Watt is the word

 

Aside from Lawrence E. Harvey’s Samuel Beckett: Poet and critic (1970), there has been little critical discussion of Samuel Beckett’s verse. Though seldom anthologized it is widely known, and some of it by heart, since the best of it speaks, or rather whispers, like his quietest dramatic pieces, to the inner ear; perhaps because the poems I mean are dramatic pieces in their own right. If not as familiar as the novels and plays, they have their own distinction. Like the prose, with which they have so much else in common, they are instantly striking and, like the finest verse, mysteriously persistent in the mind and even the nerves; they have an almost physical presence. Graphic and vivid, they are also intensely musical: theatrical too, and continuous with the work for stage, radio and other media. “Whoroscope”, for instance, considered a youthful exercise (and it is certainly that), is also a dramatic monologue of a kind to which Beckett would return in Krapp’s Last Tape, Not I and Ohio Impromptu, while the minimalist “Dieppe” is, among other things, a stage direction in the geometrical mode of Footfalls, Ghost Trio and . . . but the clouds . . . . The early poems anticipate the manner of the novel trilogy: “suck is not suck that alters”, alluding to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (“Love is not love . . . .”), prefigures the geriatric romance of Molly and Macmann in Malone Dies. Joycean in their comical obscurantism and finneganese locutions (“Not a syllogism out of him”; “My squinty doaty!”), mixing the learned and the demotic, they are Joycean too in their direct appeal to the ear.

Beckett spoke, in his critical work, of a “rupture”, a disjunction between subject and object, between the perceiving sensibility and “the unreality of reality”. He belonged, with Thomas MacGreevy and Denis Devlin, to the 1930s generation of Irish poets, and shared their fractured modernist aesthetic if not their religious convictions: “a low-down highbrow low-church Protestant”, for him poetry was the only prayer, “the only way out of the tongue-tied profanity”, as he put it in “Humanistic Quietism”, his review of MacGreevy. MacGreevy was an important influence on Beckett the poet, notably in the peripatetic “Echo’s Bones” sequence, early work owing much to MacGreevy’s “cab poem” (Beckett’s phrase) “Cron Trath na nDeithe” (“Twilight of the Gods”). Both thought highly of Eliot. (James Knowlson, in Damned to Fame, likens Beckett’s early manner to that of “Prufrock” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”.)

“Enueg”, “Sanies”, “Serena” are odd titles. We need to know, as the “Notes” to the Calder Collected Poems tell us, that the enueg (ennui) was a Provençal lament, the serena their evening poem. A sanies is a morbid discharge; and while Beckett achieved some of his happiest effects with the morbid, not to say the incurable, it is nonetheless interesting how often, flying in the face of their hilarious gloom (they “enjoy ill-health”), the poems evince traditional graces like “Meath shining through a chink in the hills”. It helps to be introduced to the strange words that Beckett is so fond of, the recondite and the archaic; to know that “Whoroscope” is spoken by Descartes; that Dortmunder is a German beer, Malacoda a deceitful demon in Dante. Although grounded in “real life” (a youthful infatuation, the death of his father), “Alba” and “Da Tagte Es” are choc-a-bloc with literary allusion. “Da tagte Es” derives from a medieval German poem; the alba is the aubade, and so on. But there is a principle at work whereby the less obviously obscure the source and the less erudite the scholarly apparatus, the more lyrical and memorable the poem and the more closely it approximates to that condition identified by Beckett himself, in his “Homage to Jack B. Yeats”, as “high solitary art uniquely self-pervaded, one with its wellhead in a hiddenmost of spirit, not to be clarified in any other light”.

