5:30am. Woke up from a dream that was far too real. The sort that wends its way from the absurd to the punishing, from a thousand purple cars to the people you know best. I was hoping for a lie in, my sleep the past two months, the last especially, having deteriorated massively. The whites of my eyes outlined red, and the skin around them darkening. The sterile brightness of the bathroom light enhancing the change. I had my coffee as the sun came up.
On Monday I got on the metro the wrong way, but instead of getting off and switching sides I stayed on and went to Montparnasse. Since I’ve moved here I’ve realised that there’s very little I want to see, tourism-wise, having knocked most of the must-see spots on the head the previous times I’ve visited. This is a good thing. Crowds are tiresome and overwhelming, and having no (self-imposed) pressure to treat a city as a list of things to see, means that I get to live here simply as someone who lives here. But I’ve never been to Montparnasse Cemetery, and knowing that the two men responsible for my being here are buried there, I decided I’d pay them a visit.
It’s a short walk from the station, with a slight detour to grab a sandwich and a drink. Being a Monday lunchtime it wasn’t busy and I parked myself up on a bench. About halfway through eating, a group of teenage boys rocked up and stopped at the grave opposite me. One of them picked up a cigarette that had been left behind among the flowers and metro tickets, waved it aloft in front of his friends, and put it back. None of them took any photos. I thought I’d heard one of them say ‘Camus,’ but this didn’t add up since I knew he wasn’t buried in Paris. Once I finished I walked over and realised I’d had my lunch opposite Serge Gainsbourg.
I’m a fan of his music but he wasn’t the reason I was there. Honestly I didn’t even know it’s where he was laid to rest, but it was nice to see. He’s buried with his parents, and beside him lies Jane Birkin.
Elsewhere in the 47 hectares lies Baudelaire and Baudrillard, Brassai and Man Ray, de Maupassant, Dreyfus and Huysmans, de Beauvoir and Sartre, Sontag, Soutine, Tzara and Varda. Not to mention all those others among the dirt whose names didn’t enter the history books. None of whom, famous or otherwise, I’d come to see.
The first time I read something by Samuel Beckett I was 15. It was a two page extract from Waiting for Godot that a substitute teacher handed out in a drama lesson. All we had to do was read it. I can’t remember what part of the play it was, but I remember reading it over and over, the teacher marking work from another class and only occasionally reminding us of her presence by telling people to shut up.
It wasn’t a particularly profound experience, but I do remember it conjuring something that previous scripts we’d looked at hadn’t. After that lesson I didn’t read anything of his until I was 23. I was staying at my parents and we went to Guildford for the afternoon. It was as unremarkable as any afternoon in Guildford, but before we left we stopped in at Waterstones. I think my dad got the latest Stephen King or Dean Koontz. For some reason I ended up in front of the shop’s only three Becketts: Waiting for Godot, Murphy and Watt.
By dinner I’d finished Godot. A few days later Murphy. Watt followed. I hadn’t known when I bought them that these last two were his first novels, which was perfect serendipity. My favourite way to read an author is to do it chronologically, or as chronologically as possible. Tracking their themes and seeing their development. The former largely consistent across Beckett’s work, the latter drastic.
I’ve written on and off since I was about 8 or 9. Music and lyrics being the dominant form from 14 to my early twenties, with the occasional stories, poems and scripts punctuating that, none of which were any good. Following that first reading of Godot, however, I was compelled to write a short play. A young man with a bloodied face turns up at a bar and bickers with an older man. It’s absolute dreck. But that doesn’t matter. The next day I wrote another. An old man in a rocking chair—something I didn’t realise I’d stolen from Beckett until a few months later, when I read Rockaby: a short play featuring only an old woman in a rocking chair.
Sleep has never come easily to me, and in 2019 I had the worst bout of insomnia I’ve ever had. For six months I barely slept, the final three averaging 7-10 hours a week. I was having auditory hallucinations by the end of it and became absolutely insufferable to be around. All I could talk about was my sleep, or lack thereof. I was irritable, found myself more and more paranoid, and my skin condition got worse. But I wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I’d write before work, come home and write before nightly band practices, try to go to sleep, fail, and stay up smoking joints and writing, passing out, if I did pass out, for a couple of hours around 5.
During this period I picked up a copy of Emil Cioran’s A Short History of Decay (translated, as almost all of his work was, by the incredible and recently deceased Richard Howard). Just as with Beckett, I’d never encountered anything like it. Philosophical but not philosophy, theological but not theology, the most beautiful prose I’d ever read, and absolutely scathing. Cioran also happens to be one of the great writers of insomnia. A lifelong sufferer, in his work I saw myself reflected. Insomnia makes you incredibly self-centred. It detaches you from other people. And to see someone else express this so elegantly, so cuttingly and clearly, was of great salve. To this day he’s the writer I return to most. Beckett close behind.
That bout of insomnia came to an end mid-December, following the worst train journey of my life and, shortly after, a trip to Lisbon, where I realised I hadn’t been happy in years, no longer wanted to pursue music, and wanted only to write. Sleep slowly came back to me over the Christmas holidays. I re-read Watt. In the new year I carried on teaching but accepted less gigs (the year before I’d played almost a hundred), started writing my first novel, and went on tour with Sweaty Palms the week Covid hit the UK. 10 days later we entered the first lockdown.
We were all legally mandated to not just slow down but to stop. As everyone else did, I took stock of my life, called it a day on being a musician, and carried on writing. For the first few months I read nothing but Beckett and Cioran. Both of them moving to write in French instead of their mother tongues of English and Romanian—Beckett self-translating his own work both ways until he died—inspired me to return to studying French. Having led a fortunate little life I attended international/private schools from the age of 6 and studied French from then until I was 16. The structures and tenses remained. The rest was uphill. Every morning I’d study until lunchtime, eat, walk, and work on what looking back were an abysmal play and an abysmal novel. Stuff I had to get out. Necessary and necessarily crap.
Beckett and Cioran first met in Paris, where they both lived, in 1961. They became fast friends and Beckett financially supported Cioran at one point, allowing him to continue his own work without having to take on other jobs of editing and translating (something he did throughout his career to help stay afloat). At one point the two of them spent a week fruitlessly trying to translate the title of one of Beckett’s short texts. Lessness. They scoured dictionaries and fired ideas back and forth before giving up. Beckett, in the end, settled on Sans, without, -less.
Their friendship fizzled out in the 70s. Cioran had written a short portrait of Beckett that his intensely private friend disapproved of, but allowed him to publish all the same. Following this they saw less of each other and Beckett, according to what he told his biographer, found there were irreconcilable differences in their personalities and beliefs. Neither felt malice for the other, and in his diaries, Cioran still writes fondly of him following the dissolution of their relationship.
In 1989 Beckett died; Cioran in 1995, 2 months and 1 day before I was born. Their graves lie all of 10 metres apart.
Truth be told I didn’t feel all that much as I stood before them. Still, I owe them a lot. Deep in the pandemic I realised that learning alone could only get me so far. I’d decided that I wanted to pursue translation and continue my own work. I’d also come to hate Manchester, so I applied to study at the University of Glasgow, got in, moved north, and three years later, here I am, struggling to sleep in Paris.