JULIET'S Conversations have been available to date only from a small French publishing house (Editions Fata Morgana), so it is no small service that the Academic Press - Leiden has performed in making them available in English in such a handsome edition. The frontispiece features a colour reproduction of an untitled 1937 painting by Van Velde which Beckett had hanging opposite his writing table for the bulk of his Paris years.
Beckett bought the painting when his penury was considerably more luxurious than Van Velde's destitution. It is reasonable to suppose that Beckett acquired the painting because he enjoyed it, took instruction from it, was provoked by it. That the acquisition supported and encouraged a fellow artist in even more straitened circumstances would not have escaped Beckett either.
Ruud Hisgen and Adriaan van der Weel speculate in their introduction that, contrary to popular belief, Beckett was probably influenced or creatively assisted by Van Velde (the senior artist by some 11 years) when they met in the late Thirties, rather than the other way around. This makes eminent sense, given Beckett's frequent attendance at Jack Yeats's "afternoons" where the moody young aspiring writer hung on until after the claque had left so as to have the master to himself.
As painters, both Yeats and Van Velde confronted problems of form and expression which Beckett saw as analogous to, or cognate with, those he was struggling with in the shadow of the intimidating presence of Joyce. Beckett also bought two Yeats paintings "on the drip" and was so committed to them that he lugged them south to the Vaucluse as he fled the attentions of the Gestapo in the early Forties.
In the immediate postwar years, during Beckett's extraordinarily prolific period, he wrote catalogue essays and pamphlets on the work of Bram and Geer Van Velde and, most famously, the Three Dialogues with George Duthuit, in which he precisely identifies the obligations and brutally limns the plight of the serious artist. These dialogues offer us not only acute criticism of painting but they also articulate the aesthetic which underpins Beckett's own practice as a writer. What Juliet's Conversations allow us to see is the degree of overlap between Beckett's and Van Velde's aesthetics and their unswerving dedication to their separate inner necessities.
These Conversations are not interviews; Juliet wrote up his recollections of some 40 encounters, with Van Velde between 1964 and 1977 and four with Beckett between 1968 and 1977 after the events. He confines his reports to the salient details, the utterances of the artists themselves, intruding himself only to offer the reader essential context. Both these artists were warriors of silence: Beckett once responded to a request for an interview with the reply, "I have no views to inter." Nevertheless, Juliet succeeded in eliciting particularly revealing aphorisms and statements from both men.
Van Velde: "Painting is an eye, a blinded eye that continues to see, and sees what blinds it/ Life is wrecked by living/ The artist has no role. He is absent/ True painting tends towards ugliness and panic." Beckett: "When you listen to yourself it is not literature that you hear/ Each piece has to represent some sort of advance/ Getting published isn't the important thing. You write in order to be able to breathe/ I've always got something on the go. It may start off long but it gets shorter and shorter/ In the end you don't know who is speaking any more. The subject disappears completely, that's the end result of the identity crisis."
Whether you regard this book as a true and faithful record of ephemeral conversations or as a complex act of homage to two great artists, one thing is sure - it is essential reading.
