Yell, Sam, If You Still Can : Maylis Besserie (translated by Clíona Ní Ríordáin) (2022)

Here is Samuel Beckett in the last stage of life in 1989, living in Le Tiers-Temps retirement home in Paris. He has become part of his own drama productions, waiting for the end with strange, unhinged individuals. 

Yell, Sam, If You Still Can is richly people with phantoms and spectres. Diary notes, clinical reports, daily menus and medical files form a counterpoint to the increasingly frail Beckett. He remains playful and ruefully aware, next door to Winnie and surrounded by grotesques like Hamm or Lucky, abandoned by his wife Suzanne who died before him. 

Besserie delights in her subject’s bilingualism, and the interplay between French and Hiberno-English, summoning James Joyce as Beckett reminisces about their evenings together, singing, talking and drinking. Largely written in the library of the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Besserie tunes in to the echo and hum of Irish voices.’

In choosing to write a novel documenting the end of Samuel Beckett’s life, Maylis Besserie risked caricaturing one of the most renowned postmodernist authors of the twentieth century, whose work evidently revolves around mortality and dread apprehensions of the meaninglessness of life. The premise of Yell, Sam, If You Still Can is ambitious to the point of audacity, but its execution is, for the most part, graceful and moving, confirming Besserie’s own talents as well as those of her translator, Clíona Ní Ríordáin. The challenge for Besserie was heightened by her decision to write most of the novel from the first-person perspective of Beckett himself while avoiding the pitfalls of ventriloquism or hagiography. In this, Yell, Sam, If You Still Can is genuinely impressive; Besserie delves to the heart of her subject’s darkest apprehensions of finitude and futility without lapsing into awestruck emulation of Beckettian stylistics. I have seen other reviewers puzzle over the replacement of Beckett’s customary  terse detachment with more fluent gregariousness in Besserie’s narrative, but the reality is that constant irony is unsustainable, especially for a man so consumed by the implications of mortality. Besserie separates the first-person musings of a man nearing the end of his life from the crafted work of the author; while absurdism can inform or even define a literary style, the individual man may still be convinced of the seriousness of his own life, or may reasonably strive to rationalise some such faith — to suggest otherwise would make of Beckett a disembodied intellect, as cold and incorporeal as a marble bust. In merging the man and the artist, Besserie evokes Derek Mahon’s ‘Antarctica’; throughout the novel, readers are met with the sentiment ‘at the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime’, as heartfelt emotion and sincerity are alternated with bathetic absurdity to dizzying but wonderful effect. While there is a palpable sadness to the sections voiced by Beckett, and even to the medical notes spliced through his narrative, the protagonist is never cast in a pathetic light; Besserie affords her subject a mournful dignity to the very last, and a tenacious, if residual, delight in language and its infinite possibilities. 

The novel plays out through a dramatic three-act structure covering the final five months of Beckett’s life, from July to December 1989. This organising principle, which is both well-considered and accomplished, serves to condense and stretch time like its subject’s own writings; although the narrative is reasonably short, and drives the reader onwards, its alternation between Beckett’s stream of consciousness and the official documents of his carers revels in tedium and monotony. The first person sections layer fragments of Beckett’s memories and reflections in a way that can be difficult to follow, but that adds to the authenticity of the work and the idea of human life as a collage of experiences and images rather than a rational, linear narrative. Besserie takes artistic license in assuming the prominence of James Joyce in Beckett’s memory, and in interpreting the nature of his relationship with Joyce’s daughter Lucia. And yet, the allusions to Anglophone and Francophone writers alike, including Joyce, Herman Melville, Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare and Moliere, are unavoidable, and create the sense of the mind of a writer as a palimpsest of his own words and those of others. Besserie shows that the very texture of Beckett’s consciousness and conversation is literature, but humanises his awesome intellect by framing sex, romantic love, and companionship as being equally important elements in his life. In a really beautiful passage, Besserie has Lucia Joyce’s letters falling from Beckett’s shelves, where they had been kept alongside the works of Oscar Wilde and Franz Kafka, prompting a yearning reflection that concludes with the heart wrenching statement: ‘They are all gone. Suzanne, Wilde, Joyce, Lucia. They are all gone. I have to remind myself, all the time.’ As Beckett nears the end of his life, he is haunted by the absence of writers and lovers alike, feeling the loneliness he had experienced throughout his life hardening into terminal isolation. Readers understand that this final solitude has been imposed on him by time and circumstance, but is also cultivated by a man who ruefully feels himself to be gauche, and who rejects the company of his fellow patients. Besserie’s rendering of Beckett’s crankiness and frustration with old age is moving and convincing, blending the narrator’s embarrassment at his own frailty with his enduring (and acerbic) wit: 

