Samuel Beckett's German Diaries 1936-1937 (Historicizing Modernism)

Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937 Historicizing Modernism Series Editors Matthew Feldman, Senior Lecturer in ...

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Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937

Historicizing Modernism Series Editors Matthew Feldman, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century History, University of Northampton, UK, and Erik Tonning, Research Director, University of Bergen, Norway Associate Editor Paul Jackson, Lecturer in History, Open University, UK Editorial Board Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Reader in 20th Century Literature, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, Oxford Brookes University, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Director, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; Professor Janet Wilson, Department of English, University of Northampton, UK Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade. Informed by archival approaches to literature, and working beyond the usual European/American avant-garde 1900–1945 parameters, this series reassesses established views of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual backgrounds, working methods, and manuscript research. Series Titles Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism Edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid Reframing Yeats: Genre and History in the Poems, Prose and Plays Charles Ivan Armstrong Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937 Mark Nixon Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’ John Pilling


Mark Nixon

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Mark Nixon 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Mark Nixon has asserted his right under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-4411-5258-9 (hardcover) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

for aura Das Wort zum Zur-Tiefe-gehn, das wir gelesen haben. Die Jahre, die Worte seither. Wir sind es noch immer. Weisst du, der Raum ist unendlich, Weisst du, du brauchst nicht zu fliegen, Weisst du, was sich in dein Aug schrieb, vertieft uns die Tiefe. (Paul Celan)

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Contents

List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Series Editors’ Preface

xii

List of Abbreviations and Notes on the Text

xiii

Introduction: Beckett’s German Diaries

1

1

Beckett’s Journey to Germany 1936–1937

6

2

Beckett’s German Diaries

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3

Psychoanalysis, Quietism and Literary Waste

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4

Beckett Reading German Literature

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5

Beckett, Nazi Culture and Contemporary German Literature

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6

Playing the Scales of Literature: Beckett’s ‘Notesnatching’

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7

Beckett’s Journal of a Melancholic and Other Writing

110

8

Talking Pictures: Beckett and the Visual Arts

132

9

Clarifiers and Obscurantists: Towards a New Aesthetic

162

Conclusion: The Threshold of Words

187

Appendix: Beckett’s Travel Itinerary

193

Notes

194

Bibliography

224

Index

239

List of Illustrations

Figure 1 Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

Visitor’s Book to the Schreckenskammer, Moritzburg, Halle, 1937; courtesy of the Moritzburg, Halle. Giorgione: Self-Portrait, c. 1510, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig, Kunstmuseum des Landes Niedersachsen. Antonello da Messina: St. Sebastian, c. 1475–76, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Naumburger Master: Hermann and Reglindis, 1937, West Screen, Naumburg Cathedral; courtesy of Deutsche Fotothek. Paul Cézanne: Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 1905–06, watercolour on paper, Tate, London; © Tate, London, 2010. Karl Ballmer: Head in Red, c. 1930–31, tempera and oil on plywood; courtesy of the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau. Hercules Seghers: View of Rhenen, c. 1625–30, oil on oak, Gemäldegalerie Berlin; © bpk / Gemäldegalerie, SMB /Jörg P. Anders.

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Acknowledgements

This book has had a long genesis, as I have been working on Samuel Beckett’s German diaries for precisely ten years. The book builds on my PhD thesis, entitled ‘what a tourist I must have been’: Samuel Beckett’s ‘German Diaries’, completed in 2005 under the supervision of Emeritus Professor John Pilling at the University of Reading. Invariably, there have been many people along the road who have enabled, encouraged and supported my work on Beckett’s diaries, and it gives me great joy to acknowledge, however inadequately, my debt to them here. My first and foremost debt of gratitude is to John Pilling, who first drew my attention to the German diaries in 1999. Over the past ten years, my work has benefited from his limitless knowledge of all things Beckettian in more ways than I can say. He has in numerous conversations offered encouragement and invaluable insights, saved me from various errors of fact and interpretation, and also provided relevant material. His own scholarship has been a model and a source of inspiration to me, and his friendship invaluable. It is also a pleasure to acknowledge my gratitude to James Knowlson for his boundless personal and intellectual generosity. Always finding the right words at the right time, he has over the last ten years helped me to see more clearly what matters, and what does not. This book has crucially benefited from the fact that, several years ago, we decided to merge our transcriptions of the German diaries. Thank you, Jim, for everything. I am also grateful to the staff, past and present, at Special Collections of the University of Reading: Mike Bott, Verity Andrews, Brian Ryder, Guy Baxter and Nathan Williams. In particular, I would like to thank the former Beckett Fellow, Julian Garforth, for all his help. For assistance, in many little and big ways, I am grateful to Jan Cox in the English Department. My thanks also go to individuals at various libraries and archives: Tom Staley, Richard Workman and Rich Oram at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research

x

Acknowledgements

Center in Austin, Jane Maxwell at Trinity College Dublin Library and John Hodge at Washington University Library in St. Louis. Many friends and colleagues have enriched my view of Beckett in conversation and have been most helpful in providing material. I am particularly grateful to Dirk Van Hulle, who both as a friend and a scholar has helped me bring several blurred ideas into focus. Our many conversations over the years have stimulated my thinking about Beckett’s work, and I have benefited from his scholarly rigour and generosity during our collaborative work on various projects. Matthew Feldman gave crucial assistance by generously providing manuscript transcriptions. Thanks are also due to Diane Lüscher-Morata for letting me use her transcriptions from the Watt notebooks, Seán Lawlor for the many good conversations, Klaus Albrecht (Hamburg) for important information regarding his brother, Günter, and Axel Kaun, and for welcoming me to his home, and Roswitha Quadflieg (Hamburg) for her friendship, encouragement and insights into Beckett’s visit to Hamburg in 1936. I have benefited from conversations about the German diaries (and Beckett’s work in general) with many colleagues, in particular Karine Germoni, Gaby Hartel, Frank Kaspar, Seán Kennedy, Michael Maier, Ulrika Maude, James McNaughton, Matthias Mühling, Lois Overbeck, Erik Tonning, David Tucker, Carola Veit and Shane Weller. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Beckett International Foundation, Rónán McDonald, Jonathan Bignell and Mary Bryden. Needless to say, all errors in this book are entirely my own. I have published some essays in the last few years that are related to chapters in this book. A version of Chapter 4 was published as ‘ “Scraps of German”: Samuel Beckett reading German Literature’, in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 16 (2006), and parts of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘The German Diaries 1936/37: Beckett und die moderne deutsche Literatur’, in Der Unbekannte Beckett: Samuel Beckett und die deutsche Kultur, eds Marion Dieckmann-Fries and Therese Seidel (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2005) and as ‘Gospel und Verbot: Beckett und Nazi Germany’, in Das Raubauge in der Stadt: Beckett liest Hamburg, eds Michaela Giesing, Gaby Hartel and Carola Veit (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007). I would like to thank Colleen Coalter and the staff at Continuum for their editorial guidance (and patience), and the series editors Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning for giving this book a home. Finally, and crucially, I am extremely grateful to Edward Beckett for granting permission on behalf of the Estate of Samuel Beckett to cite from unpublished material, and for supporting my work over the years. I am also grateful to the Harry Ransom

Acknowledgements

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Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin, the Board of Trinity College Dublin and the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading for granting permission to cite from unpublished material. On a more personal level, I am indebted to my family for their support, in particular my parents, Peter and Sheila Nixon, and my sister Lisa Ehrsam-Nixon. And to John Nixon for the many walks on the fells, and to Lilly, Keith and Sue Thompson for their kindness. Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart. Finally, my largest debt of gratitude is reflected in the dedication. There are no words – without Aura this book would simply not exist. This is for her, and in memory of Sputnik who, like Murphy, was ‘a strict non-reader’.

Series Editors’ Preface

This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-nineteenth to twentieth century literary Modernism within its historical context. Historicizing Modernism thus stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters, diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia or other archival deposits) in developing monographs, scholarly editions and edited collections on Modernist authors and their texts. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study and annotated volumes, archival editions and genetic criticism, as well as mappings of interrelated historical milieus or ideas. To date, no book series has laid claim to this interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern literature. Correspondingly, one burgeoning sub-discipline of Modernism, Beckett Studies, features heavily here as a metonymy for the opportunities presented by manuscript research more widely. While an additional range of ‘canonical’ authors will be covered here, this series also highlights the centrality of supposedly ‘minor’ or occluded figures, not least in helping to establish broader intellectual genealogies of Modernist writing. Furthermore, while the series will be weighted towards the Englishspeaking world, studies of non-Anglophone Modernists whose writings are ripe for archivally-based exploration shall also be included here. A key aim of such historicizing is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of intellectual and artistic ‘autonomy’ employed by many Modernists and their critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual literary practices. This emphasis upon the contested selfdefinitions of Modernist writers, thinkers and critics may, in turn, prompt various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept ‘Modernism’ itself. Similarly, the very notion of ‘historicizing’ Modernism remains debatable, and this series by no means discourages more theoretically informed approaches. On the contrary, the editors believe that the historical specificity encouraged by Historicizing Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the way. Matthew Feldman Erik Tonning


Works by Beckett Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. CDW The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 1986. CSP The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1995. Dis Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder, 1983. DN Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Notebook, ed. John Pilling. Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999. Dream Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1992. ECEF The Expelled / The Calmative / The End & First Love, ed. Christopher Ricks. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. HII How It Is, ed. Magessa O’Reilly. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. MC Mercier and Camier, ed. Sean Kennedy. London: Faber & Faber, 2010. MD Malone Dies, ed. Peter Boxall. London: Faber & Faber, 2010. Mo Molloy, ed. Shane Weller. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. MPTK More Pricks than Kicks, ed. Cassandra Nelson. London: Faber & Faber, 2010. Mu Murphy, ed. J. C. C. Mays. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. PTD Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: John Calder, 1965. SP Selected Poems 1930–1989, ed. David Wheatley. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. TFN Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose 1950–1976, ed. Mark Nixon. London: Faber & Faber, 2010. CIWS

xiv

Un W

List of Abbreviations and Notes on the Text The Unnamable, ed. Steven Connor. London: Faber & Faber, 2010. Watt, ed. Chris Ackerley. London: Faber & Faber, 2009.

Samuel Beckett – Archival Material EB

‘Echo’s Bones’ [typescript], Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Leventhal Collection, Box 1 Folder 1. GD ‘German Diaries’ [6 notebooks], Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading. GR Letters to George Reavey, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. MM Letters to Mary Manning Howe, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. TM Letters to Thomas MacGreevy, Trinity College Library Dublin, TCD MS10402. WN Whoroscope Notebook, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UoR MS3000.

Other Works Faust WWI

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, ed. Robert Petsch. Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, n.d. [1925]. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, 3 vols, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1896.

Library Archives HRC UoR TCD

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading. Trinity College Dublin Library, Department of Manuscripts.

Notes on the Text Extracts from Samuel Beckett’s letters, notebooks and manuscripts reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Samuel Beckett.


xv

All translations from other languages are my own unless stated otherwise. All stylistic characteristics of sources have been retained. All transcriptions from unpublished material are my own, except those from the Watt notebooks (kindly provided by Diane Lüscher-Morata) and those from Beckett’s notes on Geulincx (TCD MS10971/6) and Philosophy (TCD MS10967), which were kindly provided by Matthew Feldman.

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Introduction


Freilich ist hier niemals die Sprache selbst, die Sprache schlechthin am Werk, sondern immer nur ein unter dem besonderen Neigungswinkel seiner Existenz sprechendes Ich, dem es um Kontur und Orientierung geht. Wirklichkeit ist nicht, Wirklichkeit will gesucht und gewonnen werden. [To be sure, it is never language itself, language as such at work, but always an I speaking from a particular angle of inclination of its own self, concerned with outline and orientation. There is no reality, reality must be sought and won]. (Celan 2000, III, 167–8)

Written for the Flinker bookshop’s 1958 almanac, Paul Celan’s statement attends to a specific moment of investigation into self and being in the world through the creative act. In the same year, but in a different context (his acceptance speech for the Bremen Literary Prize), Celan went on to acknowledge that he wrote poems ‘um zu sprechen, um mich zu orientieren, um zu erkunden, wo ich mich befand und wohin es mit mir wollte, um mir Wirklichkeit zu entwerfen [so as to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to create a reality for myself]’ (Celan 2000, III, 186). Celan’s words point to a textual inscription of what Samuel Beckett in ‘For Avigdor Arikha’ posited as the ‘marks of what it is to be and be in face of’ (Dis, 152). The interrogative, or rather, self-interrogative nature of such an undertaking is epitomised by Beckett’s Malone, who writes out his days in an exercise book ‘in order to know where I have got to’ (MD, 33). This notion of writing as a vantage point, a space or location within which to apprehend the present as well as to identify where, in Celan’s words, one is ‘meant to go’, illuminates Beckett’s German diaries. Kept during his six-month journey through Germany in 1936–1937, these diaries stage a confrontation with daily life through an immediacy of notation, as well as perform the onward movement of a journey. They thus represent a textual space which folds the dimensions of the processes of

2


writing and living. As Celan said of his poems, Beckett’s diaries are ‘unterwegs: sie halten auf etwas zu [underway: they are making toward something]’, and thus crystallise the bedevilling problem of ‘going on’ (Celan 2000, III, 186). As Beckett departed Dublin for Germany on 28 September 1936, the question of how to ‘go on’ was uppermost in his mind. Beckett’s journey was an attempt to counter the feelings of personal and creative disorientation he had felt since the completion of Murphy in June 1936, and thus undertaken with the desperate hope of reversing what he called the ‘trickle down hill’ (SB to TM, 9 September 1936). The six-month tour of Germany was, like Belacqua’s walks in ‘Ding-Dong’, a ‘moving pause’ (MPTK, 32). Yet if Belacqua derived ‘in the intervals a measure of ease’, the lack of creative stimulus during this period was a rather more distressing affair for Beckett. Nevertheless, although Beckett told MacGreevy ‘I do no work’ (SB to TM, 7 March 1937), there is also a sense in which he was mentally shaping the aesthetic and creative direction his work was to take. Beckett’s intense encounter with the visual arts during these six months, for example, offered a new impetus for his writing, as Beckett studied, and took notes on, literally hundreds of paintings he saw in German galleries. Furthermore, both the choice of the diary form as well as the thoughts inscribed in its pages testify to Beckett’s increasing concern with notions of authenticity, the moment of writing and the inadequacies of language. Cutting across these preoccupations is Beckett’s overwhelming desire to find a manner in which to inscribe himself into, and at the same time remove himself from, his texts. Despite having at an early stage decided that he wanted to be the opposite of Carducci, whom he deemed to be an ‘excellent university professor but an excessively bad poet’ (TCD MS10965, 16v), Beckett throughout the 1930s struggled to remove the layers of erudite references on which he relied in his enquiry into his, and the human, condition. From 1936 onward, a growing emphasis on irrationality and incompetence contributed to a shift in Beckett’s aesthetic thinking, and he began to seek a way to express his emotions without concession or loss of substance. The German trip marks the fulcrum of this development, as Beckett’s choice of diary writing, with its concomitant use of the first person, and his recorded aesthetic pronouncements, illustrate. That Beckett was trying to capitalise on such preoccupations is evident from his creative enterprises while in Germany, in particular the ultimately unwritten new work entitled ‘Journal of a Melancholic’. The object of my inquiry, the German diaries, consists of six notebooks found by Edward Beckett in a trunk following Samuel Beckett’s death

Introduction

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in 1989. Written mainly in English, yet with German and French words and phrases playfully interwoven, the diaries comprise roughly 120,000 words. They were first made available to James Knowlson, whose perceptive and illuminating discussion of these notebooks in his 1996 biography, Damned to Fame, remains unrivalled, and to which this present study is necessarily indebted (1996, 230–61). Other scholars, however, were slow to continue the initial work done by Knowlson, which can partly be explained by the fact that the German diaries were unpublished, and remain so to this day.1 It was the German translation of Knowlson’s biography, published by Suhrkamp in 2001, which galvanised critics in Germany, and reviews of the biography invariably focused on the existence of the German diaries. The significant documentary value of the diaries was highlighted during an exhibition held at the Akademie der Künste (November 2003–December 2004) in Hamburg, in which the historical, cultural and social context of Beckett’s visit was presented on the basis of his diaries. The writer and graphic artist, Roswitha Quadflieg, who mounted the exhibition, subsequently published extracts from the Hamburg part of the diary in a limited art edition (2003). Quadflieg subsequently published Beckett was here; Hamburg im Tagebuch Samuel Becketts von 1936 (2006), a meticulously researched book which brought Beckett’s time in Hamburg into sharp historical focus. There followed scholarly symposia in Düsseldorf (2004) and Hamburg (2006), and another exhibition at the Literaturhaus in Berlin in 2006, all of which focused on the diaries and all of which resulted in accompanying publications.2 This book builds upon these initial discussions in order to investigate the importance of the diaries to Beckett’s development as a writer during the 1930s. As the German diaries telescope the creative evolution prior to 1936 as well as anticipate the direction Beckett’s writing took after his return to Dublin in April 1937, I propose to use the diaries to illuminate Beckett’s texts written throughout the thirties, at the same time using those very texts to reflect on the significance of the diaries themselves. Indeed, if the procedure is generally not unlike Miss Counihan’s bust in being ‘all centre and no circumference’ (Mu, 40), it is so because the nature of the diaries precludes the dominance of any one approach over any other. Travel diary, aide-mémoire and creative notebook in one, the German diaries call for an intergeneric as well as an interdisciplinary discussion. Such a multifaceted approach is further determined by the fact that, even as they offer a unique opportunity to eavesdrop on Beckett speaking, or rather writing, to himself, the diaries are fundamentally private documents. Molloy’s ‘Oh it’s only a diary’ (Mo, 61) indicates the difficulty of discussing a form

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of writing that in its nonfictionality adheres to different (and, moreover, unstable) criteria than those commonly analysed by literary criticism. Nevertheless, several of Beckett’s texts draw on aspects of diary writing, particularly when characters, such as Molloy, ‘recall my present existence’ (Mo, 61). Furthermore, although it was not intended for publication (or, for that matter, for any public reading), Beckett remarks of his diary that ‘at least it is not self-communion’ (GD, 6 October 1936). The opening chapter investigates the origins of Beckett’s self-writing, locating an autobiographical urge in a personal and cultural German complex first visible in Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Chapter 2 will trace Beckett’s urge to reveal and conceal traces of his own self and experiences in his work through a short outline of his reading of autobiographical and biographical texts, in which he sought to understand how other writers inscribed themselves in their texts. This in turn will lead to a general discussion of the formal and functional aspects of diary writing, and Beckett’s particular use of the form. Chapter 3 maps out Beckett’s psychological development, during which an increasing acceptance of the solitary nature of existence and a melancholy temperament becomes apparent. By way of an exploration of the self through psychoanalytical treatment and literature, Beckett’s commitment to a quietist attitude, with its concomitant aesthetic awareness of having to write from rather than about a sense of dereliction, is discussed. The following chapter will concentrate on Beckett’s reading of classical German literature throughout the 1930s, showing the enabling effect it had on Beckett’s developing aesthetics. Chapter 5 will look at Beckett’s encounter with contemporary German literature during his time in Germany in 1936–1937, charting the influence this reading had on his negation of the trope of the journey and on his creative thinking in general. This chapter will also explore Beckett’s response to the political situation in Nazi Germany. The impact German literature had on Beckett in moving toward a compositional process liberated from intertextual references is subsequently analysed in Chapter 6 through a study of Beckett’s evolving strategy of note-taking. Chapter 7 explores Beckett’s creative enterprises while in Germany, which reveal an emphasis on ‘feeling’, as well as a developing interest in drama. Central to Beckett’s artistic movements during his journey is the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’, an ultimately abandoned literary project. The penultimate Chapter 8 will focus on Beckett’s profound study of art in German galleries, which both clarified his aesthetic preoccupations at this time and influenced his creative endeavours. Finally, Chapter 9 focuses on the shift in Beckett’s aesthetics, formulated in 1936–1937 but only creatively expressed after 1945. Beckett’s emphasis on an authentic

Introduction

5

inscription of the self and an unflinching inquiry into the human condition in texts such as Malone Dies is thus the subject of the conclusion, which reveals Beckett’s creation of a textual space which ties being to writing. Beckett’s German diaries crucially prepare the ground for this development. As Vincent Kaufmann has argued for the letter writer, the diary writer occupies ‘an elusive zone leading from what he is to what he writes, where life becomes a work and the work becomes a life’ (Kaufmann 1994, 6). Ultimately, in the trajectory from cerebral texts such as the poem ‘Whoroscope’ to an underlined passage in Beckett’s personal copy of Maeterlinck that nothing is certain ‘que notre ignorance [except our ignorance]’, the German diaries mark a turning point which anticipates the grander vision of 1946: ‘Only then did I begin to write the things I feel’.3 Thus when Malone reflects on ‘what a tourist I must have been’, he specifically invokes Beckett’s trip to Germany by recalling ‘Tiepolo’s ceiling at Würzburg’ (MD, 63). Moreover, as he ‘even remember[s] the diaeresis, if it is one’, he not only manages to set the Umlaut on ‘Würzburg’ correctly, but also points to the Greek word diairein, the dividing line that led Beckett to his mature work. Indeed, Beckett’s situation in the 1930s is summed up by his question ‘that what I want to know about is the artist, who is never comfortable by definition’ (GD, 4 February 1937).

Chapter 1

Beckett’s Journey to Germany 1936–1937

They had consulted together at length, before embarking on this journey, weighing with all the calm at their command what benefits they might hope from it, what ills apprehend, maintaining turn about the dark side and the rosy. The only certitude they gained from these debates was that of not lightly launching out, into the unknown. (Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier, 3)

When Samuel Beckett sailed to Hamburg from the port of Cobh on board the S.S. Washington on 29 September 1936, he was, like his characters Mercier and Camier, ‘not lightly launching out’. Feeling ‘very dubious’ about his projected journey (GD, 29 September 1936), with only a vague hope that it would bring ‘benefits’ rather than ‘ills’, Beckett could merely reassure himself with the thought that Germany was at least not entirely ‘unknown’. Yet the political situation within Germany had changed radically since Beckett’s six visits to his relatives, the Sinclairs, in Kassel between Christmas 1928 and January 1932. In the intervening years the wider intentions of the Nazi regime had become apparent. By September 1936, having staged the Olympics in the summer, Germany had reoccupied the demilitarised Rhineland (March 1936), and nearly established its complete hold on the political, social and cultural life within its borders. Even without the advantages of hindsight, Beckett’s decision to travel through Germany for six months in 1936 and 1937 appears somewhat surprising. Beckett was undoubtedly aware that in Germany, as Mercier and Camier puts it, the ‘dark side’ outweighed the ‘rosy’ (3). He would have learnt of the anti-Semitism propagated by the Nazis even before they came to power in 1933 through his Jewish uncle, Boss Sinclair, who for that very reason left Germany (‘with not much more than pyjamas & toothbrushes’) when it ‘got too hot’ for him (SB to TM, 7 September 1933). Perhaps as a result of this Beckett included a ‘Nazi with his head in a clamp’ in the

Beckett’s Journey to Germany

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(rejected) short story ‘Echo’s Bones’, written in November 1933.1 And in a letter to A. J. Leventhal of 7 May 1934 Beckett punned on Hitler’s Mein Kampf by writing ‘Mein Krampf [My Cramp]’. Furthermore, the rise of Nazism in the ensuing years, and with it the threat to individual freedom and of geographic expansion, was widely reported in the press.2 Barely a week after his arrival in Germany he acknowledged in his diary that he was travelling through a country that might well be at war in the near future: ‘They must fight soon (or burst)’ (GD, 6 October 1936). Indeed, Beckett appears to have been aware of the likelihood of conflict, wryly commenting on his plans for the future with the remark ‘if Europe has not been obliterated before then’ (SB to TM, 9 October 1936). This knowledge compelled him to persevere in his journey, feeling ‘I shan’t be in Germany again after this trip’ (SB to TM, 18 January 1937). Beckett’s correspondence before and during his trip, as well as his diary entries, point to a variety of reasons for his decision to undertake the journey into Nazi Germany in the first place. By the autumn of 1936, Beckett had arrived at a natural turning point in his life, or rather a personal and creative impasse which left him ‘uncertain as to how to proceed’ (Dream, 178). The writing of Murphy, which he completed towards the end of June 1936, had left him both physically and mentally tired (SB to TM, 27 June 1936). Moreover, the return to Dublin earlier that year following the termination of his psychoanalytical treatment in London proved to be a more unsettling and immediate concern. With no income to his name, and Murphy far from being published (which it eventually was in 1938), Beckett was again exposed to tensions at home, an uneasy relationship with his mother, and the panic attacks which had originally driven him to seek the help of psychoanalysis. As had been the case for his alter ego Belacqua in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett’s ‘want to go – no matter where, anywhere’ (Dream, 176) was already evident in January 1936, when the idea of a prolonged stay in Germany was first communicated to MacGreevy (SB to TM, 29 January [1936] [misdated 1935 by Beckett]).3 Beckett had moreover rehearsed this sporadic exodus from the stifling atmosphere of Dublin throughout the thirties. As early as the summer of 1930, the acceptance of a teaching post at Trinity College Dublin was viewed by Beckett as a complication to his planned ‘flight and escape’ (SB to TM, undated [summer 1930]), in anticipation of his ultimate flight from academia in December 1931 (‘it really is now or never’; SB to TM, 20 December 1931). During this period, with ‘the thought of teaching paralys[ing]’ Beckett (SB to TM, 25 January 1931), Kassel in particular and Germany in general represented a relief, even after

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his relationship with Peggy Sinclair had come to an end at Christmas 1929 (Knowlson 1996, 110). In his letters to MacGreevy, Beckett thus expresses his wish to travel to Nuremberg (SB to TM, 14 November 1930), Hamburg (SB to TM, 3 February 1931) and Leipzig (SB to TM, undated [September 1931]). In the years following his last visit to Kassel at Christmastime 1931, Germany would remain a preferred, yet unattainable, destination, even as London and Paris, where he resided most often when not in Dublin, offered the company of friends and literary prospects. This is evident from his negative comments regarding Paris as being the ‘last place in the world I want to go’ (SB to TM, undated [September 1931]), at times professing to ‘feeling very anti-French’ (SB to TM, undated [January 1933]). Beckett’s incessant restlessness in the thirties is symptomatic of his ambiguous attitude toward Dublin: the ambience will soon be unbreathable and I will have no choice but go away again. Not that I want to at all. A quoi bon. And where could one go? (SB to TM, 21 November 1932) Inevitably, every ‘absquatulation’ (Dream, 30) entailed a subsequent return, a pattern reflected in Beckett’s fondness for a phrase he found in Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, the ‘glad going out & sorrowful coming home’.4 Finding himself once again at home in Foxrock in the summer of 1936, it thus comes as no surprise to find Beckett professing to ‘live in hope of getting away’ (SB to TM, 19 August 1936). This desire was exacerbated by his unrequited love for an American woman, Elizabeth Stockton, and his subsequent affair with the recently married Mary Manning Howe (Knowlson 1996, 227–9). More importantly, Beckett’s correspondence reveals that the frustration at ‘not beginning the effort to work’ had reached unbearable heights (SB to TM, 9 September 1936). The journey to Germany was to inject a spark of inspiration into Beckett’s creative activities. Moreover, he seems to have played with the idea of expanding his occasional literary criticism to encompass art, which over the years had assumed an increasingly important position in his life. He may well have been influenced by MacGreevy, who was travelling to Munich around the same time with similar intentions. It is difficult to ascertain how seriously Beckett took this idea of converting his knowledge of art into a profession. Yet his application for the position of assistant curator at the National Gallery in London in 1933 (Knowlson 1996, 173), as well as his intense study of art during his journey through Germany, support such a supposition.


9

The ‘German Comedy’ – Dream of Fair to Middling Women Cultural and emotional affinities and associations are of immense importance when analysing Beckett’s choice of destination for his journey. Beckett had initially also considered travelling to Spain, and had studied its language in a similar fashion to his study of German, but the idea was dismissed in 1936 (SB to TM, 29 January 1936 [misdated 1935]). Although becoming increasingly restrictive to foreigners, Germany was still accessible; it is conceivable that the political developments led Beckett to wish to explore the country before the curtain came down. Furthermore, as both John Pilling and Thomas Hunkeler have pointed out, Germany and its culture were very much tied up with Beckett’s personal feelings and aesthetic inclinations (Pilling 2005; Hunkeler 2000). Even the most cursory glance through the early poetry, prose, critical essays and correspondence reveals the extent of his encounter with German literature and philosophy. This is markedly evident from the numerous notebooks (discussed in Chapter 4) that Beckett kept during the first half of the thirties. Beckett’s first profound encounter with German thought was through the philosopher Schopenhauer, whom he started reading in 1930 (SB to TM, undated [25? July 1930]). Schopenhauer furnished Beckett with a system that, on the basis of all surviving biographical material from this period, was remarkably coincident with his own: an essentially negative evaluation of human existence wherein the path to any semblance of redemption was through the artistic creative act. Beckett’s reading of what he termed Schopenhauer’s ‘intellectual justification of unhappiness’ in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea) had a lasting effect on both his work and his view of life (SB to TM, undated [25? July 1930]). Beckett immediately purloined the Schopenhauerian combination of philosophy and emotional utterance for his critical monograph Proust, written in late August and early September 1930. More importantly, the discovery instigated a persistent exploration of a distinct strand in German culture, not only in literature and philosophy, but also in the visual arts and music. The frustrated striving of the individual in a meaningless universe, preoccupations with melancholy, solitude and loss were themes Beckett found within this tradition, and the dark and heavy, even tragic, quality of the German language coincided with feelings he was trying to come to terms with on a personal level and express in his own writing. Beckett’s awareness of the effect which the German language had on his emotional state is illustrated by a (as so often self-deprecatory) passage in Dream: ‘Scraps of

10


German played in his mind in the silence that ensued; grand, old, plastic words’ (Dream, 191). The implication of a brooding indulgence in the self and an immersion in German writing and language is explicit in Beckett’s confession to MacGreevy that he is ‘wallowing in . . . German’ (SB to TM, 11 November [1932]). By 1932 Beckett’s command of the German language was already quite good, although far from proficient. The German found in Dream suggests he was relying on that which he had acquired during his time in Kassel, inserting the odd word or expression he would have picked up through conversation. Thus colloquial terminology such as ‘quatsch [nonsense]’, ‘Sauladen [mess]’ or ‘abknutschen [smother with kisses]’ jostle with proverbial wisdom: ‘Der Mench [sic] ist ein Gewohnheitstier [the human being is a creature of habit]’ (Dream, 19, 82, 14 and 75). These terms contribute to the general irreverent tone of the book, compounded by Beckett’s mocking attitude towards the German language and the pedantry it so often expresses. This is particularly evident in the fun Beckett has with compound nouns, a German speciality, when coming up with names such as ‘Arschlochweh [pain-in-the-arse]’ or ‘Herr Sauerwein [Mr Sourwine]’ (61 and 106). The jewel in the compound crown is the Joycean expletive ‘Himmisacrakrüzidirkenjesusmariaundjosefundblütigeskreuz!’ (239). There is a linguistic playfulness (‘blick from this Punkt’, 160) here that is also evident in the ‘German diaries’. But more often than not the German language, in keeping with the overall satirical intention of the novel, is both mocked and mocking. This strategy finds its apotheosis in the ‘The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux’, culminating in the irreverent use of the German national anthem, the ‘Deutschlandlied’: ‘I love you über alles in dieser Welt, mehr als alles auf Himmel, Erde und Hölle [I love you above all else in this world, more than everything in heaven, earth and hell]’ (58). Beckett inserted a small private joke in ‘The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux’, when Smerry asks ‘how could you ever doupt me?’ In his essay on Joyce, ‘Dante . . . Vico. Bruno..Joyce’, Beckett had commended the German word ‘Zweifel’ for giving a ‘sensuous suggestion of hesitancy, of the necessity for choice, of static irresolution’, which the English ‘doubt’ failed to do (Dis, 28). From 1930 onwards, ‘scraps of German’ act as private correlative markers for an entire stratum of emotions ranging from a sombre worldview, to love and sexuality, to separation.5 Thomas Hunkeler has explored these associations in Beckett’s use of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest, a book which moved Peggy Sinclair to tears.6 Fontane’s novel, aptly dealing with adultery and tragic love, reappears again in Beckett’s own treatment of past love in Krapp’s Last Tape. Yet, as Hunkeler argues, the biographical sources within


11

the play can be traced to Beckett’s relationship with Ethna MacCarthy as well as to that with Peggy Sinclair, so that Effi Briest invokes a general sense of loss rather than a specific memory (Hunkeler 2000, 219).7 But it seems as if the relationship with Peggy Sinclair, and the ultimately painful separation, contributed to Beckett’s correlation between Germany’s cultural heritage and his own emotions. When viewed in this light, it is hardly surprising that when Beckett came to deal with his entanglement with Peggy in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written 1931–1932), the book would be permeated with German words and phrases, as well as fragments of German literature. These instances chiefly occur in the sections describing the Smeraldina-Rima (modelled on Peggy) and Belacqua’s time with her in Vienna. Beckett acknowledged the connection in a letter to MacGreevy by referring to his book as the ‘German Comedy’ (SB to TM, 29 May 1931). Yet the designation of the book as ‘comic’, which it undeniably is in parts, obscures Beckett’s rather less lighthearted intention in writing the novel. Beckett’s narrator refers to Dream as a ‘virgin chronicle’ (118; also 69), invoking the amalgamation of fact with legendary fiction within medieval chronicles. This helps to account for the largely autobiographical background of the events, even as they are subjected to a rather chaotic treatment.8 As the Greek stem of the word ‘chronicle’ indicates, Dream is set within a framework which, with biographical evidence, can be clearly identified as encompassing Beckett’s use of real experiences from 1928 to 1932. Indeed, James Knowlson has gone a long way in uncovering the autobiographical sources of many of the events described in the novel, such as Beckett’s visit to the dance school Peggy was attending, Schule Hellerau-Laxenburg, south of Vienna (Knowlson 1996, 83–5), or the calamitous end of the affair in Kassel on New Year’s Eve 1929. At times Dream’s narrative opens up and allows a glimpse of its autobiographical origin, as in the scene between the Alba (based on Ethna MacCarthy) and Belacqua on Silver Strand. Assuming the role of the chronicler, describing the events of a given passage of time, the narrator (assuming the first person plural ‘we, consensus, here and hereafter, of me’; Dream, 112)9 realises that looking back through our notes we are aghast to find that it was Jack’s Hole; but we cannot use that, that would be quite out of place in what threatens to come down a love passage. (189) Although the indecorous suggestion may distract the reader, the narrative is here self-referentially announcing its own fictional status, and simultaneously

12


admitting to an underlying (autobiographical, or at least extratextual) reality.10

‘German Fever’ Fundamentally, the writing of Dream was for Beckett, as John Pilling has pointed out, a ‘purging of a recent past and an even more recent present’ (1997, 62). As such the book addresses painful and unhappy experiences, not only with Peggy but also with other ‘fair’ or ‘middling’ women. This is signposted by Belacqua’s incapacity to separate himself from his past: certain aspects of her [the Smeraldina-Rima] abode in his heart . . . made themselves felt from time to time in the form of a sentimental eructation that was far from being agreeable. (Dream, 109) Thus the self-cathartic and therapeutic aspect to the book was inscribed into Dream, as when the narrator expresses his amazement at ‘how everything ends like a fairy tale, or can be made to; even the most unsanitary episodes’ (109). The difficulty Beckett had to navigate was finding the adequate manner of fictionalising his own ‘unsanitary’ experiences, which gave rise to an ambiguity, prevalent in the narrative attitude, between concealment and revelation. The concealing impulse appears in an aside which the narrator appears to direct at himself as much as the reader, ‘No no I won’t say everything, I won’t tell you everything’ (72). Yet barely two pages later the revealing (or confessional) tendency is reinstated, as the narrator declares, or rather insists, ‘[w]e strive to give the capital facts of his [Belacqua’s] case. . . . Facts, we cannot repeat it too often, let us have facts, plenty of facts’ (74). Between these two extremes a ‘Mr Beckett’ is parenthetically introduced into the text, who helps the narrator find the right words, such as ‘Kleinmeister’s Leidenschaftsucherei [a minor master’s passion-seeking] (thanks Mr Beckett)’ (69). Moreover, an instance of Freudian Verschreiben alerts the reader to questions of who is speaking and to the true relationship between the narrator and Belacqua. When the reader is asked, ‘No but surely you see now what he am?’ (72), the inharmonious interplay of personal pronouns removes the differentiation that had previously distinguished narrator (and, potentially, author) and protagonist. Beckett’s ambivalent movement towards concealment and revelation is re-enacted in his intertextual borrowings, as a large corpus of extraneous material and literary allusions is inserted at different levels


13

of remove from the surface of the text. The majority of material derived from other writers remains unacknowledged in the text, necessitating the kind of ‘depth-scholarship’ conducted by John Pilling in his Companion to ‘Dream’ (2004a). Other allusions are, however, flagrantly paraded with references such as ‘Who said all that?’ (Dream, 72), marking the presence of an authorial subjectivity responsible for the proceedings. Beckett’s strategy of concealing and revealing textual as well as personal allusions in Dream can be illustrated by his use of St. Augustine’s Confessions, commonly regarded as the first major autobiography.11 Despite tracing a spiritual evolution through a sinful life to the moment of conversion, Augustine’s book is not simply the memoir of a life. The Confessions are not written from a satisfied vantage point achieved in life; it is the continuing and immediate need for self-clarification that strikes the reader, to ‘go on to confess, not what I was, but what I am’ (Augustine 1961, 210). In anticipation of Freudian concepts, it is through the present act of writing that the spiritual path of the self is submitted to an intense scrutiny and analysis. Beckett regarded the book as fertile ground for his habitual ‘phrasehunting’ (SB to TM, 25 January 1931), and the Augustinian insertions in Dream are characterised by their fragmentary nature, as phrases and expressions are woven into the fabric of the texts. Yet there is also a sense in which Beckett is directing the reader (at least one with the time and resources to do so) through asides such as ‘We stole that one. Guess where’ back to the nature of the source – which frequently is Augustine’s confessional text (Dream, 191). Unable or unwilling to replicate Augustine’s honesty and directness, and being after all ostensibly engaged in writing fiction, the material taken from the Confessions (like that from other sources) provided Beckett with a filter through which to distance himself from writing about his own experiences. Like Augustine, Beckett introduces fragments of his scattered experiences from the ‘vast cloisters of my memory’ into Dream, yet without the anticipation that they will make up a whole or afford Belacqua any hope for salvation (Augustine 1961, 215).12 Ultimately, and despite the ‘fever to have done’ with painful memories (Dream, 195), German or otherwise, the writing of Dream did not entirely achieve the level of cleansing which Beckett undoubtedly had hoped for. In a letter written six months after the completion of Dream, his attachment to Germany was still raging: I am reading German and learning a little that way. Always when its [sic] coming up to Xmas I get the German fever for the Tannenbäumchen [little fir trees] und Bierreisen [beer trips] through the snow. But I won’t see any

14


of it this year, no Homer dusks or red steeples. And soon I will be tired of the Brothers Grimm’s machinery. (SB to TM, 21 November [1932])13 Even as the ‘Brother Grimm’s machinery’ threatened to turn Beckett’s memories of past Christmases at Kassel with Peggy Sinclair into something less than natural, the involuntary state of ‘fever’ continued to govern an intricate web of personal associations equating Germany with his emotional, or rather sexual, feelings. The ‘Homer dusks’ and the ‘red steeples’ relate explicitly to the poem ‘Dortmunder’, written early in 1932, which tells of a visit to a brothel.14 In Beckett’s annotated copy of Echo’s Bones held at Austin, the poem is appended with the words ‘Kassel revisited’, providing a link to the implied visit paid by Belacqua in Dream (and by extension possibly Beckett himself) to a brothel during New Year’s Eve 1929. In Dream itself, a further visit to a Nuremberg brothel is equally signposted through a set of German references. The details of this passage, such as the allusions to the town’s artistic legacy (the ‘Haus Albrecht Dürer’ and ‘Adam Kraft’), derive from Beckett’s own short stay in Nuremberg on his way to Kassel in the spring of 1931. On that day, Beckett had visited the castle with its torture chamber, as well as a brothel, before spending the night in the station’s waiting room and taking the morning train. In Dream, details from the visit to the torture chamber (such as the smoking prohibition) are used to transmit the sexual content of the text. Thus the brothel becomes its own kind of torture chamber, as the admonition ‘[n]o effing smoking do you hear me in the effing Folterzimmer [torture chamber]’ and the later reference to ‘The Cast-Iron Virgin of Nürnberg’ indicate (Dream, 72 and 182).15 The conflation of the two localities as ‘torture chambers’ renders the sexual details obscure, but also points to the underlying problematic nature of such activities for Beckett. This subtext is indicated by the diminutive dismissal of the ‘whorchen’, a German-English hybrid similar to the later ‘Jungfräulein’ (72 and 130). Moreover, in that she is a ‘little bony vulture of a whorchen’, she is linked to Dürer (‘dürr’ is German for ‘skinny’), just as the sculptor’s name, ‘Adam Kraft’, evokes a (now lost) power inherent in the edenically pure first man. Although the passage is on the whole rather impenetrable (‘I won’t tell you everything’, 72), the fact that it is there at all attests to Beckett’s view of the book as a ‘dump for whatever he could not get off his chest in the ordinary way’ (MPTK, 125).16 It becomes clear that the associative and specific German complex established by Beckett in his initial endeavours to come to terms with his separation from Peggy resurfaces in subsequent purging of other kinds of ‘perilous garbage’ (Dream, 115). A therapeutic aim behind Beckett’s writing


15

is illustrated by the original title, aptly expressed in German, for the poem ‘Sanies I’, which deals with the continuous turmoil over his unrequited love for Ethna MacCarthy: ‘Weg Du Einzige’ (‘Away You Only One’).17 Within Dream, as well as in the early poetry, Beckett appears to be engaged in a vendetta against his personal ghosts through the spectre of art. Shades of separation, loss and unhappiness are cast throughout his writing to be examined and purged. The early writing acts like a secret, codified map to events in Beckett’s life: an intricate network of references encompassing his travels, opinions, relationships, his reading and artistic preoccupations. Within this network it is ultimately the German discourse that engenders Beckett’s most private symbolism. Prey to attacks of melancholy, reflection and introspection, this discourse constructs an autobiographical and confessional tonality, which is subsequently often disguised and buried beneath either a layer of erudite references or self-deprecatory and humorous strategies of textual instability. To be sure, this autobiographical layer would remain largely indecipherable to the reader of today were it not for the availability of biographical data. Yet at the time of writing, and despite an urgent wish for his acquaintances and former lovers to detect their caricaturisation, Beckett undoubtedly felt that concealment was necessary in order to avoid causing offence. When Dream was recast for publication in 1934 as More Pricks than Kicks, Beckett softened both the satirical elements and ‘narcissistic manoeuvres’ further, although the biographical reality underlying the fiction remained visible (Dream, 39). Evidently Beckett felt remorse over this, as a letter of 13 July 1934 to Morris Sinclair, the brother of Peggy (who had died the previous year), illustrates: ‘I didn’t know what I was undertaking, peinlich [embarrassing or painful] no matter what angle contemplated’ (Knowlson 1996, 183).18 Yet the boundaries between the fictional and the biographical were from that early point ineradicably destabilised. In his letters Beckett continued to view people in their fictional disguises, telling MacGreevy that he ‘[s]aw Alba [Ethna MacCarthy] and have not the guts to be disinterested’ (SB to TM, 30 August 1932), and referring to Cissie Sinclair as late as 1934 as ‘Smeraldina’s Ma’ (SB to TM, 18 August 1934). More importantly, Beckett had put much of himself into his first substantial protagonist, Belacqua. In a diary note dated 20 June 1934, dealing with More Pricks than Kicks, Beckett’s friend and later literary agent, George Reavey, noted Belacqua, the hero of the stories, is himself, and the incidents are faithful portraiture of [Beckett’s] curious psychological reactions. ‘When intimidated rude beyond measure’ is the way he sums himself up.19

16


Beckett’s desire to travel across Germany, then, had a variety of reasons as its basis. On the one hand, he must have envisaged the trip as an opportunity to further his knowledge of art and to enable an in-depth study of the German language and culture. Furthermore, he must have hoped that this exposure would yield new material for his writing. On the other hand, Beckett wanted to re-enter a cultural space which in the past had offered emotional intensity, both good and bad. A letter to MacGreevy written shortly after his arrival in Hamburg in October 1936 corroborates these two suppositions: It is nice to be away, but when I have seen the pictures & struggled with the language I don’t think I’ll be sorry to go. I begin to think that Germany’s charm is perhaps after all mainly for me a matter of associations. I feel sad enough & often enough for that to be so. (SB to TM, 9 October 1936) The use of the word ‘associations’ here implies that Beckett was aware of the psychological impulses behind his journey. During his reading of texts on psychology and psychoanalysis a few years earlier Beckett had come across the mechanisms of association, noting for example (from R. S. Woodworth’s Contemporary Schools of Psychology) the Gestaltist school’s opposition to Associationism, and, interestingly in this context, Freud’s use of ‘free association’: ‘Free association, unable to accomplish factual reconstruction (of secondary importance) of early events, was utilized for their emotional recapitulation (of primary importance)’ (TCD MS10967/7, 7r). Even prior to his arrival in Hamburg, Beckett expressed doubts regarding his motives for the trip. During the one day the ship was berthed in Le Havre, he wished he ‘could stay where I am’ (SB to TM, 30 September 1936), and anticipated his arrival in Germany with trepidation: ‘Tired walking around. But what will Germany be, for 6 ? months, but walking around, mainly?’ (GD, 30 September 1936). In many ways, Beckett’s prediction was correct. The carefully plotted route of his journey, designed to encompass the major cultural attractions, stands in contrast to the general tone of internal disorientation detectable in his correspondence and the German diaries. The journey itself, the ‘walking around’, at times assumed the cloak of necessity, as Beckett wrote to MacGreevy from Germany: ‘I am very tired & often feel like turning back, but back where?’ (SB to TM, 9 January 1937). Any notion Beckett may have entertained that his trip was a ‘wandering to find home’ (Mu, 4) – or any kind of journey from which he could benefit – was soon abandoned.


17

The ‘epic caesura’ (Dream, 144) Beckett had sought to achieve in writing Dream (and the poetry) had yet to materialise four years later. Rather, an obsessive introspection which circled around old memories remained active and troublesome. Beckett was highly conscious of the persistence of these memories, and by revisiting Nuremberg during his journey he seems to have actively sought to confront them. In a letter to MacGreevy he predicted the pain that would inevitably resurface, confessing that ‘I rather baulk at Nürnberg, of which I have the gloomiest memories’ (SB to TM, 16 February 1937).20 On the day of his arrival in Nuremberg, in February 1937, Beckett recalled the time six years earlier when he had been forced to spend a night in the station waiting room on his way to Kassel: ‘Remember station well (why wouldn’t I?)’ (GD, 26 February 1937).21 His preoccupation with the past and the emotional associations with Germany are manifestly present during his stay in Nuremberg. On his first day there he went back to the castle described in Dream to catch a glimpse through closing for Mittagspause [lunch break] door of torture chamber ‘Rauchen u. Photographieren verboten’ [‘smoking and photography prohibited’]. All I wanted to see. (GD, 27 February 1937) Beckett’s confrontation with the ‘gloomiest memories’ reached a peak a few days later as he retraced the experience of an evening which took place six years earlier and which involved a lady of the night: Go out, with vague idea of finding Hospiz [hospice] & café . . . . Find Sterntor Hospiz unexpectedly, in quiet dark street SW of station. Then go to station. The photo cabinet still there, & I remember the long hall & the third class waiting room where I spent the last night, from 3 am on. Drink a beer in restaurant, which I remember also. On way back . . . see a Lokal [pub] that looks like the one & go in. Seem to remember it, the pillar near where we sat with orchestra on my right. But the space then for dancing is occupied by tables & chairs. Why does it all unnerve me? That was in spring ‘31, when still teaching in Trinity. I fled from reading of Anna Livia in Paris & Lucia complications. (GD, 1 March 1937) Beyond its renewed acknowledgement of the need for flight, the passage attests to the inner turmoil of ‘that old past ever new’ (‘Texts for Nothing 10’; TFN, 41). These Nuremberg memories incited Beckett to take the

18


remarkable step, following the above diary entry, of compiling an overview of his movements during the previous 14 years of his life (GD, 1 March 1937). It crystallises Beckett’s inherent restlessness and acts of wandering since October 1923, the year he went to Trinity College Dublin. His ‘Reisefieber [travel fever]’ in 1936 was once again a specifically German fever (Dream, 29; repeated 64). Beckett perceived Germany as a potential remedy for emotional troubles, as well as an aesthetic and cultural space that could provide inspiration for his writing. In this hope Beckett created an other textual space: the ‘German diaries’.

Chapter 2


In Beckett’s How It Is, the compulsive need to ‘say it how it is’ is matched by the necessity of recording ‘how it is’. The narrator carries a ‘little private book’ in which he notes ‘the heart’s outpourings day by day’ (HII, 72). Furthermore, there are the ‘Krim generations of scribes keeping the record’ (69). And, although it is a source for speculation in the text itself, the account of life in the mud and of Pim’s journey relies on the existence of someone who may have the ‘means of noting’ the words uttered in the mud (117). How It Is is a text that both ratifies and challenges the living process through discourse. Not dissimilarly, Beckett’s diary writing is an assertion of the scribal self. It seems as if Beckett initially intended his diary to be nothing but a standard travel diary, in which everyday experiences and sights were recorded. At the same time Beckett took three artistic notebooks with him to Germany – the Whoroscope notebook (UoR MS3000), the ‘Clare Street’ notebook (UoR MS5003) and a ‘Science and Laboratory’ notebook (UoR MS5006) which he was using for German grammar and vocabulary. Presumably in an effort to record and organise his cultural impressions separately, Beckett bought two further notebooks three weeks into his stay in Hamburg, entitling them ‘Bücher [books]’ and ‘Bilder [pictures]’ (GD, 23 October 1936). Yet this plan was quickly abandoned, the two notebooks eventually becoming diary volumes two and three with ‘Bilge’ and ‘Tripe’ respectively replacing the previous titles. How It Is contains a self-ironic allusion to this struggle to organise material. In Part 2 the narrator refers to the existence of three notebooks being kept according to distinct functions, whereas before all had been noted ‘pell-mell in the same’ (HII, 70–1). Thus the first notebook is ‘for the body inodorous farts stools’, the second for ‘the mutterings verbatim no tampering very little’ and the third ‘for my comments’. Unable to commit himself to such an organised separation of material, the German diaries are instead a ‘pell-mell’, a kind of cross-generic container, acting as a depository for personal as well as creative material.

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It is worth noting here that keeping a diary was hardly a pastime for Beckett. Beyond being a self-conscious writer, Beckett took diary writing during these six months very seriously; he recorded the events of every single day of his six-month trip, even though he often had ‘to flog myself to this’ (GD, 5 December 1936). Yet before turning to a discussion of the formal and functional aspects of diary writing in general, and Beckett’s individual use of the diary form in particular, a brief glance at Beckett’s reading of autobiographical and biographical texts will enable us to establish a context in which his self-writing can be comprehended.

Auto/Biographical Reading Like most diarists before him, Beckett turned to daily writing with an awareness of the various ways in which the diary form had been used in the past. Indeed, an examination of his reading before 1936 reveals not only diaries but a surprisingly large proportion of autobiographies and biographies, as well as what one generally could term autobiographical fiction or fictional autobiographies. Fundamentally, at the same time Beckett wrote himself into his own books, he read himself into and through other people’s writing. Beckett turned to books in general and literature in particular with a motivation shared by many readers: to acquire insight into the ‘syndrome known as life’, to find mirrors in which his own condition would be reflected back more clearly (Mu, 38). Beckett’s interest in life writing, fictional, biographical or autobiographical, can be aligned with his own struggle to accommodate both life and art. As he himself pointed out in one of his 1931 Trinity lectures on Gide’s Les faux monnayeurs, ‘relation between artist & material important – not just material’.1 Such an enquiry into the relationship between the writer and his work can be illustrated by his comments on reading David Cecil’s The Stricken Deer, or the Life of William Cowper (1929). Despite judging it ‘[v]ery bad’, Beckett goes on to exclaim: ‘But what a life! It depressed & terrified me. How did he ever manage to write such bad poetry?’ (SB to TM, 7 August 1936). This is a telling comment, attesting to Beckett’s view of life as a valid source of artistic creation as well as echoing his statement that ‘suffering’ is ‘the main condition of the artistic experience’ (PTD, 28). It is not difficult to see how Beckett could not fail to be affected by a writer whose poetry, in Michael Schmidt’s words, was a ‘means of talking himself back from the edge, not . . . of coaxing himself over it’ – a writer convinced of his own guilt and persuaded that failure and madness was his lot (1999, 364).


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Beckett’s interest in biographies is evident from the outset of his writing career, as the first creative notebook – the Dream notebook – begins, after a single quote from Plautus, with over seventy entries from two works concerned with Napoleon’s life, Lockhart’s The History of Napoleon Bonaparte and the first volume of de Bourrienne’s edition of the Memoirs of Napoleon (DN, 1–11).2 Indeed, the very symbiosis of life and work is written into Beckett’s early poem ‘Whoroscope’ (1930), which is essentially an artistic transformation of various aspects of Descartes’s life and personality.3 The appended notes in particular identify the biographical structure underlying the poem, which to a large degree relies, as Francis Doherty has shown, on J. P. Mahaffy’s Descartes. Beckett’s research on Dr Johnson similarly reveals Beckett’s interest in turning biography into literature; he told Mary Manning in December 1936 that ‘there are 50 plays in his life’ (SB to MM, 13 December 1936). More importantly, Beckett’s engagement with writers’ lives tended to focus on their position as artists within society. His own concern with how a balance between life and work was to be achieved, a struggle resulting in the ambiguous manoeuvres of concealment and revelation of autobiographical facts in his early work, led Beckett to explore the manner in which other writers inscribed themselves into their texts. This is visible, for example, in his notes taken from Goethe’s autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit, as well as in his reading of Rousseau. Beckett’s interest in the French writer was with Rousseau the autobiographer, not the sociologist or philosopher. By his own admission he did not read Rousseau’s Du contrat social, but rather the Confessions, the Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire, the epistolary novel Julie, ou: la nouvelle Héloise and the educational novel Émile.4 This necessity to write about the self, and the resulting tension inherent in ‘[b]eing forced to speak in spite of myself, I am also obliged to conceal myself’, undoubtedly interested Beckett (Rousseau 1953, 263). Beckett of course did not have to look far for examples of authors who fictionalised their lives. Both Proust and Joyce played an integral part in Beckett’s own formulation of a poetics of self-writing. Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, incorporates incidents, people and places from Dublin as well as aspects of Joyce’s own biography. And, as Bernard Benstock has pointed out, the Shem chapter of Finnegans Wake is a ‘mine of information about Joyce himself’, in which he can be seen ‘once again to deal personally as well as objectively with the real problem . . . of his own life’ (1965, 223 and 220). ‘Once again’, in Benstock’s phrase, because from the 1904 essay ‘Portrait’ right through to the completion of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1914, Joyce grappled with the aesthetic and structural problems of

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including his own biography in his writing. Portrait’s earliest conception, Stephen Hero, was, in Joyce’s brother Stanislaus’s words, to be almost autobiographical, and naturally as it comes from Jim, satirical. He is putting a large number of acquaintances into it, and those Jesuits whom he has known. I don’t think they will like themselves in it. (Stanislaus Joyce 1971, 12) Whereas the more autobiographical Stephen Hero could always only be Joyce as he was becoming, a ‘Portrait’ by its very nature could frame a development that had found some sort of completion. Moreover, by replacing the thirdperson narration with Stephen’s diary at the end of the novel, Joyce contrived to inscribe a path forward for a ‘new’ Stephen.

Diary Writing As the example of Joyce’s Portrait illustrates, during the first decades of the twentieth century the diary had become one of the preferred literary forms for many European writers. This development can be related to the decline of realism in the late nineteenth century, together with a disenchantment with traditional literary forms, especially the novel. Moreover, with the emergence of an interest in psychology and its emphasis on the illogical and mysterious workings of the unconscious, the omniscient position of the narrator of the realistic novel came to be seen as an inadequate tool with which to illustrate the fragmentary experience and divided nature of the self. In this shift of focus from the external to the internal world, the diary, with its fragmentary, self-reflexive and speculative nature, emerged as a suitable literary form to express a discontinuous discourse. Whereas realism scorned the diary due to its inability to paint a differentiated view of life, its ability to establish a concise textual framework of enquiry into the self furthered its use. In the course of the rise in popularity of the diary, the form itself evolved. Whereas the journaux intimes of the nineteenth century usually employed the journal form for its suitability in betraying the ‘sincerely’ depicted private (and often scandalous) life to a public, writers such as Gide, Kafka and Musil widened its function to include self-observation and draft writing. In contrast to this private employment, the diary form was increasingly introduced into works of fiction. Alexander Döblin in Berlin Alexanderplatz and Rilke in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, for example, relied


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on the diary to illuminate the psychology of their protagonists. As Lorna Martens has pointed out, in its ability to portray the inner world of a privileged first-person narrator, the diary form functioned similarly as a literary device to the interior monologue or stream-of-consciousness techniques (1985, 5–6). Beckett encountered the varied use to which the diary was put in the work of André Gide, whom he had lectured on at Trinity in 1931. Gide constructed a significant part of his work around the diary, going so far as to insert passages from his own journal into his novels. Rachel Burrows’s notes on Beckett’s Trinity lectures show that he was particularly interested in Gide’s Les faux-monnayeurs, a book fundamentally concerned with articulating the tension between reality and its representation, and the self-deception to which this may give rise. Gide’s personal Journal betrays ample evidence of his self-investment in his texts, with the writer going so far as to call Si le grain ne meurt his ‘Memoirs,’ and inserting part of his diary into his fiction (Gide 1967, 193). Gide was an important figure during Beckett’s apprenticeship as a writer, and he was not loath to ‘reapply the creditable phrase of Monsieur Gide’ within his work (Dream, 46).5 Beckett also seriously considered writing about Gide in a critical manner, suggesting a follow-up on the Proust to Chatto & Windus in early 1932.6 He also raised the possibility with the New Statesman of ‘covering all that artist’s [Gide’s] vicissitudes from André Walter to Oedipe’ (SB to TM, 18 [ August 1932]). A month later Beckett ‘made a desperate attempt to get something started on Gide’ (SB to TM, undated [possibly 13 September 1932]), but it seems that by then his interest was waning. Yet in his 1934 review of Leishman’s translations of Rilke’s poetry, Beckett again commended Gide, in the form of the character Lafcadio from Les Caves du Vatican, as being, together with Svevo’s Zeno and Valéry’s Teste, superior characters to Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge (Dis, 66). This attests to Beckett’s continued respect for Gide’s work, as well as his awareness of a particular strand of fictional autobiographies. The reference to Valéry is of particular interest in this context. In many ways Le Cycle Teste is reminiscent of Beckett’s Murphy, with its emphasis on Edmond Teste’s reduction of all outer phenomena in order to concentrate on a self-observing mind. The discussions of physical pain in Teste as a path to inner freedom find a counterpart in Murphy’s silken restriction on the rocking chair. Beyond being familiar with the increasingly frequent use of the diary in fictional texts, Beckett had also read nonfictional diaries, such as Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. He had, long before setting out for Germany in 1936, tried his hand at journal writing in his spoof lecture entitled Le concentrisme,

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delivered to the Modern Language Society at Trinity College Dublin, in November 1930. During his discussion of the imaginary Jean du Chas, Beckett quoted from the poet’s notebooks, establishing their authenticity (as he would later in Malone Dies) through indications such as that of a page torn through the anguished act of writing. Moreover, Beckett invests much of his own biography into the figure of du Chas, not only in terms of the same birthdate, but also in such references as ‘ces juvéniles expériences de fièvre allemande [these juvenile experiences of German fever]’ (Dis, 37). Beckett’s most concentrated diary reading before travelling to Germany was that of Jules Renard in 1931.7 The first reference to this reading occurs in a letter of February of that year, although a month later Beckett confessed to feeling ‘tired out by Renard’, yet vowed to ‘come back to him’ (SB to TM, 24 February 1931 and 11 March 1931). Having annotated his copies of Renard, Beckett subsequently transferred several quotes from the Journals into the Dream notebook (DN, 30–4). Renard’s minute observations of unusual details and his unexpected combination of disparate experiences or perceptions were used by Beckett throughout his early work. As in many other texts pilfered for creative purposes, beneath the scraps of notes there is a sense that Beckett admired Renard’s unflinching attention to himself and his surroundings. This is particularly evident in the dying pages of the Journal, as it grows into a ‘Sick Man’s Diary’. Beckett was impressed by Renard’s honest observation of the decline of his own body, culminating in his having to urinate on himself as he is unable to rise. A latent sadness pervades Renard’s Journal, a preoccupation with ageing and dying, intensified by his father’s suicide. But, more importantly, Renard’s attitude towards his own writing, as when he states that the ‘fear of boredom is the only excuse for working’, struck a chord with Beckett, as did his references to writing with ‘scrupulous inexactness’ and defining his ‘ignorance’ as the main ingredient of his ‘originality’ (Renard 1964, 49, 18 and 224). Furthermore, some of Renard’s entries strangely prefigure major concerns of Beckett’s later writing. His ‘the word that is most true, most exact, most filled with sense, is the word “nothing” ’ (192) offers a further perspective on Beckett’s own meditation on the word in Murphy. When Beckett turned to keeping his own diary, he picked up Renard’s journals again. The German diaries contain a reference to him reading ‘a Journal & Candide, a breath of air in the dungeon’ (GD, 7 February 1937). Mentioning Renard in a postcard to Reavey a week later, it can be assumed that the unidentified ‘Journal’ Beckett was reading in Germany was indeed Renard’s. That Beckett would go back or continue reading


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Renard’s Journals six years after first discovering them is an index of their importance to his own diaristic enterprise.8 In the wake of an emerging body of literary criticism investigating autobiographical writing since the 1960s, the diary has increasingly become the object of critical scrutiny. However, whereas a common conception of what defines a diary exists, scholars have failed to formulate a consistent generic categorisation of the form that encompasses the sheer variety of structures and contents evident in diary writing. Being in essence a private form of writing, the diarist is at liberty to use an individual structure and scope of content. Already the historical development of the diary shows the wide variety of functions it has encompassed, from the historical chronicle or annals, the private book of jottings, through religious (Puritan) confession, romantic introspection, travel logs and self-educational observation (Goethe), to the journal intime and therapeutic psychoanalytical recording of the unconscious. Some diaries do not restrict themselves to any one thematic area, paying equal attention to the recording of physical and emotional states, political and social events, financial issues, conversations, projects, memories, cultural experiences, travel impressions or drafts of letters and novels. Others are dedicated to a single aspect of existence, such as dreams, illnesses, a journey or a love affair. As Andrew Hassam has pointed out, any ‘convention we may describe as a convention of the diary is either not maintained by all diaries or found in other types of writing’ (1993, 11). Just as the discussion of auto-bio-graphy has foundered on the destabilisation of every aspect of its etymology (self, life and writing), efforts at formulating typologies of the diary, based either on aspects of form or content, have ultimately proven inadequate. Yet despite the fluidity of the boundaries of the diary form, it is possible to outline two minimal generic consistencies, taking into account that divergences even from these schemata may exist.9 The diary has a first-person narrative and point of view; it is written at periodic intervals whereby a certain number of the sections is preceded by a date corresponding to the time of composition or the events described. Beyond this one can say that the diary is often written daily, describing either the present or events that have only recently occurred (usually since the last entry), and that the diarist is writing for herself or himself. The implications of such a form are the absence of an addressee other than the writer and the essentially nonretrospective and fragmented narrative structure. One could add that an overarching quality of the diary, evident from the different uses to which it has historically been put, is its functionality.

