Without This World

I like my authors dead. It's not from envy, or impatience; I wish no living author ill, at least not those I like and read, but the compulsion to have the whole of a writer, to own the works, I here confess. The collector's obsession I understand, but can not admit. I can appreciate the urge to amass bottle-caps, replace and store toys in their original packaging, or recreate a beloved team, if only in baseball-cards. To fixate is to fix, to recapture something of the single-minded devotion of childhood, to set and so preserve one's best memories in something like a pristine, if sterile purity. Harmless perhaps, even admirable in terms of his devotion, the hobbyist, to my mind, invests too much in magic, endowing the past with a power already exhausted, gives more meaning than is due to what was touched or treasured by himself, used or owned by the famous, and in so doing wastes autobiography on the dead. I understand the aesthetics of the thing: the force of a thing repeated and seen complete, but I am no hobbyist. My childhood needs no memorial. I don't need toys to play, or any aids to memory but those that the accidents of time might hide in the back of a drawer. I don't believe in the perfectibility of the past, as history or autobiography. The toy just like a toy I loved, is not the toy I loved, the boy I was, I am.

I sympathize with the scholarly obsession that drives people to spend fortunes, collecting coins they never intend to spend, stamps that will never be sent on a letter, to pin butterflies to boards. I never felt the need to own, even if I could afford to buy, Thackeray's spectacles, or a lock of Shelley's hair. Rather than bid at auction for one of Oscar's letters, I would much rather read them, carefully, lovingly collected by a great editor, Rupert Hart Davis, in a great book. While I would very much like to visit Isak Dinesen's house, or sit at Dickens' desk, I have more of those authors, here on my shelves, than I am likely to find in their surviving personal effects. It is not things I collect, but books, and books are living things. To have all the books of a great or favorite author is to have, in a very real way, that author in my house. I like fine things and would rather mine were, but I do not need my books to be uniformly bound, or beautifully made. Editions, variants, and pristine copies of early printings mean less to me then strong binding and clear print. The most casual antiquarian would find my collection woefully utilitarian. My books are read, or are meant someday to be.

"Complete" is better than "Collected." "Selected" is acceptable in the absence of affordable alternatives, or when an author is new to me, but the phrase "selections from" turns me cold with suspicion. Selected by whom? and to what end?

"i am going to bed. i will have nightmares involving huge monsters in academic robes carrying long bloody butcher knives labeled Excerpt, Selection, Passage, and Abridged."
— Helene Hanff

As in all things, Helene is my guide.

Taking down tonight my big boxed set of Samuel Beckett, trying to find a particular poem, I was so grateful to have him here, in four fat volumes. So what if I've still read so little in the year or more that I've owned The Grove Centenary Edition of Samuel Beckett? I hadn't read him at all, beyond a play or two until just a year or two ago. I had decided at some point, when I was still young and full of beans, that I needn't. I had decided that Beckett was difficult, if not impossible. I wasn't wrong then. Perhaps I needed to know something more of life, or grief or language. Perhaps Beckett had to be dead.

Two years ago, I bought the Everyman's Library edition of the novels. I bought it never intending to read it. I bought it because I buy the new Everyman's Library books. And then, for whatever reason, instead of rereading Paul Scott, reissued as well in the same series, in two huge volumes, I instead one day took up Beckett. I read Molloy, not all at once, you understand. I was reading, I think Trollope just then, one Trollope or another, and strange as it may seem, wanting a break I suppose from tragic engagements and funny, frustrated suitors, I read of all things, Molloy. It took me, as I've said, quite a long time. When I finished it, I started Malone Dies, though I've yet to return to it. And when The Grove Centenary Edition came out, I bought it for myself, I think for Christmas.

Suddenly, or so at least it seemed to me, Beckett made perfect sense. He was funny, at last. He had not been, to me, before I took up that collection of novels. How was that possible? I don't know. All I do know is that now he was, now he is. Austen I couldn't really read until I was, what? thirty? Before that she wasn't difficult, as Beckett was, if anything Austen was too simple; clear as a bell, but preoccupied, or so I must have thought, with sensibilities I neither understood nor shared. For me, Jane Austen really came into my life with Emma. That was the first book of hers I liked, the first I reread, one glorious summer, with my best friend R., sitting on the bank of The Russian River, in California, both of us laughing in the heat. We saw a heron standing in the water on that trip. We watched it for the longest time. Perhaps, then, I needed to be thirty, or to hear R.'s infectious laugh, from just the other side of the shade, or perhaps I needed to be able to read through a whole summer's day, or see a heron standing in the Russian River, before Jane Austen made sense to me really, before she belonged to me, or I to her. Who knows? And maybe Beckett had to come in the middle of an Anthony Trollope novel, after I was forty, or in winter. Again, who knows?

And what does it matter? But when I found Austen, or Trollope, or Beckett at last, it mattered that I might have all or nearly all of them, that I might own their books, have collected novels, complete writings, so many Oxford World Classics of Trollope that they can't all be shelved properly on a case but must be stacked up like cord wood, waiting to be lit.

A year ago or so, I rented from Scarecrow Video the wonderful series of DVDs, Beckett on Film. Having at last read one of his novels, now all his theater pieces, his plays long and short, suddenly became a necessity. I spoke Beckett. I laughed with Beckett, as I'd learned to laugh with Austen, and cry too.

And here he is, my Samuel Beckett, in his four uniform volumes, in his box on the shelf, between my sets of J. M. Barrie and Guy de Maupassant, if you can imagine that! And so tonight, in search of a suitable quote from a poem, I can and did kick through the muddle on my library floor, make my way to a shelf, and draw from the box a book of poems by Samuel Beckett, safely dead, complete and present. And because of that impulse, or for reasons I will either never understand or may choose not to, I could read at will in the good company of genius, and find this:

WHAT WOULD I DO WITHOUT THIS WORLD

what would I do without this world faceless incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
spills in the void the ignorance of having been
without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed
what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die
the pantings the frenzies towards succour towards love
without this sky that soars
above its ballast dust
what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before
peering out of my deadlight looking for another
wandering like me eddying far from all the living
in a convulsive space
among the voices voiceless
that throng my hiddenness