Seated in an empty French café with this book, I was halfway through the poem "être là sans mâchoires sans dents" ("to be there without jaws, without teeth"), when in shuffled a very old, near-toothless man in slippers, pushing his wheelchair. Having made it up to my corner, and polished off a honey gaufre and a glass of rosé, he produced a pocket mirror, with which he examined his eyes' bright red underlids. He then produced a clementine, peeling and eating it with ritualistic care, before emptying a tiny red-leather purse of its few centimes: all in silence.
A literary revelation came upon me: Samuel Beckett did not invent, he observed. His is not an attenuated, surreal, abstracted world (the extreme end-gasp of that glorious era of high modernism), but utterly, piercingly real. It was telling that Ian McKellen, rehearsing this year's celebrated production of Waiting for Godot, discovered that Beckett's play, far from being "difficult", was actually rather straightforward closer to music-hall patter than tortured existentialism.
The danger, of course, is that Beckett will be made cuddlier, the vertiginous depth of his despair superseded by a shiny surface of comic misanthropy. Beckett's compass points firmly to the sunless north of King Lear, humanity no more than a "forked radish" in a world in which spots of love flicker on a vast bleakness of heath, and language is more dangerous than silence. Beckett articulates the void for us, in a way which no one in English letters has done since Shakespeare; and we need that articulation's purity, its catharsis.
Beckett's achievement is so vast in his plays and novels that his poems have been reduced to something ancillary, of interest mainly to Beckett scholars, much as Joyce's poetry was. The curve of his verse career saw an early flowering, a long pause and then a remarkable and under-appreciated late bloom. As David Wheatley points out in his introduction to this new, rather glumly-designed Selected: "It was as a young poet that Beckett launched himself in the little reviews of 1930s Paris, and as a poet that he would make his first breakthrough into French."
His first published effort, "Whoroscope", was written overnight for a competition: a dramatic monologue spoken by Descartes, it is little more than a Roman candle of glittering cultural references, closer to Dada than "The Waste Land". Much later, he would put such nonsense-pastiche into the mouth of characters such as Lucky, whose great "tirade" in Godot has a much more resonant beauty in its madness. The Selected omits similar juvenilia and goes straight for Beckett's first and only collection of poems, Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates (1935). A long poem in this, "Enueg I" (enueg being a stylised complaint in Provençal, from which ennui derives), has the poet "sullenly" hurrying through the Dublin suburb of Chapelizod in long-limbed free verse. The Beckett lexicon is already here: "fungus", "skull", "verminous", "pestilence", and one of his best lines anywhere: "a slush of vigilant gulls in the grey spew of the sewer", noted as he passes the Liffey.
His lyric gift is evident, but so also is his repulsion at having to articulate at all: building a new language out of "babble" runs a fierce "gantelope [gauntlet] of sense and nonsense", as he puts it in the title poem. These earlier poems resplendently illustrate both his stated belief that verbal "putrefaction" will compost to "endless verbal germination", and his acceptance of "Art as the apotheosis of solitude": they barely communicate, but writhe in their own lament at man"s folly and suffering.
Beckett is unusual for a writer in starting out enraged and disgusted, rather than being driven to it by critics, venal publishers, the mediocrity of public taste, or life itself on what Lucky who is, among other things, a disappointed poet calls "this bitch of an earth". It is as if Beckett early captured Gabriel's feeling of futility and self-loathing in Joyce's extraordinary story "The Dead", and made worrying at it his life's task. Unsurprisingly, the God-challenging Habbakuk is the one Old Testament prophet he gives voice to in the inscrutable poem "Dortmunder" ("me, Habbakuk, mard of all sinners") Donatello's toothless, howling sculpture of the same now looking thoroughly Beckettian.
These poems need to be read three-dimensionally: that is, turned slowly until the variety of each poem's facets bring pleasure, if not always sense: "grave suave singing silk / stoop to the black firmament of areca / rain on the bamboos flowers of smoke alley of willows" "areca" being a palm producing astringent nuts (excremental activity is a Beckett motif). There's no doubt that the poet, like John Ashbery in our own day, was responding to the scintillant elusiveness and collage-ism of modern French poetry, his free-ish translations of Apollinaire or Éluard bringing regret that he did not try his hand at more.
A fearless troubadour of life's purgatory, for whom words are "stale" or reduced to "whey", the one poem to arise from Beckett's war experience as a Red Cross helper in shattered Normandy, "Saint-Lo", is just four lines long, and a masterpiece of concision. His later poems are either scarcely distinguishable from such short plays as Rockaby, or self-translated from French originals. The latter are often exceptionally beautiful, reaching an apogee in untitled, fragment-like miniatures known as the "mirlitonnades". These feel like x-rays of their own linguistic structures, a recent attempt to translate one of just seven words "rêve / sans fin / ni trêve / à rien" ("dream / without cease / nor ever / peace") spurring weeks of readers' attempts in the letters page of the Times Literary Supplement.
On his deathbed, Beckett wrote "Comment dire", or "What is the word", a heroic, stammering attempt to accept that it is "folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint far away over there what " : the two versions, French and English, seem to trap each other's misprisions and stumblings. He began and ended with poems, but, as Wheatley suggests, everything he wrote was poem-like, including Waiting for Godot, with its circular structures, pooling inaction and exquisite rhythms.
Adam Thorpe's Hodd is published by Jonathan Cape.
