The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

I get ready, but Wednesday he don't come, and Saturday he don't come. All the week I stay in the flat. Only once I go out and arrange for bread, milk and eggs to be left at the door, and seems to me I meet up with a lot of policemen. They don't look at me, but they see me all right. I don't want to drink�I'm all the time listening, listening and thinking, how can I leave before I know if my fine is paid? I tell myself the police let me know, that's certain. But I don't trust them. What they care? The answer is Nothing. Nobody care. One afternoon I knock at the old lady's flat upstairs, because I get the idea she give me good advice. I can hear her moving about and talking, but she don't answer and I never try again.

Nearly two weeks pass like that, then I telephone. It's the woman speaking and she say, 'Mr Sims is not in London at present.' I ask, 'When will he be back�it's urgent,' and she hang up. I'm not surprised. Not at all. I knew that would happen. All the same I feel heavy like lead. Near the phone box is a chemist's shop, so I ask him for something to make me sleep, the day is bad enough, but to lie awake all night�Ah no! He gives me a little bottle marked 'One or two tablets only' and I take three when I go to bed because more and more I think that sleeping is better than no matter what else. However, I lie there, eyes wide open as usual, so I take three more. Next thing 1 know the room is full of sunlight, so it must be late afternoon, but the lamp is still on. My head turn around and I can't think well at all. At first I ask myself how I get to the place. Then it comes to me, but in pictures�like the landlady kicking my dress, and when I take my ticket at Victoria Station, and Mr Sims telling me to eat the sandwiches, but I can't remember everything clear, and I feel very giddy and sick. I take in the milk and eggs at the door, go in the kitchen, and try to eat but the food hard to swallow.

It's when I'm putting the things away that I see the bottles�pushed back on the lowest shelf in the cupboard.

There's a lot of drink left, and I'm glad I tell you. Because I can't bear the way I feel. Not any more. I mix a gin and vermouth and I drink it quick, then I mix another and drink it slow by the window. The garden looks different, like I never see it before. I know quite well what I must do, but it's late now� tomorrow I have one more drink, of wine this time, and then a song comes in my head, I sing it and I dance it, and more I sing, more 1 am sure this is the best tune that has ever come to me in all my life.

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LET THEM CALL IT JAZZ / 2367

The sunset light from the window is gold colour. My shoes sound loud on the boards. So I take them off, my stockings too and go on dancing but the room feel shut in, I can't breathe, and I go outside still singing. Maybe I dance a bit too. I forget all about that woman till I hear her saying, 'Henry, look at this.' I turn around and I see her at the window. 'Oh yes, I wanted to speak with you,' I say, 'Why bring the police and get me in bad trouble? Tell me that.'

'And you tell me what you're doing here at all,' she says. 'This is a respectable neighbourhood.' Then the man come along. 'Now young woman, take yourself off. You ought to be ashamed of this behaviour.'

'It's disgraceful,' he says, talking to his wife, but loud so I can hear, and she speaks loud too�for once. 'At least the other tarts that crook installed here were white girls,' she says.

'You a dam' fouti4 liar,' I say. 'Plenty of those girls in your country already. Numberless as the sands on the shore. You don't need me for that.'

'You're not a howling success at it certainly.' Her voice sweet sugar again. 'And you won't be seeing much more of your friend Mr Sims. He's in trouble too. Try somewhere else. Find somebody else. If you can, of course.' When she say that my arm moves of itself. I pick up a stone and bam! through the window. Not the one they are standing at but the next, which is of coloured glass, green and purple and yellow.

I never see a woman look so surprise. Her mouth fall open she so full of surprise. I start to laugh, louder and louder�I laugh like my grandmother, with my hands on my hips and my head back. (When she laugh like that you can hear her to the end of our street.) At last I say, 'Well, I'm sorry. An accident. I get it fixed tomorrow early.' 'That glass is irreplaceable,' the man says. 'Irreplaceable.' 'Good thing,' I say, 'those colours look like they sea-sick to me. I buy you a better windowglass.'

He shake his fist at me. "You won't be let off with a fine this time,' he says. Then they draw the curtains, I call out at them. 'You run away. Always you run away. Ever since I come here you hunt me down because I don't answer back. It's you shameless.' I try to sing 'Don't Trouble Me Now'.

Don't trouble me now You without honour Don't walk in my footstep You without shame.

But my voice don't sound right, so I get back indoors and drink one more glass

of wine�still wanting to laugh, and still thinking of my grandmother for that

is one of her songs.

It's about a man whose doudou give him the go-by5 when she find somebody rich and he sail away to Panama. Plenty people die there of fever when they make that Panama canal so long ago. But he don't die. He come back with dollars and the girl meet him on the jetty, all dressed up and smiling. Then he sing to her, 'You without honour, you without shame'. It sound good in Martinique patois too: 'Sans honte'.6

Afterwards I ask myself, 'Why I do that? It's not like me. But if they treat

4. West Indian expletive. dou": darling (French Creole). 5. Intentionally snub by leaving behind. "Dou-6. Without shame (French Creole).

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2368 / JEAN RHYS

you wrong over and over again the hour strike when you burst out that's what.'

Too besides, Mr Sims can't tell me now I have no spirit I don't care, 1 sleep quickly and I'm glad I break the woman's ugly window. But as to my own song it go right away and it never come back. A pity.

Next morning the doorbell ringing wake me up. The people upstairs don't come down, and the bell keeps on like fury self. So I go to look, and there is a policeman and a policewoman outside. As soon as I open the door the woman put her foot in it. She wear sandals and thick stockings and I never see a foot so big or so bad. It look like it want to mash up the whole world. Then she come in after the foot, and her face not so pretty either. The policeman tell me my fine is not paid and people make serious complaints about me, so they're taking me back to the magistrate. He show me a paper and I look at it, but I don't read it. The woman push me in the bedroom, and tell me to get dress quickly, but I just stare at her, because I think perhaps I wake up soon. Then I ask her what I must wear. She say she suppose I had some clothes on yesterday. Or not? 'What's it matter, wear anything,' she says. But I find clean underclothes and stockings and my shoes with high heels and I comb my hair. I start to file my nails, because I think they too long for magistrate's court but she get angry. 'Are you coming quietly or aren't you?' she says. So I go with them and we get in a car outside.

I wait for a long time in a room full of policemen. They come in, they go out, they telephone, they talk in low voices. Then it's my turn, and first thing I notice in the court room is a man with frowning black eyebrows. He sit below the magistrate, he dressed in black and he so handsome I can't take my eyes off him. When he see that he frowns worse than before.

First comes a policeman to testify I cause disturbance, and then comes the old gentleman from next door. He repeat that bit about nothing but the truth so help me God. Then he says I make dreadful noise at night and use abominable language, and dance in obscene fashion. He says when they try to shut the curtains because his wife so terrify of me, I throw stones and break a valuable stain-glass window. He say his wife get serious injury if she'd been hit, and as it is she in terrible nervous condition and the doctor is with her. I think, 'Believe me, if I aim at your wife I hit your wife�that's certain.' 'There was no provocation,' he says. 'None at all.' Then another lady from across the street says this is true. She heard no provocation whatsoever, and she swear that they shut the curtains but I go on insulting them and using filthy language and she saw all this and heard it.

The magistrate is a little gentleman with a quiet voice, but I'm very suspicious of these quiet voices now. He ask me why I don't pay any fine, and I say because I haven't the money. I get the idea they want to find out all about Mr Sims�they listen so very attentive. But they'll find out nothing from me. He ask how long I have the flat and I say I don't remember. I know they want to trip me up like they trip me up about my savings so I won't answer. At last he ask if I have anything to say as I can't be allowed to go on being a nuisance. I think, 'I'm nuisance to you because I have no money that's all.' I want to speak up and tell him how they steal all my savings, so when my landlord asks for month's rent I haven't got it to give. I want to tell him the woman next door provoke me since long time and call me bad names but she have a soft sugar voice and nobody hear�that's why I broke her window, but I'm ready to buy another after all. I want to say all I do is sing in that old garden, and I want to say this in decent quiet voice. But I hear myself talking loud and I see

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LET THEM CALL IT JAZZ / 2369

my hands wave in the air. Too besides it's no use, they won't believe me, so I don't finish. I stop, and I feel the tears on my face. 'Prove it.' That's all they will say. They whisper, they whisper. They nod, they nod.

Next thing I'm in a car again with a different policewoman, dressed very smart. Not in uniform. I ask her where she's taking me and she says 'Holloway' just that 'Holloway'.7

I catch hold of her hand because I'm afraid. But she takes it away. Cold and smooth her hand slide away and her face is china face�smooth like a doll and I think, 'This is the last time I ask anything from anybody. So help me God.'

The car come up to a black castle and little mean streets are all round it. A lorry was blocking up the castle gates. When it get by we pass through and I am in jail. First 1 stand in a line with others who are waiting to give up handbags and all belongings to a woman behind bars like in a post office. The girl in front bring out a nice compact, look like gold to me, lipstick to match and a wallet full of notes. The woman keep the money, but she give back the powder and lipstick and she half-smile. I have two pounds seven shillings and sixpence in pennies. She take my purse, then she throw me my compact (which is cheap) my comb and my handkerchief like everything in my bag is dirty. So I think, 'Here too, here too.' But I tell myself, 'Girl, what you expect, eh? They all like that. All.'

Some of what happen afterwards I forget, or perhaps better not remember. Seems to me they start by trying to frighten you. But they don't succeed with me for I don't care for nothing now, it's as if my heart hard like a rock and I can't feel.

Then I'm standing at the top of a staircase with a lot of women and girls. As we are going down I notice the railing very low on one side, very easy to jump, and a long way below there's the grey stone passage like it's waiting for you.

As I'm thinking this a uniform woman step up alongside quick and grab my arm. She say, 'Oh no you don't.' I was just noticing the railing very low that's all�but what's the use of saying so.

Another long line waits for the doctor. It move forward slowly and my legs terrible tired. The girl in front is very young and she cry and cry. 'I'm scared,' she keeps saying. She's lucky in a way�as for me I never will cry again. It all dry up and hard in me now. That, and a lot besides. In the end I tell her to stop, because she doing just what these people want her to do.

She stop crying and start a long story, but while she is speaking her voice get very far away, and I find I can't see her face clear at all.

Then I'm in a chair, and one of those uniform women is pushing my head down between my knees, but let her push�everything go away from me just the same.

They put me in the hospital because the doctor say I'm sick. I have cell by

myself and it's all right except I don't sleep. The things they say you mind I

don't mind.

When they clang the door on me I think, 'You shut me in, but you shut all those other dam' devils out. They can't reach me now.' At first it bothers me when they keep on looking at me all through the night.

7. Prison in London.

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2370 / JEAN RHYS

They open a little window in the doorway to do this. But I get used to it and get used to the night chemise8 they give me. It very thick, and to my mind it not very clean either�but what's that matter to me? Only the food I can't swallow�especially the porridge. The woman ask me sarcastic, 'Hunger striking?' But afterwards I can leave most of it, and she don't say nothing.

One day a nice girl comes around with books and she give me two, but I don't want to read so much. Beside one is about a murder, and the other is about a ghost and I don't think it's at all like those books tell you.

There is nothing I want now. It's no use. If they leave me in peace and quiet that's all I ask. The window is barred but not small, so I can see a little thin tree through the bars, and I like watching it.

After a week they tell me I'm better and I can go out with the others for exercise. We walk round and round one of the yards in that castle�it is fine weather and the sky is a kind of pale blue, but the yard is a terrible sad place. The sunlight fall down and die there. I get tired walking in high heels and I'm glad when that's over.

We can talk, and one day an old woman come up and ask me for dog-ends. I don't understand, and she start muttering at me like she very vexed. Another woman tell me she mean cigarette ends, so I say I don't smoke. But the old woman still look angry, and when we're going in she give me one push and I nearly fall down. I'm glad to get away from these people, and hear the door clang and take my shoes off.

Sometimes I think, 'I'm here because I wanted to sing' and I have to laugh. But there's a small looking glass in my cell and I see myself and I'm like somebody else. Like some strange new person. Mr Sims tells me I too thin, but what he say now to this person in the looking glass? So I don't laugh again.

Usually I don't think at all. Everything and everybody seem small and far away, that is the only trouble.

Twice the doctor come to see me. He don't say much and I don't say anything, because a uniform woman is always there. She looks like she thinking, 'Now the lies start.' So I prefer not to speak. Then I'm sure they can't trip me up. Perhaps I there still, or in a worse place. But one day this happen.

We were walking round and round in the yard and I hear a woman singing� the voice come from high up, from one of the small barred windows. At first I don't believe it. Why should anybody sing here? Nobody want to sing in jail, nobody want to do anything. There's no reason, and you have no hope. I think I must be asleep, dreaming, but I'm awake all right and I see all the others are listening too. A nurse is with us that afternoon, not a policewoman. She stop and look up at the window.

It's a smoky kind of voice, and a bit rough sometimes, as if those old dark walls theyselves are complaining, because they see too much misery�too much. But it don't fall down and die in the courtyard; seems to me it could jump the gates of the jail easy and travel far, and nobody could stop it. I don't hear the words�only the music. She sing one verse and she begin another, then she break off sudden. Everybody starts walking again, and nobody says one word. But as we go in I ask the woman in front who was singing. 'That's the Holloway song,' she says. 'Don't you know it yet? She was singing from the punishment cells, and she tell the girls cheerio and never say die.' Then I have to go one way to the hospital block and she goes another so we don't speak again.

8. Loosely fitting nightgown.

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LET THEM CALL IT JAZZ / 2371

When I'm back in my cell I can't just wait for bed. I walk up and down and I think. 'One day I hear that song on trumpets and these walls will fall and rest.'9 I want to get out so bad I could hammer on the door, for I know now that anything can happen, and I don't want to stay lock up here and miss it.

Then I'm hungry. I eat everything they bring and in the morning I'm still so hungry I eat the porridge. Next time the doctor come he tells me I seem much better. Then I say a little of what really happen in that house. Not much. Very careful.

He look at me hard and kind of surprised. At the door he shake his finger and says, 'Now don't let me see you here again.'

That evening the woman tells me I'm going, but she's so upset about it I don't ask questions. Very early, before it's light she bangs the door open and shouts at me to hurry up. As we're going along the passages I see the girl who gave me the books. She's in a row with others doing exercises. Up Down, Up Down, Up. We pass quite close and I notice she's looking very pale and tired. It's crazy, it's all crazy. This up down business and everything else too. When they give me my money I remember I leave my compact in the cell, so I ask if I can go back for it. You should see that policewoman's face as she shoo me on.

There's no car, there's a van and you can't see through the windows. The third time it stop I get out with one other, a young girl, and it's the same magistrates' court as before.

The two of us wait in a small room, nobody else there, and after a while the girl say, 'What the hell are they doing? I don't want to spend all day here.' She go to the bell and she keep her finger press on it. When I look at her she say, 'Well, what are they for?' That girl's face is hard like a board� she could change faces with many and you wouldn't know the difference. But she get results certainly. A policeman comes in, all smiling, and we go in the court. The same magistrate, the same frowning man sits below, and when I hear my fine is paid I want to ask who paid it, but he yells at me, 'Silence.'

I think I will never understand the half of what happen, but they tell me I can go, and I understand that. The magistrate ask if I'm leaving the neighbourhood and I say yes, then I'm out in the streets again, and it's the same fine weather, same feeling I'm dreaming.

