Beckett at Beck and Call

At the Dublin Writers Museum on Parnell Square, you can peer dumbly at Beckett's very own telephone. The museum boasts that within its walls 'Dublin's literary celebrities from the past three hundred years are brought to life'. 'Not so quick', you'd swear you heard the ghost of Beckett murmur, echoey down the phoneline. When did he ever want to be brought to life, even when alive? This centenary celebration of Beckett resembles that telephone in Dublin. The book gains what power it can muster from metonymic association with Beckett's voice: James Knowlson includes the text of Beckett's answers to the questions asked for the biography Damned to Fame in the last year of Beckett's dying. It also summons ghostly kudos from a bakelite proximity to Beckett's ear: Knowlson and other communicants in the volume were close to Beckett, tell precious tales of his patient, gracious listening to their voices in the bars and hotel lobbies of Paris. But, like the phone, the dead thing does not quite deliver – we pick up the pages and listen in vain for the genuine death pangs and health-giving howls from the life.

The need for a book like this is unquestionable. Reading the biography, most Beckett freaks regretted the occasional paraphrase of the Knowlson – Beckett interviews and wanted them verbatim, straight from the mouth. Well, here we have them, lifted clean from the biographer's transcripts. How unsettling then to have to admit one would rather not have had to read them. Beckett was so old, so dying, the voice frail, mumbly, hesitant, simple-minded, answering in breathless little sentences:

I struck up a friendship with Tom MacGreevy. I liked him. Our rooms were next door, up the stairs, on the first floor, I seem to remember. It was through him that I met James Joyce.

It's all like this, the same degree-zero style, artificial, not quite there at all, as though literally only seeming to remember, and then only seeming to remember potted biographies of Samuel Beckett. It's very painful. Another example:

I used to play the tin whistle by the way at the Ecole Normale, a rusty old tin whistle. I had a tin whistle and I used to tweetle on it, and in Dublin too.

Tinny, thin, non-sequitur-ridden, self-repeating, a near-joke that half-backfires – this is Beckett's voice as tin whistle tweetling. The cadences recall the work, and we expect some punchline hidden in there, some wry joke about Irish layabout pursuits in the seat of French learning, some gag about Eire in the odd irrelevance of 'in Dublin too'. But there is none – this is an old man whose mind is wandering. All his life Beckett had made prose out of imagining ancient voices near and beyond their end – when Beckett began really to sound like them, he was strangely, frustratingly, not quite the real thing.

If there might have been a measure of cruelty in putting all those questions to a man who could no longer properly reply, then this is painfully appropriate to the work too, but again in ways one would rather not have had to imagine. Remember Ill Seen Ill Said: 'Over and done with answering. With not being able'. Appropriate too, even, that he was never over and done with answering until death did come and wheel him away. But there's still an uncomfortable unkindness at this further level of our reading of these inadequate last words, our appalled witnessing, and (also because there is cruelty in all gazes, something the old Beckett knew) our obscure relishing of, the collapse of such a mind.

The very idea of a centenary has a Beckettian history – the anniversaries and timelines of the prose, often imagining the moment of death as longed-for future ('I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all') or dreamt-of past. The century is there in Beckett too, as when the creature...