Response
It was my plan to write an essay on Samuel Beckett, specifically his novel Molloy. Don’t you know Guy Davenport called Molloy one of the six best books written since 1927? I had also planned to write an essay on Guy Davenport some years back. I did start it.
Beckett began Molloy on May 2, 1947 and finished on November 1 of the same year. According to Beckett’s authorized biographer, he wrote most of the book in a friend’s villa in Garavan, a town in the south of France, near Italy. Actually the book was begun in Ireland just after his mother died. It was my idea to put information like this into my Beckett essay, just as soon as I started writing it. But then my ten-year-old son Vincent asked me to take him outside to walk in the snow.
I started to write the Davenport essay when we were in the North country. Specifically, I sat in a green plastic deck chair I had brought down from the cottage and placed on the retracting plank to the property’s small dock, while I watched the water and made notations, my way of beginning. My wife had taken Vincent and his friend, another nine-year-old, to a nearby water park. That nine-year-old’s parents, Ray and June, went off to the Wickerbasket festival a few towns over. Vincent loved their son — name of Tad or Thad. He had a lisp. So did Vincent and Ray and June. My wife does not have a lisp.
I’d come up with a title for the Beckett essay, which is odd because I hadn’t written a word and I usually don’t title things until after I’ve completed them. “Nearer My Molloy Than Thee.” I worried about the reception of that title. It alludes to, or rather, rips off Manny Farber’s “Nearer My Agee Than Me,” containing an account of his relationship to James Agee — they were both famous film critics, you see. It is more widely known as a 19th Century Christian hymn, “Nearer My God to Thee,” ultimately derived from the Bible. I like the Bible. It’s held up.
I planned to parse a sentence from Molloy in the essay, to talk about it at length, probably in long, quasi-erudite sentences that try but fail to improve on the great art and architecture that is a Beckett sentence — though translated, but into his first language, often by himself. The presence of his work in mine would leave my already bloated creation deformed, giving picture proof of how I really desired to take all the art out of Beckett’s sentence so I could get attention for what I was saying, though no one would be reading an essay on Beckett because I wrote it, they’d be reading because it was about him, his artful creations. The main protein, or what I wrote, was essentially filler, with the quotations the bejeweled content. Few want to read books, long or short, anymore, they want sentences, quotable potables. Take out those cornerstones, what need be structure? Then they quote and share them in the accepted delusion that they had some part in the authorship of the sentence because they had rescued it from burial in a broken book and pasted it onto the internet under their name. These facts didn’t dishearten me. I happen to know there is still a minor market for Beckett essays among serious scholars.
I had four sentences I thought I might refer to and then parse from the Grove Weidenfeld omnibus edition of Beckett’s Trilogy. One on pages 46, 48-9, 100-1, 103, and 118. Make that five. Also one from Beckett’s last long English prose piece, Company, about a hedgehog. It would have been as a corollary to what Beckett wrote thirty years earlier, how he unfolded.
We trudged into the snow, not many other verbs for it, and I asked him how things were going. What things? I don’t know —school, what you think about different types of cuisines these days. He said, I like limousines.
When Vincent was very young, not yet one, his mother and I had trouble being conjugal. He asks a lot of us. That was my joke for it then. She’d say, He does so sotto voce. Fully, indefatigably, her joke, her addition — though I preferred she not say it, and after a while, as I turned it out, she uttered it less and less. Finally we had to embark on what is colloquial described as a “date night.” We haven’t had a “date night” in many years. The last time we made love, she dropped her clothes too quickly. Barren trees — I watched them sway outside our bedroom window. We’d each taken the day off work while Vincent rumbled about in kindergarten. I went away from the moment as well, pretending we were on a boat, rocking. The overlay didn’t help. What happened following destroyed us more. The silence after male orgasm. What is it like for them? I held her. My hand clasped her shoulder. Her filmy green eyes staring straight up — a fount of censure.
