dread states: samuel beckett’s poems
by
Douglas Messerli
Samuel
Beckett The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press,
2014)
Confronting
the new volume of The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett of nearly 500
pages in length (actually, only about half the book contains poems, the other
half being devoted to “Commentary” “Appendix,” “Bibliography,” and “Index”),
one might be tempted to proclaim — as many have of Beckett’s mentor, James
Joyce — that his best poetry appeared in his fiction and, in Beckett’s case
alone, in his dramatic works. A more sophisticated argument might be summarized
by arguing that for Beckett — as for Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and others — all of
the works represent, in one way or another, a kind of poetry in their attention
to language above narrative and dramaturgical concerns. Yet this would hardly
explain Beckett’s own “fondness” for his poetry, as the editors of this volume,
Seán Lawlor and John Pilling, describe it. Beckett, objectively dramatizing
himself, admitted “it was in poetry that he confronted himself most intimately,
even if this confrontation was in conflict with his instinct to protect himself
by way of ventriloquism, disguise or deviousness.”
It is certainly the case that many, if not
most, readers have pounced upon Beckett’s poems as inferior forms of writing,
just as he might have feared. Reviewing this book in The New York Times Book
Review recently (December 14, 2014), Paul Muldoon cavalierly dove into the
volume to argue not only that “Beckett has almost no sense of how a line
functions in verse making,” but that his work was imitative of Irish modernist
practice by the likes of Thomas MacGreevy. Muldoon makes his case through the
choice of a “random” passage, mocking a line to suggest that it characterizes
the poetry itself, which proves, evidently, his conclusion: “’Mad dumbells
spare me,’ indeed!” He continues, “I think it’s fair to say that were Beckett’s
name not hovering around in its vicinity, his poems would not be published by
Grove Press or anyone else.” However, the poem Muldoon “sampled,” from
Beckett’s uncollected early poems archived in the Leventhal Papers at the
University of Texas, may have been one that he jettisoned from the George
Reavey publication of Echo’s Bones.
Indeed, the poem, “For Future Reference,”
is, nonetheless, a fascinating example of the dramatic energy of several of his
early works. And despite the fact that Beckett often appeared not to truly care
about line breaks, he actually used line placement to good effect in this work.
I quote the full first stanza (with ‘dumb-bells,” as Beckett actually spelled
it):
My
cherished chemist friend
Borodine
lured
me aloofly
down
from the cornice
into
the basement
and
there
drew
tubs of acid and alkali out of his breast
to
a rainbow sol-fa
mad
dumb-bells spare me!
fiddling
deft and expert
with
the double-jointed nut-crackers of the hen’s ovaries.
But
I stilled my cringing
I
did
and
I smote him
ah
my strength!
smashed
mashed
peace
my incisors!
braved
him and flayed him
with
a ready are-you-steady
cuff-discharge.
But
did I?
Based on a recurring dream that occurred,
apparently, in his adolescence, Beckett explores the sexual fears of a young
student. Biographer Deirdre Bair identifies the strange figure who lures the
boy down into the laboratory as W. N. Tetley, the science and math teacher at
Portora, where the young Beckett went to school. Although, it first appears
that the teacher is simply attempting to show the boy chemical compounds, there
is also clearly something of the horror-tale in this poem; the boy, through the
“musical” images used throughout, is being led by the pied-piper-like chemist
down into a dungeon for an encounter that may be for more than mere pedagogic
purposes.
By bringing up Borodin, in the second
line, the Russian composer, who was also a chemist, and spelling the name in a
manner that might suggest the Russian pronunciation, Beckett transforms the man
himself into a kind of painful and poisonous-like substance, akin to “iodine,”
who lures him through the cornices (suggestive, so the notes explain, of
Dante’s Purgatorio), into a strange\
basement
world.
By drawing the “acid and alkali” —
opposing substances, since alkalis neutralize acids — out of his breast,
Beckett seems to be suggesting the contradictory emotions his teacher seems to
be displaying come straight from the heart, so to speak. The “rainbow sol-fa”
of the next line suggests not only a spectrum of reflections (again evoking a
broad expression of emotions) but also as in continuation of the musical theme,
the so-fa-mi-re-do “spectrum” of the musical alphabet; yet, of course, the
“sol-fa” — in the concocted language of the boy — calls up the word “sulfur,
the explosive substance used in making matches and gunpowder, the source of a
possibly terrifying “discharge” of emotional responses.
