Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett

by James Knowlson

  Then we came to live in Paris in 1949 and we lived there for a few years. I knew Beckett was in Paris but I didn’t actually contact him. I hesitated to, you see I’d been under suspicion, I’d spent a long time in Allied custody or whatever you call it, whereas he’d been decorated by De Gaulle, so I said, ‘No, I can’t very well’.† Although I did mention that to him later and he said, ‘You should have.’ And so I should have, you know, because whatever Beckett personally might have thought you must judge a writer by his [work].

  The last time I met Sam Beckett was in that very cold winter in Paris in ‘87. He gave me an appointment in this hotel. I was a bit early so I went to a café near it. Then I went into the vestibule. I hadn’t seen him for exactly fifty years, which must have been ‘37. And there he was, standing by the reception desk in, as it was very cold, a sort of overcoat and beret, ready, it looked to me, for flight -which was chilling. And the first few minutes were chilling. We went into the lounge and he ordered some wine. For the first five minutes I was sorry I had come. It wasn’t particularly easy, not easy at all but gradually it warmed up and there was real warmth, I felt, and for me it was a moving experience, and we talked. He said, of course, he was through with Ireland. I knew what his attitude was already, but he asked about Dublin and about mutual [acquaintances]. Of course, when I came back to Ireland and met one or two gossip columnists, to whom I said that I did meet him, there were certain things which I did not repeat, naturally. One thing that he said was, ‘You know, Francis, my days are filled with trivia’. And that is sad. And I said to him how much I admired, as I did, and do, the Trilogy [Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable]. Geoffrey Elborn had met him, a year or two before, and he had given Geoffrey a first edition of this Trilogy inscribed for me and I said how grateful I was for that. And then he said, ‘You know, Francis, a different person wrote that’. And it all seemed to me sad.

  * Reverend Dr Brian McConnell, letter to James Knowlson, 15 February 1992.

  * Morris Sinclair (1918-), the son of William and Frances (‘Cissie’) Sinclair. Letters to James Knowlson, 1991-2, text agreed by Morris Sinclair in 2005. Morris played the violin. He gave Beckett German lessons in the mid-1930s; in exchange Beckett gave him French lessons. They became close friends, although it was very much a master/pupil relationship, with Beckett, the master, offering Morris advice on his career prospects.

  * Thomas MacGreevy’s poem was entitled ‘Anglo-Irish’. The line quoted above is explained by the earlier lines ‘And the gramophone starting/Bach’s Magnificat.’ Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy, an annotated edition by Susan Schreibman, Dublin, Anna Livia Press and Washington DC, Catholic University of America Press,

  * Vasa Prihoda (1900-60) was the most internationally successful Czech violinist of his generation and also perhaps the most controversial. He was thought of by some as a ‘string gymnast’ with his playing of Paganini and Bach.

  * Georges Belmont (Pelorson) later recalled that it was The Tempest that he and Beckett read together. ‘Remembering Sam’, Beckett in Dublin, ed. S. E. Wilmer, Dublin, The Lilliput Press, 1992, pp. 111-12.

  * The first paragraph of Emile Delavenay’s memories of Beckett and his predecessor at the Ecole Normale, Tom MacGreevy, is a fusion of a letter to Richard Ellmann, 17 March 1982 (copy sent to us by Emile Delavenay) and a personal interview by the editors with Delavenay at his home in Vence in 1991. The rest is taken from that same 1991 interview. The extract from the letter to Ellmann is printed by kind permission of Delavenay’s daughter, Claire Tomalin, and Lori Curtis of the University of Tulsa.

  * Published as Emile Delavenay, Témoignages. D’un village Savoyard au village mondial. 1905-1991, Aix-en-Province, Diffusion Edisud, 1992.

  † Jean Rolland was a member of the Ecole Normale rugby XV with whom we were not able to get in touch. The ‘Never again’ story referred to here was also recounted to James Knowlson in letters from two other members of the team, Ulysse Nicollet and Camille Marcoux. See Damned to Fame, pp. 93-4.

  * Beckett’s reply is taken from JK’s interview with Martin Esslin.

