Samuel Beckett – The Life

I have been submerged in several volumes about the life and work of Samuel Beckett, poet, novelist, playwright and critic, his most famous work is probably ‘Waiting for Godot’, but includes novels such as ‘Murphy’, ‘Molloy’, and plays such as ‘Endgame’ and ‘Krapps Last Tape’. I’ve just read Deirdre Bair’s ‘Samuel Becket – a biography’, ‘Beckett Remembers, Remembering Beckett’ edited by James and Elizabeth Knowlson, a collection of unpublished conversations with Beckett, and reminiscences by his friends and those who worked with him. Cambridge has published the first (of four) volumes of Beckett’s letters, and ‘Images of Beckett’ by John Haynes (photographer) and James Knowlson (biographer).

   

I remember being fascinated by Beckett from my late-teens (my mid-teens having been taken up with an obsession with another Irishman, Oscar Wilde – but that’s for another entry). Beckett was then already in his late 60s, with his almost iconic look. There was definitely something charismatic about the man and his complex and often contradictory desire for privacy, whilst both being very visible and active in regard to the production of his work. In both the biography and the recollections, he refuses interviews, gives instructions, talks to those who will produce his work saying ‘you can ask me anything about my life, but don’t ask me to interpret the work’ or at other times, saying that the life has nothing to do with the work. Often he gave individual performers incredibly astute guidance about a character in his work, having said it wasn’t his job to interpret it.



It becomes clear with such reading that Beckett himself didn’t always know what he wanted. And certainly in the work, he didn’t always understand its meaning, whilst he did appear to have a clear intent. What I also perceive is that it wasn’t dangerous to Beckett, he didn’t fear not understanding or having a clear interpretation. He was a writer writing. It was his job, and there is no law that dictates that creative beings have to fully understand everything that they do. In fact, I think it is quite common for them not to.

In the smallest of nutshells, distilling the near 1,400 pages I have read in the past 10 or so days (and I am still reading the letters and ‘images of Beckett’, and haven’t yet started on reading and re-reading the work), here is something of Beckett’s life: he was born in Dublin in 1906, he has said in April of that year, but the certification suggests May, although because it was common that registrations took up to a month, April is as likely to be the accurate month. He grew up in a reasonably well-to-do environment, his father ‘Bill’ a rather boisterous and successful businessman, if not very intellectual, and a rather assertive and commanding mother May. His childhood, with his brother Frank, and at different times a number of cousins who were being raised by his parents, seemed a relatively happy one, and very much an outdoor life, full of walks and outdoor play. The pleasure in walking remained with him throughout his life.

The problems appear to begin with the onset of adolescence and early manhood when his desires begin to diverge from the expectations of his parents. His health was always unstable and very soon his psychological disquiets began to show themselves in physical ways, he was constantly, from early adulthood, subject to cysts and other pustulations which left him in pain and discomfort and often totally debilitated him, along with colds and viral infections, and possible pneumonias that confined him to bed for long periods.

At the outset he was not a natural scholar, but following in Wilde’s footsteps he starting at Portura School, before going on to Trinity. However at some stage his passion for Latin languages took hold and by the time he left Trinity he was a highly respected graduate with expectations of joining the faculty. His tutor arranged for him to receive a lectureship in Paris, after which he returned to Dublin to teach at Trinity. He did not stay at this work for very long. It became very clear to him (as well as his students) that he was not cut out to teach in this formalised institution.

Beckett seemed to have no expectation of becoming a writer until early adulthood. He wrote a few poems and some criticism. However in Paris he became involved in supporting the life of James Joyce who by then was already almost totally blind, and along with a group of other Irishmen he helped Joyce with his work on what was to become ‘Finnegan’s Wake’.

What did become apparent to Beckett whilst in Paris was that ultimately he didn’t want to live in Ireland, and that Paris was to be the place for him. This was where he would begin his writing life. It was also almost unavoidable if he were to free himself from the web of his mother May’s life and desires.

I don’t think it is an overstatement to believe that this relationship with his mother was possibly what really formed the life of Beckett. It certainly framed it in the early years. May wanted Beckett to be a respectable academic, and preferably at her side. The situation intensified when Beckett’s father William died, and his brother Frank took over the business. Beckett returned to Dublin on a number of occasions, possibly suffering from guilt that he was unable to be the man his parents, especially his mother wanted. But his health would give out and he had to make a break for it again. Ultimately, he had to stay away.