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Indeed, Beckett’s choice of using the journal form in September 1936, rather than pursuing his habitual and more scholarly ‘note-snatching’, must surely be based upon some functional intention. One of the most striking features of Beckett’s diary is that he submits himself to a strongly conventional diaristic mode, even though he is writing for himself. The purely private nature of Beckett’s diaries is not only indicated by the absence of any statement of projected publication, but is illustrated by their very textual fabric. Grammatical or orthographic mistakes are therefore left to stand and passages are freely crossed out. A further indication of the private nature of the diaries is the indeterminacy in Beckett’s notation, in that certain events or thoughts remain unexplained and indecipherable to any reader but the diarist himself. This is further complicated by the use of abbreviations or symbols. Such instruments of concealment are often applied to matters of a delicate and private kind, and illustrate the writer’s fear that the diaries may never be absolutely secret. Beyond the use of more obvious abbreviations, Beckett only introduces one symbol (which looks like a ‘Y’) into the diaries, most probably to denote a certain solitary sexual activity.10 Yet, on the whole, Beckett’s German diaries are marked by a sincerity often absent or circumscribed in other diaries; his visits to brothels are bluntly described (and therefore not in the style of the journaux intimes). This is not to say of course that even in such a detailed account as in Beckett’s diaries, there are not omissions which are as revealing of the diarist’s intention as the words on the page. Beckett’s failure to mention some of the letters written from Germany to Thomas MacGreevy allows us to infer that there are further, and surely weightier, matters that are being concealed. In what is manifestly a private diary, these omissions not only point to forgetfulness or a decision based on a prioritisation of notation, but also to a possible evasion in the act of self-observation.11 Despite the secret nature of his diaries, Beckett, straying from his usual irreverent attitude towards generic forms, chose to adopt the main formalistic conventions of diary writing. Not only are the events and activities of the day structured chronologically, Beckett further upholds the illusion that the daily entries are written on the actual day indicated by the dating. Although most of the day’s entries are clearly written that same evening, there are instances when this is not the case.12 An example of this occurs early in the first notebook, as Beckett writes: To bed in another room, smaller, vacated only to-day, under kolossal [colossal] Pferdedecke [horse blanket] that woke me up sweating like Judas, and explains German for nightmare being Alp. (GD, 9 October 1936)


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The temporal delay in writing the following day, in that reference is made to the preceding night, is contradicted here by Beckett’s efforts at situating the moment of recording this passage ‘to-day’. Indeed, only rarely does he admit to a deviation from the convention of writing entries on the same day, and there is an entry for every day of the six months except two from the first week, which are retrospectively described but not dated (GD, 5 October 1936). In a further passage, Beckett curiously admits to writing his diary on the following day, yet from the perspective of the entry that he is retrospectively recording: ‘All above Tintenkuli [ink pen] passage, & this also, written to-morrow afternoon in bed’ (GD, 16 January 1937). However, apart from a few such isolated instances, Beckett upholds the convention of the daily entry, which is also highlighted by his practice of not correcting an inaccuracy in the previous day’s notation but doing so in the following entry.

The German Diaries – Thematic Concerns and Functions You cannot mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not worth mentioning and those even less so. For if you set out to mention everything you would never be done. (Molloy, 39)

Any attempt to discern Beckett’s aims in keeping a diary by focusing on what he found ‘worth mentioning’ runs into difficulties. The diaries Beckett kept during his six-month journey through Germany strive to ‘mention everything’. Beckett records his daily activities minutely (in a ‘wealth of filthy circumstance’ Molloy would say; Mo, 63) and a defining feature of his journal is its cross-generic and multi-purpose nature. Unlike most diarists, Beckett does not introduce his diary with a statement of intent outlining the motivations behind the commencement of notations. Rather, the journey itself provides the framework for the journal, beginning on the day he leaves Dublin and ending on the last evening spent in Munich before flying to Croydon. In this respect, the German diaries are most obviously a travel diary, the origins of which date back to antiquity. Francis Bacon, for instance, in his essay ‘Of Travel’ (1516), recommended the keeping of a diary as a practical tool to make the journey more profitable. Beckett’s diaries record in detail sites visited, impressions of local customs, political and social comments

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and accounts of conversations. This aspect of the diary is even extended to a notation of the very streets along which he walks or the number of the tram that has carried him to a certain destination. A second thematic area explored in Beckett’s diaries could most adequately be described as the ‘pathology of everyday life’, which manifests itself in the recording of the minutiae of physical existence. Beckett begins many diary entries with an evaluation of the quality of the previous night’s sleep. This is usually coupled with the time of rising, a practice repeated at the end of the day upon retiring. Furthermore, there are only a few instances where Beckett fails to record where and what he has eaten at any given time during the day, including an evaluation of the meal itself as well as the accompanying drink, and often the cost of the entire repast. These aspects of the diary are all present in the following diary entry: ‘Poor night, first cold, then anal frenzy. Called at 8 but not up till 9. Breakfast in restaurant, honey & tiny testicular rolls’ (GD, 6 December 1936).13 This attention to the habits of everyday life is extended to matters of personal hygiene and frequency of bowel movements. Although the recording of bodily functions, the ‘offal of experience’ (PTD, 78), is rather uncommon in modern diaries (Dali and Gide being exceptions), it represented a key ingredient in the journals and autobiographical works of such writers as Johnson and Rousseau. The third main area of focus lies in the diary as artist’s journal. Once the record of daily events is stripped away, what emerges is an inventory of Beckett’s accumulation of artistic references and material. This is most obvious in the vast space given over to visits to art galleries, but also extends to his wide reading of German literature throughout the trip, and visits to the cinema and the theatre. Beyond these three main areas, the diary served Beckett in a practical manner, as an agenda for telephone numbers and addresses, budget calculations and travel itinerary. It also takes on the qualities of a scrapbook or a book of commonplaces in that it records extracts from newspaper articles, snippets of overheard conversations and toilet humour. The cardinal function of diary writing is to preserve experience from the progressive erosion of memory, to prevent forgetting. Krapp’s Last Tape of course dramatises this very fixation of events, with the explicit intention of being able to return to the past at any given moment. Both Beckett’s actual diary and Krapp’s quasi-diary accurately reflect this desire to compile a history of the self which Phillipe Lejeune has defined as one of the main functions of diary writing, ‘to build a memory out of paper, to create archives from lived experience, to accumulate traces’ (2001, 107).


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The value of a diary, however, is not restricted to the future. For many diarists the immediacy of notation, the act of writing, is of prime importance. In this sense the diary enables self-therapy, self-observation or self-analysis. Needless to say, anyone keeping diaries of substantial length and meticulous detail has self-reflexive tendencies, a certain need for either an emotional outlet or the creation of a mirror in which to observe or even analyse the self. More often than not, the diarist endeavours to overcome the fragmentary perception of life by fixing it on the page. Gide confessed to ‘cling to these pages [of his diary] as to something fixed among so many fugitive things’ (80). Moreover, the ‘succession of individuals’, as Beckett conceived a human life in Proust, could be apprehended and expressed in the rigid frame of a chronological sequence (PTD, 19), even if it was ultimately only, to borrow the description of Watt’s bed, ‘the illusion of fixity’ (W, 179). Beckett’s psychological investment in his diaries surely did not reach the revelatory extremes of journaux intimes such as Amiel’s, parodied by the Polish writer Gombrowicz in his diary entry ‘Monday: Me, Tuesday: Me, Wednesday: Me’ (qtd. in Vallee 1987, 187). Nevertheless, the structuring of experiential living will have offered Beckett some assurance at a time of both emotional and artistic uncertainty.

‘My Present State’ I have also decided to remind myself briefly of my present state before embarking on my stories. I think this is a mistake. It is a weakness. But I shall indulge in it. (Malone Dies, 6)

Beckett’s tracing in his diary of his movements between 1923 and 1937, discussed in the previous chapter, is the microcosmic equivalent to the German diaries as a whole. The diaries represent a ‘reminder’ of a ‘present state’, an evaluative balance sheet compiled at a particular moment in life. Many autobiographers feel compelled to initially render an account in situ, as Rousseau does in The Reveries of a Solitary Walker: ‘Unfortunately, before setting out on this quest, I must glance rapidly at my present situation, for this is a necessary stage on the road that leads from them to myself’ (Rousseau 1979, 27). Attesting to the vigilance of a mind ‘always on the alert against itself’ (TFN, 59), diary writing epitomises the self-reflexive and conscious awareness of mental and physical experience. This aspect of the diary

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has frequently been related to a specifically Protestant tradition, where the absence of the Catholic practice of confession and the doctrine of personal responsibility governs daily introspection. Gide’s diary writing and Rembrandt’s incessant self-portraiture could, for example, be related to this tradition, as well as writers who share certain spiritual affinities with Protestantism, such as Kafka or Tolstoy. In this context it is worth remembering Hugh Kenner’s statement that ‘Beckett’s work draws on two spiritual traditions by which history has shaped the specifically Protestant character: the personal testimony and the issueless confrontation with conscience’ (1973, 134). However, also relevant in this context is the growing distance between Beckett and his closest friend, Thomas MacGreevy. Throughout the first half of the thirties, Beckett is at his most intimate when writing to his confidant. To be sure, in 1936 their correspondence was still regular and of great importance to Beckett, yet around this time there is a growing rift which undoubtedly arises from their considerable differences regarding religious, aesthetic and political questions. This change is difficult to document in detail due to the absence of MacGreevy’s side of the correspondence, but a trajectory leads from a March 1935 letter to one written in January 1938. In the first of these Beckett dismisses MacGreevy’s recommendations of the Catholic elements in Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ as a solution to his problems (SB to TM, 10 March 1935), and the second contains Beckett’s first openly critical response to his friend’s aesthetics and politics in the form of MacGreevy’s book on Jack Yeats (SB to TM, 31 January 1938). During this period Beckett’s need of his friend’s approval, and even guidance, diminished significantly. So did their contact: ‘Let us correspond more often’ (SB to TM, 23 July 1937). Although letters continue to be exchanged up until MacGreevy’s death in 1967, the intimate ‘correspondence’, in its sense of ‘agreement’, lessened. After some kind of dispute between the two men early in 1939, Beckett admitted that he had too often called upon MacGreevy’s ‘reserves of indulgence’, regretting ‘that we seem to have lost touch with one another’ (SB to TM, 11 April 1939). In any case, the writing of a diary during a long solitary sojourn would also have been ‘company’. As he noted while writing Company many years later, the German diaries represented something ‘to keep me going (company) for the duration’ (SB to Jocelyn Herbert, 2 November 1977). Ultimately there is something cathartic as well as affirmative in writing daily about one’s life; it denotes a continuous act of renewal that Beckett was seeking at the time. More importantly, Beckett’s disciplined practice at daily writing and the concomitant artistic vigilance must have mitigated the despondency he was


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feeling at the perceived lack of artistic progress, especially as Murphy was two years from publication. The German diaries offer a distinct comment on Beckett’s creative situation after the completion of Murphy in June 1936, and can be viewed as an effort against silence. It is a common occurrence that writers either turn to, or intensify, their engagement with a diary when other forms of writing are not forthcoming. Gide testifies to this when he writes that he has ‘harnessed’ himself to writing in his diary, as a ‘means of getting myself into the spirit for work’ (116). Beckett may well have hoped that by writing, simply writing, he could get something new going. This is not to say, however, that Beckett used the diary as some kind of sketchbook or drawing board for literary projects. Unlike Musil, who uses his diary for actual drafts, developing characters for his fictional worlds, or Kafka, who often notes experiences in a stylised fashion that need little change before finding their way into his stories, Beckett’s diary contains very few fragments of creative writing or literary ideas. Essentially, Beckett regarded diary writing in itself as a nonliterary exercise, clearly differentiated from his usual creative endeavours. Despite his complaint that he found it ‘more & more difficult to write’ (SB to TM, 28 November 1936), the prolific nature of the German diaries illustrates Beckett’s need to express himself. Moreover, both the diary form and diary writing correspond to three aspects of Beckett’s creative and aesthetic thinking at the time of his journey through Germany – writing without style, fragmentation and writing the self – all of which influenced his further development as a writer. The period between the completion of what is arguably Beckett’s most conventional novel, Murphy, and the first steps towards Watt in February 1941 is marked by a disenchantment with what Proust calls the ‘shortcomings of literary convention’ (PTD, 11), as well as with writing itself. Beckett’s position in 1936 was similar to the one Kafka found himself in when in 1909 he decided (having been invited to do so by Max Brod) to keep a diary of a journey: ‘But then again I believe that my trip will turn out better, that I will apprehend better if I am relaxed by a little writing, and so try it again’ (qtd. in Zilcosky 2003, 10–11). John Zilcosky, basing his arguments on Max Brod’s contentions in Der Prager Kreis to this effect, shows how Kafka’s mature writing grows out of the apprenticeship of his travel writing (1909–1912). Specifically, Kafka ‘focuses, in his travel diaries, on jotting down his disconnected, nonnarrative “experience[s]” ’, concentrating on the ‘objective description’ of what he sees (11). Indeed, as Peter Boerner has pointed out, the diary form, particularly in its use in the early part of the twentieth century, invites a declarative style and brevity through the crystallisation of experience (1972, 43). Renard similarly conceived of his journal as a tool for achieving

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style and precision of expression. Beckett’s method of recording can be set beside these examples; his observations are written in a factual manner, devoid of any attempt at interpretation, which is not to say that they are not at times emotionally charged or expressed with feeling. The diary form supports this tendency towards the statemental and the factual, in that the span of time separating the experience and its notation is reduced to a minimum. Yet even within this short distance a transformation and evaluation takes place, both through the mental agency of the diarist and the language employed. There is a curious illustration of this transformation in Watt, where Sam fears he may have altered Watt’s story, although he was ‘most careful to note down all at the time, in my little notebook’ (108). Nevertheless, the German diaries represent the first instance of Beckett writing ‘without style’ (Dream, 48). Writing purely for himself, with the specific aim of describing all the myriad observations made during the course of a day rather than developing literary drafts, he could write with a brevity and a concision that would become characteristic of much of his post-war work. This is illustrated in the following, characteristic, passage: Walk on by Teich [pond], very pretty skating scene. Then on by Neue Terrasse, past huge barrack on left, pleasant view of Japanisches Palais, as far as Marienbrücke & back. In Brüdergasse great excitement at arrival of 2 colossal fire engines to extinguish a thin dribble of smoke from a cellar. Schupi [Schutzpolizist; a policeman] springs forward & stops all traffic. Walk through Schlosshof. Strikes me as seedy & buggered up. On to Palucca. Shocked female retainer grudgingly besmirches her person with my card & Porep’s letter & bids me telephone at 8. Find case arrived. Unpack. New room not quite such a coffin. After supper ring up. Not available. Ring up again to-morrow at 11. Yes ma’am. (GD, 1 February 1937) This is not to say that Beckett’s diaries lack humour, as when he declines in an art gallery to be guided by using the word ‘verführt’ (misled) instead of ‘geführt’ (led), or when he records a conversation during which the various locations of Ufa film studios are mentioned: ‘another somewhere (buy more Watte [cotton wool]) else’ (GD, 27 February 1937 and 7 January 1937). Moreover, there are also instances where the predominantly factual language is replaced by efforts at a more stylised composition. Beckett tends to slip into a more ornate style of writing when he describes natural environments. ‘Literary’ passages particularly occur when Beckett observes


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events by the side of rivers (see Nixon 2009a), as the following two passages illustrate: Ducks in dusk, taking wing from the water with the sound of consternation & setting again with a long liquid vale, flying fiercely in pairs down the axes of water, so different in the air than afloat. (GD, 31 December 1936) by the brisk little canal, past Liebespaare [lovers], the ducks flying, taking off & landing in noisy panic down the axes of water, in one stream a great sexual or quarrelsome commotion, so that a big black muzzled hound pauses on the bridge to attend. (GD, 7 March 1937) The aphoristic and statemental style inherent in the kind of diary writing that Beckett undertook is closely aligned with the fragmentary nature of the journal. Although structured by chronology, the accretion of successive segments (micro-texts) abolishes constraints of systematisation, narrative thread or causality. The alogical progression of entries also enables the diarist to express himself without worrying whether a previous or future entry is contradicted. For Beckett, who is reputed to have said that the word ‘perhaps’ was the key to his work, the relevance of the fragmentary nature of the diary cannot be underestimated. Already in his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett had ironically attacked the ‘lovely Pythagorean chain-chant solo of cause and effect’ (10), and embodied that attack in the very fragmentary structure of the work itself. Just as the diary substitutes the discontinuous discourse for the linear or progressive order of the novel, many of Beckett’s later works seem in their residual and abandoned status to be torn from some larger narrative that can never be apprehended in its totality. This concept of discontinuity is related to Beckett’s distrust of traditional autobiographical narrative (such as the memoir), with its endeavour to ‘synthesise characters out of their infinite fragmentation’ (Pascal 1960, 4). Beckett carried the fragmentary structure of the diary into Watt, his first major work following his trip to Germany, where the omissions within the text (‘hiatus in MS.’; 207) are designed to highlight both its textuality and its inconclusiveness. Furthermore, Watt incorporates another characteristic of the diary form, its open-endedness, which is upheld not only thematically but also textually through the ‘Addenda’. Although it can deal with matters of the past and envisage a future, diary writing is essentially a writing to the moment. There is no way of predetermining what the next day will bring and thus what will be written. Nevertheless, within the forward-looking framework, the diary always presupposes a further entry. Thus the form

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itself has no terminal point, and the final word is only imposed by external reality. The most obvious terminus is the death of the diarist, anticipated, for example, by Fielding in his Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon: ‘if I should live to finish it, a matter of no great certainty’ (1973, 261). The fragility of writing, in that it is resolutely tied to the fragility of the body (or being in general), is most fully explored in the decline in both narrator and narrative in Malone Dies: ‘Soon I shall be quite dead at last, and so on, without even going on to the next page, which was blank’ (35). For Beckett, the terminal point of diary writing was rather less dramatic, imposed (as the beginning was) by the frame of the journey. Beckett seems to have planned writing a diary during his trip, taking a new and unused notebook with him, and it is equally probable that he envisaged terminating writing once the journey was over. In a sense the end of the journey is not only a place related to time and location, but also a space Beckett created through the language of the diary. Nevertheless, despite both the linguistic and emotional investment in the prediction of the end, there would have been, even to Beckett himself, no guarantee that he would stop writing, so that the diary remained potentially endless. Indeed, in the renunciation of any form of cohesion and conclusion, the diary epitomises Beckett’s preoccupations with endings and beginnings. Thus Joyce’s strategy behind ending, and not ending, Portrait will have been of particular interest to Beckett, who throughout the thirties struggled to bring his own texts to a satisfying end. Just as diaristic writing is a continual act of renewing the writing self, Beckett’s texts emphasise the impossibility of completion, as several titles such as From an Abandoned Work or For to end yet again indicate. From the very beginning, Beckett found it difficult to ascertain where to end a text. Having submitted the essay Proust to Prentice, for example, Beckett wrote to the Chatto editor requesting to add ‘5 or 6 pages’ in order to ‘develop the parallel with Dostoevski’, but ultimately failing to do so.14 Dream had also, to use the phrasing in Endgame, ‘hesitate[d] . . . to end’ (CDW, 93) before doing so with an impatient ‘END’ (Dream, 241). In what replicates his own sense of terminating certain aspects of his life and paralleling his habit of setting forth only to return, Beckett’s difficulty with bringing his individual works to a satisfactory conclusion was not easily overcome. By the time Beckett came to write Murphy, the problem had become endemic. In January 1936 Beckett was telling MacGreevy that only ‘three, four chapters’ remained to be written, but by May of that year Beckett still could only envisage a first end, finally finishing it a month later (SB to TM, 29 January, 7 May and 27 June 1936). Even then, MacGreevy must have raised concerns with the ending of the book, to which Beckett


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replied that he had envisaged ‘the difficulty and danger of so much following Murphy’s own “end” ’ (SB to TM, 7 July 1936). It seems to have taken Beckett a long time to realise that to ‘finish it all right’ would also mean to ‘begin it again’ (SB to TM, 9 January 1936), and that all he would ever write was somehow connected – as Belacqua, Murphy and all other characters would continue to surface in much of his later, even post-war, work. His reading of Johnson’s Rasselas may have contributed to this awareness. Rasselas refuses closure precisely because final determinative resolutions defy the ‘real condition of life’, which is one where ‘our minds, like our bodies, are in continuous flux’ (Johnson 1976, 115). Accordingly, the last chapter of the book is entitled ‘The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded’. There is a sense that Beckett’s texts are a continuous ‘work in progress’, a writing process that is never complete.

Writing ‘I’ If Beckett’s diary writing afforded him some ‘company’, it was also a very specific kind, as the late text Company demonstrates: ‘What an addition to company that would be! A voice in the first person singular’ (CIWS, 9). Indeed, whereas critics rightly point to Watt as Beckett’s first serious venture into the first-person narrative, it is the daily writing of the self inherent in the diaries where Beckett learnt to say ‘I’.15 The diary represents a prime textual space in which to enquire into the psychological subject and its linguistic expression. Effectively this enquiry takes the form of a linguistic transcription of a dialogue, or rather a dialogue with oneself. By splitting the self into a recording ‘I’ and a recorded ‘I’, a distancing perspective is established which allows a more even observation of the self. Whereas this mode is common to all autobiographical forms, the immediacy and the specifically self-reflexive nature of the diary collapses this gap between the teller and told, resulting in a self-contained act of self-writing. The diary is the most effective form for tying writing to being. The self-referential act of diary writing, writing to the moment, is illustrated by those instances when the very act of writing inscribes itself into the text. This performative inscription appears already in the second entry of the German diaries: Tender left about 6. On board Washington about 7.15. Sail 8. Cabin to myself (so far). Lousy table with 5 bosthoons just come on board like myself. Didn’t know we were to call at Plymouth. Tired yet don’t feel like going to bed. Very dubious at the moment about the trip. (GD, 29 September 1936)

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In its chronological retrospection the text approaches the very instance in which Beckett writes to the ‘moment’. What emerges here is not only an act of self-writing, but also the presence of the writing self, a reciprocal performance which can be located both spatially and temporally. It is this immediacy of presence that Beckett developed in his later writing, from the dramatisation of Krapp’s recording of himself to Malone’s claustrophobic writing to the very last moment.16 Already evident in early asides, as when the narrator in Dream confesses ‘spirit (getting tired of that word)’, the writing of the diary showed Beckett how to make the text not only selfreferential to the person writing it, but also to the actual moment, the spatial and narrative occasion, of its composition (43). The German diaries represent the fulcrum of a period begun with Dream and not resolved until later texts such as Krapp’s Last Tape or Malone Dies, where writing is increasingly merged with being. As we have seen, Beckett remained at a distance from his alter ego Belacqua, a gulf established through the wealth of secondary material and the use of irony, a method still active in Murphy. For Beckett, writing ‘I’ by submitting himself to diary writing over a period of six months and exploring the possible use of the journal form was a first creative step towards a writing that would more completely eradicate the border between the autobiographical and the fictional. At a time of emotional and intellectual disorientation, writing daily not only allowed Beckett to artistically experiment with writing in a new, concise style, admitting fragmentation and inconclusiveness, but also enabled him ‘to come to a little knowledge of himself’ (Dream, 184). Various fictional diaries have attested to this quality of diary writing. Roquentin in Sartre’s La Nausée states that he will ‘[k]eep a diary to see clearly’ (Sartre 1964, 1), an intention reflected in Rilke’s Malte, who reveals at the beginning of his journal-like notes ‘Ich lerne sehen [I am learning to see]’ (Rilke 1973, 9). This aspect is re-enacted again and again in the German diaries, expressed, for example, when Beckett foregrounds the textuality and temporality of his writing: ‘write . . . this Quatsch [nonsense] to this point’ (GD, 9 December 1936). It is an anticipation of the impulse governing the utterances of Beckett’s later narrators: ‘I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end. It is in order to know where I have got to’ (MD, 33).

Chapter 3


Trying to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. (T. S. Eliot, East Coker, V, 1969, 182)

T. S. Eliot’s use of a terminology of conflict to illustrate the artist’s struggle to approach the ‘inarticulate’ anticipates Beckett’s 1966 short tribute to Avigdor Arikha, where he refers to the ‘siege laid to the impregnable without’ (Dis, 152). Any metaphor of struggle would be apt to describe Beckett’s personal and aesthetic experiences precisely 30 years prior to making this statement. Expressed in terms of the short ‘For Avigdor Arikha’, Beckett during the mid-thirties had been very much seeking a ‘truce’ that would reveal ‘a space and the marks of what it is to be and be in face of’ (152). Whereas the narrator of More Pricks than Kicks could still declare that for Belacqua there were instances when it was not ‘the moment for selfexamination’ (33), by late 1934 his creator’s psychological imperatives dictated that there would be little else. After the instability and wildness of Dream there is a movement within Beckett’s work towards a ‘truce’, a personal and aesthetic equilibrium that might counter the growing disorientation. Throughout the middle years of the decade Beckett’s writing is not so much motivated by aesthetic concerns but rather driven by psychological necessity. The German diaries represent a ‘new beginning’ within a form that has helped many writers to overcome

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either a personal or an aesthetic crisis. Yet turning to this new mode of writing, Beckett did not hope that these ‘marks of what it is to be’ (Dis, 152) could be achieved with only ‘shabby equipment’ at his disposal, or that the ‘inarticulate’ could be rendered articulate. The previous two chapters discussed Beckett’s struggle to accommodate life and art in his early work, the personal and aesthetic associations Germany held for him and the nature of the textual space in which he decided to inscribe his 1936–1937 journey. In this chapter I propose to discuss the way in which Beckett’s work sought to address what Wordsworth called, in The Prelude, ‘the wavering balance’ of his mind (1979, 101). This subtext is inscribed within Beckett’s writing and aesthetics during the thirties (and beyond), enriched by borrowings from the traditions of literary melancholia, philosophical scepticism and quietism.

Therapeutic Voodoo? It is possible to view the German diaries as something more than just an artistic exercise of the writing hand or an aide-mémoire. Beckett also turned to the diary form with an awareness of its introspective quality. Indeed, it is pertinent to view the self-exploratory nature of the diary as a logical extension to the psychoanalytic sessions Beckett undertook with Wilfred Bion in London from late 1933 to 1935, following the advice of his friend Geoffrey Thompson.1 It can therefore be seen as a progression from the ‘talking cure’, aided by an analyst, to a self-therapy exercised through a form of ‘writing cure’.2 Beckett was driven to psychotherapy by ‘a specific fear & a specific complaint’ (SB to TM, 10 March 1935): an increasingly incapacitating spate of anxiety attacks which manifested themselves in an ‘internal combustion heart’ (SB to TM, 31 August 1935), and states of panic that troubled him particularly during the night.3 The trouble with ‘my bitch of a heart’ (SB to TM, 24 February 1931) had already surfaced as early as 1926 (Knowlson 1996, 64). Halfway into his therapy Beckett was ‘obliged to accept the whole panic as psychoneurotic’ (SB to TM, undated [7 August 1934]), aware that his problems were somehow related to the ‘savage loving’ of his mother (SB to TM, 6 October 1937), whose intense demands on him had reached unbearable levels following his father’s death in February 1933. As Knowlson surmises, Bion probably employed ‘reductive therapy’ in his treatment of Beckett, in order to ‘discover the dynamic links between the symptoms and its causes in the past’ (Knowlson 1996, 170). In determining


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significant incidents from the past, both free association and dream analysis were employed to enable a splitting-off or transference of certain aspects of character. Beckett’s comment to Morris Sinclair in January 1934, that analysis was ‘the only thing that interests me at the moment’ (Knowlson 1996, 171), seems initially to have been matched by its benefits. During his first visit back to Dublin in August he told MacGreevy that he felt things to be easier with Mother also. I am more than content to take her as she is. . . . I only begin to realise how much good the Covey [Bion] has done me. Pains better also. (SB to TM, 18 August 1934) As Matthew Feldman has examined in his important study, Beckett’s Books (2006), Beckett began to read widely in the field of psychology and psychoanalysis at this time, taking extensive notes in two notebooks (TCD MS10971/7 and MS10971/8).4 Beckett viewed psychology as yet another epistemological source that could potentially prove fruitful to his writing. It is easy to forget that during the thirties, psychological theories in general and psychoanalysis in particular were in part still terra incognita, inducing much excitement in the literary (and artistic) world. Beckett was of course very aware of this influence, discussing during his Trinity lectures both Gide and Racine as ‘competent psichologists’ [sic] and translating the Surrealist simulations of verbal styles of insanity for This Quarter in 1932.5 Beckett’s interest in mental disorders, references to which abound in his early work, certainly needs to be set alongside a general prevalence among writers to introduce such concerns into literary discourse. This cross-fertilisation will have been obvious to Beckett, as when he came across psychological explanations of Gide’s acte gratuit, which he had discussed during his Trinity lectures. From Karin Stephen’s The Wish to Fall Ill (1933) he noted ‘the conception of crime as the effect, not the cause, of a sense of guilt (crime immotivé), a specific act on which to fasten and so relieve the floating sense of dread’ (TCD MS10971/7, 2v).6 As with his reading in other fields, Beckett, following the reading of Stephen, initially turned to a work that would supply him with a general overview of the subject, in this case R. S. Woodworth’s Contemporary Schools of Psychology (1931). From this book Beckett took notes on all strands of psychological thought, that is to say, Psychoanalysis, Behaviourism, Purposivism, Existentialism, Gestalt Psychology and Introspectionism (which incorporated the Külpe School). Elements of this reading invariably flowed into Murphy, both in a serious as well as an irreverent manner. Indeed, one

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could hardly expect Beckett to resist employing the splendidly named proponent of the Külpe School, Narziss Kaspar Ach, the surname a fitting sigh in the face of Murphy’s eccentricities. But Beckett also found much of interest during his introductory journey through contemporary psychology, not least in the Jungian notion that the tendency of energy towards an endstate of equilibrium explains behaviour better than the causal-mechanical explanations of Freud and Adler. A neurosis represents an attempt at a fresh synthesis (TCD MS10971/7, 8r). Recalling Beckett’s dismissal of the causal chain in Proust, his annotation to this passage also looks forward to the idea of a ‘truce’: ‘Cp. Gestalt concept of insights as closing a gap and attaining an equilibrium’. Beyond Woodworth’s general overview, Beckett’s other psychological reading during this period can be related to his own preoccupations; his notes taken from eight further books betray an emphasis on personal application and represent an attempt to illuminate his own perceived problematic condition. The titles of such books as Karin Stephen’s The Wish to Fall Ill or Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth (1929) indicate as much. The reading of the latter book appears to have been a direct result of Beckett’s psychotherapy, during which (as he recounted in 1989) he came up with ‘[i]ntrauterine memories’ of ‘feeling trapped’ (Knowlson 1996, 171).7 Rank’s account enabled Beckett to make the connection between these pre-natal memories and his own feelings of anxiety: ‘Just as all anxiety goes back to anxiety at birth (dyspnoea), so every pleasure has as its final aim the re-establishment of the primal intrauterine pleasure’ (TCD MS10971/8, 17v).8 Central to Beckett’s interest in the subject is the classical dictum ‘Optimum non nasci, aut cito mori [the best is not to be born, but to die quickly]’, copied from Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy into the Whoroscope notebook, an idea which is refracted, in various guises, throughout his work (86v).9 It first appears in Proust in Calderón’s phrasing as ‘Pues el delito mayor / Del hombre es haber nacido [the greatest sin of mankind is to have been born]’, taken from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea (PTD, 67). For Beckett, the idea merged a psychological sentiment with an existential outlook. It was expanded when Beckett, together with Bion, attended one of Jung’s Tavistock lectures in October 1935, where the psychologist discussed the case of a girl ‘who had never been born properly’.10 The overall emphasis of Beckett’s psychology notes, however, lies in the exploration of the origins and symptoms of anxiety, from which he had been suffering for some time. In March 1931 Beckett complained to MacGreevy about his ‘latest cardiac feather’: ‘fear – followed by no genitive’


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(SB to TM, 11 March 1931). In a further attempt to better understand this problem, Beckett turned to Freud (whom he called ‘Freudchen’) for illumination, albeit through the filter of Ernest Jones’s Freudian Papers on Psychoanalysis (1913) and the Treatment of Neuroses (1920). In a letter to A. J. Leventhal of 7 May 1934, Beckett refers (on the basis of his reading of Jones) to Freud’s ‘ “displacement upward”, a neurotic device of great popularity’. Beckett, with a wry smile no doubt, commented that he ‘must be getting along like a jakes on fire’ with this tendency to displace (through symbolism) repressed aspects of the character from the lower to the upper part of the body.11 Beckett’s notes show that he struggled through the whole of Jones’s Papers.12 Quoting Freud’s original German throughout rather than Jones’s English translations, much of the material recorded stems from the chapter on ‘The Pathology of Morbid Anxiety’ (Jones 1920, 481–99). Like Rank later, Jones declares, as Beckett notes, that the ‘entire range of morbid anxiety phenomena stand in intimate relation to actual birth event, which is first anxiety experience of the individual & serves as archetype of all later manifestations (claustrophobia, compression, suffocation, etc.)’ (TCD MS10971/8, 8v). Yet having realised that fear, in Freudian terms, is a psychological shield that protects the organism from mental processes of which it is afraid, Beckett hesitated to remove it. In a letter to MacGreevy he hints at preferring ‘mindlessness’ to the ‘shabby depravity’ that would result from a confrontation of the displacement of the original affect (SB to TM, 15 May 1935). Moreover, Beckett’s notes reveal that despite the serious implications of Jones’s conclusion that ‘morbid anxiety means unsatisfied love’, he found it difficult to relinquish the very detached intellectual irony which continually threatened the success of his psychotherapy. Summarising a case reported by Jones of a woman whose piano playing acted as a substitute for masturbation, Beckett noted ‘Masturbation sublimating on the pianoforte’ (TCD MS10971/8, 8v). Further to Jones’s discussion of Freudian theories of anxiety, and connected with his own difficulties with sleeping, Beckett showed a keen interest in the function of dreams ‘to satisfy the activity of unconscious mental processes that would otherwise disturb sleep’ (TCD MS10971/8, 8r). Beckett further investigated this connection within the work of Edouard Claparède. In a letter to Leventhal of May 1934, Beckett refers to an article by Claparède ‘on sleep as reflex defence action’, and asks his friend to return the issue of the periodical Minotaure in which it had appeared.13 From Beckett’s later comment that he had lent Brian Coffey ‘some Minotaures’ we can assume that he often read the magazine, which ranged thematically from Surrealism

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and primitive art to psychology (SB to TM, 7 August 1936). Thus the issue in which Claparède’s article appeared also contained essays by Dali and Breton, Man Ray photographs, a ‘Horoscope de Jean-Arthur Rimbaud’ as well as an early piece (‘Motifs du crime paranoïaque’) by Jacques Lacan. Beckett’s interest in the mechanisms of sleep can be linked to one of his earliest nightmares, relating to the experience of diving into the Forty-Foot hole in Dublin at the invitation of his father (Knowlson 1996, 20). This was surely in the back of Beckett’s mind as he recorded Rank’s assertion that the ‘[d]ream of plunging into water telescopes the birth trauma’ (TCD MS10971/8, 17v). Both the memory and the dream of the diving scene are replayed with slight variations in several of Beckett’s works. It first appears in the play Eleutheria, where it is enriched by a reference to Dr Johnson recorded in one of the Human Wishes notebooks. As recounted by Mrs Thrale, Dr Johnson angrily refused to relate the dream that introduced ‘the first corruption’ into his heart (UoR MS3461/1, 72r).14 In Beckett’s first play the Glazier similarly refuses to hear Victor’s ‘diving’ dream, while Vladimir’s ‘DON’T TELL ME!’ in Waiting for Godot makes the point quite clear (CDW, 17).15

Beckett and Melancholy The ‘diving incident’ is part of an extensive autobiographical typology underlying Beckett’s work, which provokes an incessant textual return to certain memories. In conversation with James Knowlson in 1989, Beckett referred to these images, mostly deriving from his childhood and youth, as ‘obsessional’ (Knowlson 1996, xxi).16 As in the case of the memory of the Forty-Foot in Dublin, many of these autobiographical traces relate to Beckett’s father, whose death in June 1933 represented a severe blow. Indeed, as Phil Baker has convincingly shown, Beckett’s work is greatly concerned with the subject of loss and grieving, and can be biographically traced to the haunting memories of loved ones (145–70). In discussing Beckett’s reaction to this loss, privately and in his writing, it is pertinent to invoke (as Baker has done) Freud’s 1917 essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’.17 In contrast to the person in mourning, in the melancholic the libido responds to the loss of a love-object not by ‘reinvestment in a new object of desire, but by drawing itself back into the ego’. As a consequence, the ‘existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged’ by an identification of the ego with the lost object (Freud XIV, 245). This process is connected with an original narcissistic object choice.18 The ensuing conflict between


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separation and containment of the lost love-object can manifest itself in ‘cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches’ (Freud, XIV, 244). ‘[T]he dead annex the quick’, Beckett had predicted in Proust in 1931 (PTD, 39), and the German diaries show how three years after his father’s death he still painfully felt his absence. As an organ was playing in the Petrikirche in Hamburg he ‘[b]egan thinking of Father’: ‘ça me tue . . .’ (GD, 19 October 1936). And after a long walk in Grünewald, on the outskirts of Berlin, on Christmas Day, Beckett noted in his diary: ‘Melancholy memories of other Xmas walks’ (GD, 25 December 1936). It is the walks across the Dublin mountains with his father, particularly at Christmas, which are invoked here. Arguably the most precious, as well as the most painful, memories for Beckett, they were anticipated several months before his father’s death in a comment to MacGreevy: ‘Lovely walk this morning with Father . . . I’ll never have anyone like him’ (SB to TM, 23 [April 1933]). This togetherness with his father was subsequently etched in Beckett’s memory, as the following comments from letters spanning twenty years illustrate: I thought of a Xmas morning not long ago standing at the back of the Scalp with Father, hearing singing coming from the Glencullen Chapel. (SB to TM, 1 January 1935) At night, when I can’t sleep, I do the old walks again and stand beside him [Beckett’s father] again one Xmas morning in the fields near Glencullen, listening to the chapel bells. (SB to Susan Manning, 21 May 1955) The similarity in tone and the precision with which the moment is captured in these two passages reflects the repeated projection, with only slight variation, of these memories into fictional form. As Beckett talks about a walk in the countryside surrounding Ussy (two days after Christmas), ‘the real walk was elsewhere, on a screen inside’ (SB to Pamela Mitchell, 27 December 1954). The persistent return of these memories explains why Beckett disliked going back to Dublin and specifically the Dublin mountains, frequently expressing his relief at getting away, ‘out of their clutches’ (SB to Pamela Mitchell, 30 March 1968). Yet, importantly, and however painful these memories proved to be for Beckett, there is also a distinct sense in which the remembering moment is one of consolation, or even happiness. During his stay in Berlin at the

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end of 1936, Beckett could also note after a walk in the outskirts ‘feel most happily melancholy’ (GD, 7 November 1936). Indeed, just as Belacqua was ‘crowned in gloom’ in Dream (9), Beckett understood melancholia to be a mood rather than a disorder, a distinction undoubtedly derived from his reading. As Jennifer Radden points out, the ‘new, or at least sharpened association of depression with loss and self-loathing that emerges from [Freud’s] ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ [differs from] earlier accounts of a simple, almost moodlike subjectivity of nebulous fear and sorrow’ (Radden 2000, 28–9). A letter Beckett wrote in 1931, and thus before his father’s death, highlights his melancholy disposition as being independent from the experience of loss: ‘walking, the mind has a most pleasant & melancholy limpness, is a carrefour [crossroads] of memories, memories of childhood mostly, moulin à larmes [mill of tears]’ (SB to TM, 8 November 1931). As so often in the 1930s, Beckett turned to books to seek literary equivalents of his own emotional preoccupations. Thus Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy introduced him to a corpus of writing drawn from the melancholic tradition.19 Here he will have learnt of the physical symptoms arising from the humours, and appreciated the metaphysical implications of a sentiment such as ‘His heart taketh no rest in the night’, which Burton took from the Book of Ecclesiastes (2:23).20 Julia Kristeva’s statement (in Black Sun) that in Aristotle’s Problemata melancholia was ‘coextensive with man’s anxiety in being’ is surely also pertinent to Beckett (1989, 7).21 Aware of the melancholic tradition, and not averse to seeing himself as part of it, Beckett could apologise to MacGreevy for ‘this futile and not even melancholy letter’ (SB to TM, 11 March 1931). Burton’s discussion of melancholy as containing feelings of solitude, sadness and fear without cause may have offered a kind of positive emotional intensity as expressed in Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’, but, on the other hand, did little to remove Beckett’s paralysing symptoms. After the initial prospect of relief there is a marked decrease in Beckett’s conviction that the analysis with Bion could bring about any kind of improvement or solution. By January 1935, Beckett acknowledged that ‘the analysis is going to turn out a failure’ (SB to TM, 1 January 1935). More precisely, and paradoxically, Beckett’s comments indicate that any possible solution would in fact be worse than the actual problem: ‘how lost I would be bereft of my incapacitation’ (SB to TM, 14 February [1935]). Similarly, Belacqua in ‘Ding-Dong’ also had cause to ‘wonder whether the remedy were not rather more disagreeable than the complaint’ (MPTK, 31).


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Nevertheless, Beckett continued his therapeutic course for another ten months, lacking the courage to break it off in the face of Bion’s insistence that more work was needed to free him from his neuroses. Although Beckett valued the insights into his own unconscious that the analysis offered, he did not subscribe to the solutions that the psychoanalytic system advocated. By the time Beckett came to read Rank’s The Trauma of Birth, his patience with over-interpretation had given way to frustration, so that the previously committed note-taking is now interspersed with humorous asides: ‘Inestimable advantage of man over woman, consisting in his being able partially to back into the mother by means of the penis which stands – ha ! ha ! – for the child’ (TCD MS 10971/8, 18r). His overriding belief that the unconscious was ‘impregnable’ would not, and perhaps could not, have been abolished by what Murphy calls the ‘therapeutic voodoo’ (133). With the ‘internal combustion heart as bad as ever’ (SB to TM, 31 August [1935]), Beckett in the winter of 1935 decided to discontinue his therapeutic sessions with Bion. A letter to MacGreevy in January 1936 forcibly states that the whole enterprise had done nothing to improve his relations with his mother or to remove the nocturnal anxiety attacks. This letter also contains a strong condemnation, surely inflected by a sense of frustration, of the irrelevance and even dangerous nature of psychoanalytic therapy: As I write, think, move, speak, praise & blame, I see myself living up to the specimen that these 2 years have taught me I am. The word is not out before I am blushing for my automatism. (SB to TM, 16 January 1936)22 Nevertheless, Beckett may have turned away from psychoanalysis as a system – what Murphy calls ‘complacent scientific conceptualism’ – but not necessarily from some of its methods (111). In conversation with Knowlson, Beckett indicated that he had kept some kind of psychoanalytic journal, stating that he ‘used to go back to my digs and write notes on what had happened, on what I’d come up with’ (Knowlson 1996, 177). It is not impossible that Bion encouraged Beckett to pursue such a practice, as he had kept one during service in the First World War. What is certain is that Bion asked Beckett to keep a record of his dreams which could be used during therapy to shed light on unconscious mental processes.23 Such ‘dream’ diaries formed an important part of psychoanalysis. Having paid such intense attention to his dreams (and having dreamed up two dreams for Dream), one could expect Beckett to have continued the practice during his trip to Germany.

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Only two dreams, however, are recorded during the six months that he kept a diary, a ‘vivid tooth dream,’ and another – ‘frightful’ – ‘of a man getting a torpedo in the guts, and then being the only one of the crew to recover’ (GD, 1 October 1936 and 13 February 1937). Yet Beckett must have felt that there was some value in using a personal notebook into which he could deposit psychological preoccupations. His desire to continue some form of self-therapy is suggested by his response to a letter received while in Germany from Geoffrey Thompson, who relayed a message from Bion deploring any interruption of treatment, opining a total “cure” if I had stayed a little longer, & trusting to see me again. NIX ZU SAGEN. Oder zu viel [NOTHING TO SAY. Or too much]. (GD, 8 December 1936) Beckett already began to express what had hitherto remained unsaid in the ‘Clare Street’ Notebook, which he had bought in Dublin in July 1936. Much of this notebook shows Beckett practising his German, as the translations, for example of the poem ‘Cascando’ (only just written) and Johnson’s letter to Lord Chesterfield, illustrate. Yet there is a series of August entries which deviate from Beckett’s previous practice of notation: most entries are clearly dated and several short pieces written in German deal with Beckett’s psychological concerns. Thus on the 11 August 1936 Beckett notes the recurrence of feelings of anxiety, psychosomatically resulting in physical pain. The following deliberation illustrates Beckett’s own explanation of the problem: Wie durchsichtig klar kommt mir dieser Mechanismus heute vor, dessen Prinzip heisst: Lieber um Etwas Angst haben, als um Nichts. Im ersten Fall wird nur ein Teil, im zweiten das Ganze bedroht, von dem Ungeheuren, welches zum Wesen des Unbegreiflichen, fast dürfte man des Unbegrenzten sagen, unzertrennlich gehört, nicht zu reden. . . . Wenn eine solche Angst zu steigen anfängt, muss ein Grund schleunigst dafür erfunden werden. Da es keinem gegönnt wird, mit ihr in ihrer absoluten Grundlosigkeit leben zu können. So mag der Neurotische, d.h. Jedermann, mit den grössten Ernst u. mit aller Ehrfurcht behaupten, dass zwischen Gott im Himmel u. Schmerz im Bauch der Unterschied bloss minimal ist. Da beide von einer Quelle herrühren u. zum einen Zweck dienen: Angst in Furcht zu verwandeln.


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[How translucent this mechanism seems to me now, the principle of which is: better to be afraid of something than of nothing. In the first case only a part, in the second the whole is threatened, not to mention the monstrous quality which inseparably belongs to the incomprehensible, one could even say the boundless. . . . When such an anxiety begins to grow a reason must quickly be found, as no one has the ability to live with it in its utter absence of reason. Thus the neurotic, i.e. Everyman, may declare with great seriousness and in all awe that there is merely a minimal difference between God in heaven and a pain in the stomach. Since both emanate from one source and serve one purpose: to transform anxiety into fear.] (UoR MS5003, 3r–4r) The relevance of this passage lies in the very act of Beckett committing such self-revealing sentiments to paper, and, furthermore, doing so in German. Both the ‘Clare Street’ Notebook and the German diaries attest to Beckett’s dedication to a form of writing that could accommodate a self-therapeutic, or at least a self-analytical, impulse. In focusing on the recovery of material repressed by the subject’s conscious discourse, precisely through discourse, the psychoanalytical act naturally favours the spontaneous and periodic notation of the diary. In fact, the diary can replace the analyst as the recipient in an act of transference as conceptualised by Freud (see Besançon 1987). Jacques Lacan has further equated the creative capacity of language with a therapeutic function in the formulation of the past through discourse, and within a narrative.24 In what is effectively a written ‘talking cure’, the stable framework of the diary represents a space, a site in which a projection of inner processes and general preoccupations of the self can be situated. The disassociation thus achieved from troubling material provides a cathartic effect while enabling a confrontation of that very material refined by distance. To be sure, Beckett distrusted any suggestions that a ‘true’ self could be recovered through either therapeutic or artistic processes. Nor was this discovery desirable, as the ‘véritable artiste reste toujours à demi innocent de lui-même [the true artist is always partly ignorant of himself]’.25 Moreover, in his essay on Proust, Beckett denies the possibility of introspection for the same reason as Auguste Comte had before him: any attendance to experience modifies that same experience.26 Yet Beckett gleaned more from the emphasis on discourse in Freudian psychoanalysis than from its discovery techniques. The factual accuracy of the recollected material is secondary to the imaginative representation of emotions and memories fashioned in the present.

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The Necessity of Writing: Beckett and Literary Bookkeeping The therapeutic value of autobiographical writing was of course recognised before the advent of psychoanalysis. Long before doctors and therapists urged such diverse writers as Theodor Fontane or Simone de Beauvoir to keep a diary, St. Augustine wrote his Confessions in an attempt to heal spiritual infirmities. Pertinent to Beckett’s own insistent return to such memories in his work, writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and W. B. Yeats turned to autobiographical writing to banish haunting childhood experiences. This act of writing out, the necessity of release through discourse, is operative in Beckett in passages that confront autobiographical material within fictional investments. Thus Dream represents a series of ‘surrogate goodbyes’ (‘Da tagte es’; SP, 31) and can be aligned with the project announced in The Calmative: ‘I’ll try and tell myself another story, to try and calm myself’ (ECEF, 19). And the therapeutic value of writing is underlined by Beckett’s statement that he composed Watt to ‘get away from war and occupation’ (qtd. in Fletcher 1967, 58). Referring to the book as an exercise to ‘keep [his] hand in’ (qtd. in Harvey 1970, 381), Watt’s urge to encompass an irrational universe in exhaustive details closely relates to Beckett’s attempts in the German diaries (and other personal, artistic notebooks of the thirties) to counteract threatening disorientation through an obsession with order. Expressive of an intense desire to accumulate knowledge, this energy of organisation manifests itself most strikingly in the endless lists of painters in the diaries, with biographical details meticulously recorded. Beckett himself felt this energy to be misguided; in a diary entry describing an evening spent with the art historian Will Grohmann, Beckett expressed his envy of the ‘beautifully applied energy of these people’ (GD, 2 February 1937). He contrasts Grohmann’s ‘exactness of documentation’ and ‘authenticity of vocation’ with the ‘little trouble I give myself, this absurd diary with its lists of pictures, serves no purpose, is only the act of an obsessional neurotic’. This dismissive evaluation of the diary is further evident from the comment ‘this mode begins to be not only wearisome but flagrantly futile’ (GD, 6 January 1937). In his Whoroscope notebook he recorded an apt word while in Germany: ‘Detailkrankheit [detail-illness]’ (35r). Yet the chronological attention to the detailed mechanics of the day reveals a drive to control the living experience. As Christine Downing and Paul Ricoeur have argued, there is a correlation between the temporal structure of narrative (particularly in the autobiographical text) and the


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inscribed concept of the self, which would suggest that in the case of the German diaries a structured investment was favoured over an associative one.27 Kafka illustrates this interrelatedness between self and writing. Like a shipwreck victim adrift in a sea of confusion, Kafka clings to his diary as if his existence depended on it: ‘Ich werde das Tagebuch nicht mehr verlassen. Hier muss ich mich festhalten, denn nur hier kann ich es [I will no longer abandon the diary. It is here I must cling onto, as it is only here that I can]’ (entry for 16 December 1910; 1983, 22). Indeed, this kind of existential need to write has also been expressed by Beckett: ‘Writing was for me that last ditch – that or leave’ (SB to Kay Boyle, 21 August 1971). Beckett’s feelings of ‘obligation’ to have to write the diary – ‘I have to flog myself to this’ – is closer to Kafka than, for example, to Gide (GD, 5 December 1936). Interestingly, in referring to Kafka’s fiction, Beckett stated his amazement that ‘the form is not shaken by the experience it conveys’ (SB to Ruby Cohn, 17 January 1962). But it was precisely such a stable form that Beckett himself sought in his diary to weather a period in his life marked by uneasy shifts of experience. Kafka’s great achievement, which was also the source of his turmoil, was to go a long way in eradicating the border between self and text. Beckett’s own struggle with this line of demarcation is at the root of his early work, disclosed by the shifting impulses to conceal and reveal. Like Beckett, Kafka frequently attests to states of anxiety, with attendant hypochondriac and psychosomatic pressures, that necessitate writing; he thus records ‘a great urge to write my utterly fearful state out of me, and just as it comes out of the depth to inscribe it into the depth of the paper. . . . This is not an artistic urge’ (entry for December 1911; 1983, 136). At the same time as recognising the therapeutic effect of writing, both Kafka and Beckett share a distrust of the notion that utterances equal clarifications or even solutions. Thus Beckett’s German diaries elicit an awareness that the self is liable to displace or, worse, falsify emotional reality. Rather than dredging up some grand confessional from his soul or attempt any kind of interpretative evaluation, Beckett tends to sum up his general psychological state of the day in a simple sentence. Thus on the 11 February 1937 we read the sober evaluation: ‘Blind dazed painless mood all day’.28 Kafka similarly distrusted the belief that the inner and outer incoherence could be clarified: Hatred toward active self-observation. Explanations of the soul, such as: Yesterday I was like this, because of that, today I am like this, and because of that. It is not true, not because of this nor because of that and thus also not like this or like that. (1983, 248)

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On the whole, scholars have hesitated in setting Beckett’s project alongside Kafka’s, partly because it is difficult to assess to what extent Beckett was familiar with Kafka’s work. Indeed, where Beckett’s reading of Kafka’s fiction and his diary after 1945 can be documented, there is no evidence that he did such reading during the 1930s. To my mind, the only possible contact could have occurred in the pages of transition, which contained work by both authors. Its editor, Eugene Jolas, was an admirer of Kafka, and transition 11 (1928) carries the first English translation of a Kafka text, ‘Das Urteil’ (translated as ‘The Sentence’). Further translations from Kafka’s work appeared in transition, and it is likely that Beckett would have read at least some of these texts, particularly those appearing in issues that carried his own pieces. Thus three short Kafka stories from Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer were published alongside Beckett’s ‘Sedendo et Quisciendo’[sic] in transition 21 (1932), and Kafka’s Metamorphosis was printed in three instalments in issues 25–7, in the last of which Beckett’s review of Denis Devlin’s poetry appeared. Whatever the level of Beckett’s exposure to Kafka’s writing, the two share, as we have noted, a similar scepticism towards facile systemisation of experience and the possibility of Seelendeutungen [explanations of the soul]. The lack of certainty resulting from this scepticism produces a quietist tendency in both, which can only draw from an ‘unentrinnbare Verpflichtung zur Selbstbeobachtung [inescapable obligation towards self-observation]’ (entry for November 1921, Kafka 1983, 402), the same ‘self-awareness’ Beckett posited as an artistic necessity in his 1934 essay on ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (Dis, 71). As Kafka further explains in several letters to Felice Bauer (to whom he was twice engaged): ‘My relationship to writing and my relationship to people is unchangeable. . . . What I need for my writing is seclusion, not “like a hermit”, that would not be enough, but like a dead person’.29 Beckett in 1936 was still a step away from this extreme, but he evinces a growing acceptance that the artist must necessarily lead a solitary existence. On a personal level, as illustrated by a diary entry made in Berlin in 1936, Beckett emphasised ‘[h]ow I ADORE solitude’ (GD, 31 December 1936) and commented on ‘the absurd beauty of being alone’ (GD, 6 November 1936), explaining to his new acquaintance Günter Albrecht that since his departure from Hamburg he had felt lonely, but ‘auf eine so freundliche Weise, dass es mir nicht einmal eingefallen ist, nach dem zu suchen, was man “Anschluss” nennt [in such a friendly way that it has not even occurred to me to seek what one calls “connection” ’.30


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Beckett’s Quietism It was the very ‘isolationism’ inherent in his wilful seclusion in Berlin which Beckett, in a highly revealing letter to MacGreevy dated 10 March 1935, had posited as part of the problem that led him to psychotherapy. Responding to MacGreevy’s suggestion, no doubt well intended, to turn to Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ for guidance, Beckett stated that this was one of the very texts that he had ‘twisted . . . into a programme of self-sufficiency’: An abject self-referring quietism indeed . . . but the only kind that I, who seem never to have had the least faculty or disposition for the supernatural, could elicit from the text, and then only by means of a substitution of terms very different from the one you propose. I mean that I replaced the plenitude that he calls ‘God’, not by ‘goodness’, but by a pleroma only to be sought among my own feathers or entrails.31 Rejecting the primary transcendental elemental of Kempis’s ethics, Beckett could not understand how the secondary factors in the Imitation, ‘goodness & disinterestedness’ could remove the ‘sweats & shudders & panics & rages & rigors & heart burstings’.32 Beckett proceeds to explain that the initial ‘ “specific fear & complaint” was the least important symptom of a diseased condition’ that could be traced to his ‘pre-history, a bubble on the puddle’, whereby ‘the fatuous torments which I had treasured as denoting the superior man were all part of the same pathology’: For years I was unhappy, consciously & deliberately ever since I left school & went into T.C.D., so that I isolated myself more & more, undertook less & less & lent myself to a crescendo – of disparagement of others & myself. But in all that there was nothing that struck me as morbid. The misery & solitude & apathy & the sneers were the elements of an index of superiority & guaranteed the feeling of arrogant ‘otherness’. Bion’s psychotherapy seemingly focused on this ‘index of superiority’, noticeable in Beckett’s acrimonious comments on fellow (usually Irish) artists, as a problem which needed addressing. During his first return to Dublin after starting treatment, Beckett was thus ‘trying hard to find people nice & have them find me so, with more success than formerly’ (SB to TM, 18 August 1934). Beckett carried his preoccupation at this time into his

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reading of Rousseau. Having earlier been alert to ‘the madness & the distortion’ in the Reveries of a Solitary Walker (SB to TM, 5 December 1932), Beckett in September 1934 declared Rousseau an ‘authentically tragic figure’ (SB to TM, undated [16 September 1934]). Although he was a ‘champion of the right to be alone’, Beckett in this letter locates Rousseau’s unhappiness not only in society’s denial of that right, but also in his ‘infantile aspect, afraid of the dark, of his constitution’. Thus Rousseau ‘would always fall for a show of tenderness’, a fact Beckett adduces from the admission in the Reveries that ‘Mon plus grand malheur fut toujours de ne pouvoir résister aux caresses [My greatest misfortune has always been my inability to resist caresses]’ (SB to TM, undated [16 September 1934]). That this tension between solitude and human warmth had a personal application for Beckett can be exemplified by his use of Rousseau’s terminology in a 1932 letter to MacGreevy: ‘Father real. Mother comico-real. My need for anaesthetic of caress comico-real’ (SB to TM, 30 August 1932). The conscious struggle to integrate into society in a more amenable fashion is very evident during his trip to Germany. A surprising ingredient of the German diaries lies in Beckett’s extreme sociability over long stretches of time, even if it was frequently punctuated by retreats into solitude. In this heightened situation of exile and marginality, Beckett evaluates individuals and groups of people in relation to his own outlook. Although the result is mostly negative, Beckett does at times manage to find society that is congenial to him. Following an evening with the art historian Will Grohmann and his wife, he states: ‘Feel happy with these kind of people’ (GD, 11 February 1937). Conversely, however, a letter written by Günter Albrecht to Axel Kaun offers a glimpse of how Beckett appeared to other people during his time in Germany: Er [Beckett] ist ein Mensch, der überhaupt nur noch die Atmosphäre der Städte, Bilder & Plastiken, allenfalls noch einige historische & literarische Kuriositäten geniesst, betrachtet und bespöttelt. Dadurch kommt es, dass er sehr viel von dem, was anderen wichtig & lieb erscheint hat absterben lassen & sich überall & nirgends zu Hause findet. Darüber hinaus aber ist er sehr scharfsichtig, objektiv & überhaupt recht klug und intelligent. [He (Beckett) is a man who only enjoys, observes and scoffs at the atmosphere of towns, paintings and sculptures, and perhaps a few historical and literary curiosities. As a result he has let many things that are important and dear to others become numb within himself, and finds himself at home everywhere and nowhere. Beyond this however he is very perceptive, objective and generally very clever and intelligent].33


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Yet even as he managed to dampen the ‘scoffing’ part of his character, Beckett did not renege upon his fundamental belief, as stated in a discussion of Hebbel’s Gyges und sein Ring, in ‘the universal antithesis between the individual & collective’ (GD, 12 January 1937). To state it in the terms of his letter discussing Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, Beckett decided that isolationism, even if it meant accepting the related physical symptoms, was better than the ‘disinterestedness’ that any ‘cure’ entailed. Beckett’s belief that the solitary state is the irrevocable fate of human beings, particularly pronounced in the artist, was not easily shaken. ‘And art is the apotheosis of solitude’, Proust postulates (64). Indeed, the essay on Proust, written in 1930, shows Beckett first ‘cultivating’ the trope of the solitary artist, whereby his own sense of ‘wilful seclusion’ conveniently corresponded to the image of Proust preferring the quiet of his room to the bustle of the street (SB to TM, 25 January 1931). In an accentuation of the introspective quality of the artistic experience, Beckett located the ‘only possible spiritual development . . . in the sense of depth’: ‘The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent’ (PTD, 64–5). This concern with depth suggests the psychoanalytical thrust into the unconscious, with the risk that what may be hidden there may well prove to be distressing. There is an exchange between Arsene and the narrator(s), in the second notebook of Watt, in which satire uneasily coexists with an authentic emotion encapsulated in a reference to Greystones, where Beckett’s father was buried: ‘Never mind that now’ cried Arsene. ‘Dig! Delve! Deeper! Deeper! The Cambrian! The uterine! The pre-uterine!’ ‘The pre-uterine’ we said. ‘No. That reminds us of the rocks at Greystones.’34 Moreover, suffering is identified in Proust as ‘the main condition of the artistic experience (28), and the entire work is founded upon a matrix of pessimism filtered through Schopenhauer. Beckett was highly conscious of where he was taking Proust. Even before he had started writing the essay (late August 1930), an entry dated 15 July 1930 in George Reavey’s diary, presumably made after the two friends had met, illustrates this: ‘Sam. Beckett – Proust & Pessimism’.35 It was around this time that Beckett first read Schopenhauer: An intellectual justification of unhappiness – the greatest that has ever been attempted – is worth the examination of one who is interested in

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Leopardi and Proust rather than in Carducci and Barrès. (SB to TM, undated [25? July 1930]) Attentive to ‘the darkest passages in Schopenhauer’ (Dream, 62), Beckett introduced this aesthetic of unhappiness into Proust. If the book represented ‘a distorted steamrolled equivalent of some aspect of confusion of aspects of myself ’ (SB to TM, 11 March 1931; my emphasis), then his later admission that he had possibly ‘overstated Proust’s pessimism’ also implies that he invested the essay with his own negativity (Pilling 1976, 24). And having defined his interest in Leopardi by way of Schopenhauer’s ‘unhappiness’, the Italian artisan de ses malheurs was engaged to further enrich the essay’s pessimistic flavour.36 The importance of Leopardi to early Beckett is exemplified by his attachment to the poem ‘A se stesso’ (‘To Himself’). A single unlined sheet of paper survives on which Beckett had copied out the poem (he also cites it in Dream, 62), which includes lines that expressed feelings close to Beckett’s temperament: Omai disprezza Te, la natura, il brutto Poter che, nascoso, a commun danno impera, E l’infinita vanità del tutto. [Now despise Yourself, nature, the sinister Power that, secretly, commands our common ruin, And the infinite vanity of everything]. (TCD MS10971/9) However, it is Schopenhauer who has the last word in an essay in which he is omnipresent: ‘defunctus’.37 Referring to the ‘life of the body on earth as a pensum’, this single word represents the culmination of all that goes before, and, more importantly, acts as an aesthetic marker from which much of Beckett’s work unravels (PTD, 93). Nearly 70 years later, in 1979, Beckett returned to this sentence from ‘dear Arthur’ (TCD 10967, 252v) and noted it in his Sottisier notebook: Das Leben ist ein Pensum zum Abarbeiten: in diesem Sinne ist defunctus ein schöner Ausdruck [Life is a pensum to be worked off: in this sense defunctus is a fine expression]. (UoR MS2901, 13r)38 This concept of life as something to be endured, compounded by Schopenhauer’s renunciation of the will, leads Beckett to adopt a kind of a quietist aesthetic.39


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By 1934, Beckett was foregrounding quietist attitudes in his critical writing, discussing Proust’s ‘originality’ as arising out of the ‘conflict between intervention and quietism’ in ‘Proust in Pieces’, and entitling his review of MacGreevy’s poems ‘Humanistic Quietism’ (Dis, 68).40 The latter piece appears to derive much of its terminology and the images of light and clarity from Beckett’s reading of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks in the spring of 1934: There’s a good passage in Buddenbrooks where Mann speaks of happiness, success etc., as analogous with light from a star, its foyer abolished when it most bright, & that brightness its own knell. So please God it is with unhappiness, if it can be bright, & with the bells rung in the distant heart. . . . It’s a basis for quietism anyhow, if basis be needed. (SB to A. J. Leventhal, 7 May 1934) ‘Basis’ perhaps not, but rather an elaboration. Possibly inspired by his reading of the Imitation of Christ in the spring of 1935, Beckett proposed to introduce quietism into the writing of Murphy, as the outline to the work in the Whoroscope notebook suggests.41 In order to pursue this angle as well as to get Murphy moving again after a period of stagnation, Beckett planned in January 1936 to go to TCD ‘in search of Geulincx’ (SB to TM, 9 January [1936], misdated 1935). Although admitting that ‘my Geulincx could only be a literary fantasia’, Beckett made a considerable effort to penetrate the philosopher’s world, taking notes from the Latin original of the Ethica.42 Beckett’s transcriptions from Geulincx’s Ethica focused on the fourth of the Four Cardinal Virtues discussed, Humilitas: The divisions of Humility are twofold: Inspection of Oneself, and Contempt of Oneself. As to the former, it is nothing other than the celebrated saying of the Ancients, know thyself. (TCD MS10971/6, 7v)43 The combination of the inspectio sui and the despectio sui produces Geulincx’s fundamental ethical axiom, which Beckett had already mentioned in his philosophy notes: ‘Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis [Where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing]’ (TCD MS10967, 189v). Beckett appears to have connected his reading of Geulincx with Thomas à Kempis, signing off a letter to Arland Ussher, immediately after discussing Geulincx, with ‘Humiliter, Simpliciter, Fideliter [meekly, simply, truly]’ taken from The Imitation of Christ.44 Indeed, as Chris Ackerley has shown, in Beckett’s mind the two writers ‘were reconciled in their renunciation of the will and affirmation of humility’ (Ackerley 2000, 87).45 From the perspective

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granted by Beckett’s previous reading of Schopenhauer, it is not difficult to understand his attraction to the quietism these texts transmitted.46 Thus, for example, Thomas à Kempis’s ‘He who knows the secret of enduring will enjoy the greatest peace’ (emphasised by being placed in a box in the Dream notebook, item 587) glossed Schopenhauer’s ‘pensum’. But having no ‘disposition for the supernatural’, as he told MacGreevy in his discussion of The Imitation, Beckett removed the origin of the self-effacement, the ‘contempt for self’, as deriving from the human worthlessness before God, in order to arrive at the ‘self-referring quietism’. This removal of the transcendental application of the quietist position did nothing to diminish the value of the Imitation or the ‘guignol world’ of the Ethica, which nevertheless offered an aesthetic and an ethic by which to exist within a meaningless universe.47 Geulincx’s axiom also provided Beckett with one of the two poles between which Murphy had to navigate: I suddenly see that Murphy is break down between his: Ubu nihil vales ibi nihil velis (position) [where you are worth nothing, you will wish for nothing] & Malraux’s Il est difficile à celui qui vit hors du monde de ne pas rechercher les siens (negation). [It is difficult for someone who lives outside the world not to seek out his own]. (SB to TM, 16 January 1936)48 To set up the conflict between the two positions, Beckett had to abridge Malraux’s sentence, which in the English translation reads ‘Solitude, too, after the event – though it is hard for one living outside the world of men not to seek out his fellows’ (Malraux 1961, 219–20). The sentiment is that of Chen, a political activist, who had previously similarly remarked that solitude was necessary before a political act. Unsurprisingly, Beckett removes the references to the committed man, thus obscuring a complexity that pertains to his own thinking at both this and a later time. For Beckett, the artist is as committed as the political activist, although the investment of energy is directed inwards rather than outwards. Yet abridging Malraux’s sentence enabled Beckett to express more accurately his own struggle, conducted partially through psychoanalysis, with the acquisition of a selfeffacing, solitary and humble life. In the Dream notebook he emphasised a second sentence from The Imitation, ‘To desire no comfort from any creature is a sign of great purity’ (DN, item 588), yet felt his apartness rather painfully at times while in Germany: ‘I am utterly alone (no group even of my own kind)’ (GD, 2 February 1937).


