39 Books: 2015

In the Spring of 1997, I visited a friend in Kassel, a city in the middle of Germany, home of the Brothers Grimm and Franz Rosenzweig, and not very far from Weimar, hence the visit to the Goethehaus mentioned in the entry for 1989. I hadn't heard of it before and nor had my friend until she got a job there. By coincidence, the tenth edition of the Documenta festival of contemporary art, which I had also not heard of before, was taking place, with Gerhard Richter's large-scale Atlas exhibtion showing at the Fridericianum and Joseph Beuys' das Rudel at the Neue Galerie, so we could add arts tourism as we rekindled our louche student lifestyle.

Unfortunately, bar the Museum für Sepulkrakultur, I don't remember visiting any other exhibitions and now regret not spending more time looking around. But the visual arts are a blindspot for me, as my 2006 entry explains. On the plus side, I did enjoy living there for a few weeks and treasure my souvenir Documenta X tee-shirt with its huge logo, although this wasn't ideal wearing in public later that year when Princess Diana died. 

I'm not sure when I discovered that Beckett had stayed in Kassel many times, but it was before I got there, as I studied the map looking for Landgrafenstraße 5, which is the address on the first entry in volume one of the Beckett correspondence, and sent to none other than James Joyce. Many years later, I discovered that the street name had been snappily renamed to Bodelschwinghstraße and I had stayed a two-minute walk away in Pestalozzistraße.

For many years after, Kassel felt like a secret between me and Beckett, so when I found out one of Europe's best living novelists was publishing a novel about the city and the Documenta, I was taken aback. The first-person narration follows a writer invited to speak at Documenta 13 fifteen years after my visit and comprises the comical convolutions of the circumstances of the visit and the "atmosphere of fatality" in Europe at the time that led him "to see the world as something now tragically lost" and, in unnecessarily long digressions, how this atmosphere relates to the avant-garde works on display.

That said, the lack of necessity characterises avant-garde art: "Everybody knows that most so-called avant-garde art these days requires one part that is visual and another that is discursive to back it up and try to explain what we are seeing".

Study for Strings was a somber installation, a simple piece that went directly to the heart of the great tragedy, the end of the utopia of a humanizing world. Philipsz had situated loudspeakers in an enclosed area of Kassel’s Hauptbahnhof that were audible to people walking to the end of that stretch of platform—exactly the same stretch on which a great number of Jewish families waited for the train that would transport them to concentration camps; from these loudspeakers came beautiful but devastatingly sad music.
           [Trans. Anne McLean and Anna Milsom]

If an arts festival held "in the center of Germany, in the center of Europe...where it was more obvious than anywhere else that everything had been cold and dead and buried for decades" demands anything it is to forget "the triumph of reason and the idea of progress in the age of Enlightenment", and to not-forget while forgetting: "Nothing could be ruled out in a place like Kassel, which, opening its doors to the ideas of the avant-garde, was implicitly rejecting any invitation to logic." 

While The Illogic of Kassel is exhausting to read, its length challenges my preference for short, aesthetically constrained novels. "Without cruelty, no festival" wrote Nietzsche.

39 Books: 2002

The quiet joy of short, constrained memoirs. I borrowed a copy of this book in 2002 and then found a copy in a remaindered shop for £5.

Anne Atik got to know Beckett in the late 1950s through the artist Avigdor Arikha, later her husband. Beckett's circle of friends included as many painters as writers. On their nights drinking on the Boulevard Montparnasse, the trio would try to avoid Giacometti because he repeated the same anecdote much too often. Beckett’s visual memory was striking, we’re told that "he remembered paintings of Old Masters … their composition and colour, the impact each one had had". The German Diaries arriving in September will no doubt confirm this.

But it was poetry that sustained their friendship. Despite the amount of alcohol consumed, Arikha and Beckett could recite reams of verse, generally in the original language: Yeats (usually 'The Tower'), Shakespeare, Goethe, Hölderlin, the Psalms ('the greatest poems in the world'), Dante, and many others. When the drinking was over and Beckett visited the couple’s flat of an evening, they’d listen to music and discuss writers. They would swap books. A page of Beckett’s copy of Le Rime di Messer Francesco Petrarca is reprinted to show the first owner’s annotation. Descriptions of his recitations indicate how much the poetry meant to him:

Sam did not dissect, define, analyse, deconstruct or elaborate on why he found a poem great. […] His impressions or reactions came through his body, […] he’d raise a hand or look at you intensely; or lift or lower his head when repeating the lines.

How It Was consists mostly of notes made after these special evenings with reflections. Anne Atik daren’t have made notes in his presence; it wasn’t that Beckett was irascible, she says, just that she respected him too much. Sometimes, however, there was nothing to note. He’d sit for hours without saying a word: "sinking into his private world with its demons, or so we imagined."

The large format of the book allows close-up study of letters and manuscripts by Beckett, as well as moving sketch portraits by Arikha. Beckett’s other life, the one upon which the couple didn’t intrude, appears only in reprints of postcards sent from abroad when he’s working on the production of a play, or from Tangiers escaping attention. The limited perspective allows us to enjoy Beckett’s company as he reads and talks about books: he thought Kafka’s prose "Hochdeutsch" when his subject "called for a more disjointed style". He didn’t like Rilke very much. He didn’t like Pound because he had been rude to him as a young writer. He thought Saul Bellow’s Herzog was "excellent" and loved Walter Jackson Bate’s biography of Samuel Johnson so much that begged to be allowed to keep Atik’s copy. More than once we’re told he thought King Lear couldn’t be staged and that he almost wrote a play based on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71. He couldn’t get on with Bach or Jane Austen. It goes on.

Atik speculates that the certainties underpinning the worlds of Bach and Austen contribute to Beckett’s distaste. The work for them was too easy. Finding the form was all important. It shouldn’t be a given. From December 1977:

All writing is a sin against speechlessness. Trying to find a form for that silence. Only a few, Yeats, Goethe, those who lived for a long time, could go on to do it, but they had recourse to known forms and fictions. So one finds oneself going back to vielles competénces – how to escape that. [sic] One can never get over the fact, never rid oneself of the old dream of giving a form to speechlessness.

Later he concludes (without concluding):

The logical thing to do would be to look out of the window at the void. Mallarmé was near to it in the livre blanc. But one can’t get over one’s dream.

All to end (the year)

One clear memory I have of David Lodge's review of The Book of God is that he described its author as being "a novelist deeply influenced by Beckett". It stuck in my mind because, at the time, in my very early days of reading books, I wondered how on earth a novelist could be influenced by such an author; it was, I thought, like being influenced by a field or a cloud. This was 1988. In March 1989, Beckett published Stirrings Still and I began to appreciate what it might mean. Later that year, thirty years ago today, Beckett died (I saw the news on Ceefax). So, as with my post on the thirtieth anniversary of Bernhard's death earlier this year, here are a few links to what I've written about Beckett on this blog.

