Bair, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, was working toward her doctorate in 1971 when she blithely wrote Beckett, asking if she might do his biography. To the surprise of all, including very likely Beckett himself, a lifelong artful dodger of questions about his private life, he said what amounted to yes, but with peculiarly Beckettian ambivalence. (The word he perhaps most prefers in the world is “perhaps.”)
“He would not help me, he said, but he would not hinder me, either,” Bair writes in a preface. She met Beckett in Paris and he introduced her to some of his friends and wrote letters to foundations and libraries on her behalf, telling them all the same ambivalent yes. Bair, a former journalist, then spent six years reporting on and piecing together this tissue of agonies, miseries and pyrrhic triumphs that constitute Beckett’s life.
The result, says Bair, is not definitive, for she left out certain information on the private lives of Beckett and people close to him. Lack of time also kept her from seeing others with much more to say about the man. Even so, the book bears comparison to Richard Ellmann’s great biography of James Joyce, to which it is a companion piece, just as Beckett’s life is companionate to Joyce’s.
Ellmann refused to be interviewed by Bair for this work, very likely because Beckett so strongly disapproved of Ellmann’s treatment of Joyce (“He did not need to pry, to publish all those letters,” said Beckett vitriolically of Ellmann). So much more wondrous, then, is the Bair achievement, which extensively uses some three hundred letters Beckett wrote to an Irish scholar, Thomas McGreevy, in which Beckett detailed the whole inner core of his suffering, isolation and occasionally large, but more often small, joys over several decades. Without these letters, Bair admits, the biography would hardly be what it is. In Chapters Nine and Eleven, for instance, ninety-one out of 154 footnotes cite the McGreevy letters.
The book is probably full of other revelations, but one would have to read the hundreds of books about Beckett to be certain. One revelation of which this book’s advance publicity boasts is the story of his winning the Croix de Guerre for his years in the French resistance in Paris during World War II. He was also in the maquis in unoccupied southern France, which is also partially documented. “Boy Scout stuff,” Beckett said of these involvements, a typically modest attitude toward his own achievement. Only his wife and a fellow resister knew of his award, until it became public knowledge in 1975.
But we must believe that in spite of disdaining it, Beckett also valued it, as he valued his honorary doctorate of letters from his alma mater, Trinity College in Dublin (which he accepted in person), and the Nobel Prize (which he accepted in absentia). He yearned mightily for recognition for two and a half decades, even as he refused to court the marketplace. He yearned, too, for popular success, even as he wrote the most inaccessible works of any modern novelist except, perhaps, the author of Finnegans Wake.
Such a curious polarity helped keep him ill for a lifetime: hating his mother, the prime source of his trouble, at the same time he felt almost psychotically guilty for being separated from her. His relationship with his wife, Suzanne, whom he married in 1961 only to insure her inheriting his wealth, is comparable. They have been together since 1938, but have lived bizarrely separated lives (two telephones in the one house, with separate listings; her quarters furnished with the effulgence of a haute bourgeoise, his with the sparseness of a Trappist monk).
A major weakness of the Bair book is its delineation of Madame Beckett, who seems far more complex than the admittedly abundant detail makes her out to be, and clearly of extraordinary importance in Beckett’s life. She and he, Beckett admits, are the prototypes for Hamm and Clov in Endgame, and she floats significantly through the works he wrote after the war. But in the biography she is elusive, and we know there is more to her, a feeling we do not get, say, from Ellmann’s treatment of Nora Joyce.
But Madame Beckett is as private a person as her husband, and perhaps as idiosyncratic, and vulnerable. She refused to partake of his social life very early in their relationship, living only to care for him as a mate, rankled when she could not, passionately resenting his success, envying his fame, and also obsessively loyal to his every need.
But if the book fails to confront her fully, it deluges us with data and insightful appraisals of him. He was an isolated person from childhood (he felt he was not fully born, and his first memory, he claims, is prenatal). His family never understood him, or his overpowering drive to be a writer. They were ashamed of his early work (Whoroscope and More Pricks Than Kicks), on the basis of the titles alone. He exiled himself from them as best he could, living only off their meager dole.
