SAMUEL Beckett was, in the opinion of the Irish courts, an unbelievable man. In 1937, when he gave evidence for two half Jewish brothers in a libel action against the anti semitic writer Oliver St.
John Gogarty, Mr Justice O'Byrne told the jury that Beckett "did not strike me as a witness on whose word I would place a great deal of reliance". In the course of the trial, Gogarty's counsel had described him as "that bawd and blasphemer from Paris", a "wretched creature" whose word could not be believed.
Over the next ten years, as Beckett turned himself into a great writer, he seemed to make the most of these insults, to embrace the unreliability of words, to allow his own untrustworthy life to slink from view. He became, in the great age of fame, the man who was famous for his absence, a severe and silent figure almost completely hidden by his stark, laconic writings.
Now, almost seven years after his death, Beckett is acquiring from beyond the grave the kind of public presence that he avoided in life. In two major new biographies, James Knowlson's Damned To Fame, and Anthony Cronin's The Last Modernist, the man behind the words comes into focus, less forbidding, more human than before, but in some ways still more deeply mysterious, for the new books, in their different ways, make two things clear. One is that Mr Justice O'Byrne was right: Beckett is hard to believe. And the other is that in another sense the judge was completely wrong: Beckett was not just a reliable but also a profoundly truthful witness to the life of his time.
At one level, Beckett's early life in Dublin was most notable for being almost entirely untouched by the tumultuous events of the early decades of the century. The first World War, the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, even the change of flags from Union Jack to tricolour, seem to have had very little effect on the prosperous, professional and largely Protestant Foxrock in which he was raised. His first school, Earlsfort House, indeed, was self consciously non sectarian, and accepted Jews, Catholics and freethinkers as well as Protestants. Far from removing Beckett from politics, however, this helped to shape an abhorrence of racism and intolerance that would later have dramatic political consequences.
If much of Beckett's youth reads, in the essentially similar accounts of Knowlson and Cronin, like a Victorian public school novel in which Beckett himself is the hero, (Cronin describes him as "a paragon of schoolboy virtues"), it slowly begins to take on the feel, not of Toni Brown's Schoolday's, but of a novel by Katka.
The transition from golf playing Trinity student to member of the Paris avant garde is, in spite of all the detail accumulated by Cronin and Knowlson, inexplicable. The more we learn to see Beckett as a hearty hard drinking lover of Guinness and Tullamore Dew, a privileged young man about Dublin, the more difficult it is to see his later persona as the result merely of time and place, of advancing years and the move to Paris.
One of the effects of these biographies, indeed, is to remind us that there was nothing inevitable about Beckett's transformation into a great writer. Cronin notes that while planning to move from Dublin to London in 1933 and 1934, Beckett tried to get a job as an advertising copy writer: "That he entertained the wish is not in keeping with the character of the purist and uncompromising, avant garde writer which is the common image of Beckett. No doubt we are lucky he did not succeed in finding such a job but it is salutary to remind ourselves that he wanted one."
Both books suggest to differing degrees that it was Beckett's increasingly complex relationships with women that made him what he became. His earliest affairs seem to have been distorted by his love hate relationship with his strong willed mother and by his frequent use of prostitutes, both of which encouraged a coldness and distance in his attitude to women. "He wanted women", writes Cronin, " to be love objects of a sort, even sex objects of a sort, so long as, even while they were with him, they kept their distance.
Cronin describes "this distancing of women whose proximity he nonetheless sought" as "infantile and voyeuristic". But his awkward and unhappy affairs with his cousin Peggy Sinclair and with James Joyce's daughter Lucia, though they made him deeply unhappy, also helped him to slough off the callowness that seemed to cling to him well into his twenties.
THE unbelievable, almost fictional, element in Beckett's life is at its most stark, however, in an event which, were it a morality tale, would be risibly crude. For the sin of using prostitutes, Beckett was punished by being stabbed by a pimp on a Paris street in January 1938 as he was walking some friends home from the cinema.
Fifty years later, he described what happened to Knowlson: "This pimp emerged and started to pester us to go with him. We didn't know who he was until later, whether he was a pimp or not. This was established later, when I identified him (from photographs) in hospital ... Anyway, he stabbed me; fortunately he just missed the heart. And I was lying bleeding on the pavement. Then I don't remember much of what happened." While Cronin suggests that the pimp, ironically named Prudent, may have been known to Beckett having "on occasion fixed Beckett up with a girl", Beckett's own account suggests that this was not so, and that the event was a perfectly absurd black joke on the part of fate.
