There isn’t any science to any of it.

We found Black dead drunk slumped over his desk the Tuesday morning. Bottle of compound beer emptied by his screen and several more rolled off to other places. People crammed into the room to see and right away began trying to bring him to. I said:

"Why not let him be? The guy's just won is first sale."

But it wasn't a popular sentiment. 

We had spoken and knew each other a little. Both of us had joined up to the compound the same day and waited in reception together. He was at his snout plenty, scratching it, rubbing it over. He wore a full pressed suit and tie owing to how he had just come from work. He was sanitary for a badger but there was a lot of something came masked by his cologne and I couldn’t be sure but it seemed he sported a black eye. The receptionist brought me through to the interview room first of everyone to meet the three recruiters behind the desk.

"We have to prevent certain types making their way in here." They told me. "We have to ensure we don't get any kinds who just show up, take in a few meals, enjoy something of a holiday only to leave. Then there are the types on the run from the law, from debt collectors, from their wives." They asked me what my job had been.

"I worked in freight. A stevedore. The guys that load and unload ships. I was one of those." As it happened I had worked in advertising but it was no concern of theirs.

"We've decided to put you on probation. We need you to prove you really want to be a part of what we're working for here. It's no party. We're a no nonsense operation. We all chip in, quite often above and beyond. For that is what it takes. It gets tough. There are early mornings. Late nights. The crops require constant care and attention. Are you sure you still want it?"

"I definitely want it."

"Another thing is we have to confiscate all you've brought with you. In the commune we share everything equally."

"You mean my car?"

"Yes, the car."

"That's all right."

"And everything else too. You no longer own anything."

Afterwards Black told me he made the mistake of coming forth with how he had been a salesman. On account of how lying was behind him. The compound was to be his fresh start. He opened his wallet and showed me a photograph of his house, of his old car and his boat. He told me he hadn't sold them, he had given them away. That was all a part of it. These things were but symptoms of his illness. This place was the cure.

I met him again about a week and a half later. I was out in the field spraying the sprouts for flies. He passed me coming back in, still wearing that full suit. The rest of us were all in the casual sweatshirt and jeans type get-up they handed out at registration. He said to me:

"I can't understand they haven't given me anything else to wear. It's all I have with me. They keep washing and handing it back. I thought they'd supply us with a toga or robes or something. I feel like a real weirdo in this."

He showed me a photo of his son, Martin. He kept talking about this kid. He seemed the difficult type. He was a cellist. In the photo it seemed like the boy was looking right through me. But he could do no wrong by Black. He was only the one half badger. He lived back out there with Black’s ex-wife. They had helped him through much of the drinking and the clinic but had been dead against his hanging it all up to join a commune.

The three behind the desk had informed Black he had a month to pull in two large in sales or he was out. That was his probation. He had to sell the vegetables. Then after that it was three large. All this farmed produce needed to go toward paying for irrigation, electricity, the kitchens. They needed someone to sell it.

He sat by his desk early morning into the evening.

"Afternoon miss, I only called to inquire if I might be able to interest you in the finest, the best value for money organic produce from right here in the..." Then he went back and redialled.
"Good afternoon mam. I wonder am I talking to the manager of the shop. That's, yes, that's fine too. Well, I was calling to see if I might be able to interest you in the very finest, the very freshest..."

"You look like you're on tough detail." I said. I poured him a coffee.

"It's not easy either. Try selling vegetables from a hippy commune. Everyone believes all we do around here is sit in circles smoking pot beneath the oak trees."

"That or worse."

"Worse, exactly. Go try selling groceries from a drug addled sex farm. But I can do it. Two large in a month, I have to. I have to do it. I can't go back out there. It's cut throat."

He utilised age old techniques peppered with new methods like what he told me was neuro-linguistic programming. He only mentioned positive things. He made sure their answer to his every question was yes. It coaxed favourable chemicals out of the brain. It set lucrative patterns of speech. Then, each night, the managers brought him in for a full report. He produced his flow charts and projections. It usually ran till late. We would some of us stay up and listen outside. I couldn’t take much. It felt bad hearing a badger go through that kind of thing. They are proud animals and that sounded awfully demeaning.  