Why is it that even in old age, in the winter of man’s existence – the winter of his discontent — a man who no longer aspires to anything but a little peace, is confronted, in spite of himself, with so much stupidity? I mean, how is it that an old man — as soon as he is forced to associate with a cohort he did everything to avoid up until now (medical staff, barbers, etc.) – becomes a pet in front of which people start gabbing? In that respect he is not so different from a poodle, the old man entrusted with people’s unimportant views on things. He becomes a receptacle for the dregs of language and thought. A victim of everyone’s nonsense and, what’s more, it happens in front of witnesses. Yet another privilege.’

The tone of this passage, in which Beckett rails against the perceived erosion of his dignity, is reinforced by the poignancy of his carers’ clinical reports, and the inevitability of physical deterioration conveyed therein: 

‘Mr Beckett chooses his clothes in his wardrobe and gets the ready himself.

 The dressing of the upper body (vest, shirt, sweater) and middle-body region (buttons, zips, belts) is carried out with no difficulty.

The dressing of the lower body (socks and shoes) takes him a lot of time.’ 

Readers watch on as the pleasures of Beckett’s life dwindle; for a man who never had much interest in food, his appetite deteriorates further, and his desire to socialise dissolves rapidly. What remains are the minor indulgences of cigarettes and whiskey, and the genuine enjoyment the narrator continues to derive from the acrobatics of language, the confluences and divergences of English, Hiberno-English and French, and his ongoing ability to bend words to his will. Beckett’s attitude towards language and linguistics alternates between reverence and mischief, fuelling a vein mordant and jaded humour throughout the narrative that cheers and sustains its protagonist. Conversely, the fundamental sorrow underlying the novel becomes most palpable when language fails the dying man:

Hark, there is talking on the other side. The steps are drawing closer. They’re on their rounds. The watchmen are on duty. White coats or blue coats, feet in their clogs. Lights out. Curfew for the old people. Or perhaps it’s already daytime. I don’t any more in the dark of my room, the end resembles the beginning. I could also be on my island with May and my father as he is dying. My father lying outstretched on his bed in the house between the sea and the mountain. The smell of sweet pea filling his nostrils. His brave heart gives out. He’s swearing now. Swearing that he will soon climb to the top of Howth, lie down in the bracken and fart from the top of the hill. He swears that it’s not the end, that he will admire Dublin Bay once more. Fight, fight and fight, he says. Then there is silence. How silent and empty everything is. I no longer know what to say. I’m at a loss for words.

There is a knock at the door.

I don’t want to speak. I wouldn’t know what to say, what to respond. 

There is another knock. 

I cover my face with my sheets.’ 

Just as the influence of Joyce can seem overly deterministic at times, the emphasis placed on Beckett’s mother as a constraining influence can teeter on the brink of Freudian cliché. However, as the novel progresses, it becomes apparent that Beckett’s obsessive rumination on his mother is complex and rooted in his resentment and appreciation of the legacy of sorrow and psychological darkness he inherited from her. This dualism invokes Krapp’s Last Tape, as Krapp plays a tape in which his younger self can be heard to say ‘clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most…precious ally’. This darkness and existential discomfort has worked to make Beckett feel alienated from other throughout his life while fuelling his literary success, and Besserie relates this fundamental conflict with precision and sensitivity: 