When I get to the house I see two men talking in the garden. The front door and the door of the flat are both open. I go in, and the bedroom is empty, nothing but the glare streaming inside because they take the Venetian blinds away. As I'm wondering where my suitcase is, and the clothes I leave in the wardrobe, there's a knock and it's the old lady from upstairs carrying my case packed, and my coat is over her arm. She says she sees me come in. 'I kept your things for you.' I start to thank her but she turn her back and walk away. They like that here, and better not expect too much. Too besides, I bet they tell her I'm terrible person.

I go in the kitchen, but when I see they are cutting down the big tree at the

back I don't stay to watch.

At the station I'm waiting for the train and a woman asks if I feel well. 'You

look so tired,' she says. 'Have you come a long way?' I want to answer, 'I come

so far I lose myself on that journey.' But I tell her, "Yes, I am quite well. But

I can't stand the heat.' She says she can't stand it either, and we talk about

the weather till the train come in.

9. The walls of Jericho fall when trumpets sound (Joshua 6).

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237 2 / STEVIE SMITH

I'm not frightened of them any more�after all what else can they do? I know what to say and everything go like a clock works.

I get a room near Victoria where the landlady accept one pound in advance, and next day I find a job in the kitchen of a private hotel close by. But I don't stay there long. I hear of another job going in a big store�altering ladies' dresses and I get that. I lie and tell them I work in very expensive New York shop. I speak bold and smooth faced, and they never check up on me. I make a friend there�Clarice�very light coloured, very smart, she have a lot to do with the customers and she laugh at some of them behind their backs. But I say it's not their fault if the dress don't fit. Special dress for one person only� that's very expensive in London. So it's take in, or let out all the time. Clarice have two rooms not far from the store. She furnish herself gradual and she gives parties sometimes Saturday nights. It's there I start whistling the Holloway Song. A man comes up to me and says, 'Let's hear that again.' So I whistle it again (I never sing now) and he tells me 'Not bad'. Clarice have an old piano somebody give her to store and he plays the tune, jazzing it up. I say, 'No, not like that,' but everybody else say the way he do it is first class. Well I think no more of this till I get a letter from him telling me he has sold the song and as I was quite a help he encloses five pounds with thanks.

I read the letter and I could cry. For after all, that song was all I had. I don't belong nowhere really, and I haven't money to buy my way to belonging. I don't want to either.

But when that girl sing, she sing to me and she sing for me. I was there because I was meant to be there. It was meant I should hear it�this I know. Now I've let them play it wrong, and it will go from me like all the other songs�like everything. Nothing left for me at all.

But then I tell myself all this is foolishness. Even if they played it on trumpets, even if they played it just right, like I wanted�no walls would fall so soon. 'So let them call it jazz,' I think, and let them play it wrong. That won't make no difference to the song I heard.

I buy myself a dusty pink dress with the money.

1961 1962

STEVIE SMITH

1902-1971

Stevie Smith's real name was Florence Margaret Smith, but she was nicknamed "Stevie" after a famous jockey because of her small stature. She was born in Hull, Yorkshire, but at the age of three went with her mother and sister to live with an aunt in Palmer's Green, a suburb north of London. She worked as a secretary at the magazine-publishing firm of Newnes, Pearson, while continuing to live with her aunt, to whom she was devoted. When her aunt grew old and infirm, Smith gave up her job to look after her, although she herself was often in ill health. At the same time she managed to lead a lively social life in London and was known for the vividness and range of her conversation.

Smith brought out her first novel, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), at the suggestion of a publisher who rejected a collection of poems. This was followed by her first

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SUNT LEONES / 2373

volume of poetry, A Good Time Was Had b)1 All (1937), and in due course by eight further poetry collections and two further novels.

Smith's work is utterly original, fitting into no category and showing none of the characteristic influences of the age. Her poetry sometimes seems to be light verse, and it draws on nursery rhyme and often employs simple language, but its humor can shade into dread, its whimsy into metaphysical pondering. She illustrated many of her poems with line drawings (she called them "doodles") that reinforce the effect of mock-naivete. This stance is akin to the cunning innocence of the fool or the trickster, and can be seen, in part, as a gendered deflection and subversion of masculine cultural norms. Her diction ranges from the matter-of-fact to the archaic, from colloquialism ("Poor chap"), slang ("you ass"), and nonsense ("Our Bog Is Dood") to didacticism ("My point which upon this has been obscured") and foreign phrases ("Sunt Leones"). Her verse moves from free conversational rhythms to traditional verse patterns, on occasion becoming�to ironic effect�almost doggerel. Her tone can be satiric, solemn, or both at once. A poem such as "Not Waving but Drowning" belies the apparent guilelessness of Smith's art. Like the dying man's ambiguous gesture here, her poetry waves to us, with its songlike lyricism and comedy, and yet also reveals much about "drowning"�about death, suicide, and other painful human issues. A religious skeptic, Smith said she was always in danger of falling into belief, and her poetry shows her to be fascinated by theological speculation, the language of the Bible, and religious experience.

Sunt Leones1

The lions who ate the Christians on the sands of the arena By indulging native appetites played what has now been seen a Not entirely negligible part In consolidating at the very start 5 The position of the Early Christian Church. Initiatory rites are always bloody An d the lions, it appears From contemporary art, made a study Of dyeing Coliseum sands a ruddy I O Liturgically sacrificial hue .And if the Christians felt a little blue � Well people being eaten often do. Theirs was the death, and theirs the crown undying,2 A state of things which must be satisfying. 1 5 My point which up to this has been obscured Is that it was the lions who procured By chewing up blood gristle flesh and bone Th e martyrdoms on which the Churc h has grown. I only write this poem because I thought it rather looked 2 0 As if the part the lions played was being overlooked. By lions' jaws great benefits and blessings were begotten An d so our debt to Lionhood must never be forgotten.

1. There be lions (Latin). Christians were attacked 2. I.e., of martyrdom, in heaven. The Christian lit- and eaten by lions in the public games held in the urgy, or system of worship, prescribes certain col- Colosseum during the Roman Empire. ors for certain festivals (line 10).

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237 4 / STEVIE SMITH

Our Bog Is Dood

Our Bog is dood, our Bog is dood, They lisped in accents mild, But when I asked them to explain They grew a little wild.

5 How do you know your Bog is dood My darling little child?

We know because we wish it so That is enough, they cried, And straight within each infant eye

10 Stood up the flame of pride, And if you do not think it so You shall be crucified.

Then tell me, darling little ones, What's dood, suppose Bog is?

is Just what we think, the answer came, Just what we think it is. They bowed their heads. Our Bog is ours And we are wholly his.

But when they raised them up again

20 They had forgotten me Each one upon each other glared In pride and misery For what was dood, and what their Bog They never could agree.

25 Oh sweet it was to leave them then, And sweeter not to see, And sweetest of all to walk alone Beside the encroaching sea, The sea that soon should drown them all,

30 That never yet drowned me.

Not Waving but Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he's dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said.

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THOUGHT S ABOU T TH E PERSO N FRO M PORLOC K / 237 5 10Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning. 1957

Thoughts About the Person from Porlock1

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock And ever after called him a curse, Then why did he hurry to let him in? He could have hid in the house.

It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong (But often we all do wrong) As the truth is I think he was already stuck With Kubla Khan.

He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished, IO I shall never write another word of it,

1. See Coleridge, "Kubla Khan," (p. 446).

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2 3 76 / STEVIE SMITH

Whe n along comes the Person from Porlock An d takes the blame for it.

It was not right, it was wrong,

But often we all do wrong.

May we inquire the name of the Person from Porlock? Why , Porson, didn't you know? He lived at the bottom of Porlock Hill So had a long way to go,

He wasn't muc h in the social sense Though his grandmother was a Warlock, On e of the Ruthlandshire ones I fancy An d nothing to do with Porlock.

An d he lived at the bottom of the hill as I said And had a cat named Flo, And had a cat named Flo.

I long for the Person from Porlock To bring my thoughts to an end, I am becoming impatient to see him 1 think of hi m as a friend,

Often I look out of the window Often I run to the gate I think, He will come this evening, I think it is rather late.

I am hungry to be interrupted Forever and ever amen O Person from Porlock come quickly An d bring my thoughts to an end.

I felicitate the people who have a Person from Porlock To break up everything and throw it away Because then there will be nothing to keep them An d they need not stay.

Why do they grumble so much? He comes like a benison They should be glad he has not forgotten them They might have had to go on.

These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing, I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant, Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting

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PRETTY / 2377

50 With various mixtures of human character which goes best, All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us. There I go again, Smile, smile, and get some work to do Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.

1962

Pretty

Why is the word pretty so underrated? In November the leaf is pretty when it falls The stream grows deep in the woods after rain And in the pretty pool the pike stalks

5 He stalks his prey, and this is pretty too, The prey escapes with an underwater flash But not for long, the great fish has him now The pike is a fish who always has his prey

And this is pretty. The water rat is pretty

10 His paws are not webbed, he cannot shut his nostrils As the otter can and the beaver, he is torn between The land and water, Not "torn," he does not mind.

The owl hunts in the evening and it is pretty The lake water below him rustles with ice 15 There is frost coming from the ground, in the air mist All this is pretty, it could not be prettier.

Yes, it could always be prettier, the eye abashes It is becoming an eye that cannot see enough, Out of the wood the eye climbs. This is prettier

20 A field in the evening, tilting up.

The field tilts to the sky. Though it is late The sky is lighter than the hill field All this looks easy but really it is extraordinary Well, it is extraordinary to be so pretty.

25 And it is careless, and that is always pretty This field, this owl, this pike, this pool are careless, As Nature is always careless and indifferent Who sees, who steps, means nothing, and this is pretty.

So a person can come along like a thief�pretty!�

30 Stealing a look, pinching the sound and feel, Lick the icicle broken from the bank And still say nothing at all, only cry pretty.

Cry pretty, pretty, pretty and you'll be able Very soon not even to cry pretty

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237 8 / GEORGE ORWELL

35 An d so be delivered entirely from humanity This is prettiest of all, it is very pretty.

1966

GEORGE ORWELL 1903-1950

"George Orwell" was the pseudonym of Eric Blair, who was born in the village of Motihari in Bengal, India, where his father was a British civil servant. He was sent to private school in England and won a scholarship to Eton, the foremost "public school" (i.e., private boarding school) in the country. At these schools he became conscious of the difference between his own background and the wealthy backgrounds of many of his schoolmates. On leaving school he joined the Imperial Police in Burma (both Burma�now called Myanmar�and India were then still part of the British Empire). His service in Burma from 1922 to 1927 produced a sense of guilt about British colonialism and a feeling that he had to make some personal expiation for it. This he would later do with an anticolonial novel, Burmese Days (1934), and essays such as "Shooting an Elephant" (1936), which subordinates lingering colonial attitudes to fiercely anti-imperial insights. He returned to England determined to be a writer and adopted his pseudonym as one way of escaping from the class position in which his elite education placed him. He went to Paris to try to earn a living by teaching while he made his first attempts at writing. His extremely difficult time in Paris was followed by a spell as a tramp in England, and he vividly recorded both experiences in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Orwell did not have to suffer the dire poverty that he seems to have courted (he had influential friends who would have been glad to help him); he wanted, however, to learn firsthand about the life of the poor, both out of humane curiosity and because, as he wrote, if he did so "part of my guilt would drop from me."

The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) discusses the experiences Orwell shared with unemployed miners in the north of England. The book pleased neither the left nor the right, for by now Orwell was showing what was to become his characteristic independence of mind on political and social questions: he wrote of what he knew firsthand to be true and was contemptuous of ideologies. He never joined a political party but regarded himself as a man of the uncommitted and independent left.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 after General Franco raised his military rebellion against the elected government, Orwell went there as a reporter and stayed to fight on the Republican side, rising to the rank of second lieutenant and suffering a throat wound. His Homage to Catalonia (1938) strongly criticized the Communist part in the civil war and showed from his own experience how the Communist Party in Spain was out to destroy anarchists, Trotskyists, and any others on the Republican side who were suspected of not toeing the Stalinist line; it aroused great indignation on the left in Britain and elsewhere, for many leftists believed that they should solidly support the Soviet Union and the Communist Party as the natural leaders in the struggle against international fascism. Orwell never wavered in his belief that while profound social change was necessary and desirable in capitalist countries of the West, the so-called socialism established in Soviet Russia was a perversion of socialism and a wicked tyranny. In Animal Farm (1945) he wrote a fable showing how such a perversion of socialism could develop, while in Nineteen-Eighty- Four (1949), when he was an embittered man dying of tuberculosis, he wrote a savagely powerful novel depicting a totalitarian future, where the government uses the

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SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT / 237 9

language of socialism to cover a tyranny that systematically destroys the human spirit. In that vision of hell on Earth, language has become one of the principal instruments of oppression. The Ministry of Truth is there concerned with the transmission of untruth, and the white face of its pyramidal structure proclaims in "Newspeak" the three slogans of the party: "WAR IS PEACE / FREEDOM IS SLAVERY / IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH." Three years before Orwell formulated "Newspeak," "doublespeak," and "Big Brother is watching you," he had explored in one of his most influential essays, "Politics and the English Language," the decay of language and the ways in which that decay might be resisted. The fifty years that have passed since he wrote the piece have only confirmed the accuracy of its diagnosis and the value of its prescription.

Orwell was an outstanding journalist, and the essays he wrote regularly for the left- wing British journal Tribune and other periodicals include some of his best work. His independent eye made him both a permanent misfit politically and a brilliantly original writer.

Shooting an Elephant

In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people� the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel1 juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. Whe n a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young me n that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. Th e young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.

All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically�and secretly, of course�I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos�all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind

I. Leaf of a plant chewed as a delicacy in Burma and other Eastern countries.

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238 0 / GEORGE ORWELL

thought of the British Baj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum,2 upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.

One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism�the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old .44 Winchester and muc h too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful i n ter

3

rorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone "must."4 It had been chained up as tame elephants always are when their attack of "must" is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout,5 the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but he had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours' journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van, and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violence upon it.

The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palm-leaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone, and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalised cry of "Go away, child! Go away this instant!" and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something there that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie,6 almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the

2. For ever and ever (Latin). "Raj": rule (Hindi). 5. Elephant driver (Hindi). 3. To frighten it (Latin). 6. Hired laborer (disputed origin). "Dravidian": a 4. A state of sexual frenzy to which certain animals South Asian people. are subject at irregular intervals.

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SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT / 2381

rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) Th e friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead ma n I sent an orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelled the elephant.

The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of their houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides, they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant�I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary�and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. Th e elephant was standing eighty yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.

I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect

certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working

elephant�it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machin

ery�and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. An d at

that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than

a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of "must" was already

passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the

mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to

shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure

that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.

But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It

was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute.

It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of

yellow faces above the garish clothes�faces all happy and excited over this

bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watch

ing me as they would watch a conjuror about to perform a trick. They did not

like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth

watching. An d suddenly I realised that I should have to shoot the elephant

after all. Th e people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their

two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. An d it was at this

moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the

hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I,

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238 2 / GEORGE ORWELL

the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd� seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalised figure of a sahib.7 For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives" and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. 1 had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing�no, that was impossible. Th e crowd would laugh at me. An d my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast's owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks�five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.

It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behaviour. If he charged I could shoot, if he took no notice of me it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mu d into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as muc h chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn't be frightened in front of "natives"; and so, in general, he isn't frightened. Th e sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. An d if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do. There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim.

The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see

the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They

were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German

thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant

one should shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole.

I ought therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at

7. White gentleman (Urdu).

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SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT / 238 3

his ear-hole; actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.

When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick�one never does when a shot goes home�but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time�it might have been five seconds, I dare say�he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upwards like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. An d then down he came, his

belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I

lay.

