Samuel Beckett Is Closed Read online

  Published by Foxrock Books/Evergreen Review in association with OR Books/Counterpoint Press.

  Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West.

  Visit our website at evergreenreview.com.

  First printing 2018.

  Samuel Beckett Is Closed © 2018 Michael Coffey

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  British Library Cataloging in Publication Data:

  A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Text and jacket design and typesetting by Laura Lindgren.

  Set in Carre Noir, Century 731, CA Cula, Magma, and Sofia.

  Printed by Berryville Graphics, Virginia.

  hardback ISBN 978-1-944869-59-5 ∙ ebook ISBN 978-1-944869-54-0

  Excerpts from Samuel Beckett’s Long Observation of the Ray © The Estate of Samuel Beckett. Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London (p. 120). The torture scenarios are adapted from Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantanamo Diary, edited by Larry Siems, Little, Brown, 2015. The torture investigation procedures are taken from The US Army Field Manual on Interrogation 34–52, and the investigation into detainee treatment is based on the Schmidt-Furlow investigation, under the auspices of the Senate Armed Service Committee’s “Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.” Reports of terrorist attacks in Paris are adapted from Google-translated Agence France Press reports at the time.

  “Being is constantly putting form in danger.”

  —Samuel Beckett

  “B: Total object, complete with missing parts, instead of partial object. Question of degree.

  “D: More. The tyranny of the discreet overthrown. The world a flux of movements partaking of living time, that of effort, creation, liberation. . . . The fleeting instant of sensation given back, given forth, with context of the continuum it nourished.”

  —SamUel Beckett and Georges Duthuit,

  from Three Dialogues

  PART ONE

  I.

  —It’s not cricket, Sam.

  I’ve spent the last three years reading only the writings of Samuel Beckett.

  Tell me a story, she says—that’ll put me to sleep.

  The detention and interrogation operation covered a three-year period and over 24,000 interrogations.

  —So we won’t be here for five days. The prospect of nine innings gave me a fright. We’d be panting here through August.

  I exaggerate a little: I have read newspapers and the books of friends and a few literary journals, but I’ve not wandered in search of other major writers to discover or reread. I have read (and reread) only Beckett (and books about his work), while also becoming a member of the Samuel Beckett Society, subscribing to the Journal of Beckett Studies out of Edinburgh University, attending a Beckett conference, in Phoenix, and visiting the Beckett Collection at the University of Reading in England, then Antwerp, with Halifax next, as the Beckett conferences roll on.

  I can confirm that my stories do put her to sleep, on those occasions when I am stirred to render an old account or, as happens more often of late, am summoned by my beloved to perform. This power—to put people down, to take them under, to usher them from this side of the veil to the other—Christ, I’m nodding out myself. What I mean to say is this—that it is my voice simply that serves as a calmative.

  This investigation found only three interrogation acts in violation of techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual and Department of Defense. The report found that the interrogation of a high-value detainee resulted in degrading and abusive treatment but did not rise to the level of being inhuman. The report found no evidence of torture.

  —I will. That’s our man there? A crisp ale would do me, in this heat.

  —Afraid the best we’ve got here is Rheingold, [singing] the dry beer. They sponsor this spectacle.

  —I’d drink bog water from a galosh right now.

  —Two over here!

  I am sixty-two years old. How many years of reading do I have left? Let’s say twenty, which is a little optimistic but not unreasonable. I’m healthy. Let’s assume so. My eyes are good.

  I mix them up, the rhythms of my speech, all my cadences, of which I have a few—fast or slow, chipper or lugubrious, and the accents as well—my old rural honk or the Irish brogue, for the poetry. And then there’s the timbre, and the register, and that subtle interplay of adduction and abduction—I am talking open and shut here. Puffs of air. It is certainly not the content of my stories that induces unconsciousness, or so I tell myself, for I must—in order to live with the choices I have made! Which is to say, were I in fact capable of delivering pure device-agnostic content that could alter states of being, I should have found a different career, hiring myself out to surgeries and day-care centers, say, where putting people under is to be wished, and then making my texts available (for a subscription) for others to intone. There I go again, nearly comatose.

  You have been identified as having conducted an assignment at GTMO, Cuba, since 9/11/2001. The Inspection Division has been tasked with contacting those employees who have served in any capacity at GTMO. Employees should immediately respond to the following: If you observed aggressive treatment, which was not consistent with guidelines, respond via email for purposes of follow-up interview; if you observed no aggressive treatment of detainees you should respond documenting a negative response. The above email was sent to 493 FBI personnel who had served at GTMO.

  —Were they in town, I’d have taken you to see the first-place Yanks.

  —Now why is that?

  —To see a little professionalism, and the great Mickey Mantle.

  —These are . . . amateurs then?

  —Virtually . . . and retirees.

  —Pensioners—the pure game, for the love of it. Nothing like it. [Grandly, as if quoting] The presence of promise is a curse. [Snidely] Thanks, Mother. Maa.