My mother’s lair, my mother’s breast. The darkness of May who fed my own darkness, who had sown the fleurs maladives, the sickly flowers. Nursed until I had received the last drops of bile, I lay for a long time on her bed of sadness. For a long time, I felt that I had no choice but to do battle with the demons who devoured my spleen. Silence, the melancholy voices murmured in my ear. But on that particular Thursday – I believe it was a Thursday — in my mother’s room, the vision was entirely different. For the first time, my eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, May’s darkness and my own — May’s darkness which had become mine — opening onto buried worlds. My vision had become clear. A primeval scene, primitive as if a window had opened onto an empty, desiccated landscape, a country road at nightfall, which promised only a hazy perilous adventure which I had shied away from until now. As an undertaker’s assistant, all that was left for me to do was dig until it filtered in. Scrape away until I reached the bottom. Enter the obscurity, follow the tunnel. Discover the bodies trapped there and shake off the dust of dreams. Overflowing with the fire of the beyond, I was close to the precipice, right on the edge. Although I was overcome with vertigo, the pit offered the best of remedies. The best for me. Like the shadows in the morning, which capture both the obscurity of the night and the light of the coming day, I was alone, like a horseman on my mount, drunk with joy and sadness. Ready to head off again. To wash up on the arid, deserted lands of the survivors. To bury myself in the sand, head first, right up to the rump, digging the soil with my mouth. With a tongue that was not mine.’

The inherent darkness of Beckett’s work and literary worldview is seen to be in constant tension with his basic humanity, and his apprehension that life and civilisation are worth fighting for. Some of the most affecting passages in the book encapsulate this tension. In one section, the narrator describes Jack B. Yeats’s portrayal of Diarmuid, one of the mythical warriors of Na Fianna, as he lies dying, waiting for his enemy and former leader Fionn Mac Cumhail to feed him life-saving water. Beckett interprets the essence of the painting as ‘hope suspended’, but immediately counterpoints the gentleness of this scene with his memories of driving an ambulance through the hellscape of Saint-Lo during the Second World War. The very idea of Beckett as a cold, morbid, emotionally detached intellectual serving as an oracle of finitude and futility is undercut by the frenzied valour of his participation in the French resistance. Although the narrator seems determined to assess himself in the harshest of terms as a man who ‘ended up on earth by accident and who remained there out of negligence’, readers constantly seem him at war with the nihilism and cynicism that dogs him, and his hardened tone is constantly belied by his empathy, his joy in language, and his memories of love. The portrait of the artist as an old man, though poignant and terminal, resonates with humanity and courage, and Beckett is justly ennobled by Besserie’s prose.

Stylistically, Yell, Sam, If You Still Can, is experimental, bold, and polyphonic, particularly in the third act, as its narrator’s consciousness and memories begin to flit and wane. I have seen the novel criticised for its inclusion of clichés, such as ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back; it is difficult to feel that this is a failure or translation or an authorial weakness, but rather perhaps a failure for irony to land with some readers. The amusement Besserie has Beckett experiencing at language is consistent with a fond knowingness toward the way the most hackneyed idioms can vary in absurdity from tongue to tongue. At one point, Beckett wonders at his French physio’s persistent repetition of the trite saying ‘let’s get this show on the road’; the inclusion of cliché in the narrative is both mischievous and deliberate in reinforcing Beckett’s apprehensions of circularity. The novel is filled with well-honed similes, such as the description of elderly men in Grogan’s as ‘customers leaning on the counter, like sparrows on a wire.’ Furthermore, the writing reaches wonderful heights at some of the most affecting moments of the novel, notably a masterful chapter on the last moments of Beckett’s nursing home neighbour, which captures the narrator’s genuine fear of death and his fretful humanity. Occasionally, certain details feel too studied or forced, as though Besserie is pushing too hard to make her famous protagonist recognisable, including his remembrance of himself walking in Ussy in an Aran jumper. Allusions to Beckett’s own work have a similarly mixed effect; at times, such references can seem somewhat gratuitous or heavy handed. For example, while being lectured by a beautiful young nurse on his paltry appetite, Beckett compares himself to ‘Pozzo’s Lucky for whom there is little left in store’, when the invocation would have been more powerful if left implicit. Similarly, while Ní Ríordáin’s translation is smooth and skilful for the most part, there are elements of self-consciousness that signal an awkwardness or uncertainty of narration. Overall, however, Yell, Sam, If You Still Can is a thought-provoking and powerful achievement that treads a fine balance between respect and reverence for its subject. This nuanced balance is best exemplified by Besserie’s attitude towards Beckett’s writing itself, maintaining a tension between ideas of spontaneous genius and meticulous craftsmanship, preserving the aura of mystique around the writing process while showing how torturous and thankless such ‘scratching’ can be. The end of the novel is never in doubt, from a historical and a narrative point of view, but Besserie sustains the victory of defiance over defeatism to the final page, recognising the absurdity and nobility of human life at the same time, and testifying constantly to the courage of endurance in the face of darkness.