Alone, at the cottage — I mean on the dock by the cottage, the plank — I wrote, “Guy Davenport, literary and political descendant of Thoreau, maintained a socio-political outlook too complex to be comprehended by those now called the intelligentsia. He detested George W. Bush, celebrated utopias, and bluntly said, ‘What got Kipling a bad name among liberals is his intelligence, humor, and affection. These they cannot tolerate in anybody.’” I myself am apolitical. I wanted to send Vincent to a school that pretended there was no U.S. Government. There are a few of these. The principals smoke cigarettes and make jokes about pudding. I wrote some more sentences on that plank. A distant lobster boat motored into the bay and stopped by the lobster pens denoted by white and blue buoys. It was mid-day and I thought it strange they were doing what supposedly gets taken care of at dawn and dusk. But it was a pirate lobster boat! They were stealing lobsters. I dialed the authorities. This is only a minor reason why I could never get the Davenport essay into a good place.
In my youth I walked with my father in the snow. I told Vincent this. I said, I tramped with my father in the snow when I was your age, younger. I like to use words as lures. I don’t have to try very hard, he is the inquisitive sort. At his school friend’s birthday party, he asked a school friend’s mother why she made her chest bigger, as she had obvious breast implants. I did not attend this party. If I had I am sure we would not be invited to barely anything else. So the mothers believe me to be an essayist who likes big-breasted women.
I was in a park with my father, like Vincent and I. Five or six then. What is age? You’re old only when you kneel. Dad said a word — frost. The cereal, dad! The cereal! Get me those flakes! Once, I was excitable. He swung his head slowly. Bold sun. In front of us a large tree’s freeze-dripping icicles, frozen glowing by the light. An outside chandelier? I didn’t want to understand anything but just keep with the tree — or that’s my best guess at what I felt. Him? Hold me or hit me, I wished.
Let us begin with difficulties.
Vincent and I watched some sledders on a steep but short hill. I never see children wear black snowsuits. I should get out more. Go to Philadelphia. There were some shredded pieces of damp cardboard nearby. I pointed, to demonstrate the primeval body language that will be more utilized when Vincent enters the dating world. He shot his hand out, a back-handed slapping motion — meaning no. He’s good. I admire improvisation. It will help him when he enters the dating world.
I met a colleague in a hotel bar at the Conference for the Essayists of the Americas. I didn’t know she was a colleague until we’d spoken for some minutes. I refer to all other essayists as my colleagues. It gives me a special feeling, and such feelings help get me through the day. I’ve been told I have a vague Europeanish aspect to my face. Call me Jacques, I said to her. Jacques is my wife’s step sister’s husband’s name. We never see them. They live in Tampa. I didn’t explain how I adapted the name, I didn’t need to. People always lie when you meet them.
Rereading a feminist novel the other day, I arrived at a passage and then copied it out. “I thought if he was making bread with this woman there must be something between them and it was probably all over for him and me, considering how badly things had been going before I left.” I dubbed this, A Short History of Break-ups, but that center word was too broad. I wanted something more piquant. I kept looking at that sentence. Then I went into the kitchen and ripped off a piece of baguette.
