The Brooklyn Rail

No single thread—biographical or literary—can adequate knowing things in relation to each other. Constellations and gaps between those parts expose what singular narrative cannot. Waiting, a process by which what is can be apprehended, momentarily, and not definitively, acts on us over time. It is all we have, whether or not we choose to acknowledge it. The fractured, shifting drift and flow of apprehension is not to be denied: their aggregates define us. Aporias, some of which are known, but others whose shape and scope are invisible but sensed, are as determining of identity and biography as any phenomena given the credit of facticity. In a book that is itself a work of obliquity and lucidity, of courage and extraordinary craft, only Michel Leiris’s La Règle du Jeu [Rules of the Game] (1948–76) and Le Ruban au Cou d'Olympia [The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat](1981) come to mind as efforts of autobiography, reflection, and literary investigation, though the focus is sharpened and concentrated in the case of Coffey’s book. It is extremely rare that an author is anywhere near as courageous as Coffey. He is willing to both explore without obfuscation painful and unresolved autobiographical experience, and with impressive erudition and humility to illuminate, respond to, and offer insight into major literary figures; both through lives lived (his and others), as well as through literature.

Whereas previous books by Coffey have also dealt with identity and biography (for example his previous book, the excellent Samuel Beckett is Closed [2018], which also uses a sequential fragmentary structure that also addresses particular aspects of the life and work of Beckett), here in Beckett’s Children: A Literary Memoir (2024), these themes are detailed and intertwined in a beautiful and daunting, recursive and expository narrative, partitioned into five discrete and discontinuous chapters that expand in proximity to each other. Interruptions and additions, from literary commentary to personal biography, fold inward toward understanding and still evolving thought. What we encounter is both too brutal, dark, and complex, as well as light, humorous, and inventive to be definitive.

For Part One, The Leaves, the chapter page epigraph is a quote from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943): “Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children.” It is a leitmotif for the book, although that is perhaps too simplistic; the complexity of the book can’t be understated. Coffey’s desire, as an adoptee, to know his own origin, and the experience of the American poet Susan Howe in respect to the rumor that she is Samuel Beckett’s daughter—though denied by Howe herself—are similar. And, Coffey suggests, the consequences bear a trace in literary form. As in life and art, history tends to find ways to repeat itself. The montage that follows moves between literary research and intuition, memoir, reflection, and a historiography of repetitions and echoes. Of his own experience:

In the end I gave up a child.

As I had been given up.

In parental relations of absence, the silence shapes mutually: it is not passive, it is present. The void relation, an absence of heritage—a fact of adoption for Coffey—is one subject of his searching. Recalling details of a first marriage and subsequently his relationship to a grown, troubled son—so plainly exposed in the dialog form of text messages—his support and council do not change the course of his son’s life trajectory of drug use, jail time, and failed relationships, resulting in distance, and loss. In considering Howe’s life, it is the possibility of Beckett being her father, true or not, that is the structural impact of absence, adumbrating a sharp dynamic: the doubt and an urge to know more appears to color and motivate aspects of her own work whether consciously or not. As Coffey says of Howe:

This seems to me the central fact of Howe’s work, this consistent insistence upon a “presence of absence,” that something or someone is missing. It is, for me, the key to her works obliquity, its hidden measures and missing parts, its torn and rent surfaces, a kind of violence committed to the text as if it were a shroud of an ancestor who is despised because gone and prized in equal measure for its trace or shadow still. A MARK.

Howe’s father died when she was in mid-career; his name was Mark. Or, Coffey says, is it also the “mark” of something absent, unacknowledged but present nonetheless. For a time, Coffey was convinced that Howe was indeed Beckett’s daughter, which led him to the astute observations on and appreciations of her work in this book. Beckett’s character Pozzo in Godot says, “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night.” How extraordinary then if Beckett did father a child despite his bleak outlook on the meaning, or lack thereof, of life. Coffey points to the numerous examples of unaccompanied children that inhabit Beckett’s writing, recursively and so, enigmatically, inexplicably. In the final section of the book, a coda, Coffey notes that after thirty-two works containing bullied, mute, mysterious children; however, in the final section of this book, Petit Sot Poems, the boy of the title in Beckett’s poems is by contrast a confident, cheerful type that speaks in the first person. To be frank, attempting to communicate Coffey’s achievement in a short review is not enough to do it justice: best to just to point and say “read this book.” It is an astonishing work.