Company
At age seventy-five, Samuel Beckett is unquestionably established as a great writer and equally great presence. Like Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce, he personifies the integrity, dignity, and solitude of the profession of letters at its noblest. Like theirs, his is the compulsive ministry of great art, with no concessions to the bustling temptations of commercial life.
As a person, Beckett is reclusive, shy, mysterious, guarding his privacy as jealously as his works guard their essential meanings. Close friends swear to his genius for companionship once he has dropped his reserve. They testify to his wry humor, his remarkable ability to make those around him feel the better for his presence. Beckett’s published photographs, however, show dominant expressions of pain and sorrow: the famous aquiline profile, furrowed forehead, sparrow hawk eyes and cheeks, wide-eyed and anguished stare.
Beckett is an artist of nuance and scruple who is an exquisite stylist in English and French, usually writing each of his works in both languages. Although best known as a playwright and novelist, he has also written poetry, critical essays (on Joyce and Marcel Proust), radio plays, and scripts for films and television.
As a writer, Beckett is a metaphysical pointillist who specializes in rendering humanity’s dark-forest moods. The tone of his work is that of a calm and horrible lucidity which regards the storm of man’s violent rebellion as over, and all illusions of progress and stability as shattered. For him, agonizing chance and disorder rule the world, with man’s reason a ludicrously inadequate instrument for comprehending, let alone controlling it. The entire machinery of existence seems to be grinding to a halt. Words leave his characters’ mouths between pauses and in slow motion, as if each had to be lifted from a safe and smuggled into the light from a sparse stock. His scenery is either fossilized (the bare, gnarled tree of Waiting for Godot), or funereal (the ashcans of Endgame, urns of Play, mound of earth in Happy Days). Man is maimed and buried alive in these props, with Beckett dramatizing the degradation and mutilation of the body as his image for the withering away of the soul.
His plays and even more his fiction are ruminative, static, close-to-immobile. His characters usually lack motivated personalities, professions, social classes, personal histories, and intense passions. He depicts the death of Western civilization’s stock premises: parental and filial devotion, familial cohesion, sexual attraction, marital love, and belief in progress, empirical knowledge, and God’s caring presence. He is beyond (or beneath) any revolt or affirmation, insisting on intoning an elegiac, melancholic ode to Despair.
Beckett’s most recent works have been brief, cryptic, enigmatic—perhaps broken fragments of his apocalyptic vision. They have the effect of posthumous messages from the void. In That Time (1977), for example, the audience / reader of this short play confronts an old man’s head which does nothing but breathe. Three separate recordings of the man’s voice come to him “from both sides and above. They modulate back and forth without any break in general flow except where silence is indicated.” As in the brilliant Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), these are a trio of memorial fountains pouring treasured episodes from his past upon him: the feel of stones, of sunlight on a particular day, of a love, of a last departure. The general tone is tristful.
Company, Beckett’s most recent work, is a sixty-page fictional narrative which one hesitates to term either a tale or a novel. It, too, is an excavation of the past by way of episodes recalled to the present. A...
(This entire section contains 1468 words.)
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voice tells a speechless man the highlights (lowlights?) of his life. The reader is invited to imagine several persons, or at least personae: first, a man flat on his back in the dark. Then the voice he hears, his memory addressing him in the second person. Third, the narrator himself, “that cankerous other,” who warns the reader on the first page: “. . . by far the greater part of what is said cannot be verified.”
In this work, Beckett calls himself “Deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself. Deviser of himself for company. Leave it at that.” Is he—are we—at the mercy of conflicting memories, delusions, and distortions about the self? “Leave it at that,” the author repeats. “Confusion too is company up to a point. Better hope deferred than none.” He hastens to qualify even this smidgeon of optimism: “Till the heart starts to sicken. . . . Till it starts to break.”
Surprisingly helpful as a companion to Company is the only full-length biography of Beckett published to date: Deirdre Bair’s extensive 1978 study. For Company reveals itself as the author’s self-portrait in at least several of its reminiscent passages. Thus the voice tells the auditor: “You first saw the light of day the day Christ died”; twenty pages later, “You were born on an Easter Friday after long labour”; still later, “You first saw the light and cried at the close of the day when in darkness Christ at the ninth hour cried and died.” Bair tells the reader that Beckett insists on having been born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, “a date to which he has not discouraged scholars of his writing from attaching undue importance”—even though his birth certificate lists the date as May 13.
Bair reports that Beckett’s father, a bluff, robust, coarse businessman whom he adored, encouraged young Sam to strain his body with such athletic feats as dangerous sea-diving. In Company,You stand at the tip of the high board. High above the sea. In it your father’s upturned face. Upturned to you. You look down to the loved trusted face. He calls to you to jump. He calls, Be a brave boy. The red round face. The thick moustache. The graying hair. The swell sways it under and sways it up again. The far call again, Be a brave boy. Many eyes upon you. From the water and from the bathing place.
Bair writes that Beckett, when a boy, would pit his will against his mother’s by indulging in a perilous adventure that she had expressly forbidden him: Again and again he wouldclimb to one of the pine trees that towered over the house and . . . throw himself down, arms and legs spread-eagled, willing himself to fly, until the very end of his free fall, when he hoped fervently that one of the broad lower branches would stop him before he slammed into the ground.
In Company,You climb to near the top of a great fir. You sit a little listening to all the sounds. Then throw yourself off. The great boughs break your fall. The needles. You lie a little with your face to the ground. Then climb the tree again. Your mother answers Mrs. Coote again saying, He has been a very naughty boy.
Other vignettes (there are thirteen in all) cannot be paralleled in Bair’s biography, yet may well be as overtly autobiographical as those cited above. Perhaps the most painful memory concerns a hedgehog that the boy puts in an old hatbox which he places in a disused hutch, to give the hog warmth, security, and autonomy. The boy feels a glow of moral satisfaction with his good deed, however:. . . the next morning not only was the glow spent but a great uneasiness had taken its place. A suspicion that all was perhaps not as it should be. That rather than do as you did you had perhaps better let good alone and the hedgehog pursue its way. Days if not weeks passed before you could bring yourself to return to the hutch. You have never forgotten what you found then. You are on your back in the dark and have never forgotten what you found then. The mush. The stench.
This stench dominates what is recalled as an unloved, unloving childhood and youth. It is transferred toward the book’s end to the voice’s God, whom it calls “the crawling creator. Might the crawling creator be reasonably imagined to smell? Even fouler than his creature.” (One critic has called a typical Beckett hero a perverse Cartesian: “I stink, therefore I am.”)
Beckett’s vision of a befouled God crawling on all fours inevitably leads the narrative to a bleak conclusion: “God is love. Yes or no? No.” Moreover, such a stinking, supine God “. . . could not conceivably create while crawling in the same create dark as his creature.” Finally, with the auditor a defeated old man, the voice’s recall of painful vignettes concludes: “And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always were.” Then the last word, set off in isolation to end Company: “Alone.”