  At this age, I know who it is I want to read—though, really, have I read all of Shakespeare or Dickens or (any of) Balzac? Should I? I have not read the bulk of Proust even—prochaine, prochaine. So it is Beckett. I just don’t know why. The dedicated Beckett reading began as I waited out the publication of my first book of stories. These stories were much about identity and adoption and fathers and heirs both literary and otherwise and I did not know what the book’s reception would tell me about myself—I would have to wait and see. I sometimes think I don’t like waiting but the opposite is true—I find waiting for something inherently exciting—and waiting for a book to be published is particularly exquisite; I even find waiting for something miserable, like, say, a colonoscopy, a luxury, as every day that is not the dreaded day has a certain satin lining. Even so, during such an interim as prepublication represents, I was concerned about having a focus to my activities.

  It’s a funny thing—at least I pretend to laugh at it—that she cannot sleep these days. I don’t mean that she never sleeps, for she does, and not only with the aid of my soporifics. She can sleep perfectly well and on her own in boxcars rolling over land and in the theater houses of an afternoon, or at the back of the slow taverns we frequent when we are flush, availing ourselves of the steam-table fare and the Four Roses. O
h, will she sleep! But come time for the bedsheets or the pallet or the rug, I mean night-night, in our kip, she’s as jumpy as a puppet on a string. Where’d that come from? Rhymes with spring, now I remember. One of my tropes, spring is, funny how that happens in these little canters.

  The investigating officer was directed to address the following allegations:

  - That military interrogators improperly used military working dogs to threaten detainees.

  - That military interrogators improperly used duct tape to cover a detainee’s mouth and head.

  - That Department interrogators improperly impersonated agents and other Department officers during the interrogation of detainees.

  - That on several occasions Department interrogators improperly played loud music and yelled loudly at detainees.

  - That military interrogators improperly used sleep deprivation against detainees.

  - That military interrogators improperly chained detainees and placed them in a fetal position on the floor.

  - That military interrogators improperly used extremes of heat and cold during their interrogation of detainees.

  —The men in blue suits and the little caps, what do they do?

  —They enforce the rules.

  —We’ll stay on their good side, so.

  —Both these teams are new, only two years old. The league added them—expansion, they called it—and the rosters are a few kids and a lot of has-beens. Frankly, Sam, they’re pitiful.

  —Oh, excellent! Stir in a little fear and we’ll have catharsis.

  —That’s what I think, too, to be honest. You have the makings of a Mets fan, Sam. I’m going to get you a cap. For the sun.

  —For the shade.

  As I woke up each day anticipating an eventual book launch, and readings and a party and, god willing, reviews, I didn’t want to make it up each day, my reading that is. I wanted to have decided that already, to have had it decided. One of the things I learned in writing my short fiction was to interrogate what a given story is about. This often helped me shape it—or abandon it. So as I plunged into my Beckett reading two summers ago, rereading James Knowlson’s biography, and Beckett’s early stories, and a book about the diaries he kept while in Germany in the late 1930s, I asked myself this question: Why Beckett? In the ensuing months I have chased that ball, let me tell you. For example, I was convinced I had discovered that Beckett was the father of an American writer, which promised to be a shocking revelation, not only to those who understand Beckett as having such insight into life’s lack of meaning that he would never bring another being into it—“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night,” says Pozzo in Godot—but a shock as well to the Beckett estate: a sole “heir of the body?” I became transfixed by the work of this American writer, little known broadly but admired and respected by a certain avant-garde, here and in Europe. Her work is marked by a deep engagement with a purely American—indeed New England—tradition of puritanism filtered through a metaphysics of writing, feminism, and the spiritual extremism of a historic poetics convinced of God’s Immanence. This seemed to me not the polar opposite of Samuel Beckett’s inherited tradition and his rebellions, but a crafted dissent. This is not me, her work declared. I am not my father’s daughter. Not that father. I have another.

  To put her under as she thrashes about the bedsheets or upon the pallet or the rug, depending on our whereabouts and our fortunes, I often embark upon a verbal tour of the seasons. If you are not convinced by now that it is not my content that has the magic but my delivery, then ponder how it is that my most reliable oratory invokes the cycle of the seasons, either the condensed version or one of the four, in turn, in full, spring to summer to fall to winter. I mean, how dull that is. Basically, I am talking about the weather and yet, the power! You should see it. Magic potion, my words are. If she is not out cold by the time I get to winter then it is not me but another chap who has slipped into the bedchamber with her, as has happened, but we are beyond that—that was Toledo. By the vernal equinox, my otherwise jumpy puppet can be found so shallowly breathing as to seem dead, and she has never made it conscious to my rendition of Opening Day, which is a pity as it is one of my most vivid re-creations, complete with the rural accents and a few clever sound effects, crack of the bat and such. Shall I? Yes, spring, for old time’s sake. Perhaps for a little practice, a little boning up? Tenez-vous bien.

