Several readers have
lobbied me to read Earthy Powers,
with its famous opening line -- “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I
was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to
see me.” – and I slipped it into my Someday But Probably Never file. Until last
week, when I found an English first edition in a customarily disappointing and
overpriced used bookstore in Houston. The manager fancies himself a critic.
Most of the books come with a yellow card taped to the plastic-wrapped cover --
half sales pitch, half price tag -- on which he helpfully writes: “1st
Edition. He wrote more than Clockwork
Orange! A bargain! $15.00.” I bought it. The cover is potboiler-tacky – a sun
burning through black and red clouds. I enjoy owning previously owned books. I
fancy they carry traces of previous owners and readers. This volume is worn,
the cover creased, a few pages stained with brown spots as though someone had
sneezed on it while drinking coffee. No underlining or annotations, but the
front page is signed “Judith de Steifuer” in a flamboyantly spidery hand. She underlined
her name, apparently for emphasis. I’ll take good care of him, Judith.
I wasn’t going to say anything until I’d finished reading Earthly Powers, but Nige shared a charming anecdote about an inscription he found in a copy of Watt. It remains my sentimental favorite
among Beckett’s novels, the one I’ve read most often and the only one I ever
read as a class assignment. I pulled out my old Grove Press paperback, worn but
perfectly intact, the one with the pale green cover and the black circle, broken
at the bottom, that has always reminded me of a Zen painting. Traces of an earlier,
more pretentious self remain. On page 44, next to the sentence beginning “Do
not come down the letter…,” I wrote: “Wittgenstein!” And on page 77 I
underlined “for the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak as though it
were something….” On the front page is my signature and the date of purchase: “1-11-71.”
Beckett’s final entry in the novel’s “ADDENDA (I)”: “no symbols where none
intended”
1 comment:
I did not care for Earthly Powers. It suffered, I thought, from the determination to get in absolutely everything that had ever crossed the author's mind: religion, music, phonetics, cracks at higher-brow writers and the critics who admire them, etc. But then came The End of the World News, which begins, as I recall it, by saying that it isn't worth the trouble of writing good novels any more; it continues by showing that Burgess wasn't kidding. Anyway, whether or no you think that Earthly Powers is any good, you might enjoy his memoir Little Wilson and Big God. One sees where various bits and pieces of Earthly Powers, the Malaysian trilogy, etc., came from.
As for Beckett, it sounds like a borrowing from Mark Twain's notice at the beginning of Huckleberry Finn.
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