Beckett thought his novels more important than his plays, and superb new recordings of 'Molloy' and 'Malone Dies' do them justice, writes John Banville
It is hard to credit that the centenary of Samuel Beckett's birth is less than two years away, so contemporaneous to our times does he seem. If Kafka is the prophet of the 20th century, Beckett is surely its witness. His mature sensibility was formed during, and to a large extent by, the second World War. Although he could have fled to Ireland in 1939, he chose to stay in France, where he worked for the Resistance, and eventually was forced, along with his wife, Suzanne, to go on the run from the Gestapo, experiences which would feed into his work in circuitous but readily identifiable ways. Beckett's biographer, James Knowlson, has pointed to the "profound effect" the war years had on Beckett's art. "Many of the features of \ later prose and plays arise directly from his experiences of radical uncertainty, disorientation, exile, hunger, and need."
It was directly after the war, on a visit to his widowed mother at the family home in Foxrock early in 1946, that Beckett came to sudden maturity as an artist. He had already written poems, stories, and the novels Murphy and Watt, but the revelation that came to him that day, "in my mother's room", he told Knowlson, was the turning point for him as a writer: "Only then did I begin to write the things I feel". In the play, Krapp's Last Tape, the old man listening to tape recordings he had made at significant moments of his life recalls a mystical experience on Dún Laoghaire pier, "that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing".
The "whole thing" is the realisation that "the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most -" Here Krapp interrupts the tape and winds it forward. However, Beckett himself revealed to Knowlson that the missing words are " 'precious ally' etc. meaning his true element at last and key to the opus magnum", and that this insight which he gave to Krapp had been in fact his own. What Beckett saw was that he had come at last to the end of the Joycean road.
I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could go in the direction of knowing more, \ in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than adding.
The works which followed this moment of illumination, if that is the word, were written in French - Beckett had switched to French, he said, "pour écrire sans style", an odd wish on the part of one of the greatest prose stylists in any language - and in the astonishingly short period of two and a half years, between May, 1947, and January, 1950. They were the trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone meurt (Malone Dies), and L'Innommable (The Unnamable), and the play, En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot). Beckett described this artistic endeavour as "the siege in the room", and the process as "a frenzy of writing".
Materially, this was the most miserable period of Beckett's life. He and Suzanne were living in Paris in great poverty. Beckett had a small allowance from his family, but postwar inflation had whittled it to nearly nothing, and they were kept going mainly by Suzanne's efforts as a dressmaker and piano teacher. The books as he produced them were turned down by one uncomprehending publisher after another. In 1948 he wrote to his friend George Reavey, "I am now retyping, for rejection by the publishers, Malone meurt, the last I hope of the series Murphy, Watt, Mercier & Camier, Molloy . . ."
It was the redoubtable Suzanne who succeeded in getting the trilogy into print. After she died, Beckett, in an interview with Knowlson, spoke of his debt to her. "I owe everything to Suzanne . . . She was the one who went to see the publishers while I used to sit in a café 'twiddling my fingers' or whatever it is one twiddles." At last she found her way to Jérôme Lindon, a 21-year-old partner in the publishing house Vercors. He took up Molloy, "finished reading the manuscript within the day and, that same evening, wrote to Suzanne to tell her 'Yes, I'll take the book, there's no problem'. And a few months later, I published Molloy". Despite Lindon's enthusiasm, and good if often puzzled reviews in the French newspapers, the novels made scant commercial headway. It was not until the first production of En Attendant Godot in Paris on January 3rd, 1953, and the subsequent huge success of Waiting for Godot in London, that Beckett became known to the world.
This sudden burst of fame left Beckett, and Suzanne, bemused - when news came in 1969 that her husband had been awarded the Nobel Prize, Suzanne's first comment was, "Quelle catastrophe!" - but it did little for the popularity of the novels. Yet Beckett had no doubt that of his work the fiction was "the important writing", and insisted that the plays were little more than footnotes to the novels. This is perhaps to overstate the case; many critics, especially in Britain and the US, feel that in his drama Beckett achieved a transcendent purity of expression that is absent from the more prolix and, some would contend, self-indulgent prose works. Certainly the fiction, especially from The Unnamable onwards, requires from the reader a higher level of attention, concentration and patience - in a word, work - than do the plays, which are more immediately entertaining, on a superficial level, at least.
However, readers wary of the trilogy should take note of Jérôme Lindon's reaction on first encountering Molloy: "I took the manuscript of Molloy under my arm to go for lunch and in the Métro I started to read it. And as I changed trains at La Motte-Piquet Grenelle, in the lift I burst into hoots of laughter . . . and people looked at me as I carried on laughing like a fool". There are passages on every other page of Molloy and Malone Dies, and even of The Unnamable - "a bitch of a book," Beckett said of it - which are what Nancy Mitford would describe as shriekingly funny, even if the fun is often of a mordant variety: "I was born grave as others syphilitic"; "There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle"; "Morning is the time to hide. They wake up, hale and hearty, their tongues hanging out for order, beauty and justice, baying for their due". And when they are not being funny, Beckett's dead-beat narratives are moving, deeply so, in places, and of a piercing tenderness. Ignorance and incomprehension on the part of many so-called critics have led to Beckett being branded "difficult", "morbid", "pessimistic", "life-denying". He is none of these things. Even a late work such as the short fiction Ill Seen Ill Said, an account of a solitary old woman approaching death, which daunts so many readers, reveals itself, after a little work, as a masterpiece of lyricism and declarative simplicity.
Anyone approaching Beckett's fiction for the first time could do no better than to get hold of the superb recordings of Molloy and Malone Dies recently issued by Naxos Audio Books in its Modern Classics series, produced by Nicholas Soames. Sean Barrett and Dermot Crowley in Molloy, and Sean Barrett alone in Malone Dies, are the ideal readers for these marvellous works. Actors when they read prose in performance tend all too often to "act" the texts, instead of letting them speak for themselves, as it were. Crowley and Barrett, however, display a fitting artistic humility before Beckett's ravishing prose. Barrett in particular, in Malone Dies, gives a reading which is perfectly paced, and wholly natural. This is Malone to the life, to the death. Next, please, Mr Soames, let us have The Unnamable, to complete the trilogy.
John Banville's last book, Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City, is published by Bloomsbury
Molloy, read by Sean Barrett and Dermot Crowley (7 CDs, £27.99), and Malone Dies, read by Sean Barrett (5 CDs, £19.99 ), are available on Naxos Audio Books