‘I grow gnomic. It is the last phase.’1
As if predicting his career’s trajectory, Samuel Beckett’s letter to Nuala Costello of 10 May 1934 begins with the erudite mania that marked his early style and ends with the solemn reticence which would make him famous. It begins:
Dear Nuala,
You seem to be having a wunnerful time, with your new nastorquemada nyles. This is very deep. I am reading Amelia. I saw Man of Aran […]. Very smart no doubt as far as it goes, sea, rocks, air and granite gobs very fine, but a sensationalisation of Aran wouldn’t you be inclined to say, as Synge’s embroidery a sentimentalisation.2
It flows on for several pages with eddies like, ‘the whole thing was very Hugo, Hugo at his most Asti. Not Lautréamont, Lautréaval. Pauvres Gens oxygenated’, before arriving at the strikingly restrained ‘Up he went’, a poem for which Beckett seems never to have sought publication, which he follows with a brief valediction:
Up he went & in he passed
& down he came with such endeavour
As he shall rue until at last
He rematriculate for ever.
I grow gnomic. It is the last phase.
The energy and superfluity of the Joycean passes into a bleak refinement at first playful and then foreboding: it ends in the mature Beckettian style. And Beckett offers it a captivating name, ‘gnomic’, recalling the title of a poem formally and topically similar to this one, ‘Gnome’, which he did publish, two months later in
Dublin Magazine. If the prose opening the letter recalls what Christopher Ricks has written of Beckett’s early poetry, that it is ‘[c]lotted, coagulated, corrugated, rhythmically unhearable’, while, ‘erudite beyond belief and beyond impingement’, the poem that ends this letter is by marked contrast polished, rhythmically conspicuous and without obvious erudition.
4 ‘Up he went’ finds its depths not by constellating allusions outside of itself, but by mining downward, into the idiomatic stratum of our language. It opens with the idioms of beginning and ending a university education:
to go up, and
to come down.
To pass someone
in can mean ‘to gain admittance’ for them, while
to pass in means to die (an abridgement of ‘pass in one’s marble’ or to ‘pass in one’s cheques’.)
5 The most basic of English verbs,
go, come and
pass, take us wittily from school to grave.
Rematriculate further deepens the matter: as Steven Connor puts it, the word connects ‘passing through and coming down to bodily processes, of birth, defecation and other kinds of academic and corporal expulsion’.
6 Its concluding ‘for ever’ innocuously completes the rhyme of the industrious ‘endeavour’, but in so doing also emphasises that
rematriculation marks death. It is a death that is a return, punning on the return to sheer
material whose root, like
matriculate, is
mater or mother.
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