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Dereliction, Wastes and Words The German diaries reveal how much Beckett was struggling to ‘endure’ life, feeling no ‘desire except the old velleity towards painless release from the fragile habit of getting up, dressing, moving, eating, undressing, going to bed’ (GD, 7 March 1937). Beckett was also failing to keep God out of the equation, and there is a genuine sense of frustration with having to put up with various physical torments. In January 1937, in Berlin, Beckett’s considerable discomfort caused by an anal cyst provokes a scornful response: ‘God’s velleities be done’ (GD, 8 January 1937), and, a day later, ‘God’s whim be done’. This anticipates Moran’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, his ‘pretty quietist Pater’, in Molloy, where God is similarly posited as either absent or not having the best interests of his human subjects at heart: ‘Our Father who art no more in heaven than on earth or in hell, I neither want nor desire that thy name be hallowed, thou knowest best what suits thee’ (175). Yet it was precisely the prayers which largely attracted Beckett to Dr Johnson. Beckett referred MacGreevy to the ‘Prayers & Meditations’ to substantiate his view of the ‘spiritually self conscious’ and ‘tragic’ Johnson, ‘completely at sea in [his] solitude’ and disclosing a ‘need to suffer or necessity of suffering’ (SB to TM, 4 August 1937). Beckett invested much emotional and artistic energy into writing (and not writing) the biographical play, Human Wishes, about Johnson between 1937 and 1940 (see Chapter 7). Samuel Johnson represented a further link in Beckett’s melancholy and quietist chain of references, illustrated by Mrs Thrale’s sketch of the writer: ‘ “Where there is nothing to be done”, said Johnson, “something must be endured” ’ (qtd. in Birkbeck Hill, 1897, I, 210). Sharing a love for Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Beckett seems to have identified with Johnson on several levels, in particular with the sincerity and content of Johnson’s periodic ‘confessions’.49 On Easter Day, 1776, Johnson thus notes: My reigning sin, to which perhaps many others are appendant, is waste of time, and general sluggishness, to which I was always inclined, and in part of my life have been almost compelled by morbid melancholy and disturbance of mind. (qtd. in Birkbeck Hill, 1897, I, 74) This is not far removed from Beckett’s own emotional distress while in Germany, where the ‘Not a thought, not an emotion except the old clenched

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feeling of hate, suspicion & worthlessness & hideousness’ (GD, 7 March 1937) leads to an extreme outpouring of mental pain: Apathetic & melancholy. Nothing now & nothing ahead but age & ugliness & nothing past but grief & remorse. (GD, 13 March 1937) This period in Beckett’s life marks his growing acceptance of the psychological tensions and physical disorders governing his condition. As this chapter has shown, this is traceable in his adoption of a secular quietism as well as his preference of ‘incapacitation’ over an ‘automatism’ induced by psychoanalysis. The point is succinctly expressed in the diaries, in a passage reminiscent of a diary entry in Kafka revealing how the diary represents ‘the organisation of such a life’: Perhaps I am this equal to the relatively trifling act of organisation that is all that is needed to turn this dereliction, profoundly felt, into literature. Spes unica [Only hope]. (GD, 2 February 1937) The sentence amounts to a kind of statement of poetics, one moreover that incorporates Beckett’s thinking up to this point. It is hardly coincidental that Beckett’s use of ‘dereliction’ here echoes the ‘Great Dereliction’ in Dream, where it refers to Dean Inge’s description of St. Theresa’s abandonment by God (6 and 185).50 In the long March 1935 letter to MacGreevy discussing Thomas à Kempis, Beckett already referred to this ‘dereliction’ when remarking that his condition did not allow ‘any philosophical or ethical or Christlike imitative pentimenti’: If the heart still bubbles it is because the puddle has not been drained, and the fact of its bubbling more fiercely than ever is perhaps open to receive consolation from the waste that splutters most when the bath is nearly empty. (SB to TM, 10 March 1935) Beckett’s terminology derives partly from his reading of psychoanalytic literature, and his notes from Jones’s Treatment of Neuroses, for example, refer to the notion of ‘draining’ neurotic material (TCD MS10971/8, 11r).51 Yet there is also an echo of the theory, put forth by Timothie Bright in A Treatise of Melancholy (1586), which describes ‘a darknes & clouds of melancholie vapours rising from that pudle of the splene’ (qtd. in Radden 2000, 122). Beckett’s waste is thus refracted, variously, into a description of a psychological condition and a metaphor for the created texts. Accordingly,


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the ‘literary products’ created out of a sense of dereliction are persistently equated with human waste and emissions by Beckett; he thus refers to ‘my Proust turd’ or promises Reavey to ‘excavate for a poem for you one of these dies diarrhoeae’.52 Although Beckett wondered in 1932 whether ‘a garden is more frightening than a waste’, he was driven to psychoanalysis in an effort to clear up his problems (SB to TM, 18 October [1932]). As he broke the analysis off late in 1935, he did so with an awareness similar to the one expressed by Rilke: ‘Die Psychoanalyse ist eine zu gründliche Hilfe für mich, sie hilft ein für allemal, sie räumt auf, und mich aufgeräumt zu finden eines Tages, wäre vielleicht noch aussichtsloser als die Unordnung [Psychoanalysis is too thorough a help for me, it helps once and for all, it clears out, and to find myself cleared out one day would perhaps be even more hopeless than the disorder]’.53 Following his return to Dublin in 1936, Beckett felt that ‘the only plane on which I feel my defeat not proven is the literary waste’ (SB to TM, 16 January [1936]).

Chapter 4


As discussed in the first chapter, Beckett’s attraction to Germany was rooted in an intricate assemblage of personal and aesthetic experiences, originating in his relationship with Peggy Sinclair and their subsequent separation. The earliest written manifestation of what for brevity could be termed the German ‘associative complex’ occurs with Beckett’s appropriation of Schopenhauer’s pessimism in the 1931 essay Proust. It marks the beginning of a consistent use of German as both language and trope. An examination of Beckett’s Auseinandersetzung [engagement] with German culture in the thirties reveals that he found in its literature, philosophy and music a sombre and tragic quality reflecting, yet also helping to shape, his own worldview. In Dream, Belacqua had also been sensitive to the German language as ‘[s]craps of German played in his mind in the silence that ensued; grand, old, plastic words’ (Dream, 191). Indeed, the material evidence of Beckett’s reading of German literature in his notebooks and correspondence reveals that the ‘scraps of German’ continuing to surface in his work issue from an extensive scribal activity only recently recognised by scholars. Moreover, in the ‘silence that ensued’ between acts of writing, Beckett’s reading of German literature proved to be a creative stimulus as well as an influence on his developing poetics. Despite the frequent use of German vocabulary in his correspondence and the references in Dream to Hölderlin (139), Grillparzer (60) and Goethe (59 and 80), there is no evidence that Beckett’s knowledge of German literature at this point was anything but sketchy. Indeed, with the possible exception of his reading of unidentified texts in the winter of 1932, it seems as if Beckett prior to 1934 had read few German books in the original.1 The probable source of the German fragments incorporated in the early poems and prose is Schubert’s Lieder, with which Beckett was familiar from an early date (Knowlson 1996, 98).2 Thus the majority (but, to be sure, not all) of Beckett’s German references are taken from texts set to music by Schubert. It is significant that Goethe’s appearance in the


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postwar story, First Love, is by way of a song: ‘I did not know the song, I had never heard it before and shall never hear it again. It had something to do with lemon trees, or orange trees, I forget’ (ECEF, 72). The song that the prostitute Lulu (or Anna) sings for the narrator is Mignon’s Song from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, one of Schubert’s most well-known settings.3 It is indicative of Beckett’s approach to German literature through music. Indeed, Beckett’s more intense and focused study of German literature and language only began in earnest in the early months of 1934 following another painful separation, the death of his father in June 1933, and culminated during his tour of Germany from September 1936 to March 1937. As the list of ‘books sent home’ in the Whoroscope notebook indicates, Beckett had already bought and partly read over 20 books in German by December 1936, just two months into his trip.4

German Literary Histories Two notebooks (UoR MS5002 and MS5006) from early 1934, when he was staying at Paulton’s Square in London, show Beckett assiduously improving his German vocabulary and writing skills. In an essay written in order to practise recently acquired words, the programme of study is clearly set out: ‘Aber die Lektüre deutscher Bücher, scheint von allen möglichen Methoden die beste zu sein, um einen reichen Wortschatz zu erlangen [But the reading of German books seems to be the best of all possible methods to acquire a rich vocabulary]’ (UoR MS5002, 6r). The first step towards accomplishing this task was to prepare the ground by reading and taking exhaustive handwritten notes from the first edition of J. G. Robertson’s A History of German Literature, published in 1902.5 The choice of Robertson’s History reflects both Beckett’s systematic procedure (already evident in his reading of an English literary history) and his general tendency to rely on the Trinity College Dublin syllabus to guide him in his studies. Although he had not taken German as an undergraduate, Beckett must have consulted his Dublin University Calendar, which lists Robertson’s History as the standard introductory work. Beckett’s notes on German literary history, filling the first 71 pages in a notebook held at Trinity College Dublin as MS10971/1, were taken purely with the acquisition of knowledge in mind. Beckett covered all of Robertson’s historical survey with the exception of the opening section on the ‘Old High German Period’, and his notes replicate Robertson’s structural devices such as the table of contents, subdivision headings and keywords. Summarising

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the main developments, Beckett’s notes meticulously record the life dates, salient biographical features and major works (at times with bibliographic reference) of a large portion of authors mentioned in Robertson’s book. Beckett generally favoured introductory books which were factual rather than interpretative and which paid attention to the biographical and social conditions of individual writers, as his comments on various literary histories while in Germany in 1936 demonstrate. He thus rejected Wilhelm Scherer’s comprehensive Geschichte der deutschen Literatur to be ‘alas deficient in dates’ (GD, 25 October 1936), but took note of Werner Mahrholz’s Deutsche Literatur der Gegenwart, which aroused his interest in that it was ‘composed 1932 (i.e. before Machtuebernahme = 1933), knapp & von der Höhe [brief and from a distance]’, elements that in Beckett’s mind were favourable indicators of quality. He later tried to obtain this book but was told that it ‘was not to be had’, one of many instances of Nazi censorship (GD, 2 November 1936). Beckett clarified his position regarding the kind of book he was after when rejecting Friedrich Stieve’s Abriss der deutschen Geschichte von 1792–1935 in a conversation with Axel Kaun: ‘What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and deaths, because that is all I can know’ (GD, 15 January 1937). This diary entry also discloses Beckett’s interest in the biographical and social circumstances within which the writer moves: ‘So I want the old fashioned history book of reference, not the fashionable monde romancé that explains copious[ly] why e.g. Luther was inevitable without telling me anything about Luther, where he went next, what he lived on, what he died of, etc.’. Both Robertson’s History and Karl Heinemann’s Die deutsche Dichtung (1910), which he bought in Germany (GD, 22 October 1936), fulfilled these vital criteria, frequently presenting the personal pressures and concerns underlying the creative process.6 Although there are no personal observations in Beckett’s notes from Robertson’s History, the passages transcribed and the measure of detail given to individual authors and works provide an insight into Beckett’s sensitivity to certain themes and authors at this time. The two periods of German literature eliciting special interest from Beckett are the Middle High German period (1050–1350 for Robertson) and the classical period around Goethe. However, there is a decreasing attention to detail observable in the notes as Beckett progressed in his reading of Robertson. During the first few pages Beckett went as far as to complement Robertson by turning to further secondary material, incorporating, for example, passages from the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on the Nibelungenlied.


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Beckett’s reading of Robertson’s book is difficult to date with precision, yet it seems likely that he read it in the spring of 1934, as various terms and quotes from Robertson find their way into Beckett’s own writing from this time onwards.7 Both the handwritten nature of the notes and the fact that he renewed his reader’s ticket in February 1934 suggest that he read the book in the British Library in London.8 This dating is corroborated by the poem ‘Da tagte es’, which is alluded to in a letter to Leventhal in May 1934.9 The poem is annotated in Beckett’s copy of Echo’s Bones at the Harry Ransom Center with ‘Walther von der Vogelweide?’. It is conceivable that Beckett composed the poem around the same time as he was reading Robertson’s History, based as it is on Walther von der Vogelweide’s poem ‘Nemt, frowe disen kranz’, and specifically the lines ‘dô taget ez und muose ich wachen [it was dawn and I had to wake]’. Although not extant in his notebook, Beckett would have come across this poem in Robertson, who quotes the very passage Beckett uses (125).10 Indeed, considering the absence of transcription, he may not specifically have had Vogelweide in mind, but rather the generic theme of the inevitability of loss in the Tagelieder. His notes from Robertson, for example, also refer to Heinrich von Morungen as the writer of a ‘famous Tagelied with each verse closing: da tagte es’ (TCD MS10971/1, 7v.). Reflecting his use of the troubadour tradition of Provençal literature in other poems of Echo’s Bones, the medieval Minnesänger proved an enabling instance as Beckett formulated his own feelings of separation, now deepened by his father’s death.11 When he sent ‘Da tagte es’ to Leventhal on 7 August 1935, Beckett noted its ‘indiscriminate application to death-bed and whoral [foras?]’. Beckett’s transcriptions from those literary examples given by Robertson tend to relate to the themes of death, melancholy and separation, as, for example, in a passage from the Nibelungenlied taken from the Encyclopaedia Britannica: In sorrow now was ended the King’s high holiday As ever joy in sorrow ends, & must end always (TCD MS10971/1, 3v) Beckett also transcribed the melancholy and brooding lines of Walther von der Vogelweide’s Spruch opening ‘Ich saz ûf eine Steine’, which would later variously resurface in his texts: Ich saz ûf eine Steine und dahte bein mit beine;

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dar ûf sast’ ich den ellenbogen; ich hete in mîne hant gesmogen daz kinne und ein mîn Wange [I sat upon a stone, One leg across the other thrown, One hand I propped my elbow in, And in the other hand my chin And half my cheek was hidden]. (TCD MS10971/1, 8r)12 Beckett was also able to draw on his freshly gained knowledge of German literary history in the critical reviews he wrote during 1934. In accordance with his usual practice of employing his most recent reading in his writing, Beckett drew on Robertson in book reviews even when they were not explicitly concerned with German literature. Thus his introduction to Middle High German literature enabled him to invoke the ‘Meistergesang’ in his 1934 discussion of MacGreevy’s poems, entitled ‘Humanistic Quietism’ (Dis, 68). The pedantry and socially engaging singing contests evoked by the Meistergesang in this essay is contrasted with MacGreevy’s essentially solitary act of quietist poetry that turns ‘self-absorption into light’ (69). German literature is also harnessed in Beckett’s attack in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (The Bookman, August 1934) on the ‘Victorian Gael’, where Sir Samuel Ferguson and Standish O’Grady are dismissed as an ‘Irish Romantic Arnim-Brentano combination’, with a reference to Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806–1808) compounding the ‘Ossianic’ mixture (70 and 77). Beckett’s reading of Robertson further served to substantiate his dismissal of Eduard Mörike’s Mozart on the Way to Prague in a review published in March 1934 in the Spectator. With notes on the Swabian romantic poets of the nineteenth century to hand, Beckett contrived to set Mörike’s book not only in the context of his other works, but also in relationship with his ‘Minerva, Uhland’ (Dis, 61).13 Whereas a working knowledge of Mörike’s could be feigned with the help of Robertson, Beckett must have read Uhland at an earlier date. In the short story ‘Echo’s Bones’ (completed November 1933), as Belacqua was ‘abroad at this hour of the lowest vitality’, ‘portions of a poem by Uhland came into his mind’ (EB, 4). Ludwig Uhland partly comes to Belacqua’s mind because he is hardly familiar to English readers, but once again it is possible that Beckett is thinking of the poem ‘Frühlingsglaube’, made famous by Schubert’s setting. Similar to the Tagelieds, Uhland’s poem evokes an ambiguous response to the necessity


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of regeneration: ‘Nun muss sich alles, alles wenden [Now everything must change, must change]’.

Beckett and Goethe It is plausible to suggest that Beckett first ‘read’ Goethe in Schubert’s settings, although he would have needed little prompting to get to know the most important author of German literature through other sources. Beckett’s engagement with Goethe in the 1930s was profound; in all of Beckett’s notebooks of the thirties, no literary writer, German or otherwise, is accorded as much space. Beckett must already have dipped into – rather than, as later, systematically read – Goethe’s poetry and prose, from which allusions to, and quotes from, appear in the early work. Reference to Goethe first appears in a 29 May 1931 letter to MacGreevy, in the very sentence following Beckett’s mention of Dream as ‘the German comedy’. In this letter Beckett confessed that he only knew ‘a few shocking lines here & there’. He went on to illustrate this negative judgement with a quotation from Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther: Was ich weiss kann jeder wissen, mein Herz hab’ ich allein. !! [What I know everybody can know, my heart is mine alone.]14 Beckett’s dismissal of the ‘intoxicated dentist’ Goethe at this early stage is in keeping with the mocking tone voiced through the use of an excessively sentimental strand of German romanticism in Dream.15 In his letter to MacGreevy, Beckett had thus criticised the use of that ‘blabby word’ Herz in the lines from Werther. This criticism is incorporated in Smerry’s love letter to Belacqua in form of a quote from Faust, taken from Gretchen’s song at the spinning-wheel: ‘Mein Ruh ist hin mein Herz ist schwer ich finde Sie nimmer und nimmer mehr [My peace is fled, / My heart is sore; / I shall find it never, / Ah! nevermore.]’ (Dream, 59; Goethe 1926, 116).16 Yet the impulse governing Beckett’s reading of Goethe is more complex than this simple furnishing of satirical material suggests. It seems that already at this early point Beckett began to find, particularly in Goethe’s poetry, a further reflection of a particular mood. As so often in Beckett’s

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early work, the fragmentary allusions or quotations making their way into his work stand as a shorthand for the entire grid of contextual meaning from which the piece of text is taken. This is the case with Dream’s incorporation of Goethe’s ‘Wandrers Nachtlied II’: Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh, In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch. [Now stillness covers All the hill-tops; In all the tree-tops Hardly a breath stirs. The birds in the forest Have finished their song. Wait: you too shall rest Before long.] (Goethe 1992, 236; 1999, 35) Coming across this poem at a time when the hope of attaining rest seemed anything but attainable, Beckett’s attraction to the poem derives from its different use of the word ‘Ruh’ than in the line from Faust. In ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’, the invoked peace is at once metaphysical and solitary, the promise of rest, in sleep or death, quietly anticipated. Yet in keeping with Dream’s dismissive and at times misogynistic tone, Beckett amended the sixth line of the poem to ‘the Bitchlein . . . schweigen niemals im Wald [the little bitches . . . are never silent in the forest]’ (Dream, 80).17 Further references to the line are woven into the already densely packed fabric of Dream, yet signposted as it were by reference to German equivalents, as in the oblique passage where Belacqua leads ‘a fairly small fleshy lipped maiden I might have said Jungfrau [virgin] into the wood I might have said Wald [wood]’ (72). When Beckett used the same line, imaginatively recast, some years later in his 1937 letter to Kaun, it was to register a linguistic unsettledness: ‘Denn im Walde der Symbole, die keine sind, schweigen die Vöglein der Deutung, die keine ist, nie [For in the forest of symbols, which aren’t any, the little birds of interpretation, which isn’t any, are never silent]’ (Dis, 53; trans. 172).18


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Beckett’s engagement with Goethe increased during 1934, reaching an apotheosis in the following two years. This intense course of study was anticipated by a brief quotation (‘bist du nicht willig’) from Goethe’s poem ‘Der Erlkönig’ (possibly via Schubert) in the story ‘Echo’s Bones’, written in November 1933 (EB, 24). In 1934, a year that, beyond critical reviews, proved to be rather lean in terms of creative writing, Goethe’s poetry provided Beckett with sparks to ignite his own writing. Around the same time as Walter von der Vogelweide facilitated ‘Da tagte es’, Goethe and Schiller’s Xenien poems served as a model for the short poem ‘Gnome’, first published in the July–September issue of The Dublin Magazine 1934: Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning. (SP, 9) The satirical content of Goethe and Schiller’s Xenien poems (1796), written in distiches and themselves modelled on Martial, loses its sting in Beckett.19 Self-critically it is the ‘squandering / Courage’ that is attacked rather than the institutions that convey the ‘loutishness of learning’. The poem contains a subtle admission that an intertextual writing strategy has wasted much ‘courage’, particularly as erudition fails in making sense of the world. Furthermore, the lack of courage to embrace the Wanderjahre, and by extension the concomitant emotional associations, crops up time and time again in Beckett’s letters to MacGreevy, from his ‘hope for the courage to break away’ in 1931 (SB to TM, 25 January 1931) through to the admission (early in 1936) that ‘my travel-courage is so gone that the collapse is more than likely’ (SB to TM, 16 January [1936]). The poem ‘The Vulture’, probably written early in 1935, further illustrates Beckett’s conflict during these years. Here the ‘prone who must / soon take up their life and walk’ are ‘mocked’ by an artistic hunger that can only be resolved through the digestive act of internalisation (SP, 13). As Beckett’s annotated copy of Echo’s Bones demonstrates, ‘The Vulture’ was inspired by Goethe’s ‘Die Harzreise im Winter’, from which the images of journeying and artistic creation are taken.20 Significantly, both ‘Gnome’ and ‘The Vulture’, which derive their impetus from Goethe, consciously refrain from showing the ‘loutishness of learning’ that encumbers most of the other poems collected in Echo’s Bones, and indeed virtually all of the work before Watt. With Goethe proving to be such a significant influence on his work, in 1935 and 1936 Beckett moved to substantiate what was previously only

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a superficial knowledge of Goethe’s prose texts. Having noted the main stations of Goethe’s life in his reading of Robertson, in early 1935 Beckett turned to reading Dichtung und Wahrheit; Aus meinem Leben. Beckett’s transcriptions from Goethe’s autobiography, contained in the same notebook as the material from Robertson, run to over 40 pages and are only outdone in sheer length by the German notes on Faust. The transcriptions show Beckett’s by-now comfortable use of the German language as he faultlessly alters tenses when summarising or altering quotes. By March 1935 he had read more than half of the 700-odd pages, telling MacGreevy that I find parts of it absorbing, for example the literary picture during his Leipzig phase. The early years in Frankfurt, long description of Crowning of King of Empire etc., are dull. What an awful shit of a Father he had. (SB to TM, 10 March [1935]) Beckett’s notes on Dichtung reflect this judgement, as they carefully trace Goethe’s student years in Leipzig and his growing awareness of the literary scene. Yet the autobiography is essentially the portrait of a young artist, and many of the notes taken from the book concern the exposition of becoming in the interplay of self and world, and the writing practices and the psychological pressures from which Goethe’s work issues. Beckett thus copied out Goethe’s early artistic resolution: Und so begann diejenige Richtung[,] von der ich mein ganzes Leben über nicht abweichen konnte, nämlich dasjenige was mich erfreute oder quälte, oder sonst beschäftigte, in ein Bild, ein Gedicht zu verwandeln und darüber mit mir selbst abzuschliessen, um sowohl meine Begriffe von den äussern Dingen zu berichtigen, als mich im Innern desshalb zu beruhigen. [And thus began that tendency from which I could not deviate my whole life through; namely, the tendency to turn into an image, into a poem, everything that delighted or troubled me, or otherwise occupied me, and to come to some certain understanding with myself upon it, that I might both rectify my conceptions of external things, and set my mind at rest about them]. (TCD MS10971/1, 54v–55r; Goethe 1977, 311–12; Goethe 1891, I, 240) For Goethe, the self-projection governing his impulses towards expression was necessitated by a desire for understanding as well as the therapeutic act of writing. A few lines on from the passage quoted above, Goethe claims


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that all of his works are but ‘Bruchstücke einer grossen Konfession [fragments of a great confession]’, which Dichtung und Wahrheit is to make complete (Goethe 1977, 312). In his conversations with Eckermann, Goethe drew attention to the notion that his works were largely autobiographical in origin: ‘Es ist kein Strich in den Wahlverwandschaften, den ich nicht selbst erlebt habe; aber kein Strich so, wie er erlebt worden [There is not, in the Affinities, a single line that I myself have not experienced, but no line is presented as it was experienced]’ (Robertson, 441).21 Beckett may well have read Die Wahlverwandschaften at some point, as he quoted a line (‘Es wandelt niemand ungestraft unter Palmen [Nobody walks unpunished under palm trees]’) from the book in the 1934 ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ essay (Dis, 76).22 Although Goethe did keep the personal elements out of sight in the Wahlverwandschaften, the book did incorporate autobiographical techniques in the form of fictional letters and diary entries. Goethe’s comments on the manner in which he inscribed his personal experiences in his work would have interested Beckett, who, as we have seen, struggled in Dream and the early poetry to find a form that could both conceal and reveal the autobiographical pressures, more often than not rooted in a sense of separation, governing composition. In a passage Beckett transcribed from Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe explains a similar tendency to overcome his feelings of separation from loved ones (in this case from Friederika Bion) through his writing: Aber zu der Zeit, als der Schmerz über Friederikens Lage mich beängstigte, such[te?] ich, nach meiner alten Art, abermals Hülfe bei der Dichtkunst. Ich setzte die hergebrachte poetische Beichte wieder fort, um durch diese selbstquälerische Bützung [Büssung] einer inneren Absolution würdig zu werden. [At the time when I was pained by my grief at Frederica’s situation, I again, after my old fashion, sought aid from poetry. I again continued the poetical confession which I had commenced, that by this self-tormenting penance I might be worthy of an internal absolution]. (TCD MS10971/1, 60r; Goethe 1977, 571; Goethe 1891, I, 453) Undoubtedly motivated by his own struggle at self-writing, Beckett pursued the biographical nature of Goethe’s writing into the circumstances in which Die Leiden des jungen Werther was written. By his own admission in Dichtung und Wahrheit, Werther enabled Goethe to overcome the despair caused by

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the separation from Charlotte Buff and to cure subsequent suicidal leanings (TCD MS10971/1, 64v–65r). Nevertheless, eschewing intimate revelations within manoeuvres of selfdiscovery or justification, Dichtung und Wahrheit is predominantly aimed at fulfilling the desire expressed by his contemporaries to shed light on the circumstances behind artistic creation. As an entry in Goethe’s diary clarifies, ‘[a]nyone writing confessions is in peril of becoming lamentable’, a sentiment shared by Beckett (qtd. in Weintraub 1978, 345). Thus Goethe’s ‘Wandrers Sturmlied’ is a more intimate depiction of his mood following the separation from Friederike Brion than the recollection included in Dichtung und Wahrheit: ‘Es waren peinliche Tage, deren Erinnerung mir nicht geblieben ist [Those were painful days, the memory of which has not remained with me]’. (TCD MS10971/1, 59r; Goethe 1977, 547; Goethe 1891, I, 433) Beckett’s interest in Dichtung und Wahrheit undoubtedly stemmed from Goethe’s fusion of the two terms of the title. For Goethe, ‘Dichtung’ did not stand in contrast to ‘Wahrheit’, using the word to denote the expression of a higher truth through poetry rather than poetic or fictional invention as such. Indeed, Goethe’s aim of achieving ‘Ironie im höheren Sinne’ by merging poetic truth and objective truth resurfaces in Beckett’s notes on Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1923), taken in the summer of 1938.23 In terms strikingly similar to those employed by Beckett in the 1937 ‘German’ letter to Axel Kaun, and echoing Beckett’s adumbration of a ‘Nominalist irony’, Mauthner discusses Goethe’s ‘ironic’ use of language in Dichtung: in seiner [Goethes] bewunderungswürdigen Prosa scheint er sich wirklich mehr als irgend ein anderer Schriftsteller vor und nach ihm über alle möglichen Grenzen der Sprache zu erheben, weil er die Worte in einer unnachahmlichen Weise gewissermassen ironisch gebraucht, das heisst mit der deutlich verratenen Klage darüber, dass er einfach dem Sprachgebrauche folgen müsse. Nirgends ist selbst bei ihm dieser Stil so ausgebildet wie in ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit’. [But in his (Goethe’s) admirable prose he appears, more than any writer before or after him, to rise above all possible boundaries of language, because he uses words to a certain extent ironically, in an inimitable way, that is to say with the clearly betrayed complaint that he must simply


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follow linguistic usage. Nowhere does he himself use this style in such a developed form as in ‘Poetry and Truth’]. (WN, 52r) This interest in Goethe’s style of writing, by way of Mauthner, reflects Beckett’s different approach to the German writer from 1935 onwards. Whereas previously Beckett had used Goethe as inspiration and as a textual source for his work, his reading of Dichtung und Wahrheit (and subsequently Faust) contributed to his developing poetics. Accordingly, and despite the large volume of notes taken from Dichtung, very little of this reading was explicitly integrated into Beckett’s writing. This absence is emphasised by the lack of entries in the Whoroscope notebook, the container for a great deal of material later incorporated in Murphy. Yet whereas the more ‘emotional’ Dream includes much German, the ‘intellectual’ Murphy only refers explicitly to Goethe in passing. Indeed, having finished reading Dichtung in the summer of 1935, Beckett’s mind turned to the writing of Murphy in August 1935. As Pilling has shown (1997, 127–8), Beckett’s writing of the novel progressed relatively steadily until January 1936, after which for three months ‘all the sense and impulse seem to have collapsed’ (SB to TM, 29 January [1936]). Consequently, Beckett seems to have been ‘reading wildly all over the place’, including Goethe’s two plays Torquato Tasso and Iphigenia in Taurus in March 1936 (SB to TM, 25 March 1936). His judgement in both cases was not flattering: ‘[S]ome good rhetoric’ from the former was transcribed into the ‘German’ notebook, but on the whole he thought ‘anything more disgusting would be hard to devise’ (SB to TM, 8 March 1936). Nevertheless, having finished Murphy at the end of June 1936, and with his plans to go to Germany for a long period beginning to take shape, Beckett returned to Goethe by beginning to read Faust in early August.

Beckett Reading Goethe’s Faust With the trip to Germany just over a month away, Beckett’s remark that he has ‘been working at German and reading Faust’ indicates that he was expanding his knowledge of the German language as much as penetrating into Goethe’s masterpiece (TM, undated [19 August 1936]).24 Nevertheless, Beckett’s comments to MacGreevy and the extensive transcriptions in two notebooks (UoR MS5004 and MS5005), taken from the first two parts as well as from Robert Petsch’s introduction, illuminate both his attitude towards Goethe’s writing and his own creative thinking at this time.25

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As Dirk Van Hulle illustrates in his perceptive study of Beckett’s Faust notes (2006), the reading of Faust does not appear to have been undertaken with any immediate artistic use in view. Van Hulle’s observation is corroborated by the fact that there are only three small fragments, with no source given and translated into English in order to obscure their origin, in the Whoroscope notebook (WN, 34r and 35r).26 The only quotation to resurface in Beckett’s work is ‘Die Erde hat mich wieder [the earth has got me again’], which appears parodied in the ‘Addenda’ to Watt as ‘Die Merde hat mich wieder’.27 The line is taken from Part I of Faust, where Faust, having decided to leave the world by taking poison, decides to remain alive on hearing bells and a choir of angels and other creatures.28 Beckett’s attraction to Goethe’s sentence, beyond its suitability for a pun, probably stemmed from the fact that it restated Schopenhauer’s view of life on earth as a pensum to be endured. On another level, an allusion to the ‘Walpurgisnachtstraum’ of Faust in a letter to MacGreevy testifies to Beckett’s continuing association of German literature with sexuality. At about this time and in anticipation of his trip to Germany, he alluded to the ‘Walpurgisnachtstraum’ in ‘[p]lease God the Junge Hexe [Young Witch] will be there, the derbes Leibchen [lusty body] white [naked] on a horse’ (SB to TM, undated [19 August 1936]).29 Yet, on the whole, Beckett thought there was a ‘surprising amount of irrelevance’ in Faust, partly because Goethe ‘couldn’t bear to shorten anything’ (SB to TM, 7 August 1936). The statement reflects Beckett’s own shifting poetics towards a brevity and directness of utterance, evident in the poem ‘Cascando’ written a month earlier, in July 1936. Beckett similarly inveighs against Schiller’s Maria Stuart on reading it in Germany: ‘Why must one always find something to say’ (GD, 6 January 1937). Indeed, the increasing impatience with the inessential seems to have dominated Beckett’s further reading of Faust, leaving an impression of something very fragmentary, often irrelevant & too concrete, that perhaps Part 2 will correct. Auerbach’s Cellar, the Witches kitchen and Walpurgisnacht, for example, – little more than sites & atmospheres, swamping the corresponding mental conditions. (SB to TM, 19 August 1936) Already during his reading of Torquato Tasso some months previously he had referred to Goethe as a ‘machine à mots’ in expressing the inessential.30 If he wants to state a personal position, as seems to be the case here, why can’t he do so directly, even if only with the directness of the


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Wahlverwandtschaften, without soliciting precedents from among the installed, whereby he is condoned & they falsified? (SB to TM, 8 March 1936) This is an intriguing statement considering that Beckett’s poetics during the thirties is itself largely based on an evasion of stating ‘a personal position’ through ‘soliciting precedents’.31 It is an index of Beckett’s growing disavowal of erudition, strangely paralleled by Faust’s renouncement of traditional learning in favour of magic. Beckett’s response to Goethe’s Faust was ultimately ambiguous. Yet at the same time it contributed in a significant way to his understanding of the idea of onwardness, of going on, or not going on, both textually and personally. Beckett’s main criticism of Faust lies in his feeling that ‘the on and up is so tiresome . . . the determined optimism à la Beethoven’ (SB to TM, undated [19 August 1936]). As Van Hulle argues, Beckett is here directly taking his cue from Petsch’s introduction, which comments on the fact that ‘Faust . . . stetig aufwärts streben muss [must always strive upward]’.32 Beckett’s distrust of this Faustian, and, according to Petsch, Goethean, Vorwärtsstreben is further clarified in a German diary passage written after he had read Walter Bauer’s Die Notwendige Reise in January 1937, where he distances himself from the ‘heroic, the nosce te ipsum, that these Germans see as a journey’: Das notwendige Bleiben [the necessary staying-put] is more like it. That is also in the figure of Murphy in the chair, surrender to the thongs of self, a simple materialisation of self-bondage, acceptance of which is the fundamental unheroic. (GD, 18 January 1937)33 Beckett’s preoccupation with this tension between movement and standing still reappears in the 1938 essay on Denis Devlin’s Intercessions, published in transition, in which Beckett quotes the Faustian line ‘Unbefriedigt jeden Augenblick’ (Dis, 91). As this line occurs in the last act of Part Two and therefore later than where Beckett’s Faust extracts leave off, it is possible that he had in the interim continued reading the book. Yet he may also have returned to his notes on Robertson’s History of German Literature, where Faust’s words are transcribed: Im Weiterschreiten find’ er Qual und Glück, Er! unbefriedigt jeden Augenblick. [In onward-striding find his bale, his bliss, He, that each moment uncontented is]. (TCD MS10971/1, 35r; Faust ll. 11451–2; Goethe 1926, 403)

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The paradoxical nature of ‘going on’ as necessary yet ultimately useless, simultaneously joyful and painful, is clarified in the August 1936 letter to MacGreevy, where Beckett stated that in his reading of Faust he could ‘understand the “keep on keeping on” as a social prophylactic, but not at all as a light in the autological darkness’ (SB to TM, undated [19 August 1936]). Murphy had of course enjoyed the ‘vicarious autology’ (Mu, 118) offered to him by the presence of Mr Endon just as much as the darkness of the third zone of his mind.34 Beckett further explored the tension between the ‘social prophylactic’ and the ‘autological darkness’ in the Faustian carnival scene at the beginning of Part 2, during which the ‘Viktoriagruppe’ appears (UoR MS5005, 7r–8r). Viktoria, the ‘Göttin aller Tätigkeiten [goddess of all activity]’, is paraded on the back of a colossal elephant, led by the figure of Wisdom. Chained to the side of the animal are the enemies of all healthy ambition, Fear and Hope (Faust II. 5407–70). Having already noted that for Goethe the meaning of life consisted of ‘unablässige[s] Tätigsein u. Tüchtigsein [being unceasingly active and diligent]’, the importance of the issue is illustrated by Beckett’s notation of ‘Victoria Gruppe’ into his ‘Clare Street’ notebook, before writing a meditation, in German, on the true nature of the world (UoR MS5004, 17r–18r, and UoR MS5003, 17r).

‘Quiet Internal Peace’: Quietism in German Literature Against the background of Faustian ambition and Mephistophelian negation, Beckett reshaped and enriched his poetics of stillness and humility.35 To be sure, Goethe’s Vorwärtsstreben was never likely to unhinge a sentiment inherent in Beckett’s writing from the beginning. Beckett had after all borrowed Belacqua from Dante because of his ethic of renunciation and slothfulness: ‘Frate l’andar su [sic] che porta? [Oh brother, what is the use of going up?]’ (DN, 42). As the title of the text in which Belacqua makes his first appearance, the quality of ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo [sitting still]’ was of prime importance. The same attitude explains Beckett’s attraction to the melancholy and ponderous atmosphere of Walther von der Vogelweide sitting on his stone. Such a lack of incentive for motion Beckett also found in the Austrian writer Grillparzer, who understood, as Beckett noted from Robertson’s History of German Literature, ‘des Innern stiller Frieden [quiet internal peace]’ to be a profoundly heroic act, the ultimate renunciation of ambition (TCD MS10971/1, 42v). In his reading of Robertson, Beckett was


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particularly attentive to the work of Grillparzer, whose various disappointments in life and unstable temperament induced long periods of suffering and despair. He noted Grillparzer’s pessimistic attitude towards life, which he only endured through a Weltanschauung of renunciation. Grillparzer’s sentiment is illustrated in a line from the collection of lyric poetry entitled Tristia ex Ponto, which anticipates Beckett’s use of the Faustian ‘sollst entbehren’ (Mo, 114) in Moran’s advice to his son: ‘Des Menschen ew’ges Loos, es heisst Entbehren [The eternal lot of mankind is called renunciation]’.36 Beckett proceeded to read the Austrian writer in some depth immediately after finishing Murphy at the end of June 1936: ‘I am reading Grillparzer, but not the best of him (Hero & Leander), only the Jason-Medea trilogy, of which third part at least is magnificent’ (SB to TM, 7 July 1936). Both this comment and the Robertson notes indicate that Beckett had already previously read, or more likely browsed, Grillparzer’s version of the Hero and Leander story, Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen. His early familiarity is illustrated by the inclusion of the line ‘Der Tag wird kommen und die stille Nacht’ in Dream (60), and further underlined by the absence of any transcription from the passage in his reading of Robertson. In his notes from the History of German Literature, Beckett declares Hero’s tragic ‘Totenklage’, lamenting the death of Leander, to be ‘superb’: Nie wieder dich zu sehn, im Leben nie! Der du einhergingst im Gewand der Nacht Und Licht mir strahltest in die dunkle Seele, Aufblühen machtest alles, was hold und gut, Du fort von hier an einsam dunklen Ort, Und nimmer sieht mein lechzend Aug’ dich wieder? Der Tag wird kommen und die stille Nacht, Der Lenz, der Herbst, des langen Sommers Freuden, Du aber nie, Leander, hörst du? – nie! Nie, nimmer, nimmer, nie! [Never to see you again in life, never! You who went forth in the mantle of the night And shone light into my dark soul, Made everything blossom that was fair and good, You away from here at a lonely dark place, And my yearning eye never to see you again? The day will come and the silent night,

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Spring, Autumn, the long joys of summer, But never you, Leander, do you hear? – never! Never, nevermore, nevermore, never!] (Robertson, 535)37 In July 1936 Beckett read Grillparzer’s Ein treuer Diener seines Herrn and the trilogy Das Goldene Vliess, transcribing passages from both works into the notebook containing his notes from Robertson and Dichtung und Wahrheit. This reading corresponds to his overall interest in the quietist and pessimistic tradition, as indicated in his note of Robertson’s description of Ein treuer Diener as ‘embodying Kantian idea of self-effacing duty’ (TCD MS10971/1, 42v). Grillparzer was not the only German author in whom Beckett found this mode of self-denial and humility. During his reading of Dichtung und Wahrheit a year earlier he recorded Goethe’s attraction to Spinoza’s ‘grenzenlose Uneigennützigkeit [boundless selflessness]’ (TCD MS10971/1, 66r).38 Significantly, Beckett encountered this reference to self-effacement precisely at the time when he was preoccupied with his own ‘self-referring quietism’ as illustrated in the long letter to MacGreevy discussing Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ (SB to TM, 10 March [1935]). Indeed, Beckett introduces this same letter – which also contains the first mention of Beckett’s reading of Dichtung – with an allusion to Goethe’s autobiographical work. By declaring himself to be ‘touched at your bothering your head about my old Grillen’, he directly refers to Goethe’s frequent use in Dichtung of the word to denote his moodiness and troubles.39 Moreover, Beckett’s equation of self-effacement with self-sufficiency is informed by his deep attachment to Goethe’s poem ‘Prometheus’ (as well as Johnson’s letter to Lord Chesterfield). The last stanza of the poem seems particularly pertinent to Beckett as a young writer, creating characters and works out of a self struggling to be independent. Beckett typed out the poem (following his notes on Dichtung), which represents an assertion of both artistic and spiritual independence, in his notebook (TCD MS10971/1, 72r–72v). Beckett further traced the compositional background to the poem, which revealed a different Goethe from the public figure entrenched in the cultural and political happenings of his time. The impulses behind ‘Prometheus’, as recorded by Beckett from Dichtung und Wahrheit, are reminiscent of his own solitary artistic quest: ‘Ich fühlte recht gut, dass sich etwas Bedeutendes nur produciren [produzieren] lasse, wenn man sich isoliere. Meine Sachen . . . waren Kinder der Einsamkeit [I clearly felt that a creation of importance could be produced only when its author isolated himself. My productions . . . were children of solitude]’ (10971/1, 67r;


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Goethe 1977, 697–9; Goethe 1891, II, 38.). Goethe’s attraction to the figure of Prometheus in Dichtung can be set beside his attachment to three other rebellious mythological figures, Ixion, Tantalus and Sisyphus, whom he describes as his ‘saints’ (Goethe 1977, 700). Beckett appears to have been similarly interested in this fraternity of futility, as he noted short descriptions of these three characters in the Whoroscope notebook (31r–33r).40 Representing the striving towards independence as well as the meaninglessness of life, Beckett explicitly invoked Ixion and Tantalus in the ‘metaphysical considerations’ preventing Murphy from taking up any activity for money (Mu, 16).

Beckett and German Literature During the 1936–1937 Trip Beckett remained, following his intense course of study prior to his journey, attentive to Goethe while in Germany in 1936–1937, noting in his diary such details as the discovery of a new portrait or the performance of Iphigenie to mark the 150th anniversary of Goethe’s arrival in Rome.41 But having indulged in the persuasive presence of Goethe in Weimar, Beckett grew tired of him, which culminated in a diary entry from Leipzig, when, having noted the multitude of small passages with old shops that Goethe loved, he finished with ‘[b]last Goethe’ (GD, 27 January 1937). While Goethe’s star was slightly waning for him, Beckett set about rectifying his relative ignorance of Schiller’s work. He thus read Schiller’s Maria Stuart prior to attending a performance of the play in Berlin, but was moved to condemn Mortimer’s conversion speech as something that ‘could only have come from the miserable Protestant idea of Roman Catholicism as a welter of the fine arts’ (GD, 6 January 1937).42 Beckett further resented the acts of rationalisation in the play, arguing that Maria Stuart’s failure to confess to her crime (allowing Darnley to be murdered) removed the sting of the play by establishing a sentimental ending of ‘serene obscurity’: Altogether a very creamy work, ‘homogénéisé’, with the Euripidean intentions insufficiently immediate. The Oedipan Destiny, whose implements are every act of evasion, is made petty by such rationalistic comment as Marys [sic] in the last act, when she tacks the penalty for a crime she has not committed on to a crime she has committed (Darnley’s murder). So that the play does not end in a last act of understanding, as in Racine, but in self-solace. (GD, 8 January 1937)

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Beckett’s description of the performance itself is quite extensive, and testifies to his growing interest in the staging of plays and the practicalities of stagecraft. Beckett’s exposure to German drama continued in Berlin a week later, where he attended a performance of Friedrich Hebbel’s Gyges und sein Ring. As Beckett wrote to MacGreevy, Hebbel ‘is the dramatist pigeonhole, but it is as a poet that he counts’ (SB to TM, 18 January 1937).43 Beckett discerned that ‘the poetical play can never come off as play, nor when played as poetry either, because the words obscure the action & are obscured by it’ (GD, 12 January 1937). As in his comments on Maria Stuart, Beckett held Racine as a contrasting instance against which the failure of the poetical play is measured: Racine never elaborates the expression in this sense, never stands by the word in this sense, and therefore his plays are not ‘poetical’, i.e. undramatic, in this sense. (GD, 12 January 1937) Nevertheless, while the dramatic aspects of Gyges und sein Ring failed to convince Beckett, he was attracted to its poetic qualities and what he called the ‘[f]ine weigthy intellectual writing, with lovely figures (images)’ (GD, 10 January 1937). Beckett appears to have found many ‘weighty’ lines in Hebbel, who, especially in the poetry written before the plays, expressed his belief that suffering is the fundamental force of life. Once again, Beckett’s association of German literature with separation and death is evident in the lines from the play noted in the diary, such as ‘das Leben ist zu kurz, als das der Mensch sich drin den Tod auch nur verdienen könnte [Life is too short that man could therein even earn death]’. And, after purchasing a complete edition of the poems, Beckett continued to read Hebbel in the coming years, copying, for example, the epigrammatic ‘Die Veilchen’ into his Whoroscope notebook in either 1937 or 1938 (65v). Although Beckett’s reading and visits to the theatre were usually determined by availability or dependent on recommendations and books lent to him, two authors he seems actively to have sought out were Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Gottfried Keller.44 During his visit to Brunswick he bought Lessing’s six-volume complete works, and went to the Augusta Bibliothek, where Lessing had been librarian, to inspect the Wolfenbütteler Fragmente. Reading the first fragment, Beckett noted it appeared to be a first sketch for Nathan der Weise, with its plea for reason within religion. Whereas Beckett’s attraction to Lessing can be understood, his motivation to buy and (attempt to) read Keller’s ‘Erziehungsroman’ Der Grüne Heinrich,


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written 1855 and revised 24 years later, is more difficult to explain. The book charts the tension of the artist trying to come to terms with the absence of God by turning the eye of truth on himself. In its first edition, Keller obscured the autobiographical nature of the book, only to reveal this in the later edition by inserting the first person narrative throughout. Beckett’s reading of the book began enthusiastically enough, only to be confounded by the heavy and slow style of the opening, which he compared to a ‘champion for the London-Brighton walk’ (GD, 28 December 1936). Nevertheless, the reading at this point was made endurable by images and scenes that appealed to his emotions, of which his comment on the ‘[l]ovely picture of his father in the green suit’ is indicative (GD, 28 December 1936). Beckett was impressed by the story of the unfortunate girl, Meretlein, who under the suspicion of being a witch was given into the rather rough care of the local parish priest. Her story ends abruptly when she dies out in the cold, not without showing further signs of possession by getting out of her coffin and wandering off into the night. As Beckett notes, this ‘moving’ story is ‘exquisitely introduced through her portrait, with child’s skull and rose’, which had been painted as an invitation to penance for her parents (GD, 29 December 1936).45 However, following these early joys, Beckett’s reading of the book quickly came to a standstill, ‘too much praying’ and ‘too slow & correct’ signalling his inability or unwillingness to continue (GD, 29 December 1936 and 14 January 1937). Returning to it on six further occasions over the following two months, its slowness anaesthetised his critical faculty, and it is unlikely that he ever finished it.46

Beckett and Friedrich Hölderlin Beckett’s lifelong love of German classical literature originated in his extended reading of the 1930s. Anne Atik in her memoir of Beckett, for example, relates his admiration for Goethe and Heinrich Heine (2001, 62 and 67). He could recite large portions of Matthias Claudius, using the image of Death, or ‘Freund Hain’, as a ghostly image threatening Krapp. Indeed, fragments of German literature, in particular passages from Goethe, resurface or, rather, linger on under the textual surface. Thus the ‘mixed choir’ from Goethe’s Faust appears in Watt (26), also heard (‘or I am greatly deceived’) by Malone, where the reference is underlined by the possibility that it is Easter Week (MD, 34). Furthermore, in his correspondence Beckett often uses German quotations to describe his emotional state and events in his life: ‘Alle Schuld rächt sich auf Erde[n] [The debt all guilt

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exacts from mortal men]’ he tells Ruby Cohn in 1981 as he prepares to go Stuttgart for the television production of Quadrat I and II, quoting Goethe’s ‘Lied des Harfners’ (Beckett, letter to Ruby Cohn, 24 May 1981). Another writer whom Beckett never tired of quoting was Hölderlin. Beckett’s study of German literature in the 1930s culminated in his reading of Friedrich Hölderlin in 1938 and 1939. His encounter with the great German writer followed a typical pattern: the use of a fragment in the early work, the notation of biographical and literary details from Robertson’s History of German Literature, and finally a concentrated reading of the primary texts. And once again, Beckett’s notation of the first two and a half lines of ‘Mnemosyne’ (Third Version) in the Dream notebook (DN, item 1087), unacknowledged and with no obvious source, seems to have been made with scant awareness of the larger context of Hölderlin’s writing. It is strange that Beckett omits the second half of the third line in his notebook, transcribing only Reif, sind, in Feuer getaucht, gekochet Die Frücht und auf der Erde geprüfet und ein Gesetz ist Das alles hin[eingeht, Schlangen gleich [Ripe are, dipped in fire, cooked The fruits and tried on the earth and it is law, that all must (enter in, like serpents)] Yet when Beckett came to use the third line in Dream, he complemented it in accordance with the complete line, ‘alles hineingeht[,] Schlangen gleich’ (Dream, 138). The opening lines of ‘Mnemosyne’, hinting at death as well as mortal life, can be set beside Beckett’s attention to Faust’s ‘Die Erde hat mich wieder’. Moreover, the ‘ripe’ and ‘rotten’ imagery is one that crops up again and again in Beckett’s writing, as in his evaluation of language as ‘only ripe, then falls behind’ (GD, 11 March 1937). After noting the details of Hölderlin’s life (his insanity from 1802 onwards) and work (its ‘passion for Greece’ and ‘melancholy’ nature) from Robertson (TCD MS10971/1, 31v), Beckett proceeded to purchase (or he received) an edition of Hölderlin’s complete works. His personal copy, preserved in the Beckett Archive at the University of Reading, contains various annotations, and carries the inscription ‘24/12/37’.47 The underlined passages show Beckett still susceptible to expressions of nostalgia and melancholy, marking for example the line ‘Wohin könnt ich mir entfliehen, hätt ich nicht die lieben Tage meiner Jugend? [Whither could I flee from myself if I had not


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the sweet days of my youth?]’ from Hyperion (Hölderlin 1930, 441; 1965, 31) or the poem ‘Ehemals und Jetzt’ (‘Then and Now’): In jüngren Tagen war ich des Morgens froh, Des Abends weint ich; jetzt, das ich älter bin, Beginn ich zweifelnd meinen Tag, doch Heilig und heiter ist mir sein Ende. [In younger days each morning I rose with joy, To weep at nightfall; now, in my later years, Though doubting I begin my day, yet Always its end is serene and holy]. (Hölderlin 1930, 88; 1967, 41) Further annotations establish echoes with other passages from German literature. Thus two lines Beckett marked from the first book of Hyperion relate to Goethe’s ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’: ‘da ich wandelt unter herrlichen Entwürfen, wie in weiter Wäldernacht [when I roved among beautiful projects as through the night of a vast forest]’ (Hölderlin 1930, 442; 1967, 31), and Hyperion’s answer to Alabanda’s question why he had become so monosyllabic: ‘In den heissen Zonen, . . . näher der Sonne, singen ja auch die Vögel nicht. [In the tropical regions, nearer the sun, . . . the birds do not sing either]’ (Hölderlin 1930, 454; 1967, 43). Evidence of Beckett’s reading of Hölderlin can be found in his 1938 writing: the late poem ‘Der Spaziergang’ is quoted in the critical review ‘Intercessions by Denis Devlin’, published April–May 1938 in transition (Dis, 94), and the same poem also inspired Beckett’s own poem ‘Dieppe’. Furthermore, Beckett admired the poem ‘Hyperions Schicksalslied’ (1789), taken from the second book of Hyperion. The poem, with its antithetical relation between the gods, imperceptible to fate (‘schicksallos’), and the mortal human being’s helplessness at the hands of fate, naturally appealed to Beckett, who had already admired a similar thematic exposition in Goethe’s ‘Prometheus’. Beckett used the closing stanza, albeit in an extremely fractured manner, towards the end of Watt (207): Doch uns ist gegeben Auf keiner Stätte zu ruhen Es schwinden, es fallen Die leidenden Menschen Blindlings von einer Stunde zur andern,

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Wie Wasser von Klippe Zu Klippe geworfen, Jahrelang ins Ungewisse hinab. [But we are fated To find no foothold, no rest And suffering mortals Dwindle and fall Headlong from one Hour to the next, Hurled like water From ledge to ledge Downward for years to the vague abyss]. (Robertson, 410; Hölderlin 1967, 79) Beckett had originally copied this stanza from Robertson into his notebook, but when he came to use it in Watt, he prolonged the mortal torment by replacing ‘Jahrelang’ with the endless ‘endlos’ (TCD MS10971/1, 31v). In terms of his own developing poetics, Beckett read Hölderlin at a suitable time. Charles Juliet related Beckett’s admiration for the ‘mad poems’, but also the opinion that ‘there are whole pages that mean little to him’ (Juliet 1995, 167). These late poems, marked by fragmentation and, simultaneously, obscurity and inspired insight, were indeed written by Hölderlin at a time when he had lost his sanity. Crucially, Beckett started reading Hölderlin at the precise moment when he himself was moving towards a more complete integration of utterance and self, a more immediate and unadorned style of writing that admitted incoherence and unknowing. In a sense, Hölderlin replaced Goethe as a writer from whom Beckett could learn. In the July 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, Beckett had tellingly remarked that Goethe was the kind of writer that pursued a strategy of ‘Lieber NICHTS zu schreiben, als nicht zu schreiben [better to write NOTHING than not write at all]’ (Dis, 52; trans. 170).48 This opinion undoubtedly grew out of his earlier criticism of the amount of ‘irrelevance’ in Faust. In contrast, Hölderlin, as Beckett told Patrick Bowles in 1955, ended in something of this kind of failure. His only successes are the points where his poems go on, falter, stammer, and then admit failure, and are abandoned. At such points he was most successful. When he tried to abandon the spurious magnificence. (Bowles 1994, 31)


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With respect to the time at which it was made, the comment has a bearing on the Trilogy, but also on the impact Hölderlin had on Beckett in 1938–9. Indeed, Beckett’s initial attraction to Hyperion and poems written before the German writer retired to his tower at Tübingen gradually made way to a focus on the ‘terrific fragments of the Spätzeit [late period]’.49 Anticipated by the fragmented transcription from ‘Mnemosyne’ (Third Version) in the Dream notebook, Beckett’s expression of the incoherent nature of self and world, within a creative form that admitted fragmentation, spaces and silence, is formulated at this time.50 His incomplete rendition of the last stanza of ‘Hyperions Schicksalslied’ in Watt is thus all the more fitting. Throughout the 1930s, Beckett had been creatively inspired and personally attracted to German literature. A long passage from Hyperion which Beckett marked in his copy of Hölderlin crystallises this profound influence in its quietist attitude, melancholy movement and poetic beauty. Beckett marked the entire passage with pencil and appended at the top of the page ‘Nox animae’: Es gibt ein Vergessen alles Daseins, ein Verstummen unsers Wesens, wo uns ist, als hätten wir alles gefunden. Es gibt ein Verstummen, ein Vergessen alles Daseins, wo uns ist, als hätten wir alles verloren, eine Nacht unsrer Seele, wo kein Schimmer eines Sterns, wo nicht einmal ein faules Holz uns leuchtet. Ich war nun ruhig geworden. Nun trieb mich nichts mehr auf um Mitternacht. Nun sengt ich mich in meiner eigenen Flamme nicht mehr. [There is a forgetting of all existence, a silencing of our being, when we feel as if we had found everything. There is a silencing, a forgetting of all existence, when we feel as if we had lost everything, a night of our soul, in which no glimmer from a star nor even a rotting log gives us light. I had now become quiet. Now nothing drove me up around midnight. Now I no longer scorched myself in my own flame]. (Hölderlin 1930, 466–7; my translation)

Chapter 5


Möge man leise reden, es ist ein Sterbender im Zimmer. Die sterbende deutsche Kultur, sie hat im Innern Deutschlands nicht einmal mehr Katakomben zur Verfügung. [You should talk quietly, there’s a dying man in the room. Dying German culture – within Germany itself it no longer has even catacombs at its disposal]. (Ernst Bloch, Gauklerfest unterm Galgen, 1937 [1962, 80])

When Beckett arrived in Germany in September 1936, he entered a country in which the spheres of literature and the visual arts had been firmly subjugated by politics. The National Socialists had in the three years they had been in power effectively eradicated the autonomy of art and turned it into a vehicle of propaganda. The marginalisation and repression of modern art, poignantly described by Ernst Bloch in the summer of 1937, was witnessed by Beckett during his journey. Beckett’s German diaries remain one of the few (and, more importantly, unpublished) texts written by foreigners recording the political situation in Nazi Germany in 1936–1937, and thus assume the status of historical documents. Although the diaries themselves can hardly be termed ‘political’, the tense atmosphere permeating the country can be felt within their pages. Minute observations of the reality on the streets, accounts of conversations and of radio speeches invoke an air of menace and constriction. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in Beckett’s often frustrated efforts to gain access to modern art collections or in his notations on banned authors. Indeed, a glance at the nature of the books available to Beckett in his endeavour to read contemporary literature is a measure of the success of Nazi cultural policies. Prior to 1936, the only modern German literature Beckett seems to have read is Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and a selection of Rilke’s poetry.


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Yet during his six-month trip to Germany, between October 1936 and March 1937, Beckett read more than ten contemporary novels. Although this reading left no discernible traces in Beckett’s work, largely because he dismissed most of the books he read as being inadequate for one reason or another, it did contribute to his understanding of the shape his own writing was to take. In order to discuss Beckett’s relationship with earlytwentieth-century German literature, a general exposition of the cultural situation during his visit is necessary, particularly considering its importance to subsequent events in Germany, Europe and Beckett’s own life.