  The investigators were ordered to investigate two additional allegations concerning a female military interrogator performing a “lap dance” on a detainee and the use of faux “menstrual blood” during an interrogation. The investigators were told furthermore not to limit themselves to the listed allegations. The investigating team attempted to determine if the allegations in fact occurred. During the course of the follow-up investigation, allegations raised specifically by the two detainees who were subjects of the first and second “Special Interrogation Plans,” respectively, were considered. The investigating team applied a preponderance standard of proof consistent with the guidelines provided to determine if a particular interrogation approach fell properly within an authorized technique. In those cases in which the team concluded that the allegation had in fact occurred, the team then considered whether the incident was in compliance with techniques approved either at the time of the incident or subsequent to the incident. In those cases where it was determined the allegation had occurred and to have not been an authorized technique, the team then reviewed whether disciplinary action had already been taken and the propriety of that action. The team did not review the legal validity of the various interrogation techniques in question. Background: Interrogation operations began in January. Initially, interrogators relied upon interrogation techniques contained in FM 34-52. These techniques were ineffective. In October, the Commander requested approval of nineteen counter-resistance techniques, broken down into three categories, the third being the most aggressive. The Secretary approved categories 1 and 2 but only one of the techniques in category 3 was authorized—non-injurious physical contact.

  —There’s a stroke!

  —That should be caught . . . attaboy!

  —Now they change innings?

  —Now the home team hits, if you want to call it that. You finished your beer? What’s the verdict?

  —Bouquet des champignons.

  —That bad?

  —I’ll get these.

  There is no dispute about Beckett having had an affair with the American writer’s mother in the late summer of 1936, a Dublin woman with whom Beckett had grown up in Foxrock. The families knew each other well. The woman, in 1936, was already married to an American legal scholar—she had just returned to Dublin as chaperone for two unmarried Boston ladies in the style of the day. But Beckett’s family, wary of a scandal, urged the end to the liaison. Beckett fled to Germany—as he had done before when under duress—and the woman returned to Boston. The daughter was born nine months later. She looks like Beckett. She affects a Beckett look, to this day—short cropped gray hair; she is possessed of the aquiline nose and what look like Beckett’s gnarled fingers, possibly from Dupuytren’s contracture, sometimes known as “the Celtic hand.” Her literary style is austere, her aesthetic uncompromising, a kind of literary abstraction.

  Such springs as I recall them begin with a sense of a cool damp emanating from the ground, just thawing, all kinds of dead matter giving up their odors, to us, fair children, out to play. The color and cold of promise! Then the buds dotting the tree branches like a hesitant code or speech, on the way to another form, a blossoming, into birds and then the damn bees. Oh, the bees that zither through the air in their dizzy loops, almost making fun of menace, so harmless, so necessary, don’t sting me. I can go on, to digging up the bait from the earth warmed by the burn barrel, with my Gramps, whose old heavy boot would thump the spade in but slowly, slowly and then as slowly turn over a loaf of ear
th, enlivened by the wriggling heads, or tails—there is no difference, to me—of garden worms. He would then gently chunk the hunk apart, in sections, revealing long annelid strands, purple and gray, and these would go into this disused tobacco can with handfuls of dirt and bits of grass, and then we’d give the trout hell in the stream. I would seldom, if at all, in my telling, go into the details of impaling these creatures on a barbed Eagle number 9, and resolutely never extend to describing the actual tricking of a trout to lurch at the dangling meal with the fatal business concealed within, for this was narrative information of a tenor that might agitate rather than sedate my lovely.

  The Secretary issued a new policy accepting twenty-four techniques. The Secretary’s guidance remains in effect today. First, it required all detainees to continue to be treated humanely. Second, it required notification prior to the implementation of the following aggressive interrogation techniques: Incentive/Removal of Incentive, Pride and Ego Down, Mutt and Jeff, and Isolation. Third, it specifically limited the use of these aggressive techniques to circumstances required by “military necessity.” The memorandum did not attempt to define the parameters of “humane treatment” or “military necessity.” Mutt and Jeff are the stars of a comic strip that began in 1908. They are stupid and scheming risk-takers, horse players, gamblers, one more stupid than the other.

  —This is what you would call the home side. Look!

  —He keeps running?

  —Around the bases, that diamond, really a square—first base, second, third, home—if he can. Bobby Klaus—slides into second!

  Beckett sent a gift when she was born. He sent it to America. Most scholars I have spoken to off the record say the math doesn’t work—more than nine months between the mother’s return by boat to Boston and the birth of the daughter. I tired of doing the math, which proved no such thing—parturition is forty weeks, not nine months, for starters. The math doesn’t rule anything out—or in. But a DNA test does, proving that the writer is not Beckett’s daughter but the daughter of the legal scholar and her mother, a relief, no doubt, for her mother, too, was unsure, and often tormented her young daughter and then not-so-young daughter that indeed she might be a Beckett.