Clattering of saucepans and gongs
Hilary Corke
There is a sense in which the word is even more important than the deed, and whatever fate comes visiting the one who suffers and records matters less than the word he finds for it. It is notably true of young writers and never more so than for young writers of the 30's. All through that decade Finnegan's Wake was appearing in installments as Work in Progress, although the novel was not to be published as a whole until 1939. These installments were devotionally studied by expatriate begin- ners: the wake of Finnegan, so to speak, paradoxically and characteristically, pre- ceded the ship — less (to change metaphor) a rocket than a series of them as through successive cataracts of down-sail- ing rosy stars were soon dimly to be descried the frantic figures of Durrell, in 1936, scribbling The Black Book and , in 1938, that of Henry Miller feverishly at work on Tropic of Cancer. But earlier than either, in 1932, in a white heat of inspira- tion on the top floor of a cheap Parisian hotel, young Samuel Beckett was hurling off his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, now at last happily rescued from the vaults of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.
It is a work of splendid turgidity. Belac- qua, its hero, himself in passing describes the norm of its composition:
For a postpicassian man with a pen in his fist, doomed to a literature of saving clauses, it is frankly out of the question, it would seem to be an impertinence — perhaps we should rather say an excess, an indiscretion — stolidly to conjugate to be without a shud- der.
. Yes indeed. And the resulting linguistic Impasto is so thick that the basic plot (if one so dignifies a matter of a little simple bed-hopping) is almost lost behind the swags and trompe-l'oeil. One could, I sup- pose read Dream in the spirit of transat- lantic academe, word by word, phrase by phrase,the elbows supported by lavish lexi- cons in mixed tongues with which to sort out the baci saporiti, potele, lippue, aboulia, chiroplatonism and so on with which the galloping and polymathic tender scrib- bleroony realise (et avec une morgue !) des loopings verbawc but it would not then be read as written. For this is impressionist prose not delineatory. When Beckett con- fides:
Why we want to drag in the Syra-Cusa at this juncture it passes our persimmon to say
the absurd word 'persimmon' is there as a sort of warning notice not to look at any passing detail too frightfully carefully. An advertent inadvertency, to coin an oxy- moron. What Beckett is signalling in fact is that his reader should dash through his forests like a bolted horse, well-blinkered; and, although no particular adornment will bear too close microscopic attention, every rift loaded with rift, nevertheless a sense of a traverse of meaning, of a tale advanced, will remain with him at the terminus of each paragraph.
Beckett's complete literary career, now at last viewable in its entirety, seems more than ever to be one long logical progress from the absurdly over-written to the absurdly under-written, a continuous implo- sion of expression from wild periphery to still centre, with language never really trust- ed in and for itself but treated always as a metabolic disorder in an unbroken stately parade from diarrhoea to constipation. If, as Pope has it, life is one long disease, then all our words are dying words, and all creative endeavour is a sort of cock-snook- ing at the dark. In this sense we may feel that all the fury and cafuffle of Dream is by way of a frightening off of spirits by a clat- tering of saucepans and gongs, whereas Happy Days, say, is the attempt to scare death off with the image of his own lantern face reflected in a slab of polished marble. It may be recalled that Beckett once refused an interview on the grounds that 'I have no views to inter' but that seems pecu- liarly disingenuous, for no-one had more views devoted to that destination. With equally mordant mortal wit he also once declared that 'I have no bones to pick with graveyards', and with as little ultimate con- viction. Christopher Ricks, in his Beckett's Dying Words, which deserves a lot more space than this review can give it, wheels like a highly sophisticated moth about such necrological candles. In a sense Beckett is only his prop, just as Keats was his prop in his marvellous study of Keats and Embar- rassment. He makes use of him rather as a sort of adhesive velcro core to which all kinds of fluttering notions about mortality, about the artist's awareness and wariness of it, can attach. He worries at it and all round it in a work of great compassion and con- summate wit, of criticism rising way above mere literary criticism (that sticky slough), and unreservedly to be recommended.
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