However, the first thing I ever wrote for the internet was a review not for this blog but for Spike Magazine of the two biographies of Beckett published that year, and though I am reluctant to hyperlink (empathising with Beckett for his own reluctance to allow early work to be reprinted), I do so because the first line prefigures a theme in what I've written ever since: that it has not been easy assimilating Beckett into our culture in the way his mentor Joyce has been assimilated. The reason can be explained via a post from 2008 in which I quote Beckett explaining why his work changed at the time of Molloy following what he calls a revelation:

I simply understood that there was no sense adding to the store of information, gathering knowledge. The whole attempt at knowledge, it seemed to me, had come to nothing. It was all haywire. What I had to do was investigate not-knowing, not-perceiving, the whole world of incompleteness.

Such an understanding remains alien to English-language literary culture. Popular book discussion still promotes writing that offers knowledge: Ten books you need to read. Imagine being told you need to read the authors who Beckett admired for the flame that burns away filthy logic.

This year I discovered that the book in which Beckett said this was published without Beckett's approval; he thought the conversations were private. But it does include his important refutation of the label 'theatre of the absurd' for his plays. He was also filmed without his knowledge talking about a television play, perhaps the only time he ever spoke on film.

The longest posts on Beckett appeared in 2011, on his silence and on the second volume of letters. 

But going back to Stirrings Still: ten years ago, I wrote about its initial publication in Oh all to publish, a post that includes a photograph of the full text as it appeared on the front page of the Guardian. Around the same time BBC Radio 3 broadcast a reading by Barry McGovern, which I recorded on a C90 cassette at the time and whose words – such and much more – still echo in my mind. Here it is, digitised in three parts.

The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett by Jeff Fort

"My compulsion to write does not occlude the uselessness of filling pages with words" writes Fernando Sdrigotti. "I know that what I do is pointless, one more message in a bottle in a moment when everyone else around me is also casting messages adrift". He expresses sadness at the sight of so many washed up on the shores of labyrinthine bookshops and, to mitigate the condition, offers a mutated version of Borges' infinite library in which an infinite number of alphabets are postulated with their own infinity to be filled, leaving more spaces than even Borges allowed for: "We go after those gaps, selfish that we are".

This admittedly contrived excuse to continue is one response to a problem that has confronted writers for over a century, with perhaps Samuel Beckett's response to Joyce being emblematic, though curiously it's a problem that fails to affect filmmakers, composers or painters. At least, it isn't visible in what they produce. While biographical material might reveal Alfred Hitchcock self-harmed in the presence of so many other psychological thrillers, what he produced does not bear its scars; or, rather, those scars are indistinguishable from perfectly powdered skin. For writers, however, consternation at the pointlessness of adding to an infinite number of books leads to at least three outcomes, the last of which is perhaps unique to writers: first, silence, in the form of never writing again, or at least never being published; second, denial or indifference, in the form of publishing regardless, and third, subjecting the writing to the condition. The last is unstable ground for sure, threatening idiosyncratic, fragmented structures invariably prompting disillusion and contempt from marketing departments and consumers wandering the aisles. Why not give up writing to make a living in what everyone says is the art form of the modern era? Well, if you need to ask, you might be free of the compulsion.

So what are the details of this pathological condition exactly? Sdrigotti does not analyse, preferring to leave the personal need to write in the shadow of the shelves, and given the historical conditions in which the publishing industry has come to define literature, setting mass market genre fiction and celebrity biographies alongside Beckett's novels and the poems of Paul Celan, it should be no surprise. Yet, as soon as the industry in the form of conglomerate publishing, chain bookshops and careers as a bestselling author is recognised as inimical to the compulsion, as soon as its shadow is removed, that sadness, that sense of pointlessness, is replaced by something much more interesting.  

God, goodness and silence 

Jeff Fort does this in his study of three writers who experienced "the literary vocation as an all-consuming task" when the time for such a vocation had apparently long passed. What results is a revision of the focus and purpose of modern fiction and should be vital reading for the sad writer. He begins by examining each author's stated reasons or excuses for writing. Kafka's grand self-torment is familiar to us – “God does not want me to write, but I, I must” – as is Beckett's self-deprecating manner – Bon qu'à ça; writing is "all I'm good for" – but the third less so. Maurice Blanchot's author biography heading his collection of essays The Book to Come includes the line: "His life is entirely devoted to literature and to the silence that is proper to it”. As this is both hyperbolic and self-effacing, it embodies Fort's contention that all three keep a flame alive however faint for "unparalleled satisfactions, not to say ecstasy" in writing and, what's more, some kind of transcendence, and this is what makes them stand out among so many others. The need for goodness is easily missed in the "good" of Beckett's statement, as is the need for salvation in Kafka's letter, but they are there, and both are sought in silence.

All three expressions are included in Fort's "downward displacements" of intellectual history following Luther's stand at the Diet of Worms and Kant's philosophy, making it clear The Imperative to Write places the predicament of the modern fiction writer in deep history and seeks to confirm the significance of these writers' work through its modesty, as it completes a trajectory from church pulpit through university lectern to solitary writing desk.

All three writers trail in the wake of the Kantian revolution in which reason replaced divine authority, disabling in its wake the religious function of art. In what Fort calls a cruel compulsion, but might also be called a categorical imperative, the artist, philosopher or scientist, is nevertheless left with reason's immanent drive to colonise what is beyond its limits, what we might call the ideal or the sublime. In doing so the imagination substitutes an image for the departed authority (hence words like 'ideal' and 'sublime'). In art this appears to have no more than a decorative function, while in more rational discourse it is a means of dismissing what cannot be contained. Resisting both, Fort argues the specific condition – the imperative to write – is the echo of the sublime behind the attractive images, which makes the impulse to write fiction significant. The echo is heard in as the uncanny space of Kafka's castle village, Beckett's 'timeless void' and Blanchot's 'literary space'; images haunting the pursuit of the ideal into the fictional void:

What is “real” in this radically fictive space has nothing to do with representational realism, but emerges rather from the sort of insistent and irreducible drive ... that stubbornly inhabits literary speech.

He calls this habitation "a literary alterworld," one that punishes the writer as much as rewards, as it "separates language from the world it names" and sets the author at "an irreducible remove" from the everyday world, perhaps embodied by the unpublished writer traipsing the aisles, where a book has at least an alibi for its emptiness in its physical, commercial reality. While this is also the celebrated freedom of creative writing – let your imagination run wild – it is also never far away from real world contempt and its timid apologists with their so-called Reality Hunger. However, writing fiction is not quite reality and it is this 'not quite' that is the "irritating breach, a hollow kernel in the language that cannot be voided" and one that "opens the spaces of an imperative that cannot be fulfilled". Such a residue, Fort says, "is all that is left of writing's sublimity".

Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett 

It is this residue that the three writers pursue in their own ways. Fort's three central chapters present close readings of their fiction in order to see how the imperative compels or structures specific works of fiction. These chapters were extremely difficult for me to summarise, so what follows is a crude outline that leaves out a great deal and may misrepresent as a result, for which I apologise in advance.

Fort characterises Kafka's cries of despair and defiance, anxiety and guilt, as a means of heightening the value of writing and dramatising his position when, in his time, as in ours, writing is essentially a discipline, an office job with all the conventions and competencies that this entails. When Kafka is not writing, he is defying the earthly powers who employ him and yet, when he is writing, he is going in the opposite direction, against society's grain, which may perhaps get him closer to God or what God forbids. The fictions of trial and punishment that result from this risk are those we know so well: the innocent one who is also guilty, the salesman who becomes a giant vermin and the son sentenced to death by his father. What sets Kafka apart from his precursors or those who might now be labelled Kafkaesque is that in these stories writing is at war with the writer:

The protagonists of these stories must plead a case for innocence before a hostile, aggressive, or at the very least highly skeptical judge; and the failure of their self-defense casts into doubt the very medium in which Kafka himself struggled to conjure them: language as the persuasive presentation of an otherwise occluded interiority.

The enigma of Gregor Samsa is that his innocence remains "invisible and unpresentable," as he is visible only in his socially beneficial role, which correlates with writing as a means of interactive and commercial utility rather than an extension into the voided sublime. Kafka's great task then is to mount a self-defence in the very form taken by the accusation; with Fort's emphasis: "to take hold of power in speech, in such a way as both to appropriate and undo that power in the very grounds of its possibility". The imperative in these works, which Fort gathers together as "judgment stories", is to present the inner reality of an individual against the law or as part of a sublime law now out of reach.

The later fiction is notable for being less melodramatic and more clearly projecting 'the destitution of the sublime' into writing. In A Hunger Artist, Kafka's great talent is presented as a negative, with showmanship displayed as a withdrawal from showmanship. This is the paradox in which his fiction must breathe. The story ends with the artist saying he didn't starve himself out of choice but because couldn't find the food he needed. But this is only another image of the void where there is no image: "the hunger artist's search is not for a food he 'never found' but rather for the nothing that he cannot grasp or make graspable". The sublime is as destitute as the showman.

What distinguishes Blanchot from what has passed so far is the premise that, in using language, we are already subject to "the abyssal fault by which 'the world' and 'life' are always already removed, remote, distanced". For our everyday reading and writing lives, the astonishment of this separation invariably passes by unnoticed, so it's one of Blanchot's great gifts in his critical writings to reanimate this revelation:

Apparently we read only because what is written is already there, laying itself out before our eyes. Apparently. But the first one to write, the one who cut into stone and wood under ancient skies, was hardly responding to the demands of a view requiring a reference point and giving it a meaning; rather, he was changing all relations between seeing and the visible. What he left behind was not something more, something added to other things; it was not even something less – a subtraction of matter, a hollow in relation to a relief. Then what was it? A gap in the universe: nothing that was visible, nothing invisible. I suppose the first reader was engulfed by this non-absent absence, but without knowing anything about it. And there was no second reader ...
                    (from The Infinite Conversation translated by Susan Hanson)

But it is in Blanchot's fiction that Fort wonders whether "ghostly returns" might traverse this gap, "an unloseable something that is not a thing", specifically something left behind by the 'feminine specters' in the récit Death Sentence, and present as we gaze at the death mask of l'inconnue de la seine, an image that Blanchot displayed on the wall of his study in Èze and is on the cover of this book. The separation is present in the movement of writing fiction, with the abyssal fault borne in these figures so that their presence in a life evokes "an extreme mode of loss". It is the imperative to write that provokes the haunting of these fascinating images, with fiction originating in the ghostly encounter rather than something reported after the event, not a confession projected into genre features but "something yet to come, an imminence whose lack of reality awaits its realization in the récit itself".

In this chapter, Fort takes issue with Blanchot's insistence on the separation of the biographical facts of a writer's life and the work, and this is also the focus of the chapter on Beckett, whose fiction lives in a similar relation to Blanchot's but differs in "the carefully cultivated melancholy, and even nostalgia" in responding to the loss of the world, which in Beckett's case maintains clear parallels to his life. Fort is especially good on the tension between formal precision of Beckett's fiction, which might hold these at a distance, and the "lyrical transports" that bring them close. The latter evidently allows what others call Beckett's experimentalism an alibi into mainstream appreciation. In July 2015, the actor Richard Wilson presented a documentary in which he conceded that Beckett's work "can be difficult and obscure" but added "there is one heartbreaking play that he wrote...his most autobiographical", so that his work is received as displaced self-expression alone, whereas it is according to Fort precisely the incompatibility of the abstract character of the fictive voice with the particularities of a singular life that sets Beckett's work apart. If the condition of possibility of such fiction is "the loss of the world" in the destitution of the sublime, the voice is also driven "by the indescribable charge produced by the unbridgeable distance from what has been left"; a distance, as we have seen, that is opened by language. And it is with this in mind that Fort makes a key point when he says "the words we read when we read The Unnamable are written words, and not the supposed stream of a supposed consciousness". It is in this novel that fiction is divested of characters and events, making it rely on its sources in the now-destitute sublime, which nonetheless, in an apparent paradox, allows the intrusion of reality "in a way that is impossible in more conventional or 'realistic' fictions".

Ending

We've come a long way from the initial compulsion to write, with the image of an infinite library replaced by an infinite nothing beyond its infinite shelves, and perhaps as a result a greater sense of the uselessness of writing. Except it is in the denial of reality in its widest sense as characterised in The Unnamable that our sad and frustrated compulsion to write persists. What excites me about The Imperative to Write is that it presents a perspective on what we carelessly call experimental writing that might catalyse many a writers' despondency and turn it into the work they were born to write. It is certainly one of the most extraordinary books about literature that I have ever read, one that has compelled me to write about in order to raise awareness of its ideas.

In the months it took me to read (the text including the notes reaches a quarter of a million words) I couldn't help but wonder about its own relation to the destitution of the sublime, and this intensified during my troubled attempts to summarise such a complex and detailed book, steeped as it is in philosophy and close readings of all three writers in their original languages. That is, what relation does this have in terms of literary history to the works under discussion, or, more specifically, are the works under discussion themselves kinds of summaries, albeit a highly stylised, of what such a profound study thickens and fills out, so that critical exposition is not so much secondary text feeding like a parasite on the larger organism but a continuation of the same movement in the form specific to our time, much as Luther and Kant might be considered as part of the genealogy of modernism despite the forms taken by their writings? In one aside, Fort refers to modernism as "a name for the sounding and unfolding of depth and interiority, its radical externalisation: inwardness as boundless exteriority," which happens to be a good way to summarise the first two volumes of Knausgaard's My Struggle, books that transcend their rather mundane, non-experimental form because they reach toward the distant horizons of a life. And remember, the writings by which we know Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett take many different forms – diaries, letters, short stories, novels, plays, poems, even critical essays and book-length studies – with not one demanding any fundamental priority. In contrast, contemporary works of such dispersed singularity and focus appear to be impossible, as if the disenchantment of the world, which might be another name for the destitution of the sublime, has been internalised to such an extent that fiction in particular is content to be trapped in its own freedom, its own blank space of infinite invention.

