Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  a dapper little man with a twinkling sense of humour [who] … conveyed an impression of elegance, even when, as was often the case, he was virtually penniless … He was as confident, talkative, and gregarious as Beckett was diffident, silent, and solitary.4

  Beckett and McGreevy had become acquainted in Paris in 1928. Though McGreevy was the older by thirteen years, the two hit it off at once. But their itinerant lifestyles meant that for much of the time they could keep in touch only via the mails. For a decade they exchanged letters on a regular, sometimes weekly, basis. Then, for unexplained reasons, their correspondence tailed off.

  McGreevy was a poet and critic, author of an early study of T. S. Eliot. After his Poems of 1934 he more or less abandoned poetry, devoting himself to art criticism and later to his work as director of the National Gallery in Dublin. In Ireland there has recently been a revival of interest in him, though less for his attainments as a poet, which are slight, than for his efforts to import the practices of international modernism into the introverted world of Irish poetry. Beckett’s own feelings about McGreevy’s poems were mixed. He approved of his friend’s avant-garde poetics, but was discreetly non-committal about his Catholic and Irish nationalist bent.

  Beckett’s letters from the 1930s are packed with comments on artworks he has seen, music he has heard, books he has read. Among the earlier of these, some are just silly, the pronouncements of a cocky tyro – ‘Beethoven’s Quartets are a waste of time,’ for example. (p. 68) Among the writers who have to endure the lash of his youthful scorn are Balzac (‘The bathos of style & thought [in Cousine Bette] is so enormous that I wonder is he writing seriously or in parody’) and Goethe (than whose drama Tasso ‘anything more disgusting would be hard to devise’). (pp. 245, 319) Apart from forays into the Dublin literary scene, his reading tends to be among the illustrious dead. Of English novelists, Henry Fielding and Jane Austen win his favour, Fielding for the freedom with which he interjects his authorial self into his stories (a practice he himself takes over in Murphy). Ariosto, Sainte-Beuve, and Hölderlin also get approving nods.

  One of the more unexpected of his literary enthusiasms is for Samuel Johnson. Struck by the ‘mad terrified face’ in the portrait by James Barry, he comes up in 1936 with the idea of turning the story of Johnson’s relationship with Hester Thrale (best known in our day for her voluminous diaries) into a stage play. It is not the great pontificator of Boswell’s Life who engages him, as the letters make clear, but the man who struggled all his life against indolence and the black dog of depression. In Beckett’s version of events, Johnson takes up residence with the much younger Hester and her husband at a time when he is already impotent and therefore doomed to be a ‘Platonic gigolo’ in the ménage à trois. He suffers first the despair of ‘the lover with nothing to love with’, then heartbreak when the husband dies and Hester goes off with another man. (pp. 352, 397, 489)

  ‘Mere existence is so much better than nothing, that one would rather exist even in pain,’ said Dr Johnson.5 The Hester Thrale of Beckett’s projected play will fail to understand that a man can prefer to love hopelessly than to feel nothing at all, and thus fail to recognize the tragic dimension of Johnson’s love for her.

  In the confident public man who privately struggles against listlessness and depression, who sees no point in living yet cannot face annihilation, Beckett clearly detects a kindred spirit. Yet after an initial flurry of excitement over the Johnson project, his own indolence supervenes. Three years pass before he puts pen to paper; halfway through Act One he abandons the work.6

  Before he discovered Johnson, the writer whom Beckett had elected to identify with was the famously active and productive James Joyce, Shem the Penman. His own early writing, as he cheerfully admits, ‘stinks of Joyce’. (p. 81) But only a handful of letters passed between Beckett and Joyce. The reason is simple: during the times when they were closest (1928–30, 1937–40) – times when Beckett acted as Joyce’s occasional secretary and general dogsbody – they were living in the same city, Paris. Between these two periods their relations were strained and they did not communicate. The cause of the strain was Beckett’s treatment of Joyce’s daughter Lucia, who was infatuated with him. Though alarmed by Lucia’s evident instability of mind, Beckett, much to his discredit, allowed the relationship to develop. When he finally broke it off, Nora Joyce was furious, accusing him – with some justice – of exploiting the daughter to maintain access to the father.

  It was probably not a bad thing for Beckett to be expelled from this dangerous Oedipal territory. By the time he was re-enlisted, in 1937, to help with the proofreading of Work in Progress (later Finnegans Wake), his attitude to the master had become less fraught, more charitable. To McGreevy he confides:

  Joyce paid me 250 fr. for about 15 hrs. work on his proofs … He then supplemented it with an old overcoat and 5 ties! I did not refuse. It is so much simpler to be hurt than to hurt. (p. 574)

  And again, two weeks later:

  He [Joyce] was sublime last night, deprecating with the utmost conviction his lack of talent. I don’t feel the danger of the association any more. He is just a very lovable human being. (p. 581)

  The night after he wrote these words Beckett got into a scuffle with a stranger in a Paris street and was stabbed. The knife just missed his lungs; he had to spend two weeks in hospital. The Joyces did everything they could to help their young compatriot, having him moved to a private ward, bringing him custard puddings. Reports of the assault made it into the Irish newspapers; Beckett’s mother and brother travelled to Paris to be at his bedside. Among other unexpected visitors was a woman Beckett had met years earlier, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, who would in due course become his companion and then his wife.

  The aftermath of the assault, reported to McGreevy with some bemusement, seems to have revealed to Beckett that he was not as alone in the world as he liked to believe; even more curiously, it seemed to confirm him in his decision to make Paris his home.

  Though Beckett’s literary output during the pre-war years is fairly thin – the Proust monograph; an apprentice novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, disowned and not published during his lifetime; the stories More Pricks Than Kicks; Murphy; a volume of poems; some book reviews – he is far from inactive. He reads extensively in philosophy from the pre-Socratics to Schopenhauer. On Schopenhauer he reports: ‘A pleasure … to find a philosopher that can be read like a poet, with an entire indifference to the apriori forms of verification’. (p. 550) He works intensively on Geulincx, reading his Ethics in the original Latin: his study notes have recently been unearthed and published as a companion to a new English translation.7

  A rereading of Thomas à Kempis elicits pages of self-scrutiny. The danger of Thomas’s quietism for someone who, like himself, lacks religious faith (‘I … seem never to have had the least faculty or disposition for the supernatural’) is that it can confirm him in an ‘isolationism’ that is, paradoxically, not Christlike but Luciferian. Yet is it fair to take Thomas as a purely ethical guide, stripping him of any transcendental dimension? In his own case, how can an ethical code save him from the ‘sweats & shudders & panics & rages & rigors & heart burstings’ that he suffers?

  ‘For years I was unhappy, consciously & deliberately,’ he continues to McGreevy in language notable for its directness (gone are the cryptic jokes and faux Gallicisms of the early letters),

  I isolated myself more & more, undertook less & less & lent myself to a crescendo of disparagement of others & myself … In all that there was nothing that struck me as morbid. The misery & solitude & apathy & the sneers were the elements of an index of superiority … It was not until that way of living, or rather negation of living, developed such terrifying physical symptoms that it could no longer be pursued, that I became aware of anything morbid in myself. (p. 258)

  The crisis to which Beckett alludes, the mounting sweats and shudders, had arrived in 1933, when after the death of his father his own health, physical and
mental, deteriorated to a point where his family became concerned. He suffered from heart palpitations and had nocturnal panic attacks so severe that his elder brother had to sleep in his bed to calm him. By day he kept to his room, lying with his face to the wall, refusing to speak, refusing to eat.

  A doctor friend had suggested psychotherapy, and his mother offered to pay. Beckett consented. Since the practice of psychoanalysis was not yet legal in Ireland, he moved to London, where he became a patient of Wilfred Bion, some ten years his senior and at the time a trainee therapist at the Tavistock Institute. In the course of 1934–5 he met with Bion several hundred times. Though his letters reveal little about the content of their sessions, they make it clear he liked and respected him.

  Bion concentrated on his patient’s relations with his mother, May Beckett, against whom he was consumed by pent-up rages yet from whom he was unable to cut himself loose. Beckett’s own way of putting it was that he had not been properly born. Under Bion’s guidance he achieved a regression to what in an interview late in life he called ‘intrauterine memories’ of ‘feeling trapped, of being imprisoned and unable to escape, of crying to be let out but no one could hear, no one was listening’.8

  The two-year analysis was successful insofar as it freed Beckett of his symptoms, though these threatened to resurface when he visited the family home. A 1937 letter to McGreevy suggests that he had yet to make his peace with his mother. ‘I don’t wish her anything at all, neither good nor ill,’ he writes.

  I am what her savage loving has made me, and it is good that one of us should accept that finally … I simply don’t want to see her or write to her or hear from her … If a telegram came now to say she was dead, I would not do the Furies the favour of regarding myself even as indirectly responsible.

  Which I suppose all boils down to saying what a bad son I am. Then Amen. (pp. 552–3)

  Beckett’s novel Murphy, completed in 1936, the first work in which this chronically self-doubting author seems to have taken genuine if transient creative pride (before long, however, he would be dismissing it as ‘a very dull work, painstaking, creditable & dull’), draws on his experience of the London therapeutic milieu and on his reading in the psychoanalytic literature of the day. (p. 589) Its hero is a young Irishman who, exploring spiritual techniques of withdrawal from the world, achieves his goal when he inadvertently kills himself. Light in tone, the novel is Beckett’s response to the therapeutic orthodoxy that the patient should learn to engage with the larger world on the world’s terms. In Murphy, and even more in Beckett’s mature fiction, heart palpitations and panic attacks, fear and trembling or willed oblivion, are entirely appropriate responses to our existential situation.

  Wilfred Bion went on to make a considerable mark on psychoanalysis. During the Second World War he pioneered group therapy among soldiers returning from front-line duty (he had himself suffered battle trauma in the First World War: ‘I died on August 8th 1918,’ he wrote in his memoirs).9 After the war he underwent analysis with Melanie Klein. Though his most important writings were to be on the epistemology of transactions between analyst and patient, for which he developed an idiosyncratic algebraic notation that he called ‘the Grid’, he continued to work with psychotic patients experiencing irrational dread, psychic death.

  Attention has been given of late, by both literary critics and psychoanalysts, to Beckett and Bion and what influence they might have had on each other. Of what actually passed between them we have no record. Nevertheless, one can venture to say that psychoanalysis of the kind that Beckett underwent with Bion – what one might call proto-Kleinian analysis – was an important passage in his life, not so much because it relieved (or appears to have relieved) his crippling symptoms or because it helped (or appears to have helped) him to break with his mother, but because it confronted him, in the person of an interlocutor or interrogator or antagonist in many ways his intellectual equal, with a new model of thinking and an unfamiliar mode of dialogue.

  Specifically, Bion challenged Beckett – whose devotion to the Cartesians shows how much he had invested in the notion of a private, inviolable, non-physical mental realm – to re-evaluate the priority he gave to pure thought. Bion’s Grid, which accords phantasy processes their full due in mentation, is in effect an analytic deconstruction of the Cartesian model of thinking. In the psychic menagerie of Bion and Klein, Beckett may also have found hints for the protohuman organisms, the Worms and bodiless heads in pots, that populate his various underworlds.

  Bion seems to have empathized with the need felt by creative personalities of Beckett’s type to regress to pre-rational darkness and chaos as a preliminary to an act of creation. Bion’s major theoretical work, Attention and Interpretation (1970), describes a mode of presence of analyst to patient, stripped of all authority and directedness, that is much the same (minus the jokes) as that adopted by the mature Beckett toward the phantom beings who speak through him. Bion writes:

  To attain the state of mind essential for the practice of psycho-analysis I avoid any exercise of memory; I make no notes … If I find that I am without any clue to what the patient is doing and am tempted to feel that this secret lies hidden in something I have forgotten, I resist any impulse to remember …

