The Beckett Suite

Mother-Loathing, Ducks and Horses Whiter Than Ice-Cream

Lá Amuigh Faoin Tuath
A rumination on the work of Samuel Beckett and Diarmuid Delargy
by Patrick McCabe

There was a standard essay set when I was a schoolgoing boy - called Lá Amuigh Faoin Tuath or A Day In The Country. Back in the days - as certain Welsh poets might have been tempted to phrase it - When I was high and nimble, free as never beneath the bright blue glass of the exalted roof of heaven.
No such verse can authentically be said to exist, of course, but after spending some time in the company of Messrs. Beckett and Delargy, one can't help but conspire with the mischievous assertion that such exuberant licence can in some way be justified, so airy and elated do they tend to make one feel. Inducing emotions, I contend, which can be comprehensively snared only by such audaciously impudent and incorrigibly impish syntax. Language which has unrepentantly shaken off its mind-caging chains. Very much, indeed, in the prelapsarian, carefree manner of the aforementioned essays - or 'compositions' as they were more often called in those turf-fired, dusty schoolrooms of yore.
Lá Amuigh Faoin Tuath was a title which never failed to draw out the secret Robert Louis Stevenson that lurked, or so it seemed, in the corners of every boy's heart. Or, if not him, then some equally noble and daring adventurer, the possessor of an impossibly rural and romantic soul - if the amount of high hills crested and the number of dark glens investigated in mysterious green worlds are anything to go by. Uncovered also were a substantial number of apprentice John Clares, and a few pencil-chomping William Wordsworths in the making. The school was coming down with verdant pastorales. And I was as guilty as any in all of this - breathlessly peppering my paragraphs with cow pats and birdies, not to mention the fragrance of sweet primrose as it wafted through the air, observed throughout by the hopelessly bewildered Godless eyes of the average County Monaghan Fresian.
All of which may already, to the average reader, have begun to seem nothing so much as a surfeit of information - if not indeed suggesting itself as entirely irrelevant to the pressing subject of the work of Mr Samuel Beckett. Or that of Mr Delargy either. Except that, reasonable enough as this initial perception may seem, I find myself forced to suggest that, in this case, it might just prove that small bit inaccurate. For, in the electrifying - if incomplete - pages of this work that is indeed what the author of Godot does - take himself for a walk faoin tuath.

And what an extraordinary ramble it turns out to be. Not that an awful lot happens, mind you - not at least in the exterior world. No, there are no encounters with funny farmers and not a word about the price of heifers. There is an attack by a pack of savage stoats - but that doesn't come until somewhat later on.
Mostly the narrative is concerned with four topics - a mother in a window, violence, rage and rain. For any reader too bashful to profess themselves puzzled by my earlier stylistic reference to Dylan Thomas, the self-styled 'Bard Of Cwmdonkin Drive', let me make it clear that, on first entering into Mr Beckett's Abandoned, that is exactly what I found myself expecting. A pastiche, perhaps of Mr Thomas's hopperty-skipperty fishing boat-bobbing prose (beginning as it does: Up bright and early, I was young then) or even, for all I knew, a savage demolition - even, perhaps, some kind of respectful homage. I was wrong on both counts. For hardly had I reached the end of the first line before I found myself pitched into a maelstrom of inexplicable white-hot furies, a veritable catalogue of hypomania and hypochondria - not to mention advanced paranoia and the deepest of melancholiae. With a considerable amount of mother-hatred and common-or-garden sociopathy thrown in.
Which would appear indeed to be a very long way from The Day We All Went To Abetstffannwwffy by Charabanc or The Two China Dogs I Love Best On My Mantelpiece, which might have been expected from the irrepressible Mr Dylan Thomas. Or, then again, perhaps not. Either way, Mr Samuel Beckett was off out the country, with his staff in his hand and his wild wiry hair sticking up in great stalks.
But the two artists in question have more in common than we might at first think - for, as we are to discover - and sooner, rather than later, for he seems to have no hesitation in declaring it - Mr Beckett is defiantly exultant in his love for words and their transformative, healing power. In spite of all of his fulminating fevers - and, believe me, reader, there are many of them - the one beguiling constant throughout this interrogatively manic perambulation is his unswerving dedication to words and their sounds. As he chants obsessively to himself vent the pent vent the pent it is as though some autistic child has, to his delight, come upon a mantra in harmony with his uniquely crafted, preposterously idiosyncratic goosestep - that steady, predictable, never-changing mathematical march which he has perfected in order to negotiate a threatening hostile environment and its wily, ever-alert, myriad perplexities. Both physical and mental. The words which he constantly repeats in the course of his jaunt seem like so many lifelines connecting him to the earth, bereft as he is of solid and reliable moorings. Which he readily acknowledges - or, if not, certainly suggests - in his avowal of his admiration for all things rooted -such as flowers and trees and bushes and boulders.
In spite of his many rages and blatantly professed antipathy towards his mother - who is depicted as a weak-willed hapless fool in a window, waving or performing exercises or appealing frantically for either assistance or love - neither of which we are, frankly, encouraged to be bothered about - there is something wholly disarming about the character's readiness to succumb, however transiently, to the alchemic sorcery of art and beauty. Whether it be embodied in the euphonious ring of an inverted invocation - vero o vero - or in the startling vision of a horse the colour of snow, a horse the colour of the most astonishingly whitest white. Making it clear, at the very least, there remains within the author a willingness to engage. Even to consider that he may well have got it wrong. Paradoxically, right at that very moment when he is wishing he was all over instead of in store we find ourselves charmed by his somehow finding the time - however irascibly - to ruefully praise this old earth which genially has carried him along for so long.