Their Irish puritanism was as alien to him as their mercantile brains, yet he loved his father, and loved and hated his mother, and maintained a horrible but enduring, and in its own way loyal, relationship to them until they died. But his suffering for it all was equally enduring: he generated psychosomatic boils on his genitals, cysts in his anus, constipation, night sweats, nightmares, insomnia, colds, flu, pleurisy and mental breakdown. He had lifelong trouble with his teeth, mouth, heart and lungs. He had choking fits, and withdrew into the fetal position.
Psychoanalysis in London helped bring him partway out of his misery; distance from the family helped at other times. But even at the pinnacle of his success—winning the Nobel Prize—for months he was so physically debilitated by so many ills that his doctor could not operate on the glaucoma that was keeping him all but blind.
His works have always treated of prolonged and profound suffering, but not until the revelation of this biography have we been fully able to understand that that old bum Molloy, that nameless protagonist of The Unnameable, that sexless figure in How It Is, the Hamm and Clov of Endgame, and the Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting for Godot, who cannot go on, but who go on, are not only Beckett’s psychic projections, but the full, transported actuality of this extraordinary man’s extraordinary burden.
His subjects are failure (Murphy, his first novel, was rejected by forty-two publishers and sold six copies during its first year of publication in France), agony, despair and suffering. He has lived all his life in hell, and it steams up from the brimstone of every line he ever wrote.
Writing these lines has been his whole life. Women were conveniences; love didn’t exist, only sex. Friends were important but resistible, whiskey was invaluable, isolation essential. Yet only writing really sustained life for him, writing of a kind that came from a spelunker in the deepest caverns of the soul and the unconscious. Beckett was from the beginning an intellectual, a Proust and Dante scholar, a Joyce explicator, a student of Descartes and Schopenhauer. But he devalued intellectual writing all his life, once dismissing an Aldous Huxley novel as “unremittingly smart.”
He became famous in 1953 as a playwright (after a quarter century of struggle), but he plays this down, thinks of himself primarily as a novelist, and of theater as the therapy that helped him out of his fiction-writing block. He considers Godot a poor play that was written for money, and Endgame his masterpiece. He has a trunkful of unpublished and unfinished manuscripts which we may or may not have access to in time, and he continues to write even now, minimally, but significantly.
Bair closes her book with Beckett’s eloquent remark about this continuation of work: “I couldn’t have done it otherwise. Gone on, I mean. I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.”
We learn from the biography that Beckett’s work was an obsessive piling up of failures, which in time came to be viewed as qualified successes, or perhaps masterpieces. But one also derives from the story of this generous, self-denying, long-suffering, willful man that the final triumph is much more than exemplary compulsion, that it is a writer’s victory on that moral plane where we venerate the special few who never confuse obligation with commitment.
1978
The Lime Works:
Thomas Bernhard’s Citadel
Knowing i
t isn’t what it seems to be will help you penetrate Thomas Bernhard’s formidable novel The Lime Works. What it seems to be at first is a perverse, self-indulgent anti-novel. But it becomes a masterfully dense set of aesthetic, social and political metaphors about contemporary life, about art, about obsessive commitment to any thing—metaphors that open up to reinterpretation on second and third readings.
The novel is 1973’s Christmas present to literary exegetes and to readers in search of something besides narrative sweep. It is, to suggest a few interpretations, a parable about the death of archaic romanticism at the hands of soulless modernism, an attack on anarchy as ultimately self-destructive, an exposé of the bankruptcy of inhumane scholarship, a study of failure, a treatise on the imperfectibility of art, a probe of the symbiotic relation between the analytic and the poetic, an anatomy of an artist’s madness, a diagram of a marriage of inimical opposites—spirit and intellect, revolutionist and reactionary, Communist east and capitalist west—and a cautionary tale of the impotence of life stripped of sweetness. The book is none of these above. Neither is it a gothic horror tale that can stand independently of them, though it sometimes seems that. The metaphors are too frequently and obviously intrusive for any conventional story to survive. The book is a jungle of meaning, the opposite of simplistic allegory, and a major achievement because of this.
