Anathemas and Admirations Read online

  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

  TO 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the tacit motto of his every moment, on its implication of solitude and subterranean stubbornness, on the essence of a withdrawn being who pursues an endless and implacable labor.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 . . .”

  A marvelous judgment that in its acuteness and its strange density reminds me of how Armand Robin once answered a question I put to him. “Why, after translating so many poets, haven’t you ever tried Chuang-tse, who has more poetry i
n him than all the sages?” “I’ve often thought of it,” he replied “but how can you translate a work that is comparable only to the barren countryside of northern Scotland?”

  How many times, since I’ve known Beckett, have I wondered (an obsessive and rather stupid interrogation) about his relation to his characters. What do they share? Who could conceive of a more radical disparity? Can it be true that not only their existence but his, too, is steeped in that “leaden light” described in Malone Dies? More than one of his pages seems to me a sort of monologue after the end of some cosmic epoch. . . . The sensation of entering into a posthumous universe, some geography dreamed by a demon released from everything, even his own malediction.

  Beings who do not know whether they are still alive, subject to an enormous fatigue not of this world (to use a language contrary to Beckett’s tastes), all conceived by a man whom we guess to be vulnerable and who for decency’s sake wears the mask of invulnerability — not long ago, I had a sudden vision of the links that bind them to their author, to their accomplice. What I saw then, or rather what I felt, I cannot translate into an intelligible formula; nonetheless, ever since, the merest remark of one of his heroes reminds me of the inflections of a certain voice. . . . But I hasten to add that a revelation can be as fragile and as mendacious as a theory.

  Ever since our first encounter, I have realized that he reached the limit, that he perhaps began there, at the impossible, at the exceptional, at the impasse. And the admirable thing is that he has not budged, that having come up against a wall from the starts he has persevered, as valiant as he has always been: the limit-situation as point of departure, the end as advent! Which accounts for the feeling that that world of his, though always tottering on the verge of deaths may continue indefinitely, whereas ours will soon disappear.

  I am not especially attracted by Wittgenstein’s philosophy, but I have a passion for the man himself. Everything I read about him has the gift of stirring me. More than once I have found features he and Beckett share. Two mysterious apparitions, two phenomena one is glad to find so baffling, so inscrutable. In both, the same distance from beings and things, the same inflexibility, the same temptation to silence, to the final repudiation of the word, the same will to collide with frontiers never foreseen. In other ages, they would have been lured by the Desert. We know now that Wittgenstein at a certain point actually envisaged entering a monastery. As for Beckett, how easy to imagine him, some centuries back, in a naked cell, undisturbed by the least decoration, not even a crucifix. Do I digress? Just remember that remote, enigmatic, “inhuman” gaze of his in certain photographs.

  Granted, our beginnings matter, but we make the decisive step toward ourselves only when we no longer have an origin, when we offer as little substance for a biography as God. . . . It is both important and utterly unimportant that Beckett is Irish. What is dead wrong is to maintain (a French assertion?) that he is “the typical Anglo-Saxon.” Certainly nothing would displease him more. Is it his bad memories of his prewar stay in London? I suspect him of finding the British “vulgar.” This verdict that he has not passed — which I am passing for him as a shortcut to his reservations, if not his resentments — I could scarcely adopt for my own, especially because (a Balkan illusion, perhaps) the British strike me as the most devitalized and the most threatened nation, hence the most refined, the most civilized.

  Beckett, who oddly enough feels quite at home in France, has in reality no affinity with a certain dryness, an eminently French virtue, or at least a Parisian one. Is it not significant that he versified Chamfort? Not all Chamfort, of course; only a few maxims. The enterprise, remarkable in itself and in fact almost inconceivable (if we think of the absence of lyric impulse that characterizes the moralists’ skeletal prose), is equivalent to an avowal, if not a proclamation. It is always in spite of themselves that secret minds betray the depths of their nature. Beckett’s is so impregnated with poetry that it is inseparable from it.

  I find him as obstinate as any fanatic. Even if the world crumbled, he would not abandon the work under way, nor would he alter his subject. In the essential things, he is certainly not to be influenced. As for the rest, the inessential, he is defenseless, probably as weak as all of us, even weaker than his characters. . . . Before collecting these notes, I had intended to reread what Meister Eckhart and Nietzsche wrote, from their different perspectives, about “the noble man.” I have not carried out my project, but I have not forgotten for a single moment that I had conceived it.

