Ursula Thompson† My husband [Dr Geoffrey Thompson] was a close contemporary of Sam Beckett. He went to a Quaker school in the south of Ireland and Sam was already at Portora Royal when Geoffrey transferred there at about the age of fifteen. They soon became very good friends. Cricket was a shared interest and they played together, both at Portora and at Trinity College, Dublin. He and Sam also went to the Abbey Theatre a great deal together. Geoffrey was very interested in George Bernard Shaw and the Irish writers of the time.
Ursula and Geoffrey Thompson, c. 1937.
I first met Geoffrey in September 1934, when he came over to England to do psychiatric medicine at the Maudsley Hospital. He had been a consultant physician at the Baggot Street Hospital in Dublin, specializing mainly in the heart, I think. Sam was already in London in 1934 and I met him then through Geoffrey, who was working as a Registrar at the Bethlem and the Maudsley. To become a psychoanalyst you have to have a long training and nobody in Ireland could give him that. Catholicism was strictly against psychiatric medicine in those days and it could not be practised at all in Ireland. Geoffrey had to start immediately with an analysis. It was called a training analysis, with a man called Hadfield, a senior man, very well qualified, at the Tavistock Clinic at the beginning of 1935. In those days psychoanalysts were often not very well qualified in medicine but Geoffrey was and, as such, he was a valuable asset to the field.
He mentioned Sam very early to me. Sam was really ill in 1934 and Geoffrey was very worried about him. And in those days there was little help for any kind of psychosomatic illness (panic attacks and so on). He was a physician but learning in psychiatric matters. And Geoffrey advised Sam about psychoanalysis. Sam and he spent a lot of time together in 1935, when Geoffrey was at the Bethlem Royal. He took Sam, dressed in a white coat, around the Bethlem to see the patients.* Sam was curious, interested in the patients. He regarded himself as a bit of a ‘loony’ and wanted to see the other ‘loonies’!
When Geoffrey and I got married, he left the Bethlehem and began to think of setting up on his own in psychoanalysis. Then Hadfield offered to take him on at £600 a year, while he started his own practice, to help him with his extra patients. He suggested that we ought to leave the scruffy flat in Pimlico and take a place in Harley Street, which we did. So Geoffrey had private patients in Harley Street but he also worked at the Tavistock Clinic, where he knew W. R. Bion, Beckett’s analyst.
We lived in a little attic on the top floor in Harley Street and Sam used to come and visit us there. They played chess together. The door bell would go, the butler [from downstairs] would open the door and we would peer over the banisters to see who it was and see the top of Sam’s beaver hat, a large rather artistic type of hat, sombrero style, which young men interested in poetry often affected at the time. We still have the armchair he used to sit in, where he made a cigarette burn between the arm and the seat! I felt that he did not think I was the best choice for Geoffrey and viewed me as ‘a silly ass of a schoolgirl’. [Ursula was teaching gymnastics and dance in Croydon High School when Geoffrey Thompson met her.] But he was awfully nice to me, none the less.
I married Geoffrey on 2 November 1935. Sam was our best man, although I don’t remember him making a speech. The wedding was in a village called West Lulworth in Dorset, where my parents lived. We went down to Lulworth on the Friday night with Geoffrey driving a hired car and Sam sitting shivering in the back, because he had no overcoat - either because he hadn’t got one or because he hadn’t brought it with him. It was a Protestant church wedding, a small wedding; we walked to and from it. There is a wedding photograph with Sam in it. My aunt Sarah, the headmistress of a school in Leicester, said at the wedding: ‘You’re marrying the wrong one’. She had fallen for Sam. Everyone did fall for Sam.
The Thompsons’ wedding 1935. Beckett is standing on the left in the second row.
