Damned Is Right

Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson.  Grove Press.  800 pp. $22.00. ****

Four Men Shaking: Searching for Sanity with Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, and My Perfect Zen Teacher by Lawrence Shainberg.  Shambhala.  134 pp.  $16.95   *****

The story told in the first half of James Knowlson’s excellent biography is thrilling and fascinating.  Samuel Beckett as a young and middle-aged man was devoted to writing and to world culture, reading like crazy, attending concerts, haunting museums to look at art—he spent two years in Germany doing little else—and making almost no money.  He didn’t seem to care.  He did a thoroughgoing psychoanalysis for two years, then went through the hell of World War Two in France, working for the resistance initially and then, once he’d been discovered, doing everything he could to flee the Nazis.

At the end of that time he had a sudden realization about his work, seeing that his real subject was the depression and impotence that he’d thought he was struggling against.  In a burst of creativity, he produced the work that he’s best known for, the Three Novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, and Waiting for Godot.  The novels were not exactly bestsellers, but companies all over Europe began producing Godot and it eventually made him famous.  The proceeds from that play, along with an inheritance from his mother, made him financially secure.  And the second half of his life began, culminating in 1969 with the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I have to say that, though Knowlson continued his admirably detailed and beautifully written account of Beckett’s life, I found the second half of the book less interesting than the first and ultimately rather depressing.  For one thing, this man who had been so devoted to writing and the arts in general was suddenly traveling around Europe, and ultimately the whole world, overseeing productions and sometimes directing them.  Beckett not only considered the words of his plays important, but also the pacing, the way actors said the lines, the way they moved or didn’t move on the stage.  The expression control freak comes to mind, though perhaps that isn’t fair.  But this essentially introverted and contemplative man—to say the very least—suddenly had a public role, which he was called on to play more and more.  He seemed unable to resist it, but it wasn’t good for his health or his creative juices.  He’d always had a thing for booze, but tended when he was away to drink quite heavily, and he also had assignations with women other than his wife (who was more averse to the acclaim than he was, and rarely traveled with him).

These problems reached a crescendo when he won the Nobel Prize, a moment when he tried to stay in seclusion and didn’t accept the award in person.  But he had years of living left, and the portrait Knowlson paints is of a man who is run ragged by his success, an introvert who is forced by circumstances to live like an extrovert (and too often used booze to ease the pain).

I haven’t read Beckett’s later work, only the Three Novels and the two most famous plays, Godot and Endgame.  Knowlson has an enormous knowledge of Beckett’s work, and lets us know that there are masterpieces in the later and often shorter work.  Beckett was happiest when he was writing, but the later work came out in tormented periods of solitude when he complained constantly that he wasn’t getting enough done (not an uncommon complaint for a writer.  I’ve actually never met a writer who did think she was getting enough done).  When your big subjects are ignorance and impotence, the work comes slowly.

At one point during this immense reading experience I reread Lawrence Shainberg’s Four Men Shaking, a short memoir about his acquaintance with three men who had a huge influence on him, Beckett, Norman Mailer, and his longtime Zen teacher, Kyudo Nakagawa Roshi.  Three men more different from each other it would be hard to imagine.

Shainberg was a lifelong admirer of Beckett, who seemed to embody in his work many things Zen teaches.  Shainberg routinely sent Beckett his work as it came out, and when he wrote a nonfiction book called Brain Surgeon, to his astonishment, he got a short note in reply.  Shainberg was heading to Europe to publicize his book and arranged to meet Beckett there.  As various people have said, the Nobel Prize winner was modest and self-effacing in person, interested in Shainberg and in Zen, though he repeatedly denied any knowledge of it or any intentional relationship between his work and Zen teachings.  He was also completely candid; when Shainberg brought a novel manuscript on one visit, Beckett read it immediately and told him, unfortunately, that he didn’t think the book worked and that the novel wasn’t his form (though the book was later published as Memories of Amnesia).  Beckett seemed sharp and completely with it, and the year was 1979, ten years after his Nobel.

Shainberg met Mailer when he sought out—and received—a blurb for his wonderful book, Ambivalent Zen.  Both men had houses in Provincetown, and the garrulous Mailer—who seemed more extrovert than introvert—subsequently often asked Shainberg out for dinner.  And though Mailer definitely had his public side when he was younger, going on TV and acting out in public and running for Mayor of New York, as an older man he devoted himself to work, having a long slow start to his day but eventually heading up to his attic to write.  He was a completely different writer from Beckett, a putter inner rather than a taker outer, and didn’t much like Beckett’s work.  Mailer’s own work varies in quality (as is true for anyone who published 37 books.  I think that’s the number Shainberg mentioned).  But as a strategy for leading a life, I would have to say that Mailer’s seemed better.  He loved and embraced life, and was still hobbling up to his attic to write the last time Shainberg had dinner with him, when Mailer was over 80 and showed up with two canes to get around.

The third man in Shainberg’s book is the one I would regard as the sanest, Kyudo Roshi.  He is portrayed much more fully in Ambivalent Zen; the portrait here essentially catches up on a character who had been so vivid in the previous book.  He hasn’t changed much, comes back to New York once a year and runs the zendo exactly as he had before, showing up early for zazen even on the first evening and cleaning and taking care of the place as he always had.  He never wrote a book and didn’t care how many people heard his teaching, only had maybe a dozen American students even after Ambivalent Zen had been published.  He preferred a small group of sincere people (and he’d be the judge of sincerity).  His teachings never changed much either.

Beckett was one of the bravest writers who ever lived.  He wrote from the essential emptiness of life—whether he called it Zen or not—and faced it squarely; I don’t know of another writer who stayed with it so well.  (If you don’t believe me, read any of the Three Novels and give me a plot summary.  Good luck with that.)  But I’m not sure his strategy for living was the best, or that he needed to suffer as much as he did.  I kept thinking as I read the 600 closely written pages of Knowlson’s book: if anyone would have profited from Zen practice, and from hanging around someone like Kyudo Roshi, it would have been this guy.  He might have felt less alone.  But maybe alone was how he wanted to feel.