“A Beckett poem”, says Anthony Cronin in The Last Modernist, thinking of the early work, “is an almost indecipherable tangle of recondite references and allusions” – but this ceases to be so after a certain point. With the French poems and the shorter lyrics we can leave behind Augustine and Descartes, Dante and Goethe, confident in the knowledge that it is Beckett’s own voice we are hearing now – except, of course, in the sometimes surprising translations. Beckett himself formed a low opinion of his youthful verse (the fiction too), which he described as “showing off”, yet he kept it in print. One reason, suggests Cronin, may have been that he began as a poet and, “in a manner commoner in France than in England, continued to think of himself as such, even after he had virtually abandoned poetry for prose”. The history of “Whoroscope” is well known. Nancy Cunard of The Hours Press advertised a prize for a poem on the subject of time (“for or against”), which was given to the twenty-four-year-old Beckett. The title relates to Descartes’ refusal to have his horoscope cast, since this would predetermine the day of his death. This prize-winning exercise in modernist pastiche is little more than a bit of fun. The point of it can be teased out, in a way, with the help of the Eliot-like “Notes”; but it is not to be taken seriously, nor was it meant to be. Of interest, though, are the Joycean rodomontade (“Them were the days I sat in the hot-cupboard throwing Jesuits out of the skylight”) and the curious pre-echoes of many a later and more laconic soliloquy: “Who’s that? Hals? Let him wait”; “What’s that? How long?”; then, with a sudden flash of lyricism, he “who has climbed the bitter steps” (Descartes was a late riser, but Christine of Sweden required him to be in attendance at five in the morning) asks to be spared by his foes for a natural death as unpredictable as his birth-date is secret:

and grant me my second
starless inscrutable hour.

The (literally) rambling “Enueg”, “Sanies” and “Serena” series from Echo’s Bones (1935), interspersed with shorter poems, cycle (“zeep”), trudge and drift around Dublin, London and Paris, noting such things as an old man “scuttling along between a crutch and a stick”, tulips “shining on Guinness’s barges” in the Liffey, the “mackerel” (maquereaux) at billiards in the American Bar, rue Mouffetard, thunder in Regent’s Park, the Crystal Palace glimpsed from Primrose Hill. The touristic contingency of these peregrinations (“Gnome” invokes “the years of wandering”) bespeaks, in Montale’s phrase, solitary inanition, an apparently “wasted” youth; and the cold eye cast on most people and things, even natural phenomena (“the tattered sky like an ink of pestilence”, “a black west throttled by clouds”), sees only the anxiety and confusion characteristic of the period: compare, for example, David Gascoyne. But the random method, or lack of method, throws up rare moments of wit (“smoke more fruit”) and oddly luminous intervals (“my breath held in the midst of thickets”; even “all things full of gods”), so tone is unreliable and intention, if any, unclear – in his own words, “the work of a very young man with nothing to do all day and the itch to make”.

Of the shorter poems in Echo’s Bones, one at least, “Alba”, is in a different, more affective register – perhaps because, in its slightly incoherent way, it is a love poem, or a sketch for one, frustrated by inhibition and a wished-for renunciation of the flesh in the form of a picturesque “Buddhist” reverie: “rain on the bamboo flower of smoke alley of willows”.

 “Cascando” (“Cascadingly”, a Beckettian musical tempo), written in youth for a young American woman who quickly dropped the acquaintance (“is it not better abort than be barren” etc), reads like the work of an adolescent, not of a grown man: “the hours after you are gone are so leaden”, “if you do not love me I shall not be loved” and so on. But all this neurotic work, this “work” on his neuroses, cleared his head for plainer, truer things both in English and French. These are the “existential lyrics” (his own phrase though used in another connection): “Dieppe”, the immediately post-war “Saint-Lô”. The existential lyric shares certain features, not least its brevity, with the Imagist poem, though it is free of the Imagist preciosity, partaking rather of the “Spartan maieutics” Beckett commended in Pound. One of those poems that makes immediate contact, “Dieppe” does so less for its verbal than for its visual, even filmic character:

again the last ebb
the dead shingle
the turning then the steps
towards the lights of old.

