What kind of art is Becketfs? It completely ignores the traditional conventions of the stage, among them clarity. Becketfs most famous play is Waitingfor Godot. Asked who Godot was, Beckett replied, "If I knew, I would have said so in the play." As for form, he once wrote to his younger disciple Harold Pinter, "If you insist on finding form [for my plays] Fll describe it for you. I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cвncer. In the silences I could hear his screams continually. That's the only kind of form my work has." Ever since the Greeks, physical or mental action, adding up to some kind of statement or resolution of conflict, has been a staple of drama. But early in Godot we have:
ESTRAGON (giving up again): Nothing to be done.
and the curtain lines are:
VLADIMIR: Well, shall we go? ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go. They do not move.
Shakespeare [39] has accustomed us to a mixture of humor and tragedy in the same play, but the dominant tone is always clear. Beckett, however, in accord with absurdist doctrine, deliberately carries this confusion of genres to almost fright- ening extremes. Once, directing the Berlin production of Endgame, he remarked that the most important line in the play was:
NELL: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.
Beckett has removed himself completely from Aristotle^ mimetic theory of drama [13]. He throws out ali the play's traditional furnishings, somewhat as Virginia Woolf [111] has done for the novel and minimalist painters for art. One playlet (Come and Go) contains only 121 words. Another, Breath, lasts thirty seconds.
Beckett's triumphs as a dramatist may make us forget that he is also a novelist of extraordinary originality. Among his fic- tions are Watt and the trilogy composed of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable.
Interpretations of Beckett have been as endless as they are ingenious, but each reader or viewer must make up his or her own mind. Perhaps mind is the wrong word, because the meaning is the play itself, to be felt rather than understood, as with music. Beckett is trying to make us share his agonized inability to answer the two darkest questions: Who are we? Why are we? Ali his work is an elaboration, sometimes bleak, sometimes comic, of Hamm's statement (in Endgame): "YouYe on earth, there's no cure for that!"
So far more than twenty-five volumes of Beckett have been published, certainly the most comprehensive treatment in ali literature of the theme of negation. Yet he is no cynic—indeed he is deeply moved by human misery, and his own life (he per- formed nobly during the French Resistance) evinces great purity of character. His nada, unlike Hemingway^ [119], is not a response to the dislocation of our time but is deeply meta- physical, a vision of life as eternally the same and eternally incomprehensible. It is interesting that a dramatist so obscure, so nightmarish, so uncompromising, and so oblivious to what we normally expect from drama should have met with world- wide acclaim. However strange his way of saying it, he must be saying something to us.
The last words of The Unnameable are "I can't go on, Fll go on." Of that, make what you will.
C.F.
W.H. AUDEN
1907-1973
Collected Poems
It is a minor paradox that in our hypertechnological era poetry should be alive and well. Poets proliferate; more to the point, many are producing work of high quality. Nor can their influence be gauged by sales figures alone. Their work seems, rather, to be absorbed somehow into the mental climate of intelligent men and women who are not necessarily assiduous poetry readers.
In our country Yeats [103] and Eliot [116] would probably figure as the two most pervasively influential English-language poets. To them I would add a third: W.H. Auden. For me and many others his is the most eloquent and representative poetic voice of what he dubbed the "Age of Anxiety.,, The tonality of that age was announced by Eliofs The Waste Land and by Yeats's "Things fali apart; the centre cannot hold." This preoc- cupation with our dysfunctional society Auden developed in his long and short poems, in his plays (several written in collab- oration with Christopher Isherwood), and in his somewhat undervalued criticai essays.
There are ways in which Auden reminds one of Goethe [62]. Like Goethe he was no garret-poet, but led a very active life, traveling extensively, constantly in touch with the extralit- erary world, constantly metamorphosing in the Goethean style. A quester like Goethe, he passed from youthful rebellion against the tradition in which he had been reared to an uneasy leftism to a rediscovered Anglo-Catholicism. One wonders whether, had he lived another fifty years, he would have remained an Anglo-Catholic. Like Goethe he was a man in motion, the carrier of possibility.
Born a British subject, Auden became an American citizen in 1946, and so his work achieved a certain amplitude by draw- ing from two major historical traditions. The name Audun (so spelled) appears in Icelandic sagas, and Auden was much influenced, particularly in the actual techniques of his verse, by the great body of poetry of the far North.
Auden's father was a distinguished physician, and the son was brought up in an atmosphere of scientific inquiry and dis- cussion. At one time in his undergraduate years he planned to become a biologist, and his work is filled with metaphors and allusions drawn from the earth sciences and the revolution in physics, as well as from applied sciences such as metallurgy, mining, and railroad-building. Here, too, he reflects the drift of our time, as does his involvement with Freudian [98] and Jungian thought, metaphysics, ethics and politics. He was mas- ter of a treasury of language, often extending to a difficult-to- follow private symbolism. But even his more incomprehensible phrases have magic.
Auden was homosexual, but this does not seem to have affected his openness to the erotic drives that sway ali men and women. A large fraction of his poetry deals with love—usually frustrated, incomplete, longed-for, distrusted love. But the poetry is simply good love poetry.
Perhaps the wittiest English poet since Donne [40], Auden erases the line between light and serious verse. Like Eliot and the later Yeats, he throws away the romantic lexicon of the great nineteenth-century English poets. Into his intricate metaphysical verse he cunningly introduces the vernacular and creates the unique Auden poetic sentence. Thus his work is full of linguistic surprises, often turning on near-rhymes or odd alliterations. A technical experimenter, he invented new forms, along with ringing the changes on ali the older forms, includ- ing those to be found in Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic poetry. He often felt that his critics had not sufficiently appreciated his capacities as a metrist.
Auden is not an "easy" poet, and his density tends to increase in his later poems. He cannot be read straight through. Try the shorter poems first, including such classics as
"In Memory of W.B. Yeats," and "In Memory of Sigmund Freud." Then make your way as best you can. Five years from now, come back to him—and you may find that somehow he has become part of you. Great poets have a way of creating and educating their own audiences.
No brief quotation can even suggest the range of Auden's emotional world, but here are three Auden quatrains, written in wartime, which reveal something of his sense of the poet's role in "the nightmare of the dark":
Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress;