DEL CENTRO DE TRANSFORMACIÓN 2 (4 CARGAS) TRAMO 1 (2 CARGAS)

With Murphy completed by the summer of 1936, Beckett’s travels through Germany in many ways mirrored his own continuing progression and journey as a writer. Even if his confrontation with contemporary German literature did not furnish him with material that could be incorporated into any new creative enterprise, as his reading had done, for example, in the writing of Murphy, it did offer him a kind of ‘negative knowledge’, of how not to proceed. Moreover, his reading of what he describes in a letter to Mary Manning Howe as ‘belated German romantic novels’, namely Walter Bauer’s Notwendige Reise and Hermann Hesse’s Demian, gave him a further angle from which to approach various aesthetic concerns (SB to MM, 18 January 1937). Beckett’s discussion of these two novels in his diary gives a rare insight into his creative thinking.

Beckett’s initial response to Hesse’s Demian (1919) was positive, as he deemed it ‘so far as I have read very astute, elegant & entertaining’ (GD, 18 January 1937). There are several passages in the fi rst half of the book which possibly explain this evaluation. The protagonist Emil Sinclair, for example, prefers the damned thief to the saved, as he shows more character and sincerity by not grovelling at the prospect of death. Moreover, he possesses sentiments that are reminiscent of Beckett’s own professed emotions, a turning away from the world and a similar love of the solitary pleasures of walking:

Ich gefi el mir in der Rolle, übertrieb sie noch, und grollte mich in eine Einsamkeit hinein, die nach aussen beständig wie männlichste Weltverachtung aussah, während ich heimlich oft verzehrenden Anfällen

von Wehmut und Verzweifl ung unterlag. . . Ich hatte mir angewöhnt, bei jedem Wetter kleine, denkerische Spaziergänge zu machen, auf denen ich oft eine Art von Wonne genoss, eine Wonne voll Melancholie, Weltverachtung und Selbstverachtung.

[I enjoyed myself in the part, exaggerated it even, and worked myself into a solitude which outwardly appeared consistently as the manliest contempt for the world, while I secretly often suffered from bouts of melancholy and desperation . . . I had got in the habit of taking small, thoughtful walks in every weather, during which I enjoyed a kind of bliss, a bliss fi lled with melancholy, contempt for the world and contempt for myself]. (Hesse 1977, 68–9; my translation)

However close such a passage, with its contradictory feelings, may be to Beckett’s emotional statements in his letter to MacGreevy of 10 March 1935, the second half of the book pleased him less.¹⁹ The main reason for this was the book’s structure, which frames the autobiographical story of Emil Sinclair’s youth. In an extended discussion of the formal aspects of the book, Beckett felt ‘it is dishonest throughout, not because it is a transcript, but because it gives itself out as a transcript’ (GD, 18 January 1937).²⁰ Applied to Beckett’s own writing, this statement looks both forwards and backwards. Beyond once again emphasising the theme of sincerity, there is an echo here of Beckett’s own notes written towards Murphy in the Whoroscope notebook, where an entry comments ‘this is the prologue. But call it not so’ (5r). Beckett’s criticism of Demian’s structural device of presenting itself as a transcript or as a ‘found’ document looks forward to his own postwar work. The text of Watt similarly purports to be a manuscript, through references to unintelligible parts of the manuscript, and the implication in Malone Dies is similarly that the text we are reading is the one Malone is writing in bed. The discussion is in keeping with Beckett’s overall concern with literary self-representation and the relation-ship between fi ction and autobiography.

But, in accordance with Beckett’s 1937 admonition, Watt or Malone Dies do not ‘give themselves out’ as transcripts but rather fulfi l (unlike the earlier Dream) a further criteria expressed in the discussion of Demian:

Never defi ne a book, the critic has merely then to elaborate the contrary.

Never for a second betray awareness of reader & critic. . . . Even the title must not give a direction. Thus Damian [sic] a good title, & Notwendige Reise a bad one, because all I need then prove is that it was not in the least necessary. It is impossible to controvert Murphy. (GD, 18 January 1937; Beckett’s emphasis)

Beckett, Nazi Culture and Contemporary German Literature 97

Beckett’s ruminations anticipate his use of what he termed ‘labels’ or names as titles for his novels, and in his diary entry he goes on to illustrate just why the title of Walter Bauer’s Notwendige Reise [Necessary Journey] is inadequate. We have already encountered Beckett’s thoughts on Bauer’s book in connection with his distrust of the Faustian Vorwärtsstreben:

The inevitable business of course about the journey to self. . . . I fear he will fi nd not himself in the end, but “God”, as Bauer “wir” [us]. Journey anyway the wrong fi gure. How can we travel to that from which one can-not move away. Das can-notwendige Bleiben [the necessary staying put] is more like it. (GD, 18 January 1937)

The negation of any satisfactory realisation of any kind of metaphysical or psychological journey incorporates Beckett’s criticism of the psychoanalyt-ical recovery of the hidden self as well as the transcendental application of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Yet it also contains a newly acquired knowledge in the ‘new planes of justifi cation’ for the fi gure of Murphy being tied to the chair (SB to MM, 18 January 1937). Beckett proceeds to reassert his commitment to a quietist, even resigned, position:

‘That is also in the fi gure of Murphy in the chair, surrender to the thongs of self, a simple materialisation of self-bondage, acceptance of which is the fundamental unheroic’. This is contrasted by the ‘heroic’ attitude, what

‘these Germans see as a journey’, that is to say the attitude that strives to acknowledge at least the ‘possibility of escape, if not necessarily the fact’

(GD, 18 January 1937).

