THE FURNISHED ROOM

There is a poem by James Thomson (1834-82) called In the Room. The occupant has recently died yet the enclosed space hums and throbs with low life. Flies dash themselves against the pane; beetles and mice crawl out; and the various items of furniture - the misted mirror, the bare cupboard, the empty phial, the desolate bed - start conversing. The late owner did not eat well, we learn, but wrote and smoked late into the night. The mirror held him in contempt - for he left it undusted and smeared. The furniture disliked the poet, finding him obsessive, careless, indifferent to his surroundings, but they warmed to the presence of Lucy, the poet's one-time lover, who polished and repaired them. She also sang, laughed, brought life into the desolate space, while the poet, immersed in the fevers and fogs of creation, brought them no joy at all. His life was a pointless self-absorbed vigil - finally he poisoned himself. Each item of furniture has its say but it is the "broad majestic bulk" of the bed whose long experience encompasses the whole panorama: 

Lying in the bed is the corpse of the poet. His function, unlike the other items, has now been rendered obsolete: 

The tragedy of life carried on between four walls recalls Barbusse's novel L'Enfer (1908; translated as 'The Inferno' in English) wherein a nameless central character observes life through a peephole. He watches every mortal drama - birth, death, sex - being enacted a wall's thickness away. Seeing his life as inauthentic, he cannot be involved, save when he whips himself up into a sexual frenzy watching a woman undress or temporarily becomes engrossed in the dilemmas of others. It is as if he is seeing the shadow play within Plato's cave. The world is trapped in his containment - life always flows between boundaries, whether social or psychological.

The Hole in the World

In the context of the poem, the room is akin to a pregnant emptiness, a vacancy temporarily filled by someone's existence. A man dies leaving a corpse in an empty room. Who will fill the gap he has left, the hole in the world? A procession of anonymous beings may pass through the same space - achieving this and that and gradually faltering, falling, fading. The soiled objects left behind will be inherited by others, for a rented room, unlike a home, comes with pre-installed furniture, so each successive tenant has to accommodate to whatever is left behind. After sleeping on a bed that is uncomfortable, he may have to greet each dawn by looking up at wallpaper he detests. If the ceiling is low, he will have to duck down, and if there is no adjoining bathroom, he will have to move out and down the passage in order to answer a call of nature. Living in a single room one succumbs to the law of loneliness and limited space, a barren, loveless existence. The room stands for the caged self, the restrictions of society, the lonely ego set amid a few accoutrements:

"The objects in the room had an oppressive life of their own, like the atmosphere before a thunderstorm. His suedette zipper jacket hung from the door. It seemed to swell, as if the appearance of the jacket had come forward from the jacket itself. He tried looking at the wall, and the wall expanded and loomed towards him. He thought that it was wrong that objects should intrude so much. They were inescapable; great lumps of matter."

So opens The Furnished Room (1961) by Laura Del Rivo, a neglected classic of bohemian existence set in London of the fifties and later filmed - starring Alfred Lynch and Kathleen Breck - as West 11. The image of the jacket filling out is inimical, threatening, hallucinatory - an image of hollowness. The jacket wraps around nothing in the same way a godless individual wraps around no system of beliefs. The room becomes an image of frozen selfhood, the trapped ego seeking a definition of itself in the world beyond - yet always returning to the barren space that provides nominal security if minimal comfort.

The protagonist of The Furnished Room is a young man in his twenties, Joe Beckett, a lapsed Catholic who hates landladies, conformists, the voice of authority and his working environment. Constantly he feels lethargic, bored, oppressed by the futility of existence. When strong feelings well up in him, they tend to be violent and hate-filled: "Once, seeing a bald baby, the impulse to smash its skull had been so strong that he had clenched his fists in fear of giving way to it." Yet this is not typical of Beckett’s inner self, for he is in other ways a tolerant, compassionate individual, capable of small kindnesses towards downanouts and the hard-up. Smoking and drinking, he moves from cafe to cafe and pub to pub, engaging in conversations and one-night stands. Attractive to the opposite sex, his single erotic obsession is a young woman called Illsa, who is unhealthy-looking yet shapely and tantalising. Her superficiality emits a shallow sparkle which attracts him far more than the discourse of an intelligent woman. Del Rivo notates the rather dreadful jokey dialogues between Beckett and Illsa, concerning the current advertising catchphrases, with an accuracy that is almost embarrassing: 

"What makes you lyrical, loveable you?"

