Who's afraid of Samuel Beckett?

Way back when (yes, it was a long time ago), I was an undergrad discovering (literally mining, it felt to me as it feels to every young'n) the works of great (and minor) authors who described parts of my world. Grand, twisted, confusing, unfair, ironic if irony were unstructured, but poetic. (See previous post.) Like medication wrapped in a plastic capsule, the world is easier to swallow when mangled into black typeface. That was when I rediscovered my desire to write.

Every great writer (I hope?) has to first be a bad writer. (I'm ready to fight for this illusion.) The assignment for that  month's creative writing workshop was to write a one-act play. So, I wondered why one might hate a colour. A colour is like a number - innocuous - but still, I do not like the number 7. Even numbers have a pattern (please, tell me you know what that is) and so do primes, but odd numbers in general?! Their only pattern is that they aren't evens!

Can you explain your own reactions to innocuous things? And I'm not referring to favourite colours, which are based on preference, aesthetic. I'm talking about a judgement on something that is by nature exempt from judgement. So, is my explanation above really an explanation? Or is it hidden within the black typeface?

Dear reader, the point is a-coming. Hang in there.

The protagonist of my play is afraid of the colour red, as above. She is in the queue of a bank (clearly not the red one) and breaking the rules of All Queues: talking to people around her, with no reason; commenting on their clothing; skipping places; revealing very intimate information; and questioning the rationale behind All Queues.

Her real motivation is to confront a man who she sees the vortex of every trauma in her life. But the plot of the play is not the plot of this post.

One of the other workshoppers (very knowledgeable but irritatingly so) was intrigued by the pattern of my characters, by the misanthropy and the tragic, self-deprecating humour. She recommended I read Watt by Samuel Beckett. I was racing on the adrenalin of inspiration and dutifully had to have that book. I ordered online and it arrived, in Russian-doll squares of cardboard and bubble-wrap.

The production specs tell you this is something different (though I could not have told you how at the time - please note this, cynics of the influence of an experience of a book). The cover is clouds of dark puce, which fold into the ghost of a man and his suitcase at a train station, facing down the tracks. The title is written in yellow caps in a stark and thin font, as is the name. The surname dwarfs everything. This is a writer of stature, it says.

The cover is matt laminated. (Expensive and a risk, because the film comes off at the corners after a while.) The paper is thicker than the usual 70 gsm and yellowed. (Thicker paper is again expensive and paper nowadays is often acid-free because acid yellows the paper.) The type and layout is old-school, and the design leaves wide margins at all four sides. (The typeface is a thick, calligraphic serif font, which takes more space than a modern, cleaner font, as do the margins. This means more pages and more expense.) The last two points suggest that this a reprinting of the original film - also suggested by the copyright date on the imprint page, which would need to be renewed with each edition.

Where on earth does one find a printing press that prints this outmoded format? None that I know of.

I'm getting carried away. You can ignore that entire paragraph if you like. My point is, this is a work of substance, immune to time. Remind you of any other author? Another author I am afraid to read? Yep, James Joyce and Beckett were friends - groan - friends!

As with Ulysses, I have not read Watt, ten years later. It sits comfortably on my bookshelf, between Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry and Alexandra Fuller's The Legend of Colby Bryant, part of a section dedicated to books I will read next. (Next being a comfortably indeterminate word.) I have a reading eye larger than available leisure time, so this shelf grows like a creature from Aliens.

At least I have read 90 pages of Ulysses, set schedules and worn the cover a bit. Watt is pristine, which is why I can wax lyrical about its specs. I pick books to read depending on my mood. But when you are feeling dark and deep, does it make sense to read something equally or perhaps more dark? In those moods (in this mood) I pick something wherein the characters kill the fantastical bad... things... (projection intended), where the moral high ground is easy to identify and where I can fixate on seemingly indestructible things like direwolves and dragons.

But this is not the real reason, although whatever sense of self-preservation I have does revolt at the idea. You know my tired complaint, the one I can actually do something about, but am afraid to. I have not published. Yet. But there's another, less obvious one. I have not accomplished. This book reminds me of myself before I graduated into the big bad world (although I would argue I already a foot in the muck and felt the promising squelch).

My play was not very good, although it has some redeeming points, but I never wanted to be a playwright. I also have never really bothered with plot except as a coat hanger for my characters' baggage. Now here is a mentor for my characters, to help me make them great - standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. But I have to accept that, at first, they won't be. They won't be giantific - they will be dwarfish - subjectively dwarfish.

Will reading Watt help me feel more optimistic or less? Will I get farther than I have with Ulysses? (Will I understand more of it? Come'n, you didn't understand 95% of it either.) Will I remember how it felt to be so sure of success that I was prepared to fail? And will I finally find some balls and write the damn thing?! It may be a while before we find out, so hold on, kids.