Nazi Germany in 1936–1937 Travelling to Germany with a basic understanding of the situation there, Beckett actively sought to gain an insight into the cultural and political changes wrought by the National Socialists since his last visit in 1932.1 Inquisitive about his environment, he took the time to keep up with the main political events reported in German newspapers and on the radio. Beckett thus records listening to an ‘[i]nterminable harangue by Goering on Vierjahresplan [Four Year Plan] relayed from Berlin.2 Sehr volkstümlich. Kolonien, Rohstoffe, Fettwaren [Very traditional. Colonies, raw materials, fats]’ (GD, 28 October 1936), and shows even more endurance when he listens like a fool to 2 hours of Hitler & an hour of Goering (opening of Reichstag, Goering reelected President, laws controlling 4 years plan extended for another 4[)], the usual from A. H. with announcement of a 20 yr. plan for development of Berlin, ‘reply’ to Eden consisting mainly in repeated assertion that Germany’s policy is not one of isolation; then Goering announces foundation of 3 yearly ‘cultural’ prices [sic] of 100,000 ? RM & prohibition imposed on any Germans to accept a Nobel Prize! (GD, 30 January 1937)3 Despite the indication of boredom inherent in the description of these ‘interminable harangues’, Beckett rarely evaluates or comments explicitly upon events happening around him. Beckett’s observational tone rather resembles Christopher Isherwood’s enterprise, who in Goodbye to Berlin (1939) remarked ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording’ (1969, 7). Yet Beckett’s camera is remarkable for its wide lens; his sensitive observations noted in the German diaries offer a privileged insight into the

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range of opinion within society and on the street regarding the political and cultural situation.4 Thus the enthusiasm for National Socialist ideals is recorded in equal measure to cultural prohibitions and personal persecutions enacted by the regime. There are many observations of the reality on the streets – the Winterhilfswerk, Eintopfsonntag, the brief reference to ‘[p]hotographers outside Jewish shops’ (GD, 21 January 1937) and a church inscription on which ‘Grüss Gott’ has been replaced by ‘Heil Hitler’ (GD, 5 March 1937). These observations are complemented by Beckett’s notation of conversations with those supporting the new Germany: in Munich, a typesetter expresses his admiration for the Führer and shows him the place where the insurgent Nazis were shot on 9 November 1923 (GD, 5 March 1937); a fellow guest at his pension propounds Germany’s right to colonies; and in Leipzig he hears that ‘the Pelz [fur] trade has gone to hell because of Jews’ (GD, 28 January 1937). Indeed, the Nazi sentiments were drilled into Beckett from all sides so that he was in a position to discern that a ‘Little waiter reels out the NS Evangile with only one or two errors & omissions’ (GD, 28 January 1937). Beckett’s correlation between Nazi discourse and biblical ‘truth’ appears several times in the pages of his diaries: the art collector Ida Bienert ‘starts with the Nazi litany’; in Erfurt Beckett has to suffer ‘the NS Gospel from the waiter’; and in Berlin an ‘appallingly Nazi’ man ‘reels off the entire Gospel, as conceived for interior & exterior’ (GD, 3 March 1937). Beckett also experienced a more direct exposure to Nazi ideology. For example, in Munich he saw Karl Anton’s propaganda film against bolshevism, Weisse Sklaven, which after 1940 was shown under the title ‘Rote Bestien’ (GD, 21 March 1937). This film was a response to Goebbels’s 1934 demand for a National Socialist ‘Battleship Potemkin’. Interestingly, considering Beckett’s application to Eisenstein in Moscow to join his film school, the Russian filmmaker responded to Goebbels in an open letter, in which he stated that National Socialism and truth are incompatible, and accused Nazis of having no idea how to create art. Furthermore, early in his stay in Hamburg, Beckett attended a charity event for Germans in Spain, at which he was treated to ‘SS Blasekapelle [brass band], bit of documentary film (Moskau droht [Moscow threatens]), speech from one Lorenz (I stretched out the wrong arm to Horst Wessel & Haydn), then more blasts from the Kapelle’ (GD, 11 October 1936).5 The humorous reference here to the use of the wrong arm to salute exemplifies Beckett’s tendency to subtly undermine or satirise National Socialism rather than to condemn it outright. This is illustrated by his reference to the irony inherent in the fact that Horst Wessel was ‘whelped, not least suckled’ in


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the Judenstrasse in Berlin (GD, 19 December 1936). And noting one of Hitler’s aphorisms inscribed on the Haus der deutschen Kunst in Munich, ‘Kein Volk lebt länger als die Dokumente seiner Kultur [No people lives longer than its documents]’, Beckett wryly comments ‘[p]leasant possibilities of application’ (GD, 10 March 1937).6 Beckett’s textual subversion of Nazism is most noticeable in the notebook where he recorded quotations by the leading figures of the regime. Here we find material such as Hitler’s statement, made in a radio broadcast celebrating the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the Berlin Gau, that ‘Nationalsozialist ist man nicht vom Tage der Geburt an [One is not born a National Socialist]’ (UoR MS5006, 52v). Yet the previous entry in the notebook is, like others made around this time, a German proverb: ‘Mit dem ist nicht gut Kirschen essen [It is not good to eat cherries with him]’, that is to say, ‘he is not friendly’. Beckett’s refusal of Nazi discourse through this (most probably unconscious) interweaving of political statements and jokes or proverbs eventually anticipates an end to the regime. Under a quotation from Goebbels, Beckett noted the saying: ‘Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei [Everything has an ending, only the sausage has two]’. Yet at other times Beckett’s distaste for the new Weltanschauung is expressed more clearly, as in his relationship with his German conversation partner Claudia Asher, who had been assigned to him through the Akademische Auslandsstelle in Hamburg; having listened to her talk of ‘national soul, of unity & might of her country’ on several occasions (GD, 19 November 1936), he at one point remarked that ‘[h]er Kraft durch Freude conversation kills me’ (GD, 1 November 1936).7 There are also numerous references to people being ‘appallingly Nazi’ (GD, 20 December 1936), and in conversation with the bookseller Axel Kaun he clearly asserted ‘the expressions “historical necessity” & “Germanic destiny” start the vomit moving upwards’ (GD, 15 January 1937). Yet, on the whole, the German diaries reveal Beckett’s reticence in expressing outright opinions about the political situation. In his diaries, Beckett tended to record the accounts of repressive measures by the authorities in a measured tone, stating what he had heard rather than commenting upon it. In his descriptions of the conversations he had during his stay, his diaries reveal him to have been quiet when the discussion became embroiled in politics. Naturally Beckett was also aware of the atmosphere of surveillance in which utterances of political opposition to the regime were not taken lightly. Keeping a low profile must have seemed most expedient, especially as a foreigner. The delicate nature of the situation was brought home to Beckett by the art collector Margaritha Durrieu,

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who ‘hint[ed] how unpleasant it could be for her & Frau Fera if I published disparagements of Germany’ (GD, 2 December 1936). Beckett’s visit to Germany coincided with an intensification of what Watt termed the ‘Kulturkampf’ (W, 162). Indeed, the Watt notebooks contain various hidden references to the Nazi regime. In a letter to George Reavey, Beckett referred to hearing ‘Adolf the Peacemaker on the wireless last night’ (27 September 1938), which is echoed in the second Watt notebook: ‘Cheeks still wet with weeping for the Peacemaker. Shadows falling over a large portion of the inhabited globe’ (39r). In the autumn of 1936, the outward tolerance presented to the world during the Olympic Games of that year was being replaced by more aggressive policies. The Nazis stepped up their campaign against ‘decadent’ art, imposing stringent measures against literary publications. As Beckett wrote to his friend Thomas MacGreevy, ‘the campaign against ‘Art-Bolshevism’ is only just beginning’ (SB to TM, 28 November 1936 [misdated by Beckett 1937]). The Nazis had not hesitated to impose their own cultural agenda immediately after assuming power, and moved quickly to cleanse the academies of unwanted writers under the Gleichschaltung. By April 1933, legislation had been passed that excluded non-Aryan and politically divergent authors from the ‘Preussische Akademie der Künste’; by the end of the next month a number of writers resigned (including Thomas Mann and Alfred Döblin), and 15 of the original 31 members of the Prussian Academy had been removed. All remaining members were forced to sign a declaration of loyalty to the regime (i.e. abstinence from criticism), and were joined by new members sympathetic to the National Socialist cause. On 11 May 1933, the union of booksellers (Börsenverein der Deutschen Buchhändler) advocated Nazi cultural policy by publishing a list of authors who were no longer to be distributed by its members (see Schnell 1976, 25). These ‘black lists’ not only had consequences for the banned authors – seizure of works, removal from state libraries, loss of livelihood – but also for booksellers, who faced fines and exclusion from distributors’ catalogues should they sell prohibited books. Having cleansed the academies of unwanted writers, the Nazis tightened their control over all published material in November 1933 by founding the ‘Reichskulturkammer’, designed to act as a controlling institution in that membership was compulsory for any person wanting to work in their cultural field. It is not surprising that under the circumstances those authors who were deemed non-Aryan or ‘undesirable’ for political or other reasons went into exile to pursue their writing. Yet to equate the writers who remained and


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continued to publish within the boundaries set by the National Socialists with fascist authors does not represent the complexity of the situation. It is important to remember that many German writers had been writing literature, such as that characterised as ‘Heimatliteratur’, long before the Nazis came to power, but which incorporated elements of that Lebensanschauung they came to celebrate. Many of these authors, who were sympathetic to certain facets of National Socialism but distrustful of others, came to see their status as being one of internal exile. This literature, which has come to be known as Innere Emigration, represents a shady area, debated to this day as representing either collaboration or ineffective resistance. For the purposes of our discussion it is merely important to recognise that this literature represented at the time what we could term ‘popular literature’, in that it fundamentally expressed beliefs and attitudes shared by a large proportion of the German population, the ‘bürgerlich’, or middle class. It is apposite here to remember that Beckett had of course himself experienced censorship, although much less restrictive, in his native Ireland, where his collection of short stories, More Pricks than Kicks, was banned. It cannot have escaped Beckett’s attention that had he himself published in Germany, his inclusion on a ‘black list’ would have been assured. His unshakeable aversion to limitations on artistic freedom was voiced in a condemnation of the Irish Censorship Act he had written in 1934 (‘Censorship in the Saorstat’; Dis, 84–8). Now in Germany, Beckett remarked upon the divisive separation of cultural works on either side of 1933 after a visit to the bookshop Boysens in Hamburg: ‘Everything in way of history of literature, art, m.[music], prior to Machtübernahme [assumption of power], disparaged’ (GD, 22 October 1936). Beckett was thus sensitive to the cultural implications of the Nazi policies, aware of the fact that any book that had been published after they had come to power would be biased, and realised that when ‘the author is in “retirement”, I know I am on the right thing’ (GD, 24 February 1937). Much of Beckett’s information regarding the literary situation in Germany came from two young booksellers and friends, Axel Kaun and Günter Albrecht.8 He clearly felt at ease with these two men, who possessed a more liberal outlook, underlined by his description of Albrecht as ‘not at all a Hitler Jüngling [youth]’ (GD, 6 November 1936).9 Beckett thus endorsed Axel Kaun’s measured analysis of ‘the new Germany as one half sentimental demagogies and one half the brilliant obscurantics of Dr G. [Goebbels]’, and further noted that Kaun ‘deplores the failure of the Jews in exile to establish a spiritual criticism & the futility of their protest against the

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inessential’ (GD, 11 January 1937). Beckett’s endeavours to understand the situation in Germany is evident from a letter written by Albrecht to Kaun: Wie ich Dir früher schon einmal schrieb, sieht er [Beckett] eben alles nur an intellektuellen Masstäben & unsere Not in Deutschland wird er nicht ganz verstehen, soviel Mühe er sich auch in der Erforschung von Erscheinungen & Menschen geben mag. [As I have already written to you, he only measures everything according to intellectual standards and he will never quite be able to understand our distress here in Germany, however much effort he may invest in exploring appearances and people].10 It is through Axel Kaun that Beckett learnt that Thomas Mann was ‘now (in last fortnight) definitely banned, & his German citizenship taken away, because of articles in Baseler Zeitung’ (GD, 11 January 1937).11 Thomas Mann and the controversial work Joseph und seine Brüder frequently formed the centre of Beckett’s recorded discussions.12 Professor Diederich, for example, who was acquainted with Mann, told Beckett that Buddenbrooks was entirely ‘Schlüsselroman’ in that ‘Mann himself [is] the child that dies’ (GD, 25 October 1937). Yet in contrast to his brother, Heinrich, who had been censored for his satirical treatments of Germany, as had Stefan Zweig and Franz Werfel for other reasons, books by Thomas Mann could still be bought in Germany at the time of Beckett’s visit. Nevertheless, Beckett does not seem to have had the urge to follow up his reading of Thomas Mann after Buddenbrooks, although the inside cover of one of his diary notebooks gives the titles of Mann’s series of four novels, Joseph und seine Brüder. Like the absence of Thomas Mann in Beckett’s 1936–1937 reading list, literature by German authors one would expect him to have been attracted to is also conspicuously missing. The diaries do not contain any references to Bertolt Brecht, for instance. Beckett’s exclusion of exiled authors is contrasted with the comprehensive overview given in the diaries to writers judged acceptable by the Nazis, itself a barometer of the success of the ideological and cultural programme of National Socialism. Although not always by his own volition, Beckett became acquainted with many authors who were acceptable to the regime or were the main proponents of Nazi literature. For example, his description of works inspected at a book exhibition in Hamburg’s Kunsthalle includes most of the prominent authors of the National Socialist regime: Friedrich Griese, Hans Friedrich Blunck, Gerhard Schumann, Hans Heyse, and Hans Grimm, whose novel Volk ohne Raum was one of the earliest books


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to conform to Nazi ideology and thus very influential. As Beckett noted at one point, the shift in literary sensibilities meant that ‘Mann’s world can no longer rival Grimm’s (Volk ohne Raum)’ (GD, 22 November 1936). Furthermore, public readings during a book festival in Hamburg and a series of lectures promoting ‘Volkhafte Dichtung der Zeit’ in Berlin made Beckett aware of the instrumentalisation of art. Unable to attend any of the lectures, and thus failing to hear what he frequently termed the ‘NS Gospel’, Beckett nevertheless copied some phrases from a newspaper following a Hamburg lecture by Gerhard Schumann into his diary: Die heilige[n] Begriffe: Führer, Bewegung, Blut u. Boden, Freiheit u. Ehre dürfen nicht dem Geschwätz der Verwandlungskünst[l]er überlassen werden, die mit der Weltanschauung des NS ein Geschäft zu machen suchen. [The holy terms: Führer, Movement, Blood and Soil, Freedom and Honour must not be given over to the babble of the fraudsters who seek to make a business out of the worldview of National Socialism]. (GD, 28 October 1936)13 The only book of overt nationalistic persuasion that Beckett actually purchased during his trip was Hans Pferdmenges’s Deutschlands Leben (1930), which explicitly propounds Germany’s destiny of superiority. Beckett, who had bought the book following several recommendations, quickly discerned that it ‘seems NS Kimmwasser [bilge]’ (GD, 4 November 1936). And presumably guided by his reading of the philosopher before his departure, Beckett also bought the Spinoza novel Amor Dei (1908) by Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, later a vociferous supporter of the Nazi regime. However, most books that Beckett bought and read belong to that wide category of popular literature appealing to an educated middle-class readership. This is hardly surprising considering the cultural circumstances, as Beckett based his reading on both publishers’ lists and almanacs (which by 1936 would have been devoid of ‘undesirable’ literature), and the recommendations of people he met. The majority of people Beckett encountered and conversed with – including many active in the visual arts – were of bourgeois orientation. Although conversations with art historians and other intellectuals touched on international writers such as Proust or Ibsen, or German authors such as Rilke or Stefan George, most people admired a literature that was essentially nationalist and realistic in its eschewal of experimentation. Most of these writers, such as Ernst Wiechert, Hans Carossa and Paul Alverdes, are little discussed today, but were highly

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influential and popular in the 1930s, expressing beliefs and attitudes shared by a large proportion of the German population. Beckett’s awareness of the divide between healthy German writing and foreign decadence is illustrated by his comment following his reading of a PhD thesis by Irma Tiedtke on Proust: ‘But there is something magnificent in doing a doctorate in 1936 with a work on not merely an “exquisite”, but a nonAryan’ (SB to TM, 28 November 1936). The complex situation of the writer working within an oppressive cultural sphere is exemplified by the literary magazine Das Innere Reich, founded in 1934 by Paul Alverdes and Benno von Mechow who were under duress to declare their support of National Socialist cultural policies.14 Designed as a conservative monthly publication with a target audience of the educated middle class, an overview of contributors between 1934 and 1939 shows the efforts made by the journal to guarantee an image of allegiance to the regime while giving voice to opinions ranging from passive acceptance and doubt to faintly discernible rejection. When Beckett arrived in Germany in October 1936, his first entry in the ‘Science and Laboratory’ notebook, which he had been using for German vocabulary, records the prohibition of Das Innere Reich following its publication of an essay by Rudolf Thiel, who had portrayed Frederick the Great with less honour than was deemed appropriate (UoR MS5006, 13v; entry is dated 12 October 1936). Beckett proceeded to buy the November 1936 issue, which included, as he noted, ‘a promise to be good in future’ by the editors that secured the journal’s survival (GD, 12 November 1936). Nevertheless, Das Innere Reich remained a vehicle for non-Nazi writers to publish works that did not openly support the aims of Hitler’s Germany. Rejecting all direct reference to the events of the day, the journal retreated into an aesthetic distance, although still occasionally engaging in what Walter Benjamin in 1936 termed the ‘aestheticising’ of war.15 Beckett was reminded of the journal during his reading of Hölderlin in 1938, as he annotated in his personal copy a passage from Hyperion with the words ‘fit for Das I.R. [Innere Reich]’ – the passage in question being ‘Von ihren Taten nähren die Söhne der Sonne sich; sie leben vom Sieg; mit eignem Geist ermuntern sie sich, und ihre Kraft ist ihre Freude [The sons of the sun nourish themselves from their deeds; they live on victory; their own spirit rouses them, and their strength is their joy]’ (Hölderlin 1930, 453). Towards the end of his German trip, Beckett met the journal’s editor, Paul Alverdes. His impression was of a ‘[p]leasant sturdy little man with strong face’ (GD, 30 March 1937). During their conversations, Alverdes related to Beckett the precise ambiguity at the heart of the position of the


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conservative writer in Nazi Germany. Referring to the disagreeable elements within National Socialism, he confessed ‘his hope of stranglehold being broken from inside Partei [Party] itself’, but also his belief of ‘Goebbels’ entire competence to judge what is good & what not’ (GD, 31 March 1937). Alverdes proceeded to invite Beckett to contribute an ‘English letter on contemporary lyric’ to a future ‘English number’ of Das Innere Reich, which was also to contain translations from Yeats but ultimately never appeared (GD, 30 March 1937).

Beckett and Contemporary German Fiction Beckett’s reading of Alverdes during his journey represented one of the few rewarding moments of his efforts to acquaint himself with contemporary German fiction. Early on in his stay, Beckett read Die Pfeiferstube, based on Alverdes’s wartime experience of suffering a throat wound which hospitalised him in 1915. Although often classified as a war novel, the book largely ignores external events to concentrate on the brotherhood of three soldiers convalescing from throat wounds, and their friendship with an English soldier suffering from the same injury. Beckett thought the book ‘excellent’, but, as always attentive to how authors finished their books, thought ‘the kiss of peace at end’ a mistake (GD, 14 November 1936).16 The autobiographical element at the root of Alverdes’s fiction can also be observed in the fiction of two other modern authors Beckett read in Germany, Hans Carossa and Ernst Wiechert. This is particularly the case with Carossa, a practising doctor as well as an author, whose work consistently eradicates the border between fiction and recollection.17 Carossa, whose frame of reference is Goethe, endeavoured to follow the model of the Wahlverwandschaften’s series of ‘elective affinities’, or inner relationships between people that determine the individual’s growth. Beckett first read Carossa’s Geheimnisse des reifen Lebens, published in 1936, on the recommendation of Axel Kaun (GD, 15 January 1937). Carossa explores the psychology of human relationships in diary form, and the book had contained some merit in Beckett’s opinion, as he noted in his own diary: ‘Lovely passages, especially cadences, but terribly slow & too highly wrought’ (GD, 28 February 1937). Beckett was, judging by his diary entries, attracted to the wistful tone of the narrator, an older man slightly out of touch with the changes occurring around him and with a nostalgic bent towards the world as it once was. Although usually dismissive of sentimental narration, certain passages nonetheless clearly appealed to Beckett, such as the story of the

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dying schoolmaster who sets his pupils an impossible equation with the advice that there are infinite solutions. Despite finding the book ultimately tedious, the praise Carossa received one evening during a discussion led Beckett to read two further books by the author in the final weeks of his sojourn: Führung und Geleit, another book of memoirs which Beckett judged ‘poor’, feeling ‘bored to extinction by war section’ (GD, 23 and 24 March 1937), and the ‘incredibly rotten’ Der Arzt Gion (GD, 27 March 1937). Where Carossa appealed to the middle-class reader, with his emphasis on humanistic values derived from Goethe, Ernst Wiechert’s prose admits a mythological element drawn from the East Prussian forests of his homeland. Although Wiechert would later spend some time in Buchenwald for his protest against the imprisonment of Martin Niemöller, at the time of Beckett’s journey he had not yet fallen from grace, and was admired for the patriotic stance based on his wartime experiences that was visible in his books. At an early stage, Beckett read Wiechert’s Das Spiel vom deutschen Bettelmann at the instigation of Fräulein Schön, a fellow guest at his pension in Hamburg. From the outset of his trip, Beckett seems to have viewed the entirety of contemporary German nationalism and its accompanying cultural manifestations with scepticism, defining the book as ‘sentimental sententiousness and tendentiousness’ (GD, 20 October 1936). During subsequent discussions with Fräulein Schön revolving around Wiechert, Beckett responded to her efforts to convert him to the new German ‘Lebensanschauung’ by stating that ‘I intend to buy entire works of Schopenhauer’ (GD, 24 October 1936). Although Beckett proceeded to read Wiechert’s Hirtennovelle and to buy Der Todeskandidat, the negative evaluations in the diaries and the complete lack of reference to Carossa or Wiechert in his otherwise detailed correspondence with MacGreevy show how little Beckett took from this reading, except for an improvement in his German reading skills. Indeed, only one line from any of the contemporary German books he read appears in his artistic notebooks, namely Wiechert’s expression ‘Des Tods müde Hand’ in the Whoroscope notebook (GD, 20 October 1936; WN, 34r).18 Considering the wide gulf, both in terms of subject and form, separating Beckett’s own prose fiction, be it Dream of Fair to Middling Women or Murphy, from the contemporary texts he was reading in Germany, it is hardly surprising Beckett found little to write home about. Confronted with sentimental utterances of heroism, elegies of landscape and romantic nostalgia, his response to the traditionalism inherent in the works can only be compared with his own condemnation of the Irish ‘antiquarians, delivering with the altitudinous complacency of the Victorian Gael the


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Ossianic goods’ (Dis, 70). The reasons for Beckett’s impatience with Irish literature as stated in the 1934 essay ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ is not unlike his rejection of much of modern German literature, in particular the falsity of the ‘cut-and-dried sanctity and loveliness’ (71). In a letter written to Günter Albrecht (30 March 1937), Beckett referred to Carossa’s ‘complete flight into style’, and delivered an implicit condemnation of the lack of sincerity and substance. That Beckett often measured books by sincerity is further evident in his reading of Georg Britting’s collection of short stories, Die Kleine Welt am Strom, in which he found an ‘[a]dmirable atmosphere’ which was ‘genuinely pathetic. Trodden with shame & compassion’ (GD, 30 March 1937).

Necessary and Unnecessary Journeys With Murphy completed by the summer of 1936, Beckett’s travels through Germany in many ways mirrored his own continuing progression and journey as a writer. Even if his confrontation with contemporary German literature did not furnish him with material that could be incorporated into any new creative enterprise, as his reading had done, for example, in the writing of Murphy, it did offer him a kind of ‘negative knowledge’, of how not to proceed. Moreover, his reading of what he describes in a letter to Mary Manning Howe as ‘belated German romantic novels’, namely Walter Bauer’s Notwendige Reise and Hermann Hesse’s Demian, gave him a further angle from which to approach various aesthetic concerns (SB to MM, 18 January 1937). Beckett’s discussion of these two novels in his diary gives a rare insight into his creative thinking. Beckett’s initial response to Hesse’s Demian (1919) was positive, as he deemed it ‘so far as I have read very astute, elegant & entertaining’ (GD, 18 January 1937). There are several passages in the first half of the book which possibly explain this evaluation. The protagonist Emil Sinclair, for example, prefers the damned thief to the saved, as he shows more character and sincerity by not grovelling at the prospect of death. Moreover, he possesses sentiments that are reminiscent of Beckett’s own professed emotions, a turning away from the world and a similar love of the solitary pleasures of walking: Ich gefiel mir in der Rolle, übertrieb sie noch, und grollte mich in eine Einsamkeit hinein, die nach aussen beständig wie männlichste Weltverachtung aussah, während ich heimlich oft verzehrenden Anfällen

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von Wehmut und Verzweiflung unterlag. . . . . Ich hatte mir angewöhnt, bei jedem Wetter kleine, denkerische Spaziergänge zu machen, auf denen ich oft eine Art von Wonne genoss, eine Wonne voll Melancholie, Weltverachtung und Selbstverachtung. [I enjoyed myself in the part, exaggerated it even, and worked myself into a solitude which outwardly appeared consistently as the manliest contempt for the world, while I secretly often suffered from bouts of melancholy and desperation . . . I had got in the habit of taking small, thoughtful walks in every weather, during which I enjoyed a kind of bliss, a bliss filled with melancholy, contempt for the world and contempt for myself]. (Hesse 1977, 68–9; my translation) However close such a passage, with its contradictory feelings, may be to Beckett’s emotional statements in his letter to MacGreevy of 10 March 1935, the second half of the book pleased him less.19 The main reason for this was the book’s structure, which frames the autobiographical story of Emil Sinclair’s youth. In an extended discussion of the formal aspects of the book, Beckett felt ‘it is dishonest throughout, not because it is a transcript, but because it gives itself out as a transcript’ (GD, 18 January 1937).20 Applied to Beckett’s own writing, this statement looks both forwards and backwards. Beyond once again emphasising the theme of sincerity, there is an echo here of Beckett’s own notes written towards Murphy in the Whoroscope notebook, where an entry comments ‘this is the prologue. But call it not so’ (5r). Beckett’s criticism of Demian’s structural device of presenting itself as a transcript or as a ‘found’ document looks forward to his own postwar work. The text of Watt similarly purports to be a manuscript, through references to unintelligible parts of the manuscript, and the implication in Malone Dies is similarly that the text we are reading is the one Malone is writing in bed. The discussion is in keeping with Beckett’s overall concern with literary self-representation and the relationship between fiction and autobiography. But, in accordance with Beckett’s 1937 admonition, Watt or Malone Dies do not ‘give themselves out’ as transcripts but rather fulfil (unlike the earlier Dream) a further criteria expressed in the discussion of Demian: Never define a book, the critic has merely then to elaborate the contrary. Never for a second betray awareness of reader & critic. . . . Even the title must not give a direction. Thus Damian [sic] a good title, & Notwendige Reise a bad one, because all I need then prove is that it was not in the least necessary. It is impossible to controvert Murphy. (GD, 18 January 1937; Beckett’s emphasis)


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Beckett’s ruminations anticipate his use of what he termed ‘labels’ or names as titles for his novels, and in his diary entry he goes on to illustrate just why the title of Walter Bauer’s Notwendige Reise [Necessary Journey] is inadequate. We have already encountered Beckett’s thoughts on Bauer’s book in connection with his distrust of the Faustian Vorwärtsstreben: The inevitable business of course about the journey to self. . . . I fear he will find not himself in the end, but “God”, as Bauer “wir” [us]. Journey anyway the wrong figure. How can we travel to that from which one cannot move away. Das notwendige Bleiben [the necessary staying put] is more like it. (GD, 18 January 1937) The negation of any satisfactory realisation of any kind of metaphysical or psychological journey incorporates Beckett’s criticism of the psychoanalytical recovery of the hidden self as well as the transcendental application of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Yet it also contains a newly acquired knowledge in the ‘new planes of justification’ for the figure of Murphy being tied to the chair (SB to MM, 18 January 1937). Beckett proceeds to reassert his commitment to a quietist, even resigned, position: ‘That is also in the figure of Murphy in the chair, surrender to the thongs of self, a simple materialisation of self-bondage, acceptance of which is the fundamental unheroic’. This is contrasted by the ‘heroic’ attitude, what ‘these Germans see as a journey’, that is to say the attitude that strives to acknowledge at least the ‘possibility of escape, if not necessarily the fact’ (GD, 18 January 1937). Significantly, Beckett’s thoughts on the necessity of staying put coincide with his growing realisation that his own journey through Germany was turning out to be a failure. But there is a shift in emphasis in Beckett’s own view of Murphy, from what an early note in the Whoroscope notebook calls the ‘[d]ynamist ethic’ of the main character to the essential stasis visible in Beckett’s thoughts on Murphy in the chair (WN, 1r). Indeed, it is precisely the lack of motion or the denial of transcending a present state, of being still and not still stirring, which Beckett’s characters progressively aim to achieve. The trope of the journey remains central to Beckett’s postwar work, but is negated. Thus in Molloy, for example, the symbolic epic journey is unmasked as circularity without purpose, and in later texts the journey itself is abolished only to be finally replaced by the static images of his theatre and prose fiction. Beckett’s reading of modern German literature was not restricted to novels. Besides Rainer Maria Rilke (an encounter which will be discussed in Chapter 7), Beckett read Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s poetic drama Der Tor

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und der Tod. He condemned the thought of the piece, which records the dialogue between a man who realises he has never properly lived and Death, as ‘crass’ (GD, 23 November 1936). Nevertheless, Beckett transcribed two passages into his diary, of which one in particular appears to have touched an emotional chord: Ich hab mich so an Künstliches verloren, Dass ich die Sonne sah aus toten Augen, Und nicht mehr hörte, als durch tote Ohren: Stets schleppte ich den rätselhaften Fluch, Wie ganz bewusst, wie völlig unbewusst, Mit kleinem Leid u.[und] schaler Lust Mein Leben zu erleben wie ein Buch, Das man zur Hälft noch nicht u.[und] halb nicht mehr begreift, Und hinter dem der Sinn erst nach Lebendigem schweift [I have lost myself to artifice so much That I saw the sun through dead eyes, And did not hear but through dead ears: Always dragging along the mysterious curse, Completely conscious, completely unconscious, With minor pain and stale joy, To experience my life like a book, Partly not yet intelligible, partly no longer so, Solely beyond which the mind roams for life]. (GD, 23 November 1936) The entire passage seems to express Beckett’s own desire to break away from the artificial and move towards an authenticity of feeling. It reflects Beckett’s growing realisation that he had to move away from viewing his own experiences through the lens of literature and to reanimate, give shape, to the vitality of immediate experience. If Hofmannsthal did little on the whole to impress Beckett, Georg Trakl, a volume of whose poetry he bought towards the end of his stay, was more to his liking (GD, 3 March 1937). He must have read Trakl the following week, for during a conversation one evening he brought up Trakl, and commented in his diary how ‘lovely’ the poem ‘Winterabend’ was (GD, 11 March 1937). Beckett must have continued to be occupied with Trakl on his return to Ireland. In his letter to Axel Kaun dated July 1937 he asks whether an English edition of Trakl is in existence. It is possible that Beckett viewed a translation of Trakl as an alternative to the Ringelnatz


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selection he had just turned down. Indeed, the importance of the aesthetic programme formulated in the Kaun letter obscures Beckett’s ostensible reason for writing it in the first place. Having been hired by Rowohlt-Verlag in February 1937, Kaun tried to interest Beckett in translating a selection of Joachim Ringelnatz’s poetry into English, to be published by Faber. Beckett ultimately turned the job down, in the event unsurprisingly considering his adumbration of a ‘literature of the unword’ in the same letter, citing ‘disgust with Ringelnatz’s rhyming fury’ (Dis, 171).21 Nevertheless, the project attests to Beckett’s confidence regarding his knowledge of the German language. Yet finally, and to his mother’s disappointment, Beckett did not convert his German trip into anything of commercial value. His failure to do so is encapsulated by his response to his family’s enquiry into why his diary could not be used in the manner of Lafcadio Hearn, a nineteenth-century Irish writer who settled in, and wrote about, Japan: ‘ “Why don’t I submit my Lafcadio Hernia to Irishman’s Diary?” Why [?] is it customary to keep one’s fly buttoned?’ (GD, 4 January 1937).22

Chapter 6

Playing the Scales of Literature: Beckett’s ‘Notesnatching’

This discovery, which constituted the sole literary satisfaction of a long and patient life was made during the brief period accorded by James to a consideration of the celebrated passages of the more celebrated works of the most celebrated authors; a period which, after deduction of its numerous intermissions, cannot have fallen much short of 18 calendar months. (Samuel Beckett, Watt notebook 1, 31r) With his literary discovery of a text by Leopardi during his ‘brief period’ of literary pursuit, James takes his place in a long series of retired or former scholars making their appearance in Beckett’s work. Beckett may or may not have been thinking of his own time spent with ‘celebrated authors’ during his time as a student at Trinity College Dublin in this passage from the Watt notebooks. But Molloy’s recollection of the ‘days when I thought I would be well advised to educate myself’ reflects Beckett’s own movements during the 1930s, a decade in which the acquisition of knowledge was very much at the forefront of his mind (Mo, 86). The extant notebooks of the thirties, now enriched by those made available to scholars by Trinity in 2002, further reveal Beckett’s committed pursuit of material that would serve his writing as well as fulfil what seemed an unquenchable need to know and to understand. The increasing suspicion among critics that Beckett’s writing is intrinsically connected with his reading has, with such painstaking annotative work as Chris Ackerley’s ‘Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy’ (1997– 1998), John Pilling’s Companion to ‘Dream’ (2004a) and his edition of the Dream notebook (Beckett 1999), been substantiated beyond doubt. Indeed, Pilling’s assertion that ‘Dream simply could not have existed without the books which, and in which, Beckett had been reading’ can be expanded to include most of Beckett’s writing up to and including Murphy (Pilling 1998,

Beckett’s ‘Notesnatching’

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21). Moreover, it appears as if, especially in the early thirties, Beckett felt uncomfortable with his dependence on material deriving from other writers, and struggled to find a way in which to express himself without relying on things borrowed or stolen. In many ways these years are dominated by Beckett’s struggle with secondary material – how to acquire it and, once acquired, what to do with it – only gradually replaced by a struggle against any form of knowledge whatsoever. This is reflected in the notebooks themselves, or, rather, the manner in which Beckett takes notes from his reading. Indeed, there is a correlation between Beckett’s note-taking strategies and the texts which they serve. As such, these notebooks reveal the sources and impetuses underlying Beckett’s writing, but, significantly, also illustrate Beckett’s developing poetics.

‘Treasury of Nutshell Phrases’ In 1929, the first year in which Beckett saw publication, the separation between academic writing and creative writing seemed easy to maintain, as the difference between his essay on Joyce (‘Dante . . . Vico.Bruno..Joyce’) and the short story ‘Assumption’ illustrates. In an essay on Carducci, probably written as an undergraduate, Beckett clearly outlined the dangers of blurring the borders between the two approaches: Carducci, with all his erudition and complicated metres, was not a poet. His work is stamped with a desperate self conscious effort. He is an elephant jumping ponderously through a hoop. The highest poetry has been written in simple language and with a simply constructed system. The French realised this, and the verses of Ronsard, Racine, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire are the verses of men who knew what they wanted to say, what they could not help saying, and who said it with that direct and inevitable simplicity of language . . . Carducci produced poetry by sheer force of intellect. (TCD MS10965, 15v–16r) However, Beckett had to admit at an early stage that more often than not his intellect was writing much of his poetry, a fact ostensibly visible in ‘Whoroscope’. This elicited a rather disheartened comment in ‘Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin’ (published in 1931 in the European Caravan), where the speaker confesses ‘I am ashamed / of all clumsy artistry’ (Harvey 1970, 281). By its own admission, the poem is ‘inclined to be rather too self-conscious’, thus committing the very crime

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Beckett detected in Carducci. The extent to which the early poetry relied on extraneous material can be measured by Beckett’s comment to Lawrence Harvey in the 1960s regarding the early poem ‘Yoke of Liberty’: ‘all the images in it are my own’ (Harvey 1970, 314); and by Seán Lawlor’s exhaustive studies of the allusions and intertextual references in Beckett’s early poetry (Lawlor 2008). At the same time, Beckett was trying his utmost to shun erudition and the academic apparatus in his essay Proust, undoubtedly guided by what he perceived as his subject’s ‘anti-intellectualism’ (PTD, 85). Nevertheless, the essay relies on extraneous material to a large extent. Yet Beckett was at pains to tell MacGreevy that ‘it isn’t scholarly & primo secundo enough’ for publication (SB to TM, undated [17 September 1930]). By failing to acknowledge the use of phrases and ideas borrowed from elsewhere, the essay dismissed the wide reading and thus the very academic discourse on which it depended. In part this unscholarly approach stemmed from Beckett’s growing dissatisfaction with his teaching at Trinity, stating categorically in a letter to MacGreevy of 11 March 1931: ‘I don’t want to be a professor’. With this in mind, Beckett would hardly have been pleased had he been able to read Chatto & Windus’s reader’s report on Proust: ‘as soon as he starts explaining him [Proust] he drops into a complicated, rather technical kind of prose, which reminds one of the proverbial Teutonic professor’.1 Fundamentally, Beckett’s use of Schopenhauer as a filter through which to approach Proust had a critical impact on his creative writing. By internalising Schopenhauer’s thought, itself expressive of his own temperament, Beckett’s writing would henceforth include a philosophical layer that was in any event not inimical to simple or direct expression. Beckett also encountered in Schopenhauer an attitude towards secondary material that he would increasingly make his own, commending the Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit‘for its originality and guarantee of wide reading – transformed’, something he also found in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (SB to TM, 25 August 1930). Thus the very fabric of Dream depends on Beckett’s wide reading, the text at times approaching the status of pastiche with its extensive use of quotations and allusions. In 1931 and 1932 Beckett was reading mainly with Dream in mind, ‘phrase-hunting’ for any material that could somehow be incorporated into the text (SB to TM, 25 January 1931). So much so, in fact, that reading the Odyssey ‘free of all pilfering velleities’ in September 1931 formed a surprising exception (SB to TM, undated [late September 1931]), even if Homer ultimately still turned up in Dream like everything else. The inextricable connection between reading, note-taking


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and writing is emphasised by Beckett’s comment in a letter to MacGreevy that ‘I can’t write anything at all, can’t imagine even the shape of a sentence, nor take notes’ (SB to TM, 8 November 1931).2 The accretive and cumulative method of composition underlying Dream attests to Joyce’s influence.3 Moreover, Joyce’s example is also evident in the nature of Beckett’s notes themselves, which tend to be short, fragmented and, moreover, unsourced. Beckett not only rendered his sources anonymous but also principally relied on secondary literature, as if to legitimise borrowing material that had, as it were, already been borrowed. Corresponding to Belacqua’s statement in ‘Yellow’ that he ‘had read the phrase somewhere and liked it and made it his own’ (MPTK, 152), the appropriation of this material is often achieved through the misquotation from sources as much as the use of ‘the tag and the ready-made’ (Dream, 47). Yet however enabling his reading proved to be during the writing of Dream, Beckett’s letters to MacGreevy also reveal an underlying sense of guilt at being ‘soiled, too, by the old demon of notesnatching’ (SB to TM, undated [early August 1931]). More importantly, Beckett was aware that the sheer volume of ‘butin verbal’ [verbal booty] he was amassing was threatening to ‘strangle anything I’m likely to want to say’ (SB to TM, 8 November 1931). Precisely what it was that he ‘wanted to say’ was probably not even quite clear to Beckett himself, but in keeping with the overall autobiographical tenor of the book, the very tension between any intended message and the extraneous material was inscribed into the text. This is particularly evident in the obscure passage dealing with Belacqua’s visit to a brothel (described by way of the ‘torture chamber’) and a possible sexual (whether active or passive by way of voyeurism) encounter in a wood. During the course of this revelatory passage the narrator interrupts himself to ‘wonder did I do well to leave my notes at home, in 39 [Beckett’s address at TCD] under the east wind’ (Dream, 72). Unable to use his notes, the narrator is obliged to continue ‘what we were saying’ before once again holding back by emphasising ‘I won’t tell you everything’. Yet revelation ultimately proves stronger than concealment in this passage, despite the lingering doubt inherent in ‘Oh did I do well to leave my notes at home’ (Dream, 72).4 It thus seems as if the erudite layer of references acted as a shield or a filter through which autobiographical and potentially intimate material could be expressed, or at least saved from sentimental disclosure. There is a curious counterpart to this strategy in Gide, who similarly urges himself to read Stendhal, Swift and the Encyclopaedia in order ‘to dry up my heart’ – ‘there is enough possibility of tears in my soul to irrigate thirty books’.5 Amazed by the ‘amount of tears and twilight in this book’

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(Dream, 149), Beckett pursued this technique of channelling his emotions through a close correlation between reading and writing, seemingly unwilling to unleash the full force of his thoughts and emotions directly onto the page.

‘Reading Wildly’ In the four years following the completion of Dream in the summer of 1932, Beckett intensified his already firmly established routine of ‘notesnatching’. The surviving notebooks that he kept before his trip to Germany in 1936 can be roughly divided into two categories. On the one hand there is the successor to the Dream notebook, the Whoroscope notebook, kept roughly between 1932 and 1938 with a similar intent to collate material that would feed into the process of writing. The entries made in this notebook up until 1936 resemble those in the earlier notebook in that much of the material is unsourced, usually only consisting of single words, a phrase or a short passage, and these often transformed during notation. To borrow Rousseau’s comment in the Reveries, Beckett was ‘keeping a record of my readings without trying to reduce them to a system’ (Rousseau 1979, 33). Beckett grafted notes from both notebooks into his writing, ticking them off as he went along, although in the case of the Whoroscope notebook this was only done (for Murphy) in the case of the section at the back of the book designated ‘For Interpolation’ (see Pilling 2006b). These notes on Restoration drama and the ‘University Wits’, kept for inclusion in Murphy, derive from a systematic reading procedure, despite their fragmented and often unsourced appearance in the notebook. Beyond outlining the major works of the ‘University Wits’ in a separate notebook (TCD MS10971/3), Beckett in his notes taken from a book on English literary history (TCD MS10970) ticked off (in a different pen) works from which the quotations in the Whoroscope ‘For Interpolation’ section are taken, such as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine or Thomas Dekker’s Old Fortunatus (see Pilling 2004b). Yet, unlike the Dream notebook, and with the exception of the draft outline to Murphy and the ‘For Interpolation’ section, the Whoroscope notebook contains a wealth of miscellaneous material which Beckett could only have envisaged using at some unspecified future point in time. Apart from the Mauthner notes contained there, Beckett continued to use the Whoroscope notebook in a largely non-syntagmatic manner until 1938. This can be related to Beckett’s inauguration in 1935 of a new method of


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notesnatching from specifically literary texts. The excerpts taken from Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit in March (SB to TM, 10 March [1935]), and, to a lesser degree, from Rabelais in September (SB to TM, undated [late September 1935]) of that year witness a move from noting merely short quotations to longer transcriptions, a shift visible in the Faust notes and culminating in the material collated towards the writing of the play on Dr Johnson, Human Wishes. On the other hand there exists a large corpus of thematic transcriptions, taken specifically with the acquisition of knowledge or with an eye on personal application (the two went hand in hand) rather than with any compositional process in mind.6 These extensive notes, including, for example, over 200 pages on philosophy, witness Beckett harnessing knowledge by reading introductory works such as Robertson’s History of German Literature, Windelband’s A History of Philosophy and Woodworth’s Contemporary Schools of Psychology. From these sources, often acknowledged, Beckett excerpted in chronological order long passages, often verbatim. The only personal intervention occurs when Beckett summarises and he mostly endeavours to maintain the structural integrity of the original. On the whole, these notes exemplify Beckett’s academic approach to his reading long after his departure from, or rather desertion of, Trinity in late 1931. This is underlined by his notation of bibliographic details of potential further reading. Frequently relying on the syllabuses of Trinity to guide him in his reading, as was probably the case with Robertson, Beckett also spent a lot of time doing research in various libraries. He thus read Plato, Aristotle and the Gnostics in the British Museum in July or August 1932 (SB to TM, 4 August 1932), and explored the work of Geulincx in Trinity College Library in 1936. Considering this large bulk of material, it is not surprising that Murphy turned out to be a rather more cerebral affair than Dream had been. To be sure, Dream also relies on erudite and recondite references, but they are thrown at the text as much as incorporated into it, and the book as a whole is written from the belly, so to speak. Murphy, on the other hand, although at pains to undermine any system of rational coherence, depends more fully on a conscious amalgam of philosophical thought, psychological termini and literary history. Thus the loose jottings and literary quotations are grafted onto the surface of the text, whereas the more conceptual material deriving from Beckett’s philosophical, psychological and other reading function both on the surface as well as at a deeper textual level. At the same time, the urge to conceal the borrowings remained very much an issue. As the outline to Murphy in the Whoroscope notebook emphasised, ‘keep whole Dantesque analogy out of sight’ (2r).

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Despite the obvious differences between the two books, Murphy depended on extraneous material as much as Dream had done. This is particularly evident during Beckett’s struggle, lasting several months, to finish the book. During an entire series of letters, written after his return to Dublin from London in December 1935, potential progress is linked with the endeavour to settle into ‘a room with all my books’ (SB to TM, 31 December 1935). With no visible improvement forthcoming, Beckett resorted in March 1936, as he often did during such periods, to ‘reading wildly all over the place’, citing in this same letter, ‘Goethe’s Iphigenia & then Racine’s to remove the taste, Chesterfield, Boccaccio, Fischart, Ariosto & Pope’ (SB to TM, 25 March 1936). His reading of Geulincx in that same month, again coupled with extended note-taking, initiated the final push towards bringing Murphy to a close in June 1936. With Murphy finally off his chest and with the German trip drawing closer, Beckett started a new notebook. The ‘Clare Street’ notebook, which is inscribed ‘13/7/36’, was kept with the distinct aim to record all things German, and is exclusively written in that language. Beyond a few lists of vocabulary, it contains various smaller passages dealing with personal matters as well as translations of the poem ‘Cascando’, Samuel Johnson’s letter to Lord Chesterfield and an adaptation of the Rinaldo and Angelica story from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (reprinted in Dittrich et al. 2006). With several entries dated, the ‘Clare Street’ notebook can be regarded as a generic predecessor to the German diaries. Although guided by practical considerations, Beckett’s departure from his habitual strategy of notetaking results in a synthesis of autobiographical experiences and artistic material. Significantly, Beckett was, during this period, not reading with an eye on any immediate creative enterprise, as the long transcriptions from Goethe’s Faust illustrate. Beckett took three notebooks with him to Germany in September 1936, the Whoroscope notebook, the ‘Clare Street’ notebook and a vocabulary book, all designed to act once again as artistic receptacles to be filled with material for incorporation into future writing. Although all three notebooks contain material inscribed during the journey, at times repetitiously, Beckett proceeded to concentrate on using the German diaries as a receptacle for all kinds of note-taking. With no definite creative idea in mind, the endless lists of paintings and the daily structure imposed on experience by diary writing were presumably designed to counter Beckett’s overriding feelings of personal and artistic uncertainty. The meticulous cross-referencing, discussions about attributions and detailed documentation of the paintings seen in Germany show that Beckett’s mind was still functioning along ‘scholarly’ lines, even if such an


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attitude had acquired the nature of a reflex. This did not hinder him from continuing to disparage the ‘tedious academic distinctions’ he encountered in Irma Tiedtke’s thesis on Proust, Symbole und Bilder im Werke Marcel Prousts, discovering ‘[c]lassification, definitions + paradigms, but never a whiff of Proust as ARTIST’ (GD, 20 and 28 November 1936).7 It explains Beckett’s fondness for the line ‘Zitto! Zitto! das nur das Publikum nichts merke! [Hush! Hush! as long as the public notices nothing]’ (WN, 83). Taken from Schopenhauer’s Über die Vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, the phrase encapsulates Schopenhauer’s attack on the German philosophical community for ignoring his work.8 That Beckett enjoyed satirising academia, especially of the German variety, is further evident from his play on the word ‘Gelehrte [scholars]’, changing it in his review of Devlin’s poems (1938) to ‘Geleerte [emptied out people]’ (Dis, 91).9 Fundamentally, the German diaries reflect Beckett’s efforts at this time to move away from erudition towards a poetics based more directly on the emotional dimension of the self. This shift is mirrored in the personal tone and lack of overt learnedness of the poem ‘Cascando’ (written July 1936) as well as the creative impulses arising in Germany. Beckett’s difficulties in implementing any such new aesthetic direction towards impoverishment, minimalism and self-writing are evident in the renewed reliance after the German trip on an academic approach to creative writing. Beckett filled three large notebooks with material drawn from a variety of sources during his work (between summer 1937 and 1940) towards the play on Samuel Johnson, Human Wishes, the step backwards undoubtedly borne out of a sense of desperation at the lack of new writing. During this time of lasting disorientation, particularly following his return to Dublin in April 1937, academia probably seemed at least some kind of solution, as Beckett’s application for an Italian Lectureship in Cape Town suggests: ‘I applied last week for the Lectureship in Italian at Cape Town . . . I am really indifferent about where I go and what I do, since I don’t seem to be able or to want to write any more, or let us be modest and say for the moment’ (SB to TM, 4 August 1937). Such a move would however hardly have been an enticing one to Beckett, particularly considering his condemnation of T. S. Eliot’s essay on Dante in the same letter as ‘insufferably condescending, restrained & professorial’.

Remnants of Learning In January 1896, Jules Renard recorded in his journal that to ‘take notes is to play the scales of literature’ (1964, 80). Even as Beckett’s notesnatching

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was replaced after the Second World War by draft and production notebooks, with only the occasional fragment recorded here and there from his reading, he continued to listen to and use the extensive material recorded during the 1930s.10 Responding to a query by Alan Schneider regarding the ‘Old Greek’ in Endgame, Beckett elucidated the reference from memory, but also stated ‘I can’t find my notes on the pre-Socratics’, a comment revealing the lasting value of those hours spent transcribing in the thirties.11 The late text All Strange Away also refers to the existence of these philosophy notes, and describes them accurately when referring to ‘ancient Greek philosophers ejaculated with place of origin when possible suggesting pursuit of knowledge at some period’ (TFN, 78). Beckett transferred his habit of ‘looking back through our notes’ to his characters (Dream, 189). One such instance occurs in a passage from Malone Dies, when the rain falling on Macmann is described as ‘pelting down on his palms, also called the hollows of the hands, or the flats, it all depends’ (MD, 70). Besides the more obvious reference in the same book to his journey to Germany in the allusion to ‘Tiepolo’s ceiling in Würzburg’ (63), the indecision pertaining to the proper term for the anatomy of the hand comes from Beckett’s reading of a collection of commemorative essays on Rilke in 1937 (see Buchheit 1931, 82). Dismissing most of the essays in his diary as ‘bilge’, he does however comment on Gide’s contribution, a dry account of Rilke’s distress anlässlich [on the occasion of] his translation of Enfant Prodigue on finding in Grimms dictionary no proper word for palm of hand, or rather anlässlich his translation of Michelangelo’s Sonnets. Handrücken [back of the hand] gibt’s [exists] (but hardly in English!) but for palm only Handfläche [flats of the hand] or the archaic Handteller [hollow of the hand] which he rejects. (GD, 12 February 1937) Without dismissing the possibility that Beckett may have remembered this anecdote, it seems more probable that he referred back to the diary (as well as to the Whoroscope notebook) for material when he came to writing Malone Dies.12 Malone is one among many Beckett characters who have enjoyed some kind of education, and can remember fragments of past learning. Thus Belacqua in the short story ‘Echo’s Bones’ is able to quote ‘rags of Latin flogged into [him] at school’, as befits a ‘Master of Arts’ (EB, 13–14). Murphy was also an erstwhile scholar, of theology, and moreover ‘one of the elect, who require everything to remind them of something else’


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(Mu, 42). Molloy had probably been the most tenacious in his intellectual enquiries: Yes, I once took an interest in astronomy, I don’t deny it. Then it was geology that killed a few years for me. The next pain in the balls was anthropology and the other disciplines, such as psychiatry, that are connected with it, disconnected, then connected again, according to the latest discoveries . . . In the end it was magic that had the honour of my ruins, and still today, when I walk there, I find its vestiges. (Mo, 37–8) Molloy’s choice of magic over more traditional fields of learning is of course reminiscent of the wandering scholar, Faust. Beckett later in life looked back on the 1930s, with its intense note-taking enterprise, as a period during which he thought he ‘had to equip myself intellectually’ (Juliet 1995, 150). Yet even as his reliance on any such knowledge ‘collapsed’, remnants of his erudition could never be entirely eradicated from his writing as he continued to rely on ‘dear scraps recorded somewhere’ (HII, 20). As Mephistopheles tells Faust: ‘Dir steckt der Doktor noch im Leib [There sticks . . . / The Doctor in thy carcase yet]’ (UoR MS5004, 43r; Faust, I. 3277; Goethe 1926, 113).

Chapter 7

Beckett’s Journal of a Melancholic and Other Writing

Whey of Words The completion of Murphy in late June 1936, after a long struggle to find an adequate ending, was accompanied by an audible sigh of relief. ‘I am very tired, of it & words generally’ Beckett remarked to MacGreevy (SB to TM, 27 June 1936), a feeling that would see him working without much of an idea of where he was headed until Watt began to emerge in early 1941. Beckett inscribed this disenchantment with the basic tools of his trade – words – in the poem ‘Cascando’, written less than a month after Murphy had been brought to a close. This July 1936 poem reflects Beckett’s move towards the ‘spontaneous combustion of the spirit’ advocated four years earlier (SB to TM, 18 October [1932]). In the opening lines of ‘Cascando’, ‘why not merely the despaired of / occasion / of wordshed’, Beckett affirms the legitimacy of admitting an unadulterated emotional statement into his art (SP, 35). This first overtly personal poem, the ‘occasion of wordshed’ lying in giving vent to his unrequited feelings of love for Betty Farley Stockton, represents something of a watershed in Beckett’s writing, both artistically and personally. ‘Cascando’ is essentially an emotional utterance, unencumbered by the erudition that had previously cast a distancing veil over both the occasion and emotional content of his writing.1 Written at a time when Beckett’s thinking revolved nearly exclusively around all things German, the poem’s emotional directness and absence of recondite references reflects those previously influenced by German literature, such as ‘Da tagte es’. During his reading of Dichtung und Wahrheit in 1935, Beckett had transcribed Goethe’s definition of the ‘occasional’ poem, the Gelegenheitsgedicht, as the ‘ächteste aller Dichtarten [most genuine of all kinds of poetry]’ (TCD MS10971/1, 56v). Indeed, ‘Cascando’ includes several echoes of Goethe’s autobiography. Thus Beckett had recorded in his notebook

Beckett’s ‘Journal of a Melancholic’

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Goethe’s description of how the noise of writing with an ink pen rather than a pencil ‘mich zerstreute u. ein kleines Produkt in der Geburt erstickte [disoriented me and aborted a little conception at its birth]’ (TCD MS10971/1, 68r). This reflects Beckett’s own question ‘is it not better abort than be barren’, and the poem’s notion of the presence of past loves and past separations also finds a correlative passage in Beckett’s notes from Dichtung und Wahrheit: Nichts aber veranlasst mehr diesen Lebensüberdruss [Überdruss], als die Wiederkehr der Liebe. Die erste Liebe, sagt man mit Recht, sei die einzige: denn in der zweiten und durch die zweite geht schon der höchste Sinn der Liebe verloren. Der Begriff des Ewigen und Unendlichen, der sie eigentlich hebt und trägt, ist zerstört, sie erscheint vergänglich wie alles Wiederkehrende. [Nothing occasions this weariness (of life) more than the return of love. The first love, it is rightly said, is the only one, for with the second, and by the second, the highest sense of love is already lost. The conception of the eternal and the infinite, which elevates and supports it, is destroyed, and it appears transient like everything else that recurs]. (TCD MS10971/1, 63r–63v; Goethe 1891, I, 503)2 The tone of Goethe’s passage strikingly encapsulates the weary movement of Beckett’s poem. At the same time, however, ‘Cascando’ achieves, despite the ‘bones the old loves’ still being present, a sense of cautious hope of renewal, of moving on, of being able to love again (SP, 35). Yet while the validity of the fragile hope in renewal is explored, the language in which it is expressed is examined and found wanting. Reminiscent of the reference to the ‘blabby word’ ‘Herz’ [heart] several years before (SB to TM, 29 May 1931), the poem’s ‘stale words’ anticipate Beckett’s increasing preoccupation with the inadequacy of language (SP, 36). This in turn leads Beckett to comment in his July 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, suitably written in German, on how it was getting ‘immer schwieriger, ja sinnloser, ein offizielles Englisch zu schreiben [more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English]’ (Dis, 52, 171). In the months leading up to his trip to Germany, Beckett initially sought to solve this problem of the ‘unalterable / whey of words’ (SP, 36) by making an early foray into a foreign language. In Beckett’s own translation of ‘Cascando’ into German, the spurned love of the English version is replaced by a focus on ‘words’. The shortened lines and the insertion of

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punctuation in the German version, made on the 18 August 1936 (the same day Beckett finished reading the first part of Faust), give the poem a more clear-cut structure.3 Moreover, whereas the English version pinpoints the problem of communication in the temporal space of ‘saying again’, Beckett’s German translation shifts the emphasis to language itself. As Thomas Hunkeler has pointed out in his excellent discussion of the German translation of ‘Cascando’ (2000, 35–6), Beckett replaces ‘saying again’, which occurs three times in the English version, with a single ‘Sie wiederholen’ [They repeat], followed by the more explicit ‘Die alten Worte’ [the old words], ‘Die grauen Worte’ [the grey words] and ‘Die schalen Worte’ [the stale/empty words]. The insistent concentration on the ‘word’ is further emphasised in section 3, where it appears again with the attributes ‘faul’ [lazy] and ‘schal’ [empty/stale]. Indeed, the repeated use of the word ‘Worte’ combined with adjectives of failure intensifies the sense of the impossibility of communication.

Feeling Nothing: The Ohlsdorf Cemetery Beckett’s impending departure for Germany at the end of September 1936 must have appeared to him as a possibility to reverse ‘the trickle down hill’ smothering any ‘effort to work’ (SB to TM, 9 September [1936]). If Germany and German writing had in the past enabled a satisfying outlet for personal experiences, then a prolonged exposure could potentially offer a new creative impetus. Beckett seemed receptive to instances of creative stimulus during his first few weeks in Hamburg. Encouraged by the writing of ‘Cascando’, a poem with which he seemed unusually content, it was poetry that preoccupied him during the early part of his trip.4 His visit to the graveyard in Ohlsdorf on the outskirts of Hamburg offered an initial favourable occasion. He spent a long time walking among the graves, the atmosphere stirring something within him. Beckett’s diary entry describing his visit betrays a more literary style, emphasising his statement that ‘I thought a poem would be there’ (GD, 25 October 1936). Having referred to the place as being ‘[a]live with graves’, he tried to capture the mood of the cemetery: Strange banners on the newly earthed. One bedraggled crape fillet all on its own. Yellow leaves & red berries. Young poplars of incredible delicacy, almost bare of leaves, sheathed in their branches. Dull golden larches & glaucus pines. Heather on graves (but in bunches), roses . . . One Liebespaar


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[loving couple]. Fish in pond being fed. Swans. A [erasure] small old man sidles determinedly into a nook, [erasure] behind a yew hedge, facing a piece d’eau, [erasure] with the air of a regular weekend mourner, a Leidtragender Trostsuchend [erasure] und findender [sufferer/bereaved seeking and finding consolation]. (GD, 25 October 1936) Regardless of its concise and abbreviated tone, Beckett’s efforts at something more than simple notation are illustrated by the large number of erasures in the passage. Yet despite being reminded of something by ‘the noise of my steps in the leaves’, Beckett left without having found the desired creative inspiration. Beckett’s comments in his diary equate this failure to capitalise on what seemed a promising experience with an absence of emotional sensitivity: ‘I feel nothing’ (GD, 25 October 1936). Having vowed to return to the cemetery, sensing a ‘[b]ig poem, with a little pains’, Ohlsdorf remained in Beckett’s mind in the following weeks. But the next time Beckett mentioned the Ohlsdorf cemetery in his diary, he had replaced the idea of writing a poem with an outline for an article: ‘Must try & [write] article on Friedhof [cemetery]. With special ref.[erence] to giant Crematorium’ (GD, 30 October 1936). This shift may have been precipitated by his receipt of a copy of the Irish Times, which his mother sent him throughout his trip, the day after his visit to the cemetery. Beckett felt that her sending him the newspaper was ‘designed to stimulate me into feuilletons’ (GD, 26 October 1936). In a desperate effort to counter the absence of feeling and of spontaneous creativity, Beckett resorted to the old strategy of reading in order to write. He proceeded to read two accounts of the cemetery in the main library, the Staatsbibliothek, taking extensive notes5 and subsequently stating his intention in a diary entry: ‘Another long visit there & then perhaps an article. Tone: cold elegiac. Code Napoléon. Precise placings of preposterous Tatsachen [facts]’ (GD, 5 November 1936). Beckett’s notes are indeed a mass of ‘preposterous facts’ concerning the cemetery: the wildlife to be found there, the technical data of the crematorium, the history of its construction and the amount of dead in the various sections, all conspiring to present a ‘cold’ (if not stiff) account of the location. This ‘elegiac’ tone is underlined by the reference to Napoleon’s 1804 ‘Code Civil’, granting personal freedom, legislative equality, private property and civil marriage, and recalls Beckett’s notes taken on Napoleon in the Dream notebook.6 Beckett must have thought of the Code Civil on noting that the cemetery is nonsectarian and admits Jews (an unusual situation), and that the individual plot owner must subordinate his grave design to the general consensus. More important here, however, is the

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reference to the Code Civil, to which Stendhal compared his dry style of writing. As John Pilling has shown (1996, 56–62), Beckett was very interested in Stendhal in the early 1930s, having first encountered Le rouge et le noir at Trinity. Beckett returned to reading Stendhal at precisely those moments when he was struggling with his own writing. There is a reference to Le rouge et le noir in a letter of late 1931 to MacGreevy in which he refers to his problems with keeping Dream going: ‘I started yet again & soon saw no reason to continue’ (SB to TM, 20 December 1931). Beckett similarly read or re-read Stendhal in April 1935, at a time when he was trying to make a start on Murphy (SB to TM, 26 April 1935). In this 1935 letter, Beckett even raises the proposition that Stendhal’s autobiography, La vie de Henri Brulard, ‘might be an idea for a translation’.7 It is thus possible that, faced once again with a creative impasse, Stendhal may well have preoccupied Beckett due to his tendency to inscribe himself into his texts while obscuring that inscription by writing in a dry style. In his 1931 Trinity lectures Beckett had commented that Stendhal ‘used encyclopediatic [sic] machinery [yet was] not really interested in illumination of it’.8 The emphasis on a nonlyrical use of the Ohlsdorf cemetery, established by way of Stendhal and enabled through the shift from poem to article, suggests that Beckett was finding it difficult to write something as personal as ‘Cascando’, that ‘last echo of feeling’ (SB to TM, 18 January 1937). Yet Beckett’s repeated use of the word ‘feeling’ in reference to his writing marks a new insistence. He expressed this during his first visit to Ohlsdorf, stating that he had walked among the graves ‘dully without ad quem [towards which] & without feeling’ (GD, 25 October 1936).9 This lack of both purpose and emotional sensitivity repeated itself during his second visit, and in the evening, having felt ‘stupid and melancholy’ in the afternoon, he located his failure to be inspired in a ‘[p]aralysed sensibility, feebly flogging piggish sensibility’ (GD, 9 November 1936). It was precisely this act of ‘flogging’ that Beckett wished to avoid in his attempt to build on ‘Cascando’. As a diary entry made following a discussing of his German translation of ‘Cascando’ with the art historian Rosa Schapire clarifies, Beckett’s thinking was revolving around how to synthesise the creative life with the personal life: New lights on poem since Sunday’s disquisition [15 November 1936]: consternation at inability to write poem swallowed up in consternation at inability to love. Intractable dichotomy of artist & man. Too much love for a good poem, too much poem for a good love. Etc. etc. (GD, 17 November 1936)


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Beckett only succeeded at writing about the Ohlsdorf cemetery several years later in a passage in First Love: I infinitely preferred Ohlsdorf, particularly the Linne section, on Prussian soil, with its nine hundred acres of corpses packed tight, though I knew no one there, except by reputation, the wild animal collector Hagenbeck. . . . Coaches ply to and fro, crammed with widows, widowers, orphans and the like. Groves, grottoes, artificial lakes with swans, offer consolation to the inconsolable. It was December, I had never felt so cold, the eel soup lay heavy on my stomach, I was afraid I’d die, I turned aside to vomit, I envied them. (ECEF, 62–3) Although it had not been December and he had not eaten eel soup that day (yet eel soup did lay heavy on his stomach the day – 14 October 1936 – he ate it in conjunction with plums), Beckett clearly returned to the diaries when writing this passage, as most of the details mentioned in First Love correspond to his diary entries.10

Paternosters and Poetry Beckett’s failure to capitalise on his visits to Ohlsdorf resulted in a period of hectic sociability, as if he were trying to escape feeling ‘speechless & blank’ (GD, 14 November 1936).11 In late November, however, the poetic vein stirred once more as he noted ‘Write a poem about Paternoster. Heraclitus, etc.’ (GD, 27 November 1936). Although it is impossible to make any assumptions concerning the style this poem was to have, the thematic sketch treads familiar territory, approaching poetic statement by way of allusion rather than direct emotionality. Beckett had already drawn on his reading of philosophy to introduce Heraclitus into the story ‘Yellow’ as the ‘lachrymose philosopher’, who, moreover, ‘was obscure at the same time’ (MPTK, 155).12 Beckett had come across Heraclitus again when in early 1936, in his search for a way to get Murphy moving again, he had immersed himself in Geulincx’s Ethics in the library of Trinity College Dublin. Possibly around this time he took a single page of notes from R. P. Gredt’s Elementia philosophia aristotelico-thomistica, which set Heraclitus at the beginning of the nominalist strain of thought (TCD MS10971/6, 37r). But mentioning Heraclitus in the same breath as the Lord’s Prayer could only result in the playing out of an antithesis, with irony not far away. In his later work,

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Beckett employed the prayer to evoke the absence of God or to illustrate the redundancy of such supplications, as in Hamm’s utterance of the opening line of the Lord’s Prayer in Endgame (CDW, 119), or the ‘broken paternosters’ of ‘Enough’ (TFN, 95).13 But in his early work there is a more searching and wistful sense of appeal. This is most evident in the poem ‘Serena I’, where the line ‘ah father father that art in heaven’ stands prominently separated from the surrounding lines and evokes a heartfelt and melancholy sense of questioning. By projecting a poem referring to the Paternoster, Beckett was searching for a way to creatively transform a theory which he had been entertaining for some time. As early as 1934, in his review ‘Humanistic Quietism’ on MacGreevy’s poems, he had stated that ‘[a]ll poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer’, and that this prayer is an ‘act of recognition’ (Dis, 68). Beckett expanded on this idea the following year, stating ‘all poems are prayers, of Dives and Lazarus one flesh’ (SB to TM, 8 September 1935). The source of this is identified in the Whoroscope notebook as being Luke XVI, where the Dives-Lazarus relationship (with Leibniz’s help) brings prayer and poetry together.14 The equation of poetry and prayer was very much on Beckett’s mind in Germany, notably just ten days before reminding himself to write the Paternoster poem. Invited by Rosa Schapire to describe his response to her portrait painted by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, he launched into a mixed dissertation, twine object-subject round stem of art as prayer. New figure occurs as I speak. The art (picture) that is a prayer sets up prayer, releases prayer in onlooker, i.e. Priest: Lord have mercy upon us. People: Christ have mercy upon us. What is name of this art? (GD, 17 November 1936)15 The supplication spoken at morning and evening prayer, ‘Lord have mercy upon us’, is another line of the liturgy that Beckett was fond of inserting into his work, a vain cry for redemption in the face of suffering. The poem ‘Sanies II’, for example, ends with the alternating lines ‘Christ have mercy upon us’ and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’, whereby the previous plea to Becky for forgiveness is broadened into a more profound supplication (SP, 24). That such mercy is not forthcoming is illustrated when Vladimir’s ejaculation in Waiting for Godot – ‘Christ have mercy on us!’ – is tellingly met with resounding silence (CDW, 96). ‘Paralysed by merciful providence’, as Watt tells us (W, 85), Beckett after his trip to Germany continued to


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relate poetry with prayer, as his original title ‘Prière’ for the French poem ‘musique de l’indifférence’ of 1938 indicates. Yet while in Germany, none of these poetic ideas, it appears, generated any writing. Late December, on observing elderly women ‘quite gone in the legs’ on the steps of the Pergamon Museum, Beckett noted: ‘Poem: “Fallen arches on the altar of Pergamon.” ’ (GD, 26 December 1936). This lighthearted approach did produce some doggerel later on during the trip, as Beckett visited a courtyard in Nuremberg and observed the treatment of the thieves in a Crucifixion by Adam Kraft (GD, 2 March 1937): I wish I were an old man or an old woman half & half or an old hermaphrodite if hermaphrodites live to be old only old old as a crutch with a room off the big yard of the Holy Ghost Spital in Nürnberg When the sun shines at midday on Adam Kraft’s Big black stone Christ Crucified But not on the repentant thief Nor the unrepentant. A further instance of Beckett’s ‘gerontophilia’ (SB to TM, 8 September [1935]), the poem, however unthinkingly dashed off, attests to Beckett’s tendency to focus on the thieves rather than the central figure of Christ: ‘Thieves in shadow. Unrepentant wears a moustache & is treated with sympathy’ (GD, 2 March 1937). This in turn prefigures Beckett’s frequent use of the idea that while one of the thieves was damned, the other was saved, amounting to what Waiting for Godot calls ‘a reasonable percentage’ (CDW, 13). A more substantial poetic effort is registered in the diary in early February during Beckett’s stay in Dresden. Possibly inspired by his thoughts on the ‘necessary’, or rather, unnecessary, journey during his reading of Walter Bauer’s Die Notwendige Reise a month earlier, Beckett noted two and half lines of poetry in his diary (GD, 7 February 1937): Always elsewhere In body also The dew falls & the rain from . . .