Back to Beckett. I’ve heard that phrase so much in my career, or my life. I’ve heard it more than I’ve heard the great intimacies: I love you, I hate you, Give me some money. I was to make the essay an epigrammic work — that’s my word for it. But I wanted to quote some controversy. Some writer of repute summarized Beckett’s feelings thus, “… [he] describes language as a veil that the modern writer needs to tear apart if he wants to reach what lies beyond … Gertrude Stein, with her minimalist verbal style, has the right idea, whereas Joyce is moving in quite the wrong direction …” Another reputed author said, “there are two very different strands of innovation in American fiction. One can be traced, roughly, back to Joyce (Ulysses in particular) and involves a kind of excessive maximalism and lots of pyrotechnics … The other strand for me is traced back to Beckett and Kafka, who manage to do amazing things with language but also aren’t really interested in being impressive. Those works don’t say ‘Look at me’; instead they get down to the very serious business of figuring something out, of following and pursuing a line, and then don’t mind cutting out the noise of other things that don’t feel relevant. They’re modest in one way, incisive and deadly in another. I tend to think if more American writers ended up reading Beckett, and Molloy in particular, it’d shift the American sense of what experiment is.” I wanted these views to be not so complementary, rather to antagonize one another. I expected a chorus of free negative publicity for the piece because A. I’m a neo-academic essayist, B. I’m not well regarded, C. I’m not well-liked personally, and D. There’s a widely viewed YouTube clip of me drunkenly crying, really weeping, about a writer I love dying and so being disqualified from ever winning the Nobel Prize — someone would inevitably link to it, making viral again that which had been dormant. I know literary fiction has gotten more minimal, more epigrammic, like Emerson without the wisdom or the music. Minimalism carries the day because it’s easier to see profundity in white space. Less is pretty much more and more a chore —do it with less, like being struck in love at first sight. Well, hell, less emotion in relationships is more. Less affection, less approbation — you get to keep the other person wanting more, which is what is needed. There is never balance, there is surfeit or scarcity. The needy person needs, the aloof keeps aloof and loofs, in better, more imbricated ways to dazzle him or her in the vast stretches of time and memory their aloofness affords them. Like the needy person, it’s all about their own ego, the prevarications naturalize the aloof’s attractions to himself. Back to Beckett.
I need to read V. Woolf’s Flush, a dog biography, even though I’m a cat person.
I couldn’t write anymore after the pirate lobster boat incident, couldn’t look at the water with all the police and Coast Guard boats streaming around. I went back to the cottage, walked the deck, and briefly studied a wasp’s nest under an eave. The welcome note from the owner’s said: Please leave the wasps and the wasp’s nest alone, we prefer a peaceful, bucolic relationship with them. I went into the shed out back. They called it The Beaver. Smell of gasoline and turbines, even if I couldn’t find a turbine, nor would I ever find one in such a space. I drummed my fingers on the old ping-pong table, before removing my moleskin from my heartsided pocket. I began to write a goodbye letter.
In the surround of snow I was being silent with him, him with me. It suited us. It fitted. Attached, easily, like something sincerely synthetic. The best word for silence is no word.
What makes you tic Jacques? I wanted to tell my colleague at the hotel bar about the last time I made love to my wife, but then I thought to tell her about my father. Or mother. Since she said her father had just visited her. We were in wine.
I appeared in the 1989 edition of Best American Essays.
Davenport on writing: “At Duke I took Prof Blackburn’s Creative Writing course … and got the wrong impression that writing is an effusion of genius and talent. Also, that writing fiction is Expression of significant and deep inner emotion. It took me years to shake off all this. Writing is making a construct, and what’s in the story is what’s important. And style: in what words and phrases the story is told.”
Never knew such silence.
My colleague — Hannah being her name — my colleague recapitulated the important moments of her rather young life. The mother’s death, lost love, regrets — and regrets not to be meaner, more honest but in a mean way. This is exactly what I wanted to do with you, I said in my head. Soon, I began to breathe in a way I wasn’t accustomed to. I had to draw quickly into the nose because my mouth wouldn’t work. I couldn’t open my mouth. This was wine? Who do you love in the last moments? 800 miles away, my wife. Both out too far and not too deep. I dropped. The questions I couldn’t answer, the essays I couldn’t write — all these ideas shouted down on me as I stared up from the floor, a small crack in my head. I couldn’t reach my moleskin because my arms wouldn’t stop shaking. I continually jerked my head on a diagonal toward it, hoping she would catch me out. This could be a gran mal! a fat hovering man said. I’ve seen it before. Hannah! The moleskin!
In over thirty years of published work, I have used “chilblain” only twice, both times in the first of those years.
On our boat bed, touching. She used to point out a tree, the colored light on a building. Look at that, she’d say.
Oh, say it one more time.
