To Samuel Beckett's Doppelgänger
Translated from French by David Hoon Kim.
Read this essay in French here.
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I saw you as I was preparing to get off a plane that had just landed in Prague. It was my girlfriend who attracted my attention to you, a man in his fifties seated a row or two behind us, on the opposite side of the aisle. I remember being dumbstruck for a moment: The man I saw was a perfect double of Samuel Beckett.
This was in October of 2007. I came to Prague to visit a friend I had known in Paris, a city I had left three years earlier, not knowing my departure would be permanent. Though I was happy to visit an old friend, I was nevertheless conscious of all of the changes that had occurred since my departure from Europe. A story of mine had been published in The New Yorker, the nec plus ultra of literary magazines, and fresh from my success, I was trying to finish what I hoped would be my debut novel, a sweeping historical drama set in Paris against the backdrop of the German occupation. (I had put into a drawer my draft of an earlier novel, written in French.) I was also accompanied by Bosie, my girlfriend, who didn’t speak French. This meant we would need to use English between the three of us. Did I see already, in this linguistic shift, a turning point, a part of my life coming to an end, a door closing behind me? Even then, I was still convinced that, sooner or later, I would go back to France and continue on with my old life, my old friends, my unfinished thesis on bilingual writers (including Beckett) and the Parisian writing workshops where I had written my first short stories.
“I knew rather well the Franco-Irish writer’s eagle-like profile and piercing gaze, the stripe through his hair like a dash of white on a somber canvas.”
If the leitmotif of my story—and of my life—is the French language, the leitmotif of my French-language learning is Samuel Beckett. There was a time when I took a certain obsessive pleasure in going over photos of the bilingual Irish writer. Interviews with him are nonexistent, but there is no lack of images and photos taken by friends and paparazzi, by photographers famous and less famous. Perhaps, in the contemplation of such moments of his writerly life immortalized by the camera, I hoped to discover something new, something essential to my trajectory as a learner of French. Today, I have only to close my eyes to call forth a cavalcade of images as familiar to me as those of my childhood: Beckett at his country house in Ussy with his volumes of the Littré; Beckett at the museum contemplating a painting by Bram van Velde; Beckett having a meal at his friend Avigdor Arikha’s; Beckett sitting before a fountain next to his New York editor Barney Rosset; Beckett at the Luxembourg Garden dressed in an oversized coat; Beckett at the beach with his friends, bare-chested and wearing shorts and leather boots; Beckett draped in a doctor honoris causa robe; Beckett on the terrace of the Closerie des Lilas; Beckett inscrutable under gray skies on the rue Saint-Jacques...
So I knew rather well the Franco-Irish writer’s eagle-like profile and piercing gaze, the stripe through his hair like a dash of white on a somber canvas (a pattern that would inverse with age). I challenge anyone to describe more knowingly the slight swell above his upper lip caused by a hint of overbite as seen in photos showing one of his oh-so-rare smiles. All this to say that I was better equipped than most to recognize a “real” Beckett doppelgänger rather than someone bearing only a vague resemblance.
You were wearing steel-framed glasses and a white Oxford shirt whose sleeves you had rolled back just like your counterpart, who was never—or almost never—known to wear short-sleeved shirts. With your graying, slightly curled hair, you were a dead ringer for Beckett during the 1950s, around the time when he was writing his trilogie romanesque and the plays that would end up making his reputation. The beautiful portrait of him on the cover of my dog-eared edition of Molloy comes to mind. But beyond a mere physical resemblance, I recognized in your posture, your manner of holding yourself and even in the bearing of your head, the one who had declared that he preferred France in wartime to Ireland in peacetime.
That was supposedly his answer for why, during the war, he decided to join the Resistance despite being a citizen of a neutral country. It goes without saying that the decision to remain in a country at war and distinguish himself through acts of heroism alongside his French friends is to be applauded; but I can’t help but see in his choice a desire to remain in the French language, to not go backwards, back to his native country—a question of life and death, it would seem, for him. He knew what he was choosing when he chose “France in wartime.” It was with the same mindset that, ten years earlier, he had resigned from a prestigious post and turned his back on a ready-made career as a professor in Dublin.