I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was

obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He

was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of

a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open�I could see far

down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but

his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the

spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him

like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the

shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying,

very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not

even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to

that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast lying there,

powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish

him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart

and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps

continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.

In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that

it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were arriving with dahss and baskets

even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the

bones by the afternoon.

Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of

the elephant. Th e owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do

nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a ma d elephant has to

be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans

opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it

was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an ele

phant was worth more than any dam n Coringhee9 coolie. An d afterwards I

8. Short heavy swords (Burmese). 9. From the seaport Coringa, on the east coast of Madras in British India.

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238 4 / GEORGE ORWELL

was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

1936

Politics and the English Language

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Ou r civilisation is decadent, and our language� so the argument runs�must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. Th e point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially

bad�I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen�but because they illus

trate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little

below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I number them so

that I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic)' to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate. Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Ex-pression).

1. Thus, i.e., that's the way it was written.

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POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE / 238 5

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for hewilder. Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa).

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Wher e is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity? Essay on psychology in Politics (New York).

4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic Fascist captains, united in commo n hatred of Socialism and bestial horror of the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalise their own destruction to proletarian organisations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervour on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis. Communist pamphlet.

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanisation and galvanisation of the BBC. 2 Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream�as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes, or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English." Whe n the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches3 honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens! Letter in Tribune.

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are commo n to all of them. Th e first is staleness of imagery: the other is lack of precision. Th e writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of mod

2. British Broadcasting Corporation. than the evening nine o'clock news. Langham 3. I.e., h sounds, which are not aspirated in col-Place is the location of the BBC's main offices in loquial speech. During�and for some time after� London. World War II, few programs had a larger audience

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2386 / GEORGE ORWELL

ern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shotdder to shoidder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, rift within the lute, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (What is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would be aware of this, and would avoid

perverting the original phrase.

Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are:

render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of,

etc etc. Th e keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). Th e range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ise and de- formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not unformation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases

as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to he expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so

forth.

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POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE / 238 7

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilise, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biassed judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, Gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung,4 are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, sub-aqueous and

hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers.5 The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lacquey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.)

consists largely of words and phrases translated from Russian, Germa n or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ise formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalise, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. Th e result, in general, is an increase in slov

enliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.6 Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. Whe n one critic writes, "The outstanding features of Mr X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Man y political words are similarly abused. Th e word Fascism has now no meaning

4. Respectively: dead end (French), former system more homely word and a vague feeling that the of government (French), the god from the machine Greek word is scientific [Orwell's note]. (Latin), with the necessary changes (Latin), the 6. Example: "Comfort's catholicity of perception existing state of things (Latin), standardization of and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, political institutions among authoritarian states almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, (German), and philosophy of life (German). continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric 5. An interesting illustration of this is the way in accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably which the English flower names which were in use serene timelessness . . . Wrey Gardiner scores by till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, aiming at simple bullseyes with precision. Only snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not they are not so simple, and through this contented becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any prac-sadness runs more than the surface bitter-sweet of tical reason for this change of fashion: it is prob-resignation." (Poetry Quarterly.) [Orwell's note]. ably due to an instinctive turning-away from the

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238 8 / GEORGE ORWELL

except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." Th e words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain1 was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are:

class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

No w that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit 3, above, for instance,

contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I

have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence

follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illus

trations�race, battle, bread�dissolve into the vague phrase "success or fail

ure in competitive activities". This had to be so, because no modern writer of

the kind I am discussing�no one capable of using phrases like "objective

consideration of contemporary phenomena"�-would ever tabulate his

thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern

prose is away from concreteness. No w analyse these two sentences a little

more closely. Th e first contains 49 words but only 60 syllables, and all its

words are those of everyday life. Th e second contains 38 words of 90 syllables:

18 of its words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence

contains six vivid images, and only one phrase ("time and chance") that could

be called vague. Th e second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and

in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning

contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence

7. French army officer (1856�1951), head of the Vichy government that collaborated with Germany in World War II.

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POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE / 238 9

that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to m y imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier�even quicker, once you have the habit�to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. Whe n you are composing in a hurry�when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech�it is natural to fall into a pretentious, latinised style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save muc h mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. Th e sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. Whe n these images clash�as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting-pot�it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 53 words. On e of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip alien for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means. (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4) the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink. In

(5) words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning�they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another�but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: Wha t am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? An d he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you�even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent�and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that

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239 0 / GEORGE ORWELL

the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Wher e it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries8 do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. Whe n one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases�bestia l atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoidder to shoulder�

one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. Th e appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India,9 the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thu s political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer ofpopidation or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

8. Senior British civil servants. "White Papers": issued by the British government, official documents, each on a particular topic, 9. This ended in 1947.

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POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE / 239 1

Th e inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. Whe n the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find�this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify� that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that I see: "(The Allies) have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe." You see, he "feels impelled" to write� feels, presumably, that he has something new to say�and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetises a portion of one's brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Tw o recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not unformation out of existence,1 to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. Th e defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of

I. One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorising this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreenfield [Orwell's note[.

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2392 / GEORGE ORWELL

obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a "standard English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style." On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. Wha t is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. Whe n you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. Whe n you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose�not simply acce-pt�the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I

think the following rules will cover most cases:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do. iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article. I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? On e need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to

.

SAMUEL BECKETT / 239 3

yourself. Political language�and with variations this is true of all political

parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists�is designed to make lies sound

truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure

wind. On e cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change

one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly

enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase�some jackboot, Achilles'

heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal

refuse�into the dustbin where it belongs.

1946,1947

SAMUEL BECKETT

1906-1989

Samuel Beckett was born near Dublin. Like W. B. Yeats, Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde, he came from an Anglo-Irish Protestant family. He received a B.A. from Trinity College, Dublin, and after teaching English at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris for two years, returned to Trinity College to take his M.A. in 1931. He gave up teaching in 1932 to write, and having produced an insightful essay on the early stages of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake in 1929, he also worked as Joyce's amanuensis (secretary) and translator. In 1937 he settled permanently in Paris, where during World War II he joined an underground group in the anti-Nazi resistance and, after his group was betrayed, barely escaped into unoccupied France. From the mid-1940s he generally wrote in French and subsequently translated some of his work into an eloquent Irish-inflected English. His earlynovels�Murphy (1938; Eng. trans., 1957), Watt (1953), and the trilogy, Molloy (1951; 1955), Malone Dies (1951; 1956), and The Unnameable (1953; 1958)�have been hailed as masterpieces and precursors of postmodern fiction; but he is best-known for his plays, especially Waiting for Godot (1952; 1954) and Endgame (1957; 1958). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.

Not much happens in a Beckett play; there is little plot, little incident, and little characterization. Characters engage in dialogue or dialectical monologues that go nowhere. There is no progression, no development, no resolution. Rambling exchanges and repetitive actions enact the lack of a fixed center, of meaning, of purpose, in the lives depicted. Yet the characters persist in their habitual, almost ritualistic, activities; they go on talking, even if only to themselves. In spite of a reiterated theme of nonexistence, the characters go on existing�if minimally: a stream of discourse, of thought and will, a consciousness questioning its own meaning and purpose. In Waiting for Godot the main characters wait for an arrival that is constantly deferred. They inhabit a bleak landscape seemingly confined to one road, one tree; they talk of moving on, yet never leave. Subsequent plays restrict the acting space to a room, to urns, to a mound in which the actor is buried; characters are physically confined or disabled, until Not I (1973) presents the most minimal embodiment of human consciousness available to theatrical representation: a disembodied mouth.

Beckett focuses his work on fundamental questions of existence and nonexistence, the mind and the body, the self as known from within and as seen from the outside or in retrospect. Joyce's artistic integrity and stream-of-consciousness technique influenced him, but the minimalism of Beckett's plays and fiction contrast with the maximalism of Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. "I realised that Joyce had gone as far

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239 4 / SAMUEL BECKETT

as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one's material," he told the biographer James Knowlson. "I realised my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than adding."

At the heart of Endgame is the vexed relationship between Hamm, the master, and Clov, his servant and nurse. These irritable, resentful, spiteful characters talk of leaving, dying, or otherwise ending, but they continue repetitively in their peevish ways. They live inside a room with two high windows that afford ambiguous views of an exterior world, where everything may or may not be dead. The play's only other characters are Hamm's parents, Nell and Nagg, but they live in two garbage cans and appear from the shoulders up; their relationship is hardly robust. Like other Beckett plays, this one juxtaposes vaudeville, slapstick, and other comic traditions with the intellectual and the grotesque. While denying the audience the comfortable security of a recognizable world, Endgame provides laughs, sometimes at the audience's expense. It shares its tragicomic quality with absurdist drama, which disrupts the conventions of realist drama, draws attention to its own fictionality, and refuses to provide hierarchies of significance. Reduced to bare essentials, the maimed, struggling, incomplete characters of Endgame�though often behaving as if they were the bumbling protagonists of a farce�raise unsettling questions about meaning and absurdity, power and dependency, time and repetition, language and the void.

Endgame1

For Roger Blin2

THE CHARACTERS

NAGG

NELL

HAMM

CLOV

Bare interior. Grey light. Left and right hack, high up, two small windows, curtains drawn. Front right, a door. Hanging near door, its face to wall, a picture. Front left, touching each other, covered with an old sheet, two ashhins. Centre, in an armchair on castors, covered with an old sheet, HAMM. Motionless by the door, his eyes fixed on HAMM, CLOV. Very red face. Brief tableau.

[CLOV goes and stands under window left. Stiff , staggering walk. He looks up at window left. He turns and looks at window right. He goes and stands under window right. He looks up at window right. He turns and looks at window left. He goes out, comes back immediately with a small step-ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window left, gets up on it, draws back curtain. He gets down, takes six steps (for example) towards window right, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window right, gets up on it, draws back curtain. He gets down, takes three steps towards window left, goes back for ladder,

1. Translated by the author. premieres of Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and 2. Frenchman (1907�1984), who directed the other Beckett plays.

.

ENDGAME / 2395

carries it over and sets it down under window left, gets up on it, looks out of window. Brief laugh. He gets down, takes one step towards window right, goes hack for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window right, gets up on it, looks out of window. Brief laugh. He gets down, goes with ladder towards ashhins, halts, turns, carries hack ladder and sets it down under window right, goes to ashhins, removes sheet covering them, folds it over his arm. He raises one lid, stoops and looks into hin. Brief laugh. He closes lid. Same with other bin. He goes to HAMM, removes sheet covering him, folds it over his arm. In a dressing- gown, a stiff toque3 on his head, a large blood-stained handkerchief over his face, a whistle hanging from his neck, a rug over his knees, thick socks on his feet, HAMM seems to be asleep, CLOV looks him over. Brief laugh. He goes to door, halts, turns towards auditorium.]

CLOV [Fixed gaze, tonelessly.] Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. [Pause.] Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. [Pause.] I can't be punished any more. [Pause.] I'll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. [Pause.] Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I'll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me. [He remains a moment motionless, then goes out. He comes back immediately, goes to window right, takes up the ladder and carries it out. Pause, HAMM stirs. He yawns under the handkerchief. He removes the handkerchief from his face. Very red face. Black glasses.]

HAMM Me�[H e yawns.]�to play.4 [He holds the handkerchief spread out before him.] Old Stancher!5 [He takes off his glasses, wipes his eyes, his face, the glasses, puts them on again, folds the handkerchief and puts it back neatly in the breast-pocket of his dressing-gown. He clears his throat, joins the tips of his fingers.] Can there be misery�[H e yawns.]�loftier than mine? N o doubt. Formerly. But now? [Pause.] M y father? [Pause.] M y mother? [Pause.] My . . . dog? [Pause.] O h I a m willing to believe they suffer as muc h as such creatures can suffer. But does that mean their sufferings equal mine? N o doubt. [Pause.] No, all is a�[Heyawns.] �bsolute, [Proudly.] the bigger a man is the fuller he is. [Pause. Gloomily.] An d the emptier. [He sniffs.] Clov! [Pcmse.] No, alone. [Pause.] What dreams! Those forests! [Pause.] Enough, it's time it ended, in the shelter too. [Pause.] And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to .. . to end. Yes, there it is, it's time it ended and yet I hesitate to�[H e yawns.]�to end. [Yawns.] God, I'm tired, I'd be better off in bed. [He whistles. Enter CLOV immediately. He halts beside the chair.] You pollute the air! [Pause.] Get me ready, I'm going to bed. CLOV I've just got you up. HAMM An d what of it? CLOV I can't be getting you up and putting you to bed every five minutes, I have things to do. [Pause.] HAMM Did you ever see my eyes?

CLOV No.

HAMM Di d you never have the curiosity, while I was sleeping, to take off my

glasses and look at my eyes?

3. Small cap with no brim. the "endgame." 4. Hamm announces that it is his move, as it were 5. Handkerchief that stanches (checks the flow in a game of chess, of which the final stage is called of) blood.

.

239 6 / SAMUEL BECKETT

CLOV Pulling back the lids? [Pause.] No. HAMM One of these days I'll show them to you. [Pause.] It seems they've gone

all white. [Pause.] What time is it? CLOV Th e same as usual. HAMM [Gesture tmvards window right.] Have you looked? CLOV Yes. HAMM Well? CLOV Zero. HAMM It'd need to rain. CLOV It won't rain. [Pause.] HAMM Apart from that, how do you feel? CLOV I don't complain. HAMM YOU feel normal? CLOV [Irritably.] I tell you I don't complain. HAMM I feel a little queer. [Pause.] Clov! CLOV Yes. HAMM Have you not had enough? CLOV Yes! [Pause.] O f what? HAMM Of this . . . this . . . thing. CLOV I always had. [Pause.] Not you? HAMM [Gloomily.] The n there's no reason for it to change. CLOV It may end. [Pause.] All life long the same questions, the same answers. HAMM Get m e ready, [CLOV does not move.] G o and get the sheet, [CLOV does

not move. ] Clov! CLOV Yes. HAMM I'll give you nothing more to eat. CLOV The n we'll die. HAMM I'll give you just enough to keep you from dying. You'll be hungry all

the time.

CLOV Then we won't die. [Pause.] I'll go and get the sheet. [He goes towards

the door.]

HAMM No! [CLOV halts.] I'll give you one biscuit per day. [Pause.] One and a

half. [Pause.] Wh y do you stay with me?

CLOV Wh y do you keep me?

HAMM There's no one else.

CLOV There's nowhere else. [Pause.]

HAMM You're leaving me all the same.

CLOV I'm trying.

HAMM You don't love me.

CLOV No.

HAMM YOU loved me once.

CLOV Once!

HAMM I've made you suffer too much. [Pause.] Haven't I?

CLOV It's not that.

HAMM [Shocked.] I haven't made you suffer too much?

CLOV Yes!

HAMM [Relieved.] Ah you gave me a fright! [Pause. Coldly.] Forgive me.

[Pause. Louder.] I said, Forgive me. CLOV I heard you. [Pause.] Have you bled? HAMM Less. [Pause.] Is it not time for m y pain-killer? CLOV NO. [Pause.] HAMM HOW are your eyes?

.

