NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Publisher John Calder in Textualities (via readysteadybook, via Lee) on Beckett

He also felt that he shouldn’t enjoy anything too much because if you enjoy anything too much you want to go on living and he didn’t want to put himself in a position where he was enjoying life so much that he was afraid to die.

There may be many people who believe that while pain surrounds us all the time it is somehow constructive to try to ignore it. Beckett doesn’t. His thinking is very close to Schopenhauer’s in this, although I think by the time he discovered him he’d already come to the same conclusions. Schopenhauer thinks that everything is caused by a kind of Will: Nature has a Will that for him is evil, the cause of suffering. Standard religions – not so much Hinduism or Buddhism – of course, deny this. Beckett asks deeply searching questions about conventional beliefs. Why should a god want to be worshiped, admired, praised? All we’re doing is replacing a parental figure with a god: Please, daddy, give me this.

Friedrich ‘the anti-Christ’ Nietzsche wasn’t very keen on the church either, precisely because it aided folk in the avoidance of pain, the facing of which was important to the growth and strengthening of human resolve and spirit, ‘no pain, no gain’. Faith didn’t help his father avoid suffering however. He died when Nietzsche was five; this caused the boy to question, and eventually abandon Christianity; to champion the open minded search for objective truth; to rely on the self to find its own way, in a godless world. Trying to come up with a system of values for a world without divine sanction, drove him mad. 

Here’s Calder on Burroughs:

As far as editing Burroughs goes: I tried to sit down with him to discuss books but he hated looking at old work. He was only interested in what he was currently doing. I would say, ‘Now look, this man on page forty strikes me as very like the one on page sixty-six, except he has another name – could it be the same person?’ Burroughs would say ‘ Yes, you’re right. Change the name. Do what you like. This bores me.’ The English editions of the
Burroughs’ novels I published read very differently from the American ones.

(Quite unlike most novelists today who pay a great deal of attention to the sales and packaging of their backlists…then again Burroughs ended up sitting around in some shack in the mid West surrounded by cats and empty vodka bottles). 

I don’t see Burroughs as a good writer but he’s an important writer. What he did during his experimental period strikes me as not so different from what T.S. Eliot was doing in ‘The Waste Land’.

He was obsessed with mind control, that there were alien beings manipulating us. He became a cult figure to a generation much younger than himself. He really had nothing at all in common with these people but he accepted their admiration and got caught up in the drugs and music culture.

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