THE COLLECTORS: How Matt Bell accidentally channeled Beckett

Matt Bell, The Collectors, Caketrain, Pittsburgh, 2009, Free

“A voice comes to one in the dark.” So begins Company, Samuel Beckett’s dense novella from 1980. Company concerns, perhaps, a man recollecting his youth. There are scenes from a childhood, at least. A boy recalls one of his father’s romantic affairs. That same boy, ostensibly, recovers a box from a shed in which he left weeks earlier a mole, now rotten and flowering with mold.

Matt Bell’s new book, The Collectors-released this summer by Caketrain-is likewise a compact novella about deterioration and recollection. It begins, not dissimilar to Company, “How long has Homer been sitting here in the dark?” The parallels to Beckett do not end there, by any means. In fact, The Collectors often reads like a thematic distillation of Beckett’s oeuvre. The protagonists of The Collectors, the Collyer brothers, live alone in a dark mansion where they spend most of their time wasting away amidst disintegrating piles of newspaper. They’re the sort of men—sexless, and solitary—one finds in Beckett’s mid-century work. In Endgame, the blind Hamm wakes and sleeps in a wheelchair. In The Collectors, where there isn’t room enough to move, Homer Collyer, also blind, sits on an old leather chair in his reading room, eating only oranges. “After Homer lost his sight, his brother [Langley] put him on a diet of nothing but oranges, convinced that the fruit would restore his sight.” This is a marvelously absurd prescription, and one Beckett might have applauded. At the beginning of Krapp’s Last Tape, in one of the play’s few light moments, Krapp, perennially constipated, eats two bananas.

Though no more teleological, Bell’s work is more immediately accessible than Beckett’s—and despite some brutal passages, less cruel.

Wherever Langley is, he’s quiet now too, or else something worse, something Homer doesn’t want to think about. He feels bad enough for not hurrying, for not being able to find his brother and save him. His lungs ache and his ankles throb… He centers himself in front of the piano and starts to play, then stops when the sound comes out wrong. He sighs, starts over with more realistic expectations.

Beckett is devoid of so many things, not least of which is recognizable remorse. One cannot imagine Moran, in that more conventional half of Molloy, feeling guilty about abandoning his son; Molloy himself, in that ninety page second paragraph, may regret his compulsion to move, but of killing a stranger in the woods or having sex with his mother, he isn’t exactly penitent.

Oh well, I may as well confess it now, yes, I once rubbed up against [a woman]. I don’t mean my mother, I did more than rub up against her. And if you don’t mind we’ll leave my mother out of this. But another who might have been my mother, and even I think my grandmother, if chance had not willed otherwise…It was she made me acquainted with love.

Bell’s characters, conversely, seem to long for each other. The Collyer brothers, as inept as they may be, attempt to help each other. Abandoned by their father, they’ve spent the entirety of their lives attempting to reconstruct the home, and the family, that the patriarch discarded. Even in this passage—certainly the most enigmatic in a book replete with mysteries—one finds a desire to recapture the past, rather than eradicate history:

Now you have [your father] trapped, boarded behind the doors of the second floor, and he will never escape, not as long as you live. Every stray hair still clinging to a shirt collar, every scrap of handwriting left in the margins of his texts, all of it is him, is who he was. It is all that’s left, but if you keep it safe then it is all you’ll ever need.

Last week I wrote to Matt Bell to tell him Flatmancrooked would be posting a review of The Collectors in High Horse. “I’m a big fan of Beckett,” I wrote, “and I love to see this generation of writers reacting to his work in their fiction.” To my surprise he responded by saying:

You know, the funny thing is that I’ve never read Beckett until right now (I’m reading the Three Novels at the moment). Yet, he’s come up in discussion after discussion about my work, in blurbs and in reviews and in writing group and so on. As soon as I started reading Molloy, I saw why, and I saw how he had influenced so many of the people I’ve been influenced by. But there hasn’t been any direct influence on me to this point, although I’m sure there will be going forward.

To have engaged unknowingly in such an exact dialogue with Beckett is astounding. That alone is worthy of note. One can’t help but think of Pierre Menard composing word for word the Quixote, having never read Cervantes. It’s exciting to think what Bell will tackle next. He may abandon the subjects of solitude and decay, or he may improve the canon.

By James Kaelan