Man on a High Wire

...Beckett has taken the modern norm of the prose poem, its intensified little paragraphs, made them move internally with the awful rapidity of his own mind in the lithe body of his rhetoric, and keeps them moving sequentially through a mercilessly schematic parable of existence with a beginning, middle, and end...

...Nobody is in a position to dispraise Beckett lightly...

...Very well, he is aware, but what is one to do but shudder at his lapse when one reads "at the pitch of heaven's azure towering between its great black still spread wings the snowy body of I know not what frigate-bird the screaming albatross of the southern seas" and so on...

...Q, if he stays disconfused from theories of the universal human mind from Heraclitus to Jung, and wry, like a kind of Unholy Ghost, makes a very illuminating category or element in which to watch the works behave...

...By his use of the parable he has long managed to raise the novel above the document, and now, by an extreme simplification of story and a prose-poem paragraph supercharged with rhetorical movement, he has all but absorbed the novel into the lyric...

...Just now, in spite of an occasional "flop back into the past," I take him to be the most fiercely contemporary writer we have, and How It Is his current extremity...

...Beckett is naturally, as the most intelligent prose artist going in English, aware of this, and counts among his "mouldy old reliables" the "azure" patented by Mallarm...

...The book treats Beckett as first and pervasively a poet, dedicated less to ideas than to their grace of movement in sequence, and less even to that than to expressing his own acute sense of existence in his own voice...

...To technical criticism it contributes a most persuasive theory of a sort of core or matrix mentality, which the authors call Q, after a person in the French version of How It Is and defined only as quidam...

...The positing of Q, aside from working very well for distinguishing whose voice it is in any passage of Beckett, and aside from adding perhaps an 11th or 12th Muse, may be a considerable advance in the scientific description of the writing ego and its projections, if one cares at all about that...

...In any event, this book is not merely an introduction but points on...

...Beckett has really launched this work loose from historical apparatus, and we get an almost unmitigatedly present presentation of his original vision, on its own and on no authority...

...It is very good...

...That is of the lectern...

...Thus there are a few vulgarities of thought and of feeling, but on the whole this introduction of Beckett to the lay reader is remarkable for its elegance as well as its lucidity of exposition, and for its very subtle appreciations of quality...

...The rather crucial quidam turns out to be, as Beckett puts it in English, "some creature or other," but this version quite heightens the Q theory...

...And we end on the word "compassionate," which is, or was recently, of the daily press...

...and I observe this more in terror for an admirable man performing on the highest imaginable wire and grabbing, as he wobbles, for such makeshift "reliables" out of, not even his own past, but the past of Proust and Joyce...

...On the other hand, something alarming is revealed when what was translated by the authors of the Testament as "in my way" is translated by Beckett as "after my fashion"—which is literal Dowson, and a bad sign...

...Be that old squabble as it may, in this work Beckett has progressed even farther in his quasi-saintly denudation of means and matter, and reached a point of direst temptation, namely the esthetical manner of the '90s...

...By accident, the authors had only the French text of How It Is to go on, and now that it has been translated into English by Beckett himself it appears that there are some slight differences between what he meant and what they supposed he meant...

...Let me say, before going on to carp and deplore, that How It Is is a magnificent book, on several major counts...

...author, "Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work" An objective appraisal of The Testament of Samuel Beckett, no...

...I have an increasing prejudice, lay as it may be, for the actual as against the suggested, so that, even if the authors are more attentive than I am to orchestras of meaning addressed to the learned, I rejoice that they do insist on the primacy of the melodic or tenor meaning— on which line I am perfectly sure Beckett's greatest value depends after all, and along which his peculiar incandescences arrive...

...These parts are: before Pirn, with Pirn, and after Pirn, meaning the solitary crawling of an aged Beckett clown, or Q, through a Dantesque mud of existence until he meets a companion or victim, Pirn, then the grotesque and perverse coupling of the two clowns in the mud, and finally, after the desertion by Pirn, the continued crawling of the first old clown toward a companion who will be, this time, not his victim but his tormentor...

...But these are occasional faults or terrors, and do not interfere with what is the major accomplishment of the book: a trenchant and sustained solution to what I think is the most besetting problem of expression in writing today—the coalescence of lyric and narrative...

...In terms of form, I take this work as an event at least parallel to Tasso's absorption of the romance into the lyric register or to Pushkin's resumption of the novel into the lyric forms and manners of Eugene Onegin...

...Q is the mentality whose aspects or episodes are not only the major heroes and clowns of the plays and novels but Beckett himself through all his mercurialities...

...This book keeps that foremost, most of the time...

...I cannot resist saying that Beckett seems to be passing from the elaborated historical temporality of his masters Joyce and Proust to the nearly absolute present of the opposing school, Gertrude Stein...

...But no critic is without pedantry —nor indeed is Beckett, when clowning with his intellection or when playing it straight—so we can be told that "Beckett's main concern, like that of any great writer, is to define man...

...The authors, one a poet and the other a professor of English, write for "the intelligent lay reader," with a focus on the immediacies of writing, not on the implicit theological or historical or etymological lore which graduate students and the experts of ambiguity take for the substance...

...But history will take care of Samuel Beckett's historical importance...

...the book is too congenial...

...While keeping some faint allusions to the earlier props of his perspective, the Dantesque or Augustinian catastrophic view of man, along with the ironic pathos of the music-hall clown...

...Most of the work is in a mathematical purity of manner, and such purple flourishes are no doubt meant to disconcert when they come, but there they are, and they are dreadful, as are passages or "little scenes," as he calls them, where he lets loose his Irish sentimentality on dying women, flowers, and the like...

...Well over two thirds of it says with eloquence and precision what I had been dimly thinking, and where I disagree I do so more than reasonably...

...I think that sense, expressed in that voice, has been the most vivid and irresistible revelation we have had for the past decade in English...

...Reviewed by DONALD SUTHERLAND Professor of Classical Literature, University of Colorado...

...It is a simple enough narrative, in spite of flashbacks to a life "in the light," and provides a very strict and heightening frame or metronomic measure to the intricately wayward movements of the monologue in which the story is told, with a more poignant lyricism than I think Beckett has yet managed, outside of certain passages of the plays...