ENDGAME / 2397

CLOV Bad. HAMM Ho w are your legs? CLOV Bad. HAMM But you can move. CLOV Yes. HAMM [Violently.] The n move! [CLOV goes to back wall, leans against it with

his forehead and hands.] Where are you? CLOV Here. HAMM Come back! [CLOV returns to his place beside the chair.] Where are

you? CLOV Here. HAMM Wh y don't you kill me? CLOV I don't know the combination of the cupboard. [Pause.] HAMM Go and get two bicycle-wheels. CLOV There are no more bicycle-wheels. HAMM Wha t have you done with your bicycle? CLOV I never had a bicycle. HAMM Th e thing is impossible. CLOV Whe n there were still bicycles I wept to have one. I crawled at your

feet. You told me to go to hell. Now there are none. HAMM An d your rounds? Whe n you inspected my paupers. Always on foot? CLOV Sometimes on horse. [The lid of one of the bins lifts and the hands of

NAGG appear, gripping the rim. Then his head emerges. Nightcap. Very white

face, NAGG yawns, then listens.] I'll leave you, I have things to do. HAMM In your kitchen? CLOV Yes. HAMM Outside of here it's death. [Pause.] All right, be off. [Exit CLOV. Pause.]

We're getting on. NAGG Me Pap!6 HAMM Accursed progenitor!7 NAGG Me pap! HAMM Th e old folks at home! No decency left! Guzzle, guzzle, that's all they

think of. [He whistles. Enter CLOV. He halts beside the chair.] Well! I thought

you were leaving me. CLOV Oh not just yet, not just yet. NAGG Me pap! HAMM Give him his pap. CLOV There's no more pap. HAMM [To NAGG.] DO you hear that? There's no more pap. You'll never get

any more pap. NAGG I want me pap! HAMM Give him a biscuit. [Exit CLOV.] Accursed fornicator! Ho w are your

stumps? NAGG Never mind me stumps. [Enter CLOV with biscuit.] CLOV I'm back again, with the biscuit. [He gives biscuit to NAGG who fingers

it, sniffs it.] NAGG [Plaintively.] What is it? CLOV Spratt's medium.8 NAGG [AS before.] It's hard! I can't!

6. Mushy food. 8. Brand name of a biscuit (cookie). 7. Parent.

.

239 8 / SAMUEL BECKETT

HAMM Bottle him! [CLOVpushes NAGG hack into the hin, closes the lid.] CLOV [Returning to his place heside the chair.] If age but knew! HAMM Sit on him! CLOV I can't sit. HAMM True. An d I can't stand. CLOV So it is. HAMM Every man his speciality. [Pause.] N o phone calls? [Pause.] Don't we

laugh? CLOV [After reflection.] I don't feel like it. HAMM [After reflection.] Not I. [Pause.] Clov! CLOV Yes. HAMM Nature has forgotten us. CLOV There's no more nature. HAMM No more nature! You exaggerate. CLOV In the vicinity. HAMM But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Ou r bloom!

Ou r ideals! CLOV The n she hasn't forgotten us. HAMM But you say there is none. CLOV [Sadly.] N o one that ever lived ever thought so crooked as we. HAMM We do what we can. CLOV W e shouldn't. [Pause.] HAMM You're a bit of all right,9 aren't you? CLOV A smithereen. [Pause.] HAMM This is slow work. [Pause. | Is it not time for m y pain-killer? CLOV No. [Pause.] I'll leave you, I have things to do. HAMM In your kitchen? CLOV Yes. HAMM What, I'd like to know. CLOV I look at the wall. HAMM The wall! And what do you see on your wall? Mene, mene?' Naked

bodies?

CLOV I see my light dying.

HAMM Your light dying! Listen to that! Well, it can die just as well here, your

light. Take a look at me and then come back and tell me what you think of

your light. [Pause.] CLOV YOU shouldn't speak to me like that. [Pause.] HAMM [Coldly.] Forgive me. [Pause. Louder.] I said, Forgive me. CLOV I heard you. [The lid of NAGG'S bin lifts. His hands appear, gripping the

rim. Then his head emerges. In his mouth the biscuit. He listens.]

HAMM Did your seeds come up? CLOV No. HAMM Did you scratch round them to see if they had sprouted? CLOV The y haven't sprouted. HAMM Perhaps it's still too early. CLOV If they were going to sprout they would have sprouted. [Violently.]

They'll never sprout! [Pause, NAGG takes biscuit in his hand.]

9. You're pretty good (British slang). Balshazzar, king of Babylon. Translated as "Thou 1. "Mene mene, tekel, upharsin": words written by art weighed in the balance and found wanting," it a heavenly hand on the wall during the feast of foretells his ruin (Daniel 5.25-28).

.

ENDGAME / 2399

HAMM This is not much fun. [Pause.] But that's always the way at the end of

the day, isn't it, Clov? CLOV Always. HAMM It's the end of the day like any other day, isn't it, Clov? CLOV Looks like it. [Pause.] HAMM [Anguished. ] What's happening, what's happening? CLOV Something is taking its course. [Pause.] HAMM All right, be off. [He leans back in his chair, remains motionless, CLOV

does not move, heaves a great groaning sigh, HAMM sits up.] I thought I told

you to be off. CLOV I'm trying. [He goes to door, halts.] Ever since I was whelped.2 [Exit

CLOV.]

HAMM We're getting on. [He leans back in his chair, remains motionless, NAGG knocks on the lid of the other bin. Pause. He knocks harder. The lid lifts and the hands of NELL appear, gripping the rim. Then her head emerges. Lace cap. Very white face.]

NELL Wha t is it, my pet? [Pause.] Tim e for love? NAGG Were you asleep? NELL Oh no! NAGG Kiss me. NELL We can't. NAGG Try. [Their heads strain towards each other, fail to meet, fall apart again. ] NELL Wh y this farce, day after day? [Pause.] NAGG I've lost me tooth. NELL When? NAGG I had it yesterday. NELL [Elegiac.3] A h yesterday! [They turn painfully towards each other.] NAGG Can you see me? NELL Hardly. An d you? NAGG What? NELL Can you see me? NAGG Hardly. NELL So much the better, so much the better. NAGG Don't say that. [Pause.] Ou r sight has failed. NELL Yes. [Pause. They turn away from each other.] NAGG Can you hear me? NELL Yes. And you? NAGG Yes. [Pause.] Ou r hearing hasn't failed. NELL Ou r what? NAGG Ou r hearing. NELL No. [Pause.] Have you anything else to say to me? NAGG DO you remember� NELL No. NAGG Whe n we crashed on our tandem4 and lost our shanks. [They laugh

heartily. ] NELL It was in the Ardennes. [They laugh less heartily.] NAGG O n the road to Sedan.5 [They laugh still less heartily.] Are you cold?

2. Born (usually applied to puppies: whelps). Army was defeated in 1870 during the Franco3. As though lamenting something lost. Prussian War. Ardennes is a forest in northern 4. A bicycle made for two. France, which was the scene of fierce fighting in 5. Town in northern France where the French both World Wars.

.

240 0 / SAMUEL BECKETT

NELL Yes, perished. An d you? NAGG [Pause.] I'm freezing. [Pause.] D o you want to go in? NELL Yes. NAGG Then go in. [NELL does not move.] Wh y don't you go in? NELL I don't know. [Pause.] NAGG Has he changed your sawdust? NELL It isn't sawdust. [Pause. Wearily.] Ca n you not be a little accurate,

Nagg? NAGG Your sand then. It's not important. NELL It is important. [Pause.] NAGG It was sawdust once. NELL Once! NAGG And now it's sand. [Pause.] Fro m the shore. [Pause. Impatiently.] Now

it's sand he fetches from the shore. NELL No w it's sand. NAGG Has he changed yours? NELL No. NAGG Nor mine. [Pause.] I won't have it! [Pause. Holding up the bisciut.] Do

you want a bit? NELL NO. [Pause.] Of what? NAGG Biscuit. I've kept you half. [He looks at the biscuit. Proudly.] Three

quarters. For you. Here. [He proffers the biscuit.] No? [Pause.] D o you not

feel well?

HAMM [Wearily.] Quiet, quiet, you're keeping me awake. [Pause.] Talk softer.

[Pause.] If I could sleep I might make love. I'd go into the woods. M y eyes

would see . . . the sky, the earth. I'd run, run, they wouldn't catch me.

[Pause.] Nature! [Pause.] There's something dripping in my head. [Pause.]

A heart, a heart in m y head. [Pause.]

NAGG [Sq/t.] D o you hear him? A heart in his head! [He chuckles cautiously.] NELL On e mustn't laugh at those things, Nagg. Wh y must you always laugh

at them?

NAGG Not so loud!

NELL [Without lowering her voice.] Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I

grant you that. But �

NAGG [Shocked.] Oh!

NELL Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. An d we laugh, we

laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's

like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we

don't laugh any more. [Pause.] Have you anything else to say to me?

NAGG No.

NELL Are you quite sure? [Pause.] The n I'll leave you.

NAGG DO you not want your biscuit? [Pause.] I'll keep it for you. [Pause.] I

thought you were going to leave me.

NELL I am going to leave you.

NAGG Could you give me a scratch before you go?

NELL NO. [Pause.] Where?

NAGG In the back.

NELL No. [Pause.] Bub yourself against the rim.

NAGG It's lower down. In the hollow.

NELL Wha t hollow?

NAGG Th e hollow! [Pause.] Could you not? [Pause.] Yesterday you scratched

me there.

.

ENDGAME / 2401

NELL [Elegiac.] A h yesterday! NAGG Could you not? [Pause.] Would you like me to scratch you? [Pause.]

Are you crying again? NELL I was trying. [Pause. ] HAMM Perhaps it's a little vein. [Pause.] NAGG Wha t was that he said? NELL Perhaps it's a little vein. NAGG What does that mean? [Pause.] That means nothing. [Pause.] Will 1

tell you the story of the tailor? NELL No. [Pause.] What for? NAGG To cheer you up.

NELL It's not funny.

NAGG It always made you laugh. [Pause.] Th e first time I thought you'd die. NELL It was on Lake Como.6 [Pause.] On e April afternoon. [Pause.] Can you believe it?

NAGG What?

NELL That we once went out rowing on Lake Como. [Pause.] On e April

afternoon.

NAGG We had got engaged the day before.

NELL Engaged!

NAGG You were in such fits that we capsized. By rights we should have been

drowned.

NELL It was because I felt happy.

NAGG [Indignant.] It was not, it was not, it was my story and nothing else.

Happy! Don't you laugh at it still? Every time I tell it. Happy!

NELL It was deep, deep. An d you could see down to the bottom. So white.

So clean. NAGG Let me tell it again. [Raconteur's voice.] A n Englishman, needing a pair

of striped trousers in a hurry for the Ne w Year festivities, goes to his tailor

who takes his measurements. [Tailor's voice.] "That's the lot, come back in

four days, I'll have it ready." Good. Four days later. [Tailor'svoice.] "So sorry,

come back in a week, I've made a mess of the seat." Good, that's all right,

a neat seat can be very ticklish. A week later. [Tailor's voice.] "Frightfully

sorry, come back in ten days. I've made a hash of the crotch." Good, can't

be helped, a snug crotch is always a teaser. Ten days later. [Tailor's voice.]

"Dreadfully sorry, come back in a fortnight, I've made a balls of the fly."

Good, at a pinch, a smart fly is a stiff proposition. [Pause. Normal voice.] I

never told it worse. [Pause. Gloomy. ] I tell this story worse and worse. [Pause.

Raconteur's voice.] Well, to make it short, the bluebells are blowing and he

ballockses7 the buttonholes. [Customer's voice.] "God damn you to hell, Sir,

no, it's indecent, there are limits! In six days, do you hear me, six days, Go d

made the world. Yes Sir, no less Sir, the WORLD ! An d you are not bloody

well capable of making me a pair of trousers in three months!" [Tailor's voice,

scandalised.] "But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look�[Disdainful gesture, dis

gustedly.]�at the world�[Pause.] and look�[Loving gesture, proudly.]�at

my TROUSERS!" [Pause. He looks at NELL who has remained impassive, her

eyes unseeing, breaks into a high forced laugh, cuts it short, pokes his head

towards NELL, launches his laugh again.]

HAMM Silence!

[NAGG starts, cuts short his laugh.]

6. Large lake in northern Italy. 7. Botches.

.

240 2 / SAMUEL BECKETT

NELL You could see down to the bottom.

HAMM [Exasperated.] Have you not finished? Will you never finish? [With sudden fury.] Wil l this never finish? [NAGG disappears into his hin, closes the lid behind him. NELL does not move. Frenziedly.] M y kingdom for a night- man!8 [He whistles. Enter CLOV.] Clear away this muck! Chuc k it in the sea! [CLOV goes to hins, halts.]

NELL SO white. HAMM What ? What's she blathering about? [CLOV stoops, takes NELL'S hand, feels her pidse.] NELL [To CLOV.] Desert! [CLOV lets go her hand, pushes her hack in the bin,

closes the lid.] CLOV [Returning to his place beside the chair.] She has no pulse. HAMM Wha t was she drivelling about?

CLOV She told me to go away, into the desert.

HAMM Dam n busybody! Is that all?

CLOV No.

HAMM What else?

CLOV I didn't understand.

HAMM Have you bottled her?

CLOV Yes.

HAMM Are they both bottled?

CLOV Yes. HAMM Screw down the lids, [CLOV goes towards door.] Tim e enough, [CLOV

halts.] M y anger subsides, I'd like to pee. CLOV [With alacrity.] I'll go and get the catheter. [He goes towards door.] HAMM Tim e enough, [CLOV halts.] Give me my pain-killer.

CLOV It's too soon. [Pause.] It's too soon on top of your tonic, it wouldn't act.

HAMM In the morning they brace you up and in the evening they calm you

down. Unless it's the other way round. [Pause.] That old doctor, he's dead

naturally?

CLOV He wasn't old.

HAMM But he's dead? CLOV Naturally. [Pause.] You ask me that? [Pause.] HAMM Take me for a little turn, [CLOV goes behind the chair and pushes it

forward.] Not too fast! [CLOV pushes chair.] Right round the world! [CLOV pushes chair.] Hu g the walls, then back to the centre again, [CLOV pushes chair.] I was right in the centre, wasn't I?

CLOV [Pushing.] Yes. HAMM We'd need a proper wheel-chair. With big wheels. Bicycle wheels!

[Pause.] Are you hugging? CLOV [Pushing.] Yes. HAMM [Groping for wall.] It's a lie! Why do you lie to me? CLOV [Bearing closer to wall.] There! There! HAMM Stop! [CLOV stops chair close to back wall, HAMM lays his hand against

wall.] Ol d wall! [Pause.] Beyond is the . . . other hell. [Pause. Violently.] Closer! Closer! Up against! CLOV Take away your hand, [HAMM withdraws his hand, CLOV rams chair against wall.] There! [HAMM leans towards wall, applies his ear to it.]

8. A collector of nightsoil (excrement). Cf. Shakespeare's Richard III 5.7.7: "Ahorse! Ahorse! My kingdom for a horse!"

.

ENDGAME / 2403

HAMM D o you hear? [He strikes the wall with his knuckles.] D o you hear? Hollow bricks! [He strikes again.] All that's hollow! [Pause. He straightens up. Violently.] That's enough. Back!

CLOV We haven't done the round. HAMM Back to my place! [CLOV pushes chair hack to centre.] Is that m y place? CLOV Yes, that's your place.

HAMM Am I right in the centre?

CLOV I'll measure it.

HAMM More or less! More or less! CLOV [Moving chair slightly.] There! HAMM I'm more or less in the centre?

CLOV I'd say so.

HAMM You'd say so! Put me right in the centre!