Around this time Beckett did undergo some psychotherapy, and amongst the things that he mentioned was a belief that he had experienced memories from inside the womb. After hearing Jung speak on the existence of such experiences and their impact, Beckett seemed to become fascinated by this pre-birth or not fully born concept.

About Beckett’s intimate life relatively little has been written. During these years between Dublin and Paris he had strong feelings for a cousin Peggy, who lived in Germany, and with whose family he visited when fleeing Dublin. There is also the complex situation with Lucia Joyce, which seems primarily to have been on her side, but the existence of this connection has followed Beckett around. Casual relations as a young man are mentioned, but he has been recorded as saying that intimate relations weren’t about love but about ‘fucking’. Ultimately he became attached to a French woman called Suzanne, who for much of their time together subsumed her personality, needs and desires to support him in his early writing career, organising much of his domestic life and being the interface between him and possible producers and publishers of his work. This relationship worked well until Beckett’s literary reputation began to form, and acceptances led to the need for him to expand on his intentions, therefore becoming less reliant on her. Although it was almost always Suzanne who turned up at the first nights of productions of his work, reporting back to him at an after show party or at home. The couple lived and remained together, if often living separate lives, even at the time of their marriage, which Beckett decided on as a means of ensuring that in the event of his death, Suzanne was suitably taken care of (she was sixty when they married and he 3-4 years younger). In their latter years they holidayed regularly together, getting away from the pressures of the life of a famous man. They remained a couple until her death shortly before his own, although Bair, in her book, mentions the probability of relationships with certainly one if not more other women in his latter years.

Beckett’s writing life primarily took place in Paris and in Ussr-sur-Mer where he built a small bungalow as a retreat from the busy life he underwent in Paris. Although he has primarily become perceived as a playwright, Beckett himself tended to speak of his earlier and later prose work for which he was most proud. What he undeniably knew was that he was a writer, it was what made him tick, what formed him, what was almost beyond his control. He was a sculptor of words, be they spoken words in theatre or off of the page. And in both places, he was primarily a monologist. There are hundreds of academics who have spent years analysing and interpreting Beckett’s work. During his lifetime he was sometimes amused by the interpretations and understandings that they imposed.

He spent much of the final third of his life working on productions of his plays in an attempt to find what he felt was the most accurate interpretations, he also spent time translating his work from one language to another (generally French or English or vis-versa, with occasional work on German – all these languages he spoke fluently, as he did Italian). My impression is that ultimately some of the German productions became the closest to his desires, as the actors were able more to subsume their own egos and simply become the voices of the characters he gave them.

My overriding sensation about the man (aside from his talent as a writer), from this reading, is of a man of great humanity. For someone who apparently guarded his privacy to the extreme, he had an extraordinary gift for friendship, loyalty and for supporting fellow creative spirits. He was at the bedsides of both his parents and brother when they died, and whenever he knew about it, at those of a number of his friends.

He had a passionate interest in literature, art and music, all of which fed into his own work, music often being spoken of as being something he used in his work. One memory of him mentions how he almost conducted elements of a performance out of an actor, using his hands and fingers quietly to indicate his desire. He has been described by many who knew or worked with him as a ‘gentleman’ and someone who had the old graces. He certainly had a power of will which he imposed in regard to productions of his work in which he was involved, but he was always aware of the needs of the artists he was working with, and hated to undermine them or withdraw from them their individual creative power. Many have said that although he was probably the most controlling of directors of his work, in a way, in being so, it liberated them even more.

He had the greatest respect for his adopted country, and remained unpolitical in part because he didn’t want to endanger his life in France. However he showed his support of this nation during the second world war by being a part of the resistance movement over a period of two years. Something he spoke of very rarely, likewise the awards he received both for those activities, and in honour of his writing work, including the Nobel prize. Beckett spent his final months in an old people’s home, dying in 1989.

Deirdre Bair’s biography concludes ten years before the death of Beckett, but the book edited by the Knowlsons has reminiscences right to the end of his life. However I will probably read Knowlson’s own biography of Beckett later in the year. I plan to read or re-read the works of Beckett throughout the year.

