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PARTISAN REVIEW
able-symbols
of fragility transformed into indestructible foundations .
* * *
The French text
Sans
is called
Lessness
in English, a word coined by
Beckett like its German equivalent,
Losigkeit.
Fascinated by this word
Lessness
(as unfathomable as Boehme's
Un–
grund),
I told Beckett one evening that I would not go to bed before finding
an honorable equivalent for it in French. .. . Together we had considered
all possible forms suggested by
sans
and
moindre.
None of them seemed to
us to come near the notion of the inexhaustible lessness, a combination of
loss and infinitude, an emptiness linked with apotheosis. Somewhat disap–
pointed, we parted company. Back at home, I kept on turning that poor
sans
over and over in my mind. Just as I was about to give up . the idea came
to me that I ought to try some derivation of the Latin
sine.
The next day I
wrote to Beckett that
sineite
seemed to me to be the yearned-for word. He
replied that he too had thought of it, perhaps at the same moment. But in
the end our lucky find failed to satisfy us. We finally agreed that we ought
to give up the search, that there was no noun in French capable of expressing
absence in itself, pure unadulterated absence, and that we had to resign our–
selves to the metaphysical poverty of a preposition.
* * *
With writers who have nothing to say, who do not possess a world of
their own, one talks only about literature. With him, very rarely; in fact al–
most never. Any everyday topic (concrete problems, annoyances of all kinds)
interests him more-in conversation, of course . What he cannot tolerate, at
any rate . are questions like: do you think this or that work is destined to last?
That this one or that deserves its reputation? Of X and Y, which one will
survive, which is the greater? All evaluations of this sort
try
his patience and
depress him. "What's the point of all that?" he said to me after a particu–
larly unpleasant evening, when the discussion at dinner had resembled a
grotesque version of the Last Judgment. He himself avoids expressing opin–
ions about his books and plays: what's important to him are not obstacles
that have been overcome, but those yet to be faced . He merges totally with
whatever he is working on . If one asks him about a play in progress, he will
not linger over the content or the meaning, but over the interpretation,
whose most insignificant details he visualizes minute by minute
(I
was about
to say second by second). I will not soon forget his spirited explanation of
the requirements to be satisfied by an actress wishing to play
Not I,
in which