The boy’s sudden call for “mad dumb-bells”
is not a declamation against the stupid, “mad” teacher, but rather a calling
upon the tools that helped to make the young Beckett a successful boxer
(Beckett wrote Barbara Bray that he was the champion boxer of the school). The
teacher appears almost like an evil monster about to wrap his “double-jointed”
fingers around the boy, notably like “hen’s ovaries,” containing the sexual
connotations of the ova/egg Beckett calls up time and again in his 1930 poem Whoroscope.
Like a cartoon figure, Beckett, the boy,
“stills” his cringing figure (as in a
movie) and comes to his own rescue, smiting the would-be predator, smashing,
mashing, and biting—quite literally beating him off. But the question, of
course, is everything: “Or did I?” Did the young boy escape or submit?
It hardly matters, for given the passage
of time, upon the buoyancy of the waters, he is swept away, as if in a magical
moment of existence, summarized in “click,” like a photograph that magically
reveals another time in his and the would-be attacker’s life:
The
hair shall be grey
above
the left temple
the
hair shall be grey there
abracadabra!
Sweet
wedge of birds faithless!
The “pitiful professor” is, in fact,
actually trapped within a kind a photograph (which Becketts’ editors describe
as being faithful to an actual photo of W. N. Tetley):
Well
of all the..
that
little bullet-headed bristle-cropped
cyanosed
rat of a pure politician
that
I thought was experimenting with barbed wire in the Punjab
It is an image from which, once again,
the boy-poet nimbly swims away; yet he is left, at poem’s end, awakening to
remember, that he is still repeating the lessons he has learned, through the
process of the dream itself, with a bitter taste on his tongue:
So
in the snowy floor of the parrot’s cell
burning
at dawn
the
palate of my strange mouth.
In short, this randomly chosen poem
to-be-dismissed by Muldoon, one not even thought of as successful enough by
Beckett to be included in a published volume, is, nonetheless, quite a
fascinating and even, I’d argue, exciting narrative poem, much of it quite
beautifully lyrical, as in the passage when the hero temporarily escapes his
would-be “mutilation” through the passage of time:
And
then the bright waters
beneath
the broad board
the
trembling blade of the streamlined divers
and
down to our waiting
to
our enforced buoyancy
come
floating the words of
the
Mutilator
and
the work of his finger-joints
observe
gen’l’men one of
the
consequences of the displacement of
click!
The alliteration of the b’s and d’s and the
internal repetitions of the c’s and s’s, move the swimmer swiftly downstream,
while the line breaks, suggesting the figure’s movement up and down in the
water in the first 6 lines, and the listing of elements of the magical
transformation in the last five lines, do certainly make clear to me that
Beckett was very well aware of what a line of poetry meant and how to carry his
words through it.
Particularly in his early poems, Beckett
is often at his best in these kinds of short “narrative” sequences. In “Enueg
I,” for example — one of the poems that did make it to publication in Beckett’s
early collection, Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates of 1935, and a
poem which Beckett, in a 1932 to letter to his friend, Tom MacGreevy,
represented as one of the poems that did not “give the impression” to him of
being construits (constructions) — he interrupts his Joycean-like voyage
through the city of Dublin with a seemingly logic-defying conversation with a
young boy:
A
child fidgeting at the gate called up:
‘Would
we be let in Mister?’
‘Certainly’
I said ‘you would.’
But,
afraid, he set off down the road.
‘Well”
I called after him ‘why wouldn’t you go on in?’
‘Oh’
he said, knowingly.
‘I
was in that field before and I got put out.’
In a poem dedicated, in the style of the
Provençal genre, to a listing of vexations or annoyances — expressed in
Beckett’s version more clearly as “laments”—the boy’s lament surely represents
his feeling that he has been locked out of a kind of garden of Eden, to which,
even if he might wish to reenter, he no longer is privy.
