Stopping at the White Page

Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett: A Centenary Celebration, edited by James and Elizabeth Knowlson, has the stitched-together-and-filled-with-sawdust feel of a rag doll assembled from scraps. I suspect that James Knowlson saved the best scraps for his biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame. The ''remembering'' parts consist mostly of interviews Knowlson conducted with Beckett between July and November 1989. Beckett died the following month, on Dec. 22, but he remains in remarkable form for an ailing 83-year-old whose wife, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, had died July 17. Most of the material will be familiar to old Beckett hands. A brief remembrance by Avigdor Arikha, an artist and friend of Beckett's for 40 years, begins:

''In spite of his great erudition, Beckett refrained from theorizing -- even concerning Dante. Unlike erudition, theorizing stops at the white page."

This is an intriguing observation. The first sentence is straightforward and accurate, though I'm uncertain exactly what Arikha means in the second. Does "the white page" mean a page without words, Beckett's aesthetic culmination, the goal of creation through annihilation? Or, does he mean Beckett did not theorize beyond what he had written, that his work was its own best critique of itself? Or, did Akhira intend the ambiguity?

I enjoy reading Beckett, in part, because he redefined "minimalism" and jettisoned the superfluous. His mature work has the solid, inevitable feel of a sculpture by his friend, Giacometti. What is on the page has endured the acid bath of Beckett's sensibility. It's dense, like an iron-nickel meteorite that has survived a fiery passage through the atmosphere. Here's how he wrote by the time of Company:

"Better hope deferred than none. Up to a point. Till the heart starts to sicken. Company too up to a point. Better a sick heart than none. Till it starts to break. So speaking of himself he concludes for the time being, For the time being leave it at that."