When Sam was stabbed in 1938, Geoffrey heard it on the wireless, and rushed over to Paris at once. Then, after the war, whenever he came over to London, Sam came to see us. I remember him not seeing very well [on account of the cataracts on both of his eyes]. He is our son Dan’s godfather. [‘The principle of selection escapes me but I’ll be glad to do it’, commented Beckett, as none of the family was religious.]* He was always very sweet towards the children. He used to bring them toys, the first they had after the war. There was a good wooden construction kit for Dan and a teddy with real fur.
J. M. Coetzee*: Samuel in Cape Town - An Imaginary History†
J. M. Coetzee.
J.M. Coetzee In 1937 the University of Cape Town advertised a vacancy for a lecturer in Italian. Applicants should hold at least an honours degree in Italian; the successful candidate would be expected to teach, for the most part, beginning Italian language. Perks would include six months of sabbatical leave every three years, and assistance with travel expenses (by ocean liner).
The advertisement was brought to the attention of T. B. Rudmose-Brown, Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Dublin, who promptly contacted one of the better students to have graduated from his department and suggested that he apply.
The student in question, S. B. Beckett, MA, followed Rudmose-Brown’s suggestion, though without enthusiasm. He sent in an application but failed to get the job. The job went to a specialist in the Sardinian dialect.*
Even if S. B. Beckett had been offered the lectureship, he would in all likelihood not have accepted, for his ambitions stretched in another direction. He wanted to be a writer, not a language teacher. On the other hand, he had no prospects at home, where at the age of thirty-one he was living off hand-outs from his brother. Penury might have forced his hand; he might indeed have found himself, in 1938, at the southern tip of Africa.
In that case, the outbreak of war would have trapped this citizen of neutral Ireland seven thousand miles from home. What might then have followed?
Conceivably, after years of easy colonial life, he might have found a return to war-ravaged Europe unappealing. Conceivably he might even by then have met and married a South African belle, and settled down and had children.
Just possibly, then, S. B. Beckett, appointed as lecturer in Italian, and advanced in the course of time to a professorship in Italian or even in Romance Languages, might still have been in residence at the University of Cape Town when, in 1957, I enrolled at that institution as an undergraduate.
Knowing no Italian and only a few words of French, I would not have been able to study in Professor Beckett’s department, but I would certainly have heard of him as the author of Waiting for Godot, and perhaps even attended a performance of the play written in an English scandalously inflected with the argot of the Cape Flats. Professor Beckett might even have consented now and again to conduct the Wednesday-afternoon creative writing class to which students from all faculties were invited to bring their handiwork.
Since I would have been no less resistant to adopting Professor Beckett or anyone else as a spiritual father than Professor Beckett would have been to adopting me as a spiritual son, I would in all likelihood have left South Africa once I had graduated - as indeed happened - and have made my way, via England, to the United States. But I would certainly not have spent my time at the University of Texas labouring over a doctoral dissertation on Professor Beckett’s prose style.
Whether I would have shaken off the influence of that prose style on my own - whether I would have wanted to shake it off - is another question entirely.
S. B. Beckett’s laconic letter of application has survived in the University of Cape Town archives, as have the testimonial Rudmose-Brown wrote for him in 1932 and the letter he wrote in 1937 in support of his candidacy. In his own letter Beckett names three referees: a doctor, a lawyer and a clergyman. No academic referee. He lists three publications: his eccentric book on Proust, his collection of stories (which he cites as Short Stories rather than by its proper title, More Pricks than Kicks), and a volume of poems.
Rudmose-Brown’s two lett
ers could not be more enthusiastic. He calls Beckett the best student of his year in both French and Italian. ‘He speaks and writes like a Frenchman of the highest education,’ he writes. ‘As well as possessing a sound academic knowledge of the Italian, French and German languages, he has remarkable creative faculty.’ In a P.S., he notes that Beckett also has ‘an adequate knowledge of Provençal, ancient and modern’.
Beckett’s application to the University of Cape Town, July 1937.