A book like The Imperative to Write might be able to jolt some writers out of such complacency, though I wonder if another version might be necessary to do that, one that is abridged to make it more financially accessible, much as My Struggle requires its excessive length to achieve its unexpected goal. Fort himself wonders if Blanchot "did not work too hard to maintain his noble manners" while Beckett’s "bawdiness and vulgarity" allowed for "a more palpably painful scattering of remains," and, when discussing Blanchot's preoccupation with dates and numerology, he inserts a moving footnote pointing out that Blanchot's fifth birthday on September 22, 1912 is the day Kafka famously wrote The Judgment, and that it is also the birth date of his late brother, to whom he pays "discrete homage" each time this date arises in his reading. What this latter signifies is left open to speculation and leaves one wanting more. What it also does is to reveal the possibilities of alternative forms that may be open to us to explore this strange imperative. As the contrast of noble manners and vulgarity suggests, the form of such explorations is also subject to the chance conditions, and perhaps only in submitting to the initial compulsion to write allows us to transcend them, a suggestion that itself contains the paradox in which writing must begin.

'Foreign to the resources of literature'

In the early days of blogging, I often wrote about book prizes. At that time I trusted the aura of a shortlist, drawn by what I assumed was the light of Literature shining down and carving deep relief into the profile of an otherwise flat novel. But I also often complained precisely because once read the books themselves didn't seem to deserve such attention, while others that did were ignored. After a while, in fact after serving on a jury, it became clear that I was fascinated instead by the aura of the impersonal force of a collective honour rather than in the books themselves. The books themselves are incidental, as a glance at the titles of previous winners will confirm. For me the aura now illuminates only the book equivalent of the picture of Dorian Gray decaying in an attic while below literary professionals in brightly lit rooms swoon over its prettified worldly companion. Yes, prize-winning literary novels are a genre in themselves: rhetorical exercises, inbred descendents of mummified classics rather than sui generis acts of writing. Nothing to see here. But sometimes the shock of what prizes overlook is a revelation.

Last week the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist was announced. At the time I took even less notice than usual, indifferent to the predominance of predictable titles and their keeny blurbs, but I then discovered that Mathias Énard's Zone, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, was eligible and had been entered and yet is not featured. This astonished me. I found out only because its absence prompted an unofficial shadow jury of bloggers to add it to their longlist. For a detailed review, see Max Cairnduff's, which includes links to other coverage.

The shock is a minor one and this is not a post to complain of its omission or to speculate on the competence of the judges – in 2013 the prize didn't go to Vila-Matas' sublimely light Dublinesque, so hope has long flown – and instead to wonder if the failure of such novels to walk away with such a title is a sign of the necessity and vitality of no-genre writing, in which form and content struggle into existence on their own merit rather than rushing to adopt a generic mould for safe passage, and that it is only committed amateurs on the sidelines, those not on a career path or with corporate sponsors to appease, who are able to subject themselves to the full force of writing as a presence in itself.

No-genre is most noticeable when conservative responses to innovative literature are raised, hence the value of prizes. It is nothing new: at the beginning of Samuel Beckett's life writing in French, Maurice Blanchot recommended him for a major award, and failed:

In a way, when Molloy, then Malone Dies first appeared in France, it was naïve of us (Georges Bataille, Maurice Nadeau and myself) to hope to alert the Prix des Critiques to these texts, even though so many remarkable writers and critics were on that committee, admittedly still as members of the 'literary establishment', when it was clear that even Beckett's early books were foreign to the resources of 'literature'.

And, after his death, Anthony Burgess predicted Beckett's reputation would descend, no doubt as a sign that his renown was an aberration in literary appreciation. In his posthumous tribute, Blanchot seeks to distance Beckett from the greats to whom he is compared in obituaries (Proust, Joyce, Musil, Kafka), regarding his work (but "there is no work in Beckett") as something less (or more) than literature; that is, what I call no-genre. So we might dwell on that phrase Foreign to the resources of 'literature' and wonder what it might mean when browsing the conveyor belt of recommended good reads.

Without doubt Dublinesque and Zone are very literary novels in the obvious sense: full of explicit allusions – the first to Beckett himself, the second to Apollinaire's poem Beckett had translated – but literary in another, less recognised sense too. As my review of the latter argues, the value and meaning of writing is never a given, is always under question within the work itself – is indeed an accelerant for its own flame – and its gifts doubted or resisted even as they are received. Of course, as Beckett's example suggests, even the most resistant to the gifts only burden us with more, becoming a resource itself, with the lamentable genre label Beckettian. Blanchot's claim, however, is Beckett's writing is "simply an attempt to keep within the limits of literature that voice or rumble or murmur which is always under the threat of silence", which might be a voice from the inside – "When you listen to yourself, it's not literature you hear" – or something from the outside – which is how I read the first two volumes of Knausgaard's My Struggle. So the paradoxical imperative to speak when speaking drowns out the murmur is the great challenge for whoever senses its demand; a challenge that might (still paradoxically) require passivity and weakness rather than mastery and strength, and perhaps inevitably, necessarily, wonderfully never prize-winning.

A world without feeling

I don't know how people can read an emotional novel. Unless the reader is hoodwinked into thinking the novel can deliver 'real' emotion.
— Lee Rourke (@LeeRourke) August 14, 2013

Twitter is an unreliable arena for literary debate because terms cannot be defined – What is an emotional novel? What is a real emotion? – and one can only misunderstand by assuming answers. Better to move away. Displacement is therefore precisely Twitter's value for literary debate. Lee's rightful distaste for button-pushing novels displaced me to remember a passage in Saul Bellow's More Die of Heartbreak in which the narrator recalls the existential troubles of his uncle Benn Crader, a botanist, an expert in arctic lichens:

Benn once told me that when he landed by helicopter on the slope of Mount Erebus to collect samples, he had felt that he was very near the end of the earth, the boundary of boundaries. "Of course, there's no such thing," he said, "but there's such a feeling."