Signifi cantly, Beckett’s thoughts on the necessity of staying put coincide with his growing realisation that his own journey through Germany was turning out to be a failure. But there is a shift in emphasis in Beckett’s own view of Murphy, from what an early note in the Whoroscope notebook calls the ‘[d]ynamist ethic’ of the main character to the essential stasis visible in Beckett’s thoughts on Murphy in the chair (WN, 1r). Indeed, it is precisely the lack of motion or the denial of transcending a present state, of being still and not still stirring, which Beckett’s characters progressively aim to achieve. The trope of the journey remains central to Beckett’s postwar work, but is negated. Thus in Molloy, for example, the symbolic epic journey is unmasked as circularity without purpose, and in later texts the journey itself is abolished only to be fi nally replaced by the static images of his theatre and prose fi ction.

Beckett’s reading of modern German literature was not restricted to novels. Besides Rainer Maria Rilke (an encounter which will be discussed in Chapter 7), Beckett read Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s poetic drama Der Tor

und der Tod. He condemned the thought of the piece, which records the dialogue between a man who realises he has never properly lived and Death, as ‘crass’ (GD, 23 November 1936). Nevertheless, Beckett transcribed two passages into his diary, of which one in particular appears to have touched an emotional chord:

Ich hab mich so an Künstliches verloren, Dass ich die Sonne sah aus toten Augen, Und nicht mehr hörte, als durch tote Ohren:

Stets schleppte ich den rätselhaften Fluch, Wie ganz bewusst, wie völlig unbewusst, Mit kleinem Leid u.[und] schaler Lust Mein Leben zu erleben wie ein Buch,

Das man zur Hälft noch nicht u.[und] halb nicht mehr begreift, Und hinter dem der Sinn erst nach Lebendigem schweift [I have lost myself to artifi ce so much

That I saw the sun through dead eyes, And did not hear but through dead ears:

Always dragging along the mysterious curse, Completely conscious, completely unconscious, With minor pain and stale joy,

To experience my life like a book,

Partly not yet intelligible, partly no longer so,

Solely beyond which the mind roams for life]. (GD, 23 November 1936) The entire passage seems to express Beckett’s own desire to break away from the artifi cial and move towards an authenticity of feeling. It refl ects Beckett’s growing realisation that he had to move away from viewing his own experiences through the lens of literature and to reanimate, give shape, to the vitality of immediate experience.

If Hofmannsthal did little on the whole to impress Beckett, Georg Trakl, a volume of whose poetry he bought towards the end of his stay, was more to his liking (GD, 3 March 1937). He must have read Trakl the following week, for during a conversation one evening he brought up Trakl, and commented in his diary how ‘lovely’ the poem ‘Winterabend’ was (GD, 11 March 1937). Beckett must have continued to be occupied with Trakl on his return to Ireland. In his letter to Axel Kaun dated July 1937 he asks whether an English edition of Trakl is in existence. It is possible that Beckett viewed a translation of Trakl as an alternative to the Ringelnatz

Beckett, Nazi Culture and Contemporary German Literature 99

selection he had just turned down. Indeed, the importance of the aesthetic programme formulated in the Kaun letter obscures Beckett’s ostensible reason for writing it in the fi rst place. Having been hired by Rowohlt-Verlag in February 1937, Kaun tried to interest Beckett in translating a selection of Joachim Ringelnatz’s poetry into English, to be published by Faber. Beckett ultimately turned the job down, in the event unsurprisingly considering his adumbration of a ‘literature of the unword’ in the same letter, citing

‘disgust with Ringelnatz’s rhyming fury’ (Dis, 171).²¹ Nevertheless, the project attests to Beckett’s confi dence regarding his knowledge of the German language. Yet fi nally, and to his mother’s disappointment, Beckett did not convert his German trip into anything of commercial value. His failure to do so is encapsulated by his response to his family’s enquiry into why his diary could not be used in the manner of Lafcadio Hearn, a nineteenth-century Irish writer who settled in, and wrote about, Japan:

‘ “Why don’t I submit my Lafcadio Hernia to Irishman’s Diary?” Why [?] is it customary to keep one’s fl y buttoned?’ (GD, 4 January 1937).²²