Samuel Beckett. Eugene Webb
silence, or nonbeing.
Beckett’s first published story, ‘Assumption’ (1929),6 does not define the problems of human existence in much detail, but it does describe the desire to escape from them. The nameless protagonist, disgusted with the life force that makes him and others go on thinking, talking, and living, tries to stifle all sound, all his mental processes, thereby damming up into a ‘flesh-locked sea of silence’ a reservoir of vital energy that he feels threatens to rebel, burst forth, and destroy him. The possibility of his destruction both appeals to him and frightens him. Like so many of Beckett’s other characters, he is torn between the desire to die and a persistent, irrational fear of dying.
Then ‘the Woman’ comes to him. Far from reawakening his desire to live, she only drives him further from life. Her fatuity and her ‘charming shabbiness’ annoy him sufficiently that her presence diminishes little by little ‘the unreasonable tenacity with which he shrank from dissolution.’ As he becomes progressively more detached from life, he enjoys periods of a certain mental release, what Murphy would later call the ‘Belacqua bliss,’ but this offers no enduring peace because it only lasts for short periods, after which he has to return to the torment of ordinary consciousness:
Thus each night he died and was God, each night revived and was torn, torn and battered with increasing grievousness, so that he hungered to be irretrievably engulfed in the light of eternity, one with the birdless cloudless colourless skies, in infinite fulfilment.
Permanent release can be found only in death. Finally in a sudden explosion, ‘a great storm of sound, shaking the very house with its prolonged, triumphant vehemence,’ he dies. The woman is left behind alone, ‘caressing his wild dead hair.’
The next important work of fiction Beckett published was More Pricks than Kicks (1934).7 Actually this work is something between a novel and a collection of short stories. It was based or another novel that Beckett abandoned, ‘Dream of Fair to Middling Women.’ The ‘Dream’ was about the same central character, Belacqua Shuah, and a few sections of it were incorporated in more or less revised forms into the later volume.8 Although two of the sections of More Pricks than Kicks, ‘Dante and the Lobster’ and ‘Yellow,’ have been published separately as stories in their own right, the book really seems more like a novel than like a mere collection of stories since the stories all focus on the same character and together relate his life in chronological sequence from his student days to his burial.
As was mentioned earlier, Beckett’s Belacqua, like Dante’s, is ‘sinfully indolent, bogged in indolence’ (p. 44). Like Beckett, too, perhaps: Peggy Guggenheim called Beckett ‘Oblomov’ after the indolent protagonist of Goncharov’s novel, and she says that when she had him read the book he too saw the resemblance between himself and the Russian writer’s inactive hero.9 If Beckett was painting a self-portrait in Belacqua, or a portrait of certain aspects of himself, it was not, however, a self-indulgent portrait. The narrator’s attitude toward Belacqua is actually, as will appear in the discussion that follows, very critical.
Belacqua is indeed indolent. He claims to be an author, but he has never published anything. He spends most of his life just wandering around avoiding work and any entanglements with other people that would demand much expenditure of energy on his part. He is completely self-centred. In the first story, ‘Dante and the Lobster,’ his principal preoccupation is his lunch, which can be enjoyed only in complete privacy. Although he thinks occasionally about a murderer named McCabe, who is to be hanged, the pity he likes to think he feels is really very superficial. He spreads out the newspaper with McCabe’s face staring up at him, and proceeds to prepare on it his all-important sandwich. ‘The crumbs,’ says the narrator, ‘as though there were no such thing as a sparrow in the wide world, were swept in a fever away’ (p. 4). In ‘Ding Dong,’ while out for a walk, he sees a little girl run down by a car, but is completely indifferent; he just walks right on by.
