In the summer of 1942, Samuel Beckett and his partner Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil fled their apartment in the German-occupied city of Paris. After more than a month on the run, including stints sleeping in parks and hiding in trees from Nazi patrols, they wound up in the town of Roussillon d’Apt, in the unoccupied zone. The couple had reason to fear for their lives. In Paris, both had been active members of a Resistance cell known as Gloria, which was compromised by the Nazis. Numerous members of the cell were arrested by the Gestapo, including Beckett’s close friend Alfred Péron, who was interrogated and eventually sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria. He died two days after the camp was liberated, in 1945.
Roussillon, in the rugged southeast of France, was a good place to hide, remote and inaccessible to heavy military vehicles. It was also relatively tolerant of refugees. Beckett and Dechevaux-Dumesnil rented quarters in a house on the edge of town and proceeded to wait out the war. It was a long and difficult wait. Beckett, prone to anxiety, suffered a mental breakdown. His biographers disagree on its severity, but there is no doubt that the trauma of his friends’ arrests, his escape from Paris, and his separation from the artistic and intellectual life in the capital—compounded by his guilt at being away from his family, especially his mother, during a time of war—all took a toll on him. Beckett passed his time playing chess, going for long walks, and working in a neighboring farmer’s fields in return for food. Later, he participated in low-level Resistance activity: storing munitions on his rented property and retrieving supplies and weapons dropped by Allied planes in the nearby mountains. He also labored on a novel, “Watt,” which he’d begun the previous year, in Paris, and which, he said, provided him “a means of staying sane.” Deirdre Bair, in her biography of Beckett, describes work on the novel as his “daily therapy.”
Beckett was thirty-six at the time, and perhaps best known in literary circles as one of James Joyce’s assistants. He had aided Joyce in the composition of “Finnegans Wake” and collaborated with Péron on a French translation of the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section of the novel. His own literary production included a critical book on Proust, a collection of stories (“More Pricks Than Kicks”), and a novel, “Murphy,” which had garnered good reviews but modest sales. Once the war ended, Beckett would embark on the most productive and artistically significant decade of his career, writing “Waiting for Godot” and a trilogy of novels—“Molloy,” “Malone Dies,” and “The Unnameable.” These works are among the enduring expressions of the absurdity and estrangement of modern life. It can be argued that the seeds of that flowering were planted in “Watt,” and that those seeds were fertilized by Beckett’s experience of the war.
“Watt” seems to be the least loved and least read of Beckett’s major prose works, but I first lost myself in it more than a quarter of a century ago. I happened to be living in Paris when Beckett died, in 1989; an expatriate Irish friend, dismayed to learn that I was familiar only with “Waiting for Godot,” loaned me a copy of “Murphy,” setting off a yearlong immersion in Beckett’s books. “Watt” was among my favorites then, and I have found myself returning to it in recent months. The product of a brilliant mind reckoning with the brutal caprices of fascism, the novel now feels like much more than a curious entry in the Beckett canon. At its core, it’s an investigation into the fallibility of reason, an attempt to reckon with obscured truths and alternative facts.
Like much of Beckett’s work, “Watt” is funny and bleak and also uncompromising in its indifference to such readerly comforts as plot and accessibility. The novel follows its title character as he goes to work as a domestic servant in the home of Mr. Knott. Combine “Watt” and “Knott” and you get “whatnot,” and for some readers, assuredly, “Watt” will never be more than that: two hundred and fifty pages of mannered prose, showy vocabulary (“ataraxy,” “conglutination,” “exiguity”), syllogisms, lists, and Gertrude Stein-like repetitions and variations.
But Beckett’s stylistic extravagance has a purpose: it illustrates the desperate lengths people can be pushed to by powers that behave arbitrarily, indifferent to human suffering. Watt is helplessly, pedantically logical—a kind of dimwitted Mr. Spock. To the contemporary reader he displays more than a few autistic traits, including a love of routine and repetition, and difficulty relating to others on an emotional level. His sanity is also in question. We are told early in the novel that Watt hears voices, “singing, crying, stating, murmuring things unintelligible in his ear.”
