Horner's Corner

Desperately Seeking Sam

Remembering Beckett twenty years after his death

Roger Boylan

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence. –Samuel Beckett

The first and last time I saw Samuel Beckett, he was walking down a Paris street, the Rue Rémy Dumoncel. At least, I think it was Beckett. The height was right; the near-skeletal thinness was right; the location was right—near the nursing home where he died not long after. I think he was wearing a hat and coat, but I can’t be sure. It was twenty years ago.

Seen always from behind whithersoever he went. Same hat and coat as of old when he walked the roads. –Beckett, Stirrings Still

But I never got close enough to be certain. I was across the street, behind a row of parked cars, admiring, if memory serves, a silver Porsche. Unusually for July in Paris, it was a gray, drizzly day, what Parisians call “la grisaille,” and it was a bit misty, as if in November. Despite all that, I could easily have crossed over and asked my suspect if he was, in fact, the One True Sam. But I didn’t. I funked it. He disappeared. Six months later he was dead. And I had wanted to meet him for years.

More via Boston Review — Roger Boylan: Desperately Seeking Sam.

Samuel Beckett

(13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989)

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How It Was – A memoir of Samuel Beckett

Anne Atik

pdf here

Fathoms from Anywhere

A Samuel Beckett Centenary Exhibition

“I don’t find solitude agonizing, on the contrary. Holes in paper open and take me fathoms from anywhere.”

- Samuel Beckett

The last sentence of The Unnamable

Samuel Beckett

parsed and punctuated by Colin Greenlaw

And so on, the old rigmarole. It can’t be I. Or it’s because I pay no heed: it’s such an old habit, I do it without heeding. Or as if I were somewhere else.

There I am far again, there I am absentee again: it’s his turn now, he who neither speaks nor listens, who has neither body nor soul. It’s something else he has: he must have something, he must be somewhere. He is made of silence (there’s a pretty analysis), he’s in the silence. He’s the one to be sought, the one to be, the one to be spoken of, the one to speak. But he can’t speak: then I could stop, I’d be he, I’d be the silence, I’d be back in the silence, we’d be reunited, his story the story to be told.

But he has no story, he hasn’t been in story? It’s not certain: he’s in his own story, unimaginable, unspeakable. That doesn’t matter: the attempt must be made, in the old stories incomprehensibly mine, to find his. It must be there somewhere. It must have been mine, before being his. I’ll recognize it, in the end I’ll recognize it: the story of the silence that he never left, that I should never have left, that I may never find again, that I may find again. Then it will be he, it will be I, it will be the place: the silence, the end, the beginning, the beginning again – how can I say it? That’s all words, they’re all I have – and not many of them: the words fail, the voice fails. So be it. I know that well. It will be the silence, full of murmurs, distant cries. The usual silence, spent listening, spent waiting, waiting for the voice….(more)

via ::: wood s lot ::: “the fitful tracing of a portal”.

YouTube – Samuel Beckett, Paris, 1987..

The more I read Beckett, the more impressed I am by the work. I first read him when I was about 17: I think I was more impressed by the weird modernism (as it seemed to me then) than by his more enduring qualities – his compassion, for instance, or his amazing capacity to strip language down to essentials. But now, here’s a thing: the more I find out about him, the more impressed I am. The man and the work aren’t the same, no, but both are quite wonderful. Contrast that with most writers you know about.

And now there’s the hefty  Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940 CUP. Which is everything it ought to be – full of the at that point not-yet-great-man’s early adulthood (he was born in 1906). And we’re promised three more volumes! We must wait – with better luck than Estragon and Vladimir, I hope.

Below: Next three photographs of Beckett by JOHN MINIHAN

‘Two Men Looking at the Moon’ and a ‘A Man and a Woman Looking at the Moon’. Apparently, the former was an inspiration for Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’.