No More Learning

25 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 August 1936.
26 SBtoThomasMcGreevy,9October1936.
27 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 17 July 11936].
28 SB to George Reavey, 23 February 1937. "Obligeance prophetique" (prophetic
obligingness).
29 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 August 1936.
30 SB to George Reavey, 8 October 1932. And again to Reavey, 27 December 1936.
31 SB to George Reavey, 4 August 1937.
32 SB to George Reavey, 27 December 1936.
33 SB to George Reavey, 13 November 1936.
lxxxiii
Introduction to Volume I
readiness to cut down the work to its title. I am now prepared to go further, and change the title if it gives offence, to Quigley, Trompetenschleim, Eliot, or any other name that the publishers fancy. "34 When finally, thanks in part to the intercession of McGreevy and the painter and writer Jack B. Yeats, Routledge makes an offer on Murphy, Beckett writes, "I would sign anything to get the book out";35 a tractability which asks to be weighed alongside the apparently contradictory, but perhaps equally true, assertion: "I feel even less about its being taken than I did when it was rejected. "36
Indifference on the part of the world, or rejection from the public realm, corresponds so closely - so much more closely than success - to what is being experienced internally, that it provokes instant recogni­ tion. Defeat before the act, before the writing, will become the very ground of Beckett's imaginative world. Here, already, it gives rise to a plethora of confessions. To McGreevy, of his essay on Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu, he writes, "I can't start the Proust. "37 This matures into "I have not put pen to paper on Proust";38 which becomes "You know I can't write at all. The simplest sentence is a torture";39 followed by "I can't write anything at all, can't imagine even the shape of a sentence";40 leading to "I haven't tried to write. The idea itself of writing seems somehow ludicrous. "41 Yet somehow his Proust does get written, and he even feels some pride in it, before this is overtaken by distaste at what he judges to be "very grey & disgustingly
juvenile,"42 "a merely critical extension [ . . . J blafard, gritty like the
43
ing," critical writing comes in for very harsh censure:44 "dishonest & surfait" is how he describes his review of Jack Yeats's novel The
34 SB to George Reavey. 20 December 1936. "Trompetenschleim" (Ger. , numpetslime).
35 SB to Mary Manning Howe, [after 10 December 1937].
36 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 22 December 1937.
37 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Thursday [? 17 July 1930].
38 SB to Thomas McGreevy, [before 5 August 1930].
39 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 25 January 1931.
40 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 November 1931.
41 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
42 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 3 February 1931.
43 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 11 March 1931. '"Blafard" (wan).
44 SB to Mary Manning Howe, [after 10 December 1937].
lxxxiv
---
Civic Guard's anus. "
Having been relegated, in this period, to what he calls "slopempty­
Introduction to Volume I
Amaranthers. 4s But the judgment meted out to his poetry and fiction is only slightly more generous. "Fake" is a word he uses freely of his own
47
. . o down before the brain knows of grit in the wind. s
The gap between the self which writes and the self which reads can be as much of an affliction as a solace. Yet there is, despite asseverations to the contrary, no shortage of reading done during these years. It is tempting to invoke a notion like "apprenticeship" in this context, and certainly the later Beckett oeuvre is inconceivable without the mass of books consumed during this period. Yet, if apprentice Beckett is, not least to the writer who acts as his mentor and guide during much of the period, James Joyce, then he is one who feels he is not so much learning a trade as failing to gain initiation into a sect. He fears that the very knowledge he is accruing may itself be ruining his future chances, turning him into a "Sorbonagre," leading him to a spurious realm of knowingness. st "Ifl am not careful," he writes, after he has found in some German novels a new justification for a figure from Murphy,
45 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 17 July [1936].
46 See, for example, SB to Thomas McGreevy, Saturday [3 September 1932[, quoted in
SB to Thomas McGreevy, 13 [September 1932], n. 4.
47 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 September 1935. "Involontairement" (involuntarily).
48 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 23 May [1936[.
49 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 9 June 1936.
50 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 October 1932. "Facultatif' (optional); "pendu" (hanged
work,
"involontairement trivial";
46
or "really a most unsavoury & not very honest work," as he writes of the first draft of Murphy48 - "It reads something horrid. "49 Nowhere does he express more eloquently what he feels to be lacking in his writing than in a letter to McGreevy from 1932, where he berates himself for its lack of necessity. "Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud" - these become the whips with which to punish the literary self whose productions are never anything better than "trigged up" or "facultatif. " His own writing lacks the urgency and inevitability which for him distinguish work that is true, which must be as instinctive and automatic as a physical reflex, and which he describes memorably, in an expression that will echo through his whole writing life: 'Tm in mourning for the integrity of a pendu's emission of semen [ . . . ] the integrity of the eyelids coming
man).
