The Itch to Write

Notes During a Pandemic

One of the great pleasures of talking to my brother frequently—which I’ve been doing lately[1]–is hearing of writers I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.  Bill mentioned to me, for instance, that he had just bought two volumes of the reviews of Marjorie Perloff, a name I’d never heard.  She writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and has been a scholar of Pound, a fact which always attracts my brother; it was his writings on Pound that inspired Bill to read Guy Davenport, one of my favorites as well (Perloff also has a couple of good pieces on Davenport).  But while perusing her fascinating website, I came across a piece on Samuel Beckett’s letters that caught my attention.

People say Beckett’s letters are among the great books of our time.  In fact, this man who wrote such depressing—though often hilarious—works of art was actually someone who seemed anything but depressed, reading voraciously, going to concerts and haunting museums, and prolifically writing letters to friends (his correspondence runs to four volumes).  He was also—as Lawrence Shainberg attests in his recent book—a kind and courteous person, interested in everyone around him and far from fixated on himself.  But it was Perloff’s quotations from a particular letter which caught my eye.

The year was 1932, and the 26-year-old Beckett had gone to London in search of publishers or some kind of job.  But apparently things didn’t work out, and this is how he describes his days:

“I sat on the wharf and watched the little steamers dipping their funnels to get under the bridge, and it opening for a big boat to go under. Très emouvant. That’s all I do now—go out about 2 and find some place to sit till the pubs open and get back here about 7 and cook liver and read the Evening News.”

He gives an account of what he’s been reading lately—The Origin of Species, Moby Dick, and Point Counterpoint—how’s that for a mixed bag?—and ends the letter with these words.

“I haven’t tried to write. The idea itself of writing seems somehow ludicrous. . . . If I could work up some pretext for writing a poem, short story, or anything at all, I would be all right. I suppose I am alright. But I get frightened sometimes at the idea that the itch to write is cured.”

As Perloff points out herself, he makes this statement in the midst of an insightful and hilarious letter.  How is that not writing?  And what is this itch to write, which is apparently different from writing letters and which the young man is so afraid to lose?

When I taught narrative writing, I often mentioned to students that there are two reasons for writing: exploring the self and communicating with other people.  Some writers focus on self-exploration—Kafka and Emily Dickinson come to mind—and others are only interested in finding readers: name your favorite bestselling author.  Some see the importance of both: Thoreau spent much of his life writing in his journal, and also supposedly worked over Walden for years.  He acknowledged both aspects of the process.  Beckett, with his difficult and often depressing work—which is nevertheless marvelously written—was obviously never seeking bestsellerdom.  I read somewhere, in fact, that an early book of stories with one of my favorite titles of all time, Krapp’s Last Tape[2], sold a grand total of two copies.

Beckett’s books sold better after he won the Nobel Prize.

But I see in the young man the mature writer he was to become.  He was unimpressed with the prose of The Origin of Species—“never read such badly written catlap”—and seemed scornful of Huxley as well, but admired Moby Dick.  He was also content just to watch the steamers, and found the experience moving, then went to the pub and ate liver for dinner.  He was living his rather ordinary life—full of energy—but paying attention to everything.

Beckett was obviously interested in communicating with other human beings.  He wrote four volumes of letters!  In his art, he wanted to communicate things as he saw them, an extremely difficult endeavor; though Beckett all his life denied any interest in Buddhism, he was not only writing from what Buddhists call emptiness (all writers do that), he often, better than any other writer I know, wrote about it.  He wrote emptiness.  In his famous Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) he goes right down into it.  Nothing happens yet everything happens.  It is what the great Zen masters say about life.

But the reason he’s afraid to lose the itch to write is not just that writing gave his life purpose (as wonderful as it is, you don’t want to watch steamers all the time).  It’s also that, in the act of imaginative writing, you tap into the deep source that all real writing comes from, and tapping into it is a healing process: it keeps us alive, and makes us sane.  Beckett was faced with a common dilemma: if he did the work he really wanted to do, it wouldn’t make much money.  But if he backed away from his vision, writing wouldn’t mean anything to him.  It wouldn’t touch that deep source.

Perloff tells us that a dramatic event spurred his creativity.  In Paris six years later, a drunken man assaulted and stabbed him, just missing his heart.  He wrote his favorite correspondent from the hospital.  “How lovely it is being here . . .even with a hole in the side. A sunlit surface yesterday brighter than the whole of Ireland’s summer.”  He still appreciated the texture of the day.  But Perloff thinks his brush with death spurred him on.

The pandemic has had something of the same effect on me.  Not only has it made me want to write, it’s made me want to communicate with friends, often by e-mail.  The two things sometimes seem in conflict, but usually seem the same.  When I write for this website I often have the urge to sign my name to it, as if it were a letter to a friend (it is.  I just don’t know which one).  But my letters to friends seem no less important or significant.  I begin to understand why Henry Miller took up his correspondence every day before he worked on his book.  They weren’t two different things.  They were part of the same grand endeavor.

[1] There was a week when both he and his wife were showing Covid like symptoms.  It turned out finally to be a bacterial infection, but that was one nervous week.  I was calling once, sometimes twice a day, and often after I heard the medical news we’d shoot the breeze.

[2] I keep wanting to change it to Tape’s Last Krapp.