alas I must be that kind of person
hence in Ken Wood who shall find me
my breath held in the midst of thickets
none but the most quarried lovers
I surprise me moved by the many a funnel
hinged
for the obeisance to Tower Bridge
the viper’s curtsy to and from the City
till in the dusk a lighter
blind with pride
tosses aside the scarf of the bascules
then in the grey hold of the ambulance
throbbing on the brink ebb of sighs
then I hug me below among the canaille
until a guttersnipe blast his cernèd eyes
demanding ‘ave I done with the Mirror
I stump off in a fearful rage under Married
Men’s Quarters
Bloody Tower
and afar off at all speed screw me up Wren’s
giant bully
and curse the day caged panting on the platform
under the flaring urn
I was not born Defoe
but in Ken Wood
who shall find me
my brother the fly
the common housefly
sidling out of darkness into light
fastens on his place in the sun
whets his six legs
revels in his planes his poisers
it is the autumn of his life
he could not serve typhoid and mammon
Serena III
fix this pothook of beauty on this palette
you never know it might be final
or leave her she is paradise and then
plush hymens on your eyeballs
or on Butt Bridge blush for shame
the mixed declension of those mammae
cock up thy moon thine and thine only
up up up to the star of evening
swoon upon the arch-gasometer
on Misery Hill brand-new carnation
swoon upon the little purple
house of prayer
something heart of Mary
the Bull and Pool Beg that will never meet
not in this world
whereas dart away through the cavorting scapes
bucket o’er Victoria Bridge that’s the idea
slow down slink down the Ringsend Road
Irishtown Sandymount puzzle find the Hell
Fire
the Merrion Flats scored with a thrillion sigmas
Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour His Finger
girls taken strippin that’s the idea
on the Bootersgrad breakwind and water
the tide making the dun gulls in a panic
the sands quicken in your hot heart
hide yourself not in the Rock keep on the move
keep on the move
Sanies I
all the livelong way this day of sweet showers
from Portrane on the seashore
Donabate sad swans of Turvey Swords
pounding along in three ratios like a sonata
like a Ritter with pommelled scrotum atra cura
on the step
Botticelli from the fork down pestling the
transmission
tires bleeding voiding zeep the highway
all heaven in the sphincter
the sphincter
müüüüüüüde now
potwalloping now through the promenaders
this trusty all-steel this super-real
bound for home like a good boy
where I was born with a pop with the green of
the larches
ah to be back in the caul now with no trusts
no fingers no spoilt love
belting along in the meantime clutching the
bike
the billows of the nubile the cere wrack
pot-valiant caulless waisted in rags hatless
for mamma papa chicken and ham
warm Grave too say the word
happy days snap the stem shed a tear
this day Spy Wedsday seven pentades past
oh the larches the pain drawn like a cork
the glans he took the day off up hill and down
dale
with a ponderous fawn from the Liverpool
London and Globe
back the shadows lengthen the sycomores are
sobbing
to roly-poly oh to me a spanking boy
buckets of fizz childbed is thirsty work
for the midwife he is gory
for the proud parent he washes down a gob of
gladness
for footsore Achates also he pants his pleasure
sparkling beestings for me
tired now hair ebbing gums ebbing ebbing
home
good as gold now in the prime after a brief
prodigality
yea and suave
suave urbane beyond good and evil
biding my time without rancour you may take
your oath
distraught half-crooked courting the sneers of
these fauns these smart nymphs
clipped like a pederast as to one trouser-end
sucking in my bloated lantern behind a Wild
Woodbine
cinched to death in a filthy slicker
flinging the proud Swift forward breasting the
swell of Stürmers
I see main verb at last
her whom alone in the accusative
I have dismounted to love
gliding towards me dauntless nautch-girl on the
face of the waters
dauntless daughter of desires in the old black
and flamingo
get along with you now take the six the seven
the eight or the little single-decker
take a bus for all I care walk cadge a lift
home to the cob of your web in Holies Street
and let the tiger go on smiling
in our hearts that funds ways home
Sanies II
there was a happy land
the American Bar
in Rue Mouffetard
there were red eggs there
I have a dirty I say henorrhoids
coming from the bath
the steam the delight the sherbet
the chagrin of the old skinnymalinks
slouching happy body
loose in my stinking old suit
sailing slouching up to Puvis the gauntlet of
tulips
lash lash me with yaller tulips I will let down
my stinking old trousers
my love she sewed up the pockets alive the live-
oh she did she said that was better
spotless then within the brown rags gliding
frescoward free up the fjord of dyed eggs and
thongbells
I disappear don’t you know into the local
the mackerel are at billiards there they are
crying the scores
the Barfrau makes a big impression with her
mighty bottom
Dante and blissful Beatrice are there
prior to Vita Nuova
the balls splash no luck comrade
Gracieuse is there Belle-Belle down the drain
booted Percinet with his cobalt jowl