Set in rural Austria, the book’s central figures are Konrad (no other name), and Mrs. Konrad, his wife, no first name; her maiden name was Zryd. Konrad means bold or wise counselor, an irony, for his boldness and wisdom are revealed as negative examples of how to live and work. I don’t know what Zryd means.
Konrad has long since rejected his know-nothing capitalist family and its fortune and chosen a life of the mind. He turned autodidact and fixed on a book, The Sense of Hearing, as his life work. After much haggling with a nephew who controlled them, Konrad finally buys the defunct lime works, which has been in his family for centuries, and moves in. Designed as a lordly manor, with every architectural detail “the result of a thousand years of calculations,” the lime works are immense, with a vast number of subcellars, every decade seeing a new addition, “a superstructure tacked on, some part of it torn down.”
Each description of the place adds to its strangeness. Visitors approach it, then run from it. Its grillwork represents two centuries of bad taste. It is surrounded by ornamental shrubbery which Konrad removes as he installs new and heavier bars and locks. It stands as a citadel of privacy, of Spartan commitment, a prison, a dungeon of solitude few men could endure. It is hidden, accessible only from the east. It has been the scene of numerous murders.
As the novel begins, Konrad is still writing his book, as he has been for two decades. He has nothing to show but notes and false starts, for he is neurotically waiting for his distractions to end and the gush of final inspiration to begin. He has the entire book in his head and believes premature shaping through words will destroy it.
He has also just blown the head off his crippled wife with the Mannlicher carbine she kept strapped to her wheelchair. (The killing was done Christmas Eve. Konrad dragged the corpse through several rooms while planning to throw it out a window into the lake, but finally dragged it back to her bedroom and propped it up in the wheelchair. He then hid himself in a pit where police find him, his shoes “bloated with liquid manure.”)
The novel then becomes the oblique revelation of how and why Konrad and wife came to the lime works, how they lived there, why she died, what Konrad told several of the townsfolk. The story is a free-associated mass of hearsay, told by an unidentified life-insurance salesman who keeps quoting people he calls Fro, Wieser, the public works inspector and others. He often qualifies the sources of his story with comments such as “Konrad is supposed to have said,” and so there is doubt as to the accuracy of everything.
Bernhard deliberately keeps us emotionally distant from Konrad and willfully avoids traditional narrative style. The reader must endure Konrad-like distractions and suffer Konrad-like boredom, along with confronting Konrad’s long, sometimes brilliant, sometimes mad disquisitions on the masses, the individual, truth, violence, food, sounds, music, death and on—in order to get at Konrad’s deceptive character and the story behind the murder.
At first Konrad seems a despotic monster: “He recited to [his wife] a series of sentences with the short i sound, such as ‘In the Inn district it is still dim,’ a hundred times slowly, then a hundred times rapidly and finally about two hundred times as fast as possible in a choppy manner. When he was done he demanded an immediate description of the effect his spoken sentences had on her ear and her brain.”
He does this exercise regularly, sometimes for seven hours, giving his wife chronic earache, driving her into apathy. He makes notes on her responses but destroys the notes so no one can deduce his method.
His wife is equally batty. She sends him down every five minutes from her second-floor room to the cellar for a glass of cider, but insists he bring only one glass at a time, never a jugful that might save him a few trips. She also has been knitting him mittens for years, but unravels them as soon as she finishes them. Konrad loathes mittens and she knows it. But on she knits.
The wife, who is Konrad’s half-sister and was once a great beauty, is the embodiment of moribund romanticism in the austere modern age, the aristocracy left over after the revolution. She longs for the elegant life she had with her family in the town of Tolbach. Konrad loathes Tolbach. She yearns for the poetry of Novalis, the nineteenth-century German romanticist, but Konrad force-feeds her the politics of Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, who is his hero.
