How He
Was: Samuel Beckett's Lives
Review of James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London:
Bloomsbury, 1996) and Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London:
Harper Collins, 1996). First published in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal,
4.1 (1998): 121-6
Literary biographies are supposed to make an author's lire cohere, first
with itself, and then with its work. The particular problem for the biographer
of Beckett is to put together the diffuse life of restless indolence which
Beckett lived before the War with the utterly different life into which he
entered after it.
Any biography of Beckett must be judged largely on the quality of its
account of what happened to produce this transformation. It will also,
incidentally, have to cope with the problem of keeping the story going. Up to
the beginning of the War, the reader will be hanging on wanting to know what
will become of this wisecracking, but feckless Wunderkind. Once Beckett came
into his own life, by beginning to write the work that defined him, his life
also tended disconcertingly to vanish into that work. Neither James Knowlson
nor Anthony Cronin are able to do much more with this long aftermath than chronicle
the dates of Beckett's publications and productions.
Everything came late for Samuel Beckett. Unable or unwilling to hold
down a job or even to pick one up in the first place, the young Beckett was the
despair of his well-heeled, austerely Protestant, and utterly non-artistic
family, who nevertheless continued to support him financially. Beckett had
spent his twenties and thirties drifting back and forth between Paris and
Dublin, becoming part of the circle of artists and assistants who gathered around
Joyce, giving up a promising academic career at Trinity College Dublin,
undergoing a period of psychoanalysis with the young W.R. Bion in London,
undertaking a sort of Grand Tour of Germany in order to perfect his German and
in vague hopes of turning himself into a connoisseur of painting. During all of
this time, Beckett was living the life of a writer in the classic fashion, i.e.
not really writing anything, but instead, as he put it in a letter during the
period of his analysis, "boozing and sneering and lounging around and
feeling that I was too good for anything else'. By the beginning of the war,
the only publications of consequence he had to show for a decade of his shabby
vocation were a volume of short stories and a novel. (There was nearly a play about
Samuel Johnson as well, though the fragment that survives fails even to get
Johnson on the stage.Even in its fragmentary condition, however Human Wishes
is actually an extraordinarily fully-imagined piece of drama.)
Anthony Cronin has some very striking pages on why Beckett should have
been drawn during the late 1930s to the pessimism of Johnson rather than to
that of Swift. He thinks that Beckett found a deeper, more generalising and
less personal pessimism in Johnson, who himself criticised Swift for the
fundamental egocentricity of his hopelessness. But there might be another turn
left in this screw. What if the figure of Johnson represented for Beckett a
perverse kind of ego-ideal, formed from the recognition of how rooted his own
unforgiving, Swiftian wildness was in a set of very personal glooms and gripes?
Beckett is Swiftian rather than Johnsonian also in the fact that it is not
sadness but rage that flares most distinctly through his writing of the 1920s
and 1930s. This rilliant, but neurotically self-regarding young man was
lacerated and nourished by a savage indignation at, well, it is hard to know
quite what precisely, but largely at the not uncommon discovery that the world
was not shaped according to his needs. This indignation issues both in
matchless comic writing and in some of the vilest misogyny to be found in the
pages of any writer. I sometimes have an uneasy feeling that only Beckett's
indolence saved him from a slide into a more programmatic kind of literary
hatred. Had his rage found a convenient gutter of wrath in which to flow, had
all that patrician ressentiment and carefully distilled disdain been directed
into, rather than at politics, one can easily imagine a very different career
for him. I imagine such a Beckett rising at best to the wild, misanthropical
minority of Wyndham Lewis, whose icily erudite ferocity finds no closer
parallel in pre-War writing than Dream of Fair to Middling Women or More
Pricks Than Kicks .