I tried talking with him some at suppertimes. He talked about being a failed painter. He was a failed poet too. Everyone in sales is deep down something else. But when he visited the west, or the countryside, and he stood alone beneath a ferocious yawning sky in every direction, with an equally ferocious sea out before him, that was the only time he was content. He gave that a lot of thought. So one evening he had packed up his car and told his wife it was all done with. That was where the black eye came from.

Then the Monday night he strode in suit jacket over one shoulder, tie loose and already somewhat drunk.  He had his figures all printed. He was sure and reminded them that he was the king. Yessir. Sale agreed. He had picked out his preferred bed in the full time dorm. Preference in pillow too. He yelled a whole lot about commission. That they didn’t know with whom they were dealing. That there had been a masterclass gentlemen. Kind of thing you can’t teach. It went on. He lectured them just as long as it pleased him then slammed the door in his wake.

A few of the stoats helped him to his room and he was allowed sleep it off. There was a whole lot of hot air but in the end nothing further was done about it. He hadn't drunk any more than his commission got him anyhow. I was put on cleaning duty. He had gotten through two cartons of cigarettes, the nine beers and a hip-flask and there was ash everywhere. He had really enjoyed himself in there. I for one was glad he had made the sale. I would have missed him. And when it came down to it we were all of us in the same boat.

I cleared up the charts and sales sheets and finally a chocolate bar wrapper and a receipt. It was a credit card receipt. It was in the name of Martin Black and it had just paid out two large. I pushed it to the bottom of the bag.

They moved him by the window in the main dorm. He got himself a bedside locker at that. And a couple of days at ease, they didn’t even call upon him to work crops. He hunched over the fence afternoons in shirtsleeves rolled up and watched us. I tried to make out how his face seemed but a badger is inscrutable. Thursday came by the first of the month. I visited the office on cleaning detail and he was back in there. His suit jacket caught the light handsomely. He had the coffee machine emptied already by ten am.

Image courtesy CollegOrama

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Samuel Beckett's style.

You leave both your albums at home, I said, the small one as well as the large one. Not a word of reproach, a simple prophetic present, on the model of those employed by Youdi. Your son goes  with you, I went out.

This, excerpt from ‘Molloy’, might be one of the few instances in Beckett wherein we get something like a glimpse behind the curtain. Notoriously vague as to the explanation of anything he ever wrote, “If I knew what it was about”, he said, “I would have said it”, Beckett is an artist of pure form, almost perhaps to the extent of which the ensuing content might take its import purely by relation to it. In that it ensues. In that something must ensue from form. Throughout the development from the post-Joycean pyrotechnics of ‘More Pricks than kicks’ through to the clipped monotone utterances of the very latter stage, much more striking than the fixation upon the paring down of prose there can be traced the development of a simple, almost binary relation running through close to every sentence. Nowhere is this more visible than in his mid to the beginnings of his latter work, a period encompassing in particular The Trilogy and The Four Novellas.

No less than the sense that these works are made up from endless heaps of meandering digressions, each superceding the last, to no discernible end other than to have something told, we are indoctrinated quickly into pleasant familiarity with the peculiar timbre, a constant cadence establishes itself through these pieces and we acclimatise ourselves to a pattern, a sequence of patterns, presented as fiction. 

Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I shall survive Saint John the Baptist’s Day and even the Fourteenth of July, festival of freedom. Indeed I would not put it past me to pant on to the Transfiguration, not to speak of the Assumption.

A typical Beckett phrase the like of this makes a scaffold of its dead language, the cliché, in this case two; I would not put it past me and not to speak of. To this foundation can be added anything, any flight of fancy or self indulgence or, as in this case, technical nous, (the echoes between John the Baptists fate and resonant images from Bastille day or quirks like festival of freedom and pant on),  in full confidence that it can be easily stomached thanks to this grounding in the banal.  This banality Beckett becomes dependent on to clear a path for him, both through the gluttonous stylistics that marred his early work , forcing it into a palatable, dare we say it, bite sized, shape, and also imbuing the narrator with some sense of normalcy, even if it’s only the pretence that he’s too exhausted to bother with thinking up a more interesting way of saying it.

