The Adding Machine (27 page)

These were written out painfully in longhand with great attention to the script. The actual process of writing became so painful that I couldn’t do anything more for Carl Cranbury, as the Dark Ages descended — the years in which I wanted to be anything else but a writer. A private detective, a bartender, a criminal. . . I failed miserably at all these callings, but a writer is not concerned with success or failure, but simply with observation and recall. At the time I was not gathering material for a book. I simply was not doing anything well enough to make a living at it. In this respect, Kerouac did better that I did. He didn’t like it, but he did it — work on railroads and in factories. My record time on a factory job was four weeks. And I had the distinction to be actually fired from a defense plant during the War.

Perhaps Kerouac did better because he saw his work interludes simply as a means to buy time to write. Tell me how many books a writer has written ... we can assume usually 10 times that amount shelved or thrown away. And I will tell you how he spends his time: Any writer spends a good deal of his time alone, writing. And that is how I remember Kerouac — as a writer talking about writers or sitting in a quiet corner with a notebook, writing in longhand. He was also very fast on the typewriter. You feel that he was writing all the time; that writing was the only thing he thought about. He never wanted to do anything else.

If I seem to be talking more about myself than about Kerouac, it is because I am trying to say something about the particular role that Kerouac played in my life script. As a child, I had given up on writing, perhaps unable to face what every writer must: all the bad writing he will have to do before he does any good writing. An interesting exercise would be to collect all the worst writing of any writer — which simply shows the pressures that writers are under to write badly, that is, not write. This pressure is, in part, simply the writer’s own conditioning from childhood to think (in my case) white Protestant American or (in Kerouac’s case) to think French-Canadian Catholic.

Writers are, in a way, very powerful indeed. They write the script for the reality film. Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages. Now if writers could get together into a real tight union, we’d have the world right by the words. We could write our own universes, and they would all be as real as a coffee bar or a pair of Levis or a prom in the Jazz Age. Writers could take over the reality studio. So they must not be allowed to find out that they can make it happen. Kerouac understood this long before I did. Life is a dream, he said.

My own birth records, my family’s birth records and recorded origins, my athletic records in the newspaper clippings I have, my own notebooks and published books are not real at all; my own dreams are not dreams at all but products of my waking imagination . .. This, then, is the writer’s world — the dream made for a moment actual on paper, you can almost touch it, like the endings of
The Great Gatsby
and
On the Road.
Both express a dream that was taken up by a generation.

Life is a dream in which the same person may appear at various times in different roles. Years before I met Kerouac, a friend from high school and college, Kells Elvins, told me repeatedly that I should write and that I was not suited to do anything else. When I was doing graduate work at Harvard in 1938, we wrote a story in collaboration, entitled
Twilight’s Last Gleamings,
which I used many years later almost verbatim in
Nova Express.
We acted out the parts, sitting on a side porch of the white frame house we rented together, and this was the birthplace of Doctor Benway.

‘Are you all all right?’ he shouted, seating himself in the first lifeboat among the women. ‘I’m the doctor!’

Years later in Tangier, Kells told me the truth: ‘I know I am dead and you are too . . .’ Writers are all dead, and all writing is posthumous. We are really from beyond the tomb and no commissions. . . (All this I am writing just as I think of it, according to Kerouac’s own manner of writing. He says the first version is always the best)

In 1945 or thereabouts, Kerouac and I collaborated on a novel that was never published. Some of the material covered in this lost opus was later used by Jack in
The Town and the City
and
Vanity of Duluoz.
At that time, the anonymous gray character of William Lee was taking shape: Lee, who is there just so long and long enough to see and hear what he needs to see and hear for some scene or character he will use 20 or 30 years later in his writing. No, he wasn’t there as a private detective, a bartender, a cotton farmer, a pickpocket, an exterminator; he was there in his capacity as a writer. I did not know that until later. Kerouac, it seems, was born knowing. And he told me what I already knew, which is the only thing you can tell anybody.

I am speaking of the role Kerouac played in my script, and the role I played in his can be inferred from the enigmatically pompous Hubbard Bull Lee portrayals, which readily adapt themselves to the scenes between Carl and Doctor Benway in
Naked Lunch
. Kerouac may have felt that I did not include him in my cast of characters, but he is of course the anonymous William Lee as defined in our collaboration — a spy in someone else’s body where nobody knows who is spying on whom. Sitting on a side porch, Lee was there in his capacity as a writer. So Doctor Benway told me what I knew already: ‘I’m the doctor. . .’

I recall a personal visit to Beckett. John Calder, my publisher and Beckett’s, was the intermediary for a short, not more than half an hour audience. This was in Berlin. Beckett was there directing one of his new plays. Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag and myself were there for a reading. Also present in the visiting party were Fred Jordan and Professor Hoellerer, a professor of English literature at Berlin University.

Beckett was polite and articulate. It was, however, apparent to me at least that he had not the slightest interest in any of us, nor the slightest desire to ever see any of us again. We had been warned to take our own liquor as he would proffer none. So we had brought along a bottle of whisky. Beckett accepted a small drink which he sipped throughout the visit. Asking the various participants first what Beckett said, and what the whole conversation was about seems to elicit quite different responses. Nobody seems to remember at all clearly. It was as if we had entered a hiatus of disinterest. I recall that we did talk about my son’s recent liver transplant and the rejection syndrome. I reminded Beckett of our last meeting in Maurice Girodias’ restaurant On this occasion we had argued about the cut-ups, and I had no wish to renew the argument. So it was just ‘yes’, ‘Maurice’s restaurant’. Allen, I believe, asked Beckett if he had ever given a reading of his work. Beckett said ‘No’.

There was some small talk about the apartment placed at his disposal by the Academy: a sparsely furnished duplex overlooking the Tiergarten. I said the zoo was very good, one of the best, with nocturnal creatures in diaramas, like their natural habitat. They even have flying foxes. Beckett nodded, as if willing to take my word for this. I think there was some discussion of Susan Sontag’s cancer. I looked at my watch. Some one asked Allen or Fred for the time. We got up to go. Beckett shook hands politely.

The whole inward/outward, introverted/extroverted dichotomy is an either/or imposition on data which isn’t either/or and cannot be accurately confined in either/or terms. The whole inward/outward, introverted/extroverted dichotomy is misleading and inaccurate. The data of perception simply cannot be accurately confined in either/or terms. All experience is both objective and subjective. Obviously, there has to be a subject to experience, and something for the subject to experience. There are of course shades and degrees of emphasis.

Some people are undoubtedly more concerned with interpsychic data than others. We can see it as a spectrum with various degrees of attention. And it seems to me that Proust and Beckett are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Proust is principally concerned with time. Beckett is virtually timeless. Proust is concerned with minute descriptions of objects and characters with their sets. What do the characters, if they could be so called in Beckett, even look like, beside being awkward and not young? And the sets? What sets? His writing can be taking place anywhere. The Unnameable in its bottle could be in Paris, Hong Kong or Helsinki. Proust’s characters are firmly rooted in place and time. They are French high society: Dukes and Barons who all have long essential names. They are their names. But Watt, Malone, Murphy? The Unnameable?

I am very much closer to Proust than to Beckett. I am very much concerned with the creation of character. In fact I can say that this is my principal preoccupation. If I am remembered for anything, it will be for my characters, for Doctor Benway and A.J., for Audrey and Kim Carsons, for the Vigilante and the Heavy Metal Kid, for Hamburger Mary and Salt Chunk Mary, for the Fag, and the Beagle and the Sailor and Pantapon Rose, for Old Ike and Tio Mary and Loa la Chata, for Daddy Long Legs and the Rube.

There is no time in Beckett. Take
Waiting for Godot.
The characters can wait forever. Godot never comes. Take
Watt
or
Malone Dies.
There’s no time. Take
The Unnameable. The Unnameable
is timeless. Only that which can be named or designated is subject to time. Proust is all names and all time. There is no Memory in Beckett. Even
Krapp’s Last Tape
has no memory in the usual sense of associated recall, but rather, a mechanical process set in motion by a jar or vibration: the closing of or opening of a door.