Something happened to prevent this, something absolutely not given in
Beckett's temperament or upbringing. In
I think an argument could be made that the transformation in Beckett's
life and writing begins with the period of quite intensive analysis which
he underwent with W.R. Bion in 1934-6. Neither Cronin nor Knowlson devote
much space to this encounter, possibly because however absorbing and exacting
the analysis might have been (nearly two years of weekly sessions, though
Beckett remembered it in later years as lasting only about six months), Beckett
himself had little to say about it in his many letters to Thomas MacGreevy of
the period, and, in fact, he broke off the analysis prematurely. Of course, one
must expect biographers to suffer from a certain measure of sibling rivalry
with psychoanalysts. Both Cronin and Knowlson confirm the story which Beckett
himself frequently recited (and which features in his radio play All That
Fall) of a visit in the company of Bion to a lecture by C.G. Jung at the
Tavistock Clinic, in which Jung described a patient as never having been
properly born. However, the evidence of one or two letters to MacGreevy seems
to indicate that during these years, Beckett was beginning a process of giving
birth to himself. (The stern, somewhat stodgy Bion, who seems to have helped
initiate this process, was towards the end of his life to write some
extraordinary psychoanalytic dialogues with his own unborn self.) The
acknowledgment rather than the disavowal of his own melancholy ambivalence, an
acknowledgment that perhaps could not be complete until after the War, would be
a crucial stage in delivering Beckett from an art of mutilating rage into one
of maimed mercy.
There can be no doubt that Beckett's experiences during the War, first
of all working for the Resistance as a translator and collator of strategic
espionage, and then, following the betrayal of his cell, hiding in the
Knowlson plays his trumps very liberally in the chapter he calls
"Germany: The Unknown Diaries 1936-7', which is based on notebooks
discovered in Beckett's trunk after his death, made available to Knowlson for
his exclusive use by the writer's nephew, Edward. And yet there are also times,
I feel, when Cronin's relative distance from the material allows him to squint
past the trees to the wood. Basing his judgment largely upon remarks made by
Beckett in letters to Thomas MacGreevy, Cronin is visibly dismayed by the
boredom and apathy with which Beckett responded to the cultural barbarism of
Nazi Germany, declining, for example, to make the acquaintance of some contemporary
painters who had been the victim of oppression because '[t]hey are all great
proud angry poor put upons in their fastnesses and I can't say yessir and nosir
anymore' (qtd. in Cronin, p. 244). Knowlson explains that Beckett was tired and
depressed when he wrote these words, but even after his return to Dublin he was
still complaining (in letters which Cronin quotes, but I think Knowlson does
not) about having to listen to 'all the usual sentimental bunk about the Nazi
persecutions' and 'the usual bilge about the persecutions' (qtd. in Cronin, p.
246). This is not wickedness exactly, though it is the smallness that makes
wickedness possible. It is obvious that Beckett found Nazi ideology intolerable
too; but, like many of those lacking in political imagination in the period,
Beckett seems to have objected much more to the vulgarity of the Nazis than to
what they were actually doing. Knowlson insists that Beckett's diaries show
that while he was actually meeting persecuted Jewish artists, 'he felt genuine
concern at the constraints under which they were working and at the
restrictions that had been imposed on their freedoms' (p. 239). It may very
well be that the diaries do show this, but there is precious little sign of it
in what Knowlson chooses to quote from them. For the most part, Knowlson's
judgments about his subject are as measured and objective as those of a close
friend writing an authorised biography can be; but on the question of Beckett's
political sensitivities there are times when it seems that he may have known
the liberal and compassionate man that Beckett became in his later years too
well to be able to take proper measure of the crassness of his youth.
After the War, Beckett volunteered to work as part of a Red Cross
mission to the shattered town of
What was important was not our having penicillin when they had none...
but the occasional glimpse obtained by us in them and who knows, by them in us
(for they are an imaginative people) of that smile at the human condition as
little to be extinguished by bombs as to be broadened by the elixirs of
Burroughs and Wellcome - the smile deriding, among other things, the having and
the not having, the giving and the taking, sickness and health, (qtd. in
Cronin, p. 352)
Was the attainment of this sardonic rictus really more important than
penicillin? One is tempted to respond to this outrageous assertion in words
like those that close Beckett's own story 'Dante and the Lobster': It Was Not.
The most emphatic sign of humanisation in the writing that Beckett was already
doing in Watt by this time would be the ethical dilapidations it wrought (not
least with the meddling power of the comma) on the stifled,
self-regarding composure of sentences like the above.