The type of isolation from humanity that these instances represent is one of the important themes of the book. Belacqua’s isolation is due in part to the basic inability, intrinsic in human nature, of any two individuals to adequately communicate their inner lives to one another. This is another idea Beckett shares with Proust. In the second story, ‘Fingal,’ for example, when Belacqua takes one of his girl friends, Winnie, for a walk, their moods vary, but they never coincide—‘Now it was she who was sulky and he who was happy’ (p. 26)—and their responses to the countryside, which Belacqua is especially fond of, are completely divergent and drive them further apart: ‘He would drop the subject, he would not try to communicate Fingal, he would lock it up in his mind’ (p. 27).
Primarily, however, Belacqua’s isolation is by preference. The same story, ‘Fingal,’ ends with Belacqua leaving Winnie with a Dr Sholto, stealing a bicycle—like many of Beckett’s later characters, Belacqua loves bicycles—and sneaking off to solitude in a pub: ‘Thus they were all met together in Portrane, Winnie, Belacqua, his heart, and Dr Sholto, and paired off to the satisfaction of all parties’ (p. 36).
It seems to be mainly out of indolence that Belacqua chooses his isolation. Interpersonal relations, especially where women are involved, can demand rather a lot of energy. Sexual relations, to Belacqua, are more exhausting than pleasurable. When he becomes engaged to another of his girl friends, Lucy, he tries to persuade her to take a lover so that he might be spared the labor of sexual intercourse and be free to devote himself entirely to the less demanding erotic gratifications of what he calls ‘private experiences’ and ‘sursum corda’ (p. 150), that is, spying on lovers copulating in the woods. ‘Corda is good,’ thinks Lucy to herself. Although Lucy rebels at his suggestion that their life together be ‘like a music’ while she is the wife in body of another, the problem settles itself when she is hit by a car and crippled for life. Forced to be sexless, their marriage is indeed ‘like a music’ until her death a year or so later.
In spite of his attachment to his solitude, however, Belacqua shows a limited but definite need for fellowship. Although his sorrow at Lucy’s death seems characteristically egocentric—‘he tended to be sorry for himself when she died’ (p. 161)—he also seems to sense that in losing her he lost something more valuable than merely an easy life: the narrator tells us that Belacqua felt keenly ‘the lack of those windows on to better worlds that Lucy’s big black eyes had been.’ And there is also the fact that he marries not just once during the book but three times. He may have married Thelma née bboggs, his next wife, mainly for her father’s money, but from the impassioned tone of the love-letter in ‘The Smeraldina’s Billet-doux,’ from ‘the Smeraldina,’ a German girl who becomes his last wife, it sounds as if there must have been some emotion between them. Even the Smeraldina, of course, finds it difficult to understand Belacqua’s disinterest in sex—‘why can’t he give that what I have been longing for for the last six months?’ (p. 221)—and she is shocked by what sounds as if it must be a suggestion on Belacqua’s part that she too take a cicisbeo, but there is nothing in the book to suggest that Belacqua marries her for money as he had Thelma. He seems simply to need company. He likes to think of himself as above the need to communicate with others, but in this as in many other matters, he overestimates himself: ‘. . . his anxiety to explain himself,’ says the narrator, ‘. . . constituted a break-down in the self-sufficiency which he never wearied of arrogating to himself . . .’ (p. 45).
Probably the main reason Belacqua needs communication with others is that it can serve as a temporary distraction from a basically burdensome existence. In Proust, Beckett spoke of friendship in Proust’s thought as one of those mechanisms of habit, ‘somewhere between fatigue and ennui’ (Proust, p. 47), by which a person tries to protect himself from the fundamental pain of life. Many of Beckett’s other characters also use social relationships in this way. Molloy, for example, several novels later, out of ‘craving for a fellow’ (Molloy, p. 19), sets out in quest of his mother, though he has no idea what he will say to her or ask from her when he finds her. Malone, in Malone Dies, thinks of trapping a little girl for company. In Waiting for Godot, Didi and Gogo talk continually of splitting up, but they cannot bring themselves ever to do it. In almost all of Beckett’s central characters there is a clearly visible conflict between the ‘craving for a fellow’