The last line, originally “vers les vieilles lumières”, then “towards the lighted town” before finding its final shape, seems provisional. The English version is not as sharp as the French. We lose the stage-directional quality of “demi-tour”, the “steps” are ambiguous (footfalls or civic amenities?) and the last line seems finally untranslatable. But even in English the idea is there, the situation is instantly recognizable. It is a stage direction, yes, but also so much more; for ebb and shingle recall the “melancholy long withdrawing roar” of “Dover Beach”, of all such beaches, and the retreat of metaphysical certitude, while steps and lights point to aspirations forever disappointed, forever renewed. The beach will be known to Molloy, he of the sucking-stones, and to Winnie in Happy Days. Erskine’s twenty-four-page “short statement” in Watt (1953) remembers “on the dark shingle the turning for the last time again to the lights of the little town”, but the moment had already been caught. “Dieppe” points to the later, more exiguous poetic mode. Written in French before the Second World War and translated into English by the author, it suggests not festivity or consolation, but the tedium of time-honoured illuminations – including, perhaps, the shoreline cogito of the human figure itself. (There is no “I”, but it appears to be singular.) The French poems in general share this new transparency: “vive morte ma seule saison”, “je suis ce cours de sable”, and the strange “je voudrais que mon amour meure”, translated by the author as “I would like my love to die”:

I would like my love to die
and the rain to be raining on the graveyard
and on me walking the streets
mourning her who thought she loved me.

The exigencies of the existential lyric, and those of translation, are perhaps responsible for Beckett’s revision, as in “Dieppe”, of the last line here, originally “pleurant celle qui crut m’aimer”, then “mourning the first and last to love me”.

This revisionism, this come-and-go, is itself a visual enactment. Beckett sometimes seems to anticipate the camera and the production team. There’s a self-consciously filmic quality in “je voudrais” as there is in “Dieppe”, and it may or may not be fanciful to guess that the graveyard, besides deriving from Yeats (“He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead”) and Joyce (“She Weeps Over Rahoon”), owes something to Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), with which it is roughly contemporaneous. (One might take the filmic question further and locate one more source for Godot in the two French prisoners on the run in Renoir’s pre-war La Grande Illusion.) The soppy-tough note is there to be deplored if we want to take him literally, but “je voudrais” is really saying something else: “I’d like to do a screenplay”. Beckett had once written to Eisenstein, asking to be taken on, but had no response; though he did write a screenplay later, of course, for Buster Keaton.

Saint-Lô (Manche) stands on the River Vire: some twenty miles from the Channel coast, it was wrecked by intensive bombardment in June 1944. Beckett, as interpreter and storekeeper, spent some months on the staff of the Irish Hospital there the following year. “Saint-Lô”, which first appeared in the Irish Times in June, 1946, moves abruptly from the shimmering river to the devastation, from a mild and agreeable two lines to an apocalyptic sphere contained in the word “havoc”, as the poem’s music moves from Schubert to say, Messiaen or Ligeti. Everyone likes “Saint-Lô”; Lawrence Harvey speaks of its “brief and unadorned perfection”:

Vire will wind in other shadows
unborn through the bright ways tremble
and the old mind ghost-forsaken
sink into its havoc.

This intimate twentieth-century virelai turns on the French virer (to turn), derived in turn from the Latin vibrare (to shake but also to gleam), and all this is in “wind”, “bright”, and “tremble”. The oddly shocking “havoc” of the last line is a private imprecation, the only way out of the tongue-tied profanity; that “other shadows” will rise from the ruins affords no consolation – except in so far as such a desolate scene might give, as he put it in a Radio Éireann broadcast at the time, “an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again”. By contrast, “Tailpiece” (“who may tell the tale . . .”) and “Song” (“Age is when to a man . . .”), the first originating in the fragmentary but intriguing “Addenda” to Watt, the second in the radio play Words and Music, are almost quaint in their fluent lyricism, an unexpected quality they share with certain passages in the plays. “Song”, an old man’s love-lament for a lost “face in the ashes”, is noticeably poignant – as is the best of Beckett, prose and verse. The simpler he is, the better he is, and we can watch the lines clearing as we proceed. “Song”, for example, reads like an elegy for his cousin Peggy Sinclair, with whom he had complex relations as a young man. Peggy’s father was Jewish; the family lived in Germany; she died of tuberculosis in 1933. If anything here suggests Paul Celan’s “Deathfugue” (“your ashen hair Shulamith”), so be it. Ashes and embers recur in the plays.