The Beckett presented in Knowlson's biography appears much more of a
piece, much more a character from the kind of nineteenth-century Bildungsroman
that the young Beckett despised than the Beckett presented by Cronin, whose
life is characterised by rupture and unevenness. This looseness in the joints
allows Cronin to make sharper (if also sometimes cruder) distinctions than
Knowlson between different bits of Beckett's oeuvre. Writing, for example,
about Beckett's first completed play, Eleuthéria (which he never
translated, and which has only recently been published), Knowlson suggests that
had it been staged in 1948, when Beckett wanted it to be, "it would
certainly be talked of now, in spite of its limitations and flaws, as one of
the plays that ushered in a new era in avant-garde French theatre' (p. 366).
Cronin's rather more robust judgement is, I think, nearer the mark: He reckons
that 'if Eleutheria had been produced before Godot it would almost certainly
have been a flop', and, what is more, in seeming "like an ordinary play
gone wrong... might have prejudiced the chances and clouded the strangeness of Godot'
(p. 367).
I agree with some other reviewers of this biographical pseudocouple who
have found that Cronin's account succeeds in summoning up the specifically
Irish contexts of Beckett's writing. He has some sharply perceptive things to
say, for instance, about the culture of prosperous Protestantism in which
Beckett was brought up. He also registers more effectively than Knowlson the
horrible (my judgement, not his) maleness of the world which formed him, and
which he retained in the form of his friendships and cultural style throughout
his life. For a man who wrote so disparagingly about the possibilities of
friendship in Proust, it is remarkable what a ferocious capacity for friendship
he displayed in his life (this is one of the honourable reasons why he could
never have been a good critic). But although he was able to have intense
friendships with women as he grew older, Beckett was always more comfortable
with male butties and drinking partners than with lovers or mothers.
Beckett has Molloy imagine a kind of resolution in his tortured relationship
with his mother as a relapse into shared decrepitude, in which the crone, as it
were, is allowed to become the crony: 'We were so old she and I, she had had me
so young, that we were like a couple of old cronies, sexless, unrelated, with
the same memories, the same desires, the same rancours'. Both biographers are
infinitely more understanding than their predecessor, Deirdre Bair, of the
difficulties that must have been faced by Beckett's mother (they could scarcely
be less), with Cronin in particular encouraging us to imagine what must have
been her exasperation. And both also handle the issue of Beckett's sexual life
with honesty and tact, though predictably, Knowlson is much more in the know
than Cronin about a couple of affairs and liaisons. But really it is what I
once remember a school matron describing as the 'smell of trouser' which hangs
most heavily over this life, and which neither biographer really seems to get
at.
If Cronin allows himself more robust good sense than Knowlson, he also
probably gives in too often to gossip and picture-making to fill the gaps in
the record. This is particularly so in the portions of his biography dealing
with Beckett's childhood; while Knowlson always sieves his evidence (he, after
all, has an abundance to sieve) before concluding that passages from Beckett's
work relate to or derive from his life, Cronin shamelessly snitches for his own
purposes anything from the work that looks like it might be childhood
reminiscence. He also finds it hard to resist comic stories and vignettes, like
the account of Noelle Beamish, the tweedy lesbian in Roussillon who claimed to
be a cousin of Winston Churchill and whose utilitarian drawers flapping on the
line next to the frilly knickers of her partner, he says, caused merriment in
the
Even though the bike he is riding has no lights or brakes, and slews and
skids over the terrain that Knowlson treads with such law-abiding
circumspection, Cronin often succeeds in being righter than Knowlson. But if
one leaves aside Knowlson's propensity for excessive admiration, his style of
biography-writing is like that admired by Beckett in early 1937:
What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and
deaths, because that is all I can know... I want the oldfashioned history book
of reference, not the fashionable monde romance that explains copious [ly]
without telling me anything about Luther, where he went next, what he lived on,
what he died of, etc. I say the expressions "historical necessity' and
'Germanic destiny' start the vomit moving upwards, (qtd. in Knowlson, pp.
244-5)
Knowlson's willingness to let quotation and circumstance speak, if not
exactly for themselves, then at least unprodded by the toe of the QED, will
probably make his the more lasting of the two biographies. Or rather, come to
think of it, the opposite: I must mean that Cronin's book may still be standing
illustriously entire on my shelf long after Knowlson's has been thumbed and
rifled to venerable tatters.
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