"I don't know."

"Sweet Song Shampoo. They have that ad about her being a social outcast; then she uses Sweet Song and a millionaire marries her because she is lyrical and lovable."

Beckett thought, then asked: "What do the family jump for?"

"Joy! The scrumpy, scrunchy, mm-m-mm breakfast food."

"Oh, you're too clever for me. You know them all."

"Sure. Friends wouldn't come to Mary's house until she switched to...?"

"No?"

"Fairy Godmother fabrics for curtains and loose covers."

Beckett said: "I thought it was going to be that one where visitors shun her house because of the lavatory smell."

"No, no. You mean the one where the tin of Kleenlav appears to her in a dream."

 The insubstantiality of the claims made for the products, in which dream-fantasy combines with the materialist ethic, creates a halting sensation in the reader, like stepping into a mirror-world. It is as if our own banality is leaking out of the page as we read. While Beckett and Illsa signal themselves as superior by dint of irony, they have no real alternative to what they are deriding. They surrender to the trivial which at least carries no pretensions.

The Tempter

A hint of the traditional morality drama flavours the narrative when Dyce appears. He represents the irrepressible corrupter, the incorrigible bounder, the frank amoralist. Dyce was born to the working classes and speaks like the false major in Separate Tables. Yet he is honest about his public school affectations - acknowledging that they render him more effective as a con-artist. His gospel is money; he looks at life through "money-coloured spectacles" and frankly admits his rapacity. "I see the money," he says, "like ether, permeating everything. Collecting in pockets here, banks there, financing industry, changing into power like matter changing into energy. And obtained by wits, work or violence."

Such exuberant cynicism recalls Harry Lime in The Third Man or Balzac's master criminal, Vautrin, yet Dyce is rather a scaled-down insignificant version with none of the commanding presence, the exuberant malice, the melodramatic swagger, the comical yet threatening bonhomie, of the latter two villains. Dyce is depthless, materialistic, vain, homophobic, heartless - yet Beckett, partly out of sheer perversity, likes him and is drawn into Dyce's plan to murder his aunt. (There is a trace of authorial design in this friendship, as one feels that Beckett, despite his nihilism and willed disagreeableness, is a much finer-grained soul than Dyce, and in real life the two men would have never been drawn to one another.) It is perhaps the cynical consistency of Dyce’s outlook, the incorrigible venality and unscrupulousness with which he presents himself, that makes him stand out as an individual. There is a completeness about his wholehearted rapacity.

Anguish

Dyce contrasts with Gash, the mystic recluse, despised by local youths, rumoured to be former rapist, a man unfit for decent society - yet it turns out that he was once wealthy, financially successful and sexually attractive. The stories about him being a pervert are false, only representative of the vicious fabrications the ignorant impose upon recluses and outsiders. Gash renounced his former existence of his own volition. His gospel, which has much in common with Buddhism, is based upon the expansion of insight, the exhilarating liberation, that comes with quelling desire:

"I was advising nothing," Gash said. "The point I wished to make was that freedom follows an act of rejection. I must add that, in my opinion, all men who are capable of greatness have to go through a preliminary trough of spiritual deadness. This deadness is a preliminary to rebirth. I believe that the great are drawn from the ranks of the twice-born who have undergone death and rebirth."

Dyce is quick to exploit the fact that, at the heart of Beckett's existence, is a kind of anguish, the anguish caused by recognition of the arbitrariness of the human situation. Stemming from a deep need for God, for the stabilisation of values a transcendent authority can confer, it provokes questions of the type: Why was I born? Where am I going? What purpose is there in an existence beset with so many contradictions? Why do I so often feel outside my own reality? Why do I not engage with myself in a profound, connective sense, like a cog with a wheel? What is the point of an existence that ends in non-existence? Am I really here? This state of mind has been classified as negativity or nausea and analysed at exhausting length but nevertheless in concrete terms by Sartre in Being and Nothingness:

