Stirring Beckett
If Mark Rothko’s paintings represent a visual approach to the condition of music, then Samuel Beckett’s poems, plays and prose are the literary equivalent. Not just the music of words: a music suggested by the words, beyond them yet intrinsic to their sounds and rhythms.
Stirrings Still was Beckett’s last piece of prose: nine pages, about 2,500 words, written between 1983 and 1987, which means it was finished two years before his death. And that’s what it seems to evoke: a man quietly contemplating his own mortality, time and loss and things undone, summoning flawed memories. As it opens, he sits at a table, watching himself “rise and go”.
Paul Griffiths reads Stirrings Still on a new album of that title, the words divided into 18 sections separated by music for string quartet written by the American composer Trevor Bača. Griffiths, whom I knew when he was the chief classical music critic for The Times in London throughout the 1980s, is a much decorated author (including three novels), librettist and lecturer.
He is not an actor, which means that inflection of the text is limited, and mostly the better for it. His is an ordinary voice, suited to calm reflection, not drawing attention to itself and therefore a good fit for this Beckett piece. The quasi-incantatory repetitions are allowed to speak for themselves, while a little trouble with his Rs adds a touch of imperfection and character. A Bill Nighy or an Ian McKellen might “sell” the lines better but the result would not seem so true.
What the speaker avoids in terms of drama and variety, Bača’s music supplies. The Jack Quartet — Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman (violins), John Pickford Richards (viola) and Jay Campbell (cello) — provide a repertoire of scrapes and swoops and sawing, unsettling harmonics, microtonal drones, hurtling zigzag patterns, and glissandi that judder like a train jumping its tracks, all laid out with beautiful timing and, in Manfred Eicher’s production, a sense of space and air. Only at the end do the narration and the music overlap, an understated effect to close a remarkable piece of work.
* Stirrings Still is out now on the ECM New Series label. The text is available, along with that of Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho, in a volume published by Faber & Faber as Company Etc. The photograph of Beckett is from the cover of Stirrings Still and was taken by Rosemarie Clausen.
