* The interviews with Samuel Beckett by JK took place from July to November 1989. Other interviews in this book, unless otherwise stated, were also conducted by JK.
* On a number of occasions during these interviews Beckett adopts turns of phrase which he has already used in his writing. Here he quotes (probably unconsciously in this case) from Winnie’s story in Happy Days: ‘The sun was not well up when Milly rose, descended the steep … (pause) … slipped on her nightgown, descended all alone the steep wooden stairs, backwards on all fours, though she had been forbidden to do so …’ (Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, London, Faber and Faber, 1966 [ist edn, 1963], p. 41; New York, Grove Press, 1961, p. 55.)
† Sheila Page (née Roe) lived with the Beckett family for several years as a child with her sister, Molly, after her mother died and while her father was working in Nyasaland.
* Ann Beckett (1929-2003). Her father, Dr Gerald Beckett (1884-1950), was Sam’s father’s younger brother. He was appointed Medical Officer for County Wicklow towards the end of the 1920s. The family lived in the little village of Greystones, on the coast, south of Bray, and it was there that Ann and her twin brother, John, used to see Sam and his mother in the mid-1930s. Beckett played piano duets and golf with their father.
* Beckett is (consciously this time) quoting here from his book, Company: ‘You are alone in the garden. Your mother is in the kitchen making ready for afternoon tea with Mrs. Coote. Making the wafer-thin bread and butter. From behind a bush you watch Mrs. Coote arrive. A small thin sour woman.’ (Samuel Beckett, Company, London, John Calder, 1980, p. 28; Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, New York, Grove Press, 1996, p. 14.)
* In Company a man is ‘looking out to sea from the lee of a great rock on the first summit scaled’. (Company. 17.) ‘One day I told him [the narrator’s father] about Milton’s cosmology, away up in the mountains we were, resting against a huge rock looking out to sea, that impressed him greatly.’ (Froman Abandoned Work, The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski, New York, Grove Press, 1995, p. 158.) ‘JK: Did you ever tell your father about Milton? SB: I did, yes. Milton’s cosmology! (Laughs).’ (Interview with SB by JK.)
* Frank Beckett died of cancer on 13 September 1954 at the early age of fifty-two. Beckett stayed at Killiney for several months looking after his brother.
† The Reverend Henry B. Dobbs, BA, Vicar of All Saints’ Church, Blackrock.
* Henry Francis Lyte, 1793-1847, wrote ‘Abide with Me’. It was Cardinal John Henry Newman, 1801-90, who wrote ‘Lead Kindly Light’.
† ‘I thought a little of the Elsner sisters. Everything remained to be planned and there I was thinking of the Elsner sisters. They had an Aberdeen called Zulu.’ (Samuel Beckett, Molloy, London, Calder and Boyars, 1966, p. 113; New York, Grove Press, 1995, p. 144.)
* William Ernest Lepeton, the Headmaster of Earlsfort House, went on to found Sandford Park School in September 1922. He left the school in 1925.
† He did. A. M. Buchanan, with whom Beckett played, was captain of both Portora Royal School’s rugby XV and cricket XI and he later played for Ireland at rugby. He received his first cap against England at Lansdowne Road, Dublin, on 13 February 1926. His club was Dublin University and he represented his country on six occasions during the 1926-7 season. We thank Grainne Gaynor of the Irish Rugby Football Union for her help in obtaining this information.
* The reminiscences of Charles Jones, John A. Wallace and Herbert Gamble are taken from a document sent by Mary Rogers, wife of the Headmaster of Portora Royal School, to James Knowlson, 15 July 1970.
*Cyril Harris, letter to James Knowlson, 26 October 1992.
* Michele Esposito (1855-1929), Professor of Composition at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, founded the chamber series at the Royal Dublin Society in 1886. He also founded and directed the Dublin Orchestral Society (1898-1914) and was active as pianist, concert promoter and adjudicator at musical competitions.
* There is an excellent account of the whole Esposito family in Richard Pine and Charles Acton’s To Talent Alone. The Royal Irish Academy of Music 1848-1998, Dublin, Gill and MacMillan, 1998, pp. 194-9 and passim. Beckett’s holiday near Lake Como with Mario is reflected in Beckett’s first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, as well as in his later play Endgame.
* Payment Deferred was a play by Jeffrey Dell, based on C. S. Forrester’s novel of that title. It was also made into a film in 1932, with Charles Laughton as William Marble. Interestingly in the light of Beckett’s later play, Happy Days, the two main characters were known as ‘Willie’ and ‘Winnie’. Winnie Marble was played in the film by Maureen O’sullivan.
* In all probability the book in question was Syed Ameer Ali, A Short History of the Saracens. Being a Concise Account of tube Rise and Decline of tube Saracenic Power and of tube Economic, Social and Intellectual Development of tube Arab Nation, London, Macmillan, 1924.
† This production at the Abbey Theatre was of Oedipus tube King, W. B. Yeats’s translation of Sophocles; first performance 16 December 1926. Frank McCormick (1889-1947), real name: Peter Judge.
* Frank McCormick acted in over 500 plays at the Abbey and was particularly noted for his performances in plays by Seán O’Casey. He toured America five times and played three major film roles, the last being in Odd Man Out (1947).
† Born William Joseph Shields, Barry Fitzgerald (1888-1961) recreated his role in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock in 1930 for Alfred Hitchcock in his very first film role. He went on to have a very successful Hollywood career from 1930 to 1959, starring in many films such as How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man.
‡ The Gate Theatre was founded, in the former Grand Supper Room of the Rotunda’s New Assembly Rooms, in 1928 by Micheal MacLiammoir (1899-1978) and Hilton Edwards (1903-82).
2
Reluctant Teacher and Lecturer
Beckett as a student.
Biography, 1927-33
In 1927, Samuel Beckett graduated from Trinity College, Dublin with a First Class degree and a Gold Medal and began to work towards an MA thesis on Pierre-Jean Jouve and the French literary movement, Unanimisme. He taught briefly (and somewhat reluctantly) at Campbell College in Belfast in 1928, while waiting to take up an appointment as lecteur in English at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.
He also began a two-year love affair with his first cousin, Peggy Sinclair, who lived with her family in Kassel in Germany. His visits to Kassel established what was to be the beginning of a long and enduring contact with German art and literature.
In Paris, he was introduced to the writer James Joyce, by his fellow Irishman, Thomas MacGreevy, Beckett’s predecessor as lecteur at the Ecole, who became his close friend and confidant. Beckett was strongly influenced by the force of Joyce’s personality, the range of his culture and his total dedication to his work and he found it hard to escape from Joyce’s influence in his own writing and to discover his own distinctive voice. While living in Paris, he wrote poetry, including his first published work, Whoroscope (1930), an essay on Joyce’s Work in Progress (which was to become Finnegans Wake) and a critical study of Proust (1931).
He returned to Dublin in the autumn of 1930 to take up the post of assistant to Professor Rudmose-Brown in Trinity College, teaching French to undergraduates, taking over Rudmose-Brown’s lectures on Racine and lecturing on the Romantic poets, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Gide and Bergson. While he was lecturing in Dublin he met the Irish painter, Jack B. Yeats, whom he greatly admired and with whom he remained friendly until Yeats’s death in 1957.
But Beckett was almost pathologically shy and detested the self-exposure that was involved in lecturing. So he resigned his appointment after only four terms. After a short stay with the bohemian family of his aunt and uncle, Cissie and William Sinclair, in Kassel at the beginning of 1932, he returned to Paris, where he wrote the major part of a novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which he had begun in Dublin a year earlier. The book w
as rejected by several publishers and only appeared posthumously in 1992.
Only weeks after his cousin, Peggy Sinclair, died from tuberculosis, Beckett’s father died at the end of June 1933, leaving him feeling guilty and depressed; guilty at having, as he saw it, let his father down by resigning his academic post, depressed on account of the death of his father and of serious concerns about his own health.
Campbell College, Belfast
Beckett (centre, in his academic gown), Campbell College, Belfast, 1928.
Samuel Beckett After I graduated, I had six months. I’d already been nominated at the Ecole Normale, but the appointment didn’t have to be taken up until the fall. There was a blank period that I filled as best I could with this job at Campbell College. I didn’t like it, though I made some good friends. I don’t remember their names any more. But I played cricket with the boys.
Brian McConnell (pupil) [On the staff at Campbell College] there were the old stagers, professional teachers who had made a life career of it; and there were the young men who came and went. Among the latter was included for a very short time a myopic young man who strode gloomily about the classroom making a half-hearted attempt to teach French. The name was Beckett - Samuel Beckett. My term report from him was not favourable, but it was the only report I ever got on which the head had added some words of comment. He wrote ‘I do not agree with this report’. Unfortunately I no longer possess this, as it would be of some interest and value.
Sam Beckett has, I believe, applied to the boys at Campbell the probably not original saying ‘They were the cream of Ulster; rich and thick’. But the ethos of Campbell in those days was probably quite alien to Beckett, for it was very British indeed. The sterling qualities which made for the successful administration of the British Empire were certainly instilled into us, and the fact that the ‘Empire Day’ was observed with pomp and ceremony was more significant than most of us realized.*
The Sinclairs and Kassel
Samuel Beckett My aunt Cissie was the only daughter [in grandfather Beckett’s family]. She married a Jew called William Sinclair. They had a shop in Dublin. Cissie was musical. But she had a very difficult time with her husband. He had some political troubles in Dublin and had to leave. That’s why he went to Germany. I don’t know why he went to Kassel. Yes, I do know why. There was a friend of his there: the poet [and painter] Cecil Salkeld. He was there. That’s why he chose Kassel. I met him [Salkeld] when I was there. But then, of course, because he [Sinclair] was Jewish, he had to come back because of the Nazis. Well, with his brother, Harry -we used to call Cissie’s husband ‘Boss’ Sinclair - he had an art shop in Nassau Street in Dublin. They made some very remarkable discoveries. I remember they discovered a Rembrandt somewhere in the country. They worked together, until ‘Boss’ got into some political trouble and had to get out. And I know that Cissie’s association with Boss was looked on with some disapproval by the family. Snobbish you know - again because he was Jewish and a naughty chap, the family wouldn’t have anything to do with him. She had a big family, Cissie, no money, and a wild husband. ‘Boss’ used to give English lessons in Kassel. He had ‘Englische Sprache’ written on the door. He didn’t have many pupils! But he had some good German pictures. He knew about German art.
Aunt Cissie was a wonderful person. She came after my father in the family. [‘Boss’ and Cissie] had a lot of children. There was Sally who married a Cusack (Ralph), Peggy and Deirdre, and Morris. I used to call him ‘Sonny’. He was a good violinist. There was a sort of unofficial engagement with his sister Peggy. Then, for some reason, I don’t know why, I broke it off. And she married some German. [She was engaged, not married to Heiner Starcke.] But she died very young of tuberculosis. She was very artistic: a good musician. Peggy was a student of the piano. She was at some music school near Vienna. She was a very lively girl, full of life. She’s the Smeraldina [Rima] in my work, yes. There was a very easy-going, friendly atmosphere in the family. I enjoyed going to Kassel to stay with them.
Peggy Sinclair, 1928.
I used to go to the gallery there, oh sure. We used to go to the Wilhelmshohe, on the hill; we used to go there in parties and expeditions; and I went with Peggy, of course. Oh, Peggy didn’t need any chasing! There were four daughters: Deirdre, Peggy, Nancy and Sally. Then Morris was, I think, the youngest.
Morris Sinclair (cousin)* Sam played the piano a lot in Kassel, quatre mains [duets] with Peggy and with my mother, as well as on his own. The music played: classical overtures, Egmond, Coriolan, Magic Flute, etc.; Schumann string quartets; all the symphonies by Beethoven (except the 9th, I think); late Mozart symphonies; Haydn; Schubert unfinished; Tchaikovsky’s 5th and 6th symphonies. There was in those days no gramophone or radio in the house … Sam loved the Beethoven 7th.
In his visits to the Sinclairs in Kassel, he brought in something musically new, at least to me. He introduced me to Granados, Poulenc, MacDowell. He may well have played some Debussy, but I cannot now recall what, though the well-known Fille aux cheveux de lin is a likely candidate … As I remember, he gave passionate renderings of Mozart’s A-minor sonata and the last movement of Beethoven’s early C-minor sonata. John Sebastian [Bach] he could not abide. For Sam he was a mere technician, filling page after page of rule-correct counterpoint. There is a line in one of Mac-Greevy’s poems à propos Bach’s Magnificat: ‘The self-satisfied [Lutheran] music circles on …’.* Sam, I imagine, was in harmony with that line.
Peggy and Morris Sinclair in Kassel, 1929-30
Sam and I also made a start of playing violin and piano sonatas, notably Mozart. It is imaginable that the lack of dark spots in some of Mozart’s music might have prompted Sam to an adverse remark about this or that piece. But as a general judgement I think it must be repudiated. The A-minor sonata which I remember Sam playing in Landgrafenstrasse is certainly a dark piece and so is the G-minor string quintet (K516), which touched him deeply. Going for the dark pieces does not mean shoving the rest aside. I forget the exact context but I hear Sam saying (in the rue des Favorites [where Beckett lived for many years from 1937]): ‘Lucky enough to find somebody who likes Mozart’; i.e. a musician who likes playing Mozart.
It could perhaps not be said that he had a highly developed technique as a pianist, but I remember well with what conviction and élan he would play the last movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique. The intensity of his absorption was almost ferocious. Not in Landgrafenstrasse, I don’t think, but later on he used to hum while he played, not at all in tune with the music, and admitted that it was a bad habit. But it showed how completely absorbed he was in the music in a subjective way and how little concerned he was with a rendition for others.
He was a frequent concert-goer in London and also in Paris. He walked out of [a] concert in Kassel, a recital given by the violinist Vasa Prihoda,* which he attended with a group of the Sinclairs, including myself. The barren display of technique was not to his liking. It should not be concluded that virtuosity in his view was undesirable. Among pianists he greatly admired were Cortot, Solomon, Brailowsky.
My debt to Sam is great indeed not only because of what he wrote and published (everybody’s debt) but because he was my friend-nearly the brother-in-law - mentor and teacher: language, literature, painting, philosophy. All the family loved him.
The Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
Samuel Beckett I graduated in ’27 and started doing a thesis on Unanimisme. I met [Pierre Jean] Jouve in Paris when I came here. I was a great admirer of his early works. He occupied a big place in my scrappy work on Unanimisme, which I was supposed to do after leaving Trinity. And Rudmose-Brown got me this appointment as lecteur d’anglais at the Ecole Normale but not to take over the job until the autumn of 1928. Now, when I got to the Normale, Tom MacGreevy was already there - to the great annoyance of Rudmose-Brown. He hadn’t been appointed by Rudmose-Brown. It was some influence that got him the appointment. So he was there when I arrived. And for a year, the two of us were in the Ecole
Normale. He had rooms inside. You can still see them there. But the railings that I used to climb when I came home at night are changed. I couldn’t climb them now - not even as I was then.
I struck up a friendship with Tom MacGreevy. I liked him. Our rooms were next door, up the stairs, on the first floor, I seem to remember. It was through him that I met James Joyce.
My work was supposed to be teaching English. But there was no one taking it. It was just a joke. I taught Georges Pelorson, but I think it was in the second year that I taught him. [This is not true: Pelorson was taught by Beckett in his first year in Paris, 1928-9 and Beckett also forgets that he helped some of the postgraduates, Alfred Péron and Emile Delavenay, with their prose translations for the Agrégation examinations.] He’d remember better about that than me. He’s at Aix. You know he got into trouble in the war. He was Pelorson and changed his name afterwards to Belmont. We didn’t have any contact of course in those days. I was on the Péron side. [Beckett was a member of the Resistance cell ‘Gloria SMH’ with his good friend Péron. See Beckett’s comments later on the war years, pp. 79ff.]
Beckett’s friend, Thomas MacGreevy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, c. 1928.
I used to play the tin whistle by the way at the Ecole Normale, a rusty old tin whistle. I had a tin whistle and I used to tweetle on it, and in Dublin too.
Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Page 5