Godot, Watt, Kropp

JOHN FLETCHER

When Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature last year for 'writing which' (the citation ran) 'in new forms for the novel and drama, acquired its elevation in the destitution of modern man', the Saturday Review declared he was the obvious choice. Obvious to the Saturday Review, perhaps, and to those who for the last decade or so had annually wondered when the Nobel committee would bow to the inevitable. But it probably wasn't so obvious, and perhaps still isn't, to many well-inten- tioned readers who had tried to see great- ness in Beckett's dense scatalogical prose, his austere stage-plays and his curtly her- metic poems. Those who gave up the at- tempt in desperation need not have done: and the three most recent books on Beckett* ought to tempt them to have another go.

Mr Harvey's massive 450-page study of the early writings (poetry, criticism and un- published or uncollected fiction) pays atten- tion to the part of the canon which has tended to get short shrift in the past. Per- haps not altogether without justification: Beckett affected a rather precious coyness in his literary apprenticeship (bread is not bread but Hovis, salt not salt but Cerebos), and critics can be forgiven if they tended to hurry over this in their haste to move on to sterner and weightier stuff. But Mr Harvey has been more patient and indulgent and has taken the risk of being laughed at for devoting four pages to poems of as many lines. His tenacity pays off. What might have been academic pedantry of the worst kind turns out to be the most thrilling writing on Beck- ett we've had since Hugh Kenner's pioneer- ing study of nine years ago.

This isn't simply because Mr Harvey is a good critic (he is, and a subtle and judicious one). It's mainly because he has a great many fresh things to tell us (unlike Mr Barnard and Mr Webb, who reinterpret what was known already). He spent a lot of time talking to Beckett, and even more time put- ting what he learnt to good use. As a result he reveals aspects of Beckett's meaning which hitherto we could only guess at, and in par- ticular provides complete and convinting exegeses of the poems which before had seemed more or less incomprehensible. Now that someone has at last taken the trouble to crack the code, we can see what fine achievements most of these poems are. And they even turn out to be no more obscure than Pound's or Auden's. Whether they are really as good is another matter, but at least we can no longer complain of lacking the basis on which to decide for ourselves.

*Samuel Beckett, Poet and Critic Lawrence E. Harvey (ouP £6) Samuel Beckett: A New Approach 0. C. Barnard (Dent 40s)

Samuel Beckett: A Study of His Novels Eugene Webb (Peter Owen 45s)

It's certainly true that Beckett's poems— precipitates or rejectamenta depending on how you look at it—cast a spell even when only half-understood. Lines like 'and the old mind ghost-forsaken/sink into its havoc' (from Saint-L6) are powerfully evocative as they stand, but it certainly helps to be told that they form part of an elegiac meditation on the ruin of a city (in Normandy) and by extension on the collapse of the citadel of the poet's mind. This is a recurrent theme in Beckett's novels, as Mr Harvey, who rightly believes that the entire canon co- heres vitally together, is quick to point out.

It's an allegedly schizoid quality in Beck- ett's writing that interests Mr Barnard, per- haps a shade over-exclusively. If you are not allergic to the application of psycho- analysis to literary criticism you will find it an interesting and well-argued thesis. Mr Webb's essay is quite different. For me it had the particular merit of acting as a corrective to the view that Beckett has now worked himself out, or rather has written himself into silence. He is still trying to write, and is producing short texts from time to time. In the past such fragments have been the pre- lude to more sustained works of fiction, and Mr Webb is quite right to warn us that he may still produce a novel. With impressive dedication and even more impressive re- fusal to repeat past successes, Beckett draws a circle, explores it minutely, then draws another circle of smaller radius, exhausts that, and starts again within an even tighter ring. There's nothing to say he won't before long find a patch of experience which will run to forty thousand words rather than the few hundred we've been accustomed to of late. To use a cliche he's fond of, this restless genius can be relied upon to leave no stone unturned.

