by Colm Toibin
In other words, Yeats was attempting to move beyond what MacGreevy called ‘mere stereotyped inventions’. There was a melancholy and a mystery at the heart of all the movement and gaiety he depicted. He painted Irish light using colours and textures that belonged to his dreams as much as to the actual landscape or to the palette or systems of previous painters. Nothing in his paintings was idealized simply because it was Irish. He could easily, especially in the years when Beckett knew him, have been a German painter. There was a mixture in him of someone rigorous, watchful and solitary and someone fascinated by swirl, swift movement and pure excitement; his canvases were filled with theatricality and crowds, and also with reverie, solitary figures lost in bare, windswept places, tramps and loafers beneath the high, haunted, visionary sky. Yeats personally was elusive and reticent, despite his sociability; it was said that he seldom discussed with anyone, or even generally mentioned, anything of emotional importance to him. He had other things to talk about. And this might have been useful to Beckett. Yeats also wrote experimental plays and novels, and it was he who found Beckett a publisher in London for his first novel, Murphy, after it had been rejected by several firms.
Like Yeats and his brother the poet, and the playwrights Shaw, Synge and O’Casey, Beckett was a Dublin Protestant. The fact that he played no part in the development of the Abbey Theatre, and did not write about Ireland directly or suffer from patriotism or indulge in nationalism, and seemed in ways deracinated, a citizen of nowhere, does not mean that Ireland, its light and its landscape, and to some extent its so-called heritage, did not form him, or have a deep effect on him. His Protestantism shows up in some lovely moments, however, such as when he bathes at the Forty Foot in Dublin in 1936 and sees a Father McGrath, ‘red all over with ingrowning semen & exposure’. The footnote offered by the editors in Volume I of his Collected Letters remarks drily: ‘It is not known to which Father McGrath SB refers.’ Beckett’s South Dublin Unionist background emerges also in some wonderful comments, such as an attack on the police force of the Free State: ‘There is no animal I loathe more profoundly than a Civic Guard, a symbol of Ireland with his official Gaelic loutish complacency.’
Beckett’s problem was that, as a literary artist, he knew that what his predecessors in Ireland had done with the island’s hidden or invented personality would be of no use to him. What Jack Yeats had done had a greater influence on him than the work of any Irish writer. In 1937, he wrote to his aunt Cissie Sinclair, a kindred spirit, about Yeats’s work as though he were writing about the work he himself would begin creating a decade later:
Watteau put in busts and urns, I suppose to suggest the inorganism of the organic – all his people are mineral in the end, without possibility of being added to or taken from, pure inorganic juxtapositions – but Jack Yeats does not even need to do that. The way he puts down a man’s head & a woman’s head side by side, or face to face, is terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between. I suppose that is what gives the stillness to his pictures, as though the convention were suddenly suspended, the convention & performance of love & hate, joy & pain, giving & being given, taking & being taken. A kind of petrified insight into one’s ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness. All handled with the dispassionate acceptance that is beyond tragedy.
In the years after Beckett met Yeats he set about finding further sources of inspiration not in literary texts or traditions but in the study of European paintings. In the 1930s he was looking at paintings and writing about them with an intensity and sense of discovery. In his interest in art, and his efforts to write a poetry filled with radiant or fragmented statement, the language unadorned, personal, sometimes obscure and strangely beautiful, he came across a soul mate in Thomas MacGreevy. MacGreevy, born in Tarbert, County Kerry in 1893 and so thirteen years older than Beckett, was an art critic and a poet. His poem ‘Exile’ began:
I knew if you had died that I should grieve
Yet I found my heart wishing you were dead.
This found echoes in an untitled poem by Beckett, written first in French:
I would like my love to die
And the rain to be falling on the graveyard
And on me walking the streets
Mourning the first and last to love me.