A scientist, a rationalist, Benn appears to have been hoodwinked into distress by a combination of reality and illusion, and yet, while he knows this, the feeling haunts him. What does it mean that he can't dismiss this illusion? The question might be familiar to keen readers of novels. We are surrounded by such events teasing us with unwarranted emotion, and not just in novels. Beckett's unnamable has bitter fun at the construction of emotion:

They love each other, marry in order to love each other better, more conveniently, he goes to the wars, he dies at the wars, she weeps, with emotion, at having loved him, at having lost him, yep, marries again in order to love again, more conveniently again, they love each other, you love as many times as necessary, as necessary in order to be happy, he comes back, the other comes back, from the wars, he didn't die at the wars after all, she goes to the station, to meet him, he dies in the train, of emotion, at the thought of seeing her again, having her again, she weeps, weeps again, with emotion again, at having lost him again, yep, goes back to the house, he's dead, the other is dead, the mother-in-law takes him down, he hanged himself, with emotion, at the thought of losing her, she weeps, weeps louder, at having loved him, at having lost him, there's a story for you, that was to teach me the nature of emotion, that's called emotion, what emotion can do, given favourable conditions, what love can do, well well, so that's emotion, that's love, and trains, the nature of trains ...

Love and trains, mere mechanics. Beckett had begun writing in French in part to get away from the sentimentality of English, so this – even when translated back – and the headlong nature of the prose, begins to dismantle the mawkish tendency of storytelling. And yet the rough grains of narrative remain and so too the seeds of emotion. The fatal dangers are present in the title of Bellow's novel, taken from a passage in which Benn discusses a journalist questioning him over his botanical research and his sense of guilt over the death of a neighbour:

... he wanted a statement about plant life and the radiation level increasing. Also dioxin and other harmful wastes. He was challenging about it. Well – I agreed it was bad. But in the end I said, 'It's terribly serious, of course, but I think more people die of heartbreak than of radiation'.

Why do we embrace such narratives in which unhappiness is amplified? In his 1920 diary, Kafka wrote a series of entries in the third person, one of which presents a diagnosis:

The fact that there is fear, grief and desolation in the world is something he understands, but even this only in so far as these are vague, general feelings, just grazing the surface. All other feelings he denies; what we call by that name is for him mere illusion, fairy-tale, reflection of our knowledge and our memory. How could it be otherwise, he thinks, since after all our feelings can never catch up with the actual events, let alone overtake them. We experience the feelings only before and after the actual event, which flits by at an elemental, incomprehensible speed; they are dream-like fictions, restricted to ourselves alone. We live in the stillness of midnight, and experience sunrise and sunset by turning towards the east and the west.

The distance of "he" is Kafka's freezer next to Beckett's microwave and extends Lee's twitter statement to affirm that we experience 'real' emotion only by elective agency. We turn to books in order to have emotion in the first place. Otherwise the chimes of midnight are all that we hear.

This kind of existence is deeply unsettling – reading fiction to fabricate meaning, to provide a telos for the interminable, even if we are reading a novel like The Unnamable. As readers, we are like Benn later in More Die of Heartbreak when, stuck in an apartment away from his research, this self-proclaimed "plant visionary" seeks solace by contemplating an azalea and gains emotional stability for weeks communing with its plant nature, only to discover that it is a fake, made of silk from Japan. More comedy, more distress. Yet if we believe this reveals human gullibility, we are correct only to the extent that we too are hoodwinked, because this is only a story, made of silk from Chicago. Benn Crader is an invented character who never visited Mount Erebus, never had such a feeling and never mistook a silk plant for a real one. There is no such thing.

But there is such a story, and we condemn susceptibility in the act of succumbing. Modern writers might suggest that, once cleared of sentiment, the novel has the potential to be the ground of truth, of clinical analysis, a place in which we are no longer hoodwinked; a world without feeling. Except of course this is maintained on a contradiction: storytelling is the means to this world. Beckett's comedy confirms that even the most constricted, stripped-down story is emotional. Even the most overtly heartless, realistic novel relies on a certain kind of sentiment. Swooning under the gaze of its gritty beloved, it refuses the possibility of error or unknowing. Contemporary fiction's impatience with this paradox and its refusal to confront it in form and content actually constitutes the bulk of contemporary fiction, and might thereby trace the fate of humanism. Apparently free of heavenly abstraction, humankind still struggles to ground its story and still swims in a sea without shore, and so, to save itself, clings like Pincher Martin to one remaining outcrop, repressing its fate.

Can the novel let go? The question is the starting point of Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady with its epigraph: What will we do to disappear? The writer's block suffered by the title character suggests it is necessary. He must stop writing in order to write. The author of the epigraph has emphasised that there is nothing negative in 'not to write': "it is intensity without mastery, without sovereignty, the obsessiveness of the utterly passive". If letting go is then obsessive passivity, how might that be written?

Passivity is what's notable in Ágota Kristóf's The Notebook, a novel recently celebrated by Slavoj Žižek and soon to be reissued. What's notable in his description of the story and his wish to be like the "ethical monsters" whose words we read, the twin boys who behave with "blind spontaneity and reflexive distance" promising a world "in which sentimentality [is] replaced by a cold and cruel passion", is that he doesn't mention the form the novel takes: a notebook written by the twins in the first person plural and the present tense. It lacks both the usual ornaments of novelistic prose, has no psychological or emotional description and offers no relief or guidance from a third person. The twins state that the notebooks consist only what they know to be true: "We must describe what we see, what we hear, what we do". This means the writing does more than "tell the story" as Žižek says, it embodies their behaviour and becomes their passion, their obsession, their passivity. The question then becomes: what do we do with this illusion? 

“I am no longer capable of writing about”: The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956

Soon Beckett’s stipulation that only letters with a bearing on his work can be published will be repeated as often as Kafka’s request to Max Brod. The difference is that we may regret Beckett’s executors were not so disloyal. What ever the riches the letters contain, we will always wonder about those bearing on the life. However, the latest volume stresses the unavoidable and indeed necessary nature of such wonder.

The cover of volume two announces letters from 1941 to 1956, yet the first letter is dated 17th January, 1945. The missing years were those of war, most of which Beckett spent living and working in a farming community deep in the “free zone” having escaped occupied Paris on the brink of arrest. From there he sent postcards to his family in Ireland, which they didn’t receive and, on January 12th 1941, he sent a “pre-printed lettercard” to James Joyce. A facsimile is shown in the introduction. Joyce died the next day.






If we cannot have direct access to what Beckett experienced in that time, it remains indirectly sensible. The anxious verve of the brilliant young writer is replaced by a quieter man, still gravely lyrical yet less prone to hyperbole, much more forgiving of third parties (unless it’s Alexander Trocchi) and more focused on writing, just writing. What makes the editors’ task particularly daunting (that is, in persuading the executors to publish) is Beckett’s reluctance to discuss the detail of his work. When he does mention what he has written, he is excessively dismissive. So, rather than offer a review of the letters, I want to focus on this apparent oddity.

It is odd because Beckett was exceptionally learned and eloquent – the letters to Georges Duthuit, the major highlight of this collection, are proof enough of both – and before the war published critical essays, including the monograph on Proust. There is strong evidence of diverse learning in his fiction too: Molloy likes anthropology because of “its inexhaustible faculty of negation”. This is no divine innocent at work. One expects at least one letter to raise local decisions made during his famous “siege in a room” while writing Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Yet the nearest he gets is to comment on the possibility of an overall title: “this work is a complete whole only in so far as one takes for granted the impossibility of going on”. So much, at least, for Beckett’s alleged pessimism. What he tells the German translator Hans Naumann suggests it was nothing new: when he knew James Joyce they “seldom talked literature, he didn't like doing it, neither did I.”