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The same month, he wrote to MacGreevy: I have neither written anything nor wanted to, except for a short hour, when the frail sense of beginning life behind the eyes, that is the best of all experiences, came again for the first time since Cascando, and produced 2 lines and a half. (SB to TM, 16 February 1937)16 Beckett is here referring back to a poetic aesthetic first formulated several years earlier, which advocated ‘unsighted’ writing that would draw on the interior world rather than external experience (SB to TM, 13 [September 1932]). Yet sitting in a Weinstube in Dresden, Beckett abandoned the poem; despite having the ‘mood’ he could not ‘find a name for place that rain falls from’ (GD, 7 February 1937). The missing word seemed to be retrospectively inserted in a line in Mercier and Camier, ‘The rain was falling gently, as from the fine rose of a watering pot’ (MC, 25).17 And, as if to make sure the ghost of missing words was banished, emphasised in Molloy (26): ‘Then in my eyes and in my head a fine rain begins to fall, as from a rose, highly important’. Although only two and a half lines survive, the fragment and Beckett’s comments to MacGreevy indicate that this was, as ‘Cascando’ had been, a poem that was to favour emotionality over erudition. It is indicative of Beckett’s increasing move towards a simplicity and directness of approach, achieved through an employment of short lines and simple diction. Thematically, this poetic fragment points towards a larger concern in Beckett’s writing. With a nod towards Rimbaud’s ‘Je est un autre’ (and his visionary poetry), the lines ‘Always elsewhere / In body also’ express the alienation of self or the projection of self into an other. More importantly, the poem exemplifies Beckett’s feelings of disorientation, compounded by the realisation that Germany was yet another ‘elsewhere’ rather than a potential source of creative and personal stability. It marks a further moment of recognition, intimated in the lack of ‘ad quem’ [toward which] in the Ohlsdorf cemetery, on the path to The Unnamable’s ‘I was never elsewhere, here is my only elsewhere’ (Un, 121). Yet even with the question of home or belonging resolved, or rather unresolved, Beckett made no progress with the poem. Following his return to Dublin he noted on the back cover of the second Human Wishes notebooks (UoR MS3461/2), dating from May/June 1937, the two lines: As the sky, as the sea The dew falls and the rain from


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Beckett was still struggling to find a form to accommodate the simplicity of utterance he wished to achieve, and exchanging the more intimate image of displacement with an unusually conventional metaphoric opening did little to encourage the poem to grow. With the poems failing to come out, and his professed ‘tired[ness] with words generally’ anything but diminished, Beckett’s attention in Germany turned to the visual arts as a possible remedy for speechlessness. He thus sought to apply pictorial techniques and visual solutions to the problems he perceived in his writing. There are several instances, discussed in more detail in the following chapter, where Beckett draws on the visual arts for writing. Beyond the doggerel inspired by the Kraft Crucifixion in Nuremberg, a sculpture by Riemenschneider depicting three saints elicited the word ‘Poem’ (GD, 26 February 1937).

Beckett and Rilke ‘[R]eluctant to change his state’ yet ‘impatient to do so’, to cite Watt (83), Beckett’s move towards a more personal textual investment appears to have been thwarted during this period by the very absence of the feelings he was seeking to express. Nevertheless, a new creative work, conceived around the same time as his efforts at a poetic treatment of the Ohlsdorf cemetery were failing, illustrates Beckett’s dedication to self-writing. One evening in Hamburg at the end of October 1936 he read Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, judging it to be ‘precious in the manner of St. J. Perse’s Anabase’ (GD, 31 October 1936), a book he had five years previously deemed to be ‘bad Claudel, with abominable colour’ (SB to TM, 11 March 1931).18 Beckett discovered phrases that were either ‘réussites’ [successes] or ‘blunders’, and he proceeded to copy passages to illustrate both sentiments into his diary. One sentence of Rilke in particular ‘moved’ him: ‘Wie hinter hundert Türen ist dieser Grosse Schlaf, den zwei Menschen gemeinsam leben [haben]; so gemeinsam wie eine Mutter oder einen Tod [As if behind a hundred doors is this Great Sleep that two people share; share as one mother or one death]’; moved him moreover to such a degree that he answered in German: ‘Immer schläft man allein, d.h., die Nacht erklärt den Tag und bestätigt ihn [One always sleeps alone, that is to say, the night declares the day and confirms it]’ (GD, 31 October 1936). Beckett’s reading of Rilke must have inspired, or at least coincided with, his preoccupations with a new creative idea, as he subsequently noted in his diary: ‘More & more preoccupied with Journal of a Melancholic’.

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There is a sense in which the work of Rainer Maria Rilke stimulated Beckett’s creative nerve, even as Beckett here refutes the German poet by emphasising the irreversible solitude of the individual. Yet it appears as if Rilke’s work enabled Beckett to better understand his own feelings about solitude and the monadic existence of the human being. He thus noted the bibliographic details of Rilke’s letters in his diary after Axel Kaun read out a passage in which Rilke criticises the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker for not respecting & loving the latest ‘Einsamkeit’ [solitude] of his wife as she had the first. He personally stands full of confidence, trust, loving esteem & respect etc., before her latest Temple of solitude, waiting for the doors to open. It appears that the highest reciprocal act of two creatures in love is to wait for the doors of their solitudes to open & engulf them. (GD, 15 January 1937)19 The subject was clearly important to Beckett, as he proceeded to dismiss this characterisation of solitude by declaring that the monad, that is to say the individual, must stand alone in solitude as it was ‘absurd to conceive [of] a chain of solitudes successively liquidated’ (GD, 15 January 1937).20 Beckett had already been attentive to Rilke’s attitude towards solitude in his 1934 review of J. B. Leishman’s translations (Dis, 66–7). In 1934, Beckett’s reading of Rilke elicited an ambiguous response. Attacking what he saw by turns as ‘breathless petulance’, a ‘turmoil of self-deception’ and ‘naif discontent’, it is difficult not to suspect that Beckett’s disavowal of Rilke’s enterprise in fact stems from a similarity of concern as well as from the discovery of echoes of his own earlier fiction and poetry. After all, Beckett’s own feelings of petulance pervade his first novel, Dream. Furthermore, the ‘turmoil of self-deception’ discovered in Rilke, as well as the ‘overstatement of the solitude which he cannot make his element’, anticipates the letter written to MacGreevy in March 1935, in which Beckett admits that, in part, those problems causing him to seek psychoanalysis arose from a sense of otherness deliberately cultivated through solitude and indifference (SB to TM, 10 March 1935). Once Beckett’s personal rejection of Rilke in his review is set aside, what remains is an evaluation of the German poet’s ‘fidgets’, described as ‘a disorder which may very well give rise . . . to poetry of a high order’. The problem, however, in Beckett’s view, was that Rilke’s ‘fidgets’ were expressed transcendentally, a fallacy which, according to Beckett, could be found in German literature generally: ‘But why call the fidgets God, Ego, Orpheus and the rest?’ (Dis, 66).


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Despite Beckett’s ambivalent attitude towards Rilke’s writing, it is significant that the reading of the Cornet provoked Beckett’s admission of being ‘[m]ore & more preoccupied with Journal of a Melancholic’ (GD, 31 October 1936). In this diary entry, Beckett went on to specify: Find something rueful for im dritten Reich [in the Third Reich]. The beautiful girl in Konditorei [coffee and pastry shop] with tapeworm lovingly described. Then: ‘Fortunate tapeworm!’ A scrap of dialogue: ‘Du siehst so komisch aus.’ – ‘Nicht halb so komisch, wie es mich innen quält.’ [‘You look so strange’ – ‘Not half so strange as I am tormented inwardly’].21 Beckett is here referring back to a visit to a Konditorei on Hammerpark with Dr Reichert, where he must have overheard a conversation involving a tapeworm (GD, 21 October 1936). Moreover, it appears that Beckett had quite a clear idea of what he was trying to achieve with this project, as he noted in his diary ‘J.o.a.M. [Journal of a Melancholic] As good as written, as bad as written, I mean the pleasure is from this evening irrevocably’ (GD, 31 October 1936). Nevertheless, despite ‘phrases rattling like machine gun fire in my skull’, the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ disappears from the pages of the diary for two months.

The Journal of a Melancholic In late November Beckett wrote in his diary that he had ‘now reached the stage that I can scarcely put 2 words together’ (GD, 30 November 1936). Yet the mysterious ‘Journal’ had not gone away. Shortly after Christmas (Beckett’s favourite time for writing), Beckett commented in his diary ‘[f]iddle with Konditorei scene in Hamm’, implying that since the last reference to the ‘Journal’ in October he had at least thought about, and probably even worked on, this new creative enterprise (GD, 28 December 1936).22 Although no actual material relating to the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ seems to have survived, comments in his diary entry for the 28 December 1936 allow some insight into Beckett’s intentions regarding the structure and tone of the work. These notes reveal that the new work was to be written, similar to the projected Ohlsdorf article, in a factual yet direct mode: ‘simple elegance & absence of comment, apart from what the transitions contain. Irony so slight & quickly left that it may be ignored’ (GD3, 28 December 1936).23

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The admonition to keep irony ‘slight’ points towards the ‘Nominalist irony’ formulated in the Kaun letter as ‘finding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words’ (Dis, 172). Yet it is probably more fruitful to compare Beckett’s reference to irony in Germany with his review ‘An Imaginative Work!’ on Jack Yeats’s The Amaranthers, published in the July–September 1936 issue of the Dublin Magazine (Dis, 89–90). Here he writes that the ‘irony is Ariostesque, as slight and as fitful and struck from the same impact, between the reality of the imagined and reminiscence of its elements’ (89).24 The relationship between reality and imagination, and the nature of reminiscence, is central to Beckett’s preoccupations in his outline of the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’. As the diary entry of October indicates (‘find something rueful for im Dritten Reich’), Beckett appears to have intended to write against the social and political background of the Germany he was witnessing firsthand, yet in terms that betrayed an ‘absence of comment’: ‘No social or political criticism whatever, apart from what the fact as stated implies’ (GD, 28 December 1936). This suggests that Beckett was thinking of drawing upon his own experiences, and, more importantly, of using his diary, which already represented the kind of writing embraced by the ‘Journal’ outline, as a sourcebook. The autobiographical nature of the ‘Journal’, already manifest in its (generic) title, is further propounded by Beckett’s emphasis, ‘Not Diary but Recollections, so as to cover retreat & give an opportunity for evaluation thro’ the forgotten & the not’ (GD, 28 December 1936). This comment looks back to Beckett’s conflicting desires to conceal and reveal in Dream. Moreover, his distinction between ‘diary’ and ‘recollection’ here is of significance, and points towards a conflict between his personal and artistic aims. Whereas the persistent need for self-therapeutic writing, or at least self-inspection, is evident in the concept of the ‘evaluation thro’ the forgotten & the not’, the intimate nature of a diary was never likely to satisfy Beckett’s desire for an artistic transformation of experience.25 As Beckett acknowledged in the essay ‘La peinture des van Velde ou le Monde et le Pantalon’, written shortly after the Second World War, ‘Avec les mots on ne fait que se raconter . . . Et jusque dans le confessional on se trahit’ [With words one cannot help but tell of oneself . . . And it is precisely in the confessional that you betray yourself’] (Dis, 119). ‘Recollections’ would safeguard from such confessions by projecting them into the past, which diary writing by its nature is unable to do. The synthesis of fact and fiction offered a solution, one that was to be achieved not only through what Malone calls a ‘hiatus in my recollections’ (MD, 7) but also, as Beckett notes


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regarding the ‘Journal’, through a strategy of ‘invent[ing] without scruple’ (GD, 28 December 1936). This fictionalisation of autobiographical material could manifestly enable Beckett to tell ‘a story in the likeness of my life’, as the narrator in ‘The End’ puts it (ECEF, 57). And it is surely not a coincidence that Beckett returns to working on the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ precisely at Christmas. As we have seen, this was always a time when Beckett remembered his father most acutely and painfully, as his reference to ‘Melancholy memories of other Xmas walks’ on Christmas Day illustrates (GD3, 25 December 1936). Beckett’s notes towards the ‘Journal’ are most interesting for their references to imagery and techniques drawn from the visual arts and music, and anticipate the value assigned to these two art forms in the Kaun letter of July 1937. Undoubtedly stemming from the amount of time Beckett spent studying paintings in the art galleries in Germany, his invocation here also anticipates the striking visual images later projected onto the stage: Prose stanzas, keen pale colours, miniature school of Ferrara. Behind they should stand for moods; when the mood recurs use the same colours; reinforce the recurrence with phrase echoes. Strophe & antistrophe of fiasco, of the few moods of which the ground fiasco is capable. (GD, 28 December 1936)26 This passage reads like an uncanny prediction of the direction Beckett’s post-war writing was to take. The marked emphasis on a rigid structural control, exercised through the coordination of verbal patterns of repetition and antithesis with musical echoes and symbolic colour imagery, is emblematic of the new direction Beckett was taking in his work.27 Strophe and antistrophe, as concepts of versification, further link the projected piece with the forms of an ode, as together with the epode they form its structure (Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, for example, builds on the ancient odestrophe). Beckett’s reference to the ‘miniature school of Ferrara’, although somewhat nebulous, is of particular interest. As he had yet to come into any substantial contact with the main representatives, such as Cosimo Tura or Ercole dei’ Roberti of the Ferrara School in Germany at the time of writing, one must assume that Beckett was thinking back to paintings he had seen in London’s National Gallery. It is thus likely that he was thinking of Dosso Dossi (c.1490–1542), who worked at the court at Ferrara. From 1515 onwards, Dosso painted cabinet pictures, in which he dismissed conventions in order to experiment with colour and technique. As a result, these small

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paintings are characterised by an arbitrariness and disharmony in their expression of an emotional intensity. Beckett would have been familiar with such a cabinet picture, the Lamentation over the Body of Christ (c. 1517), from his frequent visits to the National Gallery in London. Moreover, while in Ferrara, Dossi closely collaborated with the poet Ariosto in devising court entertainment. Beckett, who invoked Ariosto in his reference to the ‘slight irony’ in his review of Jack Yeats and the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’, had been reading Orlando Furioso during the summer of 1936, and would thus have come across Ariosto’s praise of Dossi in Canto 33.28 Beckett generally admired miniature painting, particularly by Dutch landscape artists or the German Adam Elsheimer (GD, 18 December 1936). Moreover, as he was outlining his ‘Journal’, Beckett may also have been thinking of the Indian miniatures he had seen two days earlier and the catalogue he had subsequently purchased and read (GD, 26 December 1936).29 Having outlined the direction he wanted the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ to take, Beckett continued to work on it over the following few days. However, his comment on New Year’s Day, ‘write a little more in Hamm pastry books [referring back to the ‘Konditorei’], not much good’, indicates that the enterprise was beginning to flounder (GD, 1 January 1937). On the following day he ‘wrote a little more Hamm interior’, which he now referred to as ‘Bandwurm’ [tapeworm], and added ‘Keep it not kranky’ – an instance of Beckett urging himself to resist the temptation of being Beckett (GD, 2 January 1937). His description of the work at this point as ‘Hamm interior’, as well as the scraps of dialogue recorded in the diary, suggests a possible dramatic content of the piece, played out within the microcosmic framework, a ‘cabinet picture’, of a tight structure. The ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ is last mentioned on the 2 January 1937, and thereafter sinks out of sight. Nevertheless, although Beckett failed to write the journal of a melancholic man, the basic concept foreshadows later texts such as Krapp’s Last Tape or Malone Dies. Both texts explore the boundaries between fact and fiction and accommodate Beckett’s desire to provide an ‘evaluation thro’ the forgotten & the not’ (GD, 28 December 1936). Both Krapp and Malone are diarists, historians of their lives, recording distillations of experiences and memories. Krapp’s psychological state can be said to resemble that of a melancholic, a man living in solitude and haunted by a past beyond revision and redemption. His obsessive and meticulous nature is underlined by his pedantic cataloguing of his life and his persistent constipation. Without stretching the analogy too far, Krapp is a distant echo of Beckett the


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diarist in Germany, keeping a ‘pillar to post account’ (SB to MM, 13 December 1936).

Human Wishes Even as the evidence in the diaries suggests that he was working on the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ during the first months of his stay in Germany, Beckett felt frustrated by the overall lack of progress in his writing. He told Mary Manning Howe in December 1936 that he had ‘written nothing connected since I left home, nor disconnected’, adding ‘[a]nd not the ghost of a book beginning’ (SB to MM, 13 December 1936). The despondent mood displayed in this letter reflects his diary entry of the same day, in which he wonders ‘What is to become of me?’ (GD, 13 December 1936). Yet the same letter also marks Beckett’s growing preoccupation with the figure of Dr Johnson, which ultimately led him to pen part of a first act of the play Human Wishes in 1940: [t]here are 50 plays in [Johnson’s] life. . . . I often thought what a good subject was there, perhaps only one long act. What interested me especially was the breakdown of Johnson as soon as Thrale disappeared. (SB to MM, 13 December 1936) There is no evidence that Beckett was actually reading Johnson during his trip, but his use of the past tense here suggests that a potential work on Johnson had been on his mind for some time. Indeed, as the German translation of the letter to Lord Chesterfield in August 1936 shows, Beckett had been engaged with Johnson during the summer before his departure (UoR MS5003, 11v–13r).30 Given the differences between the outline to the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ in the German diaries and the comments Beckett made on the Johnson project, it seems unlikely that the two are identical. The advocating of prose stanzas, the form of ‘recollection’ and the stated time frame of the Third Reich sharply sets the ‘Journal’ apart from an eighteenth-century play on Dr Johnson. However, the proximity in time and certain thematic and structural correspondences suggest that the two pieces were somehow bound together in Beckett’s thinking. Thus, for example, the outline to the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ projects – and Human Wishes employs – frequent repetition and silences, and both contain a ‘slight irony’.31 Furthermore, the dramatic nature of Human Wishes reflects Beckett’s growing interest in

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theatre during his trip, and finds a counterpart in the dialogues of the ‘Journal’. Beckett’s interest in drama, and in particular period drama, at this time is underlined by his pastiche translation in August 1936 of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in the ‘Clare Street’ notebook, entitled ‘Mittelalterliches Dreieck [Medieval Triangle]’, as well as his comments in the diary on Hebbel’s Gyges und sein Ring and Schiller’s Maria Stuart.32 Moreover, Beckett’s references to a sharply delineated space in ‘Hamm interior’ anticipate the drawing-room atmosphere of the Johnson entourage at Bolt Court. On his return to Dublin in early April 1937, Beckett immediately began to ‘document a fantasy of the late Samuel Johnson LL.D.’ in the National Library, undoubtedly relieved to be able to ‘break the shock of my aimless presence in the house again’ as Murphy had still not found a publisher (SB to TM, 22 May 1937 and 25 March 1937). He proceeded to extensively research Dr Johnson and his circle, filling three notebooks, probably before the year was out, with material drawn from primary and secondary sources (UoR MS3461/1–3).33 Beckett’s intense note-taking shows just how desperate he had become to get something going again. It also represents a reaction against his inability while in Germany to creatively draw on his own emotions. Indeed, by thinking of his Johnson project as a ‘fantasy’ which could be ‘documented’ with biographical material, Beckett continued his efforts at finding a way to synthesise fact and fiction.34 His initial intent was to dramatise the relationship between Johnson and Mrs Thrale, particularly following the death of Mr Thrale in 1781 and her subsequent remarriage to the Italian music teacher, Piozzi. From the outset, however, it was Johnson’s ‘psychological situation’ that interested Beckett (SB to MM, 13 December 1936). At first this emphasis manifested itself in Beckett’s belief that Johnson was impotent, which resulted in the ‘despair of the lover with nothing to love with’ (SB to TM, 26 April 1937).35 Beckett’s interest in impotence had already been visible in the ‘aspermatic colossus’ Lord Gall in the short story ‘Echo’s Bones’ (12), whose problems in this respect may well have been taken from Stendhal’s Armance.36 Significantly, Beckett’s focus on Johnson’s impotence came at a time when his own creative endeavours were anything but fruitful, and also coincides with his move towards a writing of impoverishment.37 Yet as both his correspondence and the Human Wishes notes reveal, Beckett’s intention to write a play based on amatory speculations regarding Johnson and Hester Thrale was gradually subsumed by an interest in Johnson’s character, in particular his intellectual and psychological


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pessimism, as well as his fear of insanity and death.38 Beckett’s interest in the private rather than the public Johnson is evident in his comment to Mary Manning that it isn’t Boswell’s wit & wisdom machine that means anything to me, but the miseries that he never talked of, being unwilling or unable to do so. The horror of annihilation, the horror of madness, the horrified love of Mrs Thrale, the whole mental monster ridden swamp that after hours of silence could only give some ghastly bubble like ‘Lord have mercy upon us’. The background of the Prayers & Meditations. (SB to MM, 11 July 1937) It is significant that Beckett’s concentration here is on Johnson’s fragile humanity rather than the inhuman ‘machine’ of intelligence, and on the desperate plea for mercy. Fundamentally it appears as if Beckett found a kindred spirit in Dr Johnson, and there is a sense in which Beckett was investigating his own ‘psychological situation’ through Johnson as much as working on a new text. Indeed, Beckett’s attraction to, and perhaps even identification with, Samuel Johnson largely derived from a shared view of the human condition. Thus Beckett declared that being ‘spiritually self conscious’, Johnson was ‘worth putting down as part of the whole of which oneself is part’ (SB to TM, 4 August 1937). In the same letter (to MacGreevy), Beckett clarified this statement by pointing to the fact that there can hardly have been many so completely at sea in their solitude as he was or so horribly aware of it – not even Cowper. . . . [Mrs Thrale] had none of that need to suffer or necessity of suffering that he had. (SB to TM, 4 August 1937)39 These expressions of suffering and solitude Beckett primarily found in Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations, to which he repeatedly refers in his letters. Johnson’s unflinching self-scrutiny and confessions of melancholy must have struck a chord with Beckett. After all, he had only just returned from Germany where he had kept a diary, experienced solitude and tried to write a ‘Journal of a Melancholic’. Thus both Johnson and Beckett admired Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and thought about composing a work on this temperament: ‘This day it came into my mind to write the history of my melancholy. On this I purpose to deliberate. I know not whether it may not too much disturb me’. (Johnson 1897, I, 48).40

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Johnson throughout his life suffered from what he called his ‘morbid melancholy and disturbance of mind’, and his letters frequently advise his friends not to give in to this affliction, a ‘greater evil than poverty or pain’.41 In a diary entry of January 1766 Johnson further vowed ‘[t]o write the History of Memory’, stating later of the recollection of childhood that ‘[t]his species of pleasure is always melancholy’.42 In Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett drew on Johnson’s habit of composing suitable Prayers and Meditations on specific days in the calendar – New Year’s Day, March 28 (the day on which his wife, Elizabeth, ‘Tetty’, died); Good Friday, Easter Day and 18 September, his own birthday. Thus Krapp also reviews the past year on his birthday and formulates ‘resolutions’ (CDW, 218). Beckett’s diary writing can of course also be aligned with Johnson’s various personal and introspective writings in the form of journals, travel diaries, meditations and prayers. There are similarities in the structure and manner of Johnson and Beckett, such as brevity of notation and an absence of evaluation. It seems Johnson was content to record such matters as the hour of rising, meals taken, people met and expenses. Both Johnson and Beckett use symbols to denote certain events pertaining to bodily functions. In Johnson’s case, the microscopic attention to his body culminates in his ‘Sick Man’s Journal’, kept as a medical record of his illness and the medications he used during the last year of his life. In the second notebook towards the writing of Human Wishes, Beckett recorded roughly eight pages of details regarding Johnson’s various illnesses and physical ailments. As Lionel Kelly has pointed out, ‘Beckett’s interest in the implied relationship between physical illness and intellectual despair . . . reflects on his own circumstances throughout the thirties’ (1992, 31).43 There is a correspondence between the sentiments expressed in Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations as well as his letters and Beckett’s own evaluation of his situation and self in the German diaries, particularly when the two writers refer to their feelings of sadness, inertia and worthless endeavour. In a letter to Hester Thrale, Johnson confessed I can now look back upon threescore and four years, in which little has been done, and little has been enjoyed; a life diversified by misery, spent part in the sluggishness of penury, and part under the violence of pain, in gloomy discontent or importunate distress. But perhaps I am better than I should have been if I had been less afflicted. With this I will try to be content.44 There are several occasions in his diary when Beckett notes similar complaints, as when he admits to feeling ‘pathologically indolent & limp &


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opinionless & consternated’ (GD, 2 February 1937). Furthermore, as the quoted passage from Johnson illustrates, Beckett will have encountered in Johnson yet another figure who accepted the irredeemably painful nature of existing in an essentially meaningless universe and in fearful anticipation of death. As Beckett remarked to Joseph Hone, Johnson was reproached by his clerical friend, [Jeremy] Taylor, for holding the opinion that an eternity of torment was preferable to annihilation. He must have had the vision of positive annihilation. Of how many can as much be said.45 A passage written in German dating from August 1936 in the ‘Clare Street’ notebook conveys Beckett’s similar belief in absolute finality: So wie es dir bisher gegangen ist, so wird es auch ferner hin gehen, bis dein Ich in die dir so bekannten Bestandteile zersetzt worden ist. Denn vom Tode brauchst du gar nichts anders als diese Absonderung, weder etwas besseres, noch etwas schlimmeres, zu erwarten. [You will remain the same as you have previously been, until your I is decomposed into those parts you know so well. Indeed, you should not expect from death anything but this separation, nothing better, nothing worse]. (UoR MS5003, 9v) Both Johnson and Beckett repeatedly pronounced on what Johnson termed the ‘vacuity of life’.46 Beckett found an expression of this in the Book of Ecclesiastes, which forms a subtext underlying much of his writing during the 1930s. The tone is set by the opening sentence of Murphy, which refers back to the main theme of Ecclesiastes, that of the transience and futility of human endeavour: ‘I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit’ (1.14). By abridging the title of Johnson’s poem, ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, for his own play, Beckett not only deepens Johnson’s reference to Ecclesiastes but also draws attention to the theme of ‘vanity’ (Löwe 1999, 200). The sense of the word ‘vanity’ is succinctly expressed in its Hebrew translation hébel, meaning ‘vapour’, that which is insubstantial, fleeting and amounting to nothing.47 How It Is succinctly expresses this transient nature of life: ‘my life as nothing man a vapour’ (HII, 69). In June 1937, two months after commencing his work on Human Wishes, Beckett told MacGreevy that ‘I know the whole thing pretty well now and could start anytime’ (SB to TM, 5 June 1937 [misdated by Beckett 1936]).

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That he continued to do research instead of write suggests that Beckett was deriving a personal rather than a literary value from his encounter with Johnson. By August, Beckett was admitting that the ‘Johnson thing has gone away to be dyed . . . for nothing had been degraded to paper’ (SB to GR, 4 August 1937). Nevertheless, with ‘acts of intellection . . . going on about it somewhere’, Beckett felt that the ‘Johnson blasphemy’ formed part of his larger creative project, believing that with time he would ‘see how it coincides with the Pricks, Bones and Murphy, fundamentally and fundamentally with all I shall ever write or ever want to write’ (SB to MM, undated [but written between 10–22 December 1937]). As a consequence Dr Johnson was ‘back in [his] consciousness’ in August 1938 or 1939 (SB to TM, undated [5 August 1938?]), although it was not until 21 April 1940 that Beckett could tell Reavey that he had written ‘half of a first act of Johnson’. Later in life, when looking back at the ‘time I spent on that red herring’ (SB to MM, 2 January 1959), Beckett told Ruby Cohn that he ‘gave up . . . chiefly but not only because of language difficulty’ (SB to Ruby Cohn, 27 June 1965).48 Cohn’s own view of the reason why the play remained unwritten however is perhaps more accurate, believing that ‘Beckett may have realized that he was outlining a biography of Johnson . . . rather than a scenario for a play’ (Cohn 1980, 158–9). The period between 1936 and 1938 was marked by Beckett’s attempts to ‘find my positions’ (SB to TM, undated [20 or 25 April 1937]). Having chipped away some of the erudition that had encumbered the expression of his emotions, the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ ultimately proved yet another abortive effort. With Human Wishes, Beckett returned to safer ground by adopting a more systematic and academic approach in the collation of material. Yet it appears that this also produced a feeling of dissatisfaction, as if the sheer volume of material disabled Beckett from writing about what essentially were rather haunting subjects of solitude, melancholia and the difficulties of earthly existence. Nevertheless, with its emphasis on strategies of self-inspection, Beckett’s own German diaries, the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ and to a lesser degree the Human Wishes project establish the image of the solitary writer established in subsequent work. On the loose sheets inserted at the beginning of the first Watt notebook, there is a note which epitomises the thematic core of this development: ‘X is a man, 70 years old, ignorant, alone, at evening, in his room, in bed, having pains, listening, remembering’. Indeed, in the draft notebooks of Watt the character Quin keeps a journal, and the diaristic impulse survives in the existence of Arthur’s journal. Arthur’s journal entry given in the ‘Addenda’


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to Watt is thus based on Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations, with its reference to what Beckett in a 1937 letter to MacGreevy had termed the ‘ghastly bubble’ of Johnson’s ‘Lord have mercy upon us’. After Arthur goes back to the house, he writes in his journal: ‘Took a turn in the garden. Thanked God for a small mercy. Made merry with the hardy laurel. Bestowed alms on an old man formerly employed by Knott family’ (W, 222). Yet it was only in the post-war work that Beckett truly realised his selfwriting project. Ultimately, as he described his struggle to write Human Wishes, Beckett in the 1930s ‘kept pushing it back, like material into a dye’, and it was only with time that the right textual tone of (self-)observation and (self-)notation emerged (SB to TM, 23 July 1937).

Chapter 8

Talking Pictures: Beckett and the Visual Arts

I wish you were to talk pictures. (SB to TM, 8 February [1935])

Any reader glancing at the German diaries could be forgiven for thinking that they were written by an art critic, and not a creative writer. The descriptive detail and the sheer volume of notes that Beckett took on the paintings he saw in German art galleries testify to his passionate interest in the visual arts, an interest that extended to sculpture and architecture. Beckett’s Winterreise through Germany was also explicitly a Bildungsreise, and there is a distinct sense that by the mid-1930s Beckett had begun to view art as a viable alternative during phases when he struggled with writing and publication. Yet it was precisely at such times that the encounter with art enabled Beckett to clarify, shape and formulate his aesthetic preoccupations, and thus to find new approaches to his writing. This can be illustrated by the sheer weight of aesthetic formulations contained in the pages of the German diaries, kept at a time when Beckett was struggling to see the way in which his writing was to proceed. It is important to remember that Beckett’s most succinct aesthetic declarations, both before and after World War II, were mainly made in the context of discussions of art, whether in his personal correspondence with Thomas MacGreevy or Georges Duthuit, or in published pieces of art criticism. The importance of the visual arts to Beckett’s writing has been long recognised by scholars, but it was not until the publication of James Knowlson’s biography in 1996 that the influence was empirically substantiated, an influence Knowlson subsequently discussed further in Images of Beckett (2003).1 A number of more theoretically oriented studies have appeared, though a definitive account of Beckett’s interest in the visual arts in the 1930s and his subsequent use of this knowledge in his work is still outstanding.2 In this chapter I propose to discuss Beckett’s immersion

Beckett and the Visual Arts

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in the visual arts by tracing his aesthetic judgements within the German diaries, in order to illuminate the creative influence this exposure had on his writing. Knowlson shows that Beckett’s introduction to art occurred as early as 1926, when he began visiting the National Gallery in Dublin (Knowlson 1996, 57). This interest was undoubtedly further developed during his visits to his uncle, ‘Boss’ Sinclair, a collector of modern art, in Kassel (see Knowlson 2005), and through his friendships with the painter Jack B. Yeats and with Thomas MacGreevy, whose interest in painting would later lead him to become the director of Dublin’s National Gallery. From the outset of his career, Beckett littered his work with references to painters and their work as well as visual techniques. In his early texts, this was mainly done to introduce a further erudite layer beyond the literary one, in order to clarify or obscure descriptions and concepts. Both Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks than Kicks contain numerous such visual analogies, mostly based on paintings Beckett saw in Dublin, such as the description of the Alba’s eyes that ‘went as black as sloes, they went as big and black as El Greco painted’ (Dream, 174).3 By October 1933, just as Chatto & Windus agreed to publish More Pricks than Kicks, Beckett’s interest in the visual arts had become large enough for him to apply for a job as assistant curator at the National Gallery in London (SB to TM, 9 October 1933). It was most likely during that year that Beckett also read and took notes from R. H. Wilenski’s An Introduction to Dutch Art, which had been recommended to him by MacGreevy.4 As in the case of other note-taking enterprises of this period, Beckett transcribed verbatim lengthy passages from this book into a notebook, now at the Beckett International Foundation in Reading (UoR MS5001). Tracing the development of Dutch art from Cornelis of Haarlem to Jan Vermeer of Delft, Beckett took detailed notes pertaining to the biography and craft of all major Dutch painters. His well-known interest in spotlight painting is reflected in these notes, as the origin of the technique and its sophistication by painters such as the German Adam Elsheimer is duly recorded (UoR MS5001, 4r). This notebook, the only extant one dedicated purely to the visual arts, also contains lists of paintings from visits that Beckett paid to various art galleries in London (Hampton Court, Wallace Collection, Victoria & Albert Museum), Dublin (National Gallery) and France (Louvre and Musée Condé at Chantilly) in 1934 and 1935.5 These notes confirm Knowlson’s statement that Beckett’s admiration at this stage was mainly for Dutch and Flemish painting, and in particular the seventeenth-century Masters (Knowlson 1996, 57). Beckett’s notes on the National Gallery in Dublin as well as the Wallace and Victoria & Albert collections in London concentrate

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exclusively on their Dutch and Flemish holdings. Furthermore, the notebook also contains a list of those collections containing the major works by Hieronymus Bosch, taken from a German book (UoR MS5001, 22r–22v).6 Although Beckett’s attention at this point is mainly directed at Dutch and Flemish painting, the notebook also contains notes on Albrecht Dürer and other artists of sixteenth-century Nuremberg, such as Adam Kraft and Peter Vischer (UoR MS5001, 23r–26r).7 It is possible that Beckett took an interest in these artists following his very brief stay in Nuremberg in the spring of 1931, references to which found their way into Dream with allusions to the Albrecht Dürer Haus and Adam Kraft (71). Knowlson has aptly termed Beckett’s 1936–1937 trip to Germany an ‘artistic pilgrimage’ (2002, 74), and the German diaries reveal that Beckett spent a great deal of time in art museums and galleries, or visiting churches and cathedrals. Yet there is also the sense that Beckett was consciously undertaking an educational trip, perhaps with a view to expanding his knowledge for future employment. At times he refers to the ‘painful duty’ of having to study paintings from periods he otherwise disliked, as evidenced by his comments on German Romantic painting of the nineteenth century (GD, 28 December 1936).8 Undoubtedly, Beckett’s decision to travel to Germany at this time can largely be explained by his desire to view the vast collections before the political skies darkened further. As he wrote to MacGreevy merely two weeks into his stay in Hamburg, Beckett felt that ‘when I have seen the pictures & struggled into the language I don’t think I’ll be sorry to go’ (SB to TM, 9 October 1936). By the time of his trip, Beckett’s knowledge of painting was already very substantial, allowing him to compare painters and paintings across collections, to disagree with the professional attributions of paintings made in catalogues and to complain about the state of individual paintings. Yet although Beckett was very familiar with the Old Masters and to an extent with French modern painting, his trip also allowed him to study the relatively unknown territory of German Modernism.

Struggling to See: Beckett and Modern German Art As discussed in Chapter 5, by the time Beckett arrived in Hamburg in October 1936, the ‘cultural cleansing’ of degenerate art had already reached alarming levels. As early as April 1933, the Nazis had set about removing artists and art historians who were considered ‘modern’ or racially ‘impure’ from their posts in galleries, museums and academies. Artists such as


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Kandinsky, Schwitters and Klee, the latter one of the more famous artists to have been dismissed from his post, went into exile and were soon followed by others. Initially artists labelled as ‘degenerate’ were forbidden to exhibit, and subsequently had their work confiscated from public galleries (see Hüneke 2006). The prohibitions imposed on modern art meant that Beckett’s endeavours to study German Modernism were often thwarted. While he was in Germany, the Nazis stepped up their campaign against ‘decadent’ art, and on 30 October 1936, the first of the large museums, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, was forced to close its contemporary rooms in the Kronprinzenpalais. This was followed in November by a ban on contemporary art criticism. Beckett’s diaries and letters recount his frustrated efforts to gain access to closed wings of the public galleries, and his realisation that all ‘the modern pictures are in the cellars’ (SB to MM, 13 December 1936).9 Nevertheless, Beckett did manage to view numerous contemporary artworks before the final curtain came down. On 30 June 1937, Goebbels issued a decree giving a commission the authority to visit all major museums and confiscate work from 1910 onwards that ‘offend the German national sentiment, destroy or distort the natural form, or are characterised by a lack of adequate manual or artistic skills’, to be shown in an exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ (qtd. in Barron and Dube 1997, 19). This indictment encompassed virtually all twentieth-century art, whether abstract or representational, from Expressionism to Surrealism, and all ‘non-Aryan’ work. Three months after Becket’s departure from Germany, the infamous exhibition ‘Entartete Kunst’ (‘Degenerate Art’), which aimed to present the shameful decadence of modern artists and to ‘expose dangerous criminals’ to the indignation of the public, opened in Munich on 19 July 1937.10 Parallel to this, the exhibition ‘Grosse Deutsche Kunstaustellung’ with Nazi-approved art opened on the preceding day, also in Munich, in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. Beckett’s response on reading an announcement of the approved exhibition which stated that ‘the period of Nolde, the Brücke, Marc etc has been überwunden [overcome]’, is indicative of his attitude towards cultural repression: ‘Soon I shall really begin to puke. Or go home’ (GD, 15 January 1937). The ‘Entartete Kunst’ exhibition was only the start of a wider pillage of modern art; by 1938 approximately 16,000 works by some 1,200 artists had been confiscated, of which most were subsequently sold abroad for hard currency or destroyed. When Beckett wrote the essay ‘La peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon’ shortly after the Second World War, he implicitly invoked the censoring of art that he had witnessed during his stay in Germany.

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In the first half of the essay, Beckett spends considerable time denying the value of any art criticism, arguing that it is incapable of expressing or evaluating an artwork. In this essay, which is littered with references to people he had met and paintings he had seen in Germany, Beckett also refers to the imposition of established cultural opinions: Ne vous approchez pas de l’art abstrait. C’est fabriqué par une bande d’escrocs et d’incapables. Ils ne sauraient faire autre chose. Ils ne savent pas dessiner. [Do not approach abstract art. It is produced by a gang of criminals and incapables. They would not know how to do anything else. They do not know how to draw]. (Dis, 120) This parodies the Nazi denouncement of modern art as ‘degenerate’, a notion to which Beckett further alludes by stating ‘peinture à déformation est le refuge de tous les ratés [painting which distorts is the refuge of all failures]’ (120). Beckett also refers directly to the suppression of the artist, who had to belong to a Nazi academy in order to work: ‘Il lui sera peut-être bientôt interdit d’exposer, voire de travailler, s’il ne peut justifier de tant d’années d’académie [It may soon be forbidden for him to exhibit, even to work, if he cannot justify so many years of academy]’ (121). Whereas the ‘Entartete Kunst’ exhibition of 1937 was the culmination of the cultural cleansing programme of the Nazis, already from 1933 onwards antimodernist exhibitions had been established (see Barron 1991, 83ff.). Beckett visited such a ‘Schreckenskammer des Entarteten’ (Chamber of Horrors of Degenerate Art) in the Moritzburg in Halle in January 1937, as his obligatory entry in the visitors’ book confirms (Figure 1).11 The ‘Schreckenskammer’ in Halle, which opened in November 1935, was a permanent rather than a temporary installation, drawing on its own modern art collection assembled by the discredited director, Max Sauerlandt (whose widow Beckett met). The majority of the pictures in the Halle ‘Sonderausstellung’ were transferred directly into Munich’s ‘Entartete Kunst’ exhibition in July 1937, and were subsequently sold abroad or destroyed. It was in this ‘excellent collection’ that Beckett saw numerous paintings by the main representatives of German Expressionism, such as Franz Marc’s Tierschicksal (The Fate of the Animals, 1913). Representing an impending apocalypse, this painting, with ‘horses screaming in pandemonium, swine calm, Reh [deer] rearing up under falling tree’, was a culmination of Marc’s depiction of suffering as a consuming force


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Figure 1 Visitor’s Book to the Schreckenskammer, Moritzburg, Halle, 1937; courtesy of the Moritzburg, Halle.

in life.12 Beckett gives a fascinating glimpse into the general attitude towards the ‘degenerate’ paintings in this special exhibition by recording the comments of the custodian, a ‘charming old bearded Diener [servant]’ (GD, 23 January 1937). Thus the ‘Diener is very trouble[d] by some perspectives that are not alas in Nature’ in Lionel Feininger, Klee who ‘draws like a child’ and Nolde’s ‘miserable thinking’ evident in the painting Judas before the High Priests with its ‘dreadful caricature of the Sheeny that pleases the Diener’. Beckett was also able to see modern art outside such restricted exhibitions, as certain galleries had not yet removed contemporary art from public display. Indeed, Beckett’s diaries testify to inconsistencies in National Socialist cultural policies in 1936–1937, which were mainly due to the debate between Goebbels and Rosenberg over what constituted ‘degenerate’ art. He thus commented on the fact that while he was able to view drawings from Schmidt-Rottluff and Kirchner in the Zeichnungssammlung [drawings collection] of the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin, he was unable to see paintings by the same artists in the main collection (GD, 19 December 1936). In a letter to Günther Albrecht, Beckett memorably refers to this collection of drawings as a place ‘wo man die Giftmischer im Intimsten ihres Schaffens geniessen darf [where one can enjoy the mixers of poison at their most intimate creativity]’.13 Beckett was particularly attentive to the fate of Max Liebermann, whose status as either ‘degenerate’ or healthily German was

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heavily debated by the Nazi cultural authorities. Whereas Liebermann’s paintings had been removed from the public eye in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, his work could still be seen in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, much to Beckett’s surprise: ‘On ground floor so astonished at finding . . . 5 pictures by Liebermann . . . that I leave’ (GD, 23 December 1936). Beckett’s note that a further sixth picture, a portrait, is missing, elucidates a general policy in Nazi condemnations of modern art: figure painting tended to be banned while landscapes were generally deemed acceptable.14 Liebermann’s status within Nazi Germany was brought home to Beckett by a man in a small pub in Staffelstein after he had visisted the Wohlfahrtskirche Vierzehnheiligen: ‘On my mentioning Liebermann [the man] delivers a terrific harangue against Jews, than whom Germany has no other enemy’ (GD, 22 February 1937). Beckett’s awareness of the situation is further captured when he records walking ‘past Jüdischer Friedhof (a desolation, cf. [Jacob] Ruysdael’s Judenkirchhof [1653–1655; Jewish Cemetery] in Zwinger [Gallery in Dresden], which I wonder if by now burnt)’ (GD, 15 October 1936).

German Expressionism Whereas access to public collections was severely restricted, modern art could still be viewed in private collections, ‘where alone living art is to be seen’ as Beckett told MacGreevy (SB to TM, 28 November 1936). One of the most fascinating aspects of Beckett’s German trip is the degree to which he managed to make contact with, and was welcomed by, a wide circle of artists and art historians. Many of these were the very representatives and defenders of German Modernism that the Nazis were driving out of public institutions.15 It was through these people that Beckett received first-hand accounts of the cultural repression and personal persecutions ordered by the Nazi regime, being informed, for example, of impending prohibitions of art books: ‘Hear that Barlach & Nolde books are to be banned next year. I.e. buy Nolde quick’ (GD, 10 November 1936).16 In Hamburg, society ladies and art collectors, Margaritha Durrieu and Helene Fera, introduced Beckett to what he termed an ‘energetic underground’ of painters, including Willem Grimm, Karl Ballmer and Karl Kluth (SB to TM, 28 November 1936 [misdated by Beckett 1937]).17 In a letter to MacGreevy he observed that they ‘are all more or less suppressed, i.e. cannot exhibit publicly and dare sell only with precaution’ (SB to TM, 28 November 1936 [misdated by Beckett 1937]). Yet he also admired the


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apolitical attitude of these Hamburg artists, who ‘are all profoundly serious and therefore only a very little disturbed by the official attitude towards them’. The persecutions to which these painters were subject was exemplified by the case of the Jewish painter Gretchen Wohlwill, who informed Beckett that she was ‘excluded from all professional activities’ and could ‘have a closed exhibition to which only Jews may be invited’ (GD, 24 November 1936). Beckett’s interest in the plight of the artist in Nazi Germany is revealed by the fact that he copied out the official communication Wohlwill had received from the authorities. Wohlwill’s position as a Jewish painter in Germany in 1936 was mirrored by that of the art historian and Schmidt-Rottluff specialist, Rosa Schapire, who (as Beckett noted in his diary) stoically ‘[r]eveals she is fortunate[ly] not of pure Aryan descent, & therefore cannot publish nor give public lectures’ (GD, 15 November 1936). She also enabled Beckett to gain access to the ‘Magazin’ of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, a cellar room to which works by Expressionists had been banished (GD, 19 November 1936; see Mühling 2003). Schapire’s art criticism would later be exhibited in the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition in Munich in 1937, a fate similarly suffered by Will Grohmann, another eminent art historian whom Beckett met. Grohmann had published various monographs on artists such as Klee and Kandinsky, and despite enforced retirement ‘like all others of his kidney’ (SB to TM, 16 February 1937), was unwilling to think of exile. As Beckett noted, Grohmann argued that it is more interesting to stay than to go, even if it were feasible to go. They can’t control thoughts. Length of regime impossible to estimate, depends mostly on economic outshot. If it breaks down it is fitting for him & his kind to be on the spot, to go under or become active again. (GD, 2 February 1937)18 It was through people such as Grohmann that Beckett was able to see many private collections of modern art, not only in Hamburg but across Germany, which allowed him to gain a greater appreciation of Expressionist painting in particular. In Halle he was thus able to see the Weise collection of works predominantly by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. And Günther Franke, who continued to show ‘degenerate’ art in his Graphisches Kabinett in Munich, allowed Beckett to view his Max Beckmann collection (GD, 15 March 1937); Beckett had previously admired the painter’s ‘excellent colour sense’ in the Kunstverein Rabenstrasse in Hamburg (GD, 13 November 1936).19 Yet arguably the most important private art collection that Beckett saw in Germany,

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beside that of the late Max Sauerlandt in Hamburg, was that of Ida Bienert in Dresden. Despite the fact that, as Beckett points out, Ida Bienert was supportive of the new regime, she feared the seizure of her modern art collection. She thus gave Beckett the catalogue of her collection ‘on condition that I show it to nobody in Germany’ (GD, 15 February 1937), her reticence no doubt also stemming from the fact that the discredited art historian Will Grohmann had compiled the catalogue.20 Beckett admired many of the Expressionist paintings he saw in public as well as in private collections throughout Germany. At first he tended to limit himself to descriptions and evaluations of the technical aspects, such as the use of colour or the overall composition, of paintings. But as his knowledge deepened, Beckett was able to declare Kirchner to be ‘the most important artist’ of the early Expressionist group ‘Die Brücke’ (GD, 2 Febuary 1937). In giving expression to emotional atmospheres or states of mind, Kirchner used what he himself referred to as nature’s primordial hieroglyphs, and set these into simplified yet distorted forms. Again, it was the stylistic elements that Beckett emphasised in his praise for Kirchner, admiring his ‘incredible line & sureness of taste & fineness of colour’ (GD, 19 January 1937). Attracted to the immediacy of emotive expression within form and colour, Beckett similarly emphasised and praised the directness of Otto Müller’s landscapes. Beckett did not, however, merely admire Expressionist paintings for their technique, but was on occasion also drawn to their intensely evocative psychologies. This is evident in his response to Nolde’s Christus und die Kinder (Christ and the Children, 1910): clot of yellow infants, long green back of Christ (David?) leading to black & beards of Apostles. Lovely eyes of child held in His arms. Feel at once on terms with the picture, & that I want to spend a long time before it, & play it over & over like the record of a quartet. (GD, 19 November 1936) Beckett also admired the artistic and emotional statements of Edvard Munch. He was particularly impressed by the painting Mädchen auf der Brücke (Three Women Standing on a Bridge, c. 1900), which he was able to see in the private collection of Heinrich C. Hudtwalcker in Hamburg. One of several paintings Munch painted of the theme, Beckett judged it the ‘best Munch I have seen’ (GD, 22 November 1936).21 Beckett was also impressed by an ‘exquisite’ Munch painting, which he terms ‘Einsamkeit’ (GD, 20 January 1937).22 Commenting on the painting on two different occasions, the ‘pale unlimited motionless emptiness of sea’ and the figure


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of the woman on the shore reminded him of a line from Racine’s Phèdre: ‘Elle mourût aux bords . . .’ (GD, 19 December 1936).23 Beckett’s sensitivity to the psychological expression of moods reappears in his comments on a painting by Max Beckmann, where he states that the ‘head & shoulders of Ulysses beautifully felt & painted’ (GD, 15 March 1937). Beckett’s interest in German Expressionism was not limited to paintings, but extended to the plastic work of Ernst Barlach, whom he appears to have particularly admired. Beckett bought Carl Dietrich Carls’s book on Ernst Barlach in the ‘Zeichner des Volkes’ series, which included 85 illustrations and discussed all areas of the German’s work – graphic, plastic and literary (GD, 4 November 1936).24 Beckett’s thoughts on Barlach led him to note ‘[h]is name X Maillol in Murphy?’ (GD1, 4 November 1936), resulting in one of the few changes Beckett made to the original typescript of Murphy. The German sculptor thus appears in the reference to ‘the Pergamene Barlach’ (Mu, 148), setting up a contrast between the ‘dreadful machine’ of the Pergamon Altar and Barlach’s intensely emotional portrayals of human suffering (GD, 26 December 1936). Beckett subsequently showed immense interest in this artist’s pieces whenever he saw them, commenting for example on the wood sculpture Sterben (Dying) that it had the ‘right smile on the dead’ (GD, 16 March 1937). As with the early Roman sculpture Beckett admired during his trip to Germany, Barlach’s figures strikingly recall Beckett’s characters in his late stage and television plays. Towards the end of his trip, Beckett ordered several of Barlach’s plays. He also endeavoured to purchase the monograph Zeichnungen von Ernst Barlach, which had been published in November 1935 by Piper but banned and confiscated in March 1936.25 With the help of Eggers-Kestner, Beckett tried to obtain the book from the publisher Reinhard Piper directly. Yet when Beckett phoned Piper, the reply was negative, and, moreover, uttered in a ‘very terrified tone’ (letter to Günter Albrecht, 30 March 1937). Piper, who had been censored by Goebbels on several occasions, expressed his fear that Beckett would be searched at the border.

Dutch and Flemish Painting If Beckett’s engagement with modern art was not already extensive, his study of the Old Masters in the German galleries certainly was. Commenting on literally hundreds of paintings, the German diaries offer a unique insight into Beckett’s aesthetics, revealing his attraction to specific themes as much as to individual painters. As James Knowlson has discussed (2009),

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the highlights of any visit to an art gallery for Beckett were the seventeenthcentury Dutch and Flemish paintings, which he valued both for the attention to minute detail as well as their overall mood. In accordance with Molloy’s confession that ‘[h]omo mensura can’t do without staffage’ (Mo, 63), Beckett’s diary entries contain minute details, brief narrative images reminiscent of Dutch paintings: ‘Then through Rathaus, with little girl pissing beside the Apollo Brunnen’ (GD, 2 March 1937). There are numerous occasions within the diaries where Beckett describes his surroundings in terms of images derived from the paintings he was seeing daily. Thus New Year’s Eve festivities are held in ‘an atmosphere of van Brueghel the Younger’ (GD, 31 December 1936). Furthermore, Beckett’s style of writing in the diaries at times approaches the quality of painterly prose: ‘Suddenly with mist fallingly wonderful red light like an extension of the leaves that a group of women are raking together, against the grey néant of the Jungfernsee’ (GD, 12 January 1937). Often comprehending his surroundings in visual terms, Beckett at one point describes the view from the Elbhöhen across Hamburg as ‘very dim & Van Goyen’ (GD, 6 November 1936). Describing this view with reference to Van Goyen illustrates that, contrary to Malone’s dictum ‘but to hell with all this fucking scenery’ (MD, 108), Beckett was susceptible to the stillness and evocative moods of Dutch landscape painting. As he expressed with regard to Philips Wouwermann, Beckett held particularly the ‘lyrical’ landscapes in high esteem, the ‘solitary riders & resting scenes’ (GD, 5 February 1937). Yet Beckett was also aware, as he stated when discussing a Lievens painting, of the ‘frontier of sentiment & sentimentality’ (GD, 6 December 1936). Dismissing (in a Munch painting) the ‘feeling inclined to be overstated into the sentimental’, Beckett preferred pictures which retained an element of reticence (GD, 20 January 1937). This is illustrated by his comments on Kaspar David Friedrich’s Zwei Männer den Mond betrachtend (Two Men Observing the Moon, 1819), an acknowledged visual influence on Waiting for Godot: ‘Pleasant predilection for 2 tiny languid men in his landscapes, as in the little moon landscape, that is the only kind of romantic still tolerable, the bémolisé [the minor key]’ (GD, 14 February 1937).26 This view corresponds to Beckett’s evaluation of literary Romanticism, as his remarks on the ‘crouching brooding quality’ in Keats show: I like him the best of them all, because he doesn’t beat his fists on the table. I like that awful sweetness and thick soft damp green sickness. And weariness: ‘Take into the air my quiet breath’. (SB to TM, undated [1930])27


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Beckett’s sympathy with this quiet melancholy was closely connected with his growing emphasis on artistic ignorance and honesty of expression over competence, as stated in a letter to MacGreevy written from Germany: ‘impatience with the immensely competent bullies and browbeaters and highwaymen and naggers, the Rembrandts & Halses and Titians and Rubenses, the Tarquins of art’ (SB to TM, 18 January 1937). Accordingly, Beckett spends comparably little time studying these acknowledged masters, telling MacGreevy that he had not looked at Rubens because ‘I take him for granted, like the wonders of modern science’ (SB to TM, 25 March 1937). Beckett infinitely preferred the more melancholy landscapes of painters such as van Goyen, Elsheimer and, in particular, ‘Brouwer, dear Brouwer’ (GD, 5 February 1937). The last of these had arguably by this point in time become Beckett’s favourite painter, both for his landscapes and low-life peasant scenes.28 The Flemish painter Brouwer represented the very antithesis of the ‘competent’ artist in that he was a ‘talented Taugenichts [good-for-nothing] & no more’ (SB to TM, 18 January 1937). Moreover, Brouwer’s paintings incorporated the two aspects of Dutch painting that impressed Beckett, the ‘minor key’ depiction of landscapes and the minute details that implied distinct narratives; it is often the figure in the background that catches his attention rather than the main theme of the painting. This emphasis on artistic ignorance or incompetence often guides Beckett’s evaluations of the paintings he sees, so that Cranach is ‘disgusting . . . at his best’, whereas Giorgione’s Self-Portrait (Figure 2; c.1510) is praised for its ‘profound reticence’ (GD, 6 December 1936). Giorgione’s Self-Portrait, which he saw in the Herzog-Anton-Ulrich Museum in Brunswick, had a profound effect on Beckett, and he spent a long time studying the ‘expression at once intense & patient, anguished & strong’ (GD, 8 December 1936). His admiration for the Venetian painter, who subordinated subject-matter to the evocation of moods, was already visible in his essay on Proust, which refers to the ‘breathless passion of a Giorgione youth’ (PTD, 91). Furthermore, in his 1934 essay on MacGreevy, who also admired Giorgione, Beckett referred to the ‘rapt Giorgionesque elucidations’ in his friend’s poetry (Dis, 69). Beckett returned to look at Giorgione’s Self-Portrait again two days after first seeing it, formulating his further impressions in terms reminiscent of the emphasis on the antithetical movement in the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’: ‘antithesis of mind & sense, knitted brows, anguished eyes’ (GD, 9 December 1936).29 Importantly, seeing the Giorgione Portrait of a Young Man (1505–1506) in reproduction prior to his trip, Beckett had pointed towards the ‘reticence’ he subsequently detected in the Self-Portrait

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Figure 2 Giorgione: Self-Portrait, c. 1510, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig, Kunstmuseum des Landes Niedersachsen.

in Brunswick: ‘all its unsaid must be his’ (SB to TM, 9 January 1936 [misdated 1935]).30 Indeed, the same system of evaluation is evident in Beckett’s response to modern art. His comment that he preferred the ‘stillness & the unsaid of [Willem] Grimm & [Karl] Ballmer’ (GD, 26 November 1936) as opposed to Bargheer’s ‘enormous competence’ (GD, 26 November 1936) and Schmidt-Rottluff’s ‘programmatic monumentalism’ (GD, 19 December 1936), represents a visual counterpart to the quietist attitude that led him from Schopenhauer, Grillparzer and Goethe via Thomas à Kempis to Geulincx.

Turning Pictures into Literature ‘I’m 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’. (SB to TM, 28 November 1936) There are several moments in his letters to MacGreevy when Beckett points to the impossibility and ineffectiveness of writing about the pictures that he


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is discovering in German art galleries. This negation of verbally transmitting a visual experience anticipates Beckett’s postwar writings on art, especially the essay ‘La peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon’, in which the very premise of art criticism’s capability of offering insight into the art of painting is denied any validity. On another level, there is a shift in emphasis in Beckett’s evaluation of different kinds of artistic expression. Whereas before literature had remained his primary concern, into which pictures had to be transformed, from late 1936 onwards there is a sense of equity between the two creative practices. On a more immediate level, and contrary to his statement to MacGreevy in the letter of 28 November 1936 quoted above, in his diaries and letters Beckett continued to transform paintings into a more literary kind of writing. He explicitly understood that paintings were readable texts, which both transmitted and absorbed an entire array of interpretative possibilities. Throughout the diaries bear witness to Beckett’s dialogue with paintings and painters, often couched in terms of exploration or analytical challenge. Both with regard to paintings, but also during his intense study of thirteenth- to sixteenth-century German sculpture, Beckett continually displays his urge to write narratives and psychologies into what he sees. Fundamentally, Beckett believed that any artistic enterprise had to admit elements of uncertainty rather than simplify complexities or, as he put it, ‘how can one see anything “simple & whole” ’ (GD, 26 March 37). Beckett’s interpretation of the paintings he saw was often guided by psychological considerations. This is evident from Beckett’s comparison of two paintings by Vermeer, when he says that the Herr und Dame beim Wein (Lady and Gentleman drinking Wine, 1658) in Berlin was ‘better painted than the Brunswick picture [The Procuress, 1656] but less interesting psychologically’ (GD, 5 January 1937). His attraction to the disturbed vision of Hieronymus Bosch, evident from the notes he took on the location of the painter’s major works, is underlined by his comments on Dierick Bouts the Elder’s painting Resurrection in Munich (c.1450–1460): ‘[i]nteresting type for Christ, approaching Boschian, half idiot, half cunning’ (GD, 9 March 1937). His remark that the painting portrayed a ‘remoteness almost of schizophrenia’ is typical of Beckett’s close reading of the facial expressions and gestures of pictorial figures. Despite his professed preference for Dutch and Flemish painting, Beckett’s psychological readings of paintings occur when he is discussing the Italian Masters. His scrutiny of these paintings often results in the composition of small dramas, shrewdly observed fragments of narrative, as in his comments on Mantegna’s Holy Family (1485–1490) in the Gemäldegalerie of Dresden:

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Wonderful Child & Joseph, looking not blessed but accursed, outrageously capsized in his domestic & professional life. Sitting as far away as the cell permits the Christ Child looks decapitated. (GD, 13 February 1937) Beckett’s awareness of the literary potential of visual images is clear in his striking discussion of the ‘magnificent’ St. Sebastian by Antonello da Messina in Dresden (Figure 3; 1475–1476). Indeed, the painting inspired Beckett to such a degree that while looking at it he ‘felt a poem beginning’, but was disturbed by ‘a noisy guide with a party screaming about Raphael’ (GD, 17 February 1937). The elements of aggression usually inherent in

Figure 3 Antonello da Messina: St. Sebastian, c. 1475–76, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.