Beckett is quite literally inhuman. You will look in vain for human motivations of jealousy, hate or love. Even fear is absent. Nothing remains of human emotions except weariness and distress, tinged with remote sadness.

Proust, on the other hand, reflects all manner of emotion, fear, contempt, hatred, love. In fact, the whole of
A la recherche
du temps perdu
is an elaborate and beautiful structure, lovingly created and exposing, as he himself said, the poetry in snobbery.

That he was a snob humanizes Proust in a way that Beckett is never humanized. Beckett’s basic motivations are extremely obscure. Proust, in a sense, wrote to encompass and make appropriate the society that never completely accepted him. Or that is certainly an aspect. But Beckett?

Perhaps writing is simply natural to him, and an expression of his being that he is somehow obligated to make. The nature of this obligation is difficult to discern. Perhaps he means something quite different from what is ordinarily conveyed by the word obligation. Are we obligated to breathe? He comes, I think, as near as a man can to breathing his work. Personal impressions ... Completely aloof, but not at all prickly or ill at ease. We talked about a number of questions. And it seems that everyone present had quite a different account of the meeting. What did he actually say?

Beckett violates all the rules and conventions of the novelist: arbitrary rules, to be sure, which evolved in the late 18th century and solidified in the 19th century.

There is no suspense in Beckett. Beckett is above suspense. There are no cliff-hangers at the end of each chapter. There are no characters as such, and certainly no character development. He is perhaps the purest writer who has ever written. There is nothing there but the writing itself.

There are no tricks, no adornment, nothing with which the reader can identify. It is all moving inward rather than outward, inward to some final inwardness, some ultimate core. Just as the physicists progress from inwards, so Beckett’s range is always smaller and more precise.
Endgame
divides the psyche into persons to act out the endgame of division and the futile attempt to end the game which cannot be ended without ending all the characters as well, since they are all part of the same organism.

Proust is at the other end of the spectrum. Characters and character development, along with the creation of elaborate sets and realistic dialogue.

Beckett has, in effect, no dialogue, no ear for dialogue. He doesn’t need it And there is no time for Beckett, or not time as we know it. Take
Endgame.
No time is possible since there is only one character and time is change relative to other persons and objects. Whereas in Proust, time is everything. The memory traces evocations of memory on lines of association. It’s all Pavlov.

Now Proust contracted this elaborate mechanical toy of high society puppets, bowing in and out of rooms and corridors and terraces and gardens — a phantom charade, whereas Beckett does not admit of any separate being outside of his own area of perception.

If the role of a novelist is to create characters and the sets in which his characters live and breathe, then Beckett is not a novelist at all. There is no suspense in Beckett: it is all taking place in some grey limbo, and there is also no set. Is it happening in Paris, Berlin, South America? It doesn’t matter. There are no characters and no sets. It seems rather to be the endgame of the writer coming at least to grips with his role as ventriloquist reading his lines to dummies.

In Beckett we can see them at last, with all the tawdry alterations and the false moustache. But it is always Monsieur Proust who gets his final revenge on the society that never quite accepted him. He accepted it completely, and it was then his. It has no other existence. They all wind up as Mr Proust’s dummies.

Beckett refuses to play. The Dummy is now seen as the dummy.
Malone Dies.
Who killed him? Who created him?
The Unnameable?
Who didn’t name it?
Waiting for Godot.
Who wrote Godot? Now the ventriloquist’s nightmare is when his dummy starts talking on his own. Suppose a writer’s character should start writing on his own? Not the same thing. Spare me a lot of trouble. Have to reserve the right of veto, you know old thing, could have some tripe creep in out over or under my name. Good chap, fine old thing, knew you’d see it my way, hang it all, have to meet in the middle, agree to disagree and all that. So back to Proust.