An Appreciation of Samuel Beckett
Beckett is dead, a consummation he long claimed to seek. 'I have no bone to pick with graveyards' is one of the best of his bitter-sweet comments on the whole business. The world mourns the loss of a great writer, for whom recognition was almost a burden, and those of us who knew him will also miss a courteous, punctilious, faintly lunatic friend; a soft touch for a sob story or a permanent loan.
I floated quite naturally into his company in the early Sixties when we became Montparnasse neighbours. A J ('Con') Leventhal of Trinity was the catalyst, and if one was naturally wary of intruding on the great man, such caution was soon dissolved in cataracts of drink and good conversation.
We usually met about 10 pm in the Falstaff, an old watering hole of the Twenties still frequented by writers. Was that Sartre in the corner, or Ionesco? Probably, but after a friendly farmer's nod had been exchanged, we did not cross the lines, because that was the convention of our village.
Sartre lodged with Simone de Beauvoir in the Rue Schoelcher around the corner, so everyone converged in the evening after the day's work to relax among friends. And relax Beckett usually did, the lined face suddenly crinkling with laughter, the seagull eyes sparkling. His bony reserve was daunting, but his beloved Con was a gentle subversive. Leventhal and I were discussing love in a leisurely fashion when Same saw a chance to shove in his oar. 'No love!' he said with satisfaction, 'only fuck.'
Startled silence, as Beckett moves in again. 'Eat-drink-fuck, that's all!' he declared, unconsciously echoing Eliot. How a shocked Con recovered to discomfit Beckett is a longer story; but he succeeded because he knew his friend.
Friendship clearly meant a great deal to Beckett, and he was fiercely loyal; with widows of his friends in particular can testify to his care and generosity. Although he was of the select company of those who, echoing Sophocles, would prefer not to have been born, he would do everything he could to ease a friend's suffering.
Contemplating the cheerful grimness of his work and days, I once asked him if he had ever thought of ending it. 'Out of the question,' he said brusquely, 'but I have thought about disappearance.' His best plan, he elaborated, was a boat with a hole in the bottom, to be dredged up by the divers. Then a sigh. 'That's legally impossible too. The widow wouldn't inherit for seven years.'
He lived without the protective outer skin of custom, and saw naked pain and suffering everywhere.
Chased out of a publishing party by a belligerent young Irish novelist, he first disappeared under the table, emerging at the other end to plead on his hands and knees for a kiss from a pretty young woman. In a taxi afterwards, he mutely pointed to the signs of various charities adorning the inside of the car: 'Help the blind', 'Save the starving', 'Mercy for the mutilated'; they seemed to sing an answer to his call.
Over a cup of coffee, he confided: 'I see it everywhere. The human spirit is on its knees. Everything is on fire.' For him, only a few artists - the weeping canvases of Bram Van Velde, the ferocity of Celine's novels - were equal to the Goya-like darkness of our crematorium century.
Ireland was a sore subject, to be carefully handled: he had recognised Joyce's reservations and, though a firm Beckett family man and devoted to nephew or niece, he had not great desire to return. While he could speak with extraordinary fondness of the landscape, the land itself, and would praise books like Synge's Wicklow Travels, he suspected the inhabitants and their attitude towards art.
The famous misquotation about or being driven into writing because we were caught between the English and the Church, was only partly right: we had also ruined ourselves. I had an early book savaged by an older Irish poet, and Beckett was relentless: 'Don't answer, they're not worth it.' He did not like bad manners, literary or otherwise, and regarded them as endemic to the great Hibernian bog.
Withall, he seemed to me deeply Irish, with his control masking volatile swings of mood from unshakable gloom about the human condition through ferocity at any surrender to lower standards; and underlying all, the quick redeeming flash of humour, the sudden surge of generosity.
We never mentioned Deirdre Bair's biography, not even my long, repentant review of it in the Guardian, but when I teased him about the confusions about his birthday, he still stuck to Good Friday, April 13, 1906, despite the birth certificate recording May 13.
'I have it from a good source,' he said. 'Not the Dublin City Records,' I replied. 'A far better source,' he grinned, 'someone at the heart of the problem.' Then with one flat Dublin phrase, he swept my friendly prodding away: 'The mother!' His look dared me to contradict that authority.
I watched once as a crafty journalist, seeking his confidence, lightly mentioned that he had played rugby with Ollie Campbell. Beckett's eyes lit up, and all the weary embarrassment vanished. 'Do you really know Campbell?' he said excitedly. 'What's he like?'
My cunning confrere confided that no more modest humble man ever pulled on rugby boot. 'He's a genius!' cried Beckett. 'But you're not supposed to have a television,' I reminded Sam. 'You're supposed to be against all that.' 'Only for the games,' was his furtive apology, 'and only when the Irish play.'
But the journalist had the hook in, and soon Sam was discussing with him a rugby team of Irish writers. Spoilers like O'Flaherty were easy to place, but the half-blind Joyce was a problem, and Beckett would not relegate his old master to the bench. 'Very crafty, very nippy, try him at fly-half. He might surprise you when the light is fading.'
When I moved back to Ireland, a decision about which he was mildly apprehensive, our meetings became rarer. In any case, his retreat for such occasions to the ultra-modern hotel opposite his flat was a sign not only of his advancing age but also of general change.
We rarely discussed writing, except when some technical problem was involved, but he was complimentary when I needed support. Once when I lamented the fact that Irish literature seemed to have gone backwards and that there were no longer any link between French and English literature as in the great days of the Modern Movement, I was so eloquently gloomy that I finally let my head hang, declaring: 'There's no point in going on.' There was a sigh and a stir above me until I looked up into his concerned gaze: 'But John, you must go on.'
People sometimes wondered if Beckett's retiring modesty was genuine, considering his professional exactitude. In our second-to-last conversation, after we had moved away from that monstrous hotel to a little worker's cafe, he became his old relaxed self. 'What are you writing now, Sam?' 'Senilities,' he said with pleasant sharpness. 'But I'll manage something yet. Did you have that terrible choice at school between science and the Greeks? I wish I had read Sophocles...'
A phrase from our differing backgrounds intrigued him suddenly. 'John, what do you mean by a spoiled priest?' I explained, and there was a wry pause. 'Well, I suppose that I'm a spoiled hermit,' he said reflectively. 'My father was always worried about me and wanted me to do a Guinness Clerkship. I'd be retired by now.' 'And unknown,' I said. 'Ah yes,' he said with a genuine sigh. 'Never heard of.' He sounded as if he meant it.
Samuel Beckett died on December 22 and was buried yesterday in a secret ceremony at the Montparnasse Cemetery. The son of a surveyor, he was brought up in Dublin as a Protestant, and studied modern languages at Trinity College, Dublin. He first came to Paris in 1928 to lecture in English at the Ecole Normale Sup&#233rieure.
After his father William Frances Beckett died in Dublin in 1933, his mother tried to persuade Beckett to curtail his literary ambitions. In 1937 he escaped his middle-class family, and settled in Paris.
He married Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, six years his elder, in secret in 1961. She died in Paris on July 17 at the age of 89. They had no children.