Samuel Beckett, "Dante and the Lobster"

marmite jars & drum solos

"It is not."

When a reader in her twenties or thirties fails to see the appeal in a great author she feels reasonable, even prudent, saying: I'll try again in a few years. I remember beginning Proust for the first time one summer in college, lying on my grandmother's couch with a fragile-to-the-point-of-disintegration blue-and-white paperback, and feeling almost physically rejected. Not yet.

But in her forties, a disquieting thought appears: what if this is it? What if this particular set of limitations, these arbitrary aversions and failures of attention, are simply mine to bear for as long as I have the strength to hoist a book? Why should reading, unlike every single other human endeavor, allow its practitioners to simply get better and better?

Right now it looks as if I’m doomed to accept the possibility of a lifelong estrangement from: W.G. Sebald, Cormac McCarthy, Saul Bellow. I can justify each of these aversions, more or less (humorless! macho! verbose to the point of incoherence!), but the truth is that I've forgiven more significant failings in most of my literary beloveds. My palate may just be so constructed that I simply can't taste the deliciousness in a Bellow riff — he’s Marmite between hard covers.

But the other week — while trying for the dozenth time Samuel Beckett, one of my most stubbornly untasty jars of Marmite — I was stopped by an unfamiliar experience: joy. Finally, for the length of a sentence, all of my familiar, habitual objections (Should reading really feel so much like punishment? Just how many allusions is it acceptable to miss? ) fell away and I got it. In my era of collagen supplements and orthopedic inserts, I had acquired a new taste.

That sentence came not in Molloy or Malone Dies — books I've bounced off of again and again over the years, in ever-more-expensive editions — but in More Pricks Than Kicks, an early collection of stories that, by the looks of it, gets hauled out of library storage about once every three presidential administrations. The stories follow a hapless protagonist named Belacqua Shua through various misfortunes and meanderings. The best story in the book, "Dante and the Lobster," happens also to be the first.

For the story's first twelve pages we watch Beckett noodle around in the vehicle of his voice. First books are nearly always full of this sort of noodling — the bookish version of the early part of a video game when, not yet familiar with the controls, you spend a lot of time hopping up and down and bumping into bushes. Here, for instance, is Belacqua deciding to put down Dante's Inferno in order to eat lunch:

He scooped his fingers under the book and shovelled it back till it lay wholly on his palms... Thus disposed he raised it under his nose and there he slammed it shut. He held it aloft for a time, squinting at it angrily, pressing the boards inwards with the heels of his hands. Then he laid it aside.

And here he is, two paragraphs later, still establishing the conditions for that lunch:

If his lunch was to be enjoyable, and it could be very enjoyable indeed, he must be left in absolute tranquility to prepare it. But if he were disturbed now, if some brisk tattler were to come bouncing in now with a big idea or a petition...

This is charming enough, a melodious sort of navigation-by-cul-de-sac, but nothing to convince us that we must at all times keep a jar of Beckett in the fridge. The pleasures feel thin and dispensable. But then Belacqua goes over to his aunt's for dinner.

He's brought with him a lobster that he picked up from the market — an unfamiliar delicacy.

She took the parcel and undid it and abruptly the lobster was on the table, on the oilcloth, discovered.
"They assured me it was fresh" said Belacqua.
Suddenly he saw the creature move, this neuter creature. Definitely it changed position. His hand flew to his mouth.

Belacqua, it turns out, had no idea that the lobster he was carrying was alive — or that lobsters are cooked alive generally. And notice how with the arrival of an actual predicament, the prose has tightened of its own accord. His hand flew to his mouth. In his urgency Beckett is now driving straight over lawns and flowerbeds.

They stood above it, looking down on it, exposed cruciform on the oilcloth. It shuddered again. Belacqua felt he would be sick.

Here (cruciform) is a biblical allusion I can get behind — the sort of serendipitous seeing, doomed lobster as Christ, that the mind serves up in moments of terrible intensity.

The aunt, an old hand at lobster-preparation, goes off to get her apron.

She caught up the lobster and laid it on its back. It trembled. "They feel nothing" she said.
In the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies, it had breathed secretly.

This — the sudden adoption of the lobster's deep, scuttling perspective — is when the first greatness-apprehending hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Belacqua may be helpless with horror but the narrative voice is possessed of an almost divine steeliness. It can move between the oceanic depths, freezing and terrifying, and the gray dailiness of a Dublin kitchen in an instant.

"You make a fuss" she said angrily "and upset me and then lash into it for your dinner."
She lifted the lobster clear of the table. It had about thirty seconds to live.
Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all.
It is not.

This is the end of the story — and the end of my ability to pretend that Beckett is not for me. Great prose is often called musical — and usually the "music" that the praise-dispenser has in mind is like the classical music that you skim past on your car radio. But the writing in this passage is musical like a drum solo — a series of staccato bursts, each line shorter than the one before. It had about thirty seconds to live. Plucked from context, this could be Ken Follett or Frederick Forsyth. But within "Dante and the Lobster," which has been narrowing pitilessly for pages, it feels choking and true — we, glimpsing the blank space on the page below, seeing the lobster above the pot, feel that we have only about thirty seconds to live. The tension is excruciating.

And just in time, here comes good old Belacqua, he of the moseying lunch-preparations and the sweet naivete, to make one last lunge, on behalf of all of us, towards indifference (it's a quick death, God help us all).

Beckett replies with a sentence like the crunch of a lobster cracker. It is not. This is so perfectly placed, so concise in its expression and so sweeping in its certainty (we've gone from the ocean floor to the view of God), that it feels almost funny. But the humor is cosmic, brutal, sacred.

No one who can write a line like that can, in a proper reading life, be done without. I'll be keeping that jar close at hand.