Now Beacon, Now Sea
a Samuel Beckett fantasmagoria
2024, Kernpunkt Press
In Dante’s Vita Nuova, just a few poems shy of revelation, after the horrible mid-text death of Beatrice, the poet watched a young woman in her window, through his window, where he was set to read and write just as depicted on his tomb, each hand in a different book, and he saw in this woman’s disposition a grief symmetrical to his own over her own recent loss of a similar kind, and in the illusion of shared grief, he began to love her with a welling, alien, wanted and unwanted love. What emerged was a voice embarrassed, hovering in exile from itself, the poet of love and death, the pilgrim in the forest.
Now Beacon, Now Sea grew from my interest in writing about Samuel Beckett. The title comes from his novel Molloy: “Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.” I began with a conventional concept for a biographical novel, but I knew that form wouldn’t hold my interest in the long run, and more importantly, I knew that Beckett himself was squeamish about his life and work being overly connected. Ironically, he very much enjoyed knowing about the lives of the authors he admired, and he often made allusion to the idea that the keys to understanding his work lay in the works of others. Among those others, one of the foremost is Dante. So that’s where I began.
Beckett drew one of his first characters from Dante’s Purgatorio: Dante’s Belacqua (who scoffs at those eager to climb the mountain) became Beckett’s Belacqua Shuah, a do-nothing, want-nothing wanderer, confused in love, fussy, selfish, over-intellectualizing, sensitive, melancholy, and so on. Belacqua’s first foray as a character was in Beckett’s failed novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women. It’s irritating, funny, obtuse, crude, and weird.
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Dream contains numerous links to Dante, and not just to his most famous work, the Commedia, but Dante’s earlier effort, La Vita Nuova. It’s in this slim volume of poems (each accompanied by the poet’s own staid analysis and melodramatic context) that Dante gives the chronicles of Beatrice. Beatrice is his poetic love; he doesn’t really know her, but has chosen her to fuel his poetic angst and generate an emotional roller coaster. That’s all well and good until she dies.
Part of my project has been to see moments like this in Dante’s life or work that I believe Beckett, too, may have seized upon or identified with. Beckett, too, gathered characters from real life into his works, and the barrier between reality and fiction was frequently messy and painful. In that early novel of Beckett’s, his Belacqua navigates a series of confusing relationships with women, teachers, and family, coping for the first time, perhaps, with real love and real loss.
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Thus, in Now Beacon, Now Sea, we meet Sasha who, after being randomly stabbed on the street (as Beckett was one night in Paris, 1937), meets “Someone” — both a mythic Beatrice and a real friend. This was how Beckett, in fact, grew closer to his future wife Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil—she visited him in the hospital after the stabbing.
For Sasha, the connection is all misunderstood, and his inability to see beyond his own interests prevent him from understanding anything about what Someone, herself, is going through, what she has done for him, or, in fact, what she has been creating through her own process of grieving (for her sister) and caring for him. The fullness of their connection lies is the fact that neither actually needs the other, but turns the other into an element of a private story: for Sasha, a comfort and poetic longing; for Someone, a way to grieve and create connections before saying goodbye.
I wanted to imagine that Dante, by the end of La Vita Nuova, had to face his objectification of Beatrice, had to find a way to speak about her death, her real death, in a way that mattered, and, when he failed to do so, had to realize he would need to become a better poet.