Anathemas and Admirations (35 page)

Melancholy feeds on itself, and that is why it cannot renew itself.

In the Talmud, a stupefying assertion: “The more men there are, the more images of the divine there are in nature,” This may have been true in the period when the remark was made, but it is belied today by all one sees and will be still further belied by all that will be seen.

I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the gods have been against me.

I am happy only when I contemplate renunciation and prepare myself for it. The rest is bitterness and agitation. To renounce is no easy thing, yet nothing but striving for it affords some peace. Striving? Merely thinking of it suffices to give me the illusion of being someone else, and this illusion is a victory — the most flattering one, and also the most fallacious.

No one had to the same degree as he a sense of the world’s absurdity. Each time I alluded to it, he would utter, with a smile of complicity, the Sanskrit word
lila
— absolute gratuitousness, according to the Vedanta, the creation of the world by divine caprice. How we laughed at everything together! And now, he — the most jovial of the disabused — here he is, cast into this slough by his own fault, since he has deigned, for once, to take nothingness seriously.

6

Beckett

Some Meetings

T
O FATHOM THIS
separate
man, we should focus on the phrase “to hold oneself apart,” the tacit motto of his every moment, on its implication of solitude and subterranean stubbornness, on the essence of a withdrawn being who pursues an endless and implacable labor. In Buddhism, it is said of an adept seeking illumination that he must be as relentless as “a mouse gnawing on a coffin.” Every authentic writer makes a similar effort. He is a destroyer who
adds
to existence — who enriches by undermining it.

“Our time on earth is not long enough to spend on anything but ourselves”: this remark by a poet applies to whoever refuses the extrinsic, the accidental, the
other
. Beckett, or the incomparable art of being oneself. Withal, no apparent pride, no inherent stigma, in the consciousness of being unique: if the word
amenity
did not exist, it would have had to be invented for him. Scarcely credible, indeed monstrous: he disparages no one, unaware of the hygienic function of malevolence, its salutary virtues, its executory quality. I have never heard him speak ill of friends or enemies, a form of superiority for which I pity him and from which, unconsciously, he must suffer. If denigration were denied me, what difficulties and discomforts, what complications would result!

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.

Were he like his heroes — in other words, had he gained no acceptance — he would be exactly the same. He gives the impression of not wanting to assert himself at all, of being equally alien to the notion of success and to the notion of failure. “How hard it is to figure him out! And what style he has!” I tell myself each time I think of him. If by some impossibility he concealed no secret, I would still regard him as Impenetrable.

I come from a corner of Europe where outbursts of abuse, loose talk, avowals — immediate, unsolicited, shameless disclosures — are de rigueur, where you know everything about everyone, where life in common comes down to a public confessional, and specifically where secrecy is inconceivable and volubility borders on delirium.

This alone suffices to account for my fascination with a man who is supernaturally discreet.

Amenity does not exclude exasperation. At a dinner with friends, harried by absurdly pedantic questions about himself and his work, he took refuge in complete silence and actually ended by turning his back on us — or just about. The dinner was not yet over when he stood up and left, reserved and somber, as one might be before an operation or an interrogation.

About five years ago we ran into each other in Rue Guynemer; when he asked me if I was working, I answered that I had lost my taste for work, that I saw no need to show myself, to “produce,” and that writing was a torment for me. . . . He seemed amazed by this, and I was even more amazed when, precisely with regard to writing; he spoke of
joy
. Did he actually use that word? Yes, I’m sure of it. At the same moment, I recalled that at our very first meeting, ten years earlier, at the Closerie des Lilas, he had acknowledged his great lassitude, his sense that there was nothing more to be had from words.

. . . Words: who has loved them as much as he? They are his companions, and his sole support. The man relies on no certainty, yet you feel that among them he stands fast. His fits of discouragement doubtless coincide with the moments when he stops believing in them, when he imagines they are betraying him, escaping him. Once they are gone, he remains helpless; he is nowhere. I regret not having noted and listed all the places where he refers to words, where he inclines toward them — “drops of silence through silence,” as they are called in
The Unnameable
. Symbols of fragility transformed into indestructible foundations.

In English the French text
Sans
is called
Lessness
, a word coined by Beckett, as he coined the German equivalent
Losigkeit
.

This word
lessness
(as unfathomable as Boehme’s
Un-grund)
so fascinated me that one evening I told him I would not sleep until I found an honorable French equivalent. . . . We considered together every possible form suggested by
sans
and
moindre
. None seemed to come close to the inexhaustible
lessness
, a mixture of privation and infinity, a vacuity synonymous with apotheosis. We parted rather disappointed. Back home, I went on worrying about that poor
sans
. Just when I was about to capitulate, it occurred to me that I should try something in the direction of the Latin
sine
, I wrote him the next day that
sinéité
seemed to me the word we were looking for. He wrote back that he had thought of it too, perhaps at the same moment. Yet it had to be admitted that our discovery was nothing of the kind; we agreed that the search would have to be abandoned, that there was no French substantive capable of expressing absence in itself, absence in the pure state, and that we would have to resign ourselves to the metaphysical poverty of a preposition.

With writers who have nothing to say, who have no world of their own, what can you talk about but literature? With him very rarely, in fact almost never. Everyday subjects (material difficulties, problems of all kinds) interest him more — in conversation, of course. What he cannot endure in any case is questions like: Do you think that such-and-such a work will last? Does so-and-so deserve the rank he has? Between X and Y, who will survive, who is the greater figure? Any evaluation of this kind exasperates and depresses him. “What’s the sense in all that!” he exclaimed to me after one particularly painful evening when the dinner-table conversation resembled a grotesque version of the Last Judgment. He himself avoids commenting on his books, his plays: what matters to him is not the obstacles surmounted but those to be surmounted: he identifies himself totally with what he is doing. If you ask him about a play, he will discuss not the content, the meaning, but the interpretation, whose slightest details he envisions, minute by minute, almost second by second. I shall not soon forget the energy with which he explained the requirements to be satisfied by any actress who wanted to perform
Not I
, in which only a gasping voice dominates space and replaces it. How bright his eyes when he
saw
that tiny yet encroaching, omnipresent voice! It was as if he were watching the ultimate metamorphosis, the supreme collapse of the Pythia!

Having been a cemetery buff all my life, and knowing that Beckett loved them, too (
First Love
, it will be recalled, begins with the description of a cemetery, one that happens to be in Hamburg), I spoke to him last winter, on Avenue de I’Observatoire, of a recent visit to Père-Lachaise and of my indignation at not finding Proust on the list of “notables” buried there. (Let me say in passing that the first time I came across Beckett’s name was some thirty years ago, when I found his little book on Proust in the American Library.) I don’t know how we came to mention Swift, although, on reflection, the transition had nothing abnormal about it, given the funereal character of his humor. Beckett told me that he was rereading
Gulliver
and that he had a predilection for the “country of the Houyhnhnms,” particularly for the scene where Gulliver feels such terror and disgust at the approach of a female Yahoo. He told me — and this was a great surprise, certainly a great disappointment — that Joyce didn’t like Swift. Moreover, he added, Joyce had no inclination for satire, contrary to what one might think. “He never rebelled; he was detached; he accepted everything. For him,
there was no difference between the fall of a bomb and the fall of a leaf
. . .”