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depictions of Sebastian are removed in Antonello’s picture with the absence of the archers, and the martyr is portrayed in a detached and even sculptural manner. In his initial description of the painting, Beckett concentrated on ‘reading’ the activities of the figures featured behind the martyred Sebastian: ‘Soldier snoring middle left. Women staring from balcony. . . . Men chatting & going about their business. It is good to be alive’, he noted in his diary (GD, 1 February 1937).31 A letter written eleven years later on 27 July 1948 to Georges Duthuit illuminates the importance Beckett attached to this particular painting: Espace pur à force de mathématique . . . et le lapidé [sic] exposé, s’exposant, à l’admiration des courtisans prenant l’air dominical au balcon, tout ça envahi, mangé par l’humain. Devant une telle oeuvre, une telle victoire sur la réalité du désordre, sur la petitesse du coeur et de l’esprit, on manque se pendre. [Pure space created by mathematics . . . and the stoned [martyr] exposed, exposing himself, to the admiration of the courtesans with their Sunday air on the balcony, all this invaded, eaten by the human. Faced with such a work, such a victory over the reality of chaos, of the smallness of heart and spirit, we nearly hang ourselves]. (qtd. in Labrusse 1990, 674) Leaving aside Beckett’s eye for symmetry, which was to influence his own stage images, the importance of this letter lies in its reference to the humanity pervading Antonello’s St. Sebastian. Time and again Beckett’s comments favour honest pictorial expression, even at the expense of technical mastery. He thus remarks how ‘irritating [the] natural piety’ of Angelico is in contrast to the ‘humane painting of Masaccio’ (GD, 20 December 1936; Beckett’s emphasis).32 Beckett’s impatience with artistic competence at the expense of emotional depth extended to other famous painters such as Cranach, in whom ‘one can only appreciate a technique important in history of painting’ (GD, 6 December 1936). Beckett tended to dismiss most of the many German artists whose works he saw in the galleries and museums, but there were also pleasant surprises, such as the ‘[t]iny wretched crucified Christ’ by Konrad Witz (GD, 21 January; Christus am Kreuz, [Christ on Cross], 1445–50) and the paintings by Gabriel Mäleskircher.33 Yet Beckett’s main focus in terms of German art was on Albrecht Dürer, and his admiration for the artist, on whom he had previously taken notes, was undiminished while in Germany.34 He spent a lot of time studying both the Dresden Altarpiece (1496) in Dresden and the Four Apostles (The Four Holy

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Men, 1526) in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek. He took copious notes on the Four Apostles, and traced the interrelationship in a chart between the four figures through the symbolic and psychological interpretation according to medieval theories of the temperaments. He also admired Dürer’s portraits of Jakob Muffels and Hieronymus Holzschuher, in which Dürer similarly tried to capture his friends’ characters as a type of temperament rather than portraying them in realistic likeness. Beckett also spent a long time studying the work of Matthias Grünewald, and copied a list of the locations of his work into his diary (GD, 18 February 1937).35 Once again, Beckett’s sensitivity to the psychological elements contained in paintings can be illustrated by his comments on Grünewald’s Sts. Erasmus and Mauritius (1520–1524). Although it ‘immediately says very little’, it is Gradually full of psychologies & derisions. Remoteness, contempt, suspicion of Erasmus, social & devout prepossessions in conflict! Splendid old priest on “white” side, aghast at the visitor’s appearance. Sinister black retainer. Atmosphere of conspiracy, treachery. (GD, undated [probably 9 March 1937])

Still LIFE: Beckett and German Ecclesiastical Sculpture As James Knowlson argues, many of Beckett’s theatrical images can be seen as ‘a reworking of visual imagery that was derived from, or inspired by, the Old Masters’ (2002, 75). This is also the case with sculpture, as Beckett’s later drama undoubtedly owes much to the plastic arts in its stonelike quality. When Male Figure in Ghost Trio lifts his head to look at the camera, his face evokes a chiselled stone sculpture, which is further stressed by the sculptural elements inherent in the pose of the figure, the structural composition of the scene and the use of the colour grey. In the late drama and television plays, the linear and geometric composition of stage and scene reformulate the Renaissance notion of a ‘tableau vivant’.36 Beckett referred to such ‘tableau vivant’, or ‘living pictures’, depicting motionless scenes of living beings, in Murphy (106). The concept was important to Beckett’s poetics, as reflected in his description of Van Gogh’s Pears as ‘still LIFE’ (GD, 14 February 1937), a striking anticipation of his depictions of life that still stirred though almost still.37 In his notebook for the Schiller Theater production of Waiting for Godot, Beckett adapted such tableaux, referring to them as ‘Wartestellen’ (moments of stillness), instances of ‘frozen waiting’ which provided a ‘visual structure’ to the play (Knowlson and McMillan 1993, 91 and 397–8).


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At times Beckett’s passion for the paintings he sees in German art galleries is rivalled in the diaries by the intensity with which he describes the architecture, sculptures and portals of German churches and cathedrals. During the months of January and February 1937, Beckett made veritable pilgrimages to further his knowledge of thirteenth- to sixteenth-century German sculpture (see Knowlson 2008). In planning his trip, Beckett had at an early stage decided to visit some of the most important examples of early Romanesque sculpture in the Harz region, which first took him to the ‘incredibly beautiful’ Hildesheim (SB to TM, 22 December 1936). Yet it was only when he arrived in Naumburg and visited its cathedral that his interest was fully engaged. Beckett must have spent a long time studying sculptured figures, endeavouring to unravel the symbolism and to cross-reference styles. In this context, his knowledge of the Christian liturgy undoubtedly helped him understand the historical differences in imaging Christian iconography. This is exemplified by the way he describes his impression of the ‘wonderful’ screen of the west choir in the Naumburger Dom. The screen, crafted by the Master of Naumburg and his workshop, illustrates scenes from the Passion. The life-size figures communicate immense suffering, yet in a human rather than transcendent manner. Beckett is sensitive to this, judging the screen to be not only ‘[v]ery architectonic’ but also ‘psychological, not religious’, analysing the figures, such as Christ ‘carrying the Cross with diligence’, in this light (GD, 26 January 1937).38 He perceived the 12 large statues of the founders and patrons, which are placed within the west choir, to be ‘indescribable’. Once more, Beckett is attentive to facial expressions and physical comportment of the figures, commenting on Hermann’s ‘almost abject attitude’ as being a ‘wilful contrast to the prodigious masculinity of Ekkehardt opposite’ (Figure 4; GD, 26 January 1937). Following his visit to the Naumburger Dom, Beckett became increasingly interested in the debate revolving around the uncertain attributions of the Naumburger Meister’s work in the various cathedrals of Saxony, reading widely on the subject. He pursued the problem in the cathedral in Meissen, where his diary entries record his efforts to spot similarities and differences in the styles of the figures that would shed light on their creator (GD, 12 February 1937). On his way to Bamberg, Beckett stopped off at Freiberg to see the Goldne Pforte (Golden Portal) in the cathedral, a symbolic vision of heavenly paradise which Beckett felt to be ‘far more sober, stern & grave than the Naumburg & Meissen figures’ (GD, 19 February 1937). Beckett’s stay in Bamberg itself was dominated by sculptural study. He went to the Kaiserdom, with its astonishing array of sculptural decoration, on four separate occasions. Here Beckett was also intent on comparing the various figures of the different screens and portals in an attempt to

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Figure 4 Naumburger Master: Hermann and Reglindis, 1937, West Screen, Naumburg Cathedral; courtesy of Deutsche Fotothek.

understand shifting historical and stylistical patterns. He spent much time looking at the Fürstenportal, with its depiction of the Last Judgement. Inside the cathedral, Beckett was particularly impressed by the figures of the prophets and the apostles in the eastern choir screens, known as the Georgenchor. As with his study of the Old Masters, Beckett was always sensitive to gesture within sculpture, and invested a psychological interpretation into his reading of the figures: Both prophets & apostles stern, tense & remote. Perhaps essence of style in the Ecclesia & Synagogue, still & withdrawn to the point almost of petrifaction. (Petrified statue is good). Annunciation wonderfully gentle


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& tender, with intent angel almost on tiptoe and right hand caressing gesture. (GD, 20 February 1937) Beckett continued to study sculpture in Nuremberg, where many pieces by the sixteenth-century artists Veit Stoss and Tilman Riemenschneider were located. Yet Beckett was disappointed with what he saw in Nuremberg, referring once again to his distaste for the accomplished artist. He commented that the ‘great Nürnberg period is for me now a conspiracy’, where all that remained ‘after the technique is the vision of the sturdy burgher full of the sense of his worth & the mysteries of his trade’ (SB to TM, 7 March 1937).39 What emerges from the evaluations recorded in the diaries is (once again) a dislike for overwrought artistry and a preference for more humane expressions in figures. This is exemplified by his comments on the ‘superb’ Pergenstörfferisches Grabmal by Adam Kraft in the Nuremberg Frauenkirche, with its ‘beautifully absorbed Madonna’ (GD, 1 March 1937). The clarity in structure in this funerary relief admits a psychological expression that is obliterated in the heavier and more ornate pieces such as Kraft’s tomb of St. Sebald in the Sebaldus Church (a ‘machine’) or his Ciborium (‘another machine’). And, as in his discussions of paintings, Beckett continually displays his urge to write narratives into the sculptures he sees, as is exemplified in his response to the ‘superb’ Annunciation by the Erminoldmeister in the cathedral of Regensburg: More lyrical. Angel with delighted look of an express messenger from Irish Hospitals Trust. Mary . . . incredulous, flattered, happy, astonished as though by someone bursting in without knocking & interrupting her reading, all written on a surface of doom only to an eye of such permanent [biliosity?] as mine. She has not had time to think it over. Has Gabriel spoken? Does she take him merely – merely! – for an admirer. And so on. (GD, 3 March 1937) Many years passed before Beckett found a medium in which to express his passion for ecclesiastical sculpture. Within the television plays he was able to portray figures whose rigidity suggested timelessness. The frozen, stonelike poses of characters such as the seated Male Figure in Ghost Trio or Joe in Eh Joe are contrasted – as in the figures he had seen in the cathedrals in Germany – with facial expressions rendering a psychological state beyond words. This rigidity is also introduced into the scene itself, as depicted in the table of Ohio Impromptu. The sculptural effect of the dramatic works is often produced by the white and grey colouration of the characters’ faces.

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Through the medium of television, the three-dimensional approach afforded by close-ups relies more on the visualisation of a sculptural piece than the single (frontal) view necessitated by a stage or a canvas.

Self-Portraiture Confronted with the arts on a near-daily basis in Germany, Beckett’s tendency to turn his visual experiences into verbal narratives coexists with a reciprocal movement. There are several instances in which Beckett comprehended his own reality and emotions in pictorial terms. He thus described himself in a letter of November 1936 to Mary Manning Howe as ‘an anaesthetised Sebastian affecting to choke back his cries’ (SB to MM, 14 November 1936). This projection of self into the lineaments of another is most pronounced in a passage written with Brueghel’s painting Die holländischen Sprichwörter (The Dutch Proverbs, 1559) in Berlin in mind: I am the pretty young man, shall I never learn to cease thinking of myself as young, as [in] Brueghels Proverbs, der durch die Finger seht. Was sehe ich durch die Finger. Mich, mit übergehenden Augen [the one that looks through his fingers. What do I see through the fingers. Myself, with crying eyes]. (GD, 18 December 1937)40 Brueghel’s painting, of which there are numerous imitations, contains over a hundred Flemish and Dutch proverbs, which have over the centuries been variously defined and interpreted. In his diary entry Beckett is assuming the position of the man in the window (second from the top) of the farmhouse, looking through his fingers. Since the 1960s, commentators have interpreted this gesture to represent the proverb ‘He looks through his fingers’, as denoting either tolerance or shiftiness, in the sense of deliberately ignoring something.41 Yet when Beckett saw the painting, the portrayed proverb was generally defined as ‘He who cannot see through his fingers will not do well in the world’ (Fraenger 1923, 142).42 This is undoubtedly the interpretation of the proverb that struck Beckett: the portrayal of the worldweary man, seated like von der Vogelweide or Belacqua, alienated from the external world. Beckett’s diary comment testifies to an unusually frank moment of self-awareness and, moreover, an acknowledgment of unhappiness. Yet it is also possible that Beckett in his diary entry is seeing himself refracted through two figures, the one seeing through his fingers in the


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farmhouse, and the other he perceives (in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting) trying to scoop up spilt porridge: ‘irreversible catastrophe’. The abolition of the boundaries between Beckett’s own experiences and pictorial representation extended to include his acquaintances, as paintings frequently reminded him of people he knew, seeing, for example, ‘a blonde Ethna when young’ in Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Woman (studio, after 1480; GD2, 16 December 1936).43 At times it seems as if Beckett was unable to hinder the intensity of emotional associations from flowing into his reading of paintings. As he came across Arnold Böcklin’s Der Künstler und seine Frau (Self-Portrait with Wife, 1863–1864) in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, he immediately felt that the artist looks ‘astonishingly like Father’, and endeavoured to purchase a reproduction of it for his mother (GD, 21 December 1936). Beckett’s interest in self-representation and self-interpretation led him to heightened awareness of self-portraiture. Closely related to autobiographical writing, painters through the ages have endeavoured to probe into the mysteries of their own selves by painting themselves. Rembrandt is famous for having completed more than 50 self-portraits. Aware that no single selfportrait, statically bound to a specific moment of time, could capture the essence of experience, Rembrandt’s series of self-portraits achieves the status of a visual autobiography. Beckett’s attitude towards Rembrandt was ambiguous. Together with Rubens and Titian, Rembrandt represented, in Beckett’s eyes, the competent Master rather than the psychologically challenging painter. The 28 Rembrandt paintings in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin left him ‘bored and impatient with the implications that don’t come off’, and wondering whether it was possible at least to ‘admire, something, the handiwork?’ (GD, 5 January 1937). The failed ‘implications’ that Beckett perceived in Rembrandt’s paintings in 1936 were an integral part of Belacqua’s artistic vision in Dream. Having proclaimed that the ‘experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement, between the flowers that cannot coexist, the antithetical’ (Dream, 138), Beckett’s early protagonist and part alter ego Belacqua illustrates this by alluding to Rembrandt: I think now . . . of the dehiscing, the dynamic décousu [disconnected], of a Rembrandt, the implication lurking behind the pictorial pretext threatening to invade pigment and oscuro [darkness]; I think of the Selbstbildnis [Self-Portrait], in the toque and the golden chain, of his portrait of his brother, of the cute little Saint Matthew angel that I swear van Ryn never saw the day he painted. (138)44

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Yet by 1936 the oscuro, the dark quality of Rembrandt’s paintings, had no more secrets to disclose. Following his dismissal of Rembrandt’s implications in the German diaries, Beckett wrote the line ‘E l’oscuro è veramente troppo più oscuroche non lo voleva [And the dark is truly much darker than one wants]’ (GD, 5 January 1937). Beckett’s comments on the individual paintings reveal that he did indeed admire Rembrandt’s skill, but would still ‘give the lot for the little Brouwer herd sitting on the road blowing the shawm’ (GD, 5 January 1937). This is a telling statement, one that favours Brouwer’s melancholy vision over what, at another point, Beckett terms Rembrandt’s ‘hyper excellent painting’ (GD, 6 December 1936). The only Rembrandt noted with unqualified praise (‘magnificent’) is, tellingly, the Dresden Self-Portrait with a Sketchbook (1657), which shows the aged painter with a heavy, pensive look. Beckett’s comment, that ‘all light on hand’, reinforces the painting’s implication of the artist who suffers within the creative act (GD, 10 February 1937).45

Subjects and Objects, or Solitude and Incommensurability Self-portraiture contributed to one of the most important developments in Beckett’s poetics, observable in two remarkable letters to MacGreevy describing his responses to Cézanne’s work. Beckett had already alluded to Cézanne in Dream as being ‘very strong on architectonics’, although one suspects that his knowledge of Cézanne’s work at this time was rather negligible (178). However, two letters written to MacGreevy, dating from September 1934, reveal a more profound study of Cézanne. Discussing the painting Montagne Sainte-Victoire (Figure 5; 1905–1906) in the Tate Gallery, Beckett argues that whereas the ‘anthropomorphized’ reality as portrayed by Dutch painting had become insufficient, ‘Cézanne seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever’ (SB to TM, 8 September 1934).46 The problematic subject-object relation lying at the heart of Beckett’s interpretation of Cézanne occurs immediately after the publication of the essay ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, in which the ‘rupture’ in this relation forms the measuring stick by which contemporary writers are judged (Dis, 70). The awareness of this ‘rupture’, the impossibility of communicating the reality of the external, or even the internal world, corresponds to the ‘unsaid’ he detected in Grimm and Ballmer two years later. Ballmer, an advocate of the anthroposophist teachings of Rudolf Steiner, was the one


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Figure 5 Paul Cézanne: Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 1905–06, watercolour on paper, Tate, London; © Tate, London, 2010.

painter Beckett met in Germany who had the most profound impact on his thinking. Beckett, it appears, admired Ballmer for his work as much as his personality, noting that the Swiss artist was ‘[m]ild, lost almost to point of apathy & indifference’ (GD, 26 November 1936). Beckett’s interest in this painter was such that he spent considerable effort trying to understand Ballmer’s Aber Herr Heidegger! and the manuscript of Deutschtum und Christentum (GD, 20 March 1937).47 Although there was much that interested Beckett in the former book, he ultimately deemed both ‘too Steinerisch for the non-initiate’.48 In his essay ‘La peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon’, Beckett referred to Ballmer and his writings: Quand Sauerlandt se prononce . . . sur le cas du grand peintre inconnu qu’est Ballmer, ou cela retombe-t-il? Das geht mich nicht an, disait Ballmer, que les écrits de Herr Heidegger faisaient cruellement souffrir. [When Sauerlandt pronounces . . . on the case of the great unknown painter that is Ballmer, where does that leave us? That does not concern me, Ballmer would say, that the writings of Mr Heidegger would make one suffer cruelly]. (Dis, 118) Beckett is here misusing Ballmer’s words, despite relying on his diary and quoting his words verbatim. Ballmer had stated his disinterest when Beckett

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mentioned Sauerlandt’s comments on his work (GD, 26 November 1936). Beckett had noted Sauerlandt’s opinion that Ballmer was one of the most important avant-garde painters in Die Kunst der letzten dreissig Jahre (1935), but felt that the critic’s ‘passage on Ballmer strikes me as quatsch’ (GD, 27 November 1936). Beckett’s own response to the Germany painter is evident from a diary entry describing his visit to Ballmer in his Hamburg studio in November 1936, where he saw the painting Kopf in Rot (Figure 6; Female Head, c.1930): Wonderful red Frauenkopf, skull earth sea & sky, I think of Monadologie & my Vulture. Would not occur to me to call this painting abstract. A metaphysical concrete. Not Nature convention, but its source, fountain of Erscheinung [phenomenon]. Fully a posteriori painting. Object not exploited to illustrate an idea, as in say [Fernand] Léger or [Willi] Baumeister, but primary. The communication exhausted by the optical experience that is its motive & content. Anything further is by the way. Thus Leibniz, monadologie, Vulture, are by the way. Extraordinary stillness. (GD, 26 November 1936)

Figure 6 Karl Ballmer: Head in Red, c. 1930–31, tempera and oil on plywood; courtesy of the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau.


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Similar to the ‘incommensurability’ between landscape and subject located in Cézanne, Beckett found a lack of communication in Ballmer’s painting that resembled the isolated nature of the monad. More importantly, Ballmer did not seek to express appearances but rather the ‘essence’ of objects. This reduction of pictorial content to the ‘primary’ is exemplified in Ballmer’s painting by a tendency of objects and figures to disappear into space, generating a kind of threshold between what can and what cannot be visualised or represented, or Beckett’s ‘said’ and ‘unsaid’. It amounts to what Beckett in his essay on the van Velde termed ‘un métier qui insinue plus qu’il n’affirme [a skill which insinuates more than it states]’ (Dis, 130). Beckett’s notion that in Ballmer the object was ‘not exploited to illustrate an idea’ is anticipated in his discussion of Cézanne, where nature is similarly rooted in a space separate from the one occupied by the painter. He extended this lack of relation between the artist and the world to encompass the artist’s alienation from his own self, arguing that Cézanne ‘had the sense of his incommensurability not only with life of such a different order as landscape, but even with life of his own order, even with the life – one feels looking at the self-portrait in the Tate . . . – operative in himself’ (SB to TM, undated [16 September 1934]). Beckett’s sensitivity to Cézanne’s self-portrait occurs at a time when he was in psychoanalysis, and there is a hint in his observations that, beyond its theoretical implications, the irredeemable solitude governing human existence was of personal interest to Beckett.49 This is particularly visible in his view, again formulated against the background of Cézanne’s self-portrait, that ‘[e]ven the portrait beginning to be dehumanized as the individual feels himself more & more hermetic & alone & his neighbour a coagulum as alien as a protoplast or God, incapable of loving or hating anyone but himself or of being loved or hated by anyone but himself’ (SB to TM, 8 September 1934). Beckett returned to this alienation, representing one of the most important subjects in his thinking throughout the 1930s, when discussing the paintings of Jack B. Yeats in a letter of 14 August 1937, which offered a ‘kind of petrified insight into one’s ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness’, ‘handled with the dispassionate acceptance that is beyond tragedy’.50 In this same letter, written to his aunt Cissie Sinclair (herself an accomplished painter), Beckett also drew attention to the ‘impassable immensity’ between two people, and the ‘stillness’ of Yeats’s pictures. In a letter written to MacGreevy the same day as the one to Cissie Sinclair, Beckett rephrases these thoughts, but also continues the discussion of Cézanne from three years earlier: What I feel he gets so well, dispassionately, not tragically like Watteau, is the heterogeneity of nature & the human denizens, the unalterable

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alienness of the 2 phenomena, the 2 solitudes, or the solitude & the loneliness, the loneliness in solitude, the impassable immensity between the solitude that cannot quicken to loneliness & the loneliness that cannot lapse into solitude. There is nothing of the kind in Constable, the landscape shelters or threatens or serves or destroys, his nature is really infected with ‘spirit’, ultimately as humanised & romantic as Turner’s was & Claude’s was not & Cézanne’s was not. (SB to TM, 14 August 1937)

Visuals and Verbals Beckett’s intensified study of the visual arts (and in particular of Cézanne) during the years 1934 and 1935 coincides with a period that in terms of creative writing proved to be rather shallow. Beyond the publication of various reviews in 1934 and Echo’s Bones in November 1935, which included poems written some years previously, Beckett could point to little substantial writing during this time. Indeed, the correspondence with MacGreevy shows that Beckett’s thinking revolved around the aesthetic implications of writing rather than the practical process of composition. From September 1934 onwards, these more theoretical pronouncements largely derive, as we have seen, from Beckett’s encounter with painting. This makes the contention that the writing of Murphy essentially originated in Beckett’s encounter with art less surprising. It can be illustrated by the fragment ‘Lightning Calculation’, which ultimately formed part of Murphy (UoR MS2902). Beckett refers to this ‘new short story’ in a letter of 29 January 1935 to MacGreevy, only a short time after discussing Cézanne in his letters to MacGreevy of September 1934. The short typescript describes the movements of one Quigley, who is writing a book called The Pathetic Fallacy from Avercamp to Campendonck. The title of Quigley’s book can be related to Beckett’s receipt of a book on Heinrich Campendonk from Nancy Sinclair, which he found ‘very interesting’ (SB to TM, 1 January 1935). Furthermore, the ‘pathetic fallacy’ directly relates back to Beckett’s criticism of anthropomorphism in the Cézanne letters, the ‘itch to animise’ or invest landscape with human qualities: ‘What I feel in Cézanne is precisely the absence of a rapport that was all right for Rosa and Ruysdael for whom the animising mode was valid’ (SB to TM, 8 September 1934).51 Quigley’s undertaking is not without its problems, as he is both troubled by the fact that he cannot remember the ‘name of Hobbema’s celebrated avenue’ and that the ‘golden Cuyp sky which he now evoked, in order to make sure that it contained the flight of birds so important to his thesis, did


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not present itself with sufficient detail to set his mind at ease’.52 Quigley only manages to find some kind of resolution to these problems when he stops off at the Lyons teahouse on the way to the National Gallery. In a scene that reappears in Murphy, Quigley devotes considerable energy to calculating the various ways in which he can eat his five assorted biscuits. As a consequence, ‘Quigley began to be engrossed by the biscuits, and therefore no longer troubled by Hobbema and his avenue and Cuyp and his birds’. The entire episode can be seen as a fictional manifestation of Beckett’s aesthetic concerns as imparted to MacGreevy in the September 1934 letters. Ultimately, in the eating of the biscuits, Quigley is favouring mathematics, or Cézanne’s ‘architectonics’, over Dutch ‘landscapability’, illustrating Beckett’s dismissal of ‘Cuyp’s cows as irrelevant’ (SB to TM, 8 September 1934). Nevertheless, as Pilling argues, Murphy is not a book ‘strong on architectonics’ (1997, 133). In part this is because, in ‘Lightning Calculation’, Quigley finds it difficult to write his book ‘without reneging on his infatuation with the work of Hercules Seg[h]ers’. Although not a formalistic artist either, the Dutch artist Seghers is equally not an ‘animising’ painter. Indeed, as Beckett noted in February 1937 when he inspected two coloured engravings in the Print Room of the Zwinger Gallery in Dresden, Seghers was a ‘[v]ery modern talent’ (GD, 9 February 1937).53 Hercules Seghers (1580/90– 1633/38) was indeed an innovative and experimental artist, few of whose paintings survive today. Seghers, by all accounts a drunken, destitute and unappreciated artist, represents the very kind of unhappy creative spirit to whom Beckett tended to be attracted. Influenced by one of Beckett’s favourite painters, Adam Elsheimer, Seghers’s work usually depicts wild and fantastic mountainous scenes, with jagged cliffs and desolate valleys invoking at once an emotional intensity as well as a haunting, melancholy quiet. Seghers’s etchings, which Beckett admired in Dresden, are particularly ahead of their time, as he experimented with different coloured inks and often printed on dyed or coloured paper. A further diary entry on Seghers clarifies Beckett’s perception of Seghers’s modernity: ‘Two Hercules Seghers . . . both flat landscapes with view of Rhenen, one formerly given to Van Goyen, but the tone is already much more piercing, & less stylised than V.G.’s’ (GD, 2 January 1937; Figure 7). Importantly, in September 1934 Beckett had defined Van Goyen as one of the painters who ‘anthropomorphized landscape’ (SB to TM, 8 September 1934). Dismissive of the sentimental expression of anthropomorphism, yet unable to achieve the cold ‘architectonics’ of Cézanne, Beckett ultimately sought a middle ground that the innovative yet emotive Seghers could supply.

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Figure 7 Hercules Seghers: View of Rhenen, c. 1625–30, oil on oak, Gemäldegalerie Berlin; © bpk / Gemäldegalerie, SMB / Jörg P. Anders.

Whereas Beckett’s engagement with the visual arts represented an aesthetic inspiration that allowed him to start working on Murphy, his more profound study of paintings in Germany in 1936–1937 did not have the same effect. To be sure, the trip provoked a further development in his poetics, as exemplified by his thinking towards the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’. There is, furthermore, a curious postscript to Beckett’s study of art in Germany in the Watt notebooks, contained in the passage that eventually became the section dealing with the painting on the wall of Erskine’s room:54 But as he meditated on the wall, the narrow white-washed wall with its church calendar before which, seated, he meditated, there came, and stayed, and went, now faint, now clear, images of images, Kaspar David Friedrich’s Men and Moon, a coloured engraving of ? [in typescript, page 351: ‘Hercules Seghers’] in the Zwinger ? An Elsheimer pen drawing hanging one Christmas on a screen, Watt could not remember on loan from where, in the Kaiser Friedrich; and that as to where they were now, they might be anywhere now, burnt, or in a lumber-room, or sent away [Beckett’s question marks]. (Watt notebook 4, 2v–3r)55 These ‘images of images’ represent a kind of visual fulcrum of the previous years: the ‘bémolisé’ or minor key of Friedrich, the ‘modern talent’ of


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Seghers, as well as the melancholy landscape of Elsheimer, all make an appearance here.56 The passage also makes explicit reference to the tragic fate of thousands of paintings under the Nazi regime, as witnessed by Beckett and recorded in the German diaries: sent or sold abroad, burnt or locked away in cellars. If such explicit references, both to painters and to his journey through Germany, were ultimately cut from the final Watt, it was in keeping with Beckett’s general movement towards removing any erudite or overtly autobiographical allusions from his work. Nevertheless, as a further passage from the Watt notebooks succinctly summarises, Beckett’s knowledge of art ‘stood him in good stead’, and inspired his writing: It was here that Watt’s great knowledge of painting, ancient & modern, stood him in good stead and that he reaped the rewards of the many weary hours . . . spent walking up and down in private and public collections, and turning the pages of illustrated catalogues, and in putting in an appearance at exhibitions, and in [dropping?] in on painters in their studios, and in turning the pages of works of critics of art, and in listening to the noise of the conversation of lovers of art. (Watt notebook 3, 90r–91r) Having throughout the 1930s discussed his writing in terms of seeing, Beckett continued to seek a creative way forward within the field of the visual arts. Ultimately, and as he wrote of Giacometti, Beckett struggled to come to terms with the integration of visual experience into writing, of ‘wanting to render what he sees, which is perhaps not as wise as all that when one knows how to see like him’.57

Chapter 9

Clarifiers and Obscurantists: Towards a New Aesthetic

At a dinner party in Dresden on 18 February 1937, following a lecture by Fyodor Stepun on the Russian writer Andrey Biely, Samuel Beckett was asked by a fellow guest, ‘[w]as wollen sie am meisten gestalten [what is it that you want to create most]’, to which he replied: ‘[l]ight in the monad’ (GD, 18 February 1937).1 Beyond its philosophical and creative implications, Beckett’s expression ‘light in the monad’ offers an apt description of the German diaries. Recording daily events during his six-month journey through Germany from October 1936 to March 1937, the diaries not only illuminate the monadic (and nomadic) Beckett, but also shed light on a complicated, and in some ways elusive, stage in his artistic and aesthetic development. As Terence McQueeny has pointed out, Beckett probably first encountered Leibnitzian monadology in J. Lewis McIntyre’s Giordano Bruno (1903), which Beckett read in 1929 on the way to writing the Exagmination essay on Joyce (1977, 15). To answer his own question in Dream, ‘What would Leibnitz say?’ (179), Beckett proceeded to read the Monadology in December 1933, finding the German philosopher ‘a great cod, but full of splendid little pictures’ (SB to TM, 6 December 1933).2 These little pictures, the elementary units of being forming a microcosm, proved to be a persuasive element in Beckett’s philosophical and personal outlook. Thus the concept of the monad, whether Leibnitzian or other, is visible in the ‘large hollow sphere’ that is Murphy’s mind, and lies behind Beckett’s descriptions of the ‘pads’ at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat: ‘The compartment was windowless, like a monad. . . . [Murphy] had never been able to imagine a more creditable representation of what he kept on calling, indefatigably, the little world’ (Mu, 114). The degree to which Beckett absorbed the monadic theory, particularly what Watt calls its ‘windowlessness’, is evident from a number of passages in the German diaries, where he draws on it during various conversations (129).

Clarifiers and Obscurantists

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When he refutes Rilke’s belief that the ‘doors’ of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s solitude will open and ‘engulf them’, he does so by recourse to monadism: ‘I say “Die Monade ist doch Fensterlos [But the monad is windowless]” ’. Referring to the elemental independence and noncommunicability of the monad, Beckett went on to note in his diary the absurdity of conceiving ‘a chain of solitudes successively liquidated’ (GD, 15 January 1937). Indeed, during this same conversation with Axel Kaun, Beckett also proceeds to ‘stutter out my distortions of Spinoza & Leibniz’. Spinoza was very much on his mind during his journey through Germany, Beckett having been introduced to the philosopher by Brian Coffey.3 Beckett told MacGreevy in a letter of September 1936, shortly before his departure for Germany, that Coffey had lent him ‘Brunschwicg’s Spinoza et les contemporains, the Ethica in the Classiques Garnier with Latin en regard’ (SB to TM, 19 September 1936). Something in Spinoza must have impressed Beckett, as in the same letter he tells his friend that his reading gave him ‘a glimpse of Spinoza as a solution & a salvation’. In order to firm this up, Beckett took Brunschwicg’s book with him to Germany, although it is not mentioned in the diaries before it was sent back to Dublin in December 1936 with other books listed in the Whoroscope notebook (17v). Brunschwicg appears to have given Beckett some kind of insight, which remains undisclosed in the diary pages: ‘[I] propound the Spinoza formulation – solution congruence as the Hauptsache [main thing]’ (GD, 18 February 1937).4 This is an important statement, drawing attention as it does to Beckett’s preoccupations during his trip to Germany. The matrix of references here reveals the extent to which this phase was a transitional one in Beckett’s philosophical and aesthetic development. To be sure, many of Beckett’s recorded thoughts in the diaries reaffirm or substantiate established views. Yet, as I hope to show in this chapter, during the journey to Germany and during the subsequent period immediately after his return to Dublin, Beckett began to see more clearly the path his writing was to take, even if it would be a number of years before he could convert this knowledge into something more (creatively) tangible. It would be misleading to assume that it was, in the words of ‘Enough’, a matter of ‘all that goes before forget’ (TFN, 93). Indeed, one could argue that Beckett’s aesthetics were already formulated – or at least intimated – in his early essays on Joyce (1929) and Proust (1931), and in particular in Dream, and that all that followed were variations on the same set of themes. Beckett’s problem during the 1930s seems to have been caused by his difficulty in turning his reading into a workable philosophical credo that not only allowed him to make sense of his own existential experience, but

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could also be expressed in his work. In the main the struggle was one of accommodation; distrustful of any one system, Beckett tended to adopt certain aspects of individual authors or thinkers while dismissing other parts. More often than not, once a basic set of reference points had been established, it was a matter of how to reshape and combine them, which resulted, more often than not, in sideways rather than forward steps.

Truce for a Space (Behind the Veil) Beckett’s understanding of the monad as an isolated microcosm underlies one of the most persistent themes in his aesthetic pronouncements, the ‘rupture of the lines of communication’ between subject and object (Dis, 70). As noted in the previous chapter, following his treatment of this topic in his 1934 essay, ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, Beckett expanded this absence of relation in his discussion of Cézanne in letters to MacGreevy to encompass the artist’s ‘incommensurability . . . even with life of his own order’ (SB to TM, 16 September [1934]). If he continued to ‘talk bilge . . . about relation of subject & object in modern art’ in Germany in 1936, it was partly because the issue remained pertinent, and unresolved (GD, 1 November 1936). Moreover, as he acknowledged during his reading of texts by the painter Franz Marc, it was ‘not the relation between subject & object’ that was under scrutiny, ‘but the alienation (my nomansland)’ (GD, 19 November 1936).5 In the essay on Irish poetry Beckett had used the same word – ‘no-man’sland’ – to denote the ‘space that intervenes between [the artist] and the world of objects’ (Dis, 70). The notion of ‘spaces’ or gaps and the nature of thresholds delineating absences runs like a thread through Beckett’s aesthetic thinking in the thirties. On a basic textual level Beckett experimented with such gaps in Watt, which is presented as an incomplete manuscript: ‘He could not see the stands, the grand, the members’, the people’s, so ? when empty with their white and red, for they were too far off’ (23). Beckett had already used this device during the writing of the German diaries in instances when he could not remember something: ‘Slush even worse than in that day on way to Cashel’ (GD, 22 February 1937).6 The first substantial formulation of such an art of spaces occurs within Belacqua’s emphasis on silences in Dream. In what reads like an aesthetic programme, one which remarkably introduces a whole range of themes that will preoccupy Beckett throughout the decade, Belacqua outlines the book he envisages writing: The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement, between


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the flowers that cannot coexist, the antithetical (nothing so simple as antithetical) seasons of words, his experience shall be the menace, the miracle, the memory, of an unspeakable trajectory. . . . I think of his [Beethoven’s] earlier compositions where into the body of the musical statement he incorporates a punctuation of dehiscence, flottements, the coherence gone to pieces. (Dream, 138–9) It seems valid to view Belacqua’s pronouncements here as representative of Beckett’s own aesthetic thinking at the time of writing (1932), despite, or more precisely, because of the ironic inflection in which they are phrased, as nonfictional utterances corroborate much of the content. Leaving aside the emphasis on incoherence and the repeated use of the word ‘statement’, to which we shall return, it is the use of Beethoven’s ‘vespertine compositions eaten away with terrible silences’ that concern us here (Dream, 138). Beckett himself bridged the ‘unspeakable trajectory’ by returning to Beethoven’s pauses in his correspondence in the following years. Following a lecture on the plastic arts of the Geometric Period (eighth to sixth century BC) in Germany, Beckett interpreted the ‘intervals filled with fishbones’ on a love vase as the ‘dread of empty space’ (GD, 12 November 1936). A few months earlier, in July 1936, he complained to MacGreevy that in Thorns of Thunder, an English selection of Eluard’s poetry, ‘no attempt seems to have been made to translate the pauses’, comparing this failure to ‘Beethoven played strictly to time’ (SB to TM, 17 July [1936]). Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (‘the dearest of the nine’; SB to TM, 19 October 1958) is again invoked in the July 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, written in German, in which Beckett’s dissatisfaction with language finds its most pronounced expression: Gibt es irgendeinen Grund, warum jene fürchterlich willkürliche Materialität der Wortfläche nicht aufgelöst werden sollte, wie z.B. die von grossen schwarzen Pausen gefressene Tonfläche in der siebten Symphonie von Beethoven, so dass wir sie ganze Seiten durch nicht anders wahrnehmen können als etwa einen schwindelnden unergründliche Schlünde von Stillschweigen verknüpfenden Pfad von Lauten? [Is there any reason why that terribly willed materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous black pauses, of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a giddy path of sounds linking unfathomable abysses of silence?]. (Dis, 53; trans. 172 [translation amended])7

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Whereas certain arguments put forth in this letter reflect long-held beliefs, such as the importance of Beethoven’s pauses, others can be traced back to the more immediate past and the pages of the German diaries. The need for a ‘Literatur des Unworts [literature of the unword]’ is explicitly connected to the ‘Unnatur des Wortes’, the unnatural and therefore artificial aspect of language (Dis, 53–4; trans. 172–3).8 Beckett does not specify why this ‘Unnatur’, mysteriously translated as ‘vicious nature’ in Disjecta, does not underlie the other arts, specifically music and painting. Yet it seems as if, particularly towards the end of his German trip, Beckett vented his frustration with language to anyone who would listen, although his criticism did not find many supporters. Thus Eggers-Kestner ‘won’t hear of possibility of word’s inadequacy’ (GD, 26 March 1937) and the painter Edgar Ende ‘[d]oesn’t agree that communication is impossible’ (GD, 31 March 1937).9 The eagerness with which Beckett pursued the linguistic question in 1937 seems partly to stem from insights gleaned from a discussion with the art critic Will Grohmann in Dresden in February of that year. According to Beckett’s diary entry, Grohmann ‘was interested in Ulysses because of its for him connections with art of antitheses, or antimonies, of Klee & Picasso, except that in them it is simultaneous & in J.[oyce] (because written) sequential. Shades of Lessing’ (GD, 11 February 1937). It is difficult to ascertain whether Beckett or Grohmann introduced Lessing into the discussion, but Beckett had some knowledge of Lessing’s Laokoon, a reference to which appears in Murphy (129). In Laokoon, Lessing expounds a distinction similar to the one discussed between Grohmann and Beckett, except that he replaces music with painting: Der Dichter, der die Elemente der Schönheit nur nacheinander zeigen könnte, enthält sich daher der Schilderung körperlicher Schönheit, als Schönheit, gänzlich. Er fühlt es, daß diese Elemente, nacheinander geordnet, unmöglich die Wirkung haben können, die sie, nebeneinander geordnet, haben. . . . [The poet, who can only show the elements of beauty in succession therefore completely withholds from the description of physical beauty, as beauty. He feels that these elements, arranged in succession, cannot possibly attain the effect they would have when placed side by side]. (Part 1, Section XX; Lessing 1959, II, 902)10 Beckett drew on his knowledge of Joyce’s Ulysses as he adopted Grohmann’s distinction between the ‘sequential’ and the ‘simultaneous’ when the


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question of language arose during a conversation with Eggers-Kestner in Munich: The dissonance that has become principle & that the word cannot express, because literature can no more escape from chronologies to simultaneities, from nebeneinander [sequential] to miteinander [simultaneous], that [sic] the human voice can sing chords. As I talk & listen realise suddenly how Work in Progress is the only possible development from Ulysses, the heroic attempt to make literature accomplish what belongs to music – the miteinander & the simultaneous. Ulysses falsifies the unconscious, or the ‘monologue intérieur’, in so far as it is obliged to express it as a teleology. (GD, 26 March 1937)11 Beyond offering the first instance in which Beckett refers to the heroism underlying Joyce’s work, this passage shows just how far Beckett had manoeuvred himself into a corner.12 Unable to conceive of a way of following on from Murphy and hampered by linguistic doubts, it is not surprising that Beckett’s attention during 1936 and 1937 was drawn to the other creative arts as offering possible solutions. This, as we have seen, induces Beckett to see his ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ in terms of techniques derived from the visual arts and from music, in order to escape or circumvent the restrictions imposed by the chronology of language. Yet the emphasis on repetition and antithesis still did not resolve the problem of the ‘materiality of the word surface’ referred to in the Kaun letter. However, by July 1937 Beckett had, despite his doubts, retained or reaffirmed something akin to a belief in writing. Unable to abolish language, a method had to be found by which it could be revealed as a ‘mask’ (Dis, 171). In order to do this, Beckett suggested that what was needed was to reach behind or through language: ‘Ein Loch nach dem andern in ihr zu bohren, bis das Dahinterkauernde, sei es etwas oder nichts, durchzusickern anfängt [bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through]’ (52; trans. 172). There is an echo of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit in this dismantling of language. Beckett’s comment that ‘Sprache da am besten gebraucht wird, wo sie am tüchtigsten missbraucht wird [language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused]’ (52; trans. 172) recalls Goethe’s statement, transcribed by Beckett in his ‘German’ notebook, that ‘Schreiben ist ein Missbrauch der Sprache [writing is a misuse of language]’, in the sense that it is subordinate to the immediacy of speech (TCD MS10971/1, 57r).

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Furthermore, the figure Beckett adopted to express this effort of reaching beyond, of getting behind words, was one that resurfaces repeatedly in his writing: Und immer mehr wie ein Schleier kommt mir meine Sprache vor, den man zerreissen muss, um an die dahinterliegenden Dinge (oder das dahinterliegende Nichts) zu kommen. [And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it]. (Dis, 52; trans. 171)13 Echoes of this ‘veil’ can be heard throughout Beckett’s critical and creative writing of the 1930s, even as its nature and use is variously interpreted. In Proust Beckett refers to habit as ‘a screen to spare its victims the spectacle of reality’, appearing ‘when it is opposed by a phenomenon that it cannot reduce to the condition of a comfortable and familiar concept’ (PTD, 21). As John Pilling has shown, Proust in A la recherche du temps perdu frequently ‘asserts that there is a screen between the self and the world’, and it is possible that this is where Beckett originally found the image (1977, 18 and 26). Beckett derived the image of the screen, another basis for the rupture between subject and object, from his reading of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea in July and August 1930, which he used when writing Proust (SB to TM, undated [25? July 1930]). A central argument in Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea is that the world of phenomena is illusory, obscuring a deeper reality, the ‘thing-in-itself’: But the sight of the uncultured individual is clouded, as the Hindus say, by the veil of Mâyâ. He sees not the thing-in-itself but the phenomenon in time and space, the principium individuationis, and in the other forms of the principle of sufficient reason. And in this form of his limited knowledge he sees not the inner nature of things, which is one, but its phenomena as separated, disunited, innumerable, very different, and indeed opposed. (WWI, Book 4, §63; 454)14 The only possibility of overcoming the delusions and illusion of the world of phenomena is through artistic contemplation and suffering, leading to a higher level of understanding or knowledge: It is one and the same will that lives and appears in them all, but whose phenomena fight against each other and destroy each other. In one


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individual it appears powerfully, in another more weakly; in one more subject to reason, and softened by the light of knowledge, in another less so, till at last, in some single case, this knowledge, purified and heightened by suffering itself, reaches the point at which the phenomenon, the veil of Maya, no longer deceives it. It sees through the form of the phenomenon, the principium individuationis. The egoism which rests on this perishes with it, so that now the motives that were so powerful before have lost their might, and instead of them the complete knowledge of the nature of the world, which has a quieting effect on the will, produces resignation, the surrender not merely of life, but of the very will to live. (327) The reason for this ‘quieting effect’ lies in the nature of true reality. Thus when the veil is lifted, the individual ‘knows the whole, comprehends its nature, and finds that it consists in a constant passing away, vain striving, inward conflict, and continual suffering’ (489). Beckett was undoubtedly familiar with the extended passage (from Book 3, §51) quoted above, as it is located in the same section from which he lifted, without acknowledgement, Calderón’s lines on the ‘sin of having been born’ quoted in Proust (67). He seems to have been particularly attentive to this third book of The World as Will and Idea dealing with ‘The Object of Art’, allusions to which can be found in his critical essay on Proust.15 Thus for example the references to the Proustian stasis as ‘contemplative, a pure act of understanding, will-less, the “amabilis insania” and the “holder Wahnsinn” ’ derive from this section (PTD, 91; WWI, Book 3, §36, 246).16 Yet the importance of Schopenhauer to Beckett, and especially the reading of the passages on the veil of Maya, the manner in which it is lifted and the affect it has on the individual who sees through it, reaches far beyond the early critical essay, and profoundly affects his personal and aesthetic thinking.17 Thus Schopenhauer’s differentiation between perceiving disunited parts of the world of phenomena and perceiving the whole of the true nature of the world underlies Beckett’s comments on the ‘tragic’ Dr Johnson, who is ‘worth putting down as part of the whole of which oneself is part’ (SB to TM, 4 August 1937).18 This division into micro- and macrocosm is also visible in the short essay he writes in German on his feelings of fear in the ‘Clare Street’ notebook: ‘better to be afraid of something than of nothing. In the first case only a part, in the second the whole, is threatened by the monstrous quality which inseparably belongs to the incomprehensible, one could even say the boundless’ (UoR MS5003, 3r). Furthermore, Schopenhauer can be presumed to be the source of Beckett’s

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quietism, which he went on to develop through his reading of authors such as Thomas à Kempis and Geulincx. The importance of Schopenhauer’s veil of deception is exemplified by a further entry in the ‘Clare Street’ notebook made in August 1936, a year before he employed it in his language criticism in the Kaun letter. Even as Beckett is ostensibly practising his German, the passage is highly revealing as to his aesthetic concerns at this time: Es gibt Augenblicke, wo der Hoffnungsschleier endgültig weggerissen wird und die plötzlich befreiten Augen ihre Welt anblicken, wie sie ist, wie sie sein muss. Es dauert leider nicht lange, die Wahrnehmung geht schnell vorüber, ein so unverbittliches Licht können die Augen nur auf kurze Zeit ertragen, das Häutchen der Hoffnung bildet sich von neuem, man kehrt in die Welt der Phänomene zurück. Die Hoffnung ist des Geistes Star, der nicht zu stechen ist, ehe er ganz faulreif wird. Es reift nicht jeder Star, es bringt gar mancher Mensch im Dunst der Hoffnung sein ganzes Leben zu. Und wenn der Star auch für den Augenblick geheilt worden sein mag, so bildet er sich fast immer bald von neuem, so auch die Hoffnung. [There are moments when the veil of hope is finally torn apart and the suddenly liberated eyes see their world, as it is, as it must be. Alas, it does not last long, the revelation quickly passes, the eyes can only bear such pitiless light for a short while, the membrane of hope grows again and one returns to the world of phenomena. Hope is the cataract of the spirit, which cannot be pierced until it is completely ripe for decay. Not every cataract ripens, and many a human being can even spend his whole life within the mist of hope. And if the cataract may have been healed for the moment, it almost always forms itself again immediately, as does the hope]. (UoR MS5003, 17r–18r)19 Essentially, Beckett is here paraphrasing the Schopenhauerian act of achieving a state of being where the veil of Maya is torn aside to reveal the authentic world, the deeper level of reality. This reality, however, is disclosed to be one of such suffering that hope imposes itself again to shield the individual.20 There are echoes of this ‘pitiless light’, induced by absolute knowledge, in Beckett’s description of the ‘intolerable brightness’ in Proust (70). Yet the subsequent paragraph of the ‘Clare Street’ notebook passage, which contains a further reference to the ‘whole’ and the ‘part’, asserts


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Beckett’s need to reach this enlightened state, however difficult it may be to achieve, and moreover, sustain: Die Hoffnung ist die erste Lebensbedingung, der Instinkt dem es zu verdanken ist, dass das Menschengeschlecht nicht schon seit langem Zugrunde gegangen ist. Zu verdanken! Soll man denn wirklich als Ursatz annehmen, das Leben sei mit der Selbstkenntnis dermassen unverträglich, der steten klaren Selbstkenntnis deren Stimme gelassen behauptet: – So bist du, so bleibst du. So wie es dir bisher gegangen ist, so wird es auch ferner hin gehen, bis dein Ich in die dir so bekannten Bestandteile zersetzt worden ist. [Hope is the elementary condition of life, the instinct that the human race has to thank for not dying out long ago. To thank! Should one really accept as a basic premise the assertion that life is utterly incompatible with self-awareness, the self-awareness whose voice serenely asserts: – This is who you are, this is what you will remain. As you have been previously is how you will always be, until your self has been decomposed into the parts that are so familiar to you]. (UoR MS5003, 18r)21 In this short exposition, Beckett goes on to sketch out a vision of complete annihilation, the belief in which was something that had impressed him during his reading of Samuel Johnson in 1937. Beckett’s passage in the ‘Clare Street’ notebook on the ‘veil of hope’, and the ‘pitiless light’ of that which it hides, also echoes a passage (which I have already mentioned in Chapter 3) in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which Beckett had been reading in 1934. In a letter to Leventhal, Beckett referred to ‘a good passage’ in the book where ‘happiness’ is described as being ‘analogous with light from a star’. He goes on to express his wish that the same ‘brightness’ pertains to ‘unhappiness’, which would represent a ‘basis for quietism’ (SB to A. J. Leventhal, 7 May 1934).22 In this passage, Thomas Buddenbrooks suddenly has an epiphanic moment in which he realises the meaninglessness and pain of life on earth, and sees death as a release: Und siehe da: plötzlich war es, als wenn die Finsternis vor seinen Augen zerrisse, wie wenn die samtne Wand der Nacht sich klaffend teilte und eine unermesslich tiefe, eine ewige Fernsicht von Licht enthüllte [And behold: suddenly it was as though the darkness was torn from before his eyes, as if the whole wall of the night parted wide and disclosed an immeasurably deep, a boundless view of light]. (Mann 1965, 447)

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It is significant that Buddenbrooks has this moment of clarification following his reading of Schopenhauer’s chapter ‘On Death and its relation to the indestructibility of our true nature’ in the Parerga and Paralipomena. Just as in Beckett’s description of how the glare of the true perception of reality cannot be maintained, Buddenbrooks’ vision is terminated by the return of the ‘veil’ of darkness: Und bei dieser Frage schlug die Nacht wieder vor seinen Augen zusammen. Er sah, er wusste und verstand wieder nicht das geringste mehr und liess sich tiefer in die Kissen zurücksinken, gänzlich geblendet und ermattet von dem bisschen Wahrheit, das er soeben hatte erschauen dürfen. [But with this question night descended again before his eyes. He saw, he knew and understood not the least thing anymore and let himself sink back deeper into the pillows, completely blinded and exhausted from the little truth he was allowed to see]. (Mann 1965, 447) It was around this time, in August 1936, shortly before his departure for Germany, that Beckett began to see more clearly that it was this zone beyond the veil that his writing had to engage with. Indeed, the personal manifesto in the 1936 notebook and the poetic statement in the 1937 letter to Kaun are indistinguishable, joined by the common thread of the veil. This suggestion is underlined by Beckett’s repeated use of the image that only when something is ripe can it be removed, in the ‘Clare Street’ notebook entry applied to the ‘cataract’, yet during the trip to Germany used to describe the nature of language: ‘Every language only ripe, then falls behind, i.e. once congruent with its provocation, then ecclipsed [sic]’ (GD, 11 March 1937).

Liberated Eyes Invariably, the veil and the task of getting behind it entailed an act of vision, as Beckett’s emphasis on the difference between ‘liberated eyes’ and the ‘cataract’ in the ‘Clare Street’ notebook entry illustrates. This focus on seeing partly explains his alertness to the optical relation between the painter and his material during his visits to German galleries. In his evaluation of Ballmer’s Kopf in Rot, for example, Beckett deduces its ‘metaphysical concrete[ness]’ from the fact that the ‘communication [is] exhausted by the optical experience that is its motive & content’ (GD, 26 November 1936). The relationship between perception and the creative act had


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been taxing Beckett since the beginning of the 1930s as he struggled to formulate a kind of poetics of the eye. He had opened Dream with the invitation to ‘Behold Belacqua’, only subsequently to obscure the very grounds by which the reader could apprehend his protagonist. Beckett’s early thinking about poetic vision was heavily influenced by his reading of Rimbaud during his time as a lecturer at Trinity. Beckett had also translated Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre into English in May 1932, and alluded to the poem in the short story ‘Echo’s Bones’ when Belacqua ‘closed his eyes, intending to have a vision’ (EB, 19). Yet feeling ‘marooned’ and finding the ‘boat gone’, Belacqua is forced to open his eyes again, possibly Beckett’s roundabout way of referring to the fact that his translation was never published by This Quarter. In any case, nearly all of Beckett’s allusions to ‘the Infernal One, the Ailing Seer’ in Dream and the early poetry are concerned with vision (137). As John Pilling has shown, Rimbaud’s ‘eye-suicide’ (the act of rubbing one’s eyes until stars appear) in the poem ‘Les poètes de sept ans’ particularly appealed to Beckett (Pilling 2000, 20).23 Furthermore, the incoherence of the early, pre-1932, poetry can be related to Rimbaud’s ‘dérèglement de tous les sens’ as much as to the work of that other ‘ailing seer’, James Joyce. Beckett was familiar with Rimbaud’s famous so-called ‘Lettre du Voyant’ (letter of 15 May 1871 to Paul Démeny) advocating ‘qu’il faut être voyant, se faire voyant [that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer]’ through a ‘disordering of all the senses’ (Rimbaud 1997, 11).24 Beckett himself described his own poetry in terms of disordered perception when he submitted his ‘latest hallucinations’ to Samuel Putnam’s New Review in June 1932.25 Beckett’s adherence to a different way of seeing at this time is expressed in his first sustained ruminations on the relationship between seeing and writing, voiced (somewhat obscurely) by Belacqua the aesthete, who expostulates that ‘[p]oetry is not concerned with normal vision, where word and image coincide’ (Dream, 170). On the basis of this, he goes on to argue that the image is either in front or behind the ‘verbal retina’, thereby creating ‘longsighted’ or ‘shortsighted’ poetry.26 In the former, favoured by Belacqua, ‘the word is prolonged by the emotion’, whereas in the latter ‘the emotion is gathered into and closed by the word’ (170). Yet Dream also raises another spectre, where it is no longer a matter of how to see but what to see, or whether to see at all. Within Belacqua’s ‘trine’ nature his ‘third being’ is described as ‘the dark gulf, when the glare of the will and the hammerstrokes of the brain . . . were expunged’ (Dream, 120–1). This ‘marsh of sloth’ is the kind of will-less state described by Schopenhauer,

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where the self, quieted, is released from any impetus, although the ‘pitiless light’ is replaced by a perceptual gloom: the mind at last its own asylum, disinterested, indifferent, its miserable erethisms and discriminations and futile sallies suppressed . . . the glare of understanding switched off. The lids of the hard aching mind close, there is suddenly gloom in the mind; not sleep, not yet, nor dream, with its sweats and terrors, but a waking ultra-cerebral obscurity, thronged with grey angels; there is nothing of him left but the umbra of grave and womb. (44) It is through the agency of the ‘lid’ – a kind of veil – that Belacqua moves from the first two parts of his trine being to the third; he can thus ‘[open] wide the lids of the mind and let in the glare’ or ‘[force] the lids of the little brain down against the flaring bric-à-brac (63 and 123).27 When Belacqua is forced back into the world at the beginning of the story ‘Echo’s Bones’, his ‘awakening’ is similarly expressed through the lifting of ‘his lids’, the opening of his eyes: ‘he found himself fighting in vain against the hideous torpor and the grit and glare of his lids on the eyeballs so long lapped in gloom’ (EB, 2). If the lid, be it of the eyes, mind or brain, shelters the self from outer reality, it also enables a kind of inner vision. Beckett alluded to this mode of seeing (and writing) in one of his lectures at Trinity College Dublin in 1930–1931. Referring to the Symbolists, he stated that ‘[t]his cult of the unique personal point of view is symptomatic of the extent to which they found themselves out of touch with their fellows and thrown inward upon the selves of their own imagination: Rimbaud’. In a long letter to MacGreevy dated 18 October 1932, Beckett told his friend that the poetry he wanted to write would draw on his interior world and not be fashioned of extraneous material. It would possess something he found in Homer, Dante and Racine, and ‘sometimes in Rimbaud’: the ‘integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain stroms of grit in the wind’ (SB to TM, 18 October 1932). Echoing both in sentiment and also in terminology the perceptual comments in Dream (such as the ‘eyelids over grit’; 187), this letter is representative of Beckett’s increasing tendency at the end of 1932 to equate writing with the absence of sight.28 He thus referred to a new poem, ‘Serena I’ in a September letter to MacGreevy as a ‘blank unsighted kind of thing’ (SB to TM, 13 [September 1932]).29 Yet the lack of external sight did not preclude inner perception, indeed the ‘eyelids’ had to come down in order for another kind of vision to take place, an act of self-perception drawing on a deeper reality located within the self. Beckett succinctly referred to this


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perceptual difference several years later in a letter to his aunt Cissie Sinclair: ‘or one can close the eyes and see the unfailing things’.30 Beckett’s endeavour to write from behind closed eyes was unabated during his German trip, although his efforts were, more often than not, failing rather than fruitful. The two and a half lines of poetry beginning ‘always elsewhere’ were selfconfessedly the result of ‘the frail sense of beginning life behind the eyes, that is the best of all experiences’ (SB to TM, 16 February 1937).31 Moreover, having abandoned the poem by ‘spit[ting] in its eye’, Beckett referred back to Rimbaud’s ‘eye-suicide’ when noting in his diary ‘[a]nother little suicide’ (GD, 7 February 1937).32 The problem seemed to be the failure of the eyelids to come down, the expression of emotion encumbered by outside forces. As the ‘young aesthetician’ Lucien specified in his French letter to Belacqua, referring to his piece ‘C’n’est au Pélican’, it was not only with ‘des yeux clos [que] le poème se fait [with closed eyes the poem is made]’, but more precisely ‘au fond des yeux clos [in the depths of closed eyes]’ (Dream, 21). Just as the ‘only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth’, the artist ‘who does not deal in surfaces’ must engage in the ‘labours of poetical excavation’ (PTD, 64 and 29). From the very beginning, Beckett’s poetics were directed at exploring the hidden realms of living experience rather than the surface nature of outer reality. His TCD lectures on the modern French novel were dismissive of writing that attempted to represent reality but shirked from its complexity.33 The essay on Proust gave Beckett the opportunity to voice his contempt for the ‘realists and naturalists worshipping the offal of experience’ who are moreover ‘content to transcribe the surface’ (78). Beckett’s fundamental critique is one deriving from a sense of authenticity: to describe merely the surface results in the erection of a ‘façade’, a static representation of life incommensurable with life’s uncertainties and shifting realities. Beckett’s remark in Proust that the ‘observer infects the observed with his own mobility’ (17) indicates just how much he believed in the absence of a coherent reality. It also explains Beckett’s comments on Dostoevsky in a letter to MacGreevy of May 1931, where he draws his friend’s attention to ‘the movement & the transitions’ in (a French translation of) The Possessed – ‘No one moves about like Dostoievski’ (SB to TM, 29 May 1931).

