Unknown American Source of Beckett's Fiction

Tuesday afternoon Oct 20

found this terrific link between Kenneth Burke’s novel and Beckett’s Unnamable--in The Believer from 2006  

"Towards a Better Life is the longest piece in this collection, a sort of one-sided epistolary novel with a flamboyantly solipsistic narrator. Ostensibly, the story is about the narrator’s relationship with the ex-friend to whom the epistles are addressed, but the discourse seldom escapes the confines of his own mind; instead of relying upon external images or events to explain his emotional state, the narrator writes in carefully balanced aphorism and analysis, something like Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable from the point of view of Jane Austen."    by  Dan Johnson 

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Katherine Anne Porter took a few copies of Burke’s new novel to Paris to have Sylvia Beach sell them in Shakespeare and Company.  Beckett bought a copy there perhaps five or six years later.  

This last is my invention but I did check the timelines and I think it quite possible.  It is so wonderful I just know it must be true.  Or at least "true."  Remember,  as Chinua Achebe says, all stores are true. 

How to talk about the vertical

Finished McGregor’s biography last night.  He maybe rushes through the later years, listing the moments of fame and accolades.  Sweet that Beckett and Lax exchanged books and compliments.  Had not known that Lax published a piece on Beckett in the Review of Contemporary Fiction.  By doing that he succeeds in turning the ordinary literary biography into a genuinely moving, graceful portrait of Lax as spiritual seeker and of himself as devoted younger friend during the final fifteen years of Lax’s life.  It reminds me of when I visited Kenneth Burke at his home in New Jersey.  As the younger writer and admirer the possibility is there one sees to write the life, become the Boswell.  An age-old pattern there.  Why it happens and doesn’t happen is also as age-old.  McGregor has the conviction at the outset when he describes their meeting that Lax apparently saw something in him that he liked and trusted and thus the friendship took root and deepened over the years.  In the final years I wonder if McGregor doesn’t artfully leave out a good deal so as ultimately to protect the friendship from the prying eyes of the crowds that had begun to flock to see Lax, the pilgrims.  He gets in the one juicy anecdote about the American pilgrim who as astonished to meet Lax’s cousin, Marcia, on the beach.  By the end each anecdote like this has the weight of the emblematic, a token illustration of much more that might have been said, that might be said at a later time.  You can’t help but think that McGregor will do a good deal more publishing of Lax and on Lax.  Perhaps.  Surely given the Merton industry now fully renewed as the Merton-Lax industry, a new generation of scholars will want to bring into publication more and more of Lax’s journals and notebooks.  Just as they might be waiting for the Trust to release more of Merton’s massive archives.  I know one retired scholar who might inform me more fully on these matters, especially since they are celebrating this year the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton and of Robert Lax.  Meanwhile McGregor’s new book will get lots of attention and it deserves it. 

I had hurled a mock-curse midway into the book when I felt McGregor didn’t really try hard enough to appreciate the paintings of Ad Reinhardt.  If you understand abstract painting at all, you know that Reinhardt’s black paintings are still far more important to the art world than McGregor seems to have comprehended.  With his devotion to Lax and to Lax’s unique style of formatting his poems, how could McGregor not have understood the place of Reinhardt more deeply? 

My other moment of high umbrage and disbelief came on page 274 of the book when McGregor says Lax’s poem “dribbles” down the left hand side of the otherwise blank page.  Ouch.  “a dribble of words.”  What an ugly and unfortunate choice of wording.  The same word shows up way too soon within the next twenty pages, so perhaps there was some editing and final proofing glitch at work, always a problem in getting any book into production.  But then later I wondered if he had had basketball in mind, the words dribble pointedly down the page like the ball under the commanding palm of the player?  No, that would be a stretch.  I considered synonyms he might have used---the words “flowed,” “processed,” “marched,” “stuttered,” “descended” (like the famous nude), “stained,” “swayed,” even “dropped.”  All terrible.  But “dribble” is still also terrible. 