In “Sanies I,” of the same volume, wherein
the poet undergoes another voyage, this time by bicycle on Easter Saturday
1933, where — after a series of “morbid discharges” (the Provençal equivalent
of the “sanies” genre) in which the poet, 27 years of age, imagines himself
being a decade older, like Dante, as the notes suggest, “halfway through the
biblical span of three score years and ten” (in the poem, “seven pentades
past”) — he encounters a woman to whom he is highly attracted, Ethna MacCarthy,
with A. J. Leventhal (the man whom she would eventually marry):
I
see main verb at last
her
whom alone in the accusative
I
have dismounted to love
gliding
towards me dauntless nautch-girl on the face of the waters
get
along with you now take the six the seven the eight or the
little
single-decker
take
a bus for all I care walk cadge a lift
home
to the cog of your web in Holles Street
and
let the tiger go on smiling
in
our hearts that funds ways home
The
bitterness of seeing his Indian dancing girl (“nautch-girl”) with another man
is revealed in his sudden rejection of her, his command, almost as if he were
an American cowboy speaking to a steer “get along … now,” dismissing her by
insisting she take any manner of transportation she and her new lover might
seek, “the six the seven the eight or the little single-decker / take a bus for
all I care walk cadge a lift,” to return to her home on Holles Street. All of
this is even more “morbidly” reiterated with his suggestion in the second to
the last line of the famed limerick, “There Was a Young Lady from Niger”
(“There was a young lady from Niger / Who smiled as she rode a tiger; / They
returned from the ride / With the lady inside / And the smile on the face of
the tiger”), sardonically wishing the couple well on their voyage home (“in our
hearts that funds ways home”).
Although these narrative and dramatic
passages certainly seem memorable in Beckett’s early work and clearly
represent, quite early on, his ability to capsulize larger traumatizing
situations into a few taut phrases, they only reiterate the fact that these
early poems bear little in common with his later and recognizably greater
fictions and dramas, particularly with regard to their radical poetic syntax.
Works such as Whoroscope, “Enueg I,” the sanies poems, “Dortmunder” and
“Serena I” and Serena II,” as Marjorie Perloff has argued “wear their learning
rather ostentatiously, showing the poet’s cleverness, disgust, and morbidity”
(Perloff, “Beckett the Poet” in S. E. Gontarski, ed., A Companion to Samuel
Beckett [Chicheser, U.K.: Wiley Blackwell, 2010]). If passages in these
poems show his ability to wittily “dramatize” his scenes, they lack the stark
abstraction of the work we have come to most identify with the mature writer.
Even in these early works, however, we can
begin to see the enormous effects that translating and his shift to French had
upon his writing. As Perloff observes, already in “Enueg I,” which was close to
the time when Beckett translated Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Zone”:
The
structure […] departs from the usual catalogue of disconnected items that
characterizes the Provençal form, adopting instead the promenade structure of
Apollinaire’s “Zone.”
In
fact, although I will not attempt to make a case for it in this essay, it would
be useful to study of the effects of Beckett’s numerous translations of poets
such as Rimbaud, Breton, Eluard, Michaux, Tzara, and others, as well as the
influences of his very important translations from the Spanish in his Anthology
of Mexican Poetry of 1958 (published by Indiana University Press) — and
still an important anthology of early 20th century Mexican poetic writing today
— only a fraction of which appears in this volume.
Consider, for example, his translation of
Breton’s “The Free Union,” published in 1931 in Le Revolver à cheveux
blancs. Here are just 10 lines, near the end of the poem:
My
woman whose hips are skiff
Whose
hips are candelabrum whose hips are arrow-feather
And
stem of feather of white peacock
And
numb balance
My
woman whose rumps are sandstone and amianth
My
woman whose rumps are shoulders of swan
My
woman whose rumps are spring-time
Whose
sex is iris
My
woman whose sex is placer and ornithrynchus
My
woman whose sex is mirror
It’s interesting, for example, to compare
Beckett’s version with the acclaimed translation of the Breton poem published
by my Sun & Moon Press (and my later Green Integer) by Bill Zavatsky and
Zack Rogow:
My
woman with her rowboat hips
With
her hips of a chandelier and arrow feathers
And
stems of the white peacock plumes
Her
hips an imperceptible pair of scales
My
woman with her buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My
woman with her buttocks of springtime
With
her gladiolus sex
My
woman with her sex of placer and platypus
My
woman with her sex of seaweed and old-fashioned candles
My
woman with her mirror sex
I’m not interested in evaluating the
translations (which, in any case, would demand that we also consider the
French), but am simply fascinated by the way Beckett chose his metaphors in
comparison with the vernacularly-oriented Americans. Certainly, there are
numerous similarities, and, at other times, it is apparent that the Irish-born
Beckett simply chose to Anglicize rather than use the American form (“amianth”
instead of “asbestos,”) or to use scientific instead of popular terms
(“ornithrynchus” instead of “platypus”); but more often than not his word
choice differs in his preference for the simpler and more sonic of the two
selections (“skiff” over “rowboat,” “feather of white peacock” over “white
peacock plumes,” “rumps” over “buttocks,” “iris” over “gladiolus”).