This joumey of mutterings and mothers and rain is a shape-shifting, gear-changing, mesmerisingly visual peregrination. It is a kind of rural noir-poem. In which an over-vigilant, perhaps over-intelligent mind finds itself captured in a series of bright-dark card-flapping flashes, fragmenting, dissembling chequerboard squares. There is a searing blast of colour, for sure - but this blast of colour is no colour at all. White, it comes gliding. Like a low-flying stray sheet of plate glass. White. And again. White. Searingly recorded in phosphorescent bursts by Delargy in a manner no lens could ever hope to approach. Capturing the intricacies of these fleeting moments, trapping them as he might those of some erratic monochromatic butterfly, looping across a flight path all of its own. Delargy's shutters open faster than the eye can see, being as he's practically inside the author's head - as though he's a fellow-traveller in this, the most eccentric and yet most ordinary of strolls. An amble through a parallel world photo archive of the fifties, a spectral alteruate travelogue through a negative/positive X-ray world of the Irish rural ordinary extraordinary. A world which includes not only Vladimir and Estragon but Hamm and Cloy and Laurel and Hardy. And, of course, ducks. And stoats which are not stoats at all but stoats mixed up with lynxes, grainy refugees perhaps from some similarly abandoned atomic age movie, of Beckett-style science gone horribly wrong.