MacGreevy had fought in the First World War, seeing active service at Ypres and the Somme, where he was wounded twice. By the time he met Beckett, he already knew Joyce and his circle in Paris and had met Eliot in London. Besides his short book on Jack Yeats and some poems, a few of them masterpieces of their kind, he wrote books on Eliot and Richard Aldington for the same series as Beckett’s book on Proust, the publication of which he arranged. He later wrote a monograph on Poussin and was director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963. MacGreevy flits in and out of the lives of various figures in these years. He was a friend of W. B. Yeats’s wife, George, and of Joyce’s wife, Nora; he corresponded with Wallace Stevens, who dedicated a poem to him. Richard Aldington called him ‘a paradox of a man if ever there was one. He looked like a priest in civvies.’ MacGreevy chatted and gossiped a lot, knew a great deal about art and music and literature and was charming and cheerful. He disliked England, even though he retained a British passport and had no objection to actual English people. Like many before and after him, he was homosexual abroad but celibate in Ireland. (When he mentioned his sexual inclinations to a priest, he was told to kick himself every time he had such thoughts.) He was a dapper little fellow who wore a bow-tie; he managed to be Catholic and queer, patriotic and cosmopolitan all at the same time. When he lived in Paris, he often went for a walk during the day to ‘make sure the world was where [he] had left it the evening before’. In the years between Beckett’s arrival in Paris in 1928, where he and MacGreevy taught at the École Normale Supérieure, and the outbreak of the Second World War, MacGreevy was Beckett’s confidant and his closest friend.
Although Beckett was brought up in what was effectively suburban Dublin, the house was close enough to the mountains south of the city, and to the sea and the bare Wicklow Mountains even further south, to make this landscape one of abiding importance to Beckett, who, like his father, was a great walker. The letters in the first volume of his correspondence make clear that, despite his lack of interest in Ireland or Irishness, he loved the Irish landscape. In 1932 he wrote to MacGreevy about a trip to the west of Ireland with his brother Frank, describing Galway as:
a grand little magic grey town full of sensitive stone and bridges and water. We … spent a day walking on Achill right out over the Atlantic … Altogether it was an unforgettable trip and much too short, through bog and mountain scenery that was somehow far more innocent and easy and obvious than the stealthy secret variety we have here. I would like to go back to Galway and spend a little time there.
Ten days later, he described the Wicklow Mountains:
I walk immeasurably & unrestrainedly, hills and dales, all day, and back with a couple of pints from the Powerscourt Arms under my Montparnasse belt through the Homer dusk. Often very moving and it helps to swamp the usual palpitations. But I disagree with you about the gardenish landscape. The lowest mountains here terrify me far more than anything I saw in Connemara or Achill.
This habit of walking would fill one of Beckett’s miraculous late pieces, Company, in which he described his narrator walking (‘Sole sound in the silence your footfalls’) but also his own father’s setting out on a long day’s walk as his mother was giving birth:
It being a public holiday your father left the house soon after his breakfast with a flask and a package of his favourite egg sandwiches for a tramp in the mountains. There was nothing unusual in this. But on that particular morning his love of walking and wild scenery was not the only mover. But he was moved also to take himself off and out of the way by his aversion to the pains and general unpleasantness of labour and delivery. Hence the sandwiches which he relished at noon looking out to sea from the lee of a
great rock on the first summit scaled. You may imagine his thoughts before and after as he strode through the gorse and heather.
Beckett seems to have had an uncomplicated relationship with his father. In April 1933 he wrote to MacGreevy:
Lovely walk this morning with Father, who grows old with a very graceful philosophy. Comparing bees & butterflies to elephants & parrots & speaking of indentures with the leveller. Barging through hedges and over the walls with the help of my shoulder, blaspheming and stopping to rest under colour of admiring the view. I’ll never have any one like him.
Two months later, when his father died, Beckett wrote to MacGreevy:
He was in his sixty first year, but how much younger he seemed and was. Joking and swearing at the doctors as long as he had breath. He lay in the bed with sweet pea all over his face, making great oaths that when he got better he would never do a stroke of work. He would drive to the top of Howth and lie in the bracken and fart … I can’t write about him, I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him.
Beckett’s father’s late interest in not doing a stroke of work made its way with many complications and much guilt to his son. Lassitude is one of Beckett’s great subjects. In August 1930, as he worked on his book on Proust, he wrote: ‘I can’t do the fucking thing. I don’t know whether to start at the end or the beginning.’ In December, the book finished, he wrote to the editor in London to say that he had added nothing. ‘I can’t do anything here – neither read nor think nor write. So I am posting it back to you within the next day or two with practically no changes made. I must apologise for the absurdity of the entire proceeding. I expected more generous rifts in the paralysis.’ The following month he wrote to MacGreevy: ‘You know I can’t write at all. The simplest sentence is a torture.’ Soon, he wrote to MacGreevy again from London: ‘If I could work up some pretext for writing a poem, short-story, or anything at all, I would be all right. I suppose I am all right. But I get frightened sometimes at the idea that the itch to write is cured. I suppose it’s the fornicating place & its fornicating weather.’ Two weeks later, nothing had changed: ‘I don’t believe I could put a dozen words together on any subject whatsoever.’ A year afterwards, back in Ireland, there was still no advance. ‘I find it more and more difficult to write and I think I write worse and worse in consequence.’ In 1934 he wrote to his cousin: ‘I can’t do any work, no more than a man can pick his snout and thread a needle at the same time. So I’ve nearly given up trying.’ In 1936 he wrote from Hamburg to the writer Mary Manning in further despair:
My next work shall be on rice paper wound about a spool, with a perforated line every six inches and on sale in Boots. The length of each chapter will be carefully calculated to suit with the average free motion. And with every copy a free sample of some laxative to promote sales. The Beckett Bowel Books, Jesus in farto.
(He referred to his Proust book as ‘my Proust turd’.) His interest in the toilet might have been awakened by what he described to Arland Ussher early in 1936 as ‘a sebaceous cyst in my anus which happily a fart swept away before it became operable’. As late as 1939 he was writing to MacGreevy: ‘I drowse through the days & do nothing. I try now & then to get started, but it comes to nothing. If it is to be like that, let it be like that.’
His problem in these years was very simple and not easy to solve: it was how to live, what to do, and who to be. He was clever, well educated, he spoke French and Italian fluently; his German was very good. But his first book of stories had not sold and he could not find a publisher for his novel. He had no idea how he would earn a living, and he was also deeply unhappy. He was not always the saintly figure, full of shy politeness and withdrawn courtesy, that he subsequently became. His loathing for the poet Austin Clarke emerges freely in his letters. He openly satirized him in Murphy as Austin Tick-lepenny and attacked his work in an essay for the Bookman in 1934. Nor was he known for his personal courtesy in the years before he left Dublin. When one night the playwright Denis Johnston asked him for a lift to Foxrock, where they both lived, Beckett replied rudely: ‘No.’
His famous despair is not always on display here, though there are hints of it. In a letter to his cousin in 1934, he wrote about the coming of spring:
The strange, gentle pleasures I feel at the approach of spring are impossible of expression, and if that is a sentence inviting ridicule, so much the worse for me. I have positively never watched it coming with so much impatience and so much relief. And I think of it as a victory over darkness, nightmares, sweats, panic and madness, and of the crocuses and daffodils as the promise of a life at least bearable, once enjoyed but in a past so remote that all trace, even remembrance of it, had been almost lost.
At times in his letters, it is easy to see him slowly and laboriously becoming the writer and the man he later was; at other times, it is clear that he could have become someone else. In 1933 he wrote to MacGreevy about the possibility of a career in advertising (‘It has been in my mind for a long time’). In 1936, when he was thirty, he thought of training to be a commercial pilot (‘I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously’). He also considered training to be a film-maker and sent a letter to Eisenstein that same year asking to be admitted to the Moscow State School of Cinematography. As well, he applied to be a lecturer in Italian at the University of Capetown. In the end, in a splendid ruse, he decided to be an art critic and convinced his mother that she should pay for a lengthy stay in Germany so that he could look at pictures.