In several cases, Beckett transforms the
simile or metaphor into a verbal construction (“rumps are springtime” instead
of “of springtime,” “is iris,” instead “With her gladiolus sex”), and, in one
of the most significant of differences he seemingly clarifies, as in “My woman
whose sex is mirror” instead of “My woman with her mirror sex,” which
transforms the sex itself into a mirror instead of a woman mirroring her sex.
In one case, in the second to last line of the Zavatsky-Rogow translation,
Beckett, either intentionally or accidentally erases the line.
My point in all this, is that here most of
the archaic, Biblical, and other more esoteric references (except in line 31 of
the original, “And tryst in the bed yea the bed of the torrent”) that appear in
some of his early translations and in most of his own early poetry are gone. It
is almost as if, through the French, Beckett has discovered a new poetic
vocabulary.
Little wonder that in the French language Poèmes
37-39, written before World War II, but not published until 1946, his
language had completely changed. Perloff has argued that in these and others of
his works written in French, the English translations, when he bothered to
render them, were often very different from the French; but given my lack of
expertise in French, I’ll only note one brief example through the author’s
English version:
they
come
different
and the same
with
each it is different and the same
with
each the absence of love is different
with
each the absence of love is the same
elles
viennent
autres
et pareilles
avec
chacune c’est autre et c’est pareil
avec
chacune l’absence d’amour est autre
avec
hacune l’absence d’amour est pareille
What
begins as a vague notion of difference and sameness between the equally
abstract “they,” and the place to which “they come,” is quickly transformed
into a more specific notion (or two more specific notions) of whom they are
(presumably lovers) and to where they are going (ideas in their minds)
concerning the “absence of love.” The poem, which, given its vague references,
particularly in the use of its pronoun, is itself an example of the absence of
which it speaks. Here, finally, we have reached a voice somewhat closer to the
Beckett we know from such postwar fictions as Molloy, Malone Dies,
The Unnamable, and his renowned play Waiting for Godot.
But, of course, there is another entire
cache of Beckett poetry, uncollected in this volume — that, as Perloff quite
convincingly argues, we can readjust our perceptions so that we might see what are generally described as prose works —
such as “Still,” “Enough,” “For to End Yet Again,” and “Ill Seen Ill Said” — as
poems. Not only do I agree with Perloff’s cogent argument, but I might desire
to expand that concept to many other Beckett works. I only wish that the editors
of The Collected Poems had included some of these pieces so that we
might have been fully able to comprehend Beckett’s remarkable poetic
achievement. To exclude such works would be similar to determining that Stein’s
Tender Buttons did not belong within a collection of her poetry (but
then, even more sadly, there is no Collected Poems of Gertrude Stein,
which would consist of several long volumes that might even help to transform
the idea of American poetics!).
What the editors of this volume do offer
us, instead, is a selection of Beckett’s
“Later Poems” — appearing in various volumes such as Collected Poems in
English and French of 1977, Selected Poems of 1999, Poems 1930-1989 of 2002, and Selected
Poems 1930-1989 of 2009 — which reveal Beckett’s poetic maturity. What is
perhaps the most significant of these, “what is the word,” Beckett’s last poem,
has already been beautifully analyzed by Perloff, so I’ll refrain from
repeating what has already been well said, although I will quote a few lines,
to hopefully send the interested reader to the volume under review:
folly
–
folly
for to –
for
to –
what
is the word –
folly
from this –
all
this –
folly
from all this –
seeing
–
folly
seeing all this –
this
–
what
is the word –
this
this –
this
this here –
all
this this here –
folly
given all this –
Another
poem “dread nay” might serve as a lesser, but certainly artful example of
Beckett’s later poetry:
head
fast
in
out as dead
till
rending
long
still
faint
stir
unseal
the eye
till
still again
seal
again
head
sphere
ashen
smooth
one
eye
no
hint when to
then
glare
cyclop
no
one
side
eerily
on
face
of
out spread
vast
in
the
highmost
snow
white
sheeting
all
asylum
head
sole
blot
Somewhat
like “Still,” “dread nay” is a poem about a body (in this case, focusing upon
the head, its components, and the mind that lies within it) nearing cessation
but, still, in almost constant motion. If the poem, in its primarily two and
three syllabic lines, appears to be quite simple, something Beckett might have
written (as he claims he composed Whoroscope) in a single night, in fact
he suffered over its composition for several months, revealed in letters to
Barbara Bray, beginning in March 1974. In April he described it as “Poem
abandoned,” and finally finished it in early June. Moreover, Beckett had, before
even beginning to write, outlined the eight-part structure of the poem:
A.
Statement embracing all 4; B. Head alone; C. Without alone;
D.
Position of head in without with ref to Inf. XXXII, XXXIII; E.
Stir
alone; F. Eye alone; G. Inside of head normally / Inside of head
eye
open; H. Restatement (varied) embracing all.
The
author, evidently, found it particularly difficult to compose the penultimate
stanza:
at
ray
in
latibule
long
dark
stir
of dread
till
breach
long
sealed
dark
again
still
again
Here again we are met with erudite
references to Dante’s Inferno, Latinate constructions such as “latibule”
(from the Latin latibulum, a hiding place) and, possibly, even Biblical
allusions (the editors suggest his use of “latibule” may also have arisen from
the Latin version of Psalm 74:20 (“replete sunt latibula terrae tentoriis
violentiae”). Yet how different these subtle allusions are compared to the
literary references of the early poems. Certainly, in this meditation on sleep
and death, Beckett is not at all “wearing his learning ostentatiously.” Here,
in the simplest of terms, the poem sets up a rhythm of a breathing being,
falling momentarily into a seemingly near-comatose condition before coming back
to life: turning white (“ashen smooth,” “snow white,” etc) and sinking into
blackness (“nay to nought,” “dark again,” etc.) before coming back to life
either with the sudden opening of a single eye, a flash of teeth, or a snore
(“click chatter”) before sinking once more into the nothingness that resembles
breath but which, at the same time, so clearly resembles death (“in out as
dead,” the poem’s only line of four heavy beats, akin to meters of Old English
poetry and Hopkins’ sprung rhythm, with which it ends).
While throughout the poem it may appear
that the would-be sleeper is troubled in his attempts to fall to sleep, fearing
its similarity to death, Beckett, by equating sleep with death, as does Hamlet,
also makes it ordinary, something for which we daily prepare and practice,
willingly laying ourselves out on our own winding sheets and closing our eyes
as if sealing our own death certificates. Accordingly, what may first appear as
a thing of dread, is, in fact, not, as the title declares, “dread nay,” and
throughout the poem what might appear as horrific signs are denied by the
poet. The open eye might first appear to be a “cyclop,” but he immediately,
answers “no”; it is not “nothingness” (“nay to nought”), the terrifying
cessation (“ashen smooth / aghast / glittering rent”) becomes “smooth again” as
if the “past” has “never been.” Through his adjectival description, “snow
white,” the poet hints, that what appears dead can possibly be loved back into
existence.
In a poem such as “dread nay” we encounter
the poet at his essence, a writer who, although facing the most morbid of
subjects (clearly something Beckett felt destined to confront from a very early
age) expresses his vision in a work that seems necessary, as if the poem,
rather than being cleverly constructed, was a kind of natural force, a
necessity of expression that reveals universal truths about the human race.
Los
Angeles, February 1, 2015
Reprinted
from Hyperallergic (March 15, 2015).