The two have traveled the world together, accumulating thousands of heirlooms and treasures, which have all (icons too: good-bye religion) been sold for survival money. But Konrad can’t bring himself to sell his wife’s maternal grandmother’s sugar bowl (receptacle of the sweet life, long gone) nor can he part with the Francis Bacon painting, for Bacon is another of his models.
“One had to be more than a mere medical man or a mere philosopher,” Konrad says elsewhere, coveting Baconian diversity. “To do this [his own book] it was absolutely necessary to be a mathematician and a physicist as well, that is to say, one should be a master of all natural science, as well as a prophet and a superlative artist.” His wife, awash in her anachronistic dilemma, doesn’t know whether her husband is a superb artist or a crackpot.
Thomas Bernhard is surely an artist. He is forty-two, Dutch-born, now Austrian, a poet and recipient of several literary prizes in Europe. His three earlier novels are Frost, Amras and Gargoyles, the latter published here in 1971. The Lime Works invites comparison with the run-on novels of Beckett. After page 12, the 241-page book consists of one solid paragraph. One sentence runs thirty-seven printed lines. Yet nothing is impenetrable or even syntactically obtuse, thanks to Sophie Wilkins’s always lucid and fluid translation from the German.
The comic element of Konrad’s mad commitment is rarely heightened by her, however. The verbal wit, the subtlety and dexterity of language that gives a Beckett paragraph a life all its own, is missing, and so Konrad’s behavior can be comic without being very funny. But wishing Bernhard and Miss Wilkins had Beckett’s gifts in addition to their own is greedy. What they offer in The Lime Works is more than enough for anybody: a Byzantine work of art.
1973
Players:
DeLillo’s Poisoned Flowers
“So where are we?”
“Who knows?”
“We’re inside,” Lyle said.
“That’s for sure.”
“It’s obvious.”
“It’s obvious because if we were outside the cars would be climbing up my back.”
“The outside world.”
“That’s it,” McKechnie said. “Things that happen and you’re helpless. All you can do is wait for how bad.”
Lyle didn’t know exactly what they were talking about …
What we have here is homage to the vapid i
ronies of Beckett and Pinter, but we are also in the middle of Don DeLillo’s remarkable new novel of menace and mystery, Players, a fastidious rejection of the modern age. The rejectors and rejectees are one and the same, Lyle and Pammy, a couple so hip they wonder if they’re too intelligent to stay functional; and they are—in the world their hipness mocks. “Modern-stupid” is Pammy’s view of it all.
She works for the Grief Management Council in the World Trade Center (“It Ends For Him On The Day He Dies—But You Have To Face Tomorrow”). Lyle is a broker on the floor of the stock exchange, loathes it, and amuses his friends with comedy routines he learns from records. The theater bores him (but not movies) and at home he has fun quick-flipping the television dial. They order dinner from Dial-A-Steak and argue over whose responsibility it is to buy an extra battery for the Italian clock. When Pammy gets angry at Lyle she cleans the apartment.
The book opens with an allegorical prelude DeLillo calls “The Movie,” which collects all the story’s principal characters, none of them named yet, on an airplane, watching a movie of a band of terrorists slaughtering several golfers on a fairway, a vicious scene accompanied by tinkly piano music suitable for a Buster Keaton movie. The contrast of blood and piano steeps the scene in “gruesomely humorous ambiguity, a spectacle of ridiculous people doing awful things to total fools.”
When the scene ends we are thrown into the real story—Lyle’s and Pammy’s empty lives—and the book threatens to become another witty send-up of hard-core sophistication. But on page 76, while Lyle is seducing a secretary from the office, he sees in her apartment a photo of her with a man who was recently shot on the stock exchange floor. Also in the photo is the man who shot him. The story instantly assumes a tantalizing new dimension in keeping with the prologue. The killing was connected to terrorists, and so, clearly, is this girl.