We don’t really need people in the same way we once did. I still walk into old cheerless bars after a day at the desk, the kind of bar with sawdust on the floor. Okay, they don’t exist. A wine bar. 5:30 in the winter. Everyone has high-heeled boots on, everyone. There’s the forty-something in a torn dress, with greasy red locks pulled back by three antique hairpins. She’s drinking a brittle house wine. Before the phones, she used to page through the bar’s dictionary, waiting for someone to notice or for a boyfriend to show. I prefer a table, my back provided for. I have no go-to jocular mood. The fading light, the bartender who knows his reds (sure he does), the passing cars, loud groups — someone wearing an incredibly expensive jacket. Another man sees what I see, leading him to gold. I’m the donkey burdened by heavy dated saddlebags.
Most people don’t want to be reminded they are forever keeping appointments they never made. They want a reversible madman. He who’s calm and direct, telling you what your mind often teases. Boom. And you are hurt. You respect people who hurt you, but only years later.
Why are all the other fathers younger than me? Because I wisely waited until I had enough money.
We transferred to a well-trodden path. The crows in the trees were fuming. I break and tell Vincent about Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow painting. I went to study in Vienna one summer when I was young. There it was. Four-hundred and fifty years old. A rich merchant banker paid him to paint it. Vincent asks, How much money is it worth? Now? It’s priceless. Do you mean it’s not for sale?
At the hospital the nurses kept asking me why the woman who came with me in the ambulance kept calling me Jacques when my official information holds a different name.
My favorite line by Guy Davenport? “My cat does not know me when we meet a block away from home, and I gather from his expression that I’m not supposed to know him, either.” See, I told you I was a cat person.
If ever someone would show me hidden moments of my life, when I wouldn’t share my food with my wife, I think I’d die a final time. I have been loved by something strange and it has forgotten me, she quoted. I did not share my food until she told me she didn’t love me. Wait. I shared my food until she told me she didn’t love me. When she told me she didn’t love me, I stopped eating.
The local papers covered my youthful accident. As legend goes, the few park attendants working used the backs of sandpaper to staunch the blood flow from my forehead, actually right in the infamous palace of the third eye. Mother looked behind me, at him. Down a hill and into a rock? A boulder. What? There was snow, ice. Frost, dad.
I don’t play games of idolatry.
And just before I ate another slice of pizza, mother said, If you don’t solve your problems with me now, you’re going to have trouble with women for the rest of your life.
Did it hurt? Vincent asks after sticking his pinky in the dent of my dough, the fifty-year old scar. Next he’ll say, Does it hurt? I don’t remember. It was cold, though. And bright. I remember that. You might find when you grow up that memories fracture. You remember bits and pieces — long stretches of childhood are just … faint, floating in and out. Maybe that’s why we yearn for it so helplessly. You mean you “want” it? Back? Yes. In a way. Unless it was horrible. He jogged ahead, skipped a little. I want to be old. I want to drive. If you’re here you wouldn’t drive much — I mean, with the subway. You can think I’m an asshole, son — just don’t say it. I should be writing the Beckett essay, then I wouldn’t be so angry because writing essays is an expression of deep inner emotion for me. It prevents me from dwelling on the world’s cruelty — a process bringing out mine. To be whole again beyond confusion. Davenport, vastly underread, dependent on and in favor of sex with boys, was a curmudgeon. Beckett, shy of life, had widespread acclaim and money he freely gave away. Some old mouse on the internet is convinced Davenport misrepresented himself to Beckett years before they met. Oops, my son just fell down a hill. Come on, up and Adam, be a sport about it. He’s crying. Someone has their phone out. Please. Don’t call the police.
People who adore the avant-garde and make fun of Robert Frost or Winslow Homer for their supposed homey romanticism — I was one of these people … up until now.
You know Frank, he’s a cold person. I do know Frank. We only see him in different hours.
It’s difficult for me to make love anyway. No, I get it. Make it to remake it, to reshape it, not to mention, embody. A therapist once told me many people picture others when they made love to their primary or one and only. Why didn’t I ever think of that? I joked. She would know. Privately, I found it pointless. When one person wants to leave, the relationship is over. I have let her go — and I remain. I’d hardly see him otherwise.