they are necking gobble-gobble
suck is not suck that alters
lo Alighieri has got off au revoir to all that
I break down quite in a titter of despite
hark
upon the saloon a terrible hush
a shiver convulses Madame de la Motte
it courses it peals down her collops
the great bottom foams into stillness
quick quick the cavaletto supplejacks for
mumbo-jumbo
vivas puellas mortui incurrrrrsant boves
oh subito subito ere she recover the cang
&nb
sp; bamboo for bastinado
a bitter moon fessade à la mode
oh Becky spare me I have done thee no wrong
spare me damn thee
spare me good Becky
call off thine adders Becky I will compensate
thee in full
Lord have mercy upon us
Christ have mercy upon us
Lord have mercy upon us
Da Tagte Es
redeem the surrogate goodbyes
the sheet astream in your hand
who have no more for the land
and the glass unmisted above your eyes
Echo’s Bones
asylum under my tread all this day
their muffled revels as the flesh falls
the gantelope of sense and nonsense run
taken by the maggots for what they are
1935
Cascando
1.
why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed
is it not better abort than be barren
the hours after you are gone are so leaden
they will always start dragging too soon
the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want
bringing up the bones the old loves
sockets filled once with eyes like yours
all always is it better too soon than never
the black want splashing their faces
saying again nine days never floated the loved
nor nine months
nor nine lives
2.
saying again
if you do not teach me I shall not learn
saying again there is a last
even of last times
last times of begging
last times of loving
of knowing not knowing pretending
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love
the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words
terrified again
of not loving
of loving and not you
of being loved and not by you
of knowing not knowing pretending
pretending
I and all the others that will love you
if they love you
3.
unless they love you
1936
Saint-LÔ
Vire will wind in other shadows
unborn through the bright ways tremble
and the old mind ghost-forsaken
sink into its havoc
1946
Criticism
Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce.
In 1929, not long after his friend and predecessor at l’Ecole Normale, Thomas MacGreevy, had introduced the then twenty-two-year-old Beckett to James Joyce, Beckett was asked to contribute to the critical anthology then in preparation, dealing with the many levels and facets of Joyce’s Work in Progress—later to become Finnegans Wake.
Joyce, of course, was closely involved with the critical work, and, in a very real sense, supervised both the selection of the contributors and the content of their pieces. In a letter to Adrienne Monnier dated September 3, 1928, Joyce speaks of the collection as comprising “eleven articles plus one other by Stuart Gilbert, bringing the total to twelve.” In all likelihood, Beckett was not at that point among the twelve “apostles,” since he did not arrive in Paris till October of that year and had not yet made Joyce’s acquaintance. But sometime between September 1928 and the following May, when the volume was published by Shakespeare and Company under the title Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress, Beckett joined the clan, probably as a last-minute substitute for one of the original twelve. The book appeared officially on May 27, 1929, with Beckett’s essay the lead, and the entire contents was reprinted a month later in transition No. 16-17, thus bringing the young Beckett to the attention of the readership of that important review.
For years I had thought the peculiar ellipses of the title were just further typographical idiosyncrasies on the part of the French printers. But in reading a book on Beckett by Raymond Federman and John Fletcher I found that, here as always, Beckett’s punctuation, as his every word, is absolutely precise: “From Dante to Bruno,” the author explained, “is a jump of about three centuries, from Bruno to Vico about one, and from Vico to Joyce about two.”
Other contributors to Our Exagmination . . . included William Carlos Williams, Eugene Jolas, Stuart Gilbert, Elliot Paul, Robert McAlmon, and Beckett’s young friend Thomas MacGreevy.* If it is fair to say that all were laudatory, they did, to varying degrees, help explain and clarify the purpose and methods of Joyce’s awesome endeavor. Beckett’s piece, learned and at times bearing echoes of the Master’s voice, is nonetheless remarkable not only for some cogent and original insights into Joyce’s work but also for what it tells us about Beckett’s views and esthetics at the time. Thus the opening sentence: “The danger is in the neatness of identifications.” Or this, referring specifically to Joyce’s new work: “Here words are not the polite contortions of 20th century printer’s ink. They are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear.” Or: “Must we wring the neck of a certain system in order to stuff it into a contemporary pigeon-hole, or modify the dimensions of that pigeon-hole for the satisfaction of the analogymongers? Literary criticism is not book-keeping.”