  7

  Meeting the Moments

  IT IS NOT BY GENIUS, it is by suffering, by suffering only, that one ceases to be a marionette.

  When we fall under the spell of death, everything occurs as if we had known death in a previous existence, and as if now we were impatient to get back to it as soon as possible.

  Once you suspect someone of having the slightest weakness for the Future, you can be sure he knows the address of more than one psychiatrist.

  “Your truths make it impossible to breathe.”

  “Impossible for you,” I immediately replied to this innocent. Yet I might have wanted to add; “And for me, too,” instead of swashbuckling. . . .

  Man is not content to be man. But he doesn’t know what to revert to, nor how to recover a state of which he has no clear memory. His nostalgia for it is the basis of his being, and it is by such nostalgia he communicates with all that remains of what is oldest in himself.

  In the deserted church, the organist was practicing. No one else there, except a cat that wreathed itself around me. . . . Its eagerness was a shock: the inveterate tormenting questions assailed me. The organ’s answer did not seem satisfying to me, but in my condition, it was an answer nonetheless.

  The ideally truthful being, whom we are always permitted to imagine, would be someone who, at any moment, would not seek refuge in euphemism.

  Unrivaled in the worship of Impassivity, I have aspired to it frantically, so that the more I strained to achieve it, the further from it I found myself. A just defeat for a man who pursues a goal contrary to his nature.

  Man proceeds from one chaos to the next. This consideration is of no consequence and keeps no one from fulfilling his destiny — from acceding, in short, to the integral chaos.

  Anxiety, far from deriving from a nervous disequilibrium, is based on the very constitution of this world, and there is no reason why one should not be anxious at every moment, given that time itself is merely anxiety fully expanded, an anxiety whose beginning and end are indistinguishable, an eternally victorious anxiety.

  Under an incomparably desolate sky, two birds, indifferent to that lugubrious background, pursue one another. . . . Their obvious delight is more apt to rehabilitate an old instinct than the entire body of erotic literature.

  Tears of admiration: sole excuse for this universe, since one must be found.

  Out of solidarity with a friend who had just died, I closed my eyes and let myself be flooded by that semi-chaos preceding sleep. After a few minutes I began to realize that infinitesimal reality which still binds us to consciousness. Was I on the threshold of the end? A second later I was at the bottom of an abyss, without the slightest trace of fear. Then was no-longer-existing so simple? Probably, if death were only an experiment; but it is The Experiment. And what a notion, to play with a phenomenon that occurs but once! One does not test the unique.

  The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

  As if I didn’t have enough troubles, here I am harassed by those that must have been known to the caveman.

  We hate ourselves because we cannot forget ourselves, because we cannot think of anything else. It is inevitable that we should be exasperated by this excessive preference and that we should struggle to triumph over it. Yet hating ourselves is the least effective stratagem by which to manage it.

  Music is an illusion that makes up for all the others. (If illusion is a term doomed to disappear I
wonder what will become of me.)

  To no one is it vouchsafed, in a state of neutrality, to perceive the pulsation of Time. To achieve this, a malaise sui generis is necessary, a favor, proceeding from who knows where?

  When we have glimpsed vacuity and offered sunyata, a worship alternately patent and clandestine, we are helpless to ally ourselves with a personal, incarnated, paltry god. From another aspect, nakedness unscathed by any presence, by any human contamination, scoured of the very idea of a self, compromises the possibility of any worship whatever, necessarily linked to a whiff of individual supremacy. For as a hymn of Mahayana Buddhism has it, “if all things are empty, who is celebrated, and by whom?”

  Much more than time, it is sleep that is the antidote to grief. Insomnia, on the other hand, which enlarges the slightest vexation and converts it into a blow of fate, stands vigil over our wounds and keeps them from flagging.

  Instead of paying attention to the faces of people passing by, I watched their feet, and all these busy types were reduced to hurrying steps — toward what? And it was clear to me that our mission was to graze the dust in search of a mystery stripped of anything serious.

  The first thing I was told by a friend who had dropped out of sight for many years: though he had accumulated a stock of poisons over a long period, he had not managed to kill himself because he could not decide which one to take.