One of Rudmose-Brown’s colleagues in Dublin, R. W. Tate, adds his support. ‘Very few foreigners have a practical knowledge of [Italian] as sound as [Beckett’s], or as great a mastery of its grammar and constructions.’
Biography, 1940-6
Following the fall of France in June 1940, it was Beckett’s French friend, Alfred Péron, who persuaded him to work for a Resistance cell of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) called ‘Gloria SMH’. ‘Gloria’ was the Resistance name of Gabriele-Cecile (known as Jeannine), the daughter of the painter Francis Picabia and his writer, lecturer and art critic wife Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia.
(Jeannine Picabia related in her 14th March 1943 debriefing at SOE headquarters in London how she had come to meet Péron. ‘I wanted to organize something in Nantes and Lorient and through Sam Beckett, an Irishman whom I knew before the war, I met Alfred Péron who had groups of paramilitaires, and a woman called Suzanne Roussel, whose working name was Hélene … Péron had a wireless somewhere in the North of France, around Lille I believe. When we had urgent messages to send we sometimes sent them through him.’)
Beckett’s own photograph of Alfred Péron, his friend, tennis partner and fellow Resistance agent, c. 1939.
Jeannine Picabia (’Gloria’), the head of Beckett’s Resistance cell, ‘Gloria SMH’, 1939-40.
Beckett recounts below his clandestine activities as an agent and his enforced flight from the Gestapo with his partner, Suzanne, when the cell was infiltrated and betrayed and when many of his co-workers were arrested and then deported to Ravensbruck and Mauthausen concentration camps. He and Suzanne lived out the rest of the war in the little Vaucluse village of Roussillon, where Beckett wrote (in English) a large part of a daring, radically innovative novel, Watt. Returning to Paris late in 1944, he was decorated after the war with the medals of the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française, telling no one, not even his closest friends, about these decorations.
Having returned to Ireland at the end of the war to see his mother, Beckett found it difficult to return to France. So he volunteered to work as an interpreter, storekeeper and ambulance driver for the Irish Red Cross Hospital in Saint-Lo in Normandy, which had been destroyed by allied bombings and shellings after the D-Day landings. He returned to Paris to endure some of the most poverty-stricken years of his life.
Beckett and the French Resistance
Samuel Beckett [After the declaration of war in September 1939] I went back [to France from Ireland] straight away -the next day. If I hadn’t, I would have never got back. Even then I had difficulty in leaving England at Dover. They didn’t want to let me through. No way. I didn’t know what to do. I managed to wangle my way. I went back to talk to them, saying Ireland was not England, Ireland was not at war and so on. I managed to get through.
Alfred Péron* was the one who got me involved in the ‘Gloria’ Resistance group. It was at the time when they were rounding up all the Jews, including all their children, and gathering them in the Parc des Princes ready to send them off to extermination camps. Information came in from all over France about the German military movements, about movements of troops, their position, everything that concerned the occupational forces. They would bring this information to me on various bits, scraps of paper. There were about forty agents in that group. It was a huge group. It was the boy-scouts! They brought it all to me. I would type it all out clean. Put it in order and type it out, on one sheet of paper, as far as was possible. Then I would bring it to a Greek [named Hadji (Andre) Lazaro]† who was part of the group. He lived in what is now the rue de Coty I think. And he would take photographs. And my sheets would be reduced to the size of a matchbox. All the information. Probably unreadable but it could be magnified. And then he would give them to Madame Picabia, the widow of Picabia, the painter. And she was a very respectable old lady. Nothing could be less like a Resistance agent. And she could get over to the other zone, the so-called unoccupied zone, without any difficulty. And so it was sent back to England.
Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia {left in Madrid in 1943 after her escape from the Gestapo. The friend with her is unknown.
