Beckett Centenary:
His handsome hawk head is sacrificial
As he weathers to how man now is.
A phenomenon not yet fully appreciated in our increasingly post-Christian age is the way writers, even the most wayward, have begun to replace the saints. Matthew Arnold prophesied that poetry would supplant religion which, I regret to announce, does not seem to be happening. Unless you define poetry widely as anything well written, like Beckett's trilogy or Godot.
In 2004 we had a new St Patrick: Patrick Kavanagh, with our president making a pilgrimage to Monaghan to celebrate a poet whom former foreign minister Frank Aiken would not allow out to represent the country abroad. There is already a saint called Becket, as in Thomas, but this year he will have to move over for St Samuel. Indeed Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett is a bit like the shrine of a saint, the grotto of St Brigid at Faughart with disparate talismans side by side. For, following his comprehensive biography (I almost wrote hagiography), James Knowlson, along with his wife, Elizabeth, has assembled a kind of scrapbook or patchwork of familiar but also new items like his own - faintly ghoulish? - interviews with the dying Beckett.
The earliest years are dominated by the Mother, large-hatted, "very tall and rather overbearing-looking" according to a cousin. "I never remember her wearing any other colour than black" declares a niece. A neighbour recalls how his timid cocker spaniel was torn to bits by Mrs Beckett's savage dogs, Kerry Blues with names like Badger and Wolf. She was "a difficult woman" and "very stern" with young Sam.
Whereas his father was "a very kind man" with whom Beckett went for long walks in the Dublin Mountains, perhaps to escape the mother? Beckett "always felt guilty at letting him down" by abandoning his Trinity post. However, Bill Beckett would also "get angry very easily", a trait inherited by Sam's brother Frank. Even Sam, who played cards and golf with his brother, testifies that he was "very nervous; an uncertain temper". It seems like a home in Faulkner's deep, Protestant South, presided over by a gaunt and baleful mother dressed in fusty black.
This palimpsest of memories can be very poignant, especially as they are echoed in the work, and when one remembers that Sam attended nearly all the family's last illnesses. An undercurrent is the absence of political involvement: Sam was sent to private schools and to Portora "to get as far away as possible in Ireland from the troubles". However, at his Harcourt Street school he had one of his first lessons in tolerance, when a Jew called Solomon enrolled as a pupil. And then there was his "sort of unofficial engagement" with his half-Jewish cousin, Peggy Sinclair, who would die early of TB. Considering how bravely he reacted when his Jewish friends were being lifted in Paris, Beckett, like Joyce, could be regarded as a philo-Semite, something we should not forget as a new, virulent strain of anti-Semitism is spreading.
Generally the picture of young Beckett is of an all-rounder, playing rugby and cricket, bathing in the chill waters of the Erne and banging an opponent out of the ring. He would also bang the piano while parodying Gilbert and Sullivan. His gradual transformation from such apparent conformity into a silent but savage young Dublin intellectual and then into a living saint is well charted by the collage method of this book.
His sea change from near boy scout to bohemian began when he became Professor of French Rudmose-Brown's star pupil at Trinity and started to frequent the Gods in the Abbey Theatre. Meeting Joyce in Paris completed his downfall. By Beckett's own account when he first met Joyce he did not intend to be a writer. Yet while he modestly insists that he chose to write only because "I was no good at all at teaching", he also admits that Joyce served as an inspiration: "I had a great admiration for him. That's what it was: epic, heroic, what he achieved".
The central paradox of Beckett's character is not ignored here; he could, as many testify, be mulish. Nathalie Sarraute hasn't a good word to say for him, and quotes her mother, "I've never seen anyone so badly brought up in my life". A bad mark against the young Beckett is his parody of Austin Clarke as Ticklepenny, the Pot Poet in Murphy. Clarke was in poorer shape than himself, having lost both wife and job. However there is nothing that insists that saints should be sweetie-pies; a friend once described Mother Teresa as an insufferable bossy boots.
Did the Knowlsons forget that Beckett was Irish, kept his Irish passport and accepted to be a Saoi of Aosdána? It seems to me that his Irish admirers and friends get short shrift here.
His UCD pals, poets like Coffey and Devlin, are not mentioned although they might have contributed to his fascination with such ur-Irish?? characters as Murphy, Malone, Molloy, all that gang. Irish directors and actors are also scanted. What of Alan Simpson, who bravely produced Godot in the Pike Theatre? He is under the clay, but he wrote a testimony before. Jackie MacGowran is also dead, but Conor Lovett, who is dramatising the trilogy, might have had a few words to say; or Barry McGovern.
And Con Leventhal was one of Beckett's oldest friends, also Jewish. He wrote little, but had fine pieces in Beckett at 60 and elsewhere. And a gesture towards Knowlson's fellow biographer, Anthony Cronin, would have been courteous, especially since Sam was very pleased by his timely articles on the trilogy. As for illustrations, John Minihan does not get a look in, and some of Le Brocquy's portraits are haunting, as is Anne Madden's account of their late friendship. (I scrape through myself with a paragraph compressed from my recent memoir.)
An Irishman who does feature is Francis Stuart, which is fascinating considering the furore that surrounded his accession to the honour of Saoi. But they were contemporaries, and even if they found themselves in different contexts during the second World War, Sam seems not to have judged his old drinking pal. And indeed the war changed them both, although The Pillar of Cloud is not as remarkable as Watt, my favourite Beckett book, where he writes himself out of a breakdown by breaking down language.
I am dismayed that Beckett Remembering contains no index, though I hope the best plums in this pudding of a book will be assimilated into a new addition of the biography. I suppose I am saying that I would have preferred a different, more humorous book: like Sterne, Beckett is a great comic writer. But altogether this is not a bad piece of Becketeering, though we still await the MacGreevy correspondence for the earlier years, and Barbara Bray for the later.
As for the question of sanctity, it is briskly dealt with by Jocelyn Herbert, who designed Beckett's productions at the Royal Court. She mentions that his austere wife disapproved of how he got drunk with so many friends, since she didn't drink. "And he had after all endless other women. And when people say to me he was a saint I say: 'Oh no, he wasn't a saint at all. And thank God he wasn't'."
Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett, Edited by James and Elizabeth Knowlson, Bloomsbury, 313pp. £20
John Montague was a neighbour of Beckett's in Paris, and has written on him for Magazine Littéraire, and elsewhere