Fidgets In From an Abandoned Work, written 1954–1955, the narrator muses, ‘Oh but those awful fidgets I have always had I would have lived my life in a big

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echoing room with a big old pendulum clock, just listening and dozing’ (TFN, 64). There are echoes here of Beckett’s admission after his return to Dublin in 1930 after his first stay in Paris that he was unable to ‘think of anything I want to do’ except to ‘sit in an armchair and listen for the gong’ (SB to TM, undated [19 September 1930]). As previously mentioned, Beckett’s restless movements in the thirties were a necessity rather than a desire. Yet during that early part of his life an inherent restlessness was also equated in Beckett’s mind with the figure of the artist and the creative process itself. In Beckett’s terminology the need for motion was expressed by his reference to the ‘itch to write’ (SB to TM, 4 August 1932) and in particular through the word ‘fidgets’. These ‘fidgets’ appear, for example, in a remark made in Dresden in February 1937 regarding Rembrandt’s Samson Putting Forth His Riddles at the Wedding Feast (1638), where he describes Delilah as occupying a state that would have pleased Murphy: ‘timeless & still, between the fidgets of body (nuzzling & fuzzling on her right) & the fidgets of the mind (Samson propounding the riddle on her left)’ (GD, 2 February 1937). More specifically, the ‘fidgets’ represent the artistic process of creation, as sketched in a passage in Dream: The ecstatic mind, the mind achieving creation, take ours for example, rises to the shaftheads of its statement, its recondite relations of emergal, from a labour and a weariness of deep castings that brook no schema. The mind suddenly entombed, then active in an anger and a rhapsody of energy, in a scurrying and plunging towards exitus, such is the ultimate mode and factor of the creative integrity, its proton, incommunicable, but there, insistent, invisible rat, fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art surface. (Dream, 16–17)34 The ‘fidgets’ of the mind described here as somehow underpinning artistic creation reappear in Beckett’s 1934 review of J. B. Leishman’s translations of Rainer Maria Rilke, where the German poet’s ‘fidgets’ are described as ‘a disorder which may very well give rise . . . to poetry of a high order’ (Dis, 67). Yet Beckett tellingly distinguishes Gide from Rilke in his discussion, although he also ‘changes his ground without ceasing’. Rilke’s mistake, in Beckett’s eyes, is to call ‘the fidgets God, Ego, Orpheus and the rest’. Gide, on the other hand, is commended in Beckett’s TCD lectures for ‘preserving integrity of incoherence’ in Edouard’s Journal des faux-monnayeurs.35 Beckett’s struggle in the early thirties is defined by the question of how to accommodate a view of reality as fundamentally chaotic in his writing. In aesthetic terms the task was easily approached, as Beckett did with the


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help of Schopenhauer in Proust, adopting the philosopher’s ‘definition of the artistic procedure as “the contemplation of the world independently of the principle of reason” ’ (87). The task for the artist is specified as ‘the non-logical statement of phenomena in the order and exactitude of their perception, before they have been distorted into intelligibility’ (86). This seems to have been the impetus behind the disruption of novelistic parameters in Dream, where the reader is deliberately manoeuvred into a position of bafflement. Yet, as Beckett himself recognised, there is something wilful about the attack on rationality in the book; a textual self-consciousness that repeatedly glances at its creator to make sure it is fulfilling the task. In a sense Beckett’s creative dilemma was dramatised in the passage where the Mandarin accused Belacqua of shifting his ground, as he appears to ‘demand a stable architecture of sentiment’ when previously he had stated that the ‘reality of the individual . . . is an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently’ (Dream, 101).36 Beckett’s quest for a way to express ‘incoherent reality’ led him in the mid-1930s to a profound study of the irrational – whether psychological, literary or philosophical – in his reading. Yet Murphy, the culmination of much of this reading, still contained a large degree of order, perhaps necessitated by Beckett’s need for publication, the need to ‘get the book OUT’ (SB to GR, 27 December 1936). Although concepts of irrationality pervade the book, the overall impression is once again one of artificial disorder, assembled in an edifice of allusive material. Following the completion of Murphy and during the trip to Germany, Beckett seemed to realise that a new approach was necessary. Thus Beckett’s notation of an aphorism by the painter Franz Marc – ‘Alles Künstlerische ist alogisch [everything artistic is non-logical]’ (GD, 19 November 1936) – reflects Beckett’s ‘increasingly emphatic commitment’ to irrationality (Pilling 1997, 153). To be sure, the seeds of this belief had been sown several years previously, but from around the beginning of 1937 onwards the message is delivered with more conviction, even vehemence. Beckett’s diary account of a conversation with Axel Kaun in Berlin is representative of his renewed emphasis on what really mattered. Provoked by his realisation that Stieve’s Abriss der deutschen Geschichte von 1792–1935 was not the reference book on German history he was seeking, Beckett clarified, What I want is precisely a Nachschlagewerk [reference book], as I can’t read history like a novel. I say I am not interested in a “unification” of the historical chaos any more than I am in the “clarification” of the individual chaos, & still less in the anthropomorphisation of the inhuman

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necessities that provoke the chaos. What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births & deaths, because that is all I can know. . . . I say the background & the causes are an inhuman & incomprehensible machinery & venture to wonder what kind of appetite it is that can be appeased by the modern animism that consists in rationalising them. Rationalism is the last form of animism. Whereas the pure incoherence of times & men & places is at least amusing. Schicksal [Fate] = Zufall [Chance], for all human purposes. (GD, 15 January 1937) This passage is illuminating in several crucial ways. For one thing, Beckett renews his attack on anthropomorphism as a falsification of essential incoherence, and reasserts an emphasis on the ‘incomprehensible machinery’, which had determined outer reality in Murphy and resurfaces as the ‘pre-established arbitrary’ in Watt (114).37 More generally, the sentiments expressed here reflect Beckett’s distrust of the political and historical assertions encountered in Nazi Germany. In no sense could Beckett reconcile his belief in the ‘historical chaos’ with any notion of ‘Germanic destiny’.38 James McNaughton has persuasively argued that Beckett ‘fashions his German diaries as a counterexample to cause-and-effect rationality’, establishing a ‘private protest against the type of history he detests’ (2005, 102). However, as McNaughton goes on to acknowledge, Beckett was aware of the fact that the diary, ‘while a political act of a kind, lacks the rational judgments and audience that might make it meaningful’. At the same time, Beckett’s thinking about historical narratives is somehow linked to his personal feelings of disorientation. Following several failed manoeuvres at trying to ‘clarify’ his own chaos, and written at a time when the absence of direction (‘What is to become of me?’; GD, 13 December 1936) was making itself felt most intensely, Beckett could not but believe in ‘pure incoherence’. As a consequence the emphasis on the ‘straws’ and the ‘flotsam’ of existence contributed to the forging of a new poetics. This in part explains Beckett’s interest in nominalist thinkers, who, as he recorded in a notebook, in contrast to realists or conceptualists, ‘deny concepts and . . . preach that the term “universal” does not correspond in one’s mind to a universal concept, but to a group of individuals already established’.39 Further evident in Beckett’s adumbration of a ‘Nominalist irony’ in his letter to Kaun, the monadic and incommensurable element at the root of such a theory stressed the importance of those very particulars – the ‘straws’ and ‘flotsam’ – that Beckett held up against attempts at ‘unification’ and ‘clarification’.40 Fundamentally, Beckett’s thinking at this time represents an elaboration of what he had, as early as


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1929 in the essay on Joyce’s Work in Progress, defined as the ‘statement of the particular’ (Dis, 29).41 Beckett’s aversion to the reduction of complexity to comforting clarity is well-known, as his dispensing of aspirin to those seeking explanations of his plays shows. ‘Hamm as stated, Clov as stated, together as stated’ was the (rather unhelpful) advice he gave to Alan Schneider when preparing the American production of Endgame.42 To my knowledge, only John Pilling (in his Companion to Dream; 2004a, 46 and 299) has discussed what he calls Beckett’s ‘aesthetics of statement’. As Pilling notes, the words ‘to state’ or ‘statement’ recur surprisingly often in Beckett’s writing during the early thirties. Naturally enough the word is frequently employed in its functional sense of ‘to express’. But more often than not the term is employed when the sentence calls for a different word. More specifically, it tends to occur in sentences proclaiming aesthetic programmes or an aesthetic pronouncement. Two passages from Dream where Belacqua makes aesthetic or creative declarations illustrate this usage. The first passage is when Belacqua outlines the book he will write: the reader’s experience will be ‘communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement’, and his proposal to ‘state silences’ is compared to the ‘punctuation of dehiscence’ in Beethoven’s ‘musical statement’ of the Seventh Symphony (Dream, 138–9). Similarly, and just before launching into his short- and longsighted theory of poetry, Belacqua tells the Alba that he has ‘achieved a statement more ample’, that is to say, he has written a poem better than those she had previously read (170). In fact, in Dream Beckett is throughout concerned with the ‘statement of Belacqua’ (186; my emphasis).43 At least two dozen more examples could be cited of this tendency to encompass a creative or aesthetic reference within the word ‘statement’. It is difficult to give a specific definition of the signification the term effectively had for Beckett, yet its frequent conjunction with adjectives urging a lack of embellishment is suggestive: Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs contains ‘objective statement of characters’, in Racine ‘Berenice & Tithius [sic] [are] coldly stated’ and in Dream white music is an ‘impassive statement of itself drawn across the strata and symbols’ (Dream, 181).44 This last line reappears in the 1931 poem ‘Alba’ as ‘a statement of itself drawn across the tempest of emblems’ (SP, 19). In both cases, the ‘statement of itself’ indicates a hermeticism rendering the ‘symbols’ and ‘emblems’ redundant; in the poem, significantly, ‘no unveiling’ is subsequently necessary.45 In this sense, Beckett’s ‘statement’ aspires to the early comment on Joyce: ‘His writing is not about something; it is that something itself ’ (Dis, 27). Fundamentally, the word stands for Beckett’s agreement with ‘Proust’s contempt for

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the literature that “describes” ’ (PTD, 78). His insistent avoidance of any kind of circumscription is evident when the narrator in Dream announces, ‘in particular we had planned . . . to make a long rapturous statement of his hands’ (133). There is an element of finality in this sentence, as if a description of Belacqua’s hands would be false. Fundamentally it was once again a matter of ‘integrity’, and Beckett applied this distinction to what he wanted his own poetry to be: ‘a statement and not a description of heat in the spirit to compensate for pus in the spirit’ (SB to TM, 18 October [1932]). Beckett’s dismissal of descriptive discourse can be set beside his thoughts of writing ‘without style’. Thus Dream cites Racine and Malherbe as examples of authors who ‘write without style . . . they give you the phrase, the sparkle, the precious margaret’, with Belacqua (or his author) going on to acknowledge, somewhat ruefully, that ‘[p]erhaps only the French language can give you the thing you want’ (Dream, 48). The early intimation that a change of language was necessary would have been reinforced by Beckett’s struggle to abandon stylistic excursions, despite Lord Gall’s vehement interjection, in the ‘Echo’s Bones’ story, to ‘[c]ut out the style . . . how often must I tell you?’ (EB, 15).46 The speaker of the poem ‘Serena I’ similarly can ‘curse the day . . . / . . . / I was not born Defoe’ (SP, 26), being unable to emulate Defoe’s ‘factual writing’.47 Wishing to mirror Defoe’s attempts at historical authenticity in books such as A Journal of the Plague Year, a work he later in life ‘remembered being haunted by’ (Atik 2001, 47), Beckett strove to imbue Dream with ‘facts, facts, plenty of facts’ (32). Yet as we saw in the opening chapter, not only his received medium, the English language, but also a plethora of personal tensions threatened to undermine any notional factuality. Having invested Murphy with arguably too many ‘facts’ or material not his own, writing in a statemental manner was once again uppermost in Beckett’s mind during his trip to Germany. Thus at one point Beckett complains that the ‘[w]orst of this diary is that I am led into finding opinions’ (GD, 20 February 1937). Frequently he urges himself to record only the essential, urging himself at one point to ‘[b]e less beastly circumstantial’ (GD, 1 February 1937). Mr Kelly in Murphy uses the same sentence when admonishing Celia for relating the circumstances surrounding her meeting with Murphy instead of the ‘demented particulars’ of the man himself (‘Get up to your man!’; 11). The emphasis on stating the essential corresponds with Beckett’s belief, noted in his diary: ‘I boost the possibility of stylelessness in French, the pure communication’ (GD, 11 March 1937). Beckett’s writing projects outlined during his trip reflect this concern, with the article on the Ohlsdorf cemetery deriving from ‘[p]recise placings of


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preposterous Tatsachen [facts]’ (GD, 5 November 1936) and the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ revealing an ‘absence of comment’: ‘No social or political criticism whatever, apart from what the fact as stated implies’ (GD, 28 December 1936). In 1931, Beckett had declared that the ‘artistic statement [is] extracture of essential real’.48 The material evidence suggests that by the end of 1936 Beckett had realised, or rather had reshaped an earlier belief, that he had to state ‘the straws, flotsam’ and ‘the pure incoherence’ of existence, ‘because that is all I can know’ (GD, 15 January 1937). It represents an anticipation of his comments related to (or paraphrased by) Tom Driver, that a new form must be found ‘that admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else’ as it is ‘not a mess you can make sense of’ (Federman and Graver 1979, 219). Perhaps more importantly, however, it marks the beginning of a growing emphasis on, and acceptance of, personal and artistic uncertainty, as ‘all I can know’ effectively means ‘and everything else I can’t and don’t know’. Beckett’s aesthetics of ignorance and unknowing is moreover closely connected with his criticism of language, as comments made in a 1958 letter to Leventhal, in which he discusses Italian influences on his work, illustrates. Here Beckett points toa line from a Petrarch sonnet, ‘Chi puo dire com’ egli arde è in picciol foco [he who can express his ardour finds himself in a small fire]’, as an ‘interesting approach, from the technical view’ to his writing, connecting it moreover with the third of Gorgias of Leontini’s three propositions: 1. Nothing is. 2. If anything is, it cannot be known. 3. If anything is, and can be known, it cannot be expressed in speech. (Letter to A.J. Leventhal, 21 April 1958) 49 Beckett’s assertions of pursuing, in contrast to Joyce, a poetics of unknowing, of incompetence, are well-documented. Shortly before his death in 1989 he told Knowlson: I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than adding. (Knowlson 1996, 352)50

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Despite various strategies designed to invoke an absence of authorial and narrational control in Dream and Murphy, both books were, in their reliance on external material, anything but impoverished. Even if the allusive layer and the imported textual fragments were themselves somewhat ‘disabled’, the resulting literary product was in many ways a paean to knowledge, albeit derivative knowledge. The gradual disavowal of writing through a filter of erudition stems to a large part from the recognition that art could not make the ‘pure incoherence’ any more coherent, just as it could not quieten tensions brought about by experiential living. The 1938 review of Denis Devlin’s Intercessions gave Beckett the first opportunity to formulate the aesthetic and personal questions that had preoccupied him since the completion of Murphy two years previously. As I have emphasised, this period is marked by Beckett’s thinking about how to write rather than acts of writing themselves. Indeed, there had in fact been so much thinking that Beckett confided to MacGreevy in July 1937 that he ‘look[ed] forward to getting a lot off my chest apropos Denis’s poems’ (SB to TM, 7 July 1937). In the Devlin review he emphatically asserts ‘that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear, and does not make clear’ (Dis, 94). Yet as if to legitimise an art that fails in the face of that which it cannot explain, Beckett goes on to insist that ‘Art has always been this – pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric’ (91). Even if the ‘pure interrogation’ fails to penetrate the equally ‘pure incoherence’, the demand to do so is undeniable. In his German diaries Beckett phrased this need as ‘the rage to answer?’ (GD, 20 March 1937). Already in Rachel Burrows’ lecture notes we witness Beckett describing Gide’s creative enterprise as ‘interrogative not conclusive’ because he, as we noted previously, ‘preserv[ed] integrity of incoherence’.51 Unlike Corneille and Balzac, Gide (together with Racine) ‘refuses to abdicate as a critic’, and thus as interrogator.52 This refusal to surrender to facile rationalisations remained of interest to Beckett, and he detected it once again in a Cézanne painting depicting a path in a wood (Bienert collection, Dresden), thinking it ‘at last the reassertion of painting as criticism, i.e. art’ (GD, 7 February 1937).

Ingenious Fibres / That Suffer Honestly In a 1961 interview with Gabriel d’Aubarède Beckett disclosed that in 1946 he became ‘aware of his own folly’ and ‘begin to write the things I feel’ (qtd. in Federman and Graver 1979, 217). In 1973, in conversation with the writer Charles Juliet, he specified, ‘[u]p to that point, I had thought I could


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rely on knowledge. That I had to equip myself intellectually. That day, it all collapsed’ (Juliet 1995, 150). Two years later, in 1975, he specified that up to 1946 I always wanted to know, in order to be able to act. Then I realized that I was going about things the wrong way. But perhaps there are only wrong ways. All the same, you have to find the wrong way that suits you. (Juliet 1995, 156) It is conceivable that, with the intervening years, Beckett had forgotten the precise nature of the ‘wrong ways’ prior to 1946. With the advantage of hindsight and various personal papers and manuscripts to hand, the ‘turning-point’ of 1946 is in fact rather the culmination of a development during which there were other important moments of insight. Perhaps Beckett’s insistence on this date stems from an awareness that it represented the first time he was actually able to creatively act upon his own sense of what effectively did and what did not matter. The origin of the ‘unspeakable trajectory’ which culminates in the writing of Molloy can be traced (to go no further) back to Proust. As noted previously in this chapter, Beckett’s discussion of Proust incorporates a condemnation of rational discourse and intellectualism. The creative enterprise is explicitly deemed to be an imaginative expression of the inner world as Beckett defines the ‘work of art as neither created nor chosen, but discovered, uncovered, excavated’ (PTD, 84). Beckett was only too aware that his own piece of auto(bio)graphical fiction, Dream, was anything but uncovered, but rather hidden under multiple layers of erudite borrowings. A trace of self-reproach with regard to the ‘demon of notesnatching’ is evident in the book itself (SB to TM, undated [early August 1931]), as the Alba, having read one of Belacqua’s poems, tells him (‘in her soft ruined voice’) that ‘[i]t is clever, too clever, it amused me, it pleased me, it is good, but you will get over all that’ (Dream, 78). But, as the Dream notebook was shortly afterward replaced by the Whoroscope notebook, Beckett showed no signs of abandoning a habit proving to be both serviceable and, in view of the personal material flowing into his work, perhaps ultimately unavoidable. Nevertheless, at the same time Beckett wished for a somewhat more natural mode of composition whereby spontaneous composition would render any willed creation unnecessary, being aware of ‘fidgeting about, scribbling bad spirals . . . instead of simply waiting until the thing happens’ (Dream, 124). Even as ‘fidgets’ produced good poetry, as it did with Rilke, Beckett could also envisage a different kind of modus operandi. As he wrote to MacGreevy in September 1931, his wish was for a ‘nice quiet life punctuated with

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involuntary exonerations (Albas)’ (SB to TM, undated [12? September 1931]). Indeed, as an entry in the Dream notebook specifies – ‘involuntary seminal exoneration’, taken from Garnier’s Onanisme seul et à deux – these exonerations are implicitly (auto-)sexual in nature, and moreover represent a source of ‘relief’ (DN, item 458). That such compositional happenings did arise now and then is illustrated by the very same letter to MacGreevy of September 1931, as Beckett announced that two poems ‘came together one on top of the other, a double-yoked orgasm in months of dispermatic nights & days’ (SB to TM, undated [September 1931]). It is in this spirit that Beckett felt mired in an absence of ‘creative integrity’ and spontaneity, failing to capture the ‘essential real’ (Dream, 16). Moreover, this rendered his writing in his own eyes incidental and inauthentic. ‘Authenticity’ and ‘honesty of expression’ were the benchmarks by which Beckett evaluated his own writing and, for that matter, all creative expression. Beckett’s letters from the thirties reveal an intuitive recognition that his work was lost in an artificiality of statement. As early as 1931 Beckett had written to Charles Prentice expressing his hope of sending him ‘something more genuine & direct’ than Proust one day (16 February 1931).53 At the same time, he envied the ‘sincerity’ of MacGreevy’s contribution to Chatto’s Dolphin series, an essay on T. S. Eliot (SB to TM, 3 February 1931). The same criticism was levied against his early poetry, particularly that published in the European Caravan, in which Beckett detected an ‘ardour and fervour absent or faked’ (SB to TM, undated [13 September 1932]). The clearest indication of Beckett’s poetics at this time comes in a long letter to MacGreevy dated 18 October 1932. Here, once again, Beckett dismisses much of his poetry as being ‘facultatif’ [optional] in that it ‘did not represent a necessity’: Whereas the 3 or 4 I like, and that seem to have been drawn down against the really dirty weather of one of these fine days into the burrow of the ‘private life’, Alba & the long Enueg & Dortmunder & even Moly, do not and never did give me that impression of being construits [constructed] . . . [they are] written above an abscess and not out of a cavity, a statement and not a description of heat in the spirit to compensate for pus in the spirit. (SB to TM, 18 October [1932])54 This passage reaffirms the ‘poetical excavation’ advocated in Proust as well as the poetics of ‘statement’, with a further suggestion of the autobiographical impulse, the ‘private life’, underlying creation. Yet any aspirations towards a ‘spontaneous combustion of the spirit’ remained under threat from the


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‘fraudulent manoeuvres’ on which Beckett continued to depend (SB to TM, 18 October [1932]). On this basis the carefully crafted Murphy suppressed any wish Beckett may have had to create a work fuelled by emotional necessity, and is very probably the reason why he referred to it as ‘not very honest work’ (SB to TM, 23 April 1936). By July 1936, Beckett’s response to his own writing was almost a reflex as he judged his article on Jack B. Yeats’s Amaranthers ‘dishonest & sur fait [overdone]’ (SB to TM, 17 July [1936]). Yet following the writing of Murphy a gradual shift towards simplicity becomes discernible. Beckett’s reading, of Goethe’s Faust, for example, is done less with an eye for immediate compositional use than for poetical insight. There is equally an increasing emphasis on the inner world, encapsulated by the more direct and simple artistic statement of ‘Cascando’, written in July 1936, a poem more expressive of personal necessity and emotionality. Beckett’s trip to Germany, in the autumn of that year, was made in search of what the poem ‘Casket of Pralinen’ calls ‘ingenious fibres / that suffer honestly’. As we saw in Chapter 7, Beckett’s commitment to acts of self-writing while in Germany derived from an awareness that his only hope (‘spes unica’) lay in ‘turn[ing] this dereliction, profoundly felt, into literature’ (GD, 2 February 1937). Moreover, the form that this art would take would show that ‘the book, picture, music, etc. is incidental, what matters, the primary, is the illumination by which they are the vulgarisations, falsifications’ (GD, 18 February 1937). Yet Beckett ultimately seems to have viewed the journey to Germany to be a failure. As Beckett wrote to Günter Albrecht two days before his departure, ‘all the surfaces remain surfaces and that is terrible’ (30 March 1937). Nevertheless, there is a sense that he left with a clearer idea of what lay beneath these surfaces. There is a dimension of recognition, of acceptance and of an insight gained evident in a letter written to Mary Manning Howe several months after his return to Dublin: I write the odd poem when it is there, & that is the only thing worth doing. There is an ecstasy of accidia – willless in a grey tumult of idées oiseuses [idle notions]. There is an end to the temptation of light, its polite scorchings & consolations. . . . There is an end of making up ones[sic] mind, like a pound of tea, an end of putting the butter of consciousness into opinions. The real consciousness is the chaos, a grey commotion of mind, with no premises or conclusions or problems or solutions or cases or judgements. I lie for days on the floor, or in the woods, accompanied & unaccompanied, in a coenaesthetic of mind,

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a fullness of mental self-aesthesia that is entirely useless. The monad without the conflict, lightless & darkless. I used to pretend to work, I do so no longer. I used to dig about in the mental sand for the lugworms of likes & dislikes, I do so no longer. The lugworms of understanding. (SB to MM, 30 August 1937) Significantly, Beckett wrote this letter at the same time as he stopped working on Human Wishes, which had seen him return to note-taking with academic rigour. It also coincides with his renewed reading of Schopenhauer, whose complete works he had purchased in Germany. It reconfirmed his belief that the German philosopher had always been ‘one of the ones that mattered most’, and he found it ‘a pleasure more real than any pleasure for a long time to begin to understand now why it is so’ (SB to TM, 21 September 1937). The experience was, Beckett noted, ‘like suddenly a window opened on a fug’; moreover, it was a reassertion of a belief held since the writing of Proust: ‘Suffering – that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artistic experience’ (28).55 Fundamentally, even as the ‘authentic extrinsecation’ of the ‘incoherent reality’, already envisaged in Dream (102), was some years in coming, Beckett, during his trip to Germany, acquired an instinctive respect, at least, for what is real, & therefore has not in its nature, to be clear. Then when somehow this goes over into words, one is called an obscurantist. The clarifiers are the obscurantists. (SB to MM, 13 December 1936)

Conclusion

The Threshold of Words

After over a decade of ‘fraudulent manoeuvres’, Beckett emerged in 1946 with a clearer picture of how to proceed, or, more precisely, of how not to proceed (SB to TM, 18 October [1932]). There is a sense in which Watt’s harsh summation of the acquisition of knowledge – ‘What had he learnt? Nothing’ – was shared by Beckett (127). Yet hardened by the war in his belief of the inadequacy of rationality to make sense of the world, Beckett turned to, as he told Gabriel d’Aubarède, writing ‘what I feel’. Watt, written 1941–1945, represented, in two crucial ways, the necessary step in that direction. With Mauthner’s critique of language possibly at the back of his mind, Beckett set about dismantling coherence through language itself rather than through concepts. As a consequence, Watt heralds a more sophisticated use of secondary material, whereby references are absorbed rather than overtly visible – a move undoubtedly necessitated in part by not having such material readily available. This in turn freed Beckett’s hand, and the Watt notebooks show a large degree of experimentation. At the same time, they also illustrate the difficulty Beckett experienced with what after all was the first substantial piece of writing since finishing Murphy in 1936. Part of this difficulty was related to the second important innovation of Watt, the emergence of the first-person narrator. As Ann Beer has shown, Beckett struggled with various narrative modes during composition before arriving at the complex interweaving of authorial voices in the novel (1985, 54). Concurrently, the notebooks reveal a (not unrelated) tendency to erase or obscure a large proportion of the autobiographical elements, such as the references to his German trip. Nevertheless, Beckett’s ongoing habit of dissimulating references to his own life in his work after 1945 illustrates that the fundamental autobiographical impulse governing his early work remained intact. Moreover, even as the reliance on extraneous material was overcome, the question of how to achieve an appropriate mode of self-inscription remained unclear. Thus, in Mercier and Camier, written in 1946, the ‘stink of artifice’ remained

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irksome, particularly as Camier was forced to acknowledge that ‘we heard ourselves speaking of everything but ourselves’ (4 and 97). This attempt at speaking of ‘ourselves’ or ‘oneself’, as against telling a story, together with the notion of authenticity, informs much of Beckett’s post-war writing, especially the Trilogy.1 Thus Malone’s narrative oscillates between fiction and reality, with every departure into storytelling entailing an inevitable return to his own biography. Malone tries hard to disassociate himself from the characters he invents, locating them in natural surroundings far removed from his own isolated room. Yet despite emphasising ‘[n]othing is less like me’ than Sapo, Malone’s fictional incarnations are infected with his own life story: ‘I have only to open my mouth for it to testify to the old story, my old story’ (MD, 18 and 63).2 A similar process is at work in ‘The Calmative’, where the narrator decides to ‘tell my story in the past . . . as though it were a myth or an old fable’, despite the fact that the story he tells ‘this evening is passing this evening’ (ECEF, 20). Furthermore, as in Malone Dies, there is a tension in the life story related by a man to the narrator; the ‘account’ he gives is ‘brief and dense, facts, without comment’, but ‘positively fairy-like in places’ (29). The tenuous relationship between being and creation cuts across the narratives of the Trilogy through the simultaneous need to ‘[l]ive and invent’ (MD, 19). Yet the distinction between the two realms is collapsed by the realisation that storytelling is ultimately subservient to being and does not offer the desired relief: Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten. (Mo, 29) The pressure behind the storytelling is thus defined as being therapeutic or even escapist in origin, an implication clarified by Malone’s statement ‘[t]hings were not going too badly, I was elsewhere. Another was suffering’ (MD, 97). Just as the narrator in Dream declared that ‘everything ends like a fairy-tale, or can be made to’ (109), Molloy states his belief that fiction can alleviate reality: ‘Thus from time to time I shall recall my present existence compared to which this [the story of his journey] is a nursery tale’ (Mo, 61).3 Yet the escape into fiction is ultimately impossible, and, moreover, shown to be secondary to the essential creative enquiry. The Unnamable offers

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a succinct commentary on the necessity of confronting the self through direct self-inspection rather than through fictional incarnations: All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone. . . . I thought I was right in enlisting these sufferers of my pain. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it. Let them be gone now, them and all the others, those I have used and those I have not used, give me back the pains I lent them and vanish, from my life, my memory, my terrors and shames. . . . these creatures have never been, only I and this black void have ever been. (Un, 14) It is not difficult to read Beckett’s own creative enterprise into this passage, although we do not need to go so far as to equate him with the speaker. But by referring to his own fictional characters, Beckett implicates himself in turn in The Unnamable’s attitude towards storytelling, fictional incarnations and authentic utterance. Moreover, the passage quoted above restates Beckett’s 1930s concern with seeking the ‘fibres / that suffer honestly’ (‘Casket of Pralinen’); it is a further acknowledgement of the necessity to write from the perceived dereliction, rather than about it by recourse to fictional characters. The retrospective evaluation of using ‘vice-existers’, created variously in the ‘hope of learning something’ or to ‘avoid acknowledging me’ (Un, 26; MD, 53; and Un, 38), is one of regret: when I think of the time I’ve wasted with these bran-dips, beginning with Murphy, who wasn’t even the first, when I had me, on the premises, within easy reach, tottering under my own skin and bones, real ones, rotting with solitude and neglect, till I doubted my own existence. (Un, 108) The Trilogy fictionalises Beckett’s struggle to reach the point at which he could state, as the Unnamable does, ‘Yes, now I can speak of my life’ (Un, 114). The decisive step was to abolish the distinction between ‘the teller and the told’, the fictional and the nonfictional self (20). Occupying a middle ground between fiction and autobiography, Beckett’s solution was to create characters or speakers ‘in my image’, yet in a different manner from in the early work, where ‘it was clumsily done, you could see the ventriloquist’ (Un, 125).4 On the one hand this was achieved by the shift to

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a first-person narrator. Yet more important was the creation of a textual space in which the gulf between self and other is distilled in an immediacy of utterance. If Watt had already referred to its material existence as a manuscript, Malone Dies by implication is the very text Malone is writing in bed. Thus both Malone and Beckett can both ‘live and invent’ their fictional incarnations: ‘[a]nd yet I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise-book as about him’ (MD, 33). Beckett capitalised on his own diary writing in 1936–1937 to engender this new departure in his writing. Malone’s exercise book assumes diarylike qualities through its self-referentiality, immediacy of notation, and its adherence to an intermittent chronological structure (‘Enough for this evening’; MD, 4).5 Indeed, by drawing attention to the interruption of regular entries, as well as to the absence of dating, Malone upholds the generic convention of diary writing. The relatively large number of allusions to his journey through Germany – to Kaspar David Friedrich, the Tiepolo ceiling in Würzburg and Rilke’s translation of ‘palm of hands’ – indicates that Beckett returned to his own German diaries during the writing of Malone Dies. The German diaries also served as a model for the foregrounding of the material generation of text in Malone Dies, as well as in later books such as How It Is. In Malone Dies the act of writing is woven into the fabric of the text: ‘I hear the noise of my little finger as it glides over the paper and then that so different of the pencil following after’ (34). This immediacy of notation is further established by the frequent references to Malone’s pencil and exercise book. Beckett will have found such self-referential moments as well as failing tools in the pages of his German diaries: ‘Drop Tintenkuli [ink pen] right on its point, & now it can do no better than this, but perhaps will recover’ (GD, 13 March 1937). Within Malone Dies, the potential failure to continue writing is amplified. As H. Porter Abbott has discussed, Malone’s pencil dwindles in size and is lost, and the exercise book runs out of pages, falls to the floor and is finally ‘harpooned’ (1983, 73). Indeed, as Malone loses his pencil, a hiatus of 48 hours occurs in which not only the text but he himself is threatened with erasure (MD, 49). In this way, Beckett not only draws on the diary form to enquire into the nature of identity and the workings of a consciousness, but contrives to establish an existential dimension in which writing is tied to being.6 Just how far Beckett was implicated in this enterprise is evident from a comment he made in a letter to Pamela Mitchell: ‘I am absurdly and stupidly the creature of my books and L’Innommable is more responsible for my present plight than all the other good reasons put together’ (27 December 1954).

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Writing Anew Beckett’s creation of a space in which to merge writing and being was dependent on his personal need to find a physical space in which to work. Following a long period of ‘forced moves, of the streets & houses & air . . . impregnated with farewell’, it was only after 1945 that he found a more settled existence in Paris and Ussy. ‘Perhaps one has to write oneself out and down to nothing’, Beckett told Aidan Higgins in 1958, ‘and more than once, before one can really begin’.7 The idea of achieving literary impoverishment through saturation is mirrored by Beckett’s incessant travels throughout the 1930s. It was only with the decisive move to Paris in the autumn of 1937 that he managed to free himself from the constraints of Dublin and family ties, having realised that ‘when to have ever left one’s village ceases to seem a folly, perhaps it is only then that the writing begins’ (SB to MM, 18 January 1937). Yet it took Beckett nearly six months to find something resembling an environment conducive to work in Paris, unable to find an apartment and forced to live in hotels. ‘I shall never do any work until I find a place of my own’, Beckett told MacGreevy in April 1938, the same month he finally found a home at the Rue de Favorites (SB to TM, 3 April 1938). Nevertheless, although settling down in Paris gave Beckett a physical space in which to write, he was aware that ‘[a]n oscillation is not solved by its coming to rest’ (GD, 1 March 1937).8 Importantly, his situation mirrors what Beckett had called the ‘fundamental unheroic’ during his ruminations on Murphy in the pages of the German diary, the quietist negation of the ‘possibility of escape’ and the acceptance of the ‘thongs of self’ (GD, 18 January 1937). The crucial shift in Beckett’s thinking during his trip through Germany in 1936–1937 was to accept that there was nowhere to go. This is poignantly summed up by his admission to Mary Manning that ‘[i]t has turned out indeed to be a journey from, & not to, as I knew it was, before I began it’ (SB to MM, 13 December 1936).9 It is a distinction he noted during his reading of Boswell, who recorded Johnson saying ‘you are driving rapidly from something, or to something’ (UoR MS3461/1, 17r).10 Beckett’s lack of destination and, worse, emotional vitality during his trip to Germany is further evoked by his comment that he walked ‘dully without ad quem [towards which] & without feeling’ in the cemetery in Ohlsdorf (GD, 25 October 1936). By accepting that there was no ‘to’ or ‘towards’, and thus no redemptive destination, Beckett was able to become, as it were, a textual traveller. It is, to invoke that Beckettian word, the abolishment of the ‘fidgets’ of the body in order to cultivate the ‘fidgets’ of the mind. As a result, the

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‘cacoethes scribendi’, the ‘itch for writing’, remained with Beckett for many years to come, as, for example, when he told Ruby Cohn in 1977 that the ‘cacoethes [are] not yet quite quenched’ (SB to Ruby Cohn, 14 November 1977). The German diaries represent the fulcrum of a period begun by Dream and not resolved until later texts such as Malone Dies, in which Beckett sought a way to inscribe himself in his texts. As he wrote in Malone Dies, ‘this exercise-book is my life, this big child’s exercise-book, it has taken me a long time to resign myself to that’ (104). Drawing on his emotional response to Germany and German culture as well as embracing a quietist attitude towards existence, by 1936–1937 Beckett had realised more clearly the aesthetic and creative direction his writing was to take. The synthesis of life and writing evident in the German diaries and forming a backdrop to the unwritten ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ ultimately led Beckett to be able to confess to Ethna MacCarthy in a letter of 10 January 1959 that he was ‘alone with . . . the exercise-book that opens like a door and lets me far down into the now friendly dark’. It was in The Unnamable that Beckett gave an indication of what lies behind that door in the dark when he stated that ‘words’ had ‘carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence’ (Un, 134). Although Beckett pointed (in conversation with Gabriel d’Aubarède) to 1946 as the moment when he began to tell ‘my story’, or ‘the things I feel’, Beckett had already several years previously ‘fixed an existence on the threshold of its solution’.11

Appendix

Beckett’s Travel Itinerary

[Note: Dates in square brackets denote day trips] 28 September 1936 29 September 1936 30 September 1936 1 October 1936 2 October 1936 [3 October 1936] 4 December 1936 4 December 1936 5 December 1936 [8 December 1936] [10 December 1936] 11–17 December 1936 18 December 1936–10 January 1937 11–21 January 1937 22 January 1937 23 January 1937 [24 January 1937] 25 January 1937 26 January 1937 29 Jan.–13 Feb. 1937 [12 February 1937] 14–18 February 1937 [19 February 1937] 19 February 1937 [22 February 1937] 24 February 1937 26 February 1937 2 March 1937 4–16 March 1937 17 March–1 April 1937

Cork SS Washington Le Havre SS Washington Hamburg Lübeck Lüneburg Hannover Brunswick Wolfenbüttel Hildesheim Berlin Berlin Berlin Halle Weimar Erfurt Naumburg Leipzig Dresden Meissen Dresden Freiberg Bamberg Staffelstein, Banz Würzburg Nürnberg Regensburg München München

Notes

Introduction 1

2

3

However, the Beckett Estate has recently given permission for the German diaries to be published, and they will be edited by Mark Nixon for publication with Beckett’s German publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag. See Fischer-Seidel and Fries-Dieckmann 2005; Giesing et al., 2007, and Dittrich et al., 2006. Maurice Maeterlinck, Théâtre, vol.1, Paris: Fasquelle, n.d. [1939], [Beckett’s personal copy; Beckett International Foundation, UoR], xiii; interview with Gabriel d’Aubarède, 1961, in Federman and Graver 1979, 217.

Chapter 1 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Charles Prentice at Chatto’s acknowledges receipt of the story in a letter to Beckett dated 10 November 1933. Cf. for example Beckett’s disparaging comments on the conductor Furtwängler’s conversion to Nazism in a letter to Morris Sinclair of 27 January 1934. ‘Yes, sometime I hope I may get away, perhaps to Bavaria in the early summer. . . . Or better still to Lüneburg & Hannover, from Cove to Hamburg etc.’ (SB to TM, 29 January [1936]). Beckett first noted the tag in his Dream notebook (DN, item 576): ‘Laetus exitus tristem saepe reditum parit [A merry outgoing frequently brings a sad homecoming]’. Variations of this sentence are scattered throughout Beckett’s texts, such as Dream, 129; the story ‘Ding-Dong’ (MPTK, 40); the poems ‘Sanies I’ and ‘Serena II’; Watt, 38; and a letter to MacGreevy dated 10 March 1935. References to Beckett’s parents, by contrast, were encoded within an Irish landscape. In a 1937 letter Beckett thanks the bookseller Günter Albrecht for presenting him with a copy of Fontane’s Effi Briest, ‘which I neither possess nor have read’ (letter to Günter Albrecht, 30 March 1937). Although the statement may have been made out of politeness, this could indicate that Beckett had indeed not read the book together with Peggy in 1929 as is often presumed. Hunkeler’s discussion is based on Knowlson’s exposition of the biographical background to Krapp’s Last Tape (Knowlson 1996, 443).

Notes 8

9

10

11

12

13

14 15

16 17

18

19 20

21

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Beckett told James Knowlson in 1989 that the love letter in Dream, ‘Smeraldina’s Billet Doux’, was ‘a mixture between fact and fiction’ (Knowlson 1996, 146). The phrase is repeated in Dream, 112 and 177. Beckett’s use of the first-person plural ‘we’ may also be influenced by the French literary convention of replacing ‘nous’ for ‘je’. Jack’s Hole is in fact the cove where Beckett and Ethna MacCarthy spent an afternoon (Knowlson 1996, 149). The Dream notebook lists more than 100 entries from St. Augustine’s Confessions, and, as John Pilling points out, Beckett must have at certain points also consulted the original Latin text (DN, 11). Beckett read a further book on St. Augustine’s life and work around the same time (1930–1931), excerpting passages into a notebook also containing notes from Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus (TCD MS10968). See Barry 2009 for a good discussion of Beckett’s relationship with Augustine’s work. Beckett harnessed further autobiographical texts during the writing of his own, semi-confessional Dream, such as Alfred de Musset’s Confessions d’un enfant du siècle (1836). Beckett probably read Musset’s Confessions in 1931, when he jotted down some entries from the book in his Dream notebook (DN, 31 and 36). Although familiar with de Musset’s poems (‘Nuit de Mai’, seemingly a favourite), it was probably his reading of Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony that alerted him to the Confessions. The references to Musset in the Dream notebook interrupt the notes taken from Praz at precisely the point at which they are discussed in The Romantic Agony, where the influence of de Sade on Musset is explored. Cf. also Beckett’s reference to ‘ces juvéniles expériences de fièvre allemande’ in the spoof paper on Jean du Chas presented to the Modern Language Society at Trinity College Dublin, in November 1930 (Dis, 37). Dream also refers to the ‘Homer dust of the dusk-dawn’ (32). Signs prohibiting smoking generally irked Beckett; on a visit to a church in Würzburg he noted: ‘Nicht rauchen auf dem Leidenweg’ [‘No smoking on (Christ’s) path of suffering]’ (GD, 25 February 1937). Cf. also the smoking prohibition on the pier in Dream (7) and in the operating-theatre of ‘Yellow’ (MPTK, 186). The story ‘Echo’s Bones’ questions whether Belacqua’s ‘imagination had perished in the torture chamber, that non-smoking compartment’ (EB, 1). The ‘Nazi’ that appears in this story is presumably also from Nuremberg, as he has ‘his head in a clamp’ (15). See also Pilling 2004a, 143–4 for a discussion of this passage. The title appears thus in the potential content list for a collection of poems in the Leventhal Collection at Austin. Pilling points to Peggy Sinclair’s death from tuberculosis at the time of composition as a further influence on the poem, again establishing the German ‘link’ (1997, 87). Cf. also Beckett’s comment to MacGreevy that ‘I wish there was no P. B. in Dream’ (SB to TM, undated [13 September 1932]). The Polar Bear was modelled on Professor Rudmose-Brown (Knowlson 1996, 152). George Reavey, diary entry for 20 June 1934. Cf. Beckett’s comment to Günter Albrecht: ‘Nürnberg was so horrible, as I more or less expected’ (letter to Günter Albrecht, 30 March 1937). Cf. Knowlson for this episode in March or April 1931 (1996, 129).

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Notes

Chapter 2 1 2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Rachel Burrows lecture notes; TCD MIC60, 53r. Beckett further read and took notes from Albert Sorel’s L’Europe et la Révolution Française and showed an interest in the German response to the events in France by reading George Peabody Gooch’s Germany and the French Revolution (1920) (TCD MS10969). Although not often mentioned, Beckett read various books on French history and took notes on Irish history under the title ‘Trueborn Jackeen’ (TCD MS10971/2). The ‘Trueborn Jackeen’ material, mostly collated from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, must date from late 1933 or early 1934, as it was kept around the same time as the notes on the ‘Cow’, references to which appear in the story ‘Echo’s Bones’, written November 1933. In February 1934 Beckett told Nuala Costello that he was writing a ‘True-born Jackeen’ modelled on Defoe’s satirical poem ‘True-Born Englishman’. However, on 7 May 1934 he told A. J. Leventhal that ‘Trueborn Jackeen too great an undertaking’. As P. J. Murphy notes, Beckett was ‘always fascinated by the lives of philosophers in relation to their work’ (1994, 228). The same interest in biographical background can be seen in Beckett’s reading of Kant in 1938, which focused on Cassirer’s biography of the philosopher in the last volume (volume 11) of the collected works (Pilling 2004b, 43). Cf. for example the reference in the Whoroscope notebook to Kant’s description of Westminster Bridge, although he never left Prussia (WN, 49r). Beckett’s reading of Rousseau is difficult to date with certainty, although it must have largely been before the end of 1932. The Dream notebook (items 331–3) contains allusions to both the Rêveries and Julie, the latter finding its way into Dream proper in the form of a reference to ‘Saint-Preux’ (45). Beckett mentions the former in a letter to MacGreevy of 5 December 1932, and again in a September 1934 letter which also alludes to Émile. A reference to Rousseau’s Confessions occurs in the More Pricks than Kicks story ‘Fingal’. There are several echoes of Gide in early Beckett, as in the reference to Lord Gall’s wife as a ‘fruitful earth’ in the story ‘Echo’s Bones’ (EB, 11); cf. Gide’s book Nourritures terrestres [The Fruits of the Earth]. Cf. Charles Prentice (Chatto) to Beckett: ‘It is very good of you to suggest a Dolphin or otherwise on André Gide’, 8 February 1932. Beckett had, a year earlier, made the similar proposition of writing something on Dostoevsky (SB to TM, undated [early August 1931]). Later, in 1938, Beckett read, with little pleasure it seems, Vigny’s Journals (SB to TM, 5 August 1938). Beckett was still reading Renard in September 1937 (SB to GR, 27 September 1937). For various definitions of the diary form, see for example Martens 1995, 3–4; Hassam 1993, 11–26; Kuhn-Osius 1981, 167–71 and Boerner 1969, 11–2. Writers who include an entire palette of such abbreviations and symbols are Goethe (who used astronomical signs) and Johnson (who most probably is also concealing matters of either a sexual or a hygienic nature). This can be set beside more thorough concealing notations such as Pepys’s shorthand.

Notes 11

12

13

14 15

16

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Cf. Paul Valéry’s ‘Quand j’écris sur ces cahiers, je m’écris. Mais je ne m’écris pas tout’, Cahiers, 1957–1961, 236. At times Beckett also composed his diary entries during the day. Considering the length and detail of the diary entries, it is also possible that he took notes before writing an entry in the evening. Cf. the comment ‘then make notes on a piece of paper that I leave there [in café] or drop in the street’ (GD, 2 March 1937), anticipating the audio-diarist Krapp: ‘Jotted down a few notes, on the back of an envelope’ (CDW, 217). There comes a point towards the end of the journey when Beckett loses interest in his meals; after eating a ‘foul Aufschnitt [sliced cold meat]’ he comments: ‘German food is really terrible. What can one eat?’ (GD, 9 March 1937). Letters to Charles Prentice of 14 October 1930 and 3 December 1930. First-person voices, however, appear in the poems of Echo’s Bones and in the story ‘Ding-Dong’. Beckett had to learn to say ‘I’: as Roland Barthes notes in his ‘Deliberation’ over whether to keep a journal: ‘ “I” is harder to write than to read’ (1982, 487). Porter Abbott has traced this ‘moment of action taken in the moment of writing’ within what he terms Beckett’s autography; see his Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (1984), and Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (1996).

Chapter 3 1

2

3

4

5

6

Various articles exploring the relationship between Bion and Beckett exist. See for example Bennett Simon’s ‘The Imaginary Twins: The Case of Beckett and Bion’ (1988) and Lois Oppenheim’s ‘A Preoccupation with ObjectRepresentation: The Beckett-Bion Case Revisited’ (2001), both of which argue a reciprocal influence between the two men during and, rather speculatively, after the termination of Beckett’s analysis in 1935. For an excellent discussion of Beckett and psychology in general, and psychoanalysis in particular, see Phil Baker’s Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis (1997). Beckett’s arhythmic heart, and the absence of any clear medical reason, frequently finds its way into his own work. Cf. ‘the old heart’ in ‘Enueg II’ (SP, 17) and Dream (17), Dr Nye’s heart ‘that knocked and misfired for no reason known to the medical profession’ in ‘A Case in a Thousand’ (CSP, 18–19), and Murphy’s ‘irrational heart that no physician could get to the root of’ (Mu, 6). Correspondingly, terminology deriving from his psychology reading surfaces in his correspondence, as in his remark that ‘the belly’ of one of his brother’s friends ‘is in a permanent psychogenic’ (SB to TM, 8 February [1935]). A discussion of ‘Psychogenic symptoms’ occurs in notebook TCD MS10971/8. I am grateful to Matthew Feldman throughout this chapter for complementing my transcription of Beckett’s psychology notes. Rachel Burrows lecture notes, TCD MIC60, 26v; This Quarter, Surrealist number (September 1932), 121–8. Cf. the character types discussed by Ernest Jones in his Papers on Psychoanalysis, which include individuals who ‘turn criminal because of a guilty conscience.

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7

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14 15

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These commit some forbidden act because they have a floating sense of guilt and thereby obtain relief (acte gratuit and crime immotivé)’, TCD MS10971/8, 2v. Cf. the outline to Murphy in the Whoroscope notebook: ‘To X [Murphy] who has no motive, inside or out, available’ (WN, 1r). In a telling formulation, Beckett once wrote that ‘My memoirs begin under the table, on the eve of my birth, when my father gave a dinner party & my mother presided’; letter to Arland Ussher, 26 March 1937. Cf. also: ‘Authentic reminiscences of the two primal trauma[s] (birth & weaning) are at bottom of all myths & neuroses’ (TCD MS10971/8, 18r). Beckett’s continuing interest in the subject is evident from an entry in the German diaries: ‘nervous appendix might be taken as yet another uterine reminiscence’ (GD, 3 November 1936). Otto Rank had used a version of the tag ‘Optimum non nasci’ as an epigraph to his The Trauma of Birth, which he in turn had taken from Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy): ‘Miserable, ephemeral species. . . . The very best is quite unattainable for you: it is, not to be born, not to exist, to be Nothing. But the next best for you is – to die soon’ (Rank 1929, v). In his psychology notes on Rank, Beckett urges himself to read this and other books by Nietzsche, TCD MS10971/8, 18v. ‘Incomplete’ births appear in the ‘Addenda’ to Watt (248) and All That Fall (CDW, 196). Letter to A. J. Leventhal, 7 May 1934. See notes taken from Jones, TCD MS10971/8, 7r–7v. There is a reference to Beckett’s reading of Jones in a letter to MacGreevy, where he comments that he has ‘gerontophilia on top of the rest’ (SB to TM, 8 September 1935) when referring to Mr Kelly flying his kite. Beckett’s notes on Jones contains a definition of ‘Gerontophilia’ as a ‘special fondness for old people’ (TCD MS10971/8, 9v). But Beckett must have finished reading Papers on Psychoanalysis some time earlier, as his May 1934 reference to Freud’s ‘displacement upwards’, which appears in the Jones notes, suggests. On the basis of surviving evidence the psychology notes are chronological in order of reading. Thus, for example, the Jones notes appear before those taken from Alfred Adler’s The Neurotic Constitution, which he finished in early February 1935 (see SB to TM, 8 February [1935]). Letter to A. J. Leventhal, 7 May 1934. The Minotaure issue in question is the double number 3/4 (1934). Claparède’s article, entitled ‘Le sommeil, réaction du défense’, appeared on pages 22–4. Beckett inserted a reference to this piece in Minotaure in his notes on Claparède taken from Woodworth’s Contemporary Schools of Psychology, which does not refer to the article. The quote derives from Mrs Thrale-Piozzi’s Anecdotes of Dr Johnson. See Beckett 1996, 154. Further instances of the diving incident appear in the early poem ‘For Future Reference’, Dream (34) and Company (23–4). The unwillingness to discuss dreams can be also found in Molloy (138). George Reavey, having received a letter from Beckett in 1934, noted in his diary: ‘Letter from Sam Beckett: obsession!’ (entry for 26 June 1934). Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 1953–1974; Vol. XIV, 239–58. Beckett was aware of the Freudian theory of

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melancholia, having taken notes on the subject from Ernest Jones; cf. TCD MS10971/8, 3v. Cf. also: ‘Melancholia, therefore, borrows some of its features from mourning, and the others from the process of regression from narcissistic object-choice to narcissism’ (Freud, XIV, 250). As John Pilling points out, Burton’s Anatomy is the most important source of material in the Dream notebook (DN, 104). Beckett’s interest in the book was not short-lived, as further notes in the Whoroscope notebook testify. Cf. the reference to ‘heads or bellies according to type’ in Murphy (96). Kristeva’s description of the melancholy consciousness of the inevitable loss of loved ones, and the result that ‘we grieve perhaps even more when we glimpse in our lover the shadow of a long lost former loved one’ (1989, 5) relates directly to Beckett’s 1936 poem ‘Cascando’ with its reference to ‘the bones the old loves / sockets filled once with eyes like yours’ (SP, 35). Cf. the hint of the dehumanising effect of psychoanalysis: ‘I feel sorry for her [his mother] to the point of tears. That is the part that was not analysed away, I suppose’ (SB to TM, 26 May 1938). See Knowlson 1996, 171, and letter to MacGreevy: ‘Bion is now a dream habitué’ (SB to TM, 1 January 1935). In an early draft for Murphy, entitled ‘Lightning Calculation’ (UoR MS2902), the proto-Murphy Quigley keeps ‘notes on dreams made at various stages of the night’. Thus ‘psychoanalysis has only a single intermediary: the patient’s Word’ (Lacan 1968, 9). Rachel Burrows lecture notes, TCD MIC60, 11r. Beckett writes in Proust: ‘The observer infects the observed with his own mobility’ (PTD, 17). See Christine Downing, ‘Re-Visioning Autobiography: The Bequest of Freud and Jung’ (1970) and Paul Ricoeur, ‘Narrative Time’ (1980). Cf. the manner in which the ‘life story’ is given in The Calmative: ‘The account he then gave was brief and dense, facts, without comment. That’s what I call a life, he said’ (ECEF, 29). Letter to Felice Bauer, 26 June 1913; Kafka 1967, 412. Letter to Günter Albrecht, 31 December 1936. Beckett is here of course also using the word ‘Anschluss’ to highlight its political connotation, the annexing of (for example) the Sudetenland by the Nazis. This letter suggests that Beckett re-read Thomas à Kempis, having probably first read him, according to Pilling, in autumn 1931, as the Dream notebook shows (DN, xvii). For a further discussion of this letter and Beckett’s reading of the Imitation, see Ackerley’s essay ‘Samuel Beckett and Thomas à Kempis: The Roots of Quietism’ (2000), Feldman (2009), as well as Knowlson 1996, 172–4. Cf. Beckett’s diary entry: ‘Absurd dogma that the good man always produces something worth while’ (GD, 14 February 1937). Letter from Günter Albrecht to Axel Kaun, 3 January 1937 (Albrecht). Cf. The Unnamable: ‘Are there other pits, deeper down? To which one accedes by mine? Stupid obsession with depth’ (295). Cf. the reference to the ‘geology of conscience’ in the Whoroscope notebook, where the ‘Cambrian experience’ is cited.

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George Reavey, diary entry for 15 July 1930. Beckett told MacGreevy that he was struggling to start writing in a letter dated 25 August 1930. A letter to MacGreevy indicates that he handed the finished essay to Charles Prentice on 17 September 1930 (SB to TM, undated [17 September 1930]). The Watt notebooks contain a further reference to the ‘unhappy writer’ Leopardi, and his poem ‘Night Song of a Wandering Asiatic Shepherd’, notebook 1, 31r. In a 1958 letter to A. J. Leventhal, Beckett confirmed that ‘Leopardi was a strong influence when I was young (his pessimism, not his patriotism!)’; letter to A. J. Leventhal, 21 April 1958. See Pothast 2008 for a sustained analysis of Beckett’s relationship with Schopenhauer’s work. Taken from Schopenhauer’s ‘Nachträge zur Lehre vom Leiden der Welt’, Parerga und Paralipomena: Kleine Philosophische Schriften, Part 2, Chapter XII, Section 156; translation taken from Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays (1974, II, 300). The word ‘pensum’ often reappears in Beckett’s work; cf. for example Molloy (32). Cf. also Rachel Burrows’s lecture notes (1931), which refer to ‘Dostoevsky’s quietism’ (TCD MIC60, 12v). ‘Proust in Pieces’ was published in the Spectator (23 June 1934) and ‘Humanistic Quietism’ in the July–September 1934 issue of the Dublin Magazine; reprinted Dis 63–5 and 68–9. Point 3 in this outline wonders whether, following the casting of the Horoscope, the ‘corpus of motives . . . had given quietism oder was [or what]’; WN, 1. The dating of this outline to spring 1935 seems probable given that an early fragment towards Murphy, entitled ‘Lightning Calculation’, is referred to in a letter to MacGreevy dated 29 January 1935. Letter to George Reavey, 9 January [1936], misdated by Beckett 1935. Beckett’s notes on Geulincx, taken from J. P. N. Land’s 1891–1893 edition of the Opera Philosophica, are held at TCD as MS10971/6. I am grateful to Matthew Feldman for allowing me to use his transcript as well as the English translation of these notes. For insightful discussions of Beckett and Geulincx, see Feldman (2009) and Tucker (2010). This emphasis corresponds to Beckett’s recommendation to Arland Ussher to read ‘above all the second section of the second chapter of the first tractate, where [Geulincx] disquires on his fourth cardinal virtue, Humility, contempus negativus sui ipsius’; letter to Arland Ussher, 25 March 1936. Letter to Arland Ussher, 25 March 1936. Cf. DN, item 560. The importance of humility and resignation in Beckett’s thinking is further adduced by an August 1936 reference to the Stoic philosopher Epictetus in the ‘Clare Street’ notebook; UoR MS5003, 39. Beckett was pleased to read in MacGreevy’s review of Echo’s Bones that he was ‘a poet of the cloistered self on whom experience is an intrusion’ and that his ‘poetry has the temper of The Imitation’ (MacGreevy 1937, 81–2). Cf. letter to Mary Hutchinson, 28 November 1956: ‘Frightful kitchen latin but fascinating guignol world’. Murphy is rather more impressed by ‘the beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx’ (101).

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The two quotes are used in Murphy on pages 90 and 101. Geulincx’s Ubu nihil vales is invoked in Mercier and Camier: ‘One shall be born, said Watt, one is born of us, who having nothing will wish for nothing, except to be left the nothing he hath’ (MC, 114). Johnson’s love for the Anatomy is noted in the first Human Wishes notebook, UoR MS3461/1, 2r. Cf. DN, item 696: the expression is taken from Dean Inge’s Christian Mysticism (1899). See also Beckett’s remark to Desmond Smith in 1956 regarding Pozzo in Waiting for Godot ‘that it is only out of a great inner dereliction that the part can be played satisfactorily’; letter to Desmond Smith, 1 April 1956, quoted in the New Yorker 24 June 1995, 136. Phil Baker, without access to Beckett’s psychology notes, also connects this epistolary passage with Freud’s New Introductory Lectures (6–7), pointing to Molloy’s reference to a ‘swamp which, as far as I can remember, and some of my memories have their roots deep in the immediate past, there was always talk of draining’ (Mo, 75–6). Letter to Samuel Putnam, undated [September 1931] and letter to GR, 8 October 1932. Rilke, letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, 28 December 1911 (Rilke 1939b, 160).

Chapter 4 1

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‘I am reading German and learning a little that way’ (SB to TM, 21 November [1932]) and ‘I’ve been reading a lot of German’ (SB to TM, 12 [12 December 1932]). As we shall see later, it is possible that this reading consisted of Goethe’s Wahlverwandschaften. Beckett’s knowledge of the Lieder can be further inferred from his 1931 comment to MacGreevy after attending a concert: ‘The Schubert had plenty of nobility and one understood the need of relating his chamber music to his song settings’ (SB to TM, 24 February 1931). Martin Esslin sourced this allusion in ‘Patterns of Rejection: Sex and Love in Beckett’s Universe’ (1992, 63). There are other instances where Beckett made ‘textual’ use of Schubert’s Lieder. The 1982 television piece Nacht und Träume uses Schubert’s Lied of that same name, with the text slightly modified from Heinrich Josef von Collin’s poem (Knowlson 1996, 681). The Sottisier notebook, kept between 1976 and 1982 also illustrates this approach: ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss was ich leide ([Goethe’s] W.M. [Wilhelm Meister] Mignon. Schubert. Wolf.)’, UoR MS2901, 15r. The list of 22 ‘books sent home’ is in the Whoroscope notebook, 17v and 18v. The collected works of Schopenhauer were sent separately on 4 November 1936 (GD), and a large consignment with a further 20 books on 3 December 1936 (GD) from Berlin. Huizinga’s Holland, which was only ordered when Beckett had the books sent, never arrived, which explains why it remained unticked in the list following Beckett’s return to Dublin. The collected works of Lessing is not in the square bracket because it was only sent, unread, on 8 December 1936 (GD).

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Further impressions with minor changes of this standard work on German literature appeared before the new and revised second edition of 1931. There is no indication in the diaries that Beckett spent much time reading Heinemann’s work. At one point in December 1936 he notes somewhat despondently that he has nothing else to read except this book, but only records reading the chapter on Wedekind (GD, 25 December 1936). Knowlson states that these notes were begun only after Beckett moved to Gertrude Street in September 1934, but gives no reason for this (Knowlson 1996, 213). It is highly unlikely that Robertson’s History is the source of the German literary fragments in Dream (and elsewhere), that is to say that Beckett read the book in 1931–1932, as several ‘borrowings’ do not appear in Robertson. Thus, for example, the two lines from Gretchen’s Song in Faust, quoted in ‘The Smeraldina’s Billet-Doux’ in Dream (59), are not cited in Robertson. I am grateful to Matthew Feldman for providing me with the precise dates at which Beckett renewed his reader ticket for the British Library in London. ‘Wrote a couple of Quatschrains, Programs for Pogroms, nothing to signify’; letter to A. J. Leventhal, 7 May 1934. The German devaluation is apt, seeing that both ‘Da tagte es’ and ‘Gnome’, the other ‘Quatschrain’ referred to here, are based upon German sources. There is furthermore a lot of German in Beckett’s correspondence around this time, as in an (apparently unsent) letter to Arland Ussher of 14 March 1934 contained in the Leventhal collection at the Harry Ransom Center. However, Lawlor (2009b, 63) suggests the poem ‘Up He Went’ was the second ‘Quatschrain’ rather than ‘Da tagte es’. Beckett at the time did not possess an edition of Vogelweide’s poetry, as can be inferred from the fact that he bought a complete edition while in Germany (GD, 14 November 1936). He also bought an anthology of early German literature (Älteste deutsche Dichtungen) in original and modern renderings. Beckett thus appended the word ‘Alba’ to his note on Dietmar von Aist as the author of oldest Tagelied, emphasising it with brackets (TCD MS10971/1, 2r). Cf. Robertson, 123. English translation: Vogelweide 1938, 49. References to this poem can, for example, be found in The Calmative (ECEF, 29) and Stirrings Still (CIWS, 112). Cf. Beckett’s reference to Arland Ussher’s ‘Minerva’ in the 7 May 1934 letter to A. J. Leventhal. The details of the review, such as the abandoned nature of Mörike’s autobiography, Maler Nolten, correspond with those given by Robertson (525–7). Beckett wrote these lines on the left margin of his philosophy notes on Heraclitus, beside a passage stating that in ‘dreams, in opinion, each has his own world; knowing is common to all’ (TCD MS10967, 25v). Beckett read, or re-read, Werther (as well as Die Wahlverwandschaften) in French in 1938, cf. Whoroscope notebook, 68r and 68v. Cf. also Beckett’s letter to Alan Schneider regarding Endgame: ‘Faces red and white probably like Werther’s green coat, because the author saw them that way’ (10 January 1958), in Harmon 1998, 29. See Bolin (2007) for a discussion of Werther’s relevance to Beckett’s Murphy. The reference to the ‘dentist’ here belongs to a private and hermetic code equating (bad) dentistry with (poor) writing which is, for this reader at least,

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impossible to penetrate. In a letter to MacGreevy Beckett blames his comments about his friend’s book on Aldington on ‘literary caries’ (SB to TM, undated [29? September 1931]). Similarly, after Prentice had negatively responded to the short story ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’, Beckett noted: ‘I’m glad to have the thing back again in the dentist chair. I still believe there’s something to be done with it’, letter to Charles Prentice (15 August 1931). The Faust line is from Part 1, ll. 3374–7. Beckett’s complex association of Germany, music and sexuality appears frequently in Dream (‘music, Music, MUSIC’), and is also evident in ‘Dortmunder’ (SP, 20) and the poem ‘Spring Song’. His use of the word ‘Bitchlein’ here suggests Beckett was thinking of a different kind of ‘bird’ than Goethe. Furthermore, ‘vögeln’ is a German slang word meaning ‘to screw’. Cf. also the Dream notebook’s entry ‘Die Bitchlein sweifen niemals im Wald’ (DN, item 1091), where Beckett inserts the old German word ‘sweifen’ for ‘to wander’. A further, more oblique, reference to the ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’, or rather Beckett’s version of it, in the Kaun letter, occurs in Watt, underlining Beckett’s attachment to the poem’s quietness: ‘Then at night rest in the quiet house . . . the little sounds come that demand nothing, ordain nothing, explain nothing, propound nothing, and the short necessary night is soon ended’ (38). Beckett told Arland Ussher in December 1938 that he was experimenting with French syntax in the ‘form of Xenien’: ‘Ci-gît qui y échappa tant / Qu’il n’en échappe que maintenant’, letter to Arland Ussher, 20 December 1938. ‘The Vulture’ is annotated in Beckett’s copy of Echo’s Bones at the Harry Ransom Center with ‘Not without reference to Goethe’s Dem Geier gleich etc’. Goethe’s references in the ‘Harzreise im Winter’ to the ‘bittre Schere [bitter scissors]’, severing life’s ‘ehernen Fadens [iron thread]’ anticipate Beckett’s own preoccupation with the Greek figure of Atropos, one of the Parcæ, goddesses who preside over the birth and death of mankind (there are relevant notes in the Sottisier notebook). The poems ‘être là sans mâchoires sans dents’ and ‘Arènes de Lutèce’ both contain allusions to Atropos and the scissors she wields to cut off the thread of life (SP, 42 and 48). Beckett mistrusted the Eckermann conversation, as a letter to MacGreevy illustrates: ‘It strikes me as absurd to found any criticism on Goethe’s remarks to Eckermann, especially on a subject like Winckelmann, where there is the immense enthusiastic Winckelmann-Spinoza elaboration in the Leipzig period of the Dichtung u. W.’ (SB to TM, 31 December 1935). The line is taken from the second part of Die Wahlverwandschaften, Chapter 7, and assumes the quality of a Leitmotiv in Beckett’s correspondence. In 1953 he tells MacGreevy that ‘Niemand wandelt ungestraft on the road that leads to L’Innommable’ (SB to TM, 14 December 1953), and comments in a letter to Mary Manning Howe in 1968 that he is ‘struggling with French translation of Watt, in whose grim groves I feel I won’t have wandered again unpunished’ (SB to MM, 14 January 1968). A further reference occurs in a letter to A. J. Leventhal of 8 February 1972. My dating of Beckett’s reading of Mauthner as occurring in the summer of 1938 follows Van Hulle (1999 and 2002) and Pilling (2006a).

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Beckett finished Part I on 18 August 1936 and continued to read the first half of Part II, up until the ‘Klassische Walpurgisnacht’, which proved ‘too much’ so that he felt ‘no inclination to go on’ (SB to TM, 19 September 1936). Beckett used Robert Petsch’s edition of Faust, Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, n.d. [1925]. Strangely, the pun on Goethe’s ‘Die Erde hat mich wieder’ (Faust, 1.784) only seems to have been entered in the Whoroscope notebook in Germany in January 1937, although there is no evidence that Beckett took Faust with him to Germany. The other excerpts were made at the time of Beckett’s reading in August 1936: ‘soughing loom of time’ (Faust 1.508) and ‘Green benediction of the fields’ (Faust, II.4615). All three lines can be found in Beckett’s ‘Faust’ notebooks. Beckett repeats his amended version of the line in a letter to Mary Manning Howe dated 22 June 1953. Rubin Rabinowitz traces parallels between Faust and Molloy in ‘ “Molloy” and the archetypal traveller’ (1979, 25–44). Cf. Faust, I. 4285–6. During his trip to Germany, however, Beckett criticised Schiller’s Maria Stuart as ‘machine writing’ in contrast to Goethe’s more ‘human style’ (GD, 6 January 1937). Barely a year earlier, during his reading of Dichtung und Wahrheit, Beckett was more indulgent of Goethe’s strategy, stating that the ‘precedent hunting recurs very brilliant’ (SB to TM, 5 May 1935). Faust, 35, as noted by Beckett in UoR MS5004, 17r–18r. Cf. also Beckett’s remark to MacGreevy, after attending a lecture on Proust in Hamburg: ‘They want to make his “solution” a little moral triumph, the reward & the crown of a life of striving a la Goethe’ (SB to TM, 28 November 1936 [misdated by Beckett 1937]). This onward movement is also visible in the ‘heroic’ Joyce, cf. Stephen on the strand in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands’ (1992, 186). The word ‘autology’ is connected to the ‘inspectio sui’ of Geulincx in Beckett’s philosophy notes; TCD MS10967, 189v. Beckett did not, for example, comment in his letters to MacGreevy on the pact between Faust and Mephistopheles, although he transcribed the crucial passage from Part 1 in some detail. There is an allusion to this bond in Dream, where among other literary fragments, possibly drawn from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, ‘Du bist so . . .’ appears (Dream, 148). This is taken from Faust’s exclamation ‘Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen: / Verweile doch! Du bist so schön! / Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen, / Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn! [When to the moment fleeting past me, / Tarry! I cry, so fair thou art! / Then into fetters mayst thou cast me, / Then let come doom, with all my heart]’, Faust, ll.1699– 1702; Goethe 1926, 51. See also Murphy’s silken bonds. Faust, I.1549; the line is recorded in UoR MS5004, 34r; for Grillparzer see TCD MS10971/1, 42v. Beckett quotes Grillparzer’s ‘Totenklage’ in the ‘long joys of summer’ of Malone Dies (MD, 232).