"Anguish then is the reflective apprehension of freedom by itself. In this sense it is meditation, for although it is immediate consciousness of itself, it arises from the negation of the appeals of the world. It appears at the moment I disengage myself from the world where I had been engaged - in order to apprehend myself as a consciousness which possesses a pre-ontological comprehension of its essence and a pre-judicative sense of its possibilities. Anguish is opposed to the mind of the serious man who apprehends values in terms of the world and who resides in the reassuring materialistic substantiation of values. In the serious mood, I define myself in terms of the object by pushing aside a priori all possible enterprises in which I am not engaged at the moment; the meaning which my freedom has given to the world, I apprehend as coming from the world and constituting my obligations. In anguish I apprehend myself at one as totally free and as not being able to derive the meaning of the world except as coming from myself."

Sartre is saying that there is no actual freedom save those brief spells of contemplation between choice and commitment. And if one occupies that space of unknowing for too long a time, it becomes part of the anguish, for freedom cannot regard itself without souring into despair. Cracks widen in the psyche through which pours the all-engulfing nausea.

Claims of God

Essentially earnest and truth-seeking, Beckett sees religion as discredited and, although he sympathises with the hermetic Gash, lacks the commitment and staying power to become a lonely mystic. Neither will he forge a new creed out of his doubt like Rilke or Nietzsche; he lacks that element of grandiosity - of steadfast intellectual conviction - to inflate his renunciation into a personal gospel. In Chapter Five he visits his old family priest, Father Hogan, who introduces him to the intellectually alert Father Dominic. Beckett tells Father Hogan that he has lost his faith and that the Bible stories are blatant lies. But Father Dominic, who has been listening, nimbly argues that the Bible often embodies psychological rather than literal truth or "the externalisation into myth or symbol, of the paradoxes, experiences and aspirations of human nature." Beckett acknowledges this but argues that the claims of God should be those of an infallible authority, not the relativism allowed to poets, artists and other psychologists of the soul; besides, the church has murdered thousands in order to defend its doctrines and such violent punishments should at least be backed by a degree of infallibility. Rather surprisingly, Father Dominic agrees but argues that the loss of lives was less important than the maintenance of order down the centuries. The Church had to exert authority in order that a cohesive structure - however imperfect - be maintained.

The argument appeals to Beckett's rational side, but does not satisfy his craving for a deeper level of meaning. His work, at Messrs Union Cartons and Packaging, is anchored in tedium and he entertains no prospect of advancement. He admires meaningful dynamic activity, yet lacks all conviction to engage in it. Only the stronger sensations - sex, food, drink, animated discussion - jolt him into proper awareness. Without absolute values, one feels, he cannot orient his life towards a particular end. While eschewing an attitude of romantic revolt, he is basically a realist with an unsqueamish gaze that does not spare the most important person in his life:

"Beckett suddenly knew how she would be in ten years' time. She would no longer be a flame burning itself out. The sharp bone structure of her face would be blurred by softening flesh, and her slim body would have thickened. This hard-drinking, hard-living, desperately young product of the modern age would become a middle-class housewife. She would distract herself with bridge evenings, television evenings, coffee and chat in the High Street Tea Shoppe with women friends, and dances held by her husband's firm. She would cook Italian food because it was smart. From time to time, one of the neighbours would fall in love with her. She would use Family Planning because of buying a car and keeping a figure; but because of the female desire for maternity she would eventually have a child. The child would be as dull and ordinary as she was. This was the woman he loved."

 Despite her superficiality, Illsa is redeemed by a kind of honesty; she admits to Beckett that she loves pop tunes, advertising, parties, fashion and male flattery wholeheartedly. She has no need for higher values or intellectual diversions and would not dream of trying to survive as a free-standing individual. In the solitude of her parents' home in the countryside, she finds herself unhappy and bored

It is only through sex with Illsa and, to a lesser extent, other women, that Beckett can dilute a hatred which is instinctive rather than intellectual. There is more than a hint of arrogance in the way he disdains the conventional sympathetic response, even when studying photographs of the Jewish prisoners in a concentration camp. Suppressing the human dimension, he sees them as despicable, graceless objects rather than sad accidents of destiny:

"He loathed the prisoners for their ugliness, their suffering and their lack of pride. The photographs of these degraded sufferers, squatting behind the barbed wire, had revolted him so much that he thought it a pity the whole lot had not been gassed. He had preferred the photographs of the Nazi guards, who had at least looked clean and self-respecting. The prisoners, with their insistent, shameless misery, were as nauseating as Christ's bleeding heart in the picture."