He has to be more open about the plays: while Waiting for Godot is in production, the director Roger Blin learns “the spirit of the play ... is that nothing is more grotesque than the tragic”. Otherwise he avoids all requests for insight and interviews and makes only one public statement about his relation to the play: “All that I have been able to understand I have shown.” Silence, then, Beckett claims, is not due to having anything to hide, but ignorance. “You may put me in the dismal category of those who, if they had to act in full awareness of what they were doing, would never act.” Is this disingenuous? The answer, which can be neither yes nor no, may reveal the uncommon nature of Beckett’s non-method.

Once he is famous Beckett receives letters from enquirers curious about the origins of his work. Hans Naumann again: “Has the work of Kafka ever played a part in your spiritual life?”. He apologises for his response: “I am not trying to seem resistant to influences. I merely note that I have always been a poor reader, incurably inattentive, on the look-out for an elsewhere. And I think I can say, in no spirit of paradox, that the reading experiences which have affected me most are those that were best at sending me to that elsewhere.” Reading Kafka, he says, “I felt at home – too much so”. He didn’t finish The Castle because it did not offer this elsewhere: “I remember feeling disturbed by the imperturbable aspect of his approach. I am wary of disasters that let themselves be recorded like a statement of accounts.”

As this suggests, the letters bear on the work most powerfully when Beckett is looking away. And indeed he is most expressive as only Beckett can be when talking about an entirely different art form. The painting of Bram van Velde is, he tells Duthuit, “the afterbirth of the unfeasible”. His art “is new because it is the first to repudiate relation in all its forms. It is not the relation with this or that order of opposite that it refuses,” he says, “but the state of being in relation as such, the state of being in front of.” In this we can recognise the remove in which Beckett’s narration operates and in which the reader experiences it.

I think continually of those last paintings, miracles of frenzied impotence, streaming with beauties and splendours, like a shipwreck of phosphorescences, decidedly one is a literary all one’s life, with great wide ways among which everything rushes away and comes back again, and the crushed calm of the true deep. [Trans. George Craig]

Beckett admits what we suspect: “bear in mind that I who hardly ever talk about myself talk about little else.” He goes as far as to call Bram van Velde his soul-mate:

The further I sink down, the more I feel right beside him, feel how much, in spite of the differences, our ventures came together, in the unthought and the heartrending.

The reason for Beckett’s critical silence after the war is perhaps best expressed when he ends a letter about van Velde: “I am no longer capable of writing about.” Such thought, such writing, is mere relation. The contradiction inherent in making such statements cannot go unnoticed: “To write is impossible but yet impossible enough”. There is also a need to speak. To Thomas MacGreevy he writes of his “feeling of helplessness ... and of speechlessness, and of restlessness also I think, before works of art”.

In contrast, Beckett’s references to contemporary literature are few and far between: Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye he liked “more than anything for a long time”. For me, however, the great revelation of the letters is Beckett’s occasional engagement with the work of Maurice Blanchot. As early as October 1948, he acknowledges receipt of an unspecified essay sent by Duthuit, presumably for translation. Three years later Duthuit has Beckett translate passages from what is presumed to be Sade’s Reason and “the foreword” to Faux Pas which just happens to contain this passage:

The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it.

 Compare this to the famous passage in Beckett's Three Dialogues with Duthuit:

There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.

No trace of these translations remains, not even the name of the journal for which they were intended. In April 1951, he also translates The “Sacred” Speech of Hölderlin collected in The Work of Fire and complains of the “very badly translated” extracts from Heidegger. The same applies. That same month Molloy was published and was nominated for the Prix des Critiques, for which Blanchot was a judge. He supported the novel “without reservation” and tried to persuade the jury to award it the prize. Beckett’s partner Suzanne wrote to Jérôme Lindon that “[to] have been defended by a man like Blanchot is the main thing for Beckett, whatever the outcome”. In 1954, when Peter Suhrkamp was preparing a journal dedicated to Beckett and requested French reviews, Beckett told him that those by Maurice Nadeau and Georges Bataille were the best “but the big thing, for me, is the recent piece by Maurice Blanchot”. He means “Where Now? Who Now?” published in the NNRF in October 1953. This is the extent of his comment, understandable given the formality of the letter, yet he doesn’t mention the review to more casual correspondents let alone responds to its analysis. If such reticence is not disingenuous, we may recognise a reason in Blanchot’s words:

What first strikes us is that here someone is not writing for the worthy purpose of producing a good book. Nor does he write in response to the noble urge we like to call inspiration; or to say the significant things he has to say; or because this is his job; or because he hopes by writing to penetrate into the unknown. Is it then so as to get it over with? [...] What is this vacuum which becomes speech in the inwardness of he whom it engulfs? [trans. Sacha Rabinovitch]

The vacuum may then be a stuporous passivity; an elsewhere engulfing.

Art requires that he who practises it should be immolated to art, should become other, not another, not transformed from the human being he was into the artist with artistic duties, satisfactions and interests, but into nobody, the empty animated space where art’s summons is heard.

What must a writer do in order to inhabit this space? If we search these letters in the hope of finding Beckett’s secret, we betray our admiration and need. The question assumes the mastery it must divest to discern an answer. One of the final letters in this volume is to a young writer seeking guidance and consolation from a writer he revered: “Don't lose heart” he tells Robert Pinget, “plug yourself into despair and sing it for us.”

In “Oh All to End”, his obituary tribute to Beckett, Blanchot remembers Molloy's failure to win the Prix des Critiques, and recognises his naïveté in trying to alert members of the literary establishment to its deserve. Beckett's early novels, he says, were after all “foreign to the resources of 'literature'”. Even today one cannot imagine such a novel winning anything but the label unreadable. Blanchot then compares Sartre’s theatrical soliciting and refusal of the Nobel Prize with Beckett’s distance: “he had neither to accept nor refuse a prize that was for no particular work (there is no work in Beckett) but was simply an attempt to keep within the limits of literature that voice or rumble or murmur which is always under threat of silence”. The aside prompts reassuring disquiet: there is no work in Beckett. Blanchot continues by quoting from his own work Awaiting Oblivion “because Beckett was willing to recognize himself in that text”. Does this mean Beckett corresponded with Blanchot? How else did he find out? Perhaps volumes three and four will disabuse us.

Writing Beckett's Letters by George Craig

In September, Cambridge UP publishes volume two of The Letters of Samuel Beckett covering the years 1941 to 1956. The wait has been long since volume one ended immediately after and just before major events in Beckett's life. George Craig can help as we wait. As one of the four editors, he has also translated many of the letters into English. (Fifteen years ago, he was my tutor on an MA course at university and I remember seeing a photocopy of illegible text he happened to be working on.) Now in association with Sylph Editions he has produced an account of this extraordinary work:

Highly personal and at the same time informed by a lifetime of experience of movement between languages, this cahier offers an insight into the ‘task of the translator’ – when the writer being translated was himself a master translator.