Watt’s arrival at Mr. Knott’s house presents the kind of conundrum that will bedevil him throughout his tenure there. He shows up after sundown, having taken the train from the city center. Beckett describes his attempts to gain entrance to the house:
Once inside, Watt becomes consumed by his inability to plumb the “science of the locked door”—that is, to deduce how the back door came to be opened. Had he mistaken it for locked when it was really just on the latch, or had someone opened it? Watt, we are told, “was never to know, never, never, to know how the backdoor came to be opened.” This is the first of many inscrutable problems Watt will fail to solve under Mr. Knott’s roof, a failure that will drive him fully insane.
While in Mr. Knott’s employ, Watt is repeatedly confounded by the duties he is asked to manage. An order that the leftovers from Mr. Knott’s twice-daily meals be fed to the dog turns into a forty-page crisis. For starters, there is no dog in the house, so a neighborhood dog needs to be enlisted for this service—but the dog must be kept hungry enough that it will eat the leftovers when they are available, while not so hungry that it will expire from lack of nourishment when there are no leftovers. Of course, a second dog is required in case the first one should die. Then there’s the matter of how to signal the dog’s owner on nights when food is available, etc. There is something moving in Watt’s futile but relentless pursuit of solutions to these problems. He is like a G.P.S. that continues to recalculate routes long after the driver has abandoned the original destination. He is the citizen of an old order who is unable to adapt to a new reality.
Watt is never able to fathom his employer’s character or to make sense of what goes on in the house. At Mr. Knott’s, “the true [is] true no longer, and the false not true yet.” When Watt’s service is complete, he takes up residence in an insane asylum; there he meets, among others, a patient conspicuously named Sam. In the asylum, Watt suffers a complete linguistic collapse, inverting syntax and spelling—“Beg pardon” becomes “Ged nodrap,” for example. Beckett said that “Watt” was “a game,” but it was more than a mere diversion for him. One can sense, as he goes through the unspooling iterations and variations of Watt’s compulsive logic that he, Beckett, needed those same exhaustive iterations to keep a grip on himself. There are passages, such as the one below, where the patterns of the words on the page are spellbinding. Reading them induces a trance-like state, as writing them must have, too:
In the late summer of 1944, as Allied forces invaded southern France, Resistance groups were urged to use the weapons and supplies that had been dropped by air to engage in guerrilla activities against the Nazis. Among other actions, Aimé Bonhomme, the leader of the Resistance in Roussillon, planned an ambush of retreating German vehicles along the Route Nationale. Beckett joined the planned attack, but the Germans, like Godot, never showed. By late 1944 or early 1945 (accounts vary), Beckett and Dechevaux-Dumesnil were able to return to their Paris apartment. Beckett completed a draft of “Watt” on December 28th, but he had great difficulty finding a home for his strange book. It was rejected by “a good score of London publishers,” according to Beckett, including Fred Warburg, of Secker & Warburg, who observed, “It may be . . . that we are turning down a potential James Joyce. . . . However, what appears to us as his perversity is so considerable that we find ourselves unable to make an offer.” It was not until 1953, after the success of “Godot,” that “Watt” was published, by the Olympia Press, in an edition riddled with typos.
Beckett ends “Watt” with an “Addenda,” containing “precious and illuminating material” not included in the main text because of “fatigue and disgust.” The last of this miscellany is a famous injunction: “no symbols where none intended.” It places the reader in a position similar to Watt regarding the locked door. How do we know which symbols were intended? What if none were intended? That unrelenting ambiguity is what drew me back to the book earlier this year. Like so many others contending with the current Administration’s loose relations with the truth, I’ve found myself questioning my own sanity. If “Watt” could keep Samuel Beckett from losing his mind, I decided, perhaps it could do the same for me. I hope it’s working.
