Words of the Bard of the Bitter End

By Paul Gray

by SAMUEL BECKETT 128 pages. Grove Press.

FIZZLES

by SAMUEL BECKETT 61 pages. Grove Press.

Each $6.95. $1.95 paperback.

Coming from almost any author but Samuel Beckett, 70, these two collections might seem slight to the point of frippery. Ends and Odds contains eight brief pieces for the stage, radio or television. Fizzles offers an even more self-derisive title, generous margins, plenty of white space and eight snippets of prose, the longest of which does not quite fill nine pages. Yet in Beckett's case, the oddity is not that $13.90 (plus tax) purchases so few words, but that those words were written at all.

For Beckett's career, which began when he served as an aide to James Joyce and was capped in 1969 by a Nobel Prize, can be seen as a long, inexorable process of writing himself into a corner of silence. From the start, he was profoundly uninterested in the standard material of literature: heroes and heroines, simulacra of daily reality, incidents, resolution, endings happy or otherwise. Instead, the Dublin-born author seized with Irish tenacity a single perception: reductio is always ad absurdum. At the bottom of every problem, no matter how logically pared down to essentials, lies the abyss. That has been Beckett's destination all along. The wonder is not simply that he has persisted so obsessively at such a self-defeating task. Nor that he abandoned his native English for French and then set about retranslating himself. Most astonishing is the volume of high comedy and pathos he has managed to squeeze from his abstract principles.

Last Ditch. The power of Beckett's works springs from a contradiction deeper than theories and more profound than nihilism. Like the hobos, clowns, cripples and basket cases who make up his cast of characters, Beckett is a Poet of the Last Ditch, a Bard of the Bitter End. Like them, he knows that he wants to stop talking. Like them, he knows he cannot.

Faced with this dilemma, the typical Beckett figure manifests both weary resignation and fits of intense anger at a world he can neither take nor leave. As Waiting for Godot showed startled audiences in 1953, those face-changing moods can produce compelling theater. Since then, Beckett has devoted the bulk of his dwindling output to drama and to voices, in various stages of disembodiment, passing the time of their Lives. Ends and Odds collects the most recent examples and proves that Beckett is still strong medicine, even in small doses.

In Not I, for example, a female speaker designated "Mouth" commits an extended monologue on the shock she felt when she found herself talking out loud after a mute childhood. She speaks in short, half-connected bursts, yet Beckett's stingy way with words captures her existence fully:"... parents unknown ... unheard of... he having vanished ... thin air ... no sooner buttoned up his breeches... she similarly... eight months later ... almost to the tick ... so no love ... spared that ... no love such as normally vented on the ... speechless infant..." In a phrase as simple as "spared that," Beckett blends savage humor and poignancy.

The pervading color of Ends and Odds is gray, a bleak miasma that convinces one character that "the earth must have got stuck, one sunless day, in the heart of winter." This backdrop accentuates the odd, vaudevillian turns that Beckett still keeps in his repertoire. He tosses off one-liners with apparent ease: "Ah, Morvan, you'd be the death of me if I were sufficiently alive!" His precise stage directions insist that props misfire with exquisite timing. He can make a character comment on a bit of stage business while implying a condemnation of life: "This gag has gone on long enough for me."

Fizzles contains fewer jokes and suggests that Beckett's exhaustion with prose is more advanced than his boredom with drama. There are flashes of the precise, pedantic syntax that hilariously dismembered logic in such earlier novels as Murphy and Molloy, but the dominant mood is elegiac: "For an instant I see the sky, the different skies, then they turn to faces, agonies, loves, the different loves, happiness too, yes, there was that too, unhappily." It is a twilight thought, stated carefully enough to stand up to the pressures of Beckett's singular vision: happiness is hard to bear and hard to do without.

For years, Beckett watchers have been picking up signals that the Master has at last said it all. A play he wrote in 1966, which lasted 30 seconds and con sisted of a single intake and exhalation, fueled much speculation that he had at last achieved silence. The appearance of these two volumes is added evidence that Beckett is still doing more than breathing. In fact, Beckett himself has set down a fictional prophecy that now seems closer to the mark. In Malone Dies, the narrator tries to arrange things so that his story, the stub of the pencil with which he writes it, and his life will all end at the same moment. It is hard to believe that Beckett will stop writing until he has to. He has made that bur den, after all, his despair and triumph.

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