You can find out how to buy the edition at the site dedicated to The Cahier Series and a list of London, Parisian and New York bookshops where they can be found.

Beckett's silence

"Maurice Nadeau once told me that Beckett is quite capable of meeting somebody and sitting for two hours without uttering a word". Charles Juliet remembered the warning when he met Beckett for the first time and Beckett is indeed silent. "I study him covertly. He is grave, sombre. Frowning. An expression of unbearable intensity." In her rich and moving memoir Anne Atik contrasts loud, drunken nights she and her husband Avigdor Arikha shared with Beckett with "entire evenings when he didn't say a word. "It was", she says "like being in a tunnel with someone dear whose face you suddenly couldn't see. Or who couldn't see you."

Even though Sam's was not an aggressive silence directed against anyone, but rather a sinking into his private world with its demons, or so we imagined, those present suppressed their acute discomfort and feelings of ineptitude when it happened. His intimate friends learned how to cope with his struggle.

I have been thinking of Beckett's silence lately without knowing why; that is, why have I been thinking about his personal silence? The reason is no doubt personal too. Throughout January I sought silence. I put books aside, I closed the glowing notebook, I kept curtains drawn against the light and left the television unplugged. Writing was out of the question. I sought not conditions for contemplation nor of peace, because peace of a kind came with noise. So what was it?

In another meeting, Beckett tells Juliet that he often sat through whole days in silence in his cottage in Ussy-sur-Marne. With no paper before him, no intent to write, he took pleasure in following the course of the sun across the sky: "There is always something to listen to" he says. So Beckett didn't experience silence as silence: it was attention.

Juliet forced himself to break the first silence by telling Beckett of how his appreciation of his work changed after reading Texts for Nothing: "what had impressed me most" he says "was the peculiar silence that reigns... a silence attainable only in the furthest reaches of the most extreme solitude, when the spirit has abandoned and forgotten everything and is no more than a receiver capturing the voice that murmurs within us when all else is silent. A peculiar silence, indeed, and one prolonged by the starkness of the language. A language devoid of rhetoric or literary allusions, never parasitized by the minimal stories required to develop what it has to say."

– Yes, he agrees in a low voice, when you listen to yourself, it's not literature you hear.

Perhaps this is why Beckett's silence is on my mind. In the silence, if it is true silence, there are no stories to fabricate happiness or distress. Silence would then be a place where there is no beginning, no middle and no end. No literature. In silence one is protected from the violence of the turning page; nothing new, no surprises. Beckett's silence in particular also suggests a need beyond material and artistic success; a need one psychoanalyst claims to have identified and, whether he is right or irrelevant, one in which writing and not writing were unceasing and competing necessities.

We can see why reading Texts for Nothing now. It's a struggle to block the noise of literary allusions and not to glimpse minimal stories blossom and decay across each page. Text for Nothing IV refers to "a vulgar Molloy, a common Malone". Text for Nothing V asks (without a question mark) "Why did Pozzo leave home", while Text for Nothing VIII says "in the silence you can't know" which, on the final page of The Unnamable, becomes: "in the silence you don't know". In the tight swirl of hesitant intimacy, biblical lyricism and philosophical allusion, Texts for Nothing reveals Beckett as his own precursor. It becomes a cultural masterpiece for general consumption; writing that was to Juliet beyond literature is now literature itself. Where is Beckett's silence now?

Moreover, what Juliet said about Texts for Nothing has been said about the Trilogy. Martha Nussbaum writes [PDF link] about how the voices in Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable "make increasingly radical attempts to put an end to the entire project of storytelling and to the forms of life that this practice supports":

They ask us to see their forms of feeling as a pattern that can be unraveled, a writing that can be unwritten, a story that can be ended – not by bringing it to the usual happy or unhappy ending but by ending the storytelling life. If stories are learned, they can be unlearned. If emotions are constructs, they can be dismantled. And perhaps the silence onto which this deconstructive project opens is an opening or clearing in which human beings and animals can recognize one another without and apart from the stories and their guilt. And perhaps, too, the longing for that silence is itself an emotion of and inside the stories. Perhaps the negative project is a happy-ending story trapped, itself, inside the very thing that it opposes.

Worseover, what is said about the Trilogy is said about the effacement of writing itself. Silence too is assimilated into culture.

When we admire the tone of a work, when we respond to its tone as to its most authentic aspect, what are we referring to? Not to style, or to the interest and virtues of the language, but to this [effacing] silence precisely, this vigorous force by which the writer, having been deprived of himself, having renounced himself, has in this effacement nevertheless maintained the authority of a certain power: the power decisively to be still, so that in this silence what speaks without beginning of end might take on form, coherence, and sense. The tone is not the writer's voice, but the intimacy of the silence he imposes upon the word.

Worse because the intimacy of Beckett's silence goes on without Beckett, and writing is out of the question.

Double-headed monster

There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.

Samuel Beckett – Three Dialogues, 1949.

The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it.

Maurice Blanchot – Faux Pas, 1943.

Beckett and "the absurd"

A Piece of Monologue (a deleted blog) brings to my weary attention another one of The Guardian newspaper's effortlessly obtuse top ten literary lists. This time it's "top 10 absurd classics". Of course, it includes Waiting for Godot.

Beckett's remarks about this subject have been available in French for 26 years and in English translation for 15, yet still he is ignored. Charles Juliet's Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde was reissued five months ago by Dalkey Archive, so there should be no more excuses. Here is the specific passage, beginning with Juliet expressing his opinion:

Cautiously, I explain that I believe an artist's work is inconceivable without a strict ethical sense.
A long silence.
"What you say is true. But moral values are inaccessible. And they cannot be defined. In order to define them, you would have to pass judgement, which is impossible. That's why I could never agree with the notion of the theatre of the absurd. It involves a value judgment. You cannot even speak about truth. That's what's so distressful. Paradoxically, it is through form that the artist may find some kind of a way out. By giving form to formlesssness. It is only in that way, perhaps, that some underlying affirmation may be found.

This is what makes Beckett a far more complex artist than the label "absurdist" allows. Perhaps this why it remains despite the author's explicit statements and the evidence of the plays backing them up. He seeks an underlying affirmation – why else would he continue? – while all around him hacks and inattentive culture-vultures chatter about "the absurd"; a value judgement to speed their fiercely middlebrow lives beyond anything distressing like the inaccessible.

Not Even Past: Conjunctions 53

Not Even Past is the title of the 53rd and latest edition of Conjunctions, Bard College's literary journal. This edition's special features deserve attention:

• Beckett's US publisher Barney Rosset contributes Remembering Samuel Beckett including "the Beckett/Rosset Correspondence about Waiting for Godot". 
  
