'this is truly dreadful stuff': Paul Muldoon on Beckett's Letters and Poetry
We're always hoping for some unearthed treasure to add to the Beckett canon, as we've pointed to here and here. And how joyed we've been as Beckett's Selected Letters have been rolling out in three volumes, and now add to the shelf a new critical edition of his Collected Poems with previously unpublished material. At the New York Times on Friday, Paul Muldoon surveys the latest volume of letters and the new edition of Beckett's poems. Muldoon writes:
For much of Beckett’s work sets itself against something, be it turning up his nose at the self-delighting verbal high jinks that he refers to as “the stink of Joyce,” or turning his back on the conventions of the narrative arc and dramatic action. The letters collected here come in the wake of the success, in 1955, of the English version of “Waiting for Godot,” the play in which, according to the critic Vivian Mercier, “nothing happens, twice.” One of the few things that do happen is that the tree that’s barren in Act I develops some foliage in Act II. But, as the high priest of lessness writes to the director Jerzy Kreczmar of the 1957 Warsaw production — “The tree is perfect (perhaps a few leaves too many in the second act!)” — even that mustn’t be overstated.
The contradictory nature of Beckett is everywhere in evidence here. On one hand there’s the fastidiousness about the “leaves too many.” On the other is the fierce self-deprecation and disengagement, whereby “Watt” is “my regrettable novel,” " ‘Godot’ was written either between ‘Molloy’ and ‘Malone’ or between ‘Malone’ and ‘L’Innommable,’ I can’t remember,” and, about his radio play “Embers,” “Hate the sight of it in both languages.”
While Muldoon finds much to admire in Beckett's letters, he's less impressed with his poetry (to put it mildly):
Like so many of Beckett’s poems, and unlike any of his prose or drama, [“Whoroscope”] has a half-done quality. The main problem is twofold. To begin with, Beckett has almost no sense of how a line functions in verse making. To describe his line breaks as arbitrary would be a kindness. The second, related difficulty is that he is fatally under the sway of his contemporaries in Irish modernism, notably Thomas MacGreevy, who seem to understand the idea of representing fracture but without the concomitant need for some sort of fusion and farrier-work. Opening “The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett” at random, one comes upon this:
My cherished chemist friend
lured me aloofly
down from the cornice
into the basement
drew bottles of acid and
alkali out of his breast
to a colourscale
accompaniment
(mad dumbells spare me!)
fiddling deft and expert
with the double jointed
nutcrackers of the hen’s
ovaries
“Mad dumbells spare me” indeed! I think it’s fair to say that were Beckett’s name not hovering around in its vicinity, this poem would not be published by Grove Press or anyone else. The idea that this edition might include “previously unpublished” material begins to seem more of a threat than a promise! Beckett’s self-disparaging 1957 letter to Eva Hesse on her translation of his poems into German (“You have my heartfelt sympathy”) is not at all misplaced.
Read on over at the New York Times.