`The Last Thump'

In the Postscript he added to Beckett’s Dying Words, after Samuel Beckett’s death on Dec. 22, 1989, Christopher Ricks wrote:

“In my mid-fifties, everything proves to have happened three times longer ago than I first think (a death, a book, a trial), whereas yesterday it was but twice as long ago.”

Ricks links his incomprehension, if not surprise, at Beckett’s passing to Philip Larkin’s death four years earlier. Of death, Larkin had written: “Most things may never happen: this one will.” At 54, I’m sharing Rick’s sense of time distortion. Seventeen years ago this Friday, while the world watched the slow-motion collapse of the Soviet Empire, Beckett died in Paris. One day earlier, Nicolae Ceauşescu had addressed a crowd in Bucharest. The dictator looked baffled as his once cowed subjects, emboldened by the events roiling across Eastern Europe, booed him – unthinkable just days earlier.

On Christmas, after a perfunctory trial, a Rumanian army officer performed the execution of Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena, with a machine gun. The unshaven, disheveled dictator, looking more than ever like one of Beckett’s old men, sang the Internationale before the bullets ripped into him – a true believer to the end. Mrs. Ceauşescu reportedly screamed for everyone to go to hell, perhaps because she feared being lonely.

Vaclav Havel, to whom Beckett had dedicated Catastrophe (1982) – a play about a dictator – became the first president of democratic Czechoslovakia one week after Beckett’s death. Beckett’s final prose published during his life, “Stirrings Still,” concludes: “Oh all to end.” And Ricks ends Beckett’s Dying Words like this:

“`He was a man of the greatest reticence, but with nothing to conceal; a man of intensely “private life”, but wholly transparent.’ – T.S. Eliot on Spinoza and, incidentally, on himself. Beckett, I suppose, was such another. He was, though, a writer of the greatest reticence but with everything to reveal. Heartfelt. To the last. Not to the last trump (in which he blessedly did not believe), but to the last thump.”

“The last thump” is a reference to a passage in Beckett’s How It Is, which Ricks, in elegant symmetry, had quoted on page three of Beckett’s Last Words:

“thump on skull no point in post mortems and then what then what we’ll try and see last words cut thrust a few words DO YOU LOVE ME CUNT no disappearance of Pim end of part two leaving only part three and last one can’t go on one goes on as before can one ever stop put a stop that’s more like it on can’t go on one can’t stop put a stop”