Preparing for Godot

By Paul Gray

MERCIER AND GAMIER by SAMUEL BECKETT 123 pages. Grove Press. $6.95.

Beckett completed this terse comic novel (in French) in 1946, then shelved it, perhaps because it retained too much luggage from traditional fiction: plot, ambulatory characters, glimmers of recognizable settings and human haunts. In Waiting for Godot, which he wrote soon after, Beckett said good riddance to such trappings and began the task that has occupied him ever since: willfully writing himself into a corner where there is only room enough for the mind to contemplate itself. He is the king of solipsists.

Mercier and Camier was finally published in France in 1970, and Beckett then translated it into English. In the light of all he has written since, this early novel seems positively pastoral. Two seedy stumblebums named Mercier and Camier, forerunners of Estragon and Vladimir in Godot, set out on a mysterious journey through vaguely Irish scenery. Mercier is "a big bony hank with a beard," and Camier has a "red face, scant hair, four chins, protruding paunch, bandy legs, beady pig eyes." Naturally their amblings attract attention. A policeman who sees them warns: "This is a sidewalk, not a circus ring."

But not in this novel. The universe here is the biggest of all big tops. Mercier and Camier are unwilling clowns in a performance they do not under stand. They are saddled with props -- a reluctant umbrella, a sack, a raincoat and a bicycle -- and trip helplessly into Alphonse-Gaston stage routines. They are the butt of exquisitely timed mal functions. Their umbrella refuses to open just as the rain, "acting on behalf of the universal malignity," comes down in buckets.

To their credit, the voyagers treat their predicament with the contempt it deserves. While describing the weather to Mercier, who cannot bear to look, Camier insults it in the careful cadences of French primer prose: "A pale raw blotch has appeared in the east, the sun presumably. Happily it is intermittent, thanks to a murk of tattered wrack driving from the west before its face."

Ruin and Collapse. It is axiomatic in Beckett's work that the concept of purpose is beyond comprehension. This may not be true, but if granted only for the sake of argument, everything tumbles into place. Waiting for Godot was after all the critical knuckle cracking, simply a play about waiting. Mercier and Camier are waiting under the illusion that they have some place to go, though they do not know where or why. They keep returning home to look for lost possessions or items they have al ready junked as superfluous. Along the way, pub stops and a supporting cast of fellow grotesques help to pass the time. Characteristically, Beckett's acknowledgement of free will frames the novel's anticlimax. The two men have the option of spending the night in a moldering, deserted house or falling down from exhaustion: "Now we must choose, said Mercier. Between what? said Camier. Ruin and collapse, said Mercier."

Beckett's peculiar genius is to set up such Hobson's choices while squeezing them for all the farce they will yield. His is a Buster Keaton, deadpan humor that shrivels in the explaining. Mercier and Camier is as hilarious, in gasps, as anything he has written. The novel's coolly mannered prose disguises outrageous statements until the instant they land. There is also cruelty in Beckett's method (Mercier is comforted briefly by the sight of a dead and bleeding wom an) and surprising moments of compassion. When Mercier and Camier part, they lose the small comforts of their mutual buffoonery -- supporting hands and shoulders, conversational noise, animal warmth. That loss, as the book ends, is no laughing matter.

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