I POSSESS, AS PART OF A precious inheritance of little literary magazines, the January 1950 issue of
Envoy, an obscure and short-lived journal edited in Dublin. The first item on the Contents page is “An Extract from
Watt, by Samuel Beckett”. The author was at the time barely known —
Waiting for Godot would open three years later — and the novels and plays that he had written in a sustained burst of inspiration during the late 1940s remained unpublished. But the voice is already unmistakable.
Readers at the time may have thought of the Joyce of Dubliners, and perhaps the dialogue of Henry Green, but one young actor read it and knew this was a new prophet. The 19-year-old Harold Pinter, on tour in the Irish provinces, picked up the same issue and was mesmerised. When he returned to England he succeeded in locating an unborrowed copy of Murphy in the Bermondsey Public Reserve Library, took it out and kept it. The reading and playgoing public, one might reasonably think, have since been fully repaid for the theft.
One wonders why more readers in 1938 had not been similarly captivated from the first words of Murphy. “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton.” The landscape, the language, the humour of Beckett’s novels anticipate the plays that would make him world famous, though he once said that he turned to writing drama only as a light relief from the novels.
The great trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable) contains scenes and images as famous as any in the oeuvre, from Molloy’s sucking stones, transferred endlessly between pockets and mouth, to the astonishing conclusion of The Unnameable, so often taken as the quintessence of heroic existentialism. One sentence surges hypnotically onward for three pages in a series of self-interrogations, reaching an ending that lifts the hairs on your head: “. .
. perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
One of the best of the many biographies of Beckett, by Anthony Cronin, is subtitled The Last Modernist. But he is also some kind of early post-modernist, in his embrace of unreliable narrators and fractured stories (another unforgettable ending, this time to Molloy: “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight, The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.”). His vision and his landscapes are central to the late-20th-century imagination, and much that has followed him has taken up his themes of bleakness and reduction. But they are very far from the full story.
For one thing, the number and ample proportions of those biographies should give pause for thought. Preoccupied with privacy and personally modest though he was, Beckett never discouraged those who wanted to write about his life. Nor was he ever anything but highly sociable. Old Irish friends continually descended on him in Paris, and he was endlessly ready to accommodate them, lend or give them money, and go drinking with them (though Brendan Behan presented too much of a challenge).
This made his genuinely reclusive French wife, Suzanne, despair: “Sam makes friends like a dog makes turds.” And though visits to Dublin made him feel, he said, like an amphibian on dry land, nonetheless he returned — for sporting fixtures, or to see his family. As with Joyce, there were aspects of Irishness that never left him. The famously cutting response to an interviewer should be remembered. “Vous êtes anglais, M. Beckett” — “ Au contraire.”
In Paris he had become a member of the Joyce circle, and the great man’s part-time amanuensis for Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s daughter Lucia developed an obsession with him (as did so many women). Unlike Joyce, Beckett did not demand to be kept minutely informed about Dublin topography, in order to carry it around with him.
Beckett was — like Yeats — an Irish Protestant (or ex-Protestant), and much has been made of this by those in search of the philosophical underpinnings of his work; he certainly plundered that cultural milieu, and the confident pretensions of many of his characters often echo it. An Irish friend once teased him that the tramps in Godot sometimes sounded as if they had PhDs: “How do you know they don’t?” was the Beckettian reply. Watching Rosaleen Linehan in Happy Days I was struck at how she played Winnie as the epitome of genteel Irish Protestant lady; Beckett’s own favourite interpreter of the role was not his adored Billie Whitelaw, but Madeleine Renaud, who gave it every haute-bourgeoise nuance.
Happy Days is a masterpiece because it moves as well as chills. Beckett once said that all his writing in English had a touch of sentimentality, but the memory of romance in that play far transcends sentiment: as when Winnie removes a strand of her hair, an episode he directed with minute attention. “Golden you called it, that day, the last guest gone (hand up in gesture raising a glass) to your golden . . . may it never (voice breaks). . . may it never .
. . That day . . . What day?” A strange echo of Moores Melodies, or Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, extends the emotional range; Winnie’s and Willie’s marriage is not just about the revolver in the handbag. Even those who dismiss biographical insights should not ignore the fact that he worked on the final draft in — of all places — Folkestone, waiting to marry Suzanne in 1961.
Reading or listening to Beckett, it is the beauty and eloquence of the language that conquers, as much as the radically melancholic vision, shot with humour though it is. In 1978 my father-in-law, a doctor from much the same sort of comfortable Dublin background as Beckett’s, but far from a playgoer or novel reader, noticed me reading Deirdre Bair’s biography. Noting the Dublin name (“Beckett with two t’s is always Irish”), he mentioned that Frank Beckett, who ran the family business, had been a close friend through the Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, and that “his brother, the playwright, now very well known” always came over for the summer championships. “We used to have dinner together every year.”
My jaw dropping at this unexpected side of his social life, I asked what he was like. “The brother?” asked my father-in-law, surprised. “Well, to tell you the truth, he never had much to say for himself.” Beckett would have liked the story; but it could not have been further from the truth.
Genius celebrated
The Beckett Centenary Festival — incorporating drama, film, talks, and music — is at the Gate Theatre in Dublin (www.gate-theatre.ie) and the Barbican in London (www.barbican.org.uk)
