get back from London [where he was “overseeing” the world premiere of Krapp’s Last Tape and helping with the revival of Endgame at the Royal Court Theatre] if I can’t get on with any new work I’ll start on the translation of Textes pour rien. I made a balls of the new act in French I was telling you about. I’ll try it again but I’m not even sure it’s viable in the present setup. I feel I’m getting more and more entangled in professionalism and self-exploitation and that it would be really better to stop altogether [i.e., theater] than to go on with that. What I need is to get back into the state of mind in 1945 when it was write or perish. But I suppose no chance of that.
By the late 1970s, Beckett would hardly have perished had he stopped writing, but he seemed to return to his creative sources to produce the novels of Nohow On in rapid succession, three longer works that stood almost in defiance of the contemporary critical cant that saw his work lapsing (or collapsing) into inevitable and imminent silence. Some early critics had confused Beckett’s pursuit of a “literature of the unword” (a phrase he used in a 1937 letter to acquaintance Axel Kaun) with the cessation of creation, an active “unwording of the world,” as critic Carla Locatelli phrases it,8 with a passive silence, a retreat into quiescence. In the “closed space” tales, however, Beckett seemed to take some consolation and even pleasure in “unwording the world,” even as the enterprise was doomed to failure given the imagination’s persistence even in the face of the death of imagination. Rather than rejecting language, he seems to have continued to explore its tenacious power to represent even as it was being reduced, denuded, stripped bare. The images of the “closed space” novels (and stories) disappear, vanish, or are discarded from the virtual space of consciousness only to reappear through the imagination’s ineluctable visualization and the tenacity of language to represent. Even when the imagination is dead, a perverse consciousness struggles to imagine its death, which paradox seems to have launched Beckett on the enterprise of the late, “closed space” fiction. Beckett’s sudden creative expansiveness then with the Nohow On novels confounded those critical predictions of a lapse into silence. With the turn of a new decade Beckett seems to have disentangled his complicated life as a leading man of letters and returned to his creative sources, the wellhead he celebrated in the radio play Words and Music, returned to the conditions of the late 1940s and the “siege in the room” that produced the first “3 in 1.”
These three late novels, then, form something of a family triptych (or trilogy, or trinity, if we must) with Company featuring a man/son in old age, Ill Seen Ill Said, a ghostly woman/mother in old age, and finally Worstward Ho, a nearly mystical union (anticipated in Company and even earlier in From an Abandoned Work) of father and son moving motionlessly. Company, the first in the series, is dominated by scenes long associated with Beckett’s early life and which not only appeared periodically in his work but may have assailed him psychologically as well until the very end. The story of learning to swim at the Victorian seawater baths in Dun Loaghaire called “The Forty Foot”9 is rendered as childhood terror in Company: “You stand at the tip of the high board. High above the sea” (12). The scene appeared in Watt as well, where the image troubled a weary Watt’s dreams: “. . . into an uneasy sleep, lacerated by dreams, by dives from dreadful heights into rocky waters, before a numerous public” (222). The image or memory haunted Beckett’s poem of 1930 that featured this incident, “For Future Reference”: “And then the bright waters / beneath the broad board / the trembling blade of the streamlined divers / and down to our waiting / to my enforced buoyancy.”10 And according to Herbert Blau, Beckett was wrestling with just this image in the nursing home shortly before his death when he asked Blau directly, “What do you think of recurring dreams? I have one, I still have it, always had it, anyway a long time. I am up on a high board, over a water full of large rocks. . . . I have to dive through a hole in the rocks.”11
Likewise, the scene of an inquisitive child returning with his mother from Connolly’s Stores and testing her patience by raising the question about the distance of the moon from Earth is another of those recurring scenes, if not recurring dreams: “A small boy you come out of Connolly’s Stores holding your mother by the hand” (6). The question engenders a sharp reply in Company: “she shook off your little hand and made you a cutting retort you have never forgotten” (6). The mother’s retort was even sharper in “The End” (1946): “A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said” (Stories and Texts for Nothing, 50); and in Malone Dies: “The sky is further away than you think, is it not, mama? . . . She replied, to me her son, It is precisely as far away as it appears to be” (98). But such scenes even if rooted in Beckett’s childhood are no more frequent than the persistent literary allusions to Dante and Belacqua, the Florentine lute-maker stuck in Limbo: “. . . the old lutist cause of Dante’s first quarter-smile and now perhaps singing praises with some section of the blessed at last” (44). And Belacqua himself may have been the model for Beckett’s “closed space” figures: “huddled with his legs drawn up within the semicircle of his arms and his head on his knees” (19), like Botticelli’s illustration of him for the Divine Comedy.
These scenes from childhood have tempted his early biographer (among others) to suggest that Company (and so much of Beckett’s work) was coded autobiography: “You were born on an Easter Friday after long labour” (24–25), as Beckett himself was, for example. For some critics the mother-haunted Ill Seen Ill Said reflects the author’s struggling through images of his own mother, May Beckett, whose namesake appears in the play Footfalls as well. And the mystical union of father and son in Worstward Ho may owe much to memories of Samuel Beckett’s walks with his father through the Irish countryside (an image of which Radio Telefis Éireann’s documentary Silence to Silence makes much). But such autobiographical emphases ignore the anti-empiricism that runs through these works, the rejection of the “verifiability” of immediate knowledge since in Beckett’s fictive world all is re-presentation, always already a repetition. The search for an originary model for the fictive representations ignores or subverts the very nature of these late fictions where the narrator himself is a “Devised devisor devising it all for company.” The narrator is, after all, in Company’s most persistent pun, “lying” from the first. Even if we identify certain of the images in Beckett’s fiction as having parallels in his personal life, this information tells us little about their function in the fictions. Childhood memories, like literary allusions, are “figments,” “traces,” “fables,” or “shades,” a mix of memory, experience, desire, and imagination.
Company then, like the other “closed space” tales, is neither memoir nor autobiography, but a set of devised images of one devising images. To Beckett’s mind at any rate, Company was an interplay of voices, a fugue between “he” or “himself,” called on occasion “W” (31–33), imagining himself into existence, and an external voice addressing the hearer as “you” and on occasion “M” (31–33), the former trying to provide the latter with a history and so a life. The goal of the voice is, “To have the hearer have a past and acknowledge it” (24). The tale is then a pronominal pas de deux. The hearer is puzzled by the voice because it is not only sourceless but false, not his, and so the “life” not “his” either, the tale not autobiographical: “Only a small part of what is said can be verified” (3), the narrator of Company reminds us. Stories of what may or may not be images from the narrator’s past have tended to sound to him like incidents in the life of another, a situation Company’s unnamed narrator shares with Watt: “. . . this seemed rather to belong to some story heard long before, an instant in the life of another, ill told, ill heard, and more than half forgotten” (Watt, 74). What passes for memories are images often ill seen and, of necessity, ill said. In fact, both voices of Company are false; that is, they are fictions, figments of imagination whose function, like much of art, is aesthetic play, company for a narrator who is finally and fundamentally “as you always were. Alone” (46). The company of Company, then, is not the nostalgia of memory regained, the past recaptured, but the solace of “the conjuring of something out of nothing”