Anathemas and Admirations (36 page)

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 in 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

I
T 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.