THE BECKETT SEMINAR

9 4 Y T H E B E C K E T T S E M I N A R P A U L W E S T The Beckett seminar met once a year, often with the same people, no longer taking it for credit but for fun. A small wind-up skull patrolled the table for a while before we really got down to talk, and sometimes it toured the table three hours later as we finished at ten p.m. Each year, until he quit the college scene, our Canadian author-to-be of Rambo thrillers would leave the room after a couple of hours and dunk his head in the washroom in a basin of cold water, returning swathed in a towel he kept in place for the remainder of the meeting. Something plagued and enlivened us, perhaps the voodoo presence of Beckett himself, unhappily born, unhappily dying, and the knowledge that year after year the students wrote to him and got back presents in the form of French texts suitably inscribed. He was glad of us, I guess. Students would come to class, hands shaking, and exhibit the latest trophy from the hands of Maître B. Exactly why I had decided to o√er a Beckett seminar I am unsure, but perhaps because he seemed to break all fuddy-duddy rules except those stringent ones having to do with sentence structure . He did seem, at first, very Irish, and then very French. We read fiction mostly, watched his Buster Keaton movie Film, and 9 5 R babbled about his plays, Godot especially, often repeating his best aphorisms aloud for the sheer joy of them and their iconoclastic hauteur (‘‘the mortal microcosm cannot forgive the relative immortality of the macrocosm’’). I fancied, as the semester went on, that certain students had begun to adopt Beckettian ways of walking (Watt’s funambulistic stagger, for example, precursor perhaps to Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks). Others arranged themselves to sit in a slump or erect and prim as if before a cheval glass. I noticed one or two with a proptotic, bug-eyed stare, and others whose palsied hands drifted o√ the righthand side of the page with a useless pencil stub. Some of them, as he recommended , avoided exhaustion by conversation and remained silent but unbaited by me for the entire fifteen weeks and then burst forth in garrulous term papers that merited an A. The master had always su√ered from eye trouble, so they found the print of the Grove Press trilogy zigging and zagging to their profound discomfort , requiring a ruler held under each line and a Xerox blow-up of anything read aloud for exegesis. A festive but cautious air characterized our meetings, made worse by a dozen black candles perched dangerously around the table among the manuscripts and books. Often at the start of our three hours, the strip lighting was o√ and the voices, chatty or elocutional, were funereal as, born astride our graves, we pondered the question Why did he not kill himself? The answer, if any, came from a man who said that his mother’s Christianity was no more consolation to her than an old school tie (which might have meant more than one supposes), and who joked about the timber and nails needed for a crucifixion. It might not have been worth it. Such was the answer, meaning there were torments in store or that death was a worse oblivion than life. The not-knowing remained his and his personages’ torment , tricked about as it may be with visions of the eternal round of Arsène, the village mailman, or Mr. Knott, a deity figure who needed nothing but required that non-need to be witnessed. With Beckett, we soon discovered, the getting there was all, or rather the failure to get anywhere though forever striving, akin to the other failure he says so much about: having much to say but no satisfactory means, or having nothing to say but so many means. Beckett is all about technics, about fruitless doings, the quaqua that means ‘‘any old how,’’ nothing worth doing properly. But 9...