  † Duncan Scott’s memory of a conversation with Beckett about Joyce is published for the first time with the agreement of his widow, Bernadette Scott. For further information about Duncan Scott, see Ch. 7, ‘Memories of Beckett in London and Berlin’, pp. 2i4ff.

  * Beckett may well have had in mind here Richard McDougall’s The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier. An Intimate Portrait of the Literary and Artistic Life in Paris between the Wars, London, Millington, 1976, but there is no reference to the quarrel between Joyce and Beckett in this book. He may have confused it with Noel Riley Fitch’s Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation. A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties, New York/London, W. W. Norton, 1983, which lay on his desk during several of my own (JK’s) visits to see him and in which the upset of Joyce over Lucia and Beckett is indeed discussed, pp. 303, 307.

  * All these memories of Beckett as a lecturer in French at Trinity College, Dublin were written down in 1997-8 when, almost two years after the publication of the biography, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett, we sent a circular letter with many questions to students who had been taught by Beckett in 1930 and 1931. These reminiscences, unless otherwise noted, are taken from their replies to our questions. We are grateful to Professor Barbara Wright, then the Dean of the Faculty of Arts in TCD, for putting us in touch with the Alumni Office and to the staff of that office for kindly supplying us with a list of the addresses requested.

  † Samuel Beckett, letter to Tom MacGreevy, 11 March 1931, TCD.

  * The opening sentence of Beckett’s study, Proust, London, Chatto and Windus, 1930, p. 3, is ‘The Proustian equation is never simple’.

  * These reminiscences of Rachel Burrows are reprinted with permission from ‘Interview with Rachel Burrows, Dublin, Bloomsday, 1982’ by S. E. Gontarski, Martha Fehsenfeld and Dougald McMillan, Journal of Beckett Studies, nos ii and 12, 1989, pp. 6-15.

  * Grace West’s remarks are taken from a letter to James Knowlson, 4 July 1997 and from an interview with her recorded in 1997. I thank Mrs West’s son, Terence, for the photograph and for the use of her lecture notes later in this book (see Appendix).

  * Francis Stuart (1902-2000). Irish writer; author of over thirty novels and a famous autobiographical work entitled Black List, Section H, Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. He held the position of Saoi, the highest honour which the arts body of Ireland, Aosdana, can bestow on an artist. Interview with JK.

  * Jack Doyle (1913-78), known as the ‘Gorgeous Gael’, was a boxer, singer, wrestler, and playboy. He achieved fame, not to say notoriety, in the 1930s and during and after the Second World War.

  * Francis Stuart, Women and God, London, Jonathan Cape, 1931.

  † This letter from Beckett is referred to in a diary entry made by Stuart on 9 August 1942. ‘Selections from a Berlin Diary, 1942’, The Journal of Irish Literature, vol. IV, no. 1, Jan. 1976. Some doubt has since been cast on the authenticity of this entry. Beckett himself neither remembered writing it nor thought it likely that he could have written from Paris to an address in Germany at that time (letter to Francis Wheale, 10 August 1981). However, if the political circumstances allowed such a communication, it would certainly have been possible, as Beckett’s chief Resistance friends were not arrested until 14, 15 and 16 August and Beckett and Suzanne did not flee from the Gestapo until 16 August 1942.

  * Geoffrey Elborn, Francis Stuart: A Life, Dublin, Raven Arts Press, 1990.

  † Francis Stuart was imprisoned and interrogated after the war for his broadcasts to Ireland while he was living in Berlin.

  3

  The Bad Years

  Beckett and Thomas MacGreevy, London, 1934-5

  Biography, 1933-9

  A few months after the death of his father in the summer of 1933, Beckett left Dublin for London to undergo a course of psychotherapy to help him to cope with his increasingly frequent attacks
of panic and depression. These were, as Beckett himself described them, ‘bad days’ both for his psychological and emotional stability and for his efforts to make a living as a writer.