Far be it for me to compare my life with his, but I find myself thinking of another France at war, an infinitely less dangerous one than Beckett’s, and which I chose to leave like a coward while telling myself I was headed towards better things. I have never stopped being haunted by my decision not to stay in France, but at the same time I haven’t forgotten all the unpleasantries, the casual racism, the near-aggressions, the exchanges with wannabe hoodlums and bored delinquents, some of whom saw in me an easy target, the ideal mark. I was often tense and on my guard walking around or taking the subway home late at night. There were métro stations I knew not to get off at to avoid running into the guys hanging around at the exit. Then there was the day when, coming back from a movie with a friend, we stumbled into a confrontation between rioters and police in a subway corridor at Châtelet–Les Halles. The tension was palpable, the two factions seemingly frozen in their poses. Many years later, while watching the scene in Paris est à nous filmed in one continuous take through the streets of Paris during the demonstrations linked to the events of Charlie Hebdo, I was reminded of the police in riot gear I had seen in that subway corridor.
Perhaps I’m still trying to redeem myself for my past cowardice, here in my “exile” in California where fate has led me to make my home. Is that why I do everything I can to live my daily life in French, reading books, watching films, listening to the radio and, of course, writing in the language? At the same time, I don’t speak it with anyone, which can get a bit lonely; but perhaps it’s this loneliness, this exhilarating loneliness, that I crave. Is that why I’m addressing this letter to you in French, knowing I will have to translate everything once I’m done and write these words—or an approximation of them—a second time?
More than fourteen years after the encounter, I find myself wondering if I should have interpreted your presence as a sign, a message. A warning. I didn’t listen to the one who had been my north star, my cicerone; I didn’t follow his example. As a result, he had sent forth his best doppelgänger so that I would realize my mistake: I had strayed from my path, I was no longer headed in the right direction. It would be many years before I understood what he was trying to tell me. I wanted the wait on the tarmac, during which I could neither move forward nor backward, to last forever, if only to avoid the inevitable decision: that of not returning to France, of starting to write in English, of becoming another failed expat.
“I wanted the wait on the tarmac, during which I could neither move forward nor backward, to last forever, if only to avoid the inevitable decision: that of not returning to France, of starting to write in English, of becoming another failed expat.”
I admit that the idea of approaching you crossed my mind. But what would I have said to you, and in which language? Should I have asked to have a photo taken with you like a vulgar tourist? You had no doubt already been accosted by strangers amazed at your resemblance with the famous writer. And as someone who takes it as a given that people wish to be left alone (it’s my Korean upbringing, I can’t help it), I didn’t see the point of walking up to you to stammer the usual banalities. No, better to remain where I was, maintain my distance and observe from afar, like the photos I had examined with the eye of an anthropologist specializing in literary celebrity.
Six years later, during a writing fellowship, I would abandon my historical novel about occupied Paris. “Maybe it’s time to give up on it,” a creative writing professor said to me one day in her office, as though reading my thoughts. It was possible I had been going on a bit too insistently about my difficulties, my lack of motivation. I would spend the next two years not writing, reinventing myself as a reseller of vintage toys, which for a while became my principal occupation, as much an addiction as a full-time hobby. I combed through auction listings and shops in Japan looking for Showa-era toys to sell online and to a network of collectors in the US. It wasn’t until the spring of 2016, in the aftermath of the November 13 attacks in Paris, that I finally started writing again, this time about the city that I had known, rather than the historical one I had tried in vain to write about in my failed novel. I wanted to mourn the Paris that had seen me come into being as a writer.
I can count on one hand the friends I have left in Paris, in France, in Europe, who would be happy to see their prodigal friend if I managed to go back, even if going back, for me, as the holder of a tourist visa, means leaving again once my allotted time is up. Really going back, going back in the truest sense of the word, would be no less complicated than going back in time.
The plane doors opened, and passengers started to disembark. Around me, people moved about, looking up from their phones and opening baggage compartments. The stewardesses were standing at the other end of the cabin as it slowly emptied. You waited there in your row near the window while your seatmates put away their things. You appeared slightly anxious, deep in your thoughts—or perhaps you were simply biding your time like the others.
I continued to stare at you with impunity. The idea of being able to “sense” the eyes of someone on one’s person never seemed more ridiculous. Strangely enough, I have no memory of what happened next, as though you existed only in that spatiotemporal gap between the tarmac and the airport. Just as I didn’t see you get on the plane in Paris, I didn’t see you exit the plane in Prague. Without Bosie at my side, I might have been tempted to think I had imagined the whole encounter. Today, when I try to picture you, what I see is Beckett’s silhouette traversing the airport – a gait I’ve only ever seen in photographs, though I know it so well I can no longer say how much of it is illusion and how much is the truth.
About the Author
David Hoon Kim took his first creative writing workshops in France, at the Sorbonne and other places, before attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Stegner Program and the Fine Arts Work Center. In French, he has published fiction in various Francophone reviews and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. In English, he is the author of Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost and his work has appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He can be found at davidhoonkim.com.
Read David’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Léonard Cotte.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