Quite unconsciously, Beckett simultaneously subscribes to and detests the Protestant ethic, mocking the way in which the middle classes, while feigning shock, wallow in salaciousness:

"Once, walking in the woods near his parents' home, he had seen a respectable middle-aged man spying through the bushes at a courting couple. On another occasion, on a Tube platform, Beckett had noticed that one of the posters bore a pencilled scrawl, 'I want to play with your fanny.' The few passengers on the platform had been neat and stiffly dressed, and it had occurred to him that they were all a pretence, and that the only reach for truth was in those crude, semi-literate words scrawled on the poster."

In this balancing of the obscene against the decorous, Beckett demonstrates how his judgement has become distorted. The shock of the message scrawled on the poster raises the question of context rather than content, in that the middle class people on the Tube would be quite capable of recognising - perhaps acknowledging - the desire implicit in the words, only they would not choose to put it ‘quite like that’. Beckett's polemic is basically an empty rage against styles and manners rather than pungent social criticism.

Compassion and illumination

If Illsa is portrayed with detachment, the portrait of Beckett's mother is acute and compassionate. In the context of the novel she stands for family values, middle-of-the-road decency, passive suffering and self-sacrifice. She makes Beckett feel guilty for his lack of affection, his obliviousness to the qualities that she prizes most in a son, and her manner can be irritating and patronising - but her goodness and vulnerability override such reservations:

"Her thin face had a wan beauty as she spoke. A tremulous hope shone at the back of her eyes and flitted round her mouth. In spite of her physical frailty, she had indomitable willpower, love and humility. She only needed a man's touch to bring out the joy which was in her. Being denied this touch, she had bowed her shoulders patiently and got on with the housework. But the timid joy was there, waiting for the touch which could bring it to flower. When she spoke of things like the history in the Tower and the scenery of the Rhine Valley, there was a pathetic radiance in her face which could have transformed her if it had met an answering beam of love."

On learning that his mother is mortally ill with cancer, Beckett has the impulsive notion of taking her to Lourdes, believing that the strength of her faith might affect a cure. This inevitably leads him to the thought of funding the journey, and the obvious way to get the money is to accept Dyce's proposal to murder his elderly aunt. In his confused, slightly hypnagogic state, Beckett, who has been taking Thyrodine, a powerful stimulant, visits Dyce in a block of luxury flats and plans the murder. He takes a journey out of town, locates the house, breaks in and awakens the lady (the plan is that he should murder her during the course of the robbery), but drops a chesspiece in the process. When she confronts him, he cannot find it in himself to kill her - but she has a weak heart and collapses on the spot. Discovering she is dead, he escapes with the jewellery, but is traced by Silent, the crippled police informer, who has been shadowing the pair of conspirators. Silent tells Beckett that a fragment of imitation ivory was found in the house of the dead woman. Leaving the cripple, Beckett climbs the high ground between the valley and has a mystical experience, pantheistic in essence, of God pervading every form and aspect of human experience.

"He had lived in a negative hell that was absence of God. His present vision was that God was the common force manifested in all nature and in the conscious receptacle of his own soul. It was vital and yet peaceful like exultation. It gave him back his lost sense of meaning."

This insight he resolves to make the core of his new life. Without involving Dyce, he will confess to the police that he has committed manslaughter. After serving his sentence, he will study, work and become the resolute and positive individual he had always intended to be. (It seems extraordinary to what lower depths the ostensibly intelligent Beckett had to descend merely in order to realise his future potential.) His late-flowering optimism may be contrasted with the vision of Mersault at the end of Camus's The Outsider who, just before his execution, rejects visions and insights and sees everything bound together by a common futility. "What difference could they make to me, the deaths of others, or a mother's love, or his God; or the way a man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses, since one and the same fate was bound to "choose" not only me but thousands of millions of privileged people who, like him, called themselves my brothers...All alike would be condemned to die one day..."

From 'Murder as An Antidote to Boredom' by Paul Newman (Paupers Press £8.95) available from Abraxas.

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