Análisis de la competencia

Beckett’s impending departure for Germany at the end of September 1936 must have appeared to him as a possibility to reverse ‘the trickle down hill’ smothering any ‘effort to work’ (SB to TM, 9 September [1936]).

If Germany and German writing had in the past enabled a satisfying outlet for personal experiences, then a prolonged exposure could potentially offer a new creative impetus.

Beckett seemed receptive to instances of creative stimulus during his fi rst few weeks in Hamburg. Encouraged by the writing of ‘Cascando’, a poem with which he seemed unusually content, it was poetry that preoccupied him during the early part of his trip.⁴ His visit to the graveyard in Ohlsdorf on the outskirts of Hamburg offered an initial favourable occasion.

He spent a long time walking among the graves, the atmosphere stirring something within him. Beckett’s diary entry describing his visit betrays a more literary style, emphasising his statement that ‘I thought a poem would be there’ (GD, 25 October 1936). Having referred to the place as being

‘[a]live with graves’, he tried to capture the mood of the cemetery:

Strange banners on the newly earthed. One bedraggled crape fi llet all on its own. Yellow leaves & red berries. Young poplars of incredible delicacy, almost bare of leaves, sheathed in their branches. Dull golden larches &

glaucus pines. Heather on graves (but in bunches), roses . . . One Liebespaar

Beckett’s ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ 113

[loving couple]. Fish in pond being fed. Swans. A [erasure] small old man sidles determinedly into a nook, [erasure] behind a yew hedge, facing a piece d’eau, [erasure] with the air of a regular weekend mourner, a Leidtragender Trostsuchend [erasure] und fi ndender [sufferer/bereaved seeking and fi nding consolation]. (GD, 25 October 1936)

Regardless of its concise and abbreviated tone, Beckett’s efforts at some-thing more than simple notation are illustrated by the large number of erasures in the passage. Yet despite being reminded of something by

‘the noise of my steps in the leaves’, Beckett left without having found the desired creative inspiration. Beckett’s comments in his diary equate this failure to capitalise on what seemed a promising experience with an absence of emotional sensitivity: ‘I feel nothing’ (GD, 25 October 1936). Having vowed to return to the cemetery, sensing a ‘[b]ig poem, with a little pains’, Ohlsdorf remained in Beckett’s mind in the following weeks.

But the next time Beckett mentioned the Ohlsdorf cemetery in his diary, he had replaced the idea of writing a poem with an outline for an article:

‘Must try & [write] article on Friedhof [cemetery]. With special ref.[erence]

to giant Crematorium’ (GD, 30 October 1936). This shift may have been precipitated by his receipt of a copy of the Irish Times, which his mother sent him throughout his trip, the day after his visit to the cemetery. Beckett felt that her sending him the newspaper was ‘designed to stimulate me into feuilletons’ (GD, 26 October 1936). In a desperate effort to counter the absence of feeling and of spontaneous creativity, Beckett resorted to the old strategy of reading in order to write. He proceeded to read two accounts of the cemetery in the main library, the Staatsbibliothek, taking extensive notes⁵ and subsequently stating his intention in a diary entry: ‘Another long visit there & then perhaps an article. Tone: cold elegiac. Code Napoléon.

Precise placings of preposterous Tatsachen [facts]’ (GD, 5 November 1936).

Beckett’s notes are indeed a mass of ‘preposterous facts’ concerning the cemetery: the wildlife to be found there, the technical data of the cremator-ium, the history of its construction and the amount of dead in the various sections, all conspiring to present a ‘cold’ (if not stiff) account of the location. This ‘elegiac’ tone is underlined by the reference to Napoleon’s 1804 ‘Code Civil’, granting personal freedom, legislative equality, private property and civil marriage, and recalls Beckett’s notes taken on Napoleon in the Dream notebook.⁶ Beckett must have thought of the Code Civil on noting that the cemetery is nonsectarian and admits Jews (an unusual situation), and that the individual plot owner must subordinate his grave design to the general consensus. More important here, however, is the

reference to the Code Civil, to which Stendhal compared his dry style of writing. As John Pilling has shown (1996, 56–62), Beckett was very inter-ested in Stendhal in the early 1930s, having fi rst encountered Le rouge et le noir at Trinity. Beckett returned to reading Stendhal at precisely those moments when he was struggling with his own writing. There is a reference to Le rouge et le noir in a letter of late 1931 to MacGreevy in which he refers to his problems with keeping Dream going: ‘I started yet again & soon saw no reason to continue’ (SB to TM, 20 December 1931). Beckett similarly read or re-read Stendhal in April 1935, at a time when he was trying to make a start on Murphy (SB to TM, 26 April 1935). In this 1935 letter, Beckett even raises the proposition that Stendhal’s autobiography, La vie de Henri Brulard, ‘might be an idea for a translation’.⁷ It is thus possible that, faced once again with a creative impasse, Stendhal may well have preoccupied Beckett due to his tendency to inscribe himself into his texts while obscuring that inscription by writing in a dry style. In his 1931 Trinity lectures Beckett had commented that Stendhal ‘used encyclopediatic [sic]

machinery [yet was] not really interested in illumination of it’.⁸

The emphasis on a nonlyrical use of the Ohlsdorf cemetery, established by way of Stendhal and enabled through the shift from poem to article, suggests that Beckett was fi nding it diffi cult to write something as personal as ‘Cascando’, that ‘last echo of feeling’ (SB to TM, 18 January 1937). Yet Beckett’s repeated use of the word ‘feeling’ in reference to his writing marks a new insistence. He expressed this during his fi rst visit to Ohlsdorf, stating that he had walked among the graves ‘dully without ad quem [towards which] & without feeling’ (GD, 25 October 1936).⁹ This lack of both purpose and emotional sensitivity repeated itself during his second visit, and in the evening, having felt ‘stupid and melancholy’ in the after-noon, he located his failure to be inspired in a ‘[p]aralysed sensibility, feebly fl ogging piggish sensibility’ (GD, 9 November 1936). It was precisely this act of ‘fl ogging’ that Beckett wished to avoid in his attempt to build on ‘Cascando’. As a diary entry made following a discussing of his German translation of ‘Cascando’ with the art historian Rosa Schapire clarifi es, Beckett’s thinking was revolving around how to synthesise the creative life with the personal life:

New lights on poem since Sunday’s disquisition [15 November 1936]:

consternation at inability to write poem swallowed up in consternation at inability to love. Intractable dichotomy of artist & man. Too much love for a good poem, too much poem for a good love. Etc. etc. (GD, 17 November 1936)

Beckett’s ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ 115

Beckett only succeeded at writing about the Ohlsdorf cemetery several years later in a passage in First Love:

I infi nitely preferred Ohlsdorf, particularly the Linne section, on Prussian soil, with its nine hundred acres of corpses packed tight, though I knew no one there, except by reputation, the wild animal collector Hagenbeck. . . . Coaches ply to and fro, crammed with widows, widowers, orphans and the like. Groves, grottoes, artifi cial lakes with swans, offer consolation to the inconsolable. It was December, I had never felt so cold, the eel soup lay heavy on my stomach, I was afraid I’d die, I turned aside to vomit, I envied them. (ECEF, 62–3)

Although it had not been December and he had not eaten eel soup that day (yet eel soup did lay heavy on his stomach the day – 14 October 1936 – he ate it in conjunction with plums), Beckett clearly returned to the diaries when writing this passage, as most of the details mentioned in First Love correspond to his diary entries.¹⁰