Core Samples

Sunday afternoon, with my wife at the gym and the kids playing Legos, I was looking in a file cabinet for some of the letters Guy Davenport sent me. I never found them because I got distracted by other letters, notebooks, manuscripts and clips I have preserved for no good reason. For a writer, a file cabinet is a sort of core sample of his life, and the evidence is always depressing. I think: Thousands of stories, millions of words, and for what? Some of the paper is brown and crumbling, and it reminds me of that Wright Morris photograph of cutlery in a drawer lined with newspaper. It also reminds me of a line from a Rolling Stones song: “Who wants yesterday’s paper? Who wants yesterday’s girl?”

In a file labeled “Beckett” I found a column I wrote shortly after Beckett’s death on Dec. 22, 1989. It’s embarrassing, as most old work is. I can see myself working too hard for too little effect. This passage is less shameful than most: “Many of the newspaper reports of his death, garbled with cliché and gossip, rehashed Beckett’s notorious bleakness and obscurity. Often these accounts were tinged with the sort of philistine sniggering that greeted Beckett throughout his career. The impression they leave, especially on readers ignorant of his work, is that Beckett is not worth the effort.”

All true, to some degree, but I don’t like the self-righteous pleading. Today, I would celebrate Beckett’s accomplishment, not complain about his detractors. And I would never write “philistine sniggering.” I remember sending the column to Guy Davenport, who was tactful enough to compliment my mention of Vaclav Havel, a friend of Beckett’s who had been elected president of Czechoslovakia a week after the Irishman’s death.

In the same file I found a happier memory – a piece on Beckett by one of his best critics, Christopher Ricks, published in New York Newsday on New Year’s Eve 1989. Ricks, as always, is epigrammatically quotable:

“He combined, as it is difficult to do in life as in art, two very different principles. First, a tragic consciousness that life can never really be sufficiently improved. (In the words of Mrs. Rooney in the radio play `All That Fall’: `Christ, what a planet!’) Next, a political conscience that tells us we must do our best to improve life, such as led Beckett to the acts of courage that won him the Croix de Guerre in the French resistance movement.”

And: “He married conscience and consciousness within a style of unimpeachable formal beauty, poignantly sad and piercingly comic.”

And: “He took the most eternal of subjects: death. Then he gave it a fair crack of the whip.”

Readers of Ricks’ Beckett’s Dying Words, one of the few books worthy of its subject, will recognize these ideas. Also in the file I found a review of Ricks’ book written by the fine, under-read novelist Paul West, and published in The Boston Phoenix in December 1993. West, too, is a pleasure to quote:

“Rumor was, [Beckett] lived in a furnitureless room because chairs and tables would sully the purity of space. That was a Platonic or Platonicized Beckett, an apocryphal vignette. He did not deal in such absolutes (an absolute needs nothing: Mr. Knott [from Watt] needs nothing, yet needs that recognized), but in dwindlings, deteriorations, declines, defungings, deponencies.”

I love obscure, semi-extinct words used well, as did Beckett. He has been lucky in his eulogists after all, despite my fumblings. In 1954, he concluded “Homage to Jack B. Yeats” with four simple, perfect words: “Merely bow in wonder.”