Beckett often said that it is the work, not the artist, that is important. Thus one must, in general, perceive the mind of the artist through the work, and from the clues deduce as one can. In this early piece, it is possible to see, glittering in among the learned arguments, visible proof of a strong, original mind, still searching no doubt for its own territory but already, at age twenty-two, clearly aware of the landmarks that would guide it there.
The danger is in the neatness of identifications. The conception of Philosophy and Philology as a pair of nigger minstrels out of the Teatro dei Piccoli is soothing, like the contemplation of a carefully folded ham-sandwich. Giambattista Vico himself could not resist the attractiveness of such coincidence of gesture. He insisted on complete identification between the philosophical abstraction and the empirical illustration, thereby annulling the absolutism of each conception—hoisting the real unjustifiably clear of its dimensional limits, temporalizing that which is extratemporal. And now here am I, with my handful of abstractions, among which notably: a mountain, the coincidence of contraries, the inevitability of cyclic evolution, a system of Poetics, and the prospect of self-extension in the world of Mr. Joyce’s Work in Progress. There is the temptation to treat every concept like ‘a bass dropt neck fust in till a bung crate,’ and make a really tidy job of it. Unfortunately such an exactitude of application would imply distortion in one of two directions. Must we wring the neck of a certain system in order to stuff it into a contemporary pigeon-hole, or modify the dimensions of that pigeon-hole for the satisfaction of the analogymongers? Literary criticism is not book-keeping.
Giambattista Vico was a practical roundheaded Neapolitan. It pleases Croce to consider him as a mystic, essentially speculative, “disdegnoso dell’ empirismo.” It is a surprising interpretation, seeing that more than three-fifths of his Scienza Nuova is concerned with empirical investigation. Croce opposes him to the reformative materialistic school of Ugo Grozio, and absolves him from the utilitarian preoccupations of Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Bayle and Machiavelli. All this cannot be swallowed without protest. Vico defines Providence as: “una mente spesso diversa ed alle volte tutta contraria e sempre superiore ad essi fini particolari che essi uomini si avevano proposti; dei quali fini ristretti fatti mezzi per servire a fini più ampi, gli ha sempre adoperati per conserva
re l’umana generazione in questa terra.” What could be more definitely utilitarianism? His treatment of the origin and functions of poetry, language and myth, as will appear later, is as far removed from the mystical as it is possible to imagine. For our immediate purpose, however, it matters little whether we consider him as a mystic or as a scientific investigator; but there are no two ways about considering him as an innovator. His division of the development of human society into three ages: Theocratic, Heroic, Human (civilized), with a corresponding classification of language: Hieroglyphic (sacred), Metaphorical (poetic), Philosophical (capable of abstraction and generalisation), was by no means new, although it must have appeared so to his contemporaries. He derived this convenient classification from the Egyptians, via Herodotus. At the same time it is impossible to deny the originality with which he applied and developed its implications. His exposition of the ineluctable circular progression of Society was completely new, although the germ of it was contained in Giordano Bruno’s treatment of identified contraries. But it is in Book 2, described by himself as “tutto il corpo . . . la chiave maestra . . . dell’ opera,” that appears the unqualified originality of his mind; here he evolved a theory of the origins of poetry and language, the significance of myth, and the nature of barbaric civilization that must have appeared nothing less than an impertinent outrage against tradition. These two aspects of Vico have their reverberations, their reapplications—without, however, receiving the faintest explicit illustration—in Work in Progress.