  A similar procedure is followed with regard to desires: I avoid entertaining desires and attempt to dismiss them from my mind …

  By rendering oneself ‘artificially blind’ [a phrase that Bion quotes from Freud] through the exclusion of memory and desire, one achieves … the piercing shaft of darkness [that] can be directed on the dark features of the analytic situation.10

  While the decade of the 1930s may have felt to Beckett like years of blockage and sterility, we can in retrospect see that they were being used by deeper forces within him to lay the artistic and philosophical – and perhaps even experiential – foundations of the great creative outburst that came in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Despite the idleness for which he continually castigates himself, Beckett did an enormous amount of reading. But his self-education was not just literary. In the course of the 1930s he turned himself into a formidable connoisseur of painting, with a concentration on medieval Germany and the Dutch seventeenth century. The letters from his six-month visit to Germany are overwhelmingly about art – about paintings he has seen in museums and galleries or, in the cases of artists not allowed to exhibit publicly, in their studios. These letters are of unique interest, giving an intimate glimpse into the art world in Germany at the peak of the Nazi offensive against ‘degenerate art’ and ‘Art-Bolshevism’.

  The moment of breakthrough in Beckett’s aesthetic Bildung comes during the German visit, when he realizes he is able to enter into dialogue with paintings on their own terms, unmediated by words. ‘I used never to be happy with a picture till it was literature,’ he writes to McGreevy in 1936, ‘but now that need is gone’. (p. 388)

  His guide here is Cézanne, who came to see the natural landscape as ‘unapproachably alien’, an ‘unintelligible arrangement of atoms’, and had the wisdom not to intrude himself into its alienness. In Cézanne ‘there is no entrance anymore nor any commerce with the forest, its dimensions are its secret & it has no communications to make’, Beckett writes. (pp. 223, 222) A week later he pushes the insight further: Cézanne has a sense of his own incommensurability not only with the landscape but – on the evidence of his self-portraits – with ‘the life … operative in himself’. (p. 227) Herewith the first authentic note of Beckett’s mature, post-humanist phase is struck.

  It was to some degree a matter of chance that the Irishman Samuel Beckett should have ended his life as one of the masters of modern French letters. As a child he was sent to a bilingual French–English school not because his parents wished to prepare him for a literary career but because of the social prestige of French. He excelled in French because he had a talent for languages, and when he studied them did so diligently. Thus there was no pressing reason why in his twenties he should have learned Ger
man, beyond the fact that he had fallen in love with a cousin who lived in Germany; yet he worked up his German to a point where he could not only read the German classics but also write correct if stiff formal German himself. Similarly he learned Spanish well enough to publish a body of Mexican poetry in English translation.

  One of the recurring questions about Beckett is why he turned from English to French as his main literary language. On this subject a revealing document is a letter he wrote, in German, to a young man named Axel Kaun whom he had met during his 1936–7 tour of Germany. In the frankness with which it addresses his own literary ambitions, this letter to a comparative stranger comes as a surprise: even to McGreevy he is not so ready to explain himself.

  To Kaun he describes language as a veil that the modern writer needs to tear apart if he wants to reach what lies beyond, even if what lies beyond may only be silence and nothingness. In this respect writers have lagged behind painters and musicians (he points to Beethoven and the silences in his scores). Gertrude Stein, with her minimalist verbal style, has the right idea, whereas Joyce is moving in quite the wrong direction, toward ‘an apotheosis of the word’. (p. 519)

  Though Beckett does not explain to Kaun why French should be a better vehicle than English for the ‘literature of the non-word’ that he looks forward to, he identifies ‘offizielles Englisch’, formal or cultivated English, as the greatest obstacle to his ambitions. (p. 518) A year later he has begun to leave English behind, composing his new poems in French.

  16. Samuel Beckett, Watt

  In June 1940 Paris was occupied by German forces. Although he was a citizen of a neutral country, Beckett offered his services to the French Resistance. In 1942, fearing imminent arrest by the Gestapo, he and his wife fled Paris and found refuge on a farm near Roussillon in Provence.