  
• An extract from Roberto Bolaño's Antwerp
  
  
• Thomas Bernhard's poem Ave Virgil  translated by James Reidel "appearing in English for the first time, with a postscript note by Bernhard"

Of course, the last of these excites my interest. It is mentioned in passing in the Sign & Sight interview of 1986. Bernhard explains its 1981 publication, 21 years after he wrote it: Well, I found it and I thought to myself, this is actually a good poem, from that period, and that was it. [My publisher] publishes everything I give him.



As I'm likely to buy everything Bernhard published, I'll have to get this too, although currently it is not currently available at The Book Depository or Amazon.

But not everything is withheld: Web Conjunctions has published The Will of Achilles, a long poem by Robert Kelly.

Beckett speaks again

Oh all to publish

This is a picture of the front of The Guardian's review pages on March 3rd, 1989, nine months before the death of the man pictured. It is the first publication of his beautiful late work Stirrings Still. John Calder published it in a limited edition retailing at £1,000 each (though every copy was signed by the weary author).

I was prompted to dig out the clipping from my yellowing archives by A Piece of Monologue's report on Faber & Faber's new editions of Beckett's plays and fiction. Faber's own pages on the series reveal a welcome new edition of what Beckett himself called Nohow On, a loose trilogy comprising Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho.

In a letter to the NYRB, Calder explained the origin of the volume and why Stirrings Still could not be included. The good news is that Faber has now added it, thereby completing a Beckett Quartet. The bad news is that Nohow On has been dropped. Instead, the volume has four titles. Ever failed indeed.







On the other side of the page, the Guardian has a review of Stirrings Still by Frank Kermode:

So the end is a matter of muttering, in a voice so low that it does not even deserve an exclamation mark at the end. This is another of Beckett's nihilistic mantras, best mumbled aloud. They are inescapably paradoxical: representing the last possible act of imagination, they also suggest that even this quasi-Berkeleyan man, existing as perceived but almost not perceiving, cannot be represented without payment of tribute, however reluctant, to a specifically human power, not extinguished so long as one can speak of such things.

Beside Sir Frank's words there is a review of Stark by Ben Elton.

Be in no doubt (just this once)

In the 1930s ... there was no public man, and we have to see the letters as merely one of many ways in which an ambitious, confused and tormented young writer attempted to discover who he was and what it was he wanted out of life and art. These early letters, in other words, are, like the early poems and stories, in the strict sense essais, the trying out of a voice, a tone, even, at times, another language.

Gabriel Josipovici takes a long look at volume one of The Letters of Samuel Beckett.

What we now need is the other three volumes to appear as quickly as possible and then for CUP to issue a selection of the most interesting letters, with absolutely minimum annotation, in a one-volume paperback. Because, be in no doubt about it, if Godot and Molloy lit up the dreary landscape of writing in the immediate post-war era, these letters are set to do the same for the new century.

E M Cioran on Samuel Beckett

He lives not in time but parallel to it, which is why it has never occurred to me to ask him what he thinks of events. He is one of those beings who make you realize that history is a dimension man could have done without.

It just never occurred to Philip Hensher.

Beckett beyond tragedy

The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940 are exceeding even my high expectations. Above all the gift these letters offer is the chance to follow a young writer as he seeks a way forward, finding glimpses of a path in writing, music and painting. In July 1937, Beckett responded to Axel Kaun, who worked for Kafka's publisher Rowohlt Verlag and had suggested that he translate a German poet. Beckett declines but doesn't stop there. He complains of finding writing in formal English "more and more difficult, even pointless":

To drill one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through - I cannot imagine a higher goal for today's writer.

Or is literature alone to be left behind on that old, foul road long ago abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralysingly sacred contained within the unnature of the word that does not belong to the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved, as for example the sound surface of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is devoured by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence? (Translated by Viola Westbrook)

A month later, Beckett wrote to his aunt Cissie Sinclair about the work of the painter Jack B Yeats via another favourite:

Watteau put in busts and urns, I suppose to suggest the inorganism of the organic - all his people are mineral in the end, without possibility of being added to or taken from, pure inorganic juxtapositions - but Jack Yeats does not even need to do that. The way he puts down a man's head & a woman's head side by side, or face to face, is terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between. I suppose that is what gives the stillness to his pictures, as though the convention were suddenly suspended, the convention & performance of love & hate, joy & pain, giving & being given, taking and being taken. A kind of petrified insight into one's ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness. All handled with the dispassionate acceptance that is beyond tragedy.

"This academic madness"

Beckett's work — especially in the early years though no less even now, I would imagine — is often misinterpreted. Or, it seems possible to say, simply interpreted, the mis- being implicit regarding Beckett’s work; in one interview [...] asked what, if not a philosophical one, is his reason for writing, he responds I haven't the slightest idea. I'm no intellectual. All I am is feeling.

This sense of 'feeling' and not 'intellecting' is what always brings me back to Beckett's prose so strongly and deeply, at least regarding work from the Trilogy onward.

Named Tomorrow goes on to read Beckett's writing in accordance with this important apprehension. It reminds me of Beckett's admiration for the mystics. When asked in the same book as in the link what he thought of the essays and theses about his work, Beckett waved his hand: "This academic madness..."

The blogger also quotes from a lecture he attended yesterday evening "by one of the editors of the recently published Volume 1 of Beckett's letters". As it happens, I was there too and also took delivery of a copy of the book. Next to me, a student placed a book from the library flat on the table. I tried to discern the title, expecting it to be Beckett-related. It wasn't. However, I was impressed to see that the spine also contained a review of the book.

A short history of decade

1 April 1969.

Beckett wrote to me about my book Démiurge, "In your ruins I find shelter."

From EM Cioran's Cahiers 1957-1972. This and eight other extracts are from the time Cioran was friendly with Beckett. They were translated by Thomas Cousineau.

18 May 1970.

At a rehearsel of La dernière bande, when I said to Mme. B that Sam was truly despairing and that I was surprised that he was able to continue, to "live," etc., she replied: "There's another side to him." This answer applies, on a lesser scale to be sure, to myself as well.

There it was

December has not been blog-friendly to me. The year began with hospitals and has now ended with them. 2009 should offer time for more than linking, perhaps even more book reviews. In the first few months, I'm looking forward to reissues of Peter Handke's early novels (the Slow Homecoming trilogy and Short Letter, Long Farewell), to the heroic translations of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones and Jacques Roubaud's The Loop (part two of The Great Fire of London sequence) and ... and ... to volume one of The Letters of Samuel Beckett.

Such happy wonder leads me back to Fall Day, the first of Robert Kelly's three poems in Conjunctions' Winter 2009 Poetry Festival.

This is the meaning of childhood:
you do not exist. The Count of Monte Cristo
is waiting to become you
he has a sword he has a girl at either elbow
offering him green wine and hashish paste.
You have read about the world now here it is.