Spirit of Beckett guides the week

IF you believe that quality and integrity trump novelty and celebrity, then it was a bang-up week for literary awards.

The English playwright Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize for literature and the Irish novelist John Banville’s Man Booker Prize were better than well-deserved. They were right. But the week’s big winner was the 1969 literature laureate, Samuel Beckett, who died 16 years ago and in whose fecund shadow both Pinter and Banville have worked so admirably and admiringly.

At this particular historical moment -- besotted as it is by piety and passion on all sides, by cruelty in attack and reciprocal cruelty in response -- recognition of Beckett’s continuing relevance through the work of his foremost admirers hardly could be more apt. It’s even amusing to note both writers’ Beckett-like responses to news of their awards.

Thursday, a Swedish journalist working for the Nobels’ official website rang Pinter and said, “I would like just to ask you what, in your career, you think has been the most important, what has the most

On the day Banville’s novel “The Sea” was short-listed for this year’s Booker, a reporter called and asked, “Can you summarize your book in your own words?” Banville replied, “I already have -- 65,000 of them.”

No one ever summed up Beckett’s ethos better than the critic Hugh Kenner, who said, “His argument was with the Book of Genesis.” What better antidote to the gooey piety that seems to spread across the surface of our public life like some uncontrollable religious oil spill than Beckett’s astringent verity: “God is a witness that cannot be sworn.”

Pinter, who was Beckett’s friend and to whom the Irish playwright was a mentor, has been most explicit in his admiration. “The farther he goes the more good it does me,” he said once of Beckett. “I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going.... He’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs.... He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful.”

Banville also frequently has drawn attention to Beckett’s influence on his work. His own sequence of novels, “The Book of Evidence” (1989), “Ghosts” (1993) and “Athena” (1995), usually are compared to Beckett’s “Molloy,” “Malone Dies” and “The Unnamable.” Among the most telling of “Ghosts’ ” many memorable sentences are these, pure Beckett and Banville: “Such suffering, such grief: unimaginable. No, that’s not right. I can imagine it. I can imagine anything.”

Opposed to cruelty

IN this country, at least, Pinter’s Nobel is bound to be a source of dismay to some who object to his fierce criticism not only of the war in Iraq but also of its conduct, particularly the use of torture by U.S. forces. His categorical opposition to cruelty and oppression, however, springs from an insistence on the primacy of decency and humanity over ideology in any form.

In this too he is a disciple of Beckett, who famously left his neutral homeland for France on the very verge of World War II. As he later said, “I should rather be in France at war than Ireland at peace, and by the grace of God I made it just in time.” In occupied France, Beckett joined the Resistance and served heroically enough to be awarded the Croix de Guerre following liberation.

As Banville has written, “In politics Beckett was vaguely left-wing, vaguely republican; he joined the Resistance less out of political conviction, it would seem than out of a general commitment to the ordinary decencies of life as against the wickedness of the Nazi and Vichy regimes.”

The critic and commentator Fintan O’Toole has pointed out that Beckett’s “friend and fellow member of the circle of James Joyce in Paris, Paul Leon, had died in a concentration camp in 1942,” and that “his oldest French friend, Alfred Peron, had survived Mauthausen only to die shortly after its liberation from the ill-treatment he had received there.” Beckett, O’Toole noted, “explained his decision to join the French Resistance rather than remain in the safety of neutral Ireland by his outrage at the Nazis, ‘particularly in their treatment of the Jews’ and the fact that they were ‘making life hell for my friends.’ ”

Something similar, a loyalty to decency and humanity rather than programmatic ideology, is at work in Pinter’s public statements -- however injudicious some here may find them.

Beckett used to pause occasionally to torment academics hoping to discover precisely what had inspired him to write “Waiting for Godot” with its two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon. (He said to Susan Sontag, among others, that the play actually originated in the “vertigo and nausea” he experienced during the agonizing waits entailed by his work for the French Resistance.)

The playwright told more than one professor, though, that, at a certain point in his life, he’d spent a great deal of time in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris reading Augustine.

There he had come across the saint’s reflection on the two thieves the Gospels say were crucified on either side of Christ. He was struck, Beckett said, by the theologian’s admonition: “Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.”

But, as the medievalist and Augustine scholar James J. O’Donnell recently pointed out, “Thinking of Vladimir and Estragon as the two thieves crucified with Jesus is intriguing, to say the least, and it is wonderfully Beckett-like that the particular passage cannot be found anywhere in the surviving writings of Augustine ... for all that the language and tenor are quite perfectly Augustinian.”

In other words, an insight delivered with perfect pitch and, achingly true -- but in what sense? How perfectly Beckett and how perfectly suited to the present moment.

So too as warring cultures and creeds inscribe the next chapter in our long history of brutality, strife and self-inflicted catastrophe, this passage from one of Banville’s most Beckett-like novels, “The Book of Evidence.”

“I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us?”