The Trilogy represents the summit of Beckett’s prose because it’s the point where he has honed this sense of dead language past the near catatonic lists of ‘Murphy’ and ‘Watt’ and established it as perfect counterpoint to the sudden linguistic tangents his sentences constantly shock us with. He has abandoned both the urge to dazzle the reader and to numb him into submission and introduces a new sense of tongue-in-cheek, nurtured through Mercier and Camier and the Four Novellas, in which any horror or any significant incident is punctuated with a certain kind of knowing grin.    

One of these days he will astonish us all. It was thanks to Sapo’s skull that he was enabled to hazard this opinion and, in defiance of the facts and against his better judgement, to revert to it from time to time.

There are no less than six cliches in the above phrase and in The Trilogy, a steady reliance upon cliché develops, particularly in the first two books. Cliches are the bread and butter of the sandwich, sentences frequently kicking off with some or other platitude or using one to conjoin two or more eddying streams of prose. A large part of the quality of Beckett’s writing comes from not being able to guess where it will have gone by the end of the sentence, let alone the following one, or the narrative, and this goes as much as anything for the rhythms.  Cliché invests the same sense of cold, almost mathematical, language for which he had previously struggled with lists and drawn out variables, while initiating a particular form based in the appearance of spontaneity or off-handedness. It’s as if each sentence, or phrase, is started off, or built around, a stock  dead frame and then, once the floor has been given it, is allowed wander at random off in any direction until it eventually dies, at which point we begin anew.  Practically the only way this can be arranged into a narrative of any progression would be in the first person, struggling to tie narrative ends together through acrobatics of lateral thinking. These acrobatics, or rather the relation between these and the dead language, become the point of the prose.

The use of cliché emphasizes the notion of given ‘stock’ language, handed to, or even enforced upon, the user. A lack of all thought, personality or any welling up of feeling into verbal expression. A phrase with a seemingly universal significance which actually serves to express nothing. Moreover, its use here is so self conscious that  it almost actually achieves what Beckett had so long striven for and so often referred to. In hanging the structure of his prose from it, cliché, by its emptiness, by its communication of linguistic vacuum even extending to thought, robs every phrase of any hope of actual, verifiable communication. Something which by its very nature expresses that there is nothing to express and no way to express it. 

Scrupulous to the last, finical to a fault, that’s Malone, all over.

That’s the bright boy of the class speaking now, he’s the one always called to the rescue when things go badly, he talks all the time of merit and situations, he has saved more than one, of suffering too, he knows how to stimulate the flagging spirit, stop the rot, with the simple use of this mighty word alone, even if he has to add, a moment later.

The more you read a sentence like this, trawling for cliché, the more blurred the lines become between what it is you’re after  and what might possibly qualify. Parts of sentences such as ‘he’s the one’ or ‘knows how to’ or ‘a moment later’ carry that sense of having come packaged almost as much as ‘stop the rot’ and this extends deeply into every phrase. No longer is it a case of cliches peppering otherwise creative prose and a safe juxtaposition, but  the very same prose, even what could be called ‘high’ Beckettian prose, verging almost on poetry, begins to read suspiciously.

He would stand rapt, gazing at the long pernings, the quivering poise, the wings lifted for the plummet drop, the wild reascent, fascinated by such extremes of need, of pride, of patience and solitude.

There’s little doubt that a significant part of Beckett’s reputation as a writer comes from passages the like of  this, pointing to a keenly poetic bent, never fully satisfied with his attempts at poetry.  But no longer does it appear devoid of cliché. Aside from ‘he would stand’ and anything else someone might be able to spot, the sense of a kind of banality in cadence rings very much true. Gazing at the…, the…, the…, the… Extremes of …, of…, of… and…

The sense of all language being cliché.

What writing in the French drew out of Beckett was the sense that he had lost all language , had mummified his natural English with the straightforwardness of a Romance Language while at the same time setting down a kind of French that seems it’s been translated from an English text. 

Anthony Burgess was fond enough of the following phrase from ‘Murphy’ to  return to it time and again as an example of how ‘satisfactory’ Beckett’s English was.

The leaves began to lift and scatter, the higher branches to complain, the sky broke and curdled over flecks of skim blue, the pine of smoke toppled into the east and vanished, the pond was suddenly a little panic of grey and white, of water and gulls and sails.

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