How He Was: Samuel Beckett's Lives

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 Dublin, during the years immediately following the War, Beckett experienced a kind of revelation that his work would have to be written about and from within a condition of helplessness and impotence. Following this, he wrote in extremely short order the works that established his distinctiveness and on which his fame is certain to continue to rest, the three novels of the Trilogy and Waiting for Godot.

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 village of Roussillon in the unoccupied zone, helped make the existence of other people for the first time truly unignorable for him. Here, Knowlson comes into his own, combining the advantages of access to a huge range of previously uninvestigated sources and unpublished documentation with an indefatigable inquisitiveness and a breathtaking capacity for taking pains. Given Cronin's more limited access to materials and necessary dependence upon previously-published accounts, Knowlson's account of Beckett's life from the late 1930s to the end of the War is inevitably the much richer and more nuanced of the two biographies.

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 Saint-Lô. As usual, Knowlson has the edge over Cronin in the abundance and variety of the testimonies and materials on which he is able to draw. But again, the very thinness of Cronin's fabric lets some of the bony edges poke out that are pillowed by the profusion of circumstance in Knowlson's account. Knowlson alludes only in passing to the 1946 broadcast that Beckett made for Radio Eireann about his experiences at Saint-Lô, asserting blandly that it shows how deeply the experience affected him. Cronin does not flinch from showing us the possibly self-defensive, but still shocking frigidity of that broadcast. Only a knowledge of the humanity of Beckett's later explorations of the inhuman condition could rescue the insufferable, sarky high-mindedness of stuff like this:

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 village of Roussillon. Typically, Knowlson both tells us more about this woman and resists the cheap laugh.

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.