Beckett Redux

Samuel Beckett’s gravity has pulled me back into his orbit. I was rereading Parade’s End several days ago, but the music of Ford Madox Ford’s prose, which I usually find irresistible, felt like a forced march and I realized I was hearing Beckett’s rhythms everywhere, in part because Thursday was the centenary of his birth. Much has been written about him and much of it is beside the point, but I have enjoyed several mentions of the man and his work.

One of the best is Eric Ormsby’s review in the New York Sun of The Grove Centenary Edition of Beckett’s work and some other Beckett-related books. Faithful readers know my regard for Ormsby’s work as poet and critic is immense. It’s reassuring to know he loves Beckett:

“Beckett often is caricatured as a `prophet of despair,’ a nihilist of a grimly Irish sort, and such scenarios reinforce this superficial impression. But the language, whether in French or English, fairly leaps from the page; his prose and dialogue possess astonishing vigor. The bare words say one thing but their shape and rhythm and intonation say quite another; however bleak the message, it is delivered with pungent vitality.”

Ormsby is a delightful poet, very much in the mode of Wallace Stevens, with a love of rare words, comedy and elegant phrasing. Here is a poem from his most recent collection, Daybreak at the Straits, ostensibly about the author of The Imitation of Christ, yet it might easily be about Beckett. Here is “Lines Written After Reading Thomas a Kempis”:

“Take comfort from your nothingness.
Inconsequence is not futility.
Get pleasure from becoming less.

“Such diminution is not mimicry:
the cloud is cloudier than all cloudedness
but gets a pleasure in becoming less.

“At night the skin of love becomes a sea
Yet takes a comfort from its nothingness
(in consequence is not futility);

“a sea that stipples at the cloud’s caress
takes pleasure in becoming ever less.
Solace lies in what the lucent sea

“Gives up by gaining all translucency:
Take comfort from your nothingness,
Get pleasure from becoming less.”

Read in the context I have suggested, the poem reminds us that Beckett, though utterly unreligious and often blasphemous, shares themes with religious writers. He asks many of the same questions but arrives at very different answers. The Christ story haunts his work, most famously in Waiting for Godot.

Henry Green, among my favorite novelists, is not conventionally associated with Beckett, his close contemporary. Yet in Romancing, his biography of Green, Jeremy Treglown makes the linkage:

“Samuel Beckett was born only a year after Henry Green, and there are resemblances between their work, especially in Party Going’s emphasis on obsession, loneliness, and the impossibility of truly communicating with or knowing anything certain about other people. There are many cadences in the novel that Beckett seems to have heard. `After all,’ Julia say, as Max shuts the hotel window on the crowd seething below, `one must not hear too many cries for help in this world.’’’

The echo, to my ears, is distant, but I hear it.

On Thursday, George Hunka at Superfluities, himself a playwright, had heartfelt things to say about Beckett, his followers and about a book about Beckett – The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, by John Calder, a friend of the writer. I had not read it before, but George is right: It’s useful and well written. Here is Calder on Watt, the novel I have been rereading:

“It is the most unfinished of his novels, but also one of the funniest and, in its discursions, the most theatrical. Read aloud, it is a delight.”

Beckett seems to have so permeated the culture and been loved and championed by so many people, writers and non-writers alike, that traces of his influence, his voice, his example, can be found almost everywhere, as though he were radioactive and possessed an immensely long half-life.