I remember recovery more than the blood, the sticky feeling of the wound. Placed onto the large downstairs bed, reminding of how special the calamity. Felt good to be fretted over. Mother brought down Teddy, the teddy bear. Always regretted naming him so. Buy me another. With Teddy, I would touch my nose, touch my toes. With Teddy, I kept all else at bay. It was an accident, dad, okay? Could have happened to anybody. He looked at me differently from then on. Nobody had failed each other, but we’d passed an unprepared-for marker. Days later, a movie came on. A little boy’s parents die in the wilderness. An old man finds him and helps him to survive for a while. The old man will die, too. The boy will live on. As one stone, we watched.
Strange city. She came a day later, after my wife hung up the phone. I’ll still stick with the Jacques. As you wish. I’m to be released tomorrow. She’d brought me her book of essays. Said, You know I knew, the ring on your finger … from the start. I’d wanted her to say anything, just not that. I didn’t even dream of kissing you, woman. Let’s leave my head out of this.
He lived in a Paris apartment. With a house in Ussy sur Marne. “Great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse …” Gave money to Djuna Barnes. He’d read she’d fallen on … hard …. An antiquarian bookseller in New York still owed him some money. College days, each morning I gave a dollar to the old humpbacked man. Frumpled, ancient clothes straight out of Beckett. Oh, thank you sir, thank you. Would leave and get a coffee. Come back, standing again. Hit by a car one night. Formerly, he’d been someone. Where did that family go? Band of us built a memorial, steel plate in the sidewalk, approved by the city. Visiting last year, I saw it had vanished.
Used up most of the moleskin, then ripped the pages out, found an envelope in the house. Deposited, licked, turned over, hovered with nib pointed. “To be opened in the year ___” Intentionally blank. Who am I kidding?
“Nearer My Cat Than Thee”
He lived in Lexington, Kentucky. Did not drive. Liked Mike Leigh films, in addition to his devotions to literature and the fine arts. Wrote thesis on Ezra Pound’s first thirty cantos. Hugh Kenner — most cherished friend colleague, both orbiting Pound during their prosaic academic lives, though Kenner a little closer to that Renaissance man, his stained soul. Devoted books to each other, reviewed each other’s books. Their massive thirty-five year correspondence fell off in the last ten years of shared life for reasons certainly not to be found in the letters, now buried with the departed souls. Kenner in his last letter: “We’ve been separated for too long …”
I have hidden a masque somewhere in our home. Arriving back late one night, all asleep, I walked with it balanced in my hands. The desk from father had a locked portion I slid open. Stored it in a white Chinese food takeout bag. I say “somewhere” because it is no longer where I locked it, though I have the only key. Maybe I succeeded only in hiding it from myself.
I want a beginning without weather, but that’s the best start my mind has to offer. August heat, the sky dimmed by clouds on their way to charcoal. I am a simple man — if I said that I wonder if you would agree.
Our last dinner, appropriately at a restaurant we shared an antipathy for, though Vincent liked the kid’s themes. He played at Ta-Thad’s house. It’s finally spring, I said. Silence until the food came. I didn’t think the price would be so high for what I … I paused. If I’d known, I muttered to myself. Maybe get another crack. Don’t worry, I added, I’ll pay the final shared phone bill.
Really, what I mean to say — when we lived together, it all turned on memory, for me. Every moment shadowed by what came before. Always dappled, always imprecise. And so we were informing our two separate moments with one more, two more. I wonder did it come to the same with you. Maybe that was what brought us together. This ability, or deficiency. Never wanted to ask. Afraid. But afraid of answer or drawing you closer? Lonely as a boy. Days had no flow. Are these excuses? Our moods did not believe in each other. If — I have been unfair to you. I wanted to do it differently. I wanted to, more badly than blood. The root, and the chain attached to that root. A medieval padlock.
I wrote this at the cottage that summer when Vincent turned nine. The embarrassing lobster dinner, Vincent overboard on the canoe ride, an important page (it wasn’t) blown from my hands and into the threshing water. You made a joke about snipping off the wasp’s nest and placing it in my lap and then you never made a joke again.