51 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 11 March 1931.
lxxxv
Introduction to Volume I
"I shall become clear as to what I have written. "52 It is not just that an
ever-increased awareness of literary heritage furnishes the aspiring
writer with a yardstick of personal unworthiness; it is that the partic­
ular sort of success which writing constitutes is already perceived to be
achievable only in a sort of blind or spastic incomprehension. "Jenseit
der Spekulation kommt erst der Mensch in sein Eden" (Only beyond
speculation does man reach his Eden), he writes in 1934 to his cousin
53
Fortunately perhaps, not every writer's work which Beckett encounters during this period strikes him as being as necessary as that of Homer or Dante. "I have been reading wildly all over the place," he tells McGreevy in 1936, "Goethe's Iphigenia & then Racine's to remove the taste. "57 Beckett's reading may not be wild, but diverse it certainly is, as even a partial list of authors absorbed will make abundantly clear: Ariosto, Aristotle, Jane Austen, D'Annunzio, Darwin, Diderot, George Eliot, Fielding, Geulincx, Grillparzer, Guarini, Holderlin, Samuel Johnson, Ben Jonson, Kant, Keats, Lawrence, Leibniz, Melville, Plato, T. F. Powys, Ramuz, Jules Renard, Rimbaud, Rousseau, Sade, Sainte-Beuve, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Sterne, Tasso, Vigny. Few invite quite the excor­ iation that Goethe's Tasso receives, yet the view which Beckett forms of
52 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 18 January 1937.
53 SB to Morris Sinclair, 5 May 1934. 54 SB to Samuel Putnam, 28 June 1932.
55 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 September 1935.
56 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 18 January 1937.
57 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 25 March 1936.
lxxxvi
Though only later will he formulate this idea fully, in the letters to Georges Duthuit from after World War II, the awareness is already present here of the enticements and traps of knowledge. The remark he makes to Samuel Putnam, as early as 1932, concerning his indebtedness to James Joyce, that "I vow I will get over J. J. ere I die," is justthethinendofthewriter'suncomfortablewedge. 54 Littlewonder that he is delighted to report to McGreevy in 1935 a remark made to him by Nuala Costello: '"You haven't a good word to say for anyone but the failures. "'55 For writing, ifit is to matter, must constitute itselfas a sort of shedding, a venturing out with no clear landmarks, not even when these are literary, and with no sure hope of return: "when to have ever left one's village ceases to seem a folly," he writes to Mary Manning Howe in 1937, "perhaps it is only then that the writing begins. "56
Morris Sinclair.
this work may stand for the many among the canonical greats - Darwin·s The Origin ofSpedes is "badly written catlap"58 - which he dismisses: "He really invites one very patiently to think of him as a machine a mots, a cliche separator, & a bunker of the suffering that has not proved its merit in a thousand impressions, or a vademecum edition. "59 And the dead fare better than the living. It is for his contemporaries that Beckett reserves his most hostile fire, ignited as this is by a mix ofgenuine contempt and barely admissible envy. Beckett calls T. F. Powys's writing "a fabricated darkness & painfully organised unified tragic completeness. . . Go D'Annunzio has a "dirty juicy squelchy mind, bleeding and bursting, like his celebrated pomegranates. "G1 Aldous Huxley's latest offering does not even merit reiteration of its title, becoming "Cunt Pointercunt. A very painstalling work. "G2 Lawrence trades in a "tedious kindling of damp. "G3 T. S. Eliot's essay on Dante is "insufferably condescending, restrained & professo­ rial. "G4 And Proust too comes in for rough treatment, much rougher in the letters than in the essay on his work, his prose being deemed "more heavily symmetrical than Macaulay at his worst," and his loquacity being judged "certainly more interesting and cleverly done than Moore's, but no less profuse, a maudlin false teeth gobble-gobble discharge from a colic-afflicted belly. . . Gs
Little wonder that the prospect of having to read Proust, or of having, as Beckett puts it, "to contemplate him at stool for 16 volumes," is far from charming. GG Yet for the Proust to be written, Proust must be read, and not once but twice, in an infuriatingly inadequate edition. More than the exasperation, louder than the condemnations, stronger than the disgust and the envy, what informs Beckett's reading, as it does his writing in his letters about his reading, is its energy. When he wishes to read the work of Arnold Geulincx, "without knowing why exactly,"G7
58 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
59 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 March 1936. "Machine a mots" (word machine).
60 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 November 1931.
61 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 July 1930 [for 7 August 1930].
62 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
63 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Tuesday [7 August 1934].
64 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1937.
65 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Friday[? summer 1929].
66 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Friday[? summer 1929].
67 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 March 1936.
lxxxvii
Introduction to Volume I
Introduction to Volume I
he forces himself into the library at Trinity College in Dublin, which he has compelling reasons to wish to avoid, day after day. Kant's complete works have to be lugged, when they arrive in Paris, from Customs to his lodging. And as the few examples just given may indicate, to the phys­ ical efforts to gain access to the work he deems important there corres­ ponds an irrepressible linguistic verve.
Beckett is rarely more inventive than when writing about other writers, especially when insulting them. Nor do the efforts in language stop there. Geulincx's work is unavailable in translation, and so the determined reader works his Latin up to a suitable level to tackle him in the original. He reads Kant and Goethe in German, Dante, Ariosto and D'Annunzio in Italian, Proust of course in French, and efforts are made in Spanish that will later permit him to translate an anthology of Mexican poetry. Of course, one might remark that even as he was fleeing his one surefire career path, as a university professor, the ingrained scholarly habits remained. But such a remark only begs the question, when his polymathic drives were anything but obvious to a man of his family background or cultural milieu. Certainly, there are local satisfactions to be drawn from reading, along with the whips for self-punishment and the squibs to throw at the feet of rivals. In Schopenhauer, Beckett finds "an intellectual justification of unhappi­ ness - the greatest that has ever been attempted. "68 A French trans­ lation of The Odyssey offers "something of the old childish absorption with which I read Treasure Island & Oliver Twist and many others. "69 He is "enchanted with Joseph Andrews," which is "Jacques and the Vicar of W. in one. "70 Sainte-Beuve offers "the most interesting mind of the whole galere. "71 Somewhat surprisingly, "the divine Jane [ . . . ] has much to teach me. "72 And, less surprisingly, Sade's Les cent-vingtjoumees de Sodome, whose "composition is extraordinary, as rigorous as Dante's," inspires in him "a kind of metaphysical ecstasy. "73 Yet no amount of local satisfaction, even when it rises to enchantment or ecstasy, quite accounts for the sense one gathers from the letters, that Beckett is
68 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Friday [c. 18 July 1930 to 25 July 1930].
69 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Tuesday [c. 22 September 1931].
70 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 October 1932.
71 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 December [1932]. "Galere" (crew).
72 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 February [1935J.
73 SB to Thomas McGreevy. 21 February 1938.
lxxxviii
following a rigorously demanding linguistic and literary curriculum, devised by the writer he had not yet become - and in defiance of precisely this same writer.
It may be in the context of such a tension informing literary practice - be it writing or reading - that Beckett's dreams of an escape which would eradicate for ever any such problem should be understood. Yes! If he were to throw in the word-towel, give it all up, and become - what? Even as late as aged thirty, in 1936, he can be dreaming of a flight from the literary which is staggeringly literal: "I think the next little bit of excitement is flying," he writes to McGreevy; "I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. " The reasons for grasping at employment are never more clearly expressed than here: "I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them. "74 That Beckett never viewed his work in words as a lofty or romantic vocation leaps out from nearly every letter. That he viewed it not even as an honest career is only slightly less evident, perhaps because this view is overshadowed by his family's stronger, even outraged, conviction of the same. And so it is that the idea of a "real job" gives rise to: Beckett the trainee filmmaker laboring under Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow; Beckett the advertising agent at work in London; Beckett the assistant in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square; Beckett the Harvard lecturer, the Cape Town lecturer, the Milan lecturer; Beckett the translator for an international organization in Geneva; Beckett the teacher of French in a technical school in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia; and even more fancifully, Beckett the instructor of Princess Elizabeth "in the Florentine positions. "75
Letters are the vehicles for the requests and applications to these other lives, countries, cities, destinations. Hence they may be, for Beckett, the purveyors of deception, for who is he to pretend to expertise in anything, even in literature and languages - especially in literature and languages. Letters are, it gradually becomes clear, not just the means, but also the end, by which the blocked road of the present becomes, in writing, the uncluttered highway of a future. They permit their writer to imagine
Introduction to Volume I
74 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 26 July [1936]. 75 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
lxxxix
Introduction to Volume I
himselfin other roles and lives, and to describe these new characters and
their plots to his friends. And they do so while permitting their absurdity
to become transparent. Shortly after he has given up "this grotesque
comedy oflecturing" at Trinity College Dublin, to his parents' everlasting
76
Nowhere does the ambivalence informing that slip of the pen take firmer root than in the ground which Beckett treads throughout this period, the home turf. Behind the idea ofjoining the family business at Clare Street in Dublin lies a whole fantasy offitting in, following in his father's footsteps, belonging. When his brother Frank enters the family business in 1930, the fantasy only quickens. "I wonder would my Father take me into his office," he writes to McGreevy in 1932, "That is what Frank did. "79 The endorsement ofgenealogy which settling in Dublin represents becomes only the more urgent when his father dies in 1933: "I can't write about him," he tells McGreevy shortly after, "I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him. "80 The fact that he can always undo his own idea - "There is no room for another clerk in the office, and even ifthere were I simply could not do the work" - does little to stanch theguiltfeltbeforehisfamily. 81 Thefactthat,ifFrankweretowelcome him into the office, "my present saliva would bum a hole in the enve­ lope" - this counter-perception does little to slow regression toward the nostalgic idyll. 82 This last - because first - resort is pungent with prema­ ture resignation, with dejected posturing in cardigan and slippers, the bottle ofstout by the fire; thick with a voluptuousness ofself-pity at the homme moyen sensuel he suspects he is becoming, in an Ireland from which escape is no longer thinkable: "I feel now that I shall meet the most ofmy days from now on here and in tolerable content, not feeling much guilt at
76 SB to Charles Prentice, 27 October 1930.
77 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 3 November 1932.
78 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 June 1936 [for 1937]. "Verschreiben" (Ger. , slip of the pen).
79 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 August 1932.
80 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 2 July 1933.
81 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 [August 1932].
82 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 March 1936.
XC
dismay,
equipoised so perfectly the pros & cons that as usual I found myself constrained to do nothing. "77 To the organization in Geneva he replies, "asking for particulars, but forgot to sign the letter. " He does not fail to draw his conclusion: "a nice example ofVerschreiben. "78
a job in Bulawayo tempts, "but a few minutes consideration
Introduction to Volume I making the most of what ease there is to be had and not bothering very
much about effort. "83
When, in the winter of 1937 to 1938, escape from Ireland does happen, itisdescribedas"likecomingoutofgaolinApril. "84 Onthewallofhis room where he has taken temporary lodging, in the Hotel Liberia in Paris, Beckett sees confirmation of the release achieved: "A sunlit sur­ face yesterday," he writes to McGreevy, "brighter than the whole of Ireland's summer. "85 The terms are ones which he knows McGreevy will appreciate, so much of their correspondence being concerned with surfaces and light. Beckett's investment in the literary during this period is more than matched by his investment - of energy, of time, of language - in the visual arts, and in painting specifically. With McGreevy, who was already a connoisseur and who would go on to become Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, the investment bears fruit, as Beckett explores a world unbeset by any of the envy or ambivalence pervading the literary. The efforts he makes to study art, to visit galleries and museums, in Ireland, in London, in Paris, most of all in Germany, are unflagging. He spends entire days absorbing painting and learning the artists and traditions, mastering a visual language which he will himself never practice. And he does so with one eye ever on the possibilities of the present, possibilities clearer to him in this domain than in the literary. Since the primary appeal of Beckett's work is so often to the ear rather than to the eye, it might be easy to neglect what an exceptionally acute and well-trained eye he possessed. The letters reveal that eye as it roves, as it trains itself, as it probes, absorbs, quizzes, rejects, and is ravished. It is not until he corresponds with the art historian and critic Georges Duthuit, in letters which form the basis of the Three Dialogues published in 1948 (and which provide the backbone to Volume II of the present edition), that anything approach­ ing a manifesto of the possible and significant in art of the present will be extracted from him.
But these dialogues are dependent upon the prior exchanges with McGreevy, exchanges in which it is less the range of knowledge deployed which is remarkable than the immensity of the
83 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 26 April 1937. "Homme moyen sensuel" (average man with average tastes and appetites).
84 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 10 December 1937.
85 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 27 January 1938.
xci
Introduction to Volume I
curiosity displayed. Once again, Beckett is pursuing his own arduous curriculum, one which takes him away from the literary, but from which he is convinced the literary must learn.
Beckett's letters testify to an extraordinary visual memory, largely unassisted by the technical supports ofphotographs or reproductions. "I remember the Bassano in Hampton Court very well," he tells McGreevy; "In the second or third room, isn't it? The wild tormented colour. "86 His memory is such that he challenges established attribu­ tions - and several ofhis re-attributions have been vindicated by sub­ sequent catalogues. "I had forgotten the little Fabritius," he writes to McGreevy after a further visit to the Louvre, "A very slapdash attribu­ tion. More like a Flinck. "87 He refuses to believe that a small portrait ofa head in Ireland's National Gallery is a Velazquez (though he is much less certain about how to spell this painter's name). He advises his friend Arland Ussher, on the basis of a poor photograph, as to the possible attribution of a painting which Ussher has purchased: "As a decorative statement ofweights & tensions," he writes, "it seems to me to lack only technique & bravura to pair up with the easel recreations of Gianbattista [for Giambattista] Tiepolo & Sons. "88 He compiles for McGreevy exhaustive lists of the works he views during his tour of Germany, and even as he claims that "there is really not much point writing like this about the pictures," he "can't stop without mentioning the Poussin Venus. Beyond praise & appraisement. "89 He reports to McGreevy on the career ofGeorge Furlong, who is appointed Director oflreland's National Gallery in 1935, with a highly critical gaze, mock­ ing his lapses of taste in acquisitions, and ending by condemning his entire aesthetic policy: "It is time someone put him in mind of the purpose of a picture gallery, to provide pictures worth looking at and the possibility ofseeing them. "90 And he does this, characteristically, while all the time claiming that: 'Tm afraid I couldn't write about pictures at all. I used never to be happy with a picture till it was literature, but now that need is gone. "91
86 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 7 March 1937.
87 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 3 April 1938.
88 SB to Arland Ussher, 14 June [1939].
89 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 16 February 1937.
90 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 May 1937.
91 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 28 November 1936.
xcii
Introduction to Volume I
Though the previously published and by now famous 1937 "German
Letter" to Axel Kaun uses Beethoven's Seventh Symphony to sketch a
possibility for literature, and though the letters do contain some fasci­
nating insights into music - and into ballet and film as well - it is in
painting that Beckett most commonly intuits directions in which he
92
and in a request to McGreevy that he "forgive the degueulade. "93 What is glimpsed in Cezanne is more fully grasped in the work ofthe artist who will elicit from Beckett something as close as he comes at this stage to a fully fledged theory. Perhaps it is the very excitement at locating the artistic horizon so nearby, in the work ofan approachable compatriot, that leads him to find so many excuses not to accept Jack Yeats's repeated invitation to visit his studio during his "at-homes. " "Set out on Saturday afternoon to see Jack Yeats," he tells McGreevy, "and then en route changed my mind. "94 Yeats stirs in Beckett a rare acquis­ itive instinct, until the young unemployed writer is able to scrape together the cash to put down a deposit on a painting, Morning. As with Cezanne, it is the "ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness" that fascinates Beckett, and the sense in Yeats's painting of "the con­ vention & performance oflove & hate, joy & pain, giving & being given, taking & being taken" having been "suddenly suspended. " Yeats leads Beckett to a "perception & dispassion" which, in contrast to what he finds in Watteau (to whom he likens Yeats), is "beyond tragedy. " Even as one resists the temptation to find countless adumbrations ofBeckett's later work in the letters, it is hard not to hear harbingers ofthe tone and vision that will become "Beckettian," when he writes: "the way he puts down a man's head & a woman's head side by side, or face to face, is
92 SB to Axel Kaun, 9 July 1937.
93 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 September 1934. "Degueulade" (throwing up). 94 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 13 [September 1932].
xciii
In the work of Cezanne, first, Beckett sights - or sites - an all-important representation ofthe other­ ness ofthe world, "incommensurable with all human expressions what­ soever. " The "deanthropomorphizations of the artist" are the more precious in Cezanne's portraits, where the individual subject becomes "incapable ofloving or hating anyone but himselfor ofbeing loved or hated by anyone but himself'; a claim which Beckett immediately and doubly undermines, as ifhe had seen too much or reached too far, by signing off his letter in a firm rejection ofsolipsism - "God love thee" -
believes writing should be heading.
Introduction to Volume I
terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between. "95 In Yeats's work, nature itself, Ireland's nature, becomes the setting of "the ultimate inorganism of everything. " And again the future looms, the theatrical work for which Beckett will be most cele­ brated, in the metaphor he uses to describe Ireland here: "a nature almost as inhumanly inorganic as a stage set. "96 When, in 1938, return­ ing to Ireland after a prolonged absence, he visits Yeats's studio and sees his "magnificent new picture," entitled Helen, he rediscovers the "same extraordinary tenderness & distinction of handling," and beyond that, "depth and a courage more than of conviction, of certainty, absolutely natural & unrhetorical. " He rediscovers the very sense of necessity that years previously he located in Homer and Dante, the sense of art as a physical extension of the self, an art which is as natural as breathing. Unable to produce his own art to match, Beckett the viewer none the less absorbs the impact: "I was really knocked all ofa heap. "97
If art hits, and must hit, the body, this is because it must emerge
from the body to begin with, if it is to be necessary. For the greats, this
may be as easy as breathing; for the remainder, which includes Beckett
himself, whose writing emerges "above an abscess and not out of a
cavity," the somatic impetus is less unambiguously life-sustaining or
98
95 SB to Cissie Sinclair, 14 ! August 1937].
96 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 August 1937.
97 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Thursday 14 August 1938].
98 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 October 1932.
99 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 28 November 1937 [for 1936].
100 SB to Thomas McGreevy. Saturday 112 September 1931].
101 SB to George Reavey, 8 October 1932. "Dies diarrhoeae" (Lat. , literally, days of
diarrhea, echoing the Dies Irae of the reguiem Mass).
xciv
satisfying.
masturbation," Beckett says, with a sideways glance at his own restricted productivity, that there are worse things, "mental asperma­ tism for example. "99 When finally two poems do arrive, they are blessed as "a double-yoked orgasm in months ofaspermatic nights & days. " 100 At its best, writing is evacuation of pus, or is ejaculation of sperm. Being very rarely at its best, it is more commonly - even obsessively - that less exalted convulsion, defecation. When, amidst the "dies diarrhoeae,"101 some poems are taken by a journal, Beckett celebrates this acceptance of "three turds from my central lavatory. " The toilet is not private, and the
Commenting on Aldous Huxley's use of the term "mental
Introduction to Volume I
"Proustian arse-hole"102 needs to be contemplated, as we saw above, while the critic himself is "at stool. "103 To McGreevy, Beckett conveys his intention to return to writing as a determination to "take down the petites merdes de mon ame. "104 Beckett envisages writing a work which might finally please a publisher, in the following terms: "When I imagine I have a real 'twice round the pan & pointed at both ends' I'll offend you with its spiral on my soilman's shovel. "105 Of his poems which he calls "the Bones," his hope is that they will become a "bolus," which, on publication, will cause readerly discomfiture - "May it stick in their anus. "106 Even when the work is not itself fecal, it can still do cloacal duty. When an article is requested of him, he finds himself "looking through my essuie-cul de reserve. "107 The scatology may contain an undergraduate's jocularity, but that it is no mere joke, still less any mere trope, is clear even without recourse to Beckett's oeuvre. Writing and shitting: without recourse to Freud, either, these may be seen to share for Beckett an all-important intimacy, an urgency, a necessity even, just as they share a difficulty and delight in emission and transmission. They share, that is to say, both the requirement and the limits of expres­ sion. And so the irony is much fainter than might at first be imagined, when, after a publisher suggests substantial cutting of Murphy, what are envisaged next are "The Beckett Bowel Books. " Such new work might at least have a rhythm, one which would tie it to the body and its necessacy functions: "My next work shall be on rice paper wound about a spool, with a perforated line evecy six inches and on sale in Boots. The length of each chapter will be carefully calculated to suit with the average free motion. " 108
What writing and the rectal spasm share is that they take the subject, quite literally, out of himself. They are not the only spasms to do this, however, and there are others which take Beckett so far out of himself that he fears he may never return. "I always see the physical crisis just round the corner," he writes to Cissie Sinclair in 1937, confirming
102 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 25 August 11930].
103 SB to Thomas McGreevy. Friday I? summer 1929].
104 SB to Thomas McGreevy, I? after 15 August 1931]. '"Petites merdes de mon ame'"
105 (droppings from my soul).
106 SB to Charles Prentice, 15 August 1931.
107 SB to George Reavey, 9 January 1935 [for 1936].
SB to George Reavey, 6 May 1936. "Essuie-cul de reserve" (spare bumf). 108 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 14 November 1936.
XCV
Introduction to Volume I
that this crisis is far from merely dreaded: "It would solve perhaps the worst ofwhat remains to be solved, clarify the proven anyway, which I suppose is the best solution we can hope for. "109 The "crisis" takes the form ofboils, cysts, and especially heart palpitations, all ofwhich, even while he tries to attribute to them purely organic origins, Beckett suspects are psychosomatically induced.
Beckett finally decides to move into a quite new word-setting, a highly alien one, yet one in which, as in writing, language must do the work of relation and creation: in 1934 he begins a psychoanalysis with W. R. Bion, then a junior analyst, whom he quickly re-christens "the covey. " He counts the sessions: "On Monday I go for the 133rd time. "111 He fears that "the analysis is going to turn out a failure. "112 Yet he sees "no prospect of the analysis coming to an end. " The somatic symptoms persist. but with a new force he realizes: "how lost I would be bereft ofmy incapacitation. "113 The shift in perception may appear slight, but what the letters make clear - clearer than Beckett ever intends - is how significant it is, to the point where he can write in 1935 to McGreevy: "The old heart pounces now & then, as though to console me for the intolerable symptoms ofan improvement";114 or write to him later, after the analysis has ended, that he has "overcome the need ofreturn­ ing to my vomit. "115
The letters manifest the shift not just in what they say, but also in the way they say it. They present a change, achieved in part through words used in the highly specialized context ofpsychoanalysis, through those words used in the not-entirely-different context that is letter-writing: not just their information, now, but their increasingly undefended style that becomes a disarming directness. Certainly, there is still room for highly self-conscious Beckett parades, ofthe sort that make him say of his early work, "ofcourse it stinks ofJoyce in spite ofmost earnest endeavours to endow it with my own odours. "116 The letters do provide
109 SB to Cissie Sinclair, 14 [August 1937].
110 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 10 March [1935].
111 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 February [1935].
112 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 1 January 1935.
113 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 February [1935].
114 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 20 February [1935].
115 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 May 1937.
116 SB to Charles Prentice, 15 August 1931.
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11
It is only when the crisis puts "the fear ofdeath" into him, 0 that
Introduction to Volume I
plentiful opportunities for the flexing of newly acquired linguistic muscles, as well as for old-fashioned showing-off. Those written to Nuala Costello, for example, are quite as narcissistically turned, as elliptical and excessive at once, as anything he ever wrote, an aware­ ness of which he seems to catch even as he protracts it, telling her: "My velleities of self-diffusion in this stew of LETTERS have been repulsed with the traditional contumely, so now I'm sulking and won't play. "117 Here, as on occasion with Cissie Sinclair, the seductions of verbal play seem to take the place- as it were, synechdochally- of seduction more palpable. He even goes so far as to say, at one point, with tongue only half in cheek, that "Perhaps the literary value of this letter [ . . . ] would be promoted by a few lines of verse. "118
Shortly after writing to McGreevy of "obstipation" and "tepid evira­
tion,"119 Beckett declares: "I find that eschewal ofverbal sanies is one of
my New Year resolutions. " 120 Of course, this resolution is quite as hard
to keep as any other. Yet the verbal play and display in the letters, which
will yield a tone familiar from the published work of the 1930s, can
indeed cede at any point to something less ostentatious or guarded.
When Beckett's writing darts between languages or registers, at times
he may be less demonstrating his cleverness than exploring the short­
comings in the words at his disposal. The distinction between this
exploration and his Joycean play may seem slim, but it is none the
less important, as he invites not so much his reader's admiration as
an apprehension of a shared incapacity - shared with language, too,
now. When Beckett writes that "the Irish Times accuses reception of his
new prose work," he may not be merely forgetting he is writing in
121
English.
When he writes to McGreevy, upon one more rejection of
a work, "Anyhow tant piss," he may be offering more than a trans­
national pun; may be inviting his friend into a verbal space where no
ready-made language can do justice to what he feels, when this includes
a wish to shrug off the whole disappointment in the fewest words
122
possible.
When he skips across registers and languages searching
117 SB to Nuala Costello, 27 February 1934.
118 SB to Cissie Sinclair, 14 [August 1937].
119 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 November [for 3 November 1932].
120 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 January [1933].
121 SB to Arland Ussher, 25 March 1936.
122 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 [August 1932]. "Tant piss" (pun on "tant pis" [too bad]).
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Introduction to Volume I
for a word, he is not always just parading his learning. Sometimes, he is
being as straightforward as possible. When he jots on the back of a
picture postcard to McGreevy sent from Florence, "Che tu fossi meco,"
he is not only finding a fancy way ofsaying, "Wish you were here"; he is
above all trusting in his friend to catch the compacted message, which
includes their shared love of languages, of Italy and Italian, of Dante,
and of the escape which all these together imply. 123 When he flashes
between English and French - and Latin - in his letters to McGreevy,
when he complains that "this vitaccia is terne beyond all belief," he is
124
He is coax­ ing his reader on to a fragile ground between languages, a ground that he
not only repudiating the "terne" in his very formulation.
will make ever more daringly his own in the years to come.
Beckett's letters reveal, they present, explain, harangue, occasionally theorize, more rarely justify. But as, from the moment he started to write - and not only because of the influence of Joyce - their author turned his back on any instrumentalist understanding of language, the letters do these things as acts of a writer, as acts of writing. What might appear a contradiction - between a highly self-conscious Beckett for whom the act of writing mattered even when it came to letters and the Beckett we have tried to sketch above, who always had his destinataire in mind, who wrote letters to - may, in fact, offer a key to what is distinctive in the tone and style ofthe letters, as compared to his more purposefully literary work of the period. For Beckett's writing in his letters is never so unadornedly itself as when it is moving out of itself, never so fresh and indicative of his future as when he feels confident of his destinataire. The letters presented here deploy their range of languages and idioms not merely for show; they do so in order to tickle, engage, challenge their intended reader, and they do so on the reader's linguistic home­ ground. From the cod-bombast of his French to his cousin Morris Sinclair, to the super-formal English of his applications for jobs, to the slang of his back-slapping to Arland Ussher - and beyond: Beckett writes as he hopes, and increasingly trusts, he will be heard.
123 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 2 February 1937.
124 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 24 February 1931. "Vitaccia" (It. , miserable life, wretched
existence). "Teme" (colorless).
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Introduction to Volume I
Beckett's letters, like his literary works of the period, are perform­
ances as much as they are communications; only, if they are perform­
ances, they are so for a very particular audience. And when his faith in
this audience grows, as it does with McGreevy, his language leaps,
explores the in-between spaces, achieves sudden condensations. So
too may it relax. Then, a freedom, an unselfconscious simplicity,
emerges which may not be found in the oeuvre until Beckett turns to
writing fiction in French at the end of World War II. This is what one
senses in the extraordinary letter of 10 March 1935, in which Beckett
explains to McGreevy his reasons for entering into and persisting with
his psychoanalysis; explains his attempt, compelled by his acute phys­
ical crises, to shed his "feeling of arrogant otherness," his "feeling that
I was too good for anything else," in favor of something for which he has
not yet found a name - unless its name is the extended one offered by
125
125 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 10 March 1935.
126 SB to Arland Ussher, 26 March 1937.
127 SB to Thomas McGreevy. 8 October 1935.
"It is more than I can do to go on," he writes to
this marvelous letter.
Arland Ussher in 1937 - having gone on at length in his letter.
hard it is to reach a tolerable arrangement between working & living," he writes to McGreevy, when the letter is the indispensable link in just such an "arrangement. "127
126
"How
xcix
LETTERS 1929-1940
1906
1911
1915
1916
1918
1919
1920
1921 1922
1923
1924 1925
13April
24April
11 November 21 January April
23 December 6 December 28June September May
23 May August
1 October March
March April June
SamuelBarclayBeckettbornatCooldrinaghon Good Friday.
A pupil at the Elsner kindergarten. A pupil at Earlsfort House School.
Sees flames and smoke rising from Dublin while walking in the Wicklow Mountains with his father: The Easter Rising.
End of World War I.
Start of the Anglo-Irish War.
SB joins brother Frank Beckett as a pupil at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh.
Partition of Ireland by Government of Ireland Act. Signing of Anglo-Irish Treaty.
Start of the Irish Civil War.
SB appointed Junior Prefect, Portora Royal School. Sits entrance exam for Trinity College Dublin. End oflrish Civil War.
SB leaves Portora Royal School as Senior 6th Form Prefect.
Enters Trinity College Dublin.
SeesSeanO'Casey'sJunoandthePaycockatthe Abbey Theatre, Dublin.
TakespartinDonnybrookmotorcycletrial. Picked for Trinity College Dublin Cricket First XI. Becomes Senior Exhibitioner.
3
CHRONOLOGY 1906-1929
Chronology 1906-1929
1926 January
8, 11 February
31 May
August-September
Michaelmas Term (autumn)
1927 22 March
20 April-August
6July
October
8 December 1928 January-July
July
StudiesItalianwithBiancaEspositoinDublin.
Attends premiere of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey Theatre with Geoffrey Thompson. Attends again on the night W. B. Yeats addresses the audience.
Places fourth in the Foundation Scholarship (Modem Languages), which entitles him to live free of charge in rooms in College.
Takes first trip to France; meets and travels with American student Charles Clarke.
Moves into rooms in Trinity College Dublin, 39 New Square. Meets Alfred Peron, French exchange Lecteur at TCD from the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris.
Recommended to be exchangeLecteur to the Ecole Normale Superieure by Trinity College Dublin Board.
Takes first trip to Italy. Lives in Florence, spends time with the Esposito family; reads Dante with Bianca Esposito. Is joined in Italy by Charles Clarke. Visits mountains nearLake Como with Mario Esposito.
Thomas McGreevy remains in the post ofLecteur at the Ecole Normale Superieure for 1927-1928. SB is offered an alternative position at the University of Besarn;on, with assurance of appointment at the ENS in autumn 1928; on the advice of his Trinity College Dublin mentor, T. B. Rudmose-Brown, he turns this down.
Awarded First Class Moderatorship in Modern Literature at Trinity College Dublin with Large Gold Medal. Wins travel grant.
BA degree from Trinity College Dublin formally conferred.
TeachesatCampbellCollege,Belfast,aninterim post arranged by Rudmose-Brown.
Is visited in Dublin by cousin Margaret (Peggy) Sinclair and Charles Clarke.