His letters to MacGreevy about paintings are serious and well informed. He writes about paintings in his early letters better than he writes about anything else, including his own life. There is a sense of his complex personality – on the one hand, his sternness of judgement, on the other, his ability to take pleasure in what he saw – in the way he goes into exacting detail about the paintings he was looking at, including work in the National Gallery of Ireland, which was around the corner from the office in Clare Street where the family quantity surveying business was run. In December 1931, he took in Perugino’s Pietà, newly acquired by the gallery.
It’s buried behind a formidable barrage of shining glass, so that one is obliged to take cognisance of it progressively, square inch by square inch. It’s all messed up by restorers, but the Xist and the women are lovely. A clean-shaven, potent Xist, and a passion of tears for the waste … Rottenly hung in rotten light behind this thick shop window … a lovely cheery Xist full of sperm, & the woman touching his thighs and mourning his jewels.
In his story ‘Love and Lethe’ in More Pricks than Kicks, Ruby Tough from Irishtown is likened to the Mary Magdalene in this picture: ‘Those who are in the least curious to know what she looked like at the time in which we have chosen to cull her we venture to refer to the Magdalene in the Perugino Pietà in the National Gallery of Dublin, always bearing in mind that the hair of our heroine is black and not ginger.’ The following year he wrote: ‘I seem to spend a lot of time in the National Gallery, looking at the Poussin Entombment and coming stealthily down the stairs into the charming toy brightness of the German room to the Brueghels and the Masters of Tired Eyes and Silver Windows. The young woman of Rembrandt is splendid.’ In his story ‘Ding-Dong’, he described the face of the pedlar woman: ‘Yet like tormented faces that he had seen, like the face in the National Gallery in Merrion Square by the Master of Tired Eyes, it seemed to have come a long way and subtend an infinitely narrow angle of affliction, as eyes focus on a star. The features were null, only luminous, impassive and secure, petrified in radiance.’
His letters from Germany, too, are filled with the names of paintings and a sense of his fierce concentration on the task in hand. Sometimes, the descriptions and lists go on for pages. Although he wrote mainly from Germany about paintings he saw and his own melancholy, he didn’t ignore what was happening around him. From Hamburg he wrote to Mary Manning in 1936: ‘All the lavatory men say Heil Hitler. The best pictures are in the cellar.’ Soon afterwards, he wro
te to MacGreevy: ‘I have met a lot of friendly people here, mostly painters … They are all more or less suppressed, i.e. cannot exhibit publicly and dare sell only with precaution. The group was broken up in 1933, their library confiscated.’ In January 1937 he noted that Thomas Mann’s citizenship had been rescinded. The following month he wrote about an art historian he had met: ‘He was removed from his post in the Real Gymnasium here at the Gallery in 1933, like all the others of his kidney.’
While this might seem like nonchalance, it should be placed beside Beckett’s general refusal to write letters filled with news of the day and his subsequent determination to stay in France once war broke out and become involved in the Resistance. It is hard not to underline the passages where Beckett took pleasure in the image of the Pietà, in pictures of the tearful mother and her headstrong son who was lying finally in her lap, hers at last. Beckett was the sort of young man who was made to break his poor mother’s heart. Home from Paris and then London and then Germany and feeling very sorry for himself, he must have been an awful nuisance lounging around the house, or in bed with hangovers – he was drinking a lot – or other unnamable complaints. His mother was neurotic enough in any case, and sad, often depressed, after the death of her husband. Beckett’s brother Frank, who was as solid as his father, took over the family business, and he was now on the point of getting married. For Beckett’s mother, her wayward son became the focus of her worry.
There is an interesting letter written from London in 1935 to MacGreevy that deals with Beckett’s reason for undergoing psychoanalysis there. He went three times a week. ‘For years,’ he wrote,