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Cf. also an entry in the Whoroscope notebook: ‘unselfish only because he had no self – he had no self to be selfish about – Ec.’ (WN, 34r). The word is noted, for example, on page 55r of TCD MS10971/1. Beckett’s source for these entries, made in August or September 1936, is unclear. Although, as John Pilling has pointed out to me, the preceding entry derives from Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, the entries on Ixion, Sisyphus and Tantalus in Beckett’s Whoroscope notebook differ from Lemprière. A further possible source is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but here also certain details differ from Beckett’s notes. The motivation for recording these entries is also nebulous, as Beckett’s reading of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit had occurred in spring 1935. See also Beckett’s psychology notes, which refer to Otto Rank’s discussion, in The Trauma of Birth, of ancient punishments centring on the wheel as ‘representing [the] primal situation’, illustrated through the figures of Ixion, Tantalus, Sisyphus and Christ (TCD MS10971/8, 36). The passages from Rank come last in Beckett’s psychological notes, after Adler’s The Neurotic Constitution, which Beckett read in February 1935 (SB to TM, 8/2/1935). Schopenhauer also refers to the ‘subject of willing’ in The World as Will and Idea as ‘constantly stretched on the revolving wheel of Ixion, pours water into the sieve of the Danaids, is the ever-longing Tantalus’ (Schopenhauer 1896, III, 254). From the Frankfurter Zeitung, 4 October 1936. Having rejected the play as such Beckett ended his criticism with ‘That neither queen was that kind of person is another story altogether’ (GD, 8 January 1937). The same day he described the play in a letter to Mary Manning Howe as ‘such good poetry that it never comes alive at all’ (18 January 1937). Two instances of such ‘passive’ reception of books were his reading of the expressionist Franz Werfel’s Verdi; Roman der Oper, which due to the author’s Jewish background was banned in Germany at the time but was lent to him by Ilse Schneider, and his interest in Adalbert Stifter, whose name had arisen during conversations and whose voluminous Nachsommer he bought. Beckett’s interest in writers’ biographical background appeared again in context with Stifter, as he noted the details of the recently published biography by Urban Roedl into his diary (GD, 12 March 1937). Beckett also bought Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus and Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus. Beckett told Günter Albrecht that he found this story ‘erschütternd [shattering]’, which any further stylisation would have made pathetic. He also stated that the book reminded him of Manzoni; letter to Günter Albrecht, 31 December 1936. These further references to Beckett’s reading in the German diaries are 12, 13, 15, 16 and 21 March 1937. Beckett’s edition is Sämtliche Werke, Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, n.d. [c.1930]. For a more extensive discussion of Beckett’s engagement with Hölderlin’s silence, and failure to write, see Nixon 2010a. Letter to Arland Ussher, undated [14 June 1939]. At the beginning of Book Two of Hyperion Beckett noted in his volume: ‘Que de “frohlockend”s’! [The amount of “rejoicing”!]’; Hölderlin 1930, 472. Shane Weller provides a highly interesting reading of Beckett, Hölderlin and derangement in his essay ‘ “Some Experience of the Schizoid Voice”: Samuel Beckett and the Language of Derangement’ (2008, 41–3).

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This is evident from the amount of pages in the diary dedicated not only to the situation but also the history of the rise of NSDAP. For a more extensive analysis of Beckett’s attitude towards Nazi Germany, see Nixon 2009b. Or as the Whoroscope notebook calls it, the ‘Bierjahresplan’ [beer-year-plan] (34r). See Kaspar 2007 for a detailed discussion of the political broadcasts Beckett heard while in Germany. Beckett also recorded snippets of information regarding the political situation, including quotes by Goebbels, Hitler and Rudolf Hess, in a German vocabulary notebook (UoR MS5006, particularly 52v–4v). See McNaughton 2009 for a discussion of some of these entries. The speaker in question here is SS-Gruppenführer Werner Lorenz, as Roswitha Quadflieg in Hamburg has confirmed. Horst Wessel was an early Nazi activist killed in 1930, who was subsequently turned into a martyr by the regime. There are several such humorous asides in the diaries, as in his description of a newspaper article ‘with excellent photo of flight War memorial, Adolf Hitler Platz, running down to water (or sailing up from it). Indeed an exquisite flight’ (GD, 21 October 1936). In the notebooks as well as the diary Beckett noted small jokes and puns, such as ‘arish stew = neues nationalgericht der deutschen [new German national dish]’ (UoR MS5006, 50v). Cf. Beckett’s letter of 28 November 1936 to MacGreevy: ‘I was invited one evening to a Hausmusik. Wolf sung by a Kraft durch Freude spinster from Austria’. The expression is also noted in the Whoroscope notebook (34r). For a more detailed discussion of Beckett’s meeting with Albrecht and Kaun, see the article written by the brother of Günter Albrecht, Klaus Albrecht, in the Journal of Beckett Studies (Albrecht 2005). Günter Albrecht was killed during the war in 1941. Axel Kaun, after serving in the German army, was active in the cultural scene in various capacities after the war, working for publishers, literary magazines and spending some time at the theatre in Stuttgart. He emigrated to the United States in the mid-1950s, worked as a translator (rendering George Steiner and Christopher Isherwood among others into German) and died in San Francisco (probably 1982). Beckett similarly expressed his pleasure to find Kaun ‘free’ from the mentality expressed in tabloid and Nazi publications (GD, 11 January 1937). Letter from Günter Albrecht to Axel Kaun, 26 March 1937 (Klaus Albrecht). A week later Beckett told MacGreevy that ‘Thomas Mann . . . has had his citizenship taken away. Heinrich down the drain long ago’ (SB to TM, 18 January 1937). Cf. GD, 22, 25 and 28 October 1936, 6 November 1936 and 11 January 1937. The only lecture Beckett attended was one in Berlin of Hermann Stehr reading his story, Der Schatten. Beckett judged Stehr’s sentimental writing as ‘[e]arnest Kitsch’ (GD, 10 November 1936). For the following discussion of Das Innere Reich, I am indebted to Horst Denkler’s essay ‘Janusköpfig: Zur ideologischen Physiognomie der Zeitschrift Das Innere Reich’ (1976, 382–405).

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In the essay ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (Benjamin 1977, 168–9). Beckett read two further books by Alverdes, finding Reinhold im Dienst, a book also based on the author’s war experiences and accepting the necessity of conflict, ‘inferior’, employing the ‘same tricks of narration, new introductions, flash backs; physiognomic chinoiserie almost, dying falls’ (GD, 25 December 1936). Towards the end of his stay he also ‘began but did not go on with’ the more obviously autobiographical Kleine Reise: Aus einem Tagebuch (letter to Günter Albrecht, 30 March 1937). Carossa is illustrative of those writers who initially supported the Nazis but withdrew from their more unsavoury policies. Rejecting the offer to join the cleansed ‘Preussische Akademie der Dichtung’ in 1933, Carossa nevertheless accepted his appointment as president of the National Socialist Europäischer Schriftstellerverband (European Association of Writers) during the war. The original reads: ‘Der Tod sitzt still am Waldesrand / und rührt die Trommel mit müder Hand [Death sits quietly at the edge of the wood / and beats the drum with tired hand]’ (Wiechert 1933, 16; my translation). In 1971 Beckett told Kay Boyle that he had ‘tried Hesse in the old days in German without success’ (26 February 1971). Beckett specifically felt that the illusion of authenticity was broken as the complexity of the symbols and the allegorical representation of Sinclair’s inner world increases and the overall structure of Demian gets ‘out of hand’ (GD, 19 January 1937). No records of this proposal are extant in the archives of the Rowohlt-Verlag (email communication from Ralf Krause, Rowohlt Verlag, 23 July 2003). It appears as if he had talked about this possibility before leaving Ireland for Germany, as a letter to Mary Manning Howe suggests: ‘Frank writes what about the Lafcadio Hernia I was so full of before I left’ (18 January 1937). I am grateful to Sean Lawlor for alerting me to the reference to Lafcadio Hearn in the German diaries.

Chapter 6 1

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Reader’s report (no. 5767) for Chatto & Windus on Proust by Samuel Beckett by Ian M. Parsons, dated 8 October 1930 (UoR). Chatto would in any case take on Proust and Beckett go on to satirise the ‘proverbial’ German professor. For detailed discussions of the relationship between Dream and the Dream notebook, see John Pilling’s introduction to his edition of the Dream notebook and his Companion to Dream (2004a). In the latter Pilling also surmises that Beckett drew on a further notebook or scattered notes (133). Cf. Belacqua’s exclamation in the story ‘Echo’s Bones’: ‘My ideas! . . . I am a postwar degenerate. We have our faults, but ideas is not one of them’ (EB, 13). This last reference to ‘notes’ also pertains to the preceding sentence, which alludes to Goethe’s ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’. Possibly unable to remember the precise nature of this source, Beckett may be wishing he had his Dream notebook to consult, in which the Goethe quote appears.

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Gide, Journals, undated entry for 1891 (21–2). There is a wonderfully selfironic moment in Dream, where Beckett includes a reference to the charges of plagiarism that had frequently been levied against Stendhal: ‘Without going as far as Stendhal, who said – or repeated after somebody’ (12). In a book itself culpable of rather flagrant acts of literary theft, Beckett is also pointing up a similarity in compositional procedure here, as Stendhal’s sources for his writing and his working methods are not dissimilar to Beckett’s. Scornful of contemporary literature, Stendhal’s reading covered an eclectic range from dictionaries and guidebooks to books on history, economy and philosophical systems – a similarly diffuse range of sources will strike the reader of Beckett’s Dream and Whoroscope notebooks. For descriptions and discussions of these notes, see Everett Frost’s Catalogue of the Trinity notebooks (2005) and Feldman’s Beckett’s Books (2006). Beckett’s comment to Alan Schneider in 1957 that critics having headaches while trying to interpret his work should ‘provide their own aspirin’ (qtd. in Harmon 1998, 29) is wonderfully anticipated in a diary entry occasioned by the reading of Tiedtke’s thesis; immediately after declaring it to be ‘eine Langeweile [boring]’, he notes ‘[t]ake a boiling bath’ (GD, 28 November 1936). Cf. ‘Leise! Leise!’ in the German diaries (GD, 2 November 1936). Schopenhauer’s line also appears in the ‘Addenda’ to Watt (249), and is marked in Beckett’s Schopenhauer edition in his library. The word was originally recorded in the Whoroscope notebook in August or September 1936 (34r). The Sottisier notebook, for example, kept between 1976 and 1982, contains various quotations deriving from his reading (UoR MS2901). Letter to Alan Schneider, 21 November 1957 (Harmon 1998, 23). The reference is to TCD MS10967. Lucretius’s tag ‘Suave mari magno’ (MD, 219) can be found in the Whoroscope notebook (38r).

Chapter 7 1

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John Pilling has shown that the poem’s ‘old plunger / pestling’ the ‘stale words in the heart’ resembles a passage in Dream, which also refers to ‘pestle’ and ‘to bray his heart’ (2004a, 24–5). Cf. also DN, item 242, with the background to this set of words identified as Proverbs 27.22. I have amended the translation: Goethe in this passage merely refers to ‘weariness’, but the entire section deals with ‘weariness of life’, which is presumably why Beckett in his notebook writes ‘Lebensüberdruss [weariness of life]’. The German translation of ‘Cascando’ appears in the ‘Clare Street’ notebook, UoR MS5003, 13r–16r. Beckett discussed his translation with various people in Germany, and incorporated changes from the first such discussion (with Claudia Asher on 2 November 1936) into his notebook. However, there exists a further typescript at Dartmouth College, also dated 18 August 1936, carrying the title ‘Mancando’. Further changes, arising out of conversations with Rosa Schapire

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(15 November 1936) and Luther (16 November 1936) were inserted into this Dartmouth version, probably at the end of March 1937, when Beckett copied the changes recorded in the diary into the typescript in order to show the poem to Paul Alverdes (30 March 1937). However, by that time Beckett had presumably forgotten the first set of changes made in the ‘Clare Street’ notebook, as these do not appear in the Dartmouth TS. This appears likely as Beckett made no further entries in the ‘Clare Street’ notebook after his departure from Hamburg in November 1936. The Dartmouth version of Beckett’s translation of ‘Cascando’ is reprinted in Thomas Hunkeler’s essay ‘ “Cascando” de Samuel Beckett’ (2000, 27–42). See Fries-Dieckmann 2007 for an excellent discussion of Beckett and the German language, and Beckett’s German translation of ‘Cascando’. Cf. letter to MacGreevy: ‘I am glad you liked Cascando, the last echo of feeling’ (SB to TM, 18 January 1937), a comment surprisingly devoid of disparagement, even as it contains the threat that after the ‘last’ there would be no further echoes. Later, when showing the poem to the German writer Paul Alverdes, Beckett noted that it ‘reads bloody awful, even to the proud composer & translator’ (GD, 30 March 1937). UoR MS4848; these sheets look like they have been extracted from a notebook. Despite the kind help of Herr Richard Gerecke, head of the Handschriftenabteilung at the Staatsbibliothek in Hamburg, and Roswitha Quadflieg, the sources of these notes have not been identified. Beckett copied Napoleon’s words ‘I shall go down to posterity with the Code in my hand’ from Lockhart into his Dream notebook (DN, item 5). It is unclear whether Beckett had actually read Stendhal’s confessional account of his childhood, La Vie de Henri Brulard, but his interest in a translation makes it extremely likely. Rachel Burrows lecture notes, TCD MIC60, 49r. Item 719 in the Dream notebook reads ‘terminus a quo & ad quem’ [limit from which & to which]. In Dream, the narrator states that ‘after all our toil . . . it is rather late in the day for ad quem’ (Dream, 159). The term reappears in the short story ‘Echo’s Bones’ (EB, 9). There are further instances of Beckett’s later use of his experiences in Germany as noted in his diaries. His trip to Lüneburg (GD, 4 December 1936) found its way into ‘The Expelled’ (ECEF, 6), and, as Pilling has shown (1997, 224), in ‘The Calmative’ the protagonist’s climb onto a projecting gallery resembles Beckett’s own ascent up the tower of the Andreaskirche in Brunswick. This allusion is underlined by the references to the ‘Saxon Stützenwechsel’ in this text, which first appear in the diaries (GD, 10 December 1936 and 25 February 1937). Characteristic for this period, Beckett failed to compose a poem at the request of the maid of the establishment where he was staying: ‘it won’t come out’ (GD, 17 November 1936). TCD MS10967, 24r. Cf. also Beckett’s letter to MacGreevy of 23 April 1933: ‘I wish I could go into the library & work at Heraclitus & Co.’. In an early version of Endgame, entitled ‘Avant fin de partie’ and contained in the ‘Sam Francis’ notebook, the character A repeatedly and obsessively tries to recite the Lord’s Prayer; UoR MS2926. Cf. also How It Is, where prayer is an ‘old view it has faded’ (HII, 40).

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‘Luke XVI: Dives-Lazarus, prayer from virtual to actual in entelechy, or petites perceptions to apperceived in monad – poem’ (WN, 21r). The Dives-Lazarus equation reappears in the 1937 review of Denis Devlin (Dis, 92). See Maier 2007 for a detailed discussion of this quotation. The connection between ‘Cascando’ and this poetic fragment is further evident in Beckett’s diary entry stating that he has ‘the mood for the first time since the Farley episode’ (GD, 7 February 1937), Farley being, as John Pilling pointed out to me, Betty Farley Stockton. Beckett is thinking of his early use of a line from Fontenelle: ‘No gardener has died within rosaceous memory’. Beckett, who presumably read the line in Diderot’s Le rêve d’Alembert (‘La rose de Fontenelle qui disait que de mémoire de rose on n’avait vu mourir un jardinier?’), used it in Dream, where it forms the answer to the question ‘You know what the rose said to the rose?’ (Dream, 175), and in the short story ‘Echo’s Bones’: ‘He brought up duly the words of the rose to the rose: “No gardener has died, within rosaceous memory” ’ (EB, 19). Cf. also ‘Draff’ (MPTK, 204). Rilke’s ‘The Tale of the Life and Love of the Cornet Rilke’ had in fact been published in transition 19/20 (Spring–Summer 1930), the same issue that carried Beckett’s poem ‘For Future Reference’. Anne Atik records how Beckett ‘would not pronounce on Rilke’s poetry, except by taking exception to our enthusiasm’. She notes, however, that Beckett ‘had liked Rilke’s poem The Cornet when he was young’ (2001, 66). The letter from Rilke to Modersohn-Becker is dated 12 February 1902 (Rilke 1939, 202–5). Around the same time that Beckett acquired the Weise, he borrowed Rilke’s Ausgewählte Gedichte from Fräulein Schön (GD, 29 October 1936). He makes no indication in the diary as to whether or not he actually read this book, although it would be surprising if he had not, considering the numerous references to Rilke in the diaries. Beckett did, however, read, with little pleasure, Rainer Maria Rilke – Stimmen der Freunde, a volume of testimonies published after Rilke’s death. Beckett also records a variant of the second half of that exchange, which translates as ‘Not as strange as I suffer inwardly from it’. Beckett also copied this variant into his German vocabulary notebook, UoR MS5006, 52v. ‘Hamm’ here presumably refers to the street Hammerpark, where he had visited the Konditorei with Dr Reichert. Yet Hamm is also short for Hammerlandtstrasse, where the artist Grimm had his studio, and whose opinions seemed to strike a chord with Beckett. Hamm was also the name of the suburb of Hamburg in which all of these streets are located. Beckett illustrated his intent with an example: ‘ “He drew my attention to two facts that I had not noticed, that his good looks were going pasty. Every now & then he would say, in his excellent English: “I am most tired!” Even here, “in excellent English”, is too much. “With strong glottal stops” better. “Every now & then he would say, in English, with energetic glottal stopping: ‘I am most tired’.” ’ Cf. also Beckett’s German adaptation of a part of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in August 1936. Malone in his sick-bed journal self-confessedly makes a ‘joke’ when stating that if ‘my death is not ready for me . . . I shall write my memoirs’ (MD, 184), a sentiment

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also expressed by Krapp’s answer in Eleutheria that he would not consider writing ‘a little book of memoirs’ because it ‘would spoil my death throes’ (37). As John Pilling states, the word ‘fiasco’ occurs four times in Dream, and seems to have been connected in Beckett’s mind with the ‘fiasco’ of impotence in Stendhal’s Armance, as a letter to MacGreevy of 26 April 1935 illustrates (2004a, 98). Note however that already in the Whoroscope notebook outline to Murphy, Beckett had envisaged colour patterns in use of the horoscope: ‘correspondence with solar spectrum: violet, indigo . . .’ (WN, 8r). Around the same time, late December 1936, Dossi was in Beckett’s mind due to the debate over whether Giorgione’s Self-Portrait was by Dossi. Cf. SB to TM, 22 December 1936. Beckett had also been alerted to the function of miniatures in a discussion with the painters Grimm and Ruwoldt in Hamburg, who professed an ‘enthusiasm for early Christian miniature painting’ and argued for a ‘concentration & intensification of reality’ (SB to TM, 28 November [1936] and GD, 25 November 1936). See also Veit 2006. The translation was the last entry made before departure to Germany on 28 September 1936, and was thus probably done in that month. That Johnson was on Beckett’s mind is further evident from a letter to MacGreevy dated 7 July 1936, in which he enquires into the whereabouts of James Barry’s portrait of Johnson. Deirdre Bair states that Beckett felt there was too much irony, even sarcasm in the piece, but gives no source for this (1978, 220). In the opening stage setting Beckett replicates the opening of Murphy: ‘Es dämmert, weil es nicht anders kann [It dawns, as it cannot do anything else]’. In July 1937 Beckett told George Reavey that ‘my efforts to document my Johnson fantasy have not ceased’ (SB to GR, 27 July 1937). Cf. Beckett’s comment that ‘my Geulincx could only be a literary fantasia’ (SB to GR, 9 January [1936]. In the same letter Beckett admitted that ‘there is no text for the impotence’ (SB to TM, 26 April 1937). He was presumably not aware of a 1929 essay by R. Macdonald Ladell, which advanced the theory of Johnson’s sexual impotence, ‘The Neurosis of Dr. Samuel Johnson’, in the British Journal of Medical Psychology (1929, 314–23). By July 1937, Beckett had further come to the conclusion that Mr Thrale ‘must have been a syphilitic’, according to Beckett ‘no negligible accretion to the theme’ (SB to TM, 23 July 1937). Cf. also Beckett’s note in the first Human Wishes notebook: ‘Analogy with Rousseau (also impotent?)’; UoR MS3461/1, 72r. Cf. Beckett’s remarks to Mary Manning in a letter of 11 July 1937, which imply a broader application of the word ‘impotence’: ‘What a pity he [Johnson] could not have loved her [Mrs Thrale]. But the impotent can only love where he is impotent, the whole aim of loving being impotence, even a moment’s impotence, i.e. a moment’s love. The sad animal, the impotent animal, the loving animal’. As Ruby Cohn noted, Beckett’s interest ‘shifted from the couple to death and disease’ (1980, 158). N. F. Löwe plausibly argues that between July 1937 and August 1938 Beckett ‘abandoned the play on Johnson and Thrale, and began a new play on the odd characters in Bolt Court’ (1999, 193).

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Towards the end of the second Human Wishes notebook, Beckett transcribed Hill’s comments (in his edition of Johnson’s Miscellanies) on the melancholy dispositions of both Johnson and Cowper; UoR MS3461/2. Entry for 18 September 1768. Prayers and Meditations, Easter Day 1776, Johnson 1897, I, 74; Letter to Hester Thrale, 15 October 1778, Johnson 1992, III, 126–8. An example of Johnson’s complaint (in one of his letters) of his own personal melancholy: ‘I have passed this summer very uneasily. My old melancholy has laid hold upon me to a degree sometimes not easily supportable’ (Johnson 1992, I, 287). Diary entry for 1 January 1766 (Johnson 1958, 100 and 206). See also Tonning’s essay, ‘Beckett’s Unholy Dying: From Malone Dies to The Unnamable’ (2009b), which also relates Johnson to Jeremy Taylor’s 1651 The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying. Letter from Johnson to Hester Thrale, 21 September 1773 (Johnson 1897, I, 67–8). Letter to Joseph Hone, 3 July 1937. Beckett made the same point in a letter to MacGreevy, 4 August 1937, adding that in the face of ‘ultimate annihilation’ Johnson ‘would prefer an eternity of torment’. Quoted in Hester Thrale’s Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (Johnson 1897, I, 251). The word ‘vanity’ appears approximately 40 times in the authorized version of Ecclesiastes. Beckett in this letter also remembers that he ‘accumulated a mass of notes’.

Chapter 8 1

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Early discussions of Beckett’s interest in the visual arts include Dougald McMillan’s ‘Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts: The Embarrassment of Allegory’ (1975) and Vivian Mercier’s Beckett/Beckett (1977, 88–113). For recent discussions of Beckett and the visual arts, see, for example, Rémi Labrusse’s ‘Beckett et la peinture: Le témoignage d’une correspondance inédite’ (1990); the collection Samuel Beckett in the Arts: Music, Visual Arts and Non-Print Media, edited by Lois Oppenheim (1999); Lois Oppenheim’s The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (2000). For discussions of Beckett’s visits to German galleries in 1936–1937, see Knowlson (2003), Veit (2006), Giesing et al. (2007) and the National Gallery of Ireland exhibition catalogue Samuel Beckett: A Passion for Painting (2006). The reference is to El Greco’s Burial of the Count Orgaz in the National Gallery, Dublin. Allusions to paintings also occur in the early poetry, as in the reference to Mantegna in ‘Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin’. Further allusions in the early poetry are discussed by Lawlor (2009). On 8 October 1932 he wrote to MacGreevy asking for an ‘informative book on Dutch painting’. Beckett’s reading of the book cannot be precisely dated, but on the basis of the position of the Wilenski material in the notebook UoR MS5001 it was presumably in 1933, and definitely not later than the summer of 1934. Only the visits (undertaken with his brother) to the Louvre (17 June 1934) and the Musée Condé at Chantilly (18 June 1934) are dated in the notebook.

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From the position in the notebook, however, the notes on the Hampton Court collection must pre-date the French trip. The subsequent notes taken at the National Gallery Dublin probably date from January 1935, when Beckett returned home for the Christmas period, and the subsequent notes from the Victoria and Albert Museum can be dated to February 1935 (SB to TM, 8 February [1935] and 20 February 1935). James Knowlson has discussed Beckett’s visit to Chantilly in his essay ‘Beckett in the Musée Condé 1934’ (2002, 73–83). In November 1936 Beckett noted two monographs on Bosch by Walter Schürmeyer and Kurt Pfister into his diary (GD, 9 November 1936), indicating that his interest in this painter was undiminished. Cf. also Belacqua’s assurance that he did not ‘propose to Hieronymus Bosch’ the Alba (Dream, 193). A reference to Bosch’s Scourging of Christ (National Gallery London) can be found in Watt (157). The notes on Bosch and Dürer come immediately before the notes dating from the visit to the Louvre in June 1934. In contrast, Beckett in 1938 told MacGreevy that he had spent an afternoon in the Louvre ‘without working’ (SB to TM, 3 April 1938). He wrote to MacGreevy in November that ‘the campaign against “ArtBolshevism” is only just beginning’ (SB to TM, 28 November 1936 [misdated by Beckett 1937]). Information on both the ‘Entartete Kunst’ and the Nazi-approved exhibitions are taken from Barron (1991, 9–22). It is worth noting that the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition attracted far more people than the one exhibiting ‘healthy’ art. Beckett’s diary entry simply records that he visited the ‘Schreckenzimmer’ (GD, 23 January 1937). The exhibition was visited by 445 people before closing in July 1937. I am grateful to Wolfgang Büche at the Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg, Halle, for confirming Beckett’s entry in the visitors’ book on the 23 January 1937, and for providing further information on this special exhibition. On the back of the painting Marc wrote: ‘Und alles Sein ist flammend leid [And all being is flaming suffering]’. Letter to Günter Albrecht, 31 December 1936. In his diary Beckett noted with regard to these drawings: ‘So in this form they are not poison?’ (GD, 19 December 1936). In his excellent discussion of Beckett’s visit to the Hamburger Kunsthalle in October/November 1936, Matthias Mühling illustrates this difference with reference to the Expressionist paintings in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, where portraits had similarly been removed and landscapes left hanging (2003, 31). But not all: Beckett, for example, met Hans Posse, who was dismissed as Director of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie before becoming Hitler’s chief adviser for the Linz project, which aimed at making Hitler’s home town the art capital of the world, in June 1939. On the 13 November 1936 Beckett also visited Hildebrand Gurlitt’s private collection, housed beside the Kunstverein on the Alte Rabenstrasse in Hamburg. Gurlitt was one of the few art dealers who received a special (and after 1945, controversial) dispensation from the Nazis to carry on dealing in art. Beckett proceeded to buy, only two days later, the first volume of Nolde’s autobiography, Das eigene Leben (1867–1902), published in 1931. For an exhaustive discussion and documentation of art in Hamburg between 1933 and 1945 see Maike Bruhns’s meticulously researched Kunst in der Krise

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(2001). I am grateful to Professor Bruhns for kindly responding to several queries. See also Quadflieg 2006 and Veit 2007 for a discussion of Beckett’s encounters with these artists. Cf. also Beckett’s comment to Günter Albrecht that Grohmann was ‘too interested in the phenomenon to think of exile’, letter to Günter Albrecht, 30 March 1937. Rosa Schapire expressed a similar sentiment in April 1936: ‘ich kann, will und darf nicht fahnenflüchtig werden – heute weniger denn je [I cannot, will not and may not desert – today less than ever]’ (qtd. in Wietek 1964, 124). Franke was one of the more daring collectors, smuggling pieces by Beckmann from Amsterdam into Germany, and he continued to deal and show modern work throughout the war in a back room of his gallery. Will Grohmann, Die Sammlung Ida Bienert Dresden, Potsdam: Müller und Kiepenheuer, n.d. [1933]. A discussion of Ida Bienert (1870–1965) and her collection can be found in Henrike Junge’s essay, ‘Vom neuen begeistert – Die Sammlerin Ida Bienert’ (1992, 29–35). Max Sauerlandt’s widow, Alice, gave Beckett a copy of her husband’s Die Kunst der letzten dreissig Jahre, published posthumously, which had been banned and seized shortly after its appearance in the summer of 1935. This painting is now in the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Mühling 2003, 37). In a different context, however, Beckett dismissed what he felt to be a typically Nordic ‘indigested lump of naiveté’, which was not ‘merely a whole nerve complex of the mind that has never developed, nor merely a blind spot, but this cretinosity cultivated & made participant in the statement’. Besides Munch, Beckett felt this to be operative in Nolde and Hamsun (GD, 20 January 1937). This reference to Hamsun implies that Beckett had read parts of Knut Hamsun’s Der Ring schliesst sich (The Ring Is Closed), which he had received five days previously from Kaun (GD, 15 January 1937). Beckett noted that this painting was listed as Trauer (Mourning) in the catalogue of the Kronprinzenpalais. It was part of the Reinhardt-Fries, completed by Munch for the ‘Kammerspiele’ theatre in Berlin. Eight of the original 12 paintings of this frieze are now in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, but this particular painting appears to have been destroyed during World War II. Cf. Dream: ‘ “Vous mourûtes aux bords . . . “ ’ (144); the reference is pointed out by Pilling (2004a, 251). Beckett further mentions the painting in conversation with Kaun (GD, 15 January 1937). Carl Dietrich Carls, Ernst Barlach; Das Plastische, Graphische, und Dichterische Werk (‘Zeichner des Volkes’, Band 1), Berlin: Rembrandt Verlag, 1931. The book is listed in the Whoroscope notebook as having been sent home to Dublin. Zeichnungen von Ernst Barlach (1935). On Barlach’s persecution by the Nazis see Piper 1987. I am grateful to Edward Beckett for his helpful comments on Beckett’s use of the ‘bémolisé’. Cf. also Knowlson for a discussion of the way Beckett detected this ‘key’ in Friedrich (2002, 78). Note that Friedrich’s paintings did not always fulfil the criteria of the ‘minor key’. Beckett described the painting Kreuz im Gebirge (Cross in the Mountains, 1807–1808) as appealing to the ‘very dregs of aesthesia’ (GD, 14 February 1937), and he generally approached German romantic painting ‘with loathing’ (GD, 21 October 1936). Cf. also the description in Malone Dies of ‘such a night as Kaspar David Friedrich loved’ (198).

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Beckett quotes the same line in ‘Dante and the Lobster’ (MPTK, 21). It also appears in Murphy as ‘not of breath taken but of quiet air’ (87). Beckett’s passion for Brouwer dated back to at least February 1935, when he saw a picture of a man playing the lute (Interior of a Room with Figures, 1635–1638) in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (SB to TM, 8 February [1935] and UoR MS5001, 36r). Beckett encountered Giorgione again in the Zwinger Gallery in Dresden in the form of the Sleeping Venus (c. 1510), and spent much time and energy trying to unravel its complicated history of attribution and restoration. He noted that there was ‘something fishy’ about the left leg of the Venus, which ‘entered it [the painting] like Joyce’s Parnell spit at the first look’ (GD, 9 February 1937; SB to TM, 16 February 1937). Cf. also the entry in the Whoroscope notebook: ‘One leg more beautiful than the other’ (WN, 36r) and the reference in ‘La Peinture des van Velde’ (Dis, 119). In what is once again an instance of Beckett’s remarkable memory, he also commented when seeing the Sleeping Venus: ‘[d]on’t feel like crying’ (GD, 1 February 1937). He was probably remembering one of Petsch’s annotations to the First Part of Faust, which cites Wickhoff’s opinion that the beautiful woman Faust sees in the magical mirror is Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus. Although Faust is moved by and desirous of the image, he does not cry. Beckett’s note is in the Faust notebook, UoR MS5004, 75. In his 1938 review ‘Intercessions’ Beckett similarly detected in Devlin’s poems (as well as in Hölderlin’s poem ‘Der Spaziergang’) ‘the extraordinary evocation of the unsaid by the said’ (Dis, 94). Cf. also Beckett’s description of the painting in a letter to MacGreevy: ‘The Antonello . . . is stupendous – the tiny figures of the quick in the background gossiping & making appointments, under a paradisal sky’ (SB to TM, 16 February 1937). In a similar fashion Beckett admired Melchior Feselen’s ‘sad old George’ in his portrayal of St. George, the Dragon and St. Margaret (Leipzig), representing the ‘most humane version of this subject I have seen’ (GD, 27 January 1937). Beckett mentions Witz’s Ratschluss der Erlösung, inspired by the revelations of St. Mechthild v. Magdeburg in the translation by Heinrich von Nördlingen, in a letter to Arland Ussher of 26 March 1937. Beckett remembered Dürer’s biographical details which he had noted in the ‘art’ notebook. After describing the Portrait of a Young Woman, painted during Dürer’s second journey to Italy, he humorously noted ‘Agnes D[ürer] . . .’ (GD, 21 January 1937), presumably remembering his note that Dürer’s wife, Agnes Frey, was ‘a bitch’ who sent the artist to an early grave (UoR MS5001, 23v). This list is taken from Heinrich Alfred Schmidt’s Gemälde u. Zeichnungen von Mathias Grünewald, 2 vols., Strassburg: Verlag W. Heinrich, 1911. Beckett had previously bought Wilhelm Fraenger’s study, Matthias Grünewald in seinen Werken. Ein physiognomischer Versuch; Kunstbücher des Volkes, Band 15, Berlin: Rembrandt, 1936 (GD, 8 January 1937). Grünewald’s famous ‘Isenheimer Altar’ in Colmar represented an objective of Beckett’s journey, but one never reached. Cf. ‘One Evening’, an early version of Ill Seen Ill Said: ‘Tableau vivant if you will’ (CIWS, 121). The equivalent to this in Dream had been the ‘tableau mourant’ (115).

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The same ‘secular’ quality within a religious scene can be detected in Ewald Dülberg’s painting Das Abendmahl (The Last Supper), which Beckett admired. The painting was owned by Beckett’s uncle, ‘Boss’ Sinclair, who sold it to the Hamburger Kunsthalle. It was seized by the Nazis and destroyed in 1939; cf. Bruhns 2001, I, 108. It now adorns the cover of John Pilling’s Companion to Dream. In his diary Beckett lists objections to their work, together with a kind of sociocultural critique of the period, mentioning the fact that Nuremberg banished Jews for over three centuries (GD, 28 February 1937). Beckett noted a similar sentiment the following day: ‘I am the tired young man sich weinend durch die Finger sehend [who through his fingers sees himself crying], to repeat, in Brueghel’s Niederländische Sprichwörter [Dutch Proverbs]’ (GD, 19 December 1936). For a comprehensive discussion of the painting and the history of its interpretation, see Detje 1999. Although the actual proverb remained the same, its meaning was differently interpreted. Fraenger himself pointed out that his interpretation did not please him. Yet his view was still used in Gustav Glück’s 1936 study of the proverbs in Das Bruegel Buch (1936), which in the 1941 reprint however was changed to ‘He who looks through his fingers’ to admit further interpretations. Beckett refers to it as the ‘Simonetta’ portrait according to the presumption of the time, yet the identification of the young woman in this portrait as being Simonetta Vespucci has not been upheld. This passage is anticipated by a previous allusion to Rembrandt in a description of Lucien: ‘Looking at his face you saw the features bloom, as in Rembrandt’s portrait of his brother (Mem.: develop)’, emphasising the blooming effect in the following sentence with ‘red dehiscence of flesh in action’ (Dream, 116). Beckett saw the portrait of Rembrandt’s brother in the Gemäldegalerie in Kassel, and the Self-Portrait with a Gold Chain (1633) and St Matthew and Angel (1661) in the Louvre. Cf. also Pilling 2004a, 240. The other Rembrandt self-portrait in Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie, the Bitternshooter (1639), seemed to Beckett a ‘Nordic restatement of the psychologies of Antonello Sebastian’ (GD, 10 February 1937). For insightful discussions of these ‘Cézanne’ letters see Knowlson (1996, 196–7), Pilling (1997, 129–36) and Tonning (2007, 44–6). Ballmer’s Aber Herr Heidegger! was a response to Heidegger’s inaugural speech (‘What Is Metaphysics?’) at the University of Freiburg in 1929. Letter to Günter Albrecht, 30 March 1937. Many of the artists Beckett met in Germany professed to having an interest in Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical teachings, for example Karl Kluth and Edgar Ende. The Anthroposophical Society was banned in Germany on 16 November 1935. Note that this discussion of Cézanne runs parallel to his reading of Rousseau, in whom he also detected, as he told MacGreevy in the same letter (undated [16 September 1934]), a tension between solitude (which for Rousseau was natural) and societal interaction (unfortunately desired). Letter to Cissie Sinclair, 14 August 1937. Cf. also Dream’s reference to ‘two separate non-synchronised processes’ (167) and in Proust the ‘two separate and immanent dynamisms related by no system of synchronisation’ (17).

Notes 51

52

53

54

55

56

57

217

Beckett also transcribed Mauthner’s criticism of anthropomorphism from the Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache: ‘Das letzte Wort des Denkens kann nur die negative Tat sein, die Selbstzersetzung des Anthropomorphismus, die Einsicht in die profunde Weisheit des Vico: homo non intelligendo fit omnia [The last word of thought can only be the negative act, the self-destruction of anthropomorphism, the insight into the profound wisdom of Vico: man becomes all things by not understanding them]’ (TCD MS10971/5, 4). Beckett is alluding to Hobbema’s The Avenue at Middelharnis (1689) in London’s National Gallery. The Cuyp mentioned here could be any one from a number held in London, as many of Cuyp’s landscapes have both a golden sky and the flight of birds. The bird imagery here also echoes the silent birds in the forest in Goethe’s ‘Wandrers Nachtlied II’. Cf. also Beckett’s comment following a visit to the National Gallery in London, where he ‘saw a lot in the Segers [sic] that I had not seen before’ (SB to TM, 8 October 1935). David Hayman has discussed this passage in the Watt notebooks with its autobiographical references to Beckett’s trip to Germany in the context of the manuscript evolution of Watt, in ‘Beckett’s Watt, the Art Historical Trace: An Archeological Inquest’ (2005). As Hayman points out, Beckett originally wrote ‘Eisenheimer’ instead of Elsheimer. There is a curious precedent for this error in a letter to MacGreevy, where Beckett refers to the German as the painter ‘whose name I can never remember’, adding as a footnote at the end of the letter ‘Elsheimer is the man’ (SB to TM, 9 October 1936). The passage is entirely based on entries in the German diaries. We have already discussed both the Friedrich and Seghers, and the Elsheimer allusion is to the ‘[e]xquisite Nachtlandschaft, mit Hirten an einem Feuer [Night Landscape, with shepherd sitting by a fire], on loan from the Louvre’ (GD, 18 December 1936). In a letter to MacGreevy Beckett described it as ‘a lovely drawing on loan from the Louvre, water, night, wood, glades moon, and tiny fire being kindled on the shore’ (SB to TM, 18 January 1937). ‘Giacometti . . . voulant rendre ce qu’il voit, ce qui n’est peut-être pas si sage que ça lorsqu’on sait voir comme lui’; letter to Georges Duthuit, 10 September 1951 (qtd. in Labrusse 1990, 676).

Chapter 9 1

2

3

4

Anticipating the 1945 essay ‘MacGreevy on Yeats’: ‘light . . . to the issueless predicament of existence’ (Dis, 97). See Tonning 2007, Chapter 6 for an excellent discussion of Beckett’s relationship with Leibniz’s work. ‘He talked attractively of Spinoza’ (SB to TM, 26 July 1936). Beckett’s reading of Spinoza is too late to have had a central influence on Murphy. Critics have however found Spinozist elements in the novel, such as P. J. Murphy in ‘Beckett and the Philosophers’ (1994, 222–40). During his reading of Karl Ballmer’s Aber Herr Heidegger!, Beckett transcribed quotes from Rudolf Steiner into his diary and noted their similarity to the

218

5 6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Notes

Monadology, but subsequently queried ‘[a]nd my Spinozist formulation?’ (GD, 20 March 1937). Beckett was reading Franz Marc’s Briefe, Aufzeichnungen und Aphorismen, 1920. See also Porter H. Abbott’s essay ‘Narrative’ on Beckett’s ‘art of the egregious gap’, which he argues ‘has less to do with signifying nothing there than nothing known’ (2004, 7–29). As there are divergences between the original German letter to Kaun printed in Disjecta and Martin Esslin’s translation into English, it is possible that one of the other existing German drafts of this letter was used for the translation. Esslin’s translation, for example, refers to ‘a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights’ (Dis, 172). This echoes an entry in the notes taken from Romain Rolland’s Vie de Beethoven in the Dream notebook, which underlie Beckett’s use of the composer in Dream: ‘Mein Reich ist in der Luft’ (DN, item 1110). There is, however, no reference to ‘heights’, giddy or otherwise, in the German version of the Kaun letter printed in Disjecta. It is noteworthy that Axel Kaun, in his capacity as editor of the short-lived literary magazine ‘Horizont’, received a similar letter from Heinrich Böll in 1948, in which the German author also formulated his views on literature and his position within it. When Beckett met the stage designer and actor Kurt Eggers-Kestner in Munich, they spent a lot of time discussing theatrical productions. Eggers-Kestner became the director of the Städtische Bühne in Kiel in 1937 shortly after meeting Beckett, hiring the painter Kluth, whom Beckett had met in Hamburg, as stage designer. Together they tried to counter the prevailing cultural trend, which led to their removal in the summer of 1939 because of Kluth’s design for a production of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell. Both were threatened with deportation to a concentration camp. In his essay ‘La peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon’ (1945–1946), Beckett is not very sympathetic towards Lessing: ‘Ou alors on fait de l’esthetique générale, come Lessing. C’est un jeu charmant [Or we just deal with general aesthetics, like Lessing. It’s a charming game]’ (Dis, 118). Cf. also Dirk Van Hulle’s discussion of this passage in connection with Joyce’s work in his essay ‘ “Nichtsnichtsundnichts”: Beckett’s and Joyce’s Transtextual Undoings’ (2004), which also insightfully discusses the Beethoven pauses in Dream and the Kaun letter. It is interesting to note that Beckett’s vocabulary in the Kaun letter has romantic or heroic overtones (‘fürchterlich’, ‘zerreissen’, ‘schwindelnden unergründliche Schlünde’) in order to emphasise the importance of the task, there being no ‘higher goal for the writer today’ (Dis, 52–3; trans. 171). Note how the bracket here acts like a transparent veil, hiding yet revealing Beckett’s emphasis on the Nichts. The concept is also similar to the one Beckett transcribed from Mauthner, probably in the summer of 1938: ‘Die Sprachkritik allein kann diese Pforten aufschliessen und mit lächelnder Resignation zeigen, dass sie aus der Welt und dem Denken hinaus ins Leere führen’ [The critique of language alone can unlock these gates and show with friendly resignation that leads from the world and thought into the void]’ (TCD MS10971/5, 3). Cf. also entry 642 in Notebook A of George Berkeley’s ‘Philosophical Commentaries’:

Notes

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

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‘the chief thing I do or pretend to do is onely to remove the mist or veil of Words. This has occasion’d Ignorance & confusion’ (1975, 313). I am grateful to Matthew Feldman for his help in locating references to the Veil of Maya in Schopenhauer. See also Feldman 2009, 192–5 for a discussion of this issue. Cf. Beckett’s comment to MacGreevy that the ‘chapter in Will & Representation on music is amusing’ (SB to TM, 25 August 1930). As so often with Beckett, a small reference throws a long shadow. The reference to the ‘holder Wahnsinn’ derives, as Schopenhauer acknowledges, from Wieland’s introduction to Oberon. When Beckett copied out details from Robertson’s History of German Literature, transcribing biographical details and major works of a whole range of writers, he put a small cross beside Wieland’s Oberon (and his Die Abderiten); TCD MS10971/1, 23v. There is, however, no evidence that Beckett proceeded to read Wieland. Beckett for example transcribed Mauthner’s reference to the veil of Maya in his discussion of how reality is distorted through the metaphorical use of language (TCD MS10971/1, 1). In the figure of Johnson, Beckett found a kindred spirit who was also aware of the ‘phantoms of hope’; cf. The History of Rasselas (1985, 39). And, as the ‘Addenda’ to Watt notes, there are ‘limits to part’s equality with whole’ (247). Cf. also Krapp’s version of the Beckettian ‘vision’: ‘suddenly I saw the whole thing’ (CDW, 220). Cf. Renard’s journal entry in July 1907: ‘A man who would have an absolutely clear vision of the void would kill himself immediately’ (Renard 1964, 215). Cf. Schopenhauer: ‘yet the illusion of the phenomenon soon entangles us again, and its motives influence the will anew; we cannot tear ourselves free. The allurement of hope, the flattery of the present, the sweetness of pleasure, the well-being which falls to our lot, amid the lamentations of a suffering world governed by chance and error, draws us back to it and rivets our bonds anew’ (WWI, Book Four, §68, 490). For Molloy the veil also prohibits self-awareness. Cf. his meeting with the shepherd: ‘All that through a glittering dust, and soon through that mist too which rises in me every day and veils the world from me and veils me from myself’ (Mo, 29). The reading, it seems, was not reciprocal; Mann confesses to a friend in 1954 that his wife had lost a copy of Waiting for Godot on a train to Italy. My subsequent discussion of Beckett’s views on the relationship between writing and seeing is generally indebted to Pilling’s essay. Beckett refers to the ‘eyesuicide’ in a letter to MacGreevy of March 1931 (SB to TM, 11 March 1931). Cf. for example Dream, 123 and 224. For a more general discussion of Rimbaud and Beckett, see Love (2005). Beckett’s familiarity with Rimbaud’s letters can be deduced from an entry in the Dream notebook (item 1078, no source given) citing a phrase from a May 1873 letter to Ernest Delahage. Cf. also Wylie’s way of looking in Murphy (54), which was ‘as different from Murphy’s as a voyeur’s from a voyant’s’. Letter to Samuel Putnam, 28 June 1932. Cf. also point 5 of ‘The Revolution of the Word Proclamation’: ‘The expression of these concepts can be achieved only

220

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

Notes

through the rhythmic “hallucinations of the word” (Rimbaud)’, in transition 16/17 (1929). Mr Kelly in Murphy is longsighted, or, rather, ‘hypermetropic in the extreme’ (157), whereas Sam in Watt suffers from shortsightedness, or myopia (167). The ‘glare’ not only originates from the external world, but can also be the ‘inward glare’ of the ‘bureaucratic mind’ (Dream, 123), the ‘glare of understanding’ (44). Cf. also Molloy: ‘It is lying down, in the warmth, in the gloom, that I best pierce the outer turmoil’s veil’ (111). A point also made by Pilling in ‘Beckett and “the itch to make”: The Early Poems in English’ (2000, 21). The poem ‘Serena II’, a version of which was attached to the 4 November 1932 letter to MacGreevy rather despondently admits ‘it is useless to close the eyes’ to the ‘clonic earth’, with its ‘phantoms shuddering out of focus’ (SP, 27–28). Schopenhauer’s inauthentic world of phenomena manifests itself again. Letter to Cissie Sinclair, 14 August 1937. Cf. also ‘Text for Nothing V’, where there is a reference to ‘eyes staring behind the lids’ (TFN, 13). Similarly, having spent the evening reading Rilke’s Cornet, from which he transcribed the expression ‘Man hat zwei Augen zuviel [One has two eyes too many]’, and thinking about the Journal of a Melancholic, Beckett noted in his diary ‘crawl back digne & sightless’ (GD, 28 October 1936). This textual suicide also echoes Goethe’s reference to ‘abort[ing] a little conception at its birth’ in Dichtung und Wahrheit (TCD MS10971/1, 68r), and Beckett’s similar ‘is it not better abort than be barren’ in ‘Cascando’ (SP, 35). ‘Naturalistic and traditional novel seems like nature but is only surface’; Rachel Burrows lecture notes (TCD MIC60, 24r). Belacqua and the creative rodent seem to be conjoined several pages later as he ‘fidgeted by night in the dark room and the rats were with him, now he was one of them’ (Dream, 26). Rachel Burrows lecture notes, TCD MIC60, 19r. Beckett also detected in Stendhal the ‘incoherent entity’ of real and ideal, between which there could be no commerce: ‘They coexist in state of incoherence’, TCD MIC60, 50r. A theory presumably deriving from Dostoevsky, who ‘states his characters without explaining them’ (PTD, 87). Cf. also item 917 in the Dream notebook on Stendhal: ‘La profondeur, l’inconnu du caractère de Julien [the depth, the unknown of Julien’s character]’, and item 906: ‘La vie d’un homme était une suite de hasards. Maintenant la civilisation a chassé le hasard, plus d’imprévu. [A man’s life was a succession of hazards. Now that civilization has removed hazard, the unexpected is no more].’ (DN, items 917 and 906). The second quotation appears verbatim in a letter to MacGreevy of 16 September 1934. See also Beckett’s ‘Cézanne letters’, in which he discerns that the ‘animising mode’ was ‘all right’ for Ruysdael but not for Cézanne, having previously referred to the ‘ludicrous rationalisation of the itch to animise’ (SB to TM, 8 September 1934 and undated [16 September 1934]). Cf. Beckett’s description of history as a ‘fable convenue [accepted fable]’ in a letter to MacGreevy dated 31 January 1938. ‘dinegant vero conceptibus, cum doceant voci universali in mente non respondere conceptum universalem, sed collectionem individuorum voce designatorum’,

Notes

40

41

42 43

44 45

46

47

48 49

50

51 52 53

221

TCD MS10971/6, 37r. Beckett is quoting from R.P. Gredt’s Elementia philosophiae aristotelico-thomisticae, 2 vols., Freiburg i.B., 1909. Transcription and translation provided by Matthew Feldman. Nominalism further appealed to Beckett because, similar to Schopenhauer’s philosophy, it was not rigorously intellectual. Mauthner, for example, argued, as Beckett recorded in his Whoroscope notebook, that nominalism stood for ‘ein Gefühl, für die Stimmung des menschlichen Individuums gegenüber der Welt. . . . Der reine Nominalismus macht mit dem Denken ein Ende [a feeling, the mood of the human individual facing the world. . . . Pure nominalism puts an end to thinking]’ (WN, 48). Beckett in this essay similarly praised Joyce for avoiding ‘metaphysical generalisation’ (Dis, 29). In Murphy the corresponding movement is ‘from the general to the particular’ (Mu, 37), a line that (as Chris Ackerley points out) derives from Schopenhauer (1997, 60). Letter to Alan Schneider, 29 December 1957 (Harmon 1998, 24). Thus Beckett commended Alan Schneider for his production of Waiting for Godot because he ‘succeeded better than any one else in stating its true nature’, letter of 11 January 1956 (Harmon 1998, 8). Rachel Burrows lecture notes, TCD MIC60, 18r and 42r. See also Beckett’s reference to Chapter Six of Murphy as Murphy’s ‘short statement of his mind’s fantasy of itself’ (SB to TM, 17 July [1936]), itself in turn an anticipation of Arsene’s ‘short statement’ in Watt (37). Beckett was undoubtedly gratified to read MacGreevy’s comment in his review ‘New Dublin Poetry’ published in Ireland To-day: ‘Mr Beckett gathers all his forces into single precise statements’ (1937, 81–2). In the Schiller production notebook for Krapp’s Last Tape Beckett also noted: ‘Attention excès de stylisation!’ (81). Quoted by Pilling (2005, 56), citing the Harvey notes at Dartmouth College based on conversations with Beckett in 1962. Rachel Burrows lecture notes, TCD MIC60, 53r. Beckett had copied these three propositions, from Gorgias’s On Nature, or the NonExistent, into his philosophy notebook (TCD MS10967, 24r). Beckett contrasted his method with that of Joyce in the composite interview given by Israel Shenker: ‘The more Joyce knew the more he could. His tendency is toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance’ (Federman and Graver 1979, 148). John Gruen in a 1969 Vogue article similarly recorded Beckett saying, ‘If my work has any meaning at all, it is due more to ignorance, inability and intuitive despair than to any individual strength’ (210). Rachel Burrows lecture notes, TCD MIC60, 16r. Rachel Burrows lecture notes, TCD MIC60, 21r and 24v. As Pilling aptly remarks, ‘for an attempt at something “more genuine and direct” than Proust . . . , Dream is oddly dependent on Beckett’s reading’ (2004a, 9). Beckett could always console himself with the knowledge that parts of A la recherche du temps perdu were ‘offensively fastidious, artificial and almost dishonest’ (SB to TM, undated [probably late June 1930]). Cf. also Beckett’s distinction between ‘artificial Rom[antics] & Nat[uralists] [and] authentic complexity of Prenaturalists’; Rachel Burrows lecture notes (TCD MIC60, 3r).

222 54

55

Notes

Anticipating Beckett’s notes from Ernest Jones, where the treatment of neuroses is compared with the ‘draining’ of pus from cavities and abscesses (TCD MS10971/8, 11r). See also the ‘window opening on a refuge’ in Watt (38) and Beckett’s comment to Ethna MacCarthy during her final illness in a letter of 27 September 1958: ‘I suppose the best I have to do is to open for you my little window on my little world’. Beckett’s own monad was indeed not always ‘windowless’, as he variously referred to ‘looking out of the window at the old wordless world’ (letter to Pamela Mitchell, 30 June 1954).

Conclusion 1

2

3

4

5

6

For detailed discussions of the relationship between autobiographical and fictional narratives in the Trilogy, and the implications this has on questions of authorship, see Frank Matton, ‘Beckett’s Trilogy and the Limits of Autobiography’ (1996) and Peter Boxall’s ‘ “The Existence I Ascribe”: Memory, Invention, and Autobiography in Beckett’s Fiction’ (2000). But as Dream tells us, ‘nothing is less like me than me’ (77). Cf. the first words of the character A in an early version of Endgame: ‘Né en- -‘ (UoR MS1660). As Molloy acknowledges, these reminders, interruptions in the narrative, convey a diary-like immediacy: ‘My knees are enormous, I have just caught a glimpse of them. . . . Thus from time to time I shall recall my present existence [but] only from time to time, so that it may be said, if necessary, whenever necessary, Is it possible that thing is still alive? Or again, Oh it’s only a diary, it’ll soon be over’ (Mo, 61–2). The hidden allusion to Goethe’s ‘Prometheus’ and the lines ‘Hier sitz ich, forme Menschen / Nach meinem Bilde [Here I sit, forming men / In my image]’ is surely intentional. Cf. also the reference to Prometheus in The Unnamable (305), and Van Hulle’s discussion of the homunculus, the ‘creature’ and Prometheus in Beckett (2007). That the early ‘vice-existers’ belonged, despite their differences, to the same family of characters as the narrators of the Trilogy is illustrated by Beckett’s remark that there ‘are a good many degrees between him [Belacqua] and l’Innommable, but it’s the same engeance’ (letter to A. J. Leventhal, 21 April 1958). For an excellent discussion of Malone Dies as a diary novel, with respect to the ‘intercalated’ narrative, merging of times of narrative and narration and the device of the threatened manuscript, see H. Porter Abbott’s essay, ‘The harpooned notebook: Malone Dies and the convention of intercalated narrative’ (1983). Both Sartre in La Nausée (1938) and Max Frisch in Stiller (1954) use the diary to explore notions of identity and self-inspection. Beckett thought Sartre’s book, originally entitled Melancholia, ‘extraordinarily good’ (SB to TM, 26 May [1938]), undoubtedly remembering his own efforts at writing a ‘Journal of a Melancholic’, and recommended it to Pamela Mitchell in a letter dated 19 August 1954. There are striking similarities between Malone Dies and Frisch’s diary novel, Stiller: both Malone and Stiller are given paper in order to write the truth about their life, and

Notes

7

8

9

10

11

223

both invent stories in order to stop speaking about themselves (see Nixon 2010b). Letter to Aidan Higgins, 7 August 1958. This comment is anticipated in a German diary entry: ‘To be really wortkarg [taciturn] one must know every Wort [word]’ (GD, 24 October 1936). This is dramatised in Waiting for Godot, as ‘Estragon is inert and Vladimir restless. . . . The latter should always be on the fidget, the former tending back to his state of rest’, letter to Alan Schneider, 27 December 1955 (Harmon 1998, 6). Cf. Beckett’s question to MacGreevy: ‘Was it then another journey from, like so many?’ (SB to TM, 9 October 1936) and his response to Juliet’s question whether he had worked during his holiday in Morocco in 1973: ‘No. It was more of an escape than a pursuit’ (Juliet 1995, 145). As Beckett told MacGreevy: ‘Perhaps it is Dr Johnson’s dream of happiness, driving rapidly to & from nowhere, in a portchaise with a pretty woman’ (SB to TM, 26 April 1937). Cf. also Johnson’s comment in a letter of 27 August 1775 to Boswell that ‘I was . . . weary of being at home, and weary of being abroad. Is not this the state of life’ (Johnson 1992, 265). Letter to Simone de Beauvoir on the occasion of Les Temps modernes only publishing the first half of La Fin, entitled ‘Suite’, but not the second half ‘Fin’: ‘Vous immobilisez une existence au seuil de sa solution’ (qtd. in Pilling 1997, 214).

Bibliography

Samuel Beckett – Publications Beckett, Samuel, Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still, ed. by Dirk Van Hulle. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. —The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber & Faber, 1986. —Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. by Ruby Cohn. London: John Calder, 1983. —Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1992. —Eleutheria, London: Faber & Faber, 1996. —The Expelled / The Calmative / The End & First Love, ed. by Christopher Ricks. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. —How it is, ed. by Magessa O’Reilly. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. —Krapp’s Last Tape, in: The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Vol. III, ed. by James Knowlson. London: Faber & Faber, 1992. —Malone Dies, ed. by Peter Boxall. London: Faber & Faber, 2010. —Mercier and Camier, ed. by Sean Kennedy. London: Faber & Faber, 2010. —Molloy, ed. by Shane Weller. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. —More Pricks than Kicks, ed. by Cassandra Nelson. London: Faber & Faber, 2010. —Murphy, ed. by J.C.C. Mays. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. —Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: John Calder, 1965. —Selected Poems, 1930-1989, ed. by David Wheatley. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. —Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose 1950-1976, ed. by Mark Nixon. London: Faber & Faber, 2010. —The Unnamable, ed. by Steven Connor. London: Faber & Faber, 2010. —Waiting for Godot, in: The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I, ed. by James Knowlson and Dougald McMillan. London: Faber & Faber, 1993. —Watt, ed. by Chris Ackerley. London: Faber & Faber, 2009.

Samuel Beckett – Archival Material All unpublished archival material © The Estate of Samuel Beckett, c/o Rosica Colin, London. —‘Clare Street’ notebook, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UoR MS5003.

Bibliography

225

—‘Echo’s Bones’ [typescript], Baker Library, Dartmouth College. Photocopy consulted at Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Leventhal Collection. —‘German Diaries’ [6 notebooks], Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading. —German Vocabulary notebooks, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UoR MS5002 and MS5006. —Human Wishes [3 notebooks], Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UoR MS3461/1–3. —‘Lightning Calculation’ [typescript], Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UoR MS2902. —Faust notebooks, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UoR MS5004 and MS5005. —Notes from Samuel Beckett’s lectures, Trinity College Dublin, taken by Rachel Dobbin [Burrows], Trinity College Library Dublin, MIC60. —Notes from Samuel Beckett’s lectures, Trinity College Dublin, taken by Leslie Daiken, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading. —Notes on Italian Literature, Trinity College Dublin, MS10965. —Notes on Philosophy, Trinity College Dublin, MS10967. —Notes on St. Augustine, Trinity College Dublin, MS10968. —Notes on English Literary History, Trinity College Dublin, MS10970. —Notes on German Literature, Trinity College Dublin, MS10971/1. —Notes on the ‘Trueborn Jackeen’ and ‘Cow’, Trinity College Dublin, MS10971/2. —Notes on the ‘University Wits’, Trinity College Dublin, MS10971/3. —Notes on Fritz Mauthner, Trinity College Dublin, MS10971/5. —Notes on Geulincx, Trinity College Dublin, MS10971/6. —Notes on Psychology, Trinity College Dublin, MS10971/7–8. —Notes on the Visual Arts (Wilenski), Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UoR MS5001. —‘Sam Francis’ notebook, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UoR MS2926. —‘Sottisier’ notebook, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UoR MS2901. —Typescript of Leopardi’s ‘A se stesso’, Trinity College Dublin, MS10971/9. —Watt notebooks, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. —Whoroscope notebook, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UoR MS3000.

Samuel Beckett – Correspondence —Letters to Günter Albrecht, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading. —Letters to Kay Boyle, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. —Letters to Ruby Cohn, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading.

226

Bibliography

—Letters to Jocelyn Herbert, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading. —Letters to Aidan Higgins, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. —Letters to Mary Hutchinson, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. —Letters to A. J. Leventhal, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. —Letters to Ethna MacCarthy, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. —Letters to Thomas MacGreevy, Trinity College Library Dublin, MS10402. —Letters to Mary Manning Howe, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. —Letters to Susan Manning, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. —Letters to Pamela Mitchell, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading. —Letters to Charles Prentice, UoR MS2444, Chatto & Windus Archive [C&W 24/9], University of Reading. —Letters to Samuel Putnam, Princeton University Library. —Letters to George Reavey, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. —Letter to Cissie Sinclair, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading. —Letters to Arland Ussher, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Other Archival Material Reavey, George, [diary pages], Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Works About Beckett Abbott, H. Porter (1983), ‘The harpooned notebook: Malone Dies and the convention of intercalated narrative’, in: Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, eds Pierre Astier, Morris Beja, and S. E. Gontarski. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 71–9. —(1996), Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —(2004), ‘Narrative’, in: Palgrave Advances in Beckett Studies, ed. Lois Oppenheim. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 7–29. Ackerley, Chris (1993), ‘Fatigue and Disgust: The Addenda to Watt,’ in: Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui 2, ‘Beckett in the 1990s’, eds Marius Buning and Lois Oppenheim. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 175–88.

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—(1997/98), ‘Demented Particulars: the annotated Murphy’, in: Journal of Beckett Studies n.s. 7.1 & 2. —(2000), ‘Samuel Beckett and Thomas à Kempis: The Roots of Quietism’, in: Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui 9, ‘Beckett and Religion / Beckett/Aesthetics/ Politics, eds Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts and Onno Kosters. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 81–92. Admussen, Richard (1979), The Samuel Beckett Manuscripts: A Study. Boston: G. K. Hall. Albrecht, Klaus (2004), ‘Günter Albrecht – Samuel Beckett – Axel Kaun’, in: Journal of Beckett Studies 13.2, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (Spring), 24–38. Atik, Anne (2001), How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett. London: Faber & Faber. Bair, Deirdre (1978), Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape. Barry, Elizabeth (2009), ‘Beckett, Augustine, and the Rhetoric of Dying’, in: Beckett and Death, eds Steven Barfield, Matthew Feldman and Philip Tew. London: Continuum, pp. 72–88. Baker, Phil (1997), Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Beer, Ann (1985), ‘Watt, Knott and Beckett’s bilingualism’, in: Journal of Beckett Studies 10, 37–75. Bolin, John (2007), ‘The “Irrational Heart”: Romantic Disillusionment in Murphy and the Sorrows of Young Werther’, in: Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui 18, ‘Beckett and Romanticism’, eds Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, pp. 101–16. Bowles, Patrick (1994), ‘How to Fail: Notes on Talks with Samuel Beckett’, in: PN Review 96, 20.4 (March–April), 24–38. Bryden, Mary (1998), Beