Whispering the Turmoil Down

For some twenty years I taught a seminar on Beckett’s fiction, feeling that his plays had been allowed to overshadow everything else. My students used to write to him, and he would answer with copies of his books, always the French text, humbly inscribed, and those students would walk on air for months: who needed a seminar after the horse’s mouth had spoken? What my students found easiest to cope with, both intellectually and emotionally, were the longer texts, in particular the so-called trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, which, while being anti-novels (using the novel to destroy the novel), still had some of the characteristics of novels, whereas some of the shorter texts — How It Is, The Lost Ones, Ill-Seen Ill-Said left them breathless, bruised, and sometimes indignant.

One of the topics we discussed was the tendency of certain directors and actors to think that, by being dramatized, these awkward shorter texts could be made more approachable. Add the human voice and hey, presto, all was well. My own view has always been that this is poppycock, that the shorter (and shortest) texts are meant to be read on the page and grappled with there, not softened up by attitudinizing actors. In some ways, the standing of Beckett the playwright damaged profoundly the impact of his fiction, and it was as a fiction writer that he saw himself.

The arrival, therefore, of The Complete Short Prose is a matter for celebration, bringing together disparate works that belong together as Rilke’s poems belong together and giving us the full spectrum of Beckett’s reductive, antic mind, dreaming in Irish and writing in French, squeezing the phrase till it squealed and learnedly proving that all the vital subject matter in the world was to be found in a head attached to a squirming trunk. This collection would also have made my own life easier, and that of my students cheaper. It is a great pleasure to see these extraordinary neutron stars together in one album. Perhaps from now on The Complete will remind readers that the shorts belong together as an intensifying phase in the history of Beckett’s mind, not as little fiddly moments in and out of time but as components in a swerve toward the grave, toward the finality of the last period or, as he himself would say, full stop.

Paramount among the short works, Texts for Nothing (misleadingly combined with Stories in a title Beckett himself deplored) is a masterwork I read two dozen times without its ever wearing out. There are thirteen of them, capable of various interpretations, my own being that they are the final thirteen days in the womb of an entity born on a Friday the thirteenth. It doesn’t matter much what you think they mean, for this is the chamber music of penury, an act of miserable recitative, the voice trying to doom the voice before life begins, the mind trying to think the mind to a halt. No wonder one of my students, the Canadian who wrote the Rambo novels (!), used to leave my seminar to plunge his head into a washbasin of cold water, reappearing with a towel wrapped around his head. Beckett would have approved of his behavior. To help us, meretriciously I now think, we listened to Jack McGowran’s (rather careless) performance of Text 8 that begins “Only the words break the silence, all other sounds have ceased.” It helps people more to read it aloud to themselves, but the truth of the matter is that the mind’s ear is where these words belong, that being where they start. For similar reasons, this is how Dylan Thomas’s poems are best assimilated. It is noteworthy that Beckett never read his work aloud, refusing to take part in that weird recovery of literary work into the oral tradition, as if a quiet read to oneself were a sacrilege to society. There are some writers you have to be alone with, and Beckett is by far the most disquieting of these because he is the complementary opposite to Nabokov, who believes in the full pagaeant and panoply of life and word, a maximalist author if we ever had one after Shakespeare. Beckett is starchy, astringent, the hunchback closing in ever more tightly on himself while great bells toll. Nabokov is the magician being suckered by the fake eyes of a certain butterfly because they are beautiful fakes. To read these two in conjunction gives anyone a pole and an equator, things worth having when you want to know where, say, Malcolm Lowry and Emily Dickinson belong.

One of the most fascinating components of this book is the Notes on the Texts, which gives the full history of each, chronologically all the way from his first short story, “Assumption,” to the last of “Stirrings Still.” This is how the fluent and elegant ‘‘Assumption” begins:

He could have shouted and could not. The buffoon in the loft swung steadily on his stick and the organist sat drearning with his hands in his pockets. He spoke little, and then almost huskily, with the low-voiced timidity of a man who shrinks from argument, who can reply confidently to Pawn to King’s fourth, but whose faculties are frozen into bewildered suspension by Pawn to Rook’s third, of the unhappy listener who will not face a clash with the vulgar, uncultivated, terribly clear and personal ideas of the unread intelligenzia. He indeed was not such a man, but his voice was of such a man; and occasionally when he chanced to be interested in a discussion whose noisy violence would have been proof against most resonant interruption of the beautifully banal kind, he would exercise his remarkable faculty of whispering the turmoil down. This whispering down, like all explosive feats of the kind, was as the apogee of a Vimy Light’s parabola, commanding undeserved attention because of its sudden brilliance.

If he had never written better than that, surely he would have made his mark. Something rippling evokes muscle and, as always in Beckett, a better mind than the mind on show makes the whole thing irresistible. The Vimy Light image works better than the Pawn to King’s Fourth, but who cares? This man can write. Look now at how “Stirrings Still 3” ends:

spite of all the one and if the reverse then of course the other that is stir no more. Such and much more such the hubbub in his mind so-called till nothing left from deep within but only ever fainter oh to end. No matter how no matter where. Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end.

In between these two pieces lies the wasteland summed up elsewhere in the title of an abandoned novel, “Fancy Dying.” The amenities and civilities of conventional discourse have fallen starkly away, and what is left is the stertorous bicker of the ont — the existing creature. Earlier, he has gone deeper and lost more (punctuation, verb, sentence, noun), but he is always attempting a dereliction that tries to say more with less, or rather with fewer traditional constraints, as if, as some have said, his task was to purify the language of the tribe, stripping away its clever inflections, its ways of suppressing ambiguity, its disciplined way of speaking in a two-dimensional silence, so what comes in between the one quotation and the other is not so much a series of breakthroughs as the intensification of just a few deficits cultivated not only to make a philosophical point but also to create an unmistakeable unique style that doesn’t really thrive in the plays. Barbaric yawp maybe, but also agonistic shorthand. It is his way of “whispering the turmoil down.”

Introducing such a classic should be a work of self-effacing delicacy, as if regrouping someone’s bones, but S.E. Gontrarski, a New Zealander, makes a bad start with an opening sentence that means just too many things: “While short fiction was a major creative outlet for Samuel Beckett, it has heretofore attracted only a minor readership.” Is he talking about Beckett’s short fiction or short fiction in general? If the latter, he’s wrong. The trouble here is that untethered “it.” Does he really mean, as he seems to, that Beckett brought the tradition of short fiction out of the darkness? Beckett would have skewered that incompetent sentence, and rewritten it thus: Although a major creative outlet for Samuel Beckett, his short fiction… That is Gontarski’s only gaffe, though he pays far too much court to critics, refers to the novelist John Banville as a literary editor only, and pays the theater too much reverence. He rightly canes William Trevor for omitting Beckett from The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (1989) because he “conveyed his ideas more skillfully in another medium,” which is a scandalous, dumb thing to say. I wearied of Schopenhauer in Gontrarski’s introducing, but was glad to find him quoting Beckett on the novel Watt: “the unconscious mind! What a subject for the short story… perhaps deep down in those palaeozoic profounds, midst mammoth Old Red Sandstone phalli and Carboniferous pudenda…into the pre-uterine…the agar-agar … impossible to describe.” The scholarly and bibliographical apparatus provided are truly useful, and the texts have been corrected from numerous erroneous versions. Welcome back, Sam.

Paul West’s most recent novel, The Tent of Orange Mist, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Prize. His next book, My Mother’s Music (Viking), a memoir, will be out on Mother’s Day.