In their different ways, then, these are all rewarding studies. Of the three, Mr Barnard alone pays some attention to Beckett's drama, which may seem peripheral to most critics but is pretty central as far as the general reader is concerned. A book as good as Mr Harvey's on the poetry still remains to be written about the plays. Someone will have to look at Beckett's originality in the theatre with the thoroughness here lavished on his originality as a poet. It's obviously not very helpful to look at Beckett's drama- turgy as an eccentric reaction to naturalism, because his method is so radically different in conception. Its affinities are not with the mainstream Western tradition at all. It has, of course, undeniable links With such pop- ular forms as the circus. Gogo and Didi in Waiting for Godot are clowns at only one remove, hence the hat-swapping and trouser- dropping and Pozzo's ringmaster's whip. Anouilh with his practised eye spotted the analogy at once, and likened the play to Pas- cal performed by the Fratellini clowns. But the spirit of the halls is just as pervasive: cross-talk routines provided the model for

much of Beckett's dialogue, and we can al- most smell the greasepaint on his seedy comedians as they struggle to recall the old gags that once were good for a titter. Films, too, lie behind a lot of it. Didi is like Charlie Chaplin. Clov's mournful visage recalls Buster Keaton's, and Laurel and Hardy have contributed more than just their bowlers

('made merry with the hardy laurel' writes Beckett, in oblique gratitude, in Watt). The hours the young writer spent at the circus, the music-hall and in the cinema were clearly not wasted.

Aside from these popular forms, however, Beckett owes little enough to the Western theatre. His playwriting has more in common with the stylised forms of the Orient, such as the Noh. His characters don't speak in order to converse, but throw utterances to each other, deftly returning them with the back hand. The costumes are stereotyped too, and the decor, and even the movements (at least in productions Beckett is associated with) convey a curious kind of static fluidity, since the pauses genuinely declutch as the motor ticks over and nothing moves. In this world a remark like 'We're waiting for Godot' is not merely wildly optimistic, it's comically inappropriate—because if Godot did come he would disturb the fragile equili-

brium the play established between the prin- cipal characters. It would be like injecting Oblomov with hormones to make him leap from his bed.

If the Beckettian stasis partakes of any dynamic, it is a dynamic more familiar to music-lovers than to Aunt Edna. In con- versation with Charles Marowitz, Beckett once made it clear what he was after: 'the kind of form one finds in music, where themes keep recurring. When, in a text, actions are repeated', he said, 'they ought to be made unusual the first time, so that when they happen again—in exactly the same way —an audience will recognise them from before'. This principle applies not only to actions. but even more to language: the leitmotif 'we're waiting for Godot' recurs with almost Wagnerian insistence through- out the play.

In all this I've said nothing about Beck- ett's notorious pessimism, probably because I increasingly doubt whether the word means

much when it's applied to him. There is a kind of world-weariness that derives mainly

from Leopardi and Schopenhauer, and there is a certain amount of gross bawdy that reveals a perversely Irish sense of humour. The sour asides are a roguish brand of wit; when love is dismissed as 'a mug's game and tiring on top of that' the Irish accent in the words should preserve us from too right- eous an indignation at the flouting of a contemporary shibboleth. Much can be for- given a writer who can speak of the hawk's 'long pernings and quivering poise', its 'ex- tremes of need, of pride, of patience and solitude', or tell of a boy's delight in 'the -brief scattered lights that sprang up on the hilislopes at nightfall, merging in blurs scarcely brighter than the sky'. The rhythms here recall the best of Beckett's poetry, from 'Vire will wind in other• shadows' to 'I would love my love to die'. I am grateful to Mr Harvey for drawing our attention to the richness of this verse, an essential intro- duction to fictive prose which modulates

with extraordinary virtuosity, like the dia- logue in All That Fall, from the sublime to the mundane and from the demotic to the poetic. It's a marvellous world his book opens up and allows us to gaze at, silent upon a peak that's not in Darien, maybe, but perhaps in County Wicklow.