Playroom (3): The Capital Of the Ruins

Samuel Beckett, ‘The Capital of the Ruins’

A few pages survive. Rubble was the measure of a city. They were composed as if for the air, though the air that carried them was more the air of a room than the air of transmission. A town in Normandy brought low and given a new name by its own people, a name that confessed a ruin so complete that pride could only take the form of sobriety. A temporary hospital had been raised in huts and corridors. Doors were temporary refusals of walls. Visitors who came were received without charge and without questions that would make their poverty a second injury. 

The writer who set down the report had worked among those huts as an interpreter and a pair of hands. He had watched water boiled, bedding mended, medical instructions carried from one language to another without the force of style. When he wrote of it later he did not attempt to enlarge what he had seen. He preferred a voice that kept itself within the perimeter of necessity. What remains are words that feel like a narrow light held where it is needed, not a searchlight that would discover what cannot be disclosed.

The piece begins by naming facts and by naming persons whose names are not offered as trophies. One hears of doctors and nurses who had come from across the sea and of colleagues in the town who worked beside them with a steadiness that did not invite praise. One hears of huts, of beds, of a theatre for operations that was a room with walls that did not keep out weather so much as remind those inside that weather existed. One hears of absence that will not be fully counted, the absent book in which admissions might have been tallied, the absent book in which time might have been recorded. The choice to work without such books is an acceptance that the work would find its record in being done and then in being allowed to disappear. This is a respect for the kind of history that does not survive by being preserved in ledgers. It survives by leaving a change in the way people speak to one another when the ledgers are gone.

The town itself is present in the report as a body that breathes with difficulty and goes on breathing. Streets are described as what remains when structures have fallen. A pharmacy is mentioned as a memory of a pharmacy. Houses are sketched as outlines that shelter nothing, yet people walk where the houses once kept out cold and rain, as if the act of walking was a promise to the ground that it would not be abandoned. The broadcast voice does not linger over scenes of devastation. It does not dwell on the kind of detail that would add flavour to the pain of others. It remains with the exact purpose that brought the writer and his colleagues to the place. There were patients  received, infants  born, small infections and a daily labour that had to be holy without being named holy.

The style is close to reportage and yet the sentences carry a tremor that does not come from rhetoric but from the proximity of speech to a limit that neither refuses nor yields. The speaker knows that he cannot speak for those to whom the huts belonged. He knows that he cannot speak for those who lay in the beds or who walked past the hospital with a gaze that asked for privacy rather than help. He knows that his job is to remember a modesty that was not an idea but a practice, to give thanks for it, and to keep that thanks from becoming a claim. A word returns more than once, a lean humility that appears only at the bottom of a tide of disillusion. It is not humiliation. It is the opposite posture, the posture by which a person stands without a banner and therefore without the need to conquer any ground. The voice seeks to describe this posture without surrounding it with decoration. It chooses restraint as the only rich medium available.

The writer is careful to say that he offers no example to others. He records an experience and insists that what was done was done under the pressure of a particular place and moment. Even the repeated thanks carry a caution within them. Gratitude here is not triumph disguised. It is not the victory of conscience. It is the shaping of a relation in which two groups found that they could work together with trust that did not require a ritual of oaths. The townspeople and the visitors did not form a club. They kept a company that required no avowal. They shared exposure to cold, to fatigue, to the sense that the world had subtracted its familiar promises. Out of that sharing came a temporary community that was content to remain unnamed. To name it would have been to claim it. Claiming would have forced it to perform itself. Performance would have damaged the very delicacy by which it lived.

The report gives a few objects the authority that only objects can have in such circumstances. There is mention of boiling water, of sheets airing on lines, of instruments set out with an attentiveness that resembles prayer. There is mention of the theatre of operations as a place where ordinary seriousness became a kind of liturgy without rites. The sentences move around these objects with the courtesy of someone who knows how to be in a room where a person labours. There is no wish to disturb. There is no wish to conceal. The words carry, more than anything else, the manner of someone who has learned to be helpful without noise. Help in these conditions is not a drama. It is a series of tasks that ask to be done by hands that do not require witnesses. The report insists on this and in doing so it allows the reader to stand near the work without appropriating it.

There is a sense in which the short piece is also a mirror held up to its author. He had spent years learning how to withdraw speech until only the necessary remained. He had practised listening in circumstances where listening was risky and not listening was impossible. He had learned that the page could be made to hold only what is stable after the collapse of adornment. In the huts and corridors his earlier lessons find their test and their use. The voice he chooses is not yet the voice of the later fictions. It is more cordial. It is more reliant on ordinary phrases that can be welcomed by strangers. Yet the withdrawals are already there. The sentences give way and make room. They keep a border around what belongs to others. They retreat as soon as they have reached the truth they were sent to fetch.

The title is a gift that the town gave to itself and that the writer repeats with careful attention. It calls the city a capital of ruins. The phrase does not ask to be admired. It names a fact with an irony that is not bitter. A capital is a centre where value is stored and managed. Here value appears precisely because storage has failed. Here management takes the form of care that leaves little behind. The ruins are not an emblem of beauty. They are a proof that life can gather around what is left when the visible signs of life have been removed. The broadcast makes this a theme and then releases it, so that the words can go on being true without being held too tightly.

A particular scene is described with a calm exactness that will stay with anyone who reads the pages. Babies are born in the huts. The new life is not permitted to become a counterweight to loss. It is not used to make a point about cycles of destruction and renewal. The births are given in the same tone as the other tasks, a tone that values each event because it belongs fully to the day and gives itself wholly to the hands present. The reader feels the dignity of this acknowledgement. Joy is not withheld. Neither is it amplified into meaning beyond its moment. If joy is to be worthy in a place of wreck, it must accept to be quiet and to flourish within the limits of the present. This lesson is not stated. It is enacted by the prose.