The mental-movie trope is the active principle in much of the seemingly casual “Mirlitonnades” (“Doggerels”; “Burbles”) where, as in the Keaton Film (1964), a sombre figure is constantly observed. The face in shadow, sets and movements noir and enigmatic (head, light-bulb, window, floor), the figure receives silent or whispered intimations we apprehend only as mime. There is black humour (an “incontinent” yields up his forfeit soul an hour before the appointed time); and there are shining moments, as when the lonely figure, emerging from its “hermitage”, sees the calm after the storm, or suns itself on a bench in St Andrew’s (Church of Scotland) graveyard in Tangier. (“Personally”, says the narrator of First Love, “I have no bone to pick with graveyards.”) The same or a similar figure (let us think of it as “Sam”) features in two poems of the 1970s, “Roundelay” and “Something there”, engaged in its two most representative actions, walking on a beach and waiting for a sign. “Roundelay” is a reprise, forty years on, of “Dieppe”, and “Something there”, a remake (“the eye / opens wide”) of the Keaton Film. The faint interruption of Sam’s solipsism (“something there / somewhere outside / the head”) seems to indicate a world of normative reality, something besides the now customary dark communings, and for a moment there is, what, hope? But the eye closes once more and, as it were, goes back to sleep. Not such an untroubled sleep this time, perhaps, since the interruption is not unique: “so the odd time / out there / somewhere out there . . .”.

It has happened before; it will happen again. Samuel Beckett once told the present writer how much he was enjoying old age, the loss of memory and vocabulary (“I’ve been looking forward to it all my life”), and the loss or stripping away of a once photographic memory and a once sumptuous speech (“chastisement”, “pestilence”, “sphincter”, “declension”, “asphodels”) provides the rationale for a related piece, in fact his final question or statement. Watt, remembering I Corinthians 13, had hoped “to see Mr Knott face to face”, catching only a few glimpses of him “as it were in a glass” while toying runically with simple words. Beckett is still doing it at the end with “What Is the Word”. This started life in French as “Comment dire”; but “what is the word” is much more suggestive than “comment dire”, since “what” is perhaps the answer, as Anthony Cronin points out: “The uncertainty which had been given expression in Watt, the first work of his maturity, is echoed in his last, for this was Samuel Beckett’s last piece of writing”.

Speaking of Bram van Velde in the third of the brilliant and mischievous Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, Beckett proposes “an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence”, such as, he claims, never before existed – though his true preference was for livelier artists like Kandinsky and Klee: “Let us, for once, be foolish enough not to turn tail. All have turned wisely tail, before the ultimate penury”; and he implicitly associates his own practice with the stance he claims to admire in the Dutch artist: “There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said”. One of the earliest formulations is the incident, in Watt, of the “piano chooners”, one blind, who stand in a sunlit music room exchanging doom-laden remarks about Mr Knott’s instrument. For Watt the scene takes on “a purely plastic content” and becomes “an example of light commenting bodies, and stillness motion, and silence sound, and comment comment”. Another is the “soul landscape” described in the “Addenda” to the same work. Sky, “waste” and Watt are “of a dark colour”: “The source of the feeble light diffused over this scene is unknown. Beneath Watt the waste rose and fell. All was silent”.

Then there is Lucky’s “think” in Waiting for Godot, where “the skull in Connemara”, “the tennis” and “Cunard” combine to suggest a Proustian glimpse of childhood, a summer afternoon in the west of Ireland during long-ago school holidays. What these formulations have in common is a highly pictorial quality. We remember Beckett’s interest in the art of Jack B. Yeats (the dark waste, the skull) and, in the incident of the piano-chooners, the musical dimensions of the plays. The piano-chooners are a play in themselves, or as good as a play, light commenting bodies, etc. The poems, like the novels and plays, aside from their visual properties, are “really” musical compositions. Except for Jack Yeats’s older brother, the Yeats of “The Tower”, there are few if any discernible literary affinities after the Joyce–Pound–Eliot phase. Just as it would be misleading to suggest that Lucky’s think was a sort of comic mime of the history of Western philosophy, so too it would be futile to try to “place” Beckett; for his verse, like his prose, is finally sui generis. Not inexpressive, as its author might have wished, but expressive of a rare vision, like the “brief scattered lights” in Malone Dies: “They were things that scarcely were, on the confines of silence and dark, and soon ceased”.