`Beautiful'

Sometimes, context is everything. I am reviewing Philip Roth’s Everyman for the Houston Chronicle, and one of the many aspects of the novel I am not addressing is the epigraph from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” By placing four lines from the third of the poem’s eight stanzas at the beginning of his death-haunted book – haunted in a specifically 21st-century fashion, in part because of medical progress – Roth reinterprets the familiar words:

“Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs.
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow…”

Recall, these were the words of a would-be doctor who was dead from tuberculosis at 25. He wrote this and the other great odes in May 1819, and died 21 months later. The third line quoted can be read as romantic clairvoyance, but pulled from the rest of the ode and planted in a Roth novel about death, the romance of “easeful death” evaporates. This “immortal Bird” suddenly becomes hopelessly mortal. This reads grimmer, bleaker than the Keats we think we remember, and more like Samuel Beckett.

It turns out Beckett knew the poem well and bestowed upon it a word scarcely in his critical vocabulary – “beautiful.” John Montague, the Irish poet and story writer, was a friend of Beckett’s. In a piece he published in The New York Times in 1994, more than four years after Beckett’s death, Montague recalled a night of drinking Irish whiskey in Paris in the 1980s:

“Job done, we rest a while, glasses in hand. He shows me the books he has been reading, old favorites; The Oxford Book of French Verse, which he probably studied at Trinity College, Dublin, under his beloved Rudmose Brown, who introduced him to contemporary French literature. And The Penguin Book of English Verse, with a few later volumes of his own and, to my embarrassment, my recent essays, The Figure in the Cave, wedged between.

“`I've been reading Keats's `Ode to a Nightingale.’ It's very beautiful.’

“It happens to be a poem that I heartily loathe, with its smarmy Cockney view of beauty, but this is not the time for sparring matches, even if fueled by Jameson's. His barriers are down, his sympathies simple, he has gone back to the pleasant discoveries of boyhood. I say instead that I have never heard him use the word `beautiful’ except in connection with Yeats. He nods. `Ah, yes, yes, beautiful, too.’”

Montague manages to condescend to Beckett – “pleasant discoveries of boyhood,” indeed, but I hope the story is more than blarney. In her memoir How It Was, Beckett’s friend Anne Atik reports:

“Sam would quote from Keats; loved `full-throated ease,’ `To take into the air my quiet breath’ and `While thou art pouring forth they soul abroad’ (from `Ode to a Nightingale’)…”

I’ve tracked down at least one more bit of evidence that Beckett knew the ode well enough to quote from it. This comes early in Act II of his play Happy Days, in which Winnie says, “Ah yes…then…now…beechen green…this…Charlie…kisses…this…all that…deep trouble for the mind.” “Beechen green” comes from the ninth line of “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Of beechen green, and shadows numberless.”

As Beckett writes in Molloy: “But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.”