His then lover Peggy Guggenheim found Beckett in hospital two days later, weak but "very happy". As Cronin dryly notes "Beckett's nature and outlook had their drawbacks. It may be regarded nevertheless as a blessing that he tended to rejoice in calamity when it came." To give the morality tale an even more pat ending, it was as a result of the stabbing that Beckett developed the most important relationship of his life. He developed a close friendship with Suzanne Deschevaux Dumesnil who came to visit him in hospital, and ultimately became his wife.
The subsequent court case, in which the pimp received a mere two month prison sentence, was Beckett's third in a matter of months. In Dublin the previous autumn as well as appearing as a witness in the Gogarty libel action, he was also prosecuted for dangerous driving, having written off his car in a crash. This case had led to a ferocious row with his mother, which, in turn, sparked Beckett's decision to leave Ireland for good. Within a period of four months, therefore, he experienced the public humiliation of the Gogarty trial, two brushes with death, the experience of being first the accused and then the victim in criminal trials, and a rather violent breach with family and country. Personal maturity was for him not so much a transition as a rather sudden and traumatic transformation.
But as well as these private disasters, public ones also shaped the mature Beckett. Anthony Cronin plays down Beckett's political awareness, claiming that "it would be difficult to exaggerate the depth of his indifference to politics for all the early part of his life, even such politics as were now ruling in Germany with their threat to his (Jewish) relatives and friends".
But Knowlson has unearthed new information on Beckett's attitudes to events in the Germany of the mid 1930s that shows him to have been far from indifferent. He visited Germany in 1936, and, initially through his contacts with artists, discovered the realities of Nazism. In his diaries he describes a couple he met in Berlin as "appallingly Nazi", and though he may have been uninterested in political theory, he understood and felt the human cost of fascism.
THAT knowledge shaped Beckett's response to the second World War and the Holocaust. He was in Ireland, staying with his mother in a rented house in Greystones, Co Wicklow, when Britain's declaration of war with Germany came on the radio. He chose very deliberately to place himself in the midst of the chaos, returning to France the very next day. Back in Paris he offered to drive an ambulance for the French army, an offer overtaken by the quick success of the German invasion. As a citizen of a neutral country, he could have justified non involvement, but he was horrified by the rising pitch of anti semitism in occupied France, and by the arrest of some of his Jewish acquaintances, notably James Joyce's secretary Paul Leon, to whom he sent his own food rations. Less than a fortnight after Leon's arrest, Beckett formally joined the Resistance. As he commented years later "you simply couldn't stand by with your arms folded".
He joined a cell code named Gloria and run by Jeannine Picabia, daughter of the painter Francis Picabia, which was part of the British led Special Operations Executive. Its job was to gather and transmit to London information on German troop movements.
Beckett described the operation, and his own role in it, to Knowlson, whose account seems more authoritative in this regard than Cronin's, in 1989: "Information came in from all over France about the German military movements ... everything that concerned the occupying forces. They would bring this information to me on various bits, scraps of paper ... 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 who was part of the group ... And he would make 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 wife of Picabia, the painter. 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."
This strange kind of writing - secret and dangerous, carried out with the benefit of cover stories, false documents, forged identities - has a curiously poignant relationship with the precise yet mysterious fictions Beckett began to create during and after the war. It is not accidental that it was when he was "on the run" (Beckett, as Cronin points out, used the phrase himself as an ironic reminder of his Irish background) from the Gestapo that the great work for which Beckett will be remembered began. After another brush with death - he and Suzanne had a narrow escape when their cell was betrayed by an informer - he settled in Vichy France for the remainder of the war. It was there that he began his first mature novel, Watt.
Even while he was doing so, however, he rejoined the Resistance and, as he revealed to Knowlson, came close to actually firing a gun in anger when the local Resistance tried to harry the retreating Germans. Fifty years later he could still recall "going out at night and lying in ambush with my gun. No Germans came. So fortunately I never had to use it."
Beckett may have been only the shadow of a gunman but the fact that he was even that must alter forever the received image of the tortured existentialist for whom all action is futile.
After 1953, when Waiting For Godot brought Beckett international fame and an audience for the rest of his work, life was dominated by productions and publications, and the biographies reflect this change. But his work retained its intimate relationship with the brute facts of political life. He did much to help French writers who were persecuted for their attempts to expose the use of torture in Algeria. He was sickened" by apartheid in South Africa and steadfastly refused to allow his work to be performed before segregated audiences. He ordered all royalties earned by his work in Poland to be paid to Antoni Libera, a young writer and translator who was being persecuted by the Communist regime. He gave money to help defend a French anarchist whom he believed to have been unjustly accused of planting incendiary devices.
He had, as Knowlson writes, "an almost total inability to filter out pain and distress, no matter who was experiencing it". That the human suffering which he could not filter out should have been mistaken in his work for a merely fashionable sense of futility was always a travesty. Thanks to these two eloquent books, that mistake can never be made.