The writer returns more than once to the absence of account books. He chooses that detail because it carries the meaning of the whole. A hospital without an admission ledger is a hospital that trusts the reality of suffering over the comfort of records. A hospital without a timebook is a hospital that regards time as a gift to be used now rather than as a commodity to be measured and saved. There is a risk in working so. It is the risk that some will later demand proofs and that proofs will be lacking. The report, perhaps, is meant to stand in place of those proofs, but it refuses to become proof itself. It remains a witness. It is content to be a voice that says what was so, then steps back.

The manner of thanks is also a lesson. The writer speaks gratitude to his colleagues and to the people of the town, and he does so in a tone that refuses to claim any particular virtue for those who came. Gratitude goes out, and nothing returns except the chance to withdraw with grace. The Irish team will depart. The huts will be taken down. The beds will be redistributed or burned. The town will rebuild or it will not. The proper end of such work is to leave behind as little of oneself as possible, except the traces that are unavoidable when bodies have laboured in company. The report tends this end. It makes the words small so that departure can be simple.

The piece includes an admission that seems to carry the heart of the matter. It says that a modesty suited to the hour was discoverable only in the trough of disillusion. That is no praise for disillusion. That is recognition that when grand promises fail, a different virtue becomes available. It is not the austerity of denial. It is the clarity that obeys the present without giving the present more weight than it can bear. One sees in this sentence a task for language as well. Language in such a place must be modest. It must resist the lure of eloquence. It must take pleasure in precision, in the naming of a single act correctly done, of a single bed made, of a single cup of water offered and received. If a sentence can be spared, it should be spared. If a sentence must be written, it should be written as if it might still be useful when the paper has been lost.

The relation between those who came and those who were already there is the quiet centre of the report. It is described without romance. There were misunderstandings. There were the usual frictions of work done in fatigue. There were questions of authority that had to be settled without injury to anyone’s pride because pride would have been too expensive. Yet what the writer remembers most is a style of trust that appeared without fanfare. The town accepted help without indebtedness. The visitors offered help without contract or audit. This equilibrium is so rare that the writer seems almost unwilling to name it directly, lest naming disturb its balance. He prefers to show it alive in gestures and in phrases that carry more care than their function requires.

The huts and corridors teach another lesson that the writer takes with him into the later rooms of his own work. They teach him that the meaning of an act lies in its exact placement among other acts and that any attempt to lift it from its place will diminish it. An operation is scheduled at a certain hour not because that hour is essentially right, but because to keep it then will keep faith with everything else in the day. A patient is turned in bed at a given time not because a system says so, but because attentiveness will become untrustworthy if it is not allowed to have habits. The report honours these habits. The writing itself imitates them. It repeats a point, returns to a name, circles back to a scene, not to emphasise but to keep pace with a life that has learned to move carefully.

There is a temptation to read these pages as an origin story for later austerities. That would let the reader rest on a literary comfort. In truth the pages resist being placed in such a lineage. They seek only to preserve a relation to a place and to a people at a time when preserving anything was labour enough. If one hears a premonition of later voices, it is because the writer refused to assign to language a power it does not possess. He had learned this refusal in fields and in cellars long before he came to the town. The hospital gave that refusal a form that could be shared. The broadcast gives it a surface that can be touched by those who were not there.

The closing sentences give thanks once more. They repeat the name the town had given itself. They allow the phrase to resonate without interpretation. It remains ambiguous on purpose. It is a capital only if we agree that value can appear where value is not stored. It is a capital only if we concede that human worth can prepare a place for itself without foundations, that a few hours of attention given to another person may be the only enduring good, because it leaves nothing for anyone to own. The ruins are named and at the same time they are not named as a monument. A monument would contradict the lightness the writer has protected for several pages. The gift of the text is to let the town’s self naming be both a record and a modest refusal to be made into an emblem.

If one listens a final time for the tone that keeps these sentences from falling into either rhetoric or dryness, one hears a sound that belongs to work that has been done together and to silence that follows work honestly performed. There is respect in this silence. There is no wish to extend it beyond its right measure. When the labourer places a tool back on its shelf, there is a brief rest in the air. The report has that rest. It ceases where it should cease. It does not imagine that by ceasing it has finished anything. It simply stops and invites the reader to understand that the stopping is part of what has been described.

What remains for us who come to the pages long after the huts have gone is not a lesson. It is a practice that can be honoured with small imitations. One can learn to speak less quickly when praise would be easy. One can be careful with the names of others and reluctant to use them to strengthen the self. One can accept that the best records of good work are often missing, and that this absence does not erase the work. One can keep a memory of a humility that does not pose and does not despise itself. The writer offers these possibilities without drawing attention to them. He lets the few facts he supplies remain sufficient.

A final thought belongs to the image of water boiled over small stoves in a town without walls. That water stands for nothing beyond its use. It becomes sterile, it cleans, it warms, it is poured into a basin, it is poured into a kettle, it cools and must be boiled again. This cycle is unremarkable and yet it carries within it the only cycle that can be trusted when the larger orders have failed. The report knows this and keeps the water near the centre of its concern. The reader who wishes to repay the gift of these pages can do no better than to remember this image and to act by its standard. When the world is loud and the claims are many, boil the water and hold it ready. When speech is required, speak for the length it takes to pour a cup. When the cup is full, stop.