It is first necessary to condense the thesis of Vico, the scientific historian. In the beginning was the thunder: the thunder set free Religion, in its most objective and un-philosophical form—idolatrous animism: Religion produced Society, and the first social men were the cave-dwellers, taking refuge from a passionate Nature: this primitive family life receives its first impulse towards development from the arrival of terrified vagabonds: admitted, they are the first slaves: growing stronger, they exact agrarian concessions, and a despotism has evolved into a primitive feudalism: the cave becomes a city, and the feudal system a democracy: then an anarchy: this is corrected by a return to monarchy: the last stage is a tendency towards interdestruction: the nations are dispersed, and the Phoenix of Society arises out of their ashes. To this six-termed social progression corresponds a six-termed progression of human motives: necessity, utility, convenience, pleasure, luxury, abuse of luxury: and their incarnate manifestations: Polyphemus, Achilles, Caesar and Alexander, Tiberius, Caligula and Nero. At this point Vico applies Bruno—though he takes very good care not to say so—and proceeds from rather arbitrary data to philosophical abstraction. There is no difference, says Bruno, between the smallest possible chord and the smallest possible arc, no difference between the infinite circle and the straight line. The maxima and minima of particular contraries are one and indifferent. Minimal heat equals minimal cold. Consequently transmutations are circular. The principle (minimum) of one contrary takes its movement from the principle (maximum) of another. Therefore not only do the minima coincide with the minima, the maxima with the maxima, but the minima with the maxima in the succession of transmutations. Maximal speed is a state of rest. The maximum of corruption and the minimum of generation are identical: in principle, corruption is generation. And all things are ultimately identified with God, the universal monad, Monad of monads. From these considerations Vico evolved a Science and Philosophy of History. It may be an amusing exercise to take an historical figure, such as Scipio, and label him No. 3; it is of no ultimate importance. What is of ultimate importance is the recognition that the passage from Scipio to Caesar is as inevitable as the passage from Caesar to Tiberius, since the flowers of corruption in Scipio and Caesar are the seeds of vitality in Caesar and Tiberius. Thus we have the spectacle of a human progression that depends for its movement on individuals, and which at the same time is independent of individuals in virtue of what appears to be a preordained cyclicism. It follows that History is neither to be considered as a formless structure, due exclusively to the achievements of individual agents, nor as possessing reality apart from and independent of them, accomplished behind their backs in spite of them, the work of some superior force, variously known as Fate, Chance, Fortune, God. Both these views, the materialistic and the transcendental, Vico rejects in favour of the rational. Individuality is the concretion of universality, and every individual action is at the same time superindi-vidual. The individual and the universal cannot be considered as distinct from each other. History, then, is not the result of Fate or Chance—in both cases the individual would be separated from his product—but the result of a Necessity that is not Fate, of a Liberty that is not Chance (compare Dante’s “yoke of liberty”). This force he called Divine Providence, with his tongue, one feels, very much in his cheek. And it is to this Providence that we must trace the three institutions common to every society: Church, Marriage, Burial. This is not Bossuet’s Providence, transcendental and miraculous, but immanent and the stuff itself of human life, working by natural means. Humanity is its work in itself. God acts on her, but by means of her. Humanity is divine, but no man is divine. This social and historical classification is clearly adapted by Mr. Joyce as a structural convenience—or inconvenience. His position is in no way a philosophical one. It is the detached attitude of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist. . . who describes Epictetus to the Master of Studies as “an old gentleman who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water.” The lamp is more important than the lamplighter. By structural I do not only mean a bold outward division, a bare skeleton for the housing of material. I mean the endless substantial variations on these three beats, and interior intertwining of these three themes into a decoration of arabesques—decoration and more than decoration. Part 1 is a mass of past shadow, corresponding therefore to Vico’s first human institution, Religion, or to his Theocratic age, or simply to an abstraction—Birth. Part 2 is the lovegame of the children, corresponding to the second institution, Marriage, or to the Heroic age, or to an abstraction—Maturity. Part 3 is passed in sleep, corresponding to the third institution, Burial, or to the Human age, or to an abstraction—Corruption. Part 4. is the day beginning again, and corresponds to Vico’s Providence, or to the transition from the Human to the Theocratic, or to an abstraction—Generation. Mr. Joyce does not take birth for granted, as Vico seems to have done. So much for the dry bones. The consciousness that there is a great deal of the unborn infant in the lifeless octogenarian, and a great deal of both in the man at the apogee of his life’s curve, removes all the stiff interexclusiveness that is often the danger in neat construction. Corruption is not excluded from Part 1 nor maturity from Part 3. The four “lovedroyd curdinals” are presented on the same plane—“his element curdinal numen and his enement curdinal marrying and his epulent curdinal weisswasch and his eminent curdinal Kay o’ Kay!” There are numerous references to Vico’s four human institutions—Providence counting as one! “A good clap, a fore wedding, a bad wake, tell hell’s well”: “their weatherings and their marryings and their buryings and their natural selections”: “the lightning look, the birding cry, awe from the grave, ever-flowing on our times”: “by four hands of forethought the first babe of reconcilement is laid in its last cradle of hume sweet hume.”