CLOV I'll go and get the tape. HAMM Roughly! Roughly! [CLOV moves chair slightly.] Bang in the centre! CLOV There! [Pause.] HAMM I feel a little too far to the left, [CLOV moves chair slightly.] Now I feel

a little too far to the right, [CLOV moves chair slightly.] I feel a little too far forward, [CLOV moves chair slightly.] No w I feel a little too far back, [CLOV moves chair slightly.] Don't stay there, [I.e., behind the chair.] you give me the shivers, [CLOV returns to his place beside the chair.]

CLOV If I could kill him I'd die happy. [Pause.]

HAMM What's the weather like?

CLOV AS usual.

HAMM Look at the earth.

CLOV I've looked.

HAMM Wit h the glass?

CLOV NO need of the glass.

HAMM Look at it with the glass.

CLOV I'll go and get the glass. [Exit CLOV.] HAMM NO need of the glass! [Enter CLOV with telescope.] CLOV I'm back again, with the glass. [He goes to window right, looks up at it.]

I need the steps.

HAMM Why? Have you shrunk? [Exit CLOV with telescope.] I don't like that, I don't like that. [Enter CLOV with ladder, but without telescope.]

CLOV I'm back again, with the steps. [He sets down ladder under window right, gets up on it, realises he has not the telescope, gets down.] I need the glass. [He goes towards door.]

HAMM [Violently.] But you have the glass! CLOV [Halting, violently.] No, I haven't the glass! [Exit CLOV.] HAMM This is deadly. [Enter CLOV with telescope. He goes towards ladder.] CLOV Things are livening up. [He gets up on ladder, raises the telescope, lets

it fall.] I did it on purpose. [He gets down, picks up the telescope, turns it on auditorium.] I see ... a multitude ... in transports ... of joy.9 [Pause.] That's what I call a magnifier. [He lowers the telescope, turns towards HAMM.] Well? Don't we laugh?

HAMM [After reflection.] I don't. CLOV [After reflection.] Nor I. [He gets up on ladder, turns the telescope on

9. Cf. Revelation 7.9�10: "After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which . cried with a loud voice . . . Salvation."

.

240 4 / SAMUEL BECKETT

the without.] Let's see. [He looks, moving the telescope.] Zero . . . [He looks.]

. . . zero . . . [He looks.] . . . and zero. HAMM Nothing stirs. All is�

CLOV Zer� HAMM [Violently.] Wait till you're spoke to! [Normal voice.] All is . . . all is .. . all is what? [Violently.] All is what? CLOV Wha t all is? In a word? Is that what you want to know? Just a moment.

[He turns the telescope on the without, looks, lowers the telescope, turns

towards HAMM.] Corpsed. [Pause.] Well? Content? HAMM Look at the sea. CLOV It's the same.

HAMM Look at the ocean! [CLOV gets down, takes a few steps towards window left, goes hack for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window left, gets up on it, turns the telescope on the without, looks at length. He starts, lowers the telescope, examines it, turns it again on the without.]

CLOV Never seen anything like that! HAMM [Anxious.] What? A sail? A fin? Smoke? CLOV [Looking.] Th e light is sunk. HAMM [Relieved.] Pah! W e all knew that. CLOV [Looking. ] There was a bit left. HAMM Th e base. CLOV [Looking.] Yes. HAMM An d now? CLOV [Looking.] All gone. HAMM NO gulls? CLOV [Looking.] Gulls! HAMM An d the horizon? Nothing on the horizon? CLOV [Lowering the telescope, turning towards HAMM, exasperated.] What in

God's name could there be on the horizon? [Pause.]

HAMM Th e waves, how are the waves?

CLOV Th e waves? [He turns the telescope on the waves.] Lead.

HAMM An d the sun?

CLOV [Looking.] Zero.

HAMM But it should be sinking. Look again.

CLOV [Looking.] Damn the sun.

HAMM IS it night already then?

CLOV [Looking.] No.

HAMM Then what is it?

CLOV [Looking.] Grey. [Lowering the telescope, turning towards HAMM, louder.] Grey! [Pause. Still louder.] GRREY! [Pause. He gets down, approaches HAMM from behind, whispers in his ear.]

HAMM [Starting.] Grey! Did I hear you say grey?

CLOV Light black. From pole to pole.

HAMM You exaggerate. [Pause.] Don't stay there, you give me the shivers. [CLOV returns to his place beside the chair.] CLOV Wh y this farce, day after day?

HAMM Routine. On e never knows. [Pause.] Last night I saw inside m y breast.

There was a big sore.

CLOV Pah! You saw your heart.

HAMM NO, it was living. [Pause. Anguished.] Clov!

CLOV Yes.

.

ENDGAME / 2405

HAMM What's happening? CLOV Something is taking its course. [Pause.]

HAMM Clov! CLOV [Impatiently. ] What is it? HAMM We're not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something? CLOV Mean something! You and I, mean something! [Brief laugh.] A h that's

a good one!

HAMM I wonder. [Pause.] Imagine if a rational being came back to earth,

wouldn't he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough. [Voice of rational being.] Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes, now I understand what they're at! [CLOV starts, drops the telescope and begins to scratch his belly with both hands. Normal voice.] An d without going so far as that, we ourselves . . . [With emotion.] .. . we ourselves .. . at certain moments . . . [Vehemently.] T o think perhaps it won't all have been for nothing!

CLOV [Anguished, scratching himself] I have a flea! HAMM A flea! Are there still fleas?

CLOV O n me there's one. [Scratching.] Unless it's a crablouse. HAMM [Very perturbed.] But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him, for the love of God!

CLOV I'll go and get the powder. [Exit CLOV.] HAMM A flea! This is awful! Wha t a day! [Enter CLOV with a sprinkling-tin.] CLOV I'm back again, with the insecticide. HAMM Let him have it! [CLOV loosens the top of his trousers, pulls it forward

and shakes powder into the aperture. He stoops, looks, xvaits, starts, frenziedly shakes more powder, stoops, looks, waits.]

CLOV Th e bastard!

HAMM Did you get him? CLOV Looks like it. [He drops the tin and adjusts his trousers.] Unless he's laying doggo.

HAMM Laying! Lying you mean. Unless he's lying doggo.

CLOV Ah? On e says lying? On e doesn't say laying?

HAMM Use your head, can't you. If he was laying we'd be bitched. CLOV Ah. [Pause.] Wha t about that pee? HAMM I'm having it.

CLOV Ah that's the spirit, that's the spirit! [Pause.] HAMM [With ardour.] Let's go from here, the two of us! South! You can make a raft and the currents will carry us away, far away, to other . . . mammals!

CLOV Go d forbid!

HAMM Alone, I'll embark alone! Get working on that raft immediately.

Tomorrow I'll be gone for ever. CLOV [Hastening towards door. ] I'll start straight away. HAMM Wait! [CLOV halts.] Will there be sharks, do you think? CLOV Sharks? I don't know. If there are there will be. [He goes toivards door ] HAMM Wait! [CLOV halts.] Is it not yet time for m y pain-killer? CLOV [Violently.] No! [He goes towards door.] HAMM Wait! [CLOV halts.] Ho w are your eyes?

CLOV Bad.

HAMM But you can see.

CLOV All I want.

HAMM HOW are your legs?

CLOV Bad.

.

240 6 / SAMUEL BECKETT

HAMM But you can walk. CLOV I come . . . and go. HAMM In m y house. [Pause. With prophetic relish.] On e day you'll be blind,

like me. You'll be sitting there, a speck in the void, in the dark, for ever, like

me. [Pause.] On e day you'll say to yourself, I'm tired, I'll sit down, and you'll

go and sit down. The n you'll say, I'm hungry, I'll get up and get something

to eat. But you won't get up. You'll say, I shouldn't have sat down, but since

I have I'll sit on a little longer, then I'll get up and get something to eat. But

you won't go up and you won't get anything to eat. [Pause.] You'll look at

the wall a while, then you'll say, I'll close my eyes, perhaps have a little

sleep, after that I'll feel better, and you'll closeithem. And when you open

them again there'll be no wall any more. [Pausej] Infinite emptiness will be

all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn't fill it, and

there you'll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe.1 [Pause.]

Yes, one day you'll know what it is, you'll be like me, except that you won't

have anyone with you, because you won't have had pity on anyone and

because there won't be anyone left to have pity on. [Pause. ] CLOV It's not certain. [Pause.] An d there's one thing you forget. HAMM Ah? CLOV I can't sit down. HAMM [Impatiently.] Well you'll lie down then, what the hell! Or you'll come

to a standstill, simply stop and stand still, the way you are now. On e day

you'll say, I'm tired, I'll stop. Wha t does the attitude matter? [Pause.] CLOV SO you all want me to leave you. HAMM Naturally. CLOV The n I'll leave you. HAMM YOU can't leave us. CLOV The n I won't leave you. [Pause.] HAMM Wh y don't you finish us? [Pause.] I'll tell you the combination of the

cupboard if you promise to finish me. CLOV I couldn't finish you. HAMM The n you won't finish me. [Pause.] CLOV I'll leave you, I have things to do. HAMM DO you remember when you came here? CLOV NO. TOO small, you told me. HAMM DO you remember your father? CLOV [Wearily.] Sam e answer. [Pause.] You've asked me these questions mil

lions of times.

HAMM I love the old questions. [With fervour.] A h the old questions, the old

answers, there's nothing like them! [Pause.] It was I was a father to you. CLOV Yes. [He looks at HAMM fixedly.] You were that to me. HAMM My house a home for you. CLOV Yes. [He looks about him.] This was that for me. HAMM [Proudly.] But for me, [Gesture towards himself] no father. But for

Hamm, [Gesture towards surroundings.] no home. [Pause.] CLOV I'll leave you. HAMM Did you ever think of one thing? CLOV Never. HAMM That here we're down in a hole. [Pause.] But beyond the hills? Eh?

1. Level grassy plain devoid of forest, especially in southeast Europe and Siberia.

.

ENDGAME / 2407

Perhaps it's still green. Eh? [Pause.] Flora! Pomona! [Ecstatically.] Ceres!2

[Pause.] Perhaps you won't need to go very far. CLOV I can't go very far. [Pause.] I'll leave you. HAMM Is my dog ready? CLOV He lacks a leg. HAMM Is he silky? CLOV He's a kind of Pomeranian. HAMM Go and get him. CLOV He lacks a leg. HAMM G o and get him! [Exit CLOV.] We're getting on. [Enter CLOV holding

by one of its three legs a black toy dog.]

CLOV Your dogs are here. [Me hands the dog to HAMM who feels it, fondles it.] HAMM He's white, isn't he? CLOV Nearly. HAMM Wha t do you mean, nearly? Is he white or isn't he? CLOV H e isn't. [Pause.] HAMM You've forgotten the sex. CLOV [Vexed.] But he isn't finished. Th e sex goes on at the end. [Pause.] HAMM YOU haven't put on his ribbon. CLOV [Angrily.] But he isn't finished, I tell you! Fjirst you finish your dog and

then you put on his ribbon! [Pause.] HAMM Ca n he stand? CLOV I don't know. HAMM Try. [He hands the dog to CLOV who places it on the ground. ] Well? CLOV Wait! [He squats down and tries to get the dog to stand on its three legs,

fails, lets it go. The dog falls on its side.] HAMM [Impatiently. ] Well? CLOV He's standing. HAMM [Groping for the dog.] Where? Where is he? [CLOV holds up the dog in

a standing position.] CLOV There. [He takes HAMM S hand and guides it towards the dog's head.] HAMM [His hand on the dog's head.] Is he gazing at me? CLOV Yes. HAMM [Proudly. ] As if he were asking me to take him for a walk? CLOV If you like. HAMM [As before.] Or as if he were begging me for a bone. [He withdraws his

hand.] Leave him like that, standing there imploring me. [CLOV straightens up. The dog falls on its side.]

CLOV I'll leave you. HAMM Have you had your visions? CLOV Less. HAMM Is Mother Pegg's light on? CLOV Light! Ho w could anyone's light be on? HAMM Extinguished! CLOV Naturally it's extinguished. If it's not on it's extinguished. HAMM No, I mean Mother Pegg. CLOV But naturally she's extinguished! [Pause.] What's the matter with you

today? HAMM I'm taking m y course. [Pause.] Is she buried?

2. In Roman mythology, respectively, the goddesses of flowers, fruit, and crops.

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240 8 / SAMUEL BECKETT

CLOV Buried! Wh o would have buried her? HAMM YOU. CLOV Me! Haven't I enough to do without burying people? HAMM But you'll bury me. CLOV NO I won't bury you. [Pause.] HAMM She was bonny once, like a flower of the field. [With reminiscent leer.]

An d a great one for the men! CLOV We too were bonny�once. It's a rare thing not to have been bonny�

once. [Pause.] HAMM GO and get the gaff.3 [CLOV goes to door, halts.] CLOV Do this, do that, and I do it. I never refuse. Why ? HAMM You're not able to. CLOV Soon I won't do it any more. HAMM You won't be able to any more. [Exit CLOV.] A h the creatures, the

creatures, everything has to be explained to them. [Enter CLOV with gaff.] CLOV Here's your gaff. Stick it up. [He gives the gaff to HAMM who, wielding

it like a punt-pole,4 tries to move his chair.]

HAMM Did I move? CLOV No. [HAMM throws down the gaff.] HAMM GO and get the oilcan. CLOV What for? HAMM To oil the castors. CLOV I oiled them yesterday. HAMM Yesterday! Wha t does that mean? Yesterday! CLOV [Violently.] That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this

bloody awful day. I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything

any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent. [Pause.] HAMM I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come. He was a painter�and engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I'd take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! There! All that rising corn! An d there! Look! Th e sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness! [Pause.] He'd snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes. [Pause.] H e alone had been spared. [Pause.] Forgotten. [Pause.] It appears the case is . . . was not so ... so unusual.

CLOV A madman! Whe n was that? HAMM Oh way back, way back, you weren't in the land of the living. CLOV Go d be with the days! [Pause, HAMM raises his toque.] HAMM I had a great fondness for him. [Pause. He puts on his toque again.]

He was a painter�and engraver. CLOV There are so many terrible things. HAMM NO, no, there are not so man y now. [Pause.] Clov! CLOV Yes. HAMM DO you not think this has gone on long enough? CLOV Yes! [Pause.] What? HAMM This . . . this . . . thing. CLOV I've always thought so. [Pause.] Yo u not? HAMM [Gloomily.] The n it's a day like any other day.

3. Barbed fishing spear. 4. Long pole, pushed against the bottom of a river to propel a punt (a shallow flat-bottomed boat).

.

ENDGAME / 2409

CLOV AS long as it lasts. [Pause.] All life long the same inanities.

HAMM I can't leave you. CLOV I know. An d you can't follow me. [Pause.] HAMM If you leave me how shall I know?

CLOV [Briskly.] Well you simply whistle me and if I don't come running it

means I've left you. [Pause.] HAMM You won't come and kiss me goodbye? CLOV O h I shouldn't think so. [Pause.] HAMM But you might be merely dead in your kitchen.

CLOV The result would be the same.

HAMM Yes, but how would I know, if you were merely dead in your kitchen?

CLOV Well . . . sooner or later I'd start to stink.

HAMM You stink already. Th e whole place stinks of corpses.