When the whole thing blew up, as soon as we knew - the same day - I went to tell the Greek, but he didn’t take it seriously enough and he was arrested. There was an informer in the group.* Everybody used to know everybody else. There used to be meetings in the evening. Everybody knew everybody. I’ll tell you what happened. In August of 1942, Suzanne and I were at home. Mania and Alfred Péron were on holiday at the time, when Alfred was picked up by the Gestapo. And Mania sent us a more or less uncoded telegram, which we understood to mean that Alfred had been arrested by the Gestapo. I remember we got it at eleven and we’d gone within the hour. First we went to Marcel Duchamp’s and Mary Reynolds’. They had a house in the rue Halle, where we hid out for a night. It’s near here. I’ll show you sometime. That was our first refuge. Then some of Suzanne’s communist friends found us another safe place where we lay low for a time while we were provided with forged papers.
[One of the places where Beckett and Suzanne hid out was in Janvry with the French writer, Nathalie Sarraute. She relates here what happened.]
Nathalie Sarraute* During the Occupation, my daughter, Claude, who spoke English well - she started to learn it at the age of two and was bilingual -used to take lessons in English literature with Samuel Beckett. We knew that he and Suzanne were very badly off, so we tried to help him out by paying him for lessons. She read Shakespeare with him. [Claude Sarraute informs us that their lessons were held inside a tent that Beckett had erected in the apartment in the rue des Favorites because it was so cold and there was a great fuel shortage that winter.]† I didn’t know him myself personally then. I only knew him through our mutual friend, Alfred Péron, for whom Beckett used to translate messages received from London. Péron was quite an important figure in the Resistance. These messages were retyped and translated by Beckett. Claude came home one day from Beckett’s flat and said how extraordinary it was that Péron had come to see Beckett while she was there and that they’d spoken about serious matters to do with the Resistance that she shouldn’t be hearing. Beckett’s own wife reproached them even for their lack of discretion. Péron was also careless enough to have a notebook in which he had written down the names of eighty or so [sic] members of his Resistance cell with him when he was arrested.‡ Fortunately, my husband belonged to another cell in Paris. Anyway most of the members of Péron’s cell were soon arrested. But Beckett was warned in time and managed to escape before the Gestapo went round to his flat to arrest him.
Nathalie Sarraute, who sheltered Beckett and Suzanne when they were on the run from the Gestapo.
Alfred and Mania Péron, 1939.
Péron’s wife, Mania, was a childhood friend of mine. She was eight years younger than me but my mother-in-law and her mother were good friends. She was Russian and had two children, the twins Alexis and Michel. So Mania asked me if I would shelter Beckett at our house, since she knew that Claude had been having lessons with him. As you can imagine, there was no question of our saying ‘no’ at the time. So he turned up with Suzanne.
In our house at the time there were my three daughters, my mother, myself and a young Jewish girl who was living with us with false papers. Her name was Liber but she had papers in the name of Gauthier-Villar, because she was a distant relative of the Gauthier-Villars. We were all living cooped up together in a little gardener’s house at Janvry in the Vallée de la Chevreuse (which is still th
ere, by the way, on the village square). It belonged to a gardener called Monsieur Mariage who owned this little cottage. It was very primitive: there was running water only in the kitchen and the toilets were at the bottom of the garden. It was heaven’s punishment inflicted on human beings. So when the Becketts arrived, Claude and Anne moved into a dark little room behind the kitchen which was normally used as the dining-room. We put a mattress in so they could sleep there. Naturally they were very unhappy with the arrangement. The Becketts slept in their bedroom, which was fairly basic, not particularly attractive, but perfectly acceptable. It was the best and the sunniest room in the house. The children had the dark room which overlooked the street. Beckett and Suzanne stayed with us for ten days. Then we sent them on to some Russian friends in Paris and these friends found a way of getting them across the line into the Free Zone. Beckett had a very, very strong accent in French. Indeed, he did not speak French particularly well or write French well at that time. And I remember my husband saying to Beckett: ‘The first thing you must do is shave off your moustache, because you look just like an English civil servant, or even an English officer!’ Suzanne helped me in the kitchen and with the shopping.
Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Page 9
