PARTISAN REVIEW
623
and terror, but often too restless to look attentively at the text in front of him.
About Beckett's world he has trustworthy things to say, but about Beckett's
books he is often evasive and misleading. He doesn't much like the fiction (a
fatal disqualification for a survey writer), and in his desire
to
get on to the
plays, he is unfair to at least half of Beckett's achievement. Obsessed with
their difficulty and seeming narrowness of range, Alvarez does not see the
extraordinary emotional and intellectual variety of books like
Molloy
and
Malone Dies
(-vritten in Beckett's favorite "incandescent grey"). Nor is he willing
~o
allow that even the less successful novels have their glories.
Watt,
for
instance, has Arsene's inspired monologue on the nature of desire, and the
marvelous descriptions of Mr. Hackett, the Galls, and the Micks'-those
"heroic figures unique in the annals of cloistered fornication."
Alvarez is much better on the plays and on Beckett's importance for the
modern theater, but even here haste and a certain solemnity result in peculiar
distortions. He sees no humor in
Codot,
misreads the closing scene of
Endgame,
and flattens some of Beckett's finest writing with his own heavy
prose. After quoting the brilliant description of suicide from
Eh
Joe,
he re–
marks: "Like many other passages in Beckett, this has the sharpness and
economy of poetry and yet remains narrative, taking the listener effectively
from one point in time to another." When Alvarez does face a difficult critical
issue straight on, the result can be bizarre. "Beckett," he tells us, "is not an
allegorist; he simply looks allegorical in lieu of anything else-because, that is,
he has never been interested in plots. . . . Hence those larger apparently
allegorical meanings are it would seem haphazard; they are the more or less
. random effects of Beckett's over-education."
On this point, and on most others, Hugh Kenner is more helpful. Al–
though he and Alvarez must have written their books at roughly the same
time, Kenner's
Cuide
reads uncannily like a corrective to the other man's
excess.
If
Alvarez spends five pages explaining why a comparison of Beckett
and lonesco is pointless, Kenner in a sentence says:
"It
is not a useful bracket–
ing." When Alvarez argues that "the final irreducible content of all Beckett's
work is depression," Kenner chides those who account for Beckett's writing by
the simple "hypothesis of constitutional gloom." While Alvarez pursues
generalizations about desolation in a post-atomic age, Kenner tries
to
teach
his readers "relevant habits of attention."
For a critic customarily given to fancifulness and strutting, Kenner has
surprisingly pared his style for the occasion, and generally moves with quiet
discernment through three dozen novels, stories, and plays. (There is some
talk about torques, valencies, and Pozzo as a Gestapo officer, but much less
than one would expect.) Having written on Beckett before and having taught
the books for years, he knows how to anticipate the problems an ordinary