REVIEW: Must you Go? My life with Harold Pinter by Antonia Frazer

On some levels one might perceive this volume as a rather dull and mundane offering, primarily comprising selected entries from Antonia Frazer’s diaries. It is however very much a proof of a profound and satisfying romance, and all the dull and mundane things that that comprises to anyone outside of that romance. Harold Pinter and Antonia Frazer were two people who were very deeply in love with each other for the whole of their lives together.

It is also a volume of chatter and snippets that communicate in passing the lives of two working writers, whose own lives cross the lives of other working writers, creative minds and historical and political participants. It encapsulates an era in their possibly expansive if narrow milieu. And of their internationalism. Both Pinter and Frazer are engaged with what is going on in the world, and it matters to them.

As a record of the mind of Pinter, I would suggest that you revert to his work, however it does give you a sense of his persona, not as exclusively serious as his media image or work might infer. Though I think anyone who watched the wonderful two-part ‘Arena’ documentary about him, would have already gleaned this. Harold was a fine mind, a serious thinker, and a fully rounded human being.

What does this volume communicate of Antonia Frazer? It tells us relatively little of her as a writer, although the mention of some of her work is there. It does though show a woman with a deep capacity for appreciating the qualities of those around her. Almost everyone she meets she taps into their core and takes pleasure in their company. Even the difficult people, like her own ‘dada’. She isn’t a surface person, and enjoys and has a powerful capacity for friendship. Both she and Pinter were very definitely social beings, whilst their work and personalities also demand intense concentration and solitude as a counterpoint.

The final part of the book is unavoidably weighted with sadness at Pinter’s diagnosis, and subsequent decline. It offers a testimony to his courage and fortitude that he survives seven years and for many of those years remains as active as his body permits him.

Reading what we don’t enjoy - 1

I have recently begun to think about the experience of reading and to interrogate myself more fully about how I feel about reading books I don’t enjoy. I’m not here talking about badly written books, in fact I am talking about exactly the opposite. I am talking about extremely well written novels, particularly.

Of course most readers during their lives read difficult books, and books about extremely uncomfortable and unpalatable subjects, generally non-fiction books about areas we wish to educate ourselves about in order to formulate and hold an opinion. However, how do we feel when a novel we read leaves us unsatisfied, despite the fact that we can clearly see that the writer has great skill, clear intention and has very probably succeeded in achieving what he or she set out to do?

Sometimes this distemper I have with a novel may simply evolve out of the fact that I have absolutely no empathy for the characters represented. For me, empathy, if not ‘like’ is important in at least some of the characters. This is not to say I am always seeking characters that reflect me, or an idealised version of the person I would like to see in the mirror.

Nor is it that I demand characters with whose opinions I will agree. After all the pleasure of reading is very much about finding oneself in original and often different environments and situations to those we experience in our own lives, about learning to understand through fantasy the lives and imaginations of others. It’s about being able to understand their personality and life arc, and, despite that they themselves may not, to understand their motives, or to understand something about not always being able to understand their motives. And yet, even being able to achieve the above criteria, sometimes I am not satisfied.

I have recently read two novels that fall into this category by the writer Joyce Carol Oates, a novelist for whom I have great respect and from reading whose work I often achieve great satisfaction. In the past she has taken me to all kinds of places, offered many satisfying, pleasurable and often uncomfortable situations, and yet in these two instances I have had real difficulty in obtaining pleasure from the work I am reading. In ‘The Tattoed Girl’ it very much was about finding characters that for me had little saving grace, despite that I understood what had led certainly some of them to behave in the manor they did.

In the novel I am currently 2/3rds through, ‘Little Bird of Heaven’ I can’t say that it is lack of empathy, although the characters involved are very dissimilar to anyone I know or may wish to spend much time with. I do think that some of my discombobulation may be because there is a great deal of repetitiveness in the novel. And yet I can clearly see that this is an intentional part of the construction of this novel, as Oates is engaging us in how we perceive over a period of time, how what we understand can and often does change, so by revisiting incidents and feelings at different ages, the layers of knowledge and understanding shift and change. And may even become less clear, rather than more transparent. The repetitiveness is also created by the fact that the same actions are perceived by different individuals in the story.

I don’t yet know whether this constant repetition is what has alienated me from my reading pleasure zone. In this instance my investigation is still ‘live’, but I am interested to hear what others think about not enjoying a particular book.