KEVIN HOLOHAN ON SAMUEL BECKETT: A NARROW ESCAPE

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, he wrote in both English and French. Renee Gladman selected the following passage from Becket’s “The Calmative” as the epigraph to Event Factory: “But it’s to me this evening something has to happen, to my body as in myth and metamorphosis, this old body to which nothing ever happened, or so little, which never met with anything, loved anything, wished for anything, in its tarnished universe, except for the mirrors to shatter, the plane, the curved, the magnifying, the minifying, and to vanish in the havoc of its images.”

Filled with the pains and struggles of consciousness, Beckett’s work also alludes to a potential state of harmony if one is able to find the exact right balance of perseverance of self and a mindfulness for the world in which they exist.

“Comment puis-je vous aider?”

“Je cherche Monsieur Beckett, l’écrivain Irlandais. Je suis Irlandais.” (As if my Irishness was going to help matters!) It is quite possible I said something awful like “l’écritoire” instead of “l’écrivain” but he got my drift; he knew I was not looking for a writing-desk named Beckett.

“Monsieur Beckett n’est pas ici.” 

The wary and long-suffering neighbor went on to say more that mostly outstripped my meager French but the meaning was clear: Mr. Beckett was not home, would not be back in the foreseeable future, I was not the first scruffy Irish fan to wash up in this apartment lobby and if I had any message to leave, he for one, would not be taking it.

I stood there in the lobby of the modest apartment building on the Boulevard St. Jacques looking at the two mailboxes side by side: Beckett and S. Beckett. Perhaps he and his wife Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil had separate mailboxes. The S did nothing to differentiate them. I took a photograph of the two mail boxes and left, hero unmet.

I dodged a bullet that day. What on earth would I have said had Samuel Beckett been home? I had playfully joked that I had the perfect question to ask, a respectful tribute to the celebrated awkwardness of the prose of Watt, Beckett’s second novel with a wry reference to boots which figure so prominently in his work: “Do you wear and if so what size boots?” Jesus wept! I suppose I should be thankful to whatever forces had sent Mr. Beckett to his bolthole in Ussy-sur-Marne or out to walk the streets of Paris or wherever he was that saved me from embarrassing myself.

What brought me to that drab hallway? I was not generally an autograph hunter or enthusiastic fan type, but somehow I was there. I had gone to some lengths to obtain his address. This was 1984 and there was no internet so I had cajoled his address out of one of my college tutors. I wanted to pay my respects to Mr. Beckett. Why?

Growing up in Dublin with literary aspirations meant one was inevitably aware of the giant literary shadows that loomed over the small city, darkening every well-documented street and clouding the view of every bar-stool bard proclaiming how they could write better than [Insert literary eminence here] but couldn’t be bothered with the crass commercialism of it all and so put their genius into their backroom banter instead. The eminences followed you everywhere – Joyce, Beckett, Wilde, Synge, Yeats. They were a lot to live up to but for me Beckett did not clamor in the same way. His influence was quiet. It got under your skin. His was not a way of writing; it was a way of seeing and it was the voice the city seemed to use to describe itself to me.

My first experience of Beckett that I remember was a production of Rockaby in the Peacock Theater, the less august and more intimate space in the basement of the Abbey Theatre. An old woman sits in a rocking chair that rocks her and listens to her own disembodied voice, urging it on from time to time to the end of its incantatory tale. The top of my head lifted open that evening and nothing has ever looked the same since. The sparse, close-to-the-bone honesty of it was thrilling and, as I read more and more of his work I found this to be the thread running through it. I read everything I could get my hands on. I wrote bits and bobs, contagioned and imitative, foolishly adopting his cultivated lack of style as a style while scrounging for my own voice and my own stories to tell, my own blots on the silence.

I eventually escaped the influence of his non-style-style but kept something of the ethos, the need to write for and about the broken, the outsiders, people struggling to make sense of or invent a world that insists on behaving senselessly.

Reading the four volumes of his recently published letters (Vol 4 of which I had the pleasure of reviewing for the Irish Echo) confirmed much of what I had intuited over the many years of reading and seeing his work: the deep concern with the integrity of the work, the eschewing of celebrity and fame, the suspicion of “success” and his incredible devotion to and generosity towards friends and fellow artists. The man and his work continue to impress.

At one point some years ago, before my first novel was published, despairing of it ever seeing the light of day, I decided to stop writing to see what that felt like. No revising old stalled work, no jotting of notes, no voicemails to self, no notions on the back of envelopes, nothing. I lasted about two months of feeling adrift and bereft, like I was missing a limb. I came to understand that I wrote because it was my way of being in and making sense of the world, my own personal I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

Perhaps, had he been home that day in 1984, I would have suddenly come up with something better to say. Perhaps not. Either way, we were both spared the awkward horror of a nervous, callow me asking him: “Do you wear and if so what size boots?” and that is, I suppose, something to be thankful for.