voice, remains indelible. In ''Not I'' (1972), one of the most terrifying of these late plays, the speaker is simply a ''Mouth,'' pouring out a torrent of jagged memories to a silent, helpless ''Auditor.'' When the incomparable Whitelaw first performed in this play, the director was forced to clamp her head in place to keep it from moving, a perfect metaphor for Beckett's own descent into immobility. ''Oh Billie, what have I done to you?'' Beckett said when she collapsed from emotional exhaustion at a rehearsal.
As a man Beckett seems to have been the soul of kindness, generosity and unshakable loyalty, but as a writer he kept faith with the darkest corners of his mind. His gallows humor was as medieval as it was modern. Hugh Kenner, who knew him well, was struck by the contrast between the Irish and French Beckett, between ''the gentle comedian'' and ''the morbid solipsist.'' Anthony Cronin tries to make Beckett normal, to make him imaginable, but he is also attuned to the essential strangeness of his personality. Beckett's work was so parsimonious and spare, his whole way of life so ascetic, that it comes as a shock to see him surrounded by so many words, enveloped in a cascade of biographical detail. The particulars of his life complement yet hardly explain what he wrote, but they make for a wrenching tale in their own right.
Morris Dickstein teaches English at Queens College and directs the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate School of the City University of New York.
From the Archives of The New York Times
PLUS: "Bore Them To Death": Billie Whitelaw recounts the pleasure (mostly) and pain (only a little) of working with Samuel Beckett. Hear it in RealAudio®.
REVIEWS:
Plays:"Waiting for Godot" (1956)
"Don't expect this column to explain Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' which was acted at the John Golden last evening. It is a mystery wrapped in an enigma.""Endgame" (1958)
"Although the dialogue is often baffling, there is no doubt about the total impression. We are through, he says.""Happy Days" (1961)
"Mr. Beckett's threnody is grim, but in its muted, tremulous way it shimmers with beauty."Fiction:
"Murphy" (published 1938)
"Funniest, perhaps, of his novels, but least poetic, 'Murphy' evokes a ferocity of terror and humor that shames most well-made novels of our time.""Malone Dies" (1956)
"Mr. Beckett himself writes rather like a wounded bird, in short stabbing flights, never getting far into the air before he falls back, but wonderfully moving in these tiny arcs.""The Unnamable" reviewed by Stephen Spender (1958)
"Beckett is an incomparable spellbinder.""Watt" (1959)
"Now that 'Watt' is available here, the first kind of admirers will make it truly their own. The second kind will be exquisitely bored. The third kind will naturally infer from their own inability to discover what on earth Mr. Beckett is talking about, that this is indeed a significant novel. ""How It Is" (1964)
"Mr. Beckett knows how to horrify and disgust. The matter is drawn out tortuously, the short-winded efforts of the voice made plain by a lack of punctuation in a story that proceeds by limping phrases.""Mercier and Camier" (1975)
"Despite its somberness, it is in some ways a warm and funny book, occasionally tinged with stinging sarcasm.""Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989" (1996)
"Beckett was only briefly, and probably accidentally, a reader-friendly writer. ""Dream of Fair to Middling Women" (1993)
"To non-Beckettians 'Dream' still offers the vicarious experience of being overwhelmed but not silenced by art, ideas, literature, language, sex and self."ALSO:
Samuel Beckett is Dead at 83; His 'Godot' Changed Theater (December 27, 1989)
Beckett Wins Nobel For Literature (1969)
Beckett in Paris (1981)
"...the impression of hardness and diffidence acquired from remembered photographs and stories didn't match this man. For everything about him was softer and warmer by degrees: the pleasant voice, the ironic glint in his eyes, the cordial air he conveyed made a stranger in his beloved city feel like a guest."Samuel Beckett: Private in Public (1988)
"What I did not have courage to say to Beckett was that in that room I had had the sensation of being immersed in the world of his plays. Beckett listened avidly but when I encouraged him to visit the museum he said simply, 'I never go anywhere.'"A Few Drinks and a Hymn: My Farewell to Samuel Beckett (1994)
"I find the door of 'Monsieur Beckett' without difficulty, knock, and swing in. He is sitting in a bare room, at one of two small desks, with a stark iron bed behind. He rises to embrace me, kissing me, to my surprise, on both cheeks; he is not usually so demonstrative."Discussing Beckett, Whether It Matters Or Not (1989)
"Defying both the indifferent universe and the nothingness of existence, an auditorium full of Samuel Beckett enthusiasts laughed courageously, and often, during a three-day celebration..."Review of "The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett" (1993)
"What began as an act of utmost privacy reached into the rehearsal room, where the author, watching actors play his roles, would distill and clarify his plays. "Review of "Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett" (1996)
"Beckett becomes his own finest character. Mr. Knowlson is with him to the final curtain, unblinking.""Bore Them To Death": Billie Whitelaw, widely considered Samuel Beckett's muse, describes working with Beckett (10 min.). From an evening with Ms. Whitelaw at The 92nd St. Y in New York City, January 21, 1997. Billie Whitelaw is an actress, a lecturer on Beckett, and the author of the memoir "Billie Whitelaw... Who He?".
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