  The stories that he had written about an Irish intellectual, Belacqua Shuah, were published in 1934 as More Pricks than Kicks, but they had little commercial or critical success. His poems were then published in 1935 by a friend’s small private press, under the title Echo’s Bones and other Precipitates, but, again, they made little impact. His attempts to carve out a career in London as a reviewer and critic also failed. He worked on a novel, Murphy, which, when completed in June 1936 after his return to Dublin, was turned down by numerous publishers until it was finally published by Routledge in 1938. But again it sold fairly badly. While he was living in London, he read widely, including several books on psychology and psychoanalysis and went to a number of classical concerts. He also visited the Bethlem Royal Hospital (a mental hospital) where one of his old friends, Geoffrey Thompson, worked as a doctor. His visits to the hospital had a major part to play in the new novel, Murphy.

  Returning to Dublin, his relations with his mother deteriorated badly and there were countless arguments and quarrels. Things came to a head in 1936 when Beckett (considered by his mother as unemployed, although he was trying hard to write) drank heavily, had an affair with a childhood friend of the family - a married woman at that - then smashed up his car, injuring another woman whom he adored. In an attempt to escape from these troubles and dogged by ill health, he toured Nazi Germany from October 1936 to April 1937, where he indulged his passionate interest in painting and met a number of Jewish painters who were the victims of Nazi persecution. He also witnessed at first hand the furore that modern art was creating inside the Nazi party - many paintings were being physically removed from the walls of galleries during his stay.

  On returning home, under pressure to find gainful employment and not wishing to remain in Ireland, he applied for a lectureship in Italian at Cape Town University in South Africa. Failing to be appointed, he upset his mother still further by agreeing to act as a key witness in a celebrated libel case that his uncle, Harry Sinclair, was bringing against Oliver St John Gogarty. Then, after a blazing row with his mother, he left Ireland definitively to settle in Paris late in 1937, renewing his friendship with the Joyces and becoming friendly there with a number of painters and writers. Soon after that, in January 1938, he was stabbed by a pimp, the knife narrowly missing his heart.

  He had a number of affairs in Paris, including one with the American art collector, Peggy Guggenheim, and another with a Frenchwoman, Suzanne Descheveaux-Dumesnil, an accomplished pianist, whom he had met ten years earlier and who renewed their acquaintance by visiting him in hospital after the stabbing. Although they lived together soon after their reunion, they did not marry until 1961.

  Beckett’s wife, Suzanne, at sixty.

  Suzanne as a young woman.

  Beckett described these years in Paris before the outbreak of the Second World War as a ‘period of lostness, drifting around, seeing a few friends - a period of apathy and lethargy’. None the less, he was evolving in different directions as a writer, writing poems in French and translating Murphy into French, with the help of a friend, Alfred Péron.

  Psychotherapy and Murphy

  Samuel Beckett After my father’s death, I had trouble psychologically. The bad years were between when I had to crawl home in 1932 and after my father’s death in 1933 [when I was] in London. I’ll tell you how it was. I was walking up Dawson Street and I felt I couldn’t go on. It was a strange experience I can’t really describe. I found I couldn’t go on moving. So I had to rush in to the famous pub in Dawson Street, Davy Byrne’s. I don’t know where I was going, maybe up to Harcourt Street [station]. So I went into the nearest pub and got a drink - just to stay still. And I felt I needed help. So I went to Geoffrey Thompson’s surgery. Geoffrey at that time was still working in Dublin, working in the Lower Baggot Street Hospital as a heart specialist. And he wasn’t there; [he was] still at Baggot Street. He hadn’t finished his consultations. So I waited outside. When he got there, I was standing by the door. He gave me a look over, found nothing physically wrong. Then he recommended psychoanalysis for me. Psychoanalysis was not allowed in Dublin at that time. It was not legal. So in order to have psychoanalysis, you had to come to London. He himself wanted to get some training as a psychiatrist. So very bravely he took himself off to London - he was an established doctor in Dublin at the time. Before you could become a psychiatrist, you had to undergo psychoanalysis yourself. So he tried to get it arranged so that I could go to the man he was going to see [J. A. Hadfield]. I don’t know why but I finished up with [Wilfred Ruprecht] Bion to whom I used to go, I think, twice a week. It was going to cost about £200. So, of course, there was no question of my financing the course myself. So my mother paid for my course of treatment; she decided that she would finance me. The allowance from my father’s will wasn’t enough to pay the fees. So my mother gave me the money. That was when I started psychoanalysis with Bion. I used to lie down on the couch and try to go back in my past.

  After about six months [a gross underestimate of the time that he spent with Bion, which was almost two years] I decided that I’d had enough. We decided to call it a day and we parted very amicably. Well, I thought it wasn’t doing me any good. I was using my mother’s money and she couldn’t afford it. But I think it probably did help. I think it helped me perhaps to control the panic. I didn’t have that feeling of panic or dizziness or something. I think it all helped me to understand a bit better what I was doing and what I was feeling. I certainly came up with some extraordinary memories of being in the womb, intra-uterine memories. I remember feeling trapped, being imprisoned and unable to escape, of crying to be let out, but no one could hear, no one was listening. I remember being in pain but being unable to do anything about it. I used to go back to my digs and write notes on what had happened, on what I’d come up with. I’ve never found them since but maybe they still exist somewhere. I stayed on in London, seeing Geoffrey Thompson of course. He was working at the Bethlem Royal Hospital [a famous mental hospital]. He had finished his analysis and was working at this first job as a psychoanalyst. Or perhaps it was simultaneous and he hadn’t quite finished. But he had got this job in order to make enough money to pay for his analysis. And then I went to the Bethlem and saw him. I remember going to visit him at the hospital. I remember the man that I wrote about in Murphy. I remember him very clearly. Mr Endon was loosely based on him.

  John Koblef* One night in June 1971 [in Paris], as we were strolling after dinner at the Closerie des Lilas, Sam got to talking about how he had worked years ago. When writing Murphy, he had needed a psychiatric clinic upon which to model his own Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. Being a friend of the psychiatric resident at the Bethlem Royal Hospital, near London, that was the institution he chose, visiting frequently between 1935 and 1938.† ‘I often saw a patient who claimed he had hereditary syphilis and begged the doctors to kill him,’ Sam recalled. ‘I finally said to him, “You have knives and forks at meals. Why don’t you …?” ‘ The madman was furious, as Sam suspected he would be. ‘No real encounter was wanted’, Sam continued. ‘Stop the game.’ In the novel, Murphy, an avid chess player like his author, is a ward supervisor in a madhouse. Mr Endon, his opponent, is a mad man. They make meaningless manoeuvres, the pieces soon returning to their starting position. ‘Stop the game’, Sam concluded. ‘No encounter wanted. I think that’s what the chess game in Murphy meant.’

  Duncan Scott‡ He told me once about a man undergoing voluntary hypnosis, and who was gradually being taken back to the moment of his birth: first three years old, then two, then one, then … the birth itself. At this point the man cried out, ‘I’ve got a terrible pain in my neck.’ Sam: ‘Well, the whole thing seemed highly theatrical and suspect, but I liked that. Birth is a pain in the neck.’

  This tale led him to another, about the time when
he was living in World’s End, writing Murphy, and receiving psychiatric treatment, which his mother paid for. He went because he was suffering from terror in the night. His heart would thump wildly and he would be totally unable to sleep. Others were lodging in the same house, but he couldn’t even cry out for help. The psychiatrist eventually explained that something must have seriously alarmed him in the womb, when he would have been similarly helpless and unable to cry out. It wasn’t clear whether or not Sam believed the explanation, but he said that it cured him so effectively that he was quite happy alone in his cottage in the Marne Valley where there was no one to appeal to for help (Suzanne refused to visit the cottage because she disliked it), even though, at his age, he was more likely to need it at any time.

  We were crossing Hyde Park, he naming the various locations as we came to them. He spoke of Murphy as if he [Murphy] had been of flesh and blood. ‘It’s Murphy’s old haunt.’ He said. ‘He used to walk about here a lot. They used to fly kites, but I was here the other day and they don’t do it any more.’ There was disappointment in his voice. A few minutes later, we crossed the Broad Walk. A solitary kite soared in the sky. Sam beamed with pleasure.

  I did not ask him why, since he had hated so much living there, he kept returning to World’s End. It had occurred to me that he may have been exorcizing old ghosts. (‘That time. Do you remember that time? When was that?’)* He told me that he had gone there on his previous visit to London as well, looking for the house he used to live in, but it had been pulled down. He had been very poor in those days, which constituted one of the most unhappy periods of his life.