There are many questions to be resolved as Beckett wanders - as he stomps through the mountains, equipped with fern-bashing stick. Among these puzzlers include (a) the meaning of existence and (b) whether to drown or die in a fire. With the protagonist finally opting, with admirable resolve, to be burnt to bits.
How despairingly amusing Mr Beckett in his exasperation seems here doing battle with the physical world - no Not I - style disembodied voices this time, or old men sitting alone in barren rooms - as we accompany him with Diarmuid Delargy, unburdening himself of assorted wraths and iritations, with the sun full upon him in this coal-black, bible-black, bleached-out, carbonic landscape, morosely leafing through books in the relative sanctuary of a shady nook, or puffing almost exotically on a Cuban cigar with the aid of seven fingers, generously bestowed by the artist. Sauntering amorphously across the border from death into life, the wire of his skullhead winding comfortably around his own. Euphoria and catastrophe making the finest of bedfellows - when out of the shade comes trotting a Schimmel - a German word for the whitest of white horses - a steed that seems made of pure puffeloud, whiter than ice-cream, whiter than Daz. As though it must have leaped fully born and fully made from a painting entitled The End And The Beginning Of White.
It is vast and epochal image, an atom bomb of primordial smoke. And here it is - in Beckett's special land of DublinlWicklow Hiberno cubist-noir. Whiter than communion wafers, whiter than any of his womb-loathing, death-despising rages. Part of Beckett claims here that he would just as readily end his days in a big empty echoing room with a big old, pendulum clock, just listening and dozing. It seems some version of Joyce's hell as described by that author in the Portrait Of The Artist, where a great clock ticks ever never ever never, from now till the end of all eternity.
But a horse like this creation doesn't belong in such a place - why, even to imagine it, however fleetingly - never mind spend time describing it - is to surely long for some form of transcendence. When I was writing my humble Lá Amuigh Faoin Tuath essays all those years ago, I came to somehow develop this habit of storing up the images like the brightest of shining coins. Hoarding them greedily so they could be snugly inserted in other 'compositions' later on. Repeating their names as I circled the playground - birds and cows and larch and fir, lake and hill and valley and dale - rose and thorn and forget-me-not and daff. It is this faith and belief in the power inherent in the constancy of rhythm that betrays in Beckett the refusal within him of real hope to die. His quirky antiphon vent the pent prevents him becoming agoraphobic. His kinship with words gets him out into the air. Without it it is clear he would never even leave the house. Never curse his mother, never kick a duck. Never walk the roads as he yearns for damnation, never stravage a road with a cut of his vengeful, swiping stick. The lynxtoats could wind their desultory way homeward - for the solitary sociopath - he simply wouldn't be appearing. Without words he almost certainly would be locked in Joyce's hell. Far from the shadow-country and the sheet-white land of the cantering horse, incarcerated beneath a clock that ticked giantly ever never.
Vent the pent is as some sacred incantation, a semi-liturgical chant which can open in the wall of heaven just the tiniest little crack of light - not very much, but maybe just enough to keep you alive. To have fun with stoats and have enough chuckles left to chirpily acknowledge, as Beckett does: That there are few creatures stranger going about than me at the present time.
I find it very interesting that Diarmuid Delargy, one of the foremost artists in these islands, or anywhere, found himself attracted to and inspired by these intriguing paragraphs, which comprise what Beckett has decreed must be viewed as an 'abandoned work.' Why exactly it has assumed this status remains unclear - but, presumably it is not unrelated to the fact that the text at times seems almost somewhat cluttered and overly-chaotic, containing as it does almost all of the obsessions which the author was to develop at a later stage of his writing life. And for this reason alone - although perhaps morally unjustifiable - it is never less than absorbing.

For it is a piece in which there is much familiar Beckettian pain, but also his unmistakably neurotic - indeed seif-parodic - humour, which shades almost effortlessly into the world of Laurel and Hardy. There is little of this aspect of Beckett's jaggedly elliptical, knockabout jaunt which is not instinctually captured by Mr Delargy in this stunning sequence of twenty-four prints. I do not think I am overstating the case when I suggest, on this showing a least, that the author of Endgame and Watt and some of the greatest works of literature the twentieth century has seen could possibly have wished for a more kindred and perceptive interpreter - the equivalent, surely, in visual terms, of Jack McGowran and Billie Whitelaw in the theatre. This winding tonal itinerary of young boy/old man incandescent rage and tenuously choreographed near-cataclysm and entropy repays, without question, endless viewings and analyses and contains within it touches of sublime and cathartic hilarity.
I once had a dream about an abandoned work of my own, humble as it might be in the face of a master, which entailed many pages fluttering about in a vast swathe of desert, pathetically crying out like the pleas of deserted children - why o why did you abandon us? Similarly I have this image of Beckett's work, attired in its drab shapeless orphanage shift, loitering unhappily behind the forbidding high walls. Servile and huddled and craving invisibility locked in that crippling fastness of Magdalen-blue, ungiving grey.
As the heavy barred gates part, admitting a tidal wave of light from which a radiant white horse emerges, its rider gathering up those pages to crest the hills anew, traversing white plains to ferry the orphan home once more. Beckett's concluding paragraph in his Abandoned Work surmises just what it might be like if he happened to fall down a hole and remain there, anonymous amongst the ferns as his body went off and did its best without him.

Conceivably, similar thoughts went through his mind when he orphaned these words. He couldn't have known they would one day attract the attention of the artist Diarmuid Delargy 97 thereby swiftly terminating their orphan status, fostered as they were now by a carer without peer - sympathetic, respectful but never sycophantic, his own unswerving authority and integrity apparent throughout.
The Beckett/Delargy series From An Abandoned Work, to my mind is more than just an artistic event. It is almost a perfect imaginative coitus - two imaginations in clear sympathy but uniquely separate and distinct - united by landscape and the perception of it, by rain and by rage and by colour and its total absence.
But, more than anything, by a sense of the absurd, the interpretation being Schoepaenhauer but also - always - Stan Laurel. At the risk of hyperbole, it is a marriage made in heaven - a genuine and absolute imaginative synthesis: perhaps a triumph.