`His Rare Wan Smiles'

“All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante.”

True even if apocryphal, this crack is attributed to Samuel Beckett in the 1930s. True because it distills three Beckett obsessions in 16 words: Oblomovian lassitude, Swiftian scatology, and Dante. The last is first in importance. He thought a lot about Dante for more than 60 years.

He studied Italian and first read Dante at Trinity College, Dublin – “a discovery which came with the force of a revelation,” says Anthony Cronin in The Last Modernist. Beckett’s first publication was “Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce,” an almost unreadable essay in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929), a festschrift for James Joyce and the work later to become Finnegans Wake. He wrote a novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Wife, published only posthumously, in which Belacqua Shuah appears. Belacqua was a dead friend of Dante’s, who shows up in Canto IV of Purgatorio. He was renowned for indolence and sloth, and Dante finds him sitting in the shade of a rock, head between his knees, indifferent to the ascending path to salvation. “Shuah” is Hebrew, usually translated as “depression.”

Beckett recycled pieces of the novel, including Belacqua, in More Kicks than Pricks (1934). The first story in the collection is “Dante and the Lobster.” If the pimp who stabbed Beckett in Paris in 1938 had had a better aim, we would remember none of this. Beckett might survive as a footnote in a biography of Joyce. He published Murphy that year, also irradiated with Dante and also forgettable, of interest only to Beckett completists. Only in Watt, where the Dante presence is artfully remote and resonant, does Beckett become Beckett.

In 1971, he published Le Depeupleur, which appeared in his English translation the following year as The Lost Ones. On page 14 of my Grove Press first edition (I remember buying it at the BG Bookstore in Bowling Green, Ohio) appears this sentence:

“Fourthly those who do not search or non-searchers sitting for the most part against the wall in the attitude which wrung from Dante one of his rare wan smiles.”

The most photogenic of writers, Beckett patented the wan smile. Seldom in his later work does he allude so baldly to a precursor. You can find Milton, Keats and Yeats if you look hard enough, but not by name. Only Dante earns an overt homage. Cronin reports that in his final, failing year, Beckett was again rereading La Divina Commedia “and yet another biography of his lifelong hero, Samuel Johnson.” This is touching and reassuring.