I’ve long thought that what prepped me for lit theory were all the religion classes in high school and first three years of college.  Later at MD I switched from theology minor to philosophy minor.  But back in high school, maybe even late grade school, those religion classes we would try to stunp the teachers with questions that tried to trick out every contradiction we could find in religious teachings.  If God knows all, how can we have free will?  If you spend your life murdering people and on your death bed you have a conversion and receive the sacraments can you still get into heaven?  Stuff like that.  Then in college more reading in theology.  Lit crit and lit theory in grad school then seemed a slightly weaker version of such speculative big think.  In fact I nearly got into a little trouble for plagiarism in one course because I cited some stuff from Aquinas in a paper and the prof called me in to his office to ask where I had gotten the ideas and passages and wanted to be sure I really knew about such things first-hand.  

I never took a course with Wayne Booth.  A friend said to me one day, let’s take an independent study with Booth next term.  Why?  I asked. I had heard of Booth but knew nothing about him and never had heard one could take an independent study with anyone.  Well, it would be different and fun, said the friend.  He went to ask Booth and later he and I and Marjorie G-- met with Booth.  He said he would meet with us once a week and asked what we should study.  He said he was working on a book and wanted to have us study either R S Crane’s work or Kenneth Burke’s.  I said I’d never heard of Burke and asked him who he was.  He said he was a critic who disagreed with the Chicago School and attacked them a bit and was also a bit unusual and difficult.  I said, Let’s study him and so we did.  We read one of his books called The Philosophy of Literary Form.  

Booth had been a student of R S Crane, high admired prof at Chicago who had died probably five years before I got there.  Crane led a small band of literary critics in the late ‘50s in a revival of studying Aristotle with an eye to using him to attack and correct the New Critics who held forth at Yale.  They got to be called The Chicago School.  They agreed with the New Critics in being sworn to studying only literary form (close textual analysis) and keeping off the table questions about history and biography.  Burke was “outside” all of these warring factions, partly because he was never situated at one of the big universities.  His power base had been New York where he worked free-lance for mags like The New Republis, The Nation, and earlier the very influential Dial.  Crane’s work was very dry, he was trying to make criticism be as respectable as scientific discourse.  Burke was much livelier and brought in the social sciences.  He essentially advocated subsuming the social sciences under the dominance of literary thought—a position which lost the battle over the long run.  He was definitely a literary thinker so I found it disheartening that his work was pretty much ignored by the literary world, especially as he aged, but got adopted big-time by the burgeoning social science wing of English departments at the time—Communications, which quickly broke away and became much more successful and wealthy.  

Burke started college teaching in the Depression to make some money.  He had left New York to be a farmer-writer in northwest New Jersey right at the time of the crash.  He taught one term a year at Bennington.  That’s where Sontag was his student.  I’m sure he was a big influence on her but I doubt he was the most powerful shaper of her career.  She was probably enrolled in the New York Jewish intellectual elite from the time she was in denim overalls by the age of eight.  But it was unfortunate that she turned to attempting to write fiction.  I think she didn’t try it until relatively late in her career but I may be wrong.  I never read her very much but I had the impression her first and biggest success was with books on critical thought, one especially called “Against Interpretation.”  

It’s amazing how susceptible we are, I was, at 22 when all this started to take place.  I did one paper for Booth and Burke that one Quarter (ten weeks).  He wrote on it—"ready to be published.”  That bowled me over and I had no idea what to do next.  It totally scared me.  I never went to him and said Tell me how to publish this, where.  I had no idea what I was doing back then.  We moved here, took ten years until I finally wrote the dissertation the year Va was pregnant with David and there was a full-time opening in English here and I had to finish the degree or be booted out.  Nothing like pressure.  At the start of grad school it was the draft, twelve years or so later it was getting a job.  

Fifteen? years later Booth writes (we had been in touch off and on) and says Hey I just re-read your dissertation because I’m giving a paper at a conference on the same topic.  It is really good.  Did you ever publish it?  Gee, why didn’t you say that fifteen years ago?   In other words back in our day there was no such thing as “mentoring” —and if you were as clueless as I was, and as lacking in ambition or drive or whatever, you had no “career.”  Well, I oversimplify but that’s basically it.