CLOV The whole universe. HAMM [Angrily.] T o hell with the universe. [Pause.] Thin k of something. CLOV What? HAMM A n idea, have an idea. [Angrily.] A bright idea! CLOV A h good. [He starts pacing to and fro, his eyes fixed on the ground, his

hands behind his back. He halts.] The pains in my legs! It's unbelievable! Soon I won't be able to think any more. HAMM YOU won't be able to leave me. [CLOV resumes his pacing.] What are

you doing? CLOV Having an idea. [He paces.] Ah! [He halts.] HAMM What a brain! [Pause.] Well? CLOV Wait! [He meditates. Not very convinced.] Yes . . . [Pause. More con

vinced.] Yes! [He raises his head.] I have it! I set the alarm. [Pause.] HAMM This is perhaps not one of my bright days, but frankly�

CLOV You whistle me. I don't come. The alarm rings. I'm gone. It doesn't

ring. I'm dead. [Pause.] HAMM IS it working? [Pause. Impatiently.] Th e alarm, is it working? CLOV Wh y wouldn't it be working?

HAMM Because it's worked too much.

CLOV But it's hardly worked at all.

HAMM [Angrily.] The n because it's worked too little!

CLOV I'll go and see. [Exit CLOV. Brief ring of alarm off . Enter CLOV with alarm-

clock. He holds it against HAMM'S ear and releases alarm. They listen to it ringing to the end. Pause.] Fit to wake the dead! Did you hear it? HAMM Vaguely.

CLOV The end is terrific!

HAMM I prefer the middle. [Pause.] Is it not time for m y pain-killer?

CLOV NO! [He goes to door, turns.] I'll leave you.

HAMM It's time for my story. Do you want to listen to my story.

CLOV NO.

HAMM Ask my father if he wants to listen to my story, [CLOV goes to bins,

raises the lid of NAGG'S, stoops, looks into it. Pause. He straightens up.] CLOV He's asleep. HAMM Wake him. [CLOV stoops, wakes NAGG with the alarm. Unintelligible

words, CLOV straightens up.] CLOV He doesn't want to listen to your story. HAMM I'll give him a bon-bon. [CLOV stoops. As before.] CLOV He wants a sugar-plum.

.

241 0 / SAMUEL BECKETT

HAMM He'll get a sugar-plum, [CLOV stoops. As before.]

CLOV It's a deal. [He goes towards door, NAGG'S hands appear, gripping the rim.

Then the head emerges, CLOV reaches door, turns.] D o you believe in the life

to come?

HAMM Mine was always that. [Exit CLOV.] Got him that time! NAGG I'm listening. HAMM Scoundrel! Wh y did you engender me? NAGG I didn't know. HAMM What? What didn't you know? NAGG That it'd be you. [Pause.] You'll give me a sugar-plum? HAMM After the audition. NAGG You swear? HAMM Yes. NAGG On what? HAMM M y honour. [Pause. They laugh heartily.] NAGG Two. HAMM One. NAGG One for me and one for� HAMM One! Silence! [Pause.] Where was I? [Pause. Gloomily.] It's finished,

we're finished. [Pause.] Nearly finished. [Pause.] There'll be no more speech.

[Pause.] Something dripping in my head, ever since the fontanelles.5 [Stifled

hilarity of NAGG.] Splash, splash, always on the same spot. [Pause, j Perhaps

it's a little vein. [Pause.] A little artery. [Pause. More animated.] Enough of

that, it's story time, where was I? [Pause. Narrative tone.] The man came

crawling towards me, on his belly. Pale, wonderfully pale and thin, he

seemed on the point of�[Pause. Normal tone.] No, I've done that bit.

[Pause. Narrative tone.] I calmly filled m y pipe�the meerschaum, lit it with

.. . let us say a vesta,6 drew a few puffs. Aah! [Pause.] Well, what is it you

want? [Pause.] It was an extra-ordinarily bitter day, I remember, zero by the

thermometer. But considering it was Christmas Eve there was nothing . . .

extra-ordinary about that. Seasonable weather, for once in a way. [Pause.]

Well, what ill wind blows you my way? He raised his face to me, black with

mingled dirt and tears. [Pause. Normal tone.] That should do it. [Narrative

tone.] No, no, don't look at me, don't look at me. H e dropped his eyes and

mumbled something, apologies I presume. [Pause.] I'm a busy man, you

know, the final touches, before the festivities, you know what it is. [Pause.

Forcibly.] Com e on now, what is the object of this invasion? [Pause.] It was

a glorious bright day, I remember, fifty by the heliometer,7 but already the

sun was sinking down into the . . . down among the dead. [Normal tone.]

Nicely put, that. [Narrative tone.] Com e on now, come on, present your

petition and let me resume my labours. [Pause. Normal tone.] There's

English for you. A h well . . . [Narrative tone.] It was then he took the plunge.

It's my little one, he said. Tsstss, a little one, that's bad. My little boy, he

said, as if the sex mattered. Where did he come from? He named the hole.

A good half-day, on horse. What are you insinuating? That the place is still

inhabited? No no, not a soul, except himself and the child�assuming he

existed. Good. I enquired about the situation at Kov,8 beyond the gulf. Not

5. Membranous space in infant's skull at the 7. Literally, a sun meter. angles of the parietal bones. 8. Conceivably the town of Kova in southern Sibe6. Vesta is the brand name of a type of match ria (except that it has no gulf); more probably (from Vesta, Roman goddess of the hearth). Hamm's invention.

.

ENDGAME / 2411

a sinner. Good. An d you expect me to believe you have left your little one back there, all alone, and alive into the bargain? Com e now! [Pause.] It was a howling wild day, I remember, a hundred by the anemometer.9 Th e wind was tearing up the dead pines and sweeping them . . . away. [Pause. Normal tone.] A bit feeble, that. [Narrative tone.] Com e on, man, speak up, what is it you want from me, I have to put up m y holly. [Pause.] Well to make it short it finally transpired that what he wanted from me was . . . bread for his brat? Bread? But I have no bread, it doesn't agree with me. Good. Then perhaps a little corn? [Pause. Normal tone.] That should do it. [Narrative tone.] Corn, yes, I have corn, it's true, in m y granaries. But use your head. I give you some corn, a pound, a pound and a half, you bring it back to your child and you make him�if he's still alive�a nice pot of porridge, [NAGG reacts.] a nice pot and a half of porridge, full of nourishment. Good. Th e colours come back into his little cheeks�perhaps. An d then? [Pause.] I lost patience. [Violently.] Use your head, can't you, use your head, you're on earth, there's no cure for that! [Pause.] It was an exceedingly dry day, I remember, zero by the hygrometer. Ideal weather, for my lumbago.' [Pause. Violently.] But what in God's name do you imagine? That the earth will awake in spring? That the rivers and seas will run with fish again? That there's manna in heaven still for imbeciles like you? [Pause.] Gradually I cooled down, sufficiently at least to ask him how long he had taken on the way. Three whole days. Good. In what condition he had left the child. Deep in sleep. [Forcibly.] But deep in what sleep, deep in what sleep already? [Pause.] Well to make it short I finally offered to take hi m into m y service. He had touched a chord. An d then I imagined already that I wasn't muc h longer for this world. [He laughs. Pause.] Well? [Pause.] Well? Here if you were careful you might die a nice natural death, in peace and comfort. [Pause.] Well? [Pause.] In the end he asked me would I consent to take in the child as well�if he were still alive. [Pause.] It was the moment I was waiting for. [Pause.] Would I consent to take in the child . . . [Pause.] I can see him still, down on his knees, his hands flat on the ground, glaring at me with his ma d eyes, in defiance of m y wishes. [Pause. Normal tone.] I'll soon have finished with this story. [Pattse.] Unless I bring in other characters. [Pause.] But where would I find them? [Pause.] Where would I look for them? [Pause. He whistles. Enter CLOV .] Let us pray to God.

NAGG Me sugar-plum! CLOV There's a rat in the kitchen! HAMM A rat! Are there still rats? CLOV In the kitchen there's one. HAMM And you haven't exterminated him? CLOV Half. You disturbed us. HAMM He can't get away? CLOV NO. HAMM You'll finish him later. Let us pray to God. CLOV Again! NAGG Me sugar-plum! HAMM Go d first! [Pause.] Are you right? CLOV [Resigned.] Off we go.

9. A wind meter. I. Rheumatic pain in the lumbar region of the lower back. "Hygrometer": a moisture meter.

.

241 2 / SAMUEL BECKETT

HAMM [TO NAGG.] And you? NAGG [Clasping his hands, closing his eyes, in a gahhle. ] Ou r Father which art� HAMM Silence! In silence! Wher e are your manners? [Pause.] Off we go.

[Attitudes of prayer. Silence. Abandoning his attitude, discouraged.] Well? CLOV [Abandoning his attitude.] What a hope! And you? HAMM Sweet damn all! [To NAGG.] And you? NAGG Wait! [Pause. Abandoning his attitude.] Nothing doing! HAMM Th e bastard! He doesn't exist! CLOV Not yet. NAGG Me sugar-plum! HAMM There are no more sugar-plums! [Pause.] NAGG It's natural. After all I'm your father. It's true if it hadn't been me it

would have been someone else. But that's no excuse. [Pause.] Turkish Delight,2 for example, which no longer exists, we all know that, there is nothing in the world I love more. An d one day I'll ask you for some, in return for a kindness, and you'll promise it to me. On e must live with the times. [Pause.] Who m did you call when you were a tiny boy, and were frightened, in the dark? Your mother? No. Me. We let you cry. Then we moved you out of earshot, so that we might sleep in peace. [Pause.] I was asleep, as happy as a king, and you woke me up to have me listen to you. It wasn't indispensable, you didn't really need to have me listen to you. [Pause.] I hope the day will come when you'll really need to have me listen to you, and need to hear m y voice, any voice. [Pause.] Yes, I hope I'll live till then, to hear you calling me like when you were a tiny boy, and were frightened, in the dark, and I was your only hope. [Pause, NAGG knocks on lid of NELL'S bin. Pause.] Nell! [Pause. He knocks louder. Pause. Louder.] Nell! [Pause, NAGG sinks back into his bin, closes the lid behind him. Pause.]

HAMM Ou r revels now are ended.3 [He gropes for the dog] Th e dog's gone. CLOV He's not a real dog, he can't go. HAMM [Groping.] He's not there. CLOV He's lain down. HAMM Give him up to me. [CLOV picks up the dog and gives it to HAMM. HAMM

holds it in his arms. Pause, HAMM throws away the dog.] Dirty brute! [CLOV begins to pick up the objects lying on the ground.] Wha t are you doing? CLOV Putting things in order. [He straightens up. Fervently.] I'm going to clear

everything away! [He starts picking up again.] HAMM Order! CLOV [Straightening up.] I love order. It's m y dream. A world where all would

be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust. [He

starts picking up again.] HAMM [Exasperated.] What in God's name do you think you are doing? CLOV [Straightening up.] I'm doing m y best to create a little order. HAMM Drop it! [CLOV drops the objects he has picked up.] CLOV After all, there or elsewhere. [He goes towards door.] HAMM [Irritably.] What's wrong with your feet? CLOV My feet? HAMM Tramp! Tramp!

2. A sticky sweet candy (originally from Turkey). 3. Words spoken by Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest 4.1.148.

.

ENDGAME / 2413

CLOV I must have put on my boots. HAMM Your slippers were hurting you? [Pause.] CLOV I'll leave you. HAMM NO! CLOV Wha t is there to keep me here? HAMM Th e dialogue. [Pause.] I've got on with m y story. [Pause.] I've got on

with it well. [Pause. Irritably.] Ask me where I've got to. CLOV Oh, by the way, your story? HAMM [Surprised.] Wha t story? CLOV Th e one you've been telling yourself all your days. HAMM Ah you mean my chronicle? CLOV That's the one. [Pause.] HAMM [Angrily.] Keep going, can't you, keep going! CLOV You've got on with it, I hope. HAMM [Modestly.] O h not very far, not very far. [He sighs.] There are days

like that, one isn't inspired. [Pause.] Nothing you can do about it, just wait

for it to come. [Pause.] N o forcing, no forcing, it's fatal. [Pause.] I've got on

with it a little all the same. [Pause.] Technique, you know. [Paitse. Irritably.]

I say I've got on with it a little all the same. CLOV [Admiringly. ] Well I never! In spite of everything you were able to get on with it! HAMM [Modestly.] O h not very far, you know, not very far, but nevertheless,

better than nothing. CLOV Better than nothing! Is it possible? HAMM I'll tell you how it goes. He comes crawling on his belly� CLOV Who? HAMM What? CLOV Wh o do you mean, he? HAMM Wh o do I mean! Yet another. CLOV Ah him! I wasn't sure. HAMM Crawling on his belly, whining for bread for his brat. He's offered a

job as gardener. Before� [CLOV bursts out laughing.] Wha t is there so funny

about that? CLOV A job as gardener! HAMM Is that what tickles you? CLOV It must be that. HAMM It wouldn't be the bread? CLOV O r the brat. [Pause.] HAMM Th e whole thing is comical, I grant you that. Wha t about having a

good guffaw the two of us together?

CLOV [After reflection.] I couldn't guffaw again today.

HAMM [After reflection.] Nor I. [Pause.] I continue then. Before accepting

with gratitude he asks if he may have his little boy with him. CLOV What age? HAMM Oh tiny. CLOV He would have climbed the trees. HAMM All the little odd jobs. CLOV An d then he would have grown up. HAMM Very likely. [Pause.] CLOV Keep going, can't you, keep going! HAMM That's all. I stopped there. [Pause.]

.

241 4 / SAMUEL BECKETT

CLOV Do you see how it goes on.

HAMM More or less.

CLOV Will it not soon be the end?

HAMM I'm afraid it will.

CLOV Pah! You'll make up another. HAMM I don't know. [Pause.] I feel rather drained. [Pause.] Th e prolonged creative effort. [Pause.] If I could drag myself down to the sea! I'd make a

pillow of sand for my head and the tide would come. CLOV There's no more tide. [Pause.] HAMM GO and see is she dead, [CLOV goes to bins, raises the lid of NELL'S,

stoops, looks into it. Pause.] CLOV Looks like it. [He closes the lid, straightens up. HAMM raises his toque. Pause. He puts it on again.] HAMM [With his hand to his toque.] And Nagg? [CLOV raises lid O/NAGG'S bin,

stoops, looks into it. Pause.] CLOV Doesn't look like it. [He closes the lid, straightens up.] HAMM [Letting go his toque.] What's he doing? [CLOV raises lid of NAGG'S bin,

stoops, looks into it. Pause. ] CLOV He's crying. [He closes lid, straightens up.] HAMM The n he's living. [Pause.] Did you ever have an instant of happiness? CLOV Not to my knowledge. [Pause.] HAMM Bring m e under the window, [CLOV goes towards chair.] I want to feel

the light on m y face, [CLOV pushes chair.] D o you remember, in the begin

ning, when you took me for a turn? You used to hold the chair too high. At every step you nearly tipped me out. [Wit h senile quaver. ] A h great fun, we had, the two of us, great fun. [Gloomily.] An d then we got into the way of it. [CLOV stops the chair under window right.] There already? [Pause. He tilts back his head.] Is it light?

CLOV It isn't dark.

HAMM [Angrily] I'm asking you is it light. CLOV Yes. [Pause.] HAMM Th e curtain isn't closed?

CLOV No.

HAMM Wha t window is it?

CLOV Th e earth.

HAMM I knew it! [Angrily.] But there's no light there! Th e other! [CLOVstops the chair under window left, HAMM tilts back his head.] That's what I call light! [Pause.] Feels like a ray of sunshine. [Pause.] No?

CLOV No.

HAMM It isn't a ray of sunshine I feel on my face? CLOV NO. [Pause.] HAMM A m I very white? [Pause. Angrily.] I'm asking you am I very white! CLOV Not more so than usual. [Pause.] HAMM Ope n the window.

CLOV What for?

HAMM I want to hear the sea.

CLOV You wouldn't hear it.

HAMM Even if you opened the window?

CLOV NO.

HAMM The n it's not worth while opening it?

CLOV NO.

.

ENDGAME / 2415

HAMM [Violently] Then open it! [CLOVgets up on the ladder, opens the windoxv. Pause.] Have you opened it?

CLOV Yes. [Pause.]

HAMM You swear you've opened it? CLOV Yes. [Pause.] HAMM Well . . . ! [Pause.] It must be very calm. [Pause. Violently.] I'm asking

you is it very calm!

CLOV Yes.

HAMM It's because there are no more navigators. [Pause.] You haven't much

conversation all of a sudden. Do you not feel well?

CLOV I'm cold.

HAMM What month are we? [Pause.] Close the window, we're going back. [CLOV closes the window, gets down, pushes the chair hack to its place, remains standing behind it, head bowed.] Don't stay there, you give me the shivers! [CLOV returns to his place beside the chair.] Father! [Pause. Louder.] Father! [Pause.] G o and see did he hear me. [CLOVgoes to NAGGS bin, raises the lid, stoops. Unintelligible words, CLOV straightens up.]

CLOV Yes. HAMM Both times? [CLOV stoops. As before.] CLOV Once only. HAMM Th e first time or the second? [CLOV stoops. As before.] CLOV He doesn't know.

HAMM It must have been the second. CLOV We'll never know. [He closes lid.] HAMM Is he still crying?

CLOV No.

HAMM Th e dead go fast. [Pause.] What's he doing?

CLOV Sucking his biscuit. HAMM Life goes on. [CLOV returns to his place beside the chair.] Give me a

rug. I'm freezing. CLOV There are no more rugs. [Pause.] HAMM Kiss me. [Pause.] Will you not kiss me? CLOV No.

HAMM On the forehead. CLOV I won't kiss you anywhere. [Pause.] HAMM [Holding out his hand.] Give me your hand at least. [Pause.] Will you

not give me your hand? CLOV I won't touch you. [Pause.] HAMM Give me the dog. [CLOV looks round for the dog.] No! CLOV Do you not want your dog?

HAMM No.

CLOV The n I'll leave you. HAMM [Head bowed, absently.] That's right, [CLOV goes to door, turns.] CLOV If I don't kill that rat he'll die. HAMM [As before.] That's right. [Exit CLOV. Pause.] M e to play. [He takes out

his handkerchief, unfolds it, holds it spread out before him.] We're getting on. [Pause.] You weep, and weep, for nothing, so as not to laugh, and little by little . . . you begin to grieve. [He folds the handkerchief, puts it back in his pocket, raises his head.] All those I might have helped. [Pause.] Helped! [Pause.] Saved. [Pause.] Saved! [Pause.] Th e place was crawling with them! [Pause. Violently.] Use your head, can't you, use your head, you're on earth,

.

241 6 / SAMUEL BECKETT

there's no cure for that! [Pause.] Get out of here and love one another! Lick your neighbour as yourself!4 [Pause. Calmer.] Whe n it wasn't bread they wanted it was crumpets. [Pause. Violently.] Out of my sight and back to your petting parties! [Pause.] All that, all that! [Pause.] Not even a real dog! [Calmer.] Th e end is in the beginning and yet you go on. [Pause.] Perhaps I could go on with m y story, end it and begin another. [Pause.] Perhaps I could throw myself out on the floor. [He pushes himself painfully off his seat, falls hack again.] Dig my nails into the cracks and drag myself forward with m y fingers. [Pause.] It will be the end and there I'll be, wondering what can have brought it on and wondering what can have . . . [He hesitates.] . . . why it was so long coming. [Pause.] There I'll be, in the old shelter, alone against the silence and . . . [He hesitates.] . . . the stillness. If I can hold my peace, and sit quiet, it will be all over with sound, and motion, all over and done with. [Pause.] I'll have called m y father and I'll have called m y . . . [He hesitates.] . . . m y son. An d even twice, or three times, in case they shouldn't have heard me, the first time, or the second. [Pause.] I'll say to myself, He'll come back. [Pause.] An d then? [Pause.] An d then? [Pause.] H e couldn't, he has gone too far. [Pause.] An d then? [Pause. Very agitated.] All kinds of fantasies! That I'm being watched! A rat! Steps! Breath held and then . . . [He hreathes out.] Then babble, babble, words, like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three, so as to be together, and whisper

together, in the dark. [Pause.] Momen t upon moment, pattering down, like the millet grains of. . . [He hesitates.] . . . that old Greek,' and all life long you wait for that to mount up to a life. [Pause. He opens his mouth to continue, renounces.] A h let's get it over! [He whistles. Enter CLOV with alarm- clock. He halts beside the chair.] What ? Neither gone nor dead?

CLOV In spirit only.

HAMM Which?

CLOV Both.

HAMM Gone from me you'd be dead.

CLOV An d vice versa.

HAMM Outside of here it's death! [Pause.] An d the rat?

CLOV He's got away. HAMM H e can't go far. [Pause. Anxious.] Eh? CLOV H e doesn't need to go far. [Pause.] HAMM Is it not time for my pain-killer?

CLOV Yes. HAMM Ah! At last! Give it to me! Quick! [Pause.] CLOV There's no more pain-killer. [Pause.] HAMM [Appalled.] Good . . . ! [Pause.] N o more pain-killer! CLOV N o more pain-killer. You'll never get any more pain-killer. [Pause.]

HAMM But the little round box. It was full! CLOV Yes. But now it's empty. [Pause, CLOV starts to move about the room. He is looking for a place to put down the alarm-clock.]

HAMM [So/t.] What'll I do? [Pause. In a scream.] What'll I do? [CLOV sees the picture, takes it down, stands it on the floor with its face to the wall, hangs up the alarm-clock in its place.] Wha t are you doing?

4. Parody of Jesus' instruction: "Thou shalt love millet falling makes no sound, how can a bushel of thy neighbor as thyself (Matthew 19.19). grains make any sound?" (reported by Aristotle in 5. Zeno of Elea (ca. 450 B.C.E.), a Greek philoso-his Physics 5:250 a.19). pher famous for his paradoxes; e.g., "If a grain of

.

ENDGAME / 2417

CLOV Winding up. HAMM Look at the earth. CLOV Again! HAMM Since it's calling to you. CLOV IS your throat sore? [Pause.] Woul d you like a lozenge? [Pause.] No.

[Pause.] Pity, [CLOV goes, humming, towards window right, halts before it, looks up at it.]

HAMM Don't sing. CLOV [Turning towards HAMM.] On e hasn't the right to sing any more? HAMM No.

CLOV Then how can it end?

HAMM You want it to end?

CLOV I want to sing. HAMM I can't prevent you. [Pause, CLOV turns towards window right.] CLOV Wha t did I do with that steps? [He looks around for ladder.] You didn't

see that steps? [He sees it.] Ah, about time. [He goes towards window left.] Sometimes I wonder if I'm in my right mind. The n it passes over and I'm as lucid as before. [He gets up on ladder, looks out of window.] Christ, she's under water! [He looks.] Ho w can that be? [He pokes forward his head, his hand above his eyes.] It hasn't rained. [He wipes the pane, looks. Pause.] Ah what a fool I am! I'm on the wrong side! [He gets down, takes a few steps towards window right.] Under water! [He goes back for ladder.] What a fool

am! [He carries ladder towards window right.] Sometimes I wonder if I'm in m y right senses. The n it passes off and I'm as intelligent as ever. [He sets down ladder under window right, gets up on it, looks out of window. He turns towards HAMM.] An y particular sector you fancy? O r merely the whole thing?

HAMM Whole thing. CLOV Th e general effect? Just a moment. [He looks out of window. Pause.] HAMM Clov. CLOV [Absorbed.] Mmm. HAMM DO you know what it is? CLOV [As before.] Mmm. HAMM I was never there. [Pause.] Clov! CLOV [Turning towards HAMM, exasperated.] What is it? HAMM I was never there. CLOV Lucky for you. [He looks out of window.] HAMM Absent, always. It all happened without me. I don't know what's hap

pened. [Pause.] Do you know what's happened? [Pause.] Clov! CLOV [Turning towards HAMM, exasperated.] Do you want me to look at this muckheap, yes or no?

HAMM Answer me first.

CLOV What?

HAMM Do you know what's happened?

CLOV When? Where?

HAMM [Violently.] When ! What's happened? Use your head, can't you! Wha t

has happened? CLOV Wha t for Christ's sake does it matter? [He looks out of window.] HAMM I don't know. [Pause, CLOV turns towards HAMM.] CLOV [Harshly.] Whe n old Mother Pegg asked you for oil for her lamp and

you told her to get out to hell, you knew what was happening then, no?

[Pause.] You know what she died of, Mother Pegg? Of darkness.

.

241 8 / SAMUEL BECKETT

HAMM [Feebly. ] I hadn't any. CLOV [AS before.] Yes, you had. [Pause.] HAMM Have you the glass?

CLOV NO, it's clear enough as it is. HAMM G o and get it. [Pause, CLOV casts u-p his eyes, brandishes his fists. He loses balance, clutches on to the ladder. He starts to get down, halts.] CLOV There's one thing I'll never understand. [He gets down.] Wh y I always obey you. Can you explain that to me?

HAMM NO. . . . Perhaps it's compassion. [Pause.] A kind of great compassion. [Pause. ] O h you won't find it easy, you won't find it easy. [Pause, CLOV begins to move about the room in search of the telescope.]

CLOV I'm tired of our goings on, very tired. [He searches.] You're not sitting on it? [He moves the chair, looks at the place where it stood, resumes his search.]

HAMM [Anguished.] Don't leave me there! [Angrily CLOV restores the chair to its place.] A m I right in the centre?

CLOV You'd need a microscope to find this-� [He sees the telescope.] Ah, about time. [He picks up the telescope, gets up on the ladder, turns the telescope on the without.]

HAMM Give me the dog. CLOV [Looking.] Quiet! HAMM [Angrily. ] Give me the dog! [CLOV drops the telescope, clasps his hands

to his head. Pause. He gets down precipitately, looks for the dog, sees it, picks it up, hastens towards HAMM and strikes him violently on the head with the dog.]

CLOV There's your dog for you! [The dog falls to the ground. Pause.] HAMM He hit me!

CLOV YOU drive me mad, I'm mad!

HAMM If you must hit me, hit me with the axe. [Pause.] Or with the gaff, hit

me with the gaff. Not with the dog. Wit h the gaff. Or with the axe. [CLOV

picks up the dog and gives it to HAMM who takes it in his arms.] CLOV [Imploringly.] Let's stop playing! HAMM Never! [Pause.] Put me in my coffin. CLOV There are no more coffins. HAMM Then let it end! [CLOV goes towards ladder.] With a bang! [CLOV gets

up on ladder, gets down again, looks for telescope, sees it, picks it up, gets up ladder, raises telescope.] Of darkness! And me? Did anyone ever have pity on me?

CLOV [Lowering the telescope, turning towards HAMM.] What? [Pause.] Is it me you're referring to? HAMM [Angrily.] An aside, ape! Did you never hear an aside before? [Pause.] I'm warming up for my last soliloquy.

CLOV I warn you. I'm going to look at this filth since it's an order. But it's the last time. [He turns the telescope on the without.] Let's see. [He moves thetelescope.]Nothing . . . nothing . . . good . . . good . . . nothing . . . goo� [He starts, lowers the telescope, examines it, turns it again on the ivithout. Pause.] Bad luck to it!

HAMM More complications! [CLOV gets down.] Not an underplot, I trust. [CLOV moves ladder nearer window, gets up on it, turns telescope on the without. ]

CLOV [Dismayed.] Looks like a small boy! HAMM [Sarcastic.] A small . . . boy!

.

ENDGAME / 2419

CLOV I'll go and see. [He gets down, drops the telescope, goes toivards door, turns.] I'll take the gaff. [He looks for the gaff , sees it, picks it up, hastens towards door. ]

HAMM No! [CLOV halts.] CLOV NO ? A potential procreator? HAMM If he exists he'll die there or he'll come here. An d if he doesn't . . .

[Pause.] CLOV You don't believe me? You think I'm inventing? [Pause.] HAMM It's the end, Clov, we've come to the end. I don't need you any more.

[Pause.] CLOV Lucky for you. [He goes towards door. ] HAMM Leave me the gaff, [CLOV gives him the gaff, goes towards door, halts,

looks at alarm-clock, takes it down, looks round for a better place to put it,

goes to bins, puts it on lid O/NAGG'S bin. Pause.] CLOV I'll leave you. [He goes towards door.] HAMM Before you go . . . [CLOV halts near door.] . . . say something. CLOV There is nothing to say. HAMM A few words .. . to ponder .. . in my heart. CLOV Your heart! HAMM Yes. [Pause. Forcibly.] Yes! [Pause.] Wit h the rest, in the end, the

shadows, the murmurs, all the trouble, to end up with. [Pause.] Clov. . . . He never spoke to me. Then, in the end, before he went, without my having asked him, he spoke to me. He said . . .

CLOV [Despairingly.] Ah . . . ! HAMM Something . . . from your heart. CLOV My heart! HAMM A few words . . . from your heart. [Pause.] CLOV [Fixed gaze, tonelessly, towards auditorium.] They said to me, That's

love, yes, yes, not a doubt, now you see how� HAMM Articulate! CLOV [As before.] How easy it is. They said to me, That's friendship, yes, yes,

no question, you've found it. They said to me, Here's the place, stop, raise your head and look at all that beauty. That order! They said to me. Come now, you're not a brute beast, think upon these things and you'll see how all becomes clear. And simple! They said to me, What skilled attention they get, all these dying of their wounds.

HAMM Enough!

CLOV [AS before.] I say to myself�sometimes, Clov, you must learn to suffer better than that if you want them to weary of punishing you�one day. I say to myself�sometimes, Clov, you must be there better than that if you want them to let you go�one day. But I feel too old, and too far, to form new habits. Good, it'll never end, I'll never go. [Pause.] The n one day, suddenly, it ends, it changes, I don't understand, it dies, or it's me, I don't understand, that either. I ask the words that remain�sleeping, waking, morning, evening. They have nothing to say. [Pause.] I open the door of the cell and go. I am so bowed I only see my feet, if I open my eyes, and between my legs a little trail of black dust. I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit. [Pause.] It's easy going. [Pause.] Whe n I fall I'll weep for happiness. [Pause. He goes towards door.]

HAMM Clov! [CLOV halts, without turning.] Nothing, [CLOV moves on.] Clov! [CLOV halts, without turning.] CLOV This is what we call making an exit.

.

242 0 / SAMUEL BECKETT

HAMM I'm obliged to you, Clov. For your services.

CLOV [Turning, sharply.] A h pardon, it's I a m obliged to you.

HAMM It's we are obliged to each other. [Pause, CLOvgoes towards door.] One thing more, [CLOV halts.] A last favour. [Exit CLOV.] Cover me with the sheet. [Long pause.] No? Good. [Pause.] M e to play. [Pause. Wearily.] Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing. [Pause. More animated.] Let me see. [Paitse.] Ah yes! [He tries to move the chair, using the gaff as before. Enter CLOV, dressed for the road. Panama hat, tweed coat, raincoat over his arm, umbrella, bag. He halts by the door and stands there, impassive and motionless, his eyes fixed on HAMM, till the end. HAMM gives up.] Good. [Pause.] Discard. [He throws away the gaff , makes to throw away the dog, thinks better of it.] Take it easy. [Pause.] An d now? [Pause. ] Raise hat. [He raises his toque.] Peace to our . . . arses. [Pause.] An d put on again. [He puts on his toque.] Deuce. [Pause. He takes off his glasses.] Wipe. [He takes out his handkerchief and, without unfolding it, wipes his glasses.] And put on again. [He puts on his glasses, puts back the handkerchief in his pocket.] We're coming. A few more squirms like that and I'll call. [Pause.] A little poetry. [Pause.] You prayed� [Pause. He corrects himself] You CRIED for night; it comes� [Pause. He corrects himself] It FALLS: now cry in darkness. [He repeats, chanting.] You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness.6 [Pause.] Nicely put, that. [Pause.] An d now? [Pause.] Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended. [Pause. Narrative tone.] If he could have his child with him. . . . [Pause.] It was the moment I was waiting for. [Pause.] You don't want to abandon him? You want him to bloom while you are withering? Be there to solace your last million last moments? [Pause.] He doesn't realize, all he knows is hunger, and cold, and death to crown it all. But you! You ought to know what the earth is like, nowadays. O h I put hi m before his responsibilities! [Pause. Normal tone.] Well, there we are, there I am, that's enough. [He raises the whistle to his lips, hesitates, drops it. Pause.] Yes, truly! [He whistles. Pause. Louder. Pause.] Good. [Pause.] Father! [Pause. Louder.] Father! [Pause.] Good. [Pause.] We're coming. [Pause.] An d to end up with? [Pause.] Discard. [He throws away the dog. He tears the whistle from his neck.] With my compliments. [He throws whistle towards auditorium. Pause. He sniffs. Soft.] Clov! [Long pause.] No? Good. [He takes out the handkerchief] Since that's the way we're playing it . . . [He unfolds handkerchief] . . . let's play it that way . . . [He unfolds.] . . . and speak no more about it . . . [He finishes unfolding.] . . . speak no more. [He holds handkerchief spread out before him.] Ol d stancher! [Pause.] You . . . remain. [Pause. He covers his face with handkerchief, lowers his arms to armrests, remains motionless.] [Brief tableau.]

CURTAIN

6. Parody of a line from Charles Baudelaire's poem "Meditation" that can be translated as: "You were calling for evening; it falls; it is here."

.

2421

W. H. AUDEN 1907-1973 Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, the son of a doctor and of a former nurse. He was educated at private schools and Christ Church, Oxford. After graduation from Oxford he traveled abroad, taught school in England from 1930 to 1935, and later worked for a government film unit. His sympathies in the 1930s were with the left, like those of most intellectuals of his age, and he went to Spain during its Civil War, intending to serve as an ambulance driver on the left-wing Republican side. To his surprise he felt so disturbed by the sight of the many Roman Catholic churches gutted and looted by the Republicans that he returned to England without fulfilling his ambition. He traveled in Iceland and China before moving to the United States in 1939; in 1946 he became an American citizen. He taught at a number of American colleges and was professor of poetry at Oxford from 1956 to 1960. Most of his later life was shared between residences in Ne w York City and in Europe�first in southern Italy, then in Austria.

Auden was the most prominent of the young English poets who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, saw themselves bringing new techniques and attitudes to English poetry. Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice were other liberal and leftist poets in this loosely affiliated group. Auden learned metrical and verbal techniques from Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wilfred Owen, and from T. S. Eliot he took a conversational and ironic tone, an acute inspection of cultural decay. Thomas Hardy's metrical variety, formal irregularity, and fusion of panoramic and intimate perspectives also proved a useful example, and Auden admired W. B. Yeats's "serious reflective" poems of "personal and public interest," though he later came to disavow Yeats's grand aspirations and rhetoric. Auden's English studies at Oxford familiarized him with the rhythms and long alliterative line of Anglo-Saxon poetry. He learned, too, from popular and folk culture, particularly the songs of the English music hall and, later, American blues singers.

The Depression that hit America in 1929 hit England soon afterward, and Auden and his contemporaries looked out at an England of industrial stagnation and mass unemployment, seeing not Eliot's metaphorical Waste Land but a more literal Waste Land of poverty and "depressed areas." Auden's early poetry diagnoses the ills of his country. This diagnosis, conducted in a verse that combines irreverence with craftsmanship, draws on both Freud and Marx to show England now as a nation of neurotic invalids, now as the victim of an antiquated economic system. The intellectual liveliness and nervous force of this work made a great impression, even though the compressed, elliptical, impersonal style created difficulties of interpretation.

Gradually Auden sought to clarify his imagery and syntax, and in the late 1930s he produced "Lullaby," "Musee des Beaux Arts," "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," and other poems of finely disciplined movement, pellucid clarity, and deep yet unsentimental feeling. Some of the poems he wrote at this time, such as "Spain" and "September 1,

1939," aspire to a visionary perspective on political and social change; but as Auden became increasingly skeptical of poetry in the grand manner, of poetry as revelation or as a tool for political change, he removed these poems from his canon. (He came to see as false his claim in "September 1, 1939" that "We must love one another or die.") "Poetry is not magic," he said in the essay "Writing," but a form of truth telling that should "disenchant and disintoxicate." As he continued to remake his style during World War II, he created a voice that, in contrast not only to Romanticism but also to the authoritarianism devastating Europe, was increasingly flat, ironic, and conversational. He never lost his ear for popular speech or his ability to combine elements from popular art with technical formality. He daringly mixed the grave and the flippant, vivid detail and allegorical abstraction. He always experimented, particularly in ways of bringing together high artifice and a colloquial tone.

.

2422 / W. H. AUDEN

The poems of Auden's last phase are increasingly personal in tone and combine an air of offhand informality with remarkable technical skill in versification. He turned out, as if effortlessly, poems in numerous verse forms, including sestinas, sonnets, ballads, canzones, syllabics, haiku, the blues, even limericks. As he became ever more mistrustful of a prophetic role for the poet, he embraced the ordinary�the hours of the day, the rooms of a house, a changeable landscape. He took refuge in love and friendship, particularly the love and friendship he shared with the American writer Chester Kallmann. Like Eliot, Auden became a member of the Church of England, and the emotions of his late poetry�sometimes comic, sometimes solemn�were grounded in an ever deepening but rarely obtrusive religious feeling. In the last year of his life he returned to England to live in Oxford, feeling the need to be part of a university community as a protection against loneliness. Auden is now generally recognized as one of the masters of twentieth-century English poetry, a thoughtful, seriously playful poet, combining extraordinary intelligence and immense craftsmanship.

A note on the texts: Auden heavily revised his poems, sometimes omitting stanzas (as in "Spain" and "In Memory of W. B. Yeats") or even entire poems ("Spain" and "September 1, 1939"). The texts below are reprinted as they first appeared in book form and again in his Selected Poems: A New Edition, ed. Edward Mendelson (1989).

Petition1

Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all Bu t will his negative inversion, be prodigal: Sen d to us power an d light, a sovereign touch2 Curin g the intolerable neural itch, 5 Th e exhaustion of weaning, the liar's quinsy,0 tonsillitis An d the distortions of ingrown virginity. Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response An d gradually correct the coward's stance; Cove r in time with beam s those in retreat 10 That, spotted, they turn thoug h the reverse were great; Publis h each healer that in city lives Or country houses at the en d of drives; Harro w the house of the dead; look shining at Ne w styles of architecture, a change of heart.

Oct. 1929 1930

On This Island1

Look, stranger, at this island now Th e leaping light for your delight discovers, Stand stable here An d silent be,

1. This title, by which the poem is widely known, ulous cure for disease (cf. "sovereign" as an adjecis from Auden's later collections. Many of his early tive, meaning "supreme, all-dominating"). poems first appeared without titles. 1. The title is from Auden's later collections. 2. The king's touch was often regarded as mirac

.

LULLABY / 2423

5 That through the channels of the ear Ma y wander like a river Th e swaying sound of the sea.

Here at the small field's ending pause Wher e the chalk wall falls to the foam, and its tall ledges

10 Oppose the pluck An d knock of the tide, An d the shingle scrambles after the sucking surf, and the gull lodges A moment on its sheer side.

15 Far off like floating seeds the ships Diverge on urgent voluntary errands; An d the full view Indeed may enter And move in memory as now these clouds do,

20 That pass the harbour mirror And all the summer through the water saunter.

Nov. 1935 1936

Lullaby1

Lay your sleeping head, my love, Huma n on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from

5 Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral: But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me

10 Th e entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds: To lovers as they lie upon Her tolerant enchanted slope In their ordinary swoon,

is Grave the vision Venus� sends Roman goddess of love Of supernatural sympathy, Universal love and hope; While an abstract insight wakes Amon g the glaciers and the rocks

20 Th e hermit's sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity On the stroke of midnight pass

1. Title from Auden's later collections.

.

2424 / W. H. AUDEN

Like vibrations of a bell, And fashionable madmen raise

25 Their pedantic boring cry: Every farthing2 of the cost, All the dreaded cards foretell, Shall be paid, but from this night Not a whisper, not a thought,

30 Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of sweetness show 35 Eye and knocking heart may bless, Find the mortal world enough; Noons of dryness see you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass 40 Watched by every human love. Jan.1937 1937,1940

Spain1

Yesterday all the past. The language of size Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;2 Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.

Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards, The divination of water; yesterday the invention Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants, The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley, The chapel built in the forest; Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;

The trial of heretics among the columns of stone; Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns And the miraculous cure at the fountain; Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle.

2. At one time the smallest and least valuable Brit-ten while the war was raging this poem appeared ish coin. separately in 1937, the proceeds of its sale going 1. The Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936 to Medical Aid for Spain. In 1940 Auden retitled as a rebellion by General Franco's right-wing army the poem "Spain 1937," deleted lines 69�76, and against the left-wing, elected Spanish government, made other changes; later he removed the poem was viewed by British liberal intellectuals as a test-from his canon. ing struggle between fascism and democracy. Writ-2. Ancient stone circle.

.

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines, Th e construction of railways in the colonial desert; Yesterday the classic lecture On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek, The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero; Yesterday the prayer to the sunset And the adoration of madmen. But to-day the struggle.

As the poet whispers, startled among the pines, Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright On the crag by the leaning tower: "O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor."

An d the investigator peers through his instruments At the inhuma n provinces, the virile bacillus Or enormous Jupiter finished: "But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire."

An d the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss, O show us History the operator, the Organiser, Tim e the refreshing river."

And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life That shapes the individual belly and orders Th e private nocturnal terror: "Did you not found the city state of the sponge,

"Raise the vast military empires of the shark An d the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?0 district Intervene. O descend as a dove or A furious papa or a mild engineer,3 but descend."

An d the life, if it answers at all, replies from the heart And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city "O no, I am not the mover; Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the

"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped; I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be Good, your humorous story. I am your business voice. I am your marriage.

"What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will. I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic Death? Very well, I accept, for I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."

3. Auden plays on the idea of a deus ex machina, the Bible the form taken by the Holy Spirit when literally a god from a machine, who appears sud-descending to Earth. denly in a play to resolve an impasse. "Dove": in

.

2426 / W. H. AUDEN

Man y have heard it on remote peninsulas, On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen's islands Or the corrupt heart of the city, Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel; They floated over the oceans; They walked the passes. All presented their lives.

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe; On that tableland scored by rivers, Ou r thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond To the medicine ad. and the brochure of winter cruises Have become invading battalions; An d our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb. Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom As the ambulance and the sandbag; Ou r hours of friendship into a people's army.

To-morrow, perhaps the future. Th e research on fatigue An d the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the Octaves of radiation; To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love, Th e photographing of ravens; all the fun under Liberty's masterful shadow; To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,

Th e beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome; To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers, The eager election of chairmen By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs, The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion; To-morrow the bicycle races

Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, Th e conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;4 To-day the expending of powers On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

4. After these two lines were criticized by George Orwell, Auden revised them to read "the inevitable increase" and "the fact of murder."

.

As I WALKED OUT ONE EVENING / 2427

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette, Th e cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert, Th e masculine jokes; to-day the 100 Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

Th e stars are dead. Th e animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated Ma y say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

Mar. 1937 1937

As I Walked Out One Evening1

As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Wer e fields of harvest wheat.

5 And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway:

"Love has no ending.

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you 10 Till China and Africa meet And the river jumps over the mountain An d the salmon sing in the street.

"I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry 15 An d the seven stars2 go squawking Like geese about the sky.

"The years shall run like rabbits For in my arms I hold Th e Flower of the Ages 20 An d the first love of the world."

But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: "O let not Tim e deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.

25 "In the burrows of the Nightmare Wher e Justice naked is, Tim e watches from the shadow And coughs when you would kiss.

1. Title from Auden's later collections. 2. The constellation of the Pleiades, supposed by the ancients to be seven sisters.

.

2428 / W. H. AUDEN

"In headaches and in worry 30 Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to-day.

"Into man y a green valley Drifts the appalling3 snow; 35 Tim e breaks the threaded dances An d the diver's brilliant bow.

"O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin 40 An d wonder what you've missed.

"The glacier knocks in the cupboard, Th e desert sighs in the bed, An d the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.

45 "Where the beggars raffle the banknotes And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer And Jill goes down on her back.4

"O look, look in the mirror, 50 O look in your distress; Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless.

"O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; 55 You shall love your crooked neighbour Wit h your crooked heart."

It was late, late in the evening, Th e lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming 60 An d the deep river ran on.

Nov. 1937 1938, 1940

Musee des Beaux Arts1

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place

3. Literally, making white. pure) becomes a boisterous reveler; Jill, of "Jack 4. The giant of "Jack and the Bean Stalk" is trying and Jill/' is seduced. to seduce Jack; the "lily-white Boy" (presumably 1. Museum of Fine Arts (French).

.

IN MEMORY OF W. B. YEATS / 2429

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

5 How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot

io That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Wher e the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus,2 for instance: how everything turns away

15 Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

20 Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Ha d somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Dec. 1938 1940

In Memory of W. B. Yeats1

(d. January 1939) I

He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted, An d snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

5 O all the instruments agree The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness Th e wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, Th e peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;

io By mourning tongues Th e death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours;

2. The Fall of Icarus, by the Flemish painter Pieter Numbering at Bethlehem, skaters in Winter Land- Brueghel (ca. 1525�1 569), in the Musees Royaux scape with Skaters and a Bird Trap, a horse scratchdes Beaux Arts in Brussels. In one corner of Brue-ing its behind in The Massacre of the Innocents. ghel's painting, Icarus's legs are seen disappearing 1. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats, born in into the sea, his wings having melted when he flew 1865, died on January 29, 1939, in Roquebrune too close to the sun. Auden also alludes to other (southern France). paintings by Brueghel: the nativity scene in The

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2430 / W. H. AUDEN

Th e provinces of his body revolted,

15 The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities An d wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;

20 To find his happiness in another kind of wood2 An d be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow

25 Whe n the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,' And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed, An d each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom; A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day whe n one did something slightly unusual.

30 O all the instruments agree Th e day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us: your gift survived it all; Th e parish of rich women,4 physical decay, Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

35 No w Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its saying where executives Woul d never want to tamper; it flows south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

40 Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.

IIP

Earth, receive an honoured guest; William Yeats is laid to rest: Let the Irish vessel lie

45 Emptied of its poetry.

Tim e that is intolerant Of the brave and innocent, An d indifferent in a week To a beautiful physique,

2. Cf. the beginning of Dante's Inferno: "In the Augusta Gregory (1852�1932), provided financial middle of the journey ot our life I came to myself help to Yeats. in a dark wood where the straight way was lost" 5. The stanza pattern of this section echoes that (1.1-3). of Yeats's late poem "Under Ben Bulben." Auden 3. The French stock exchange. later omitted the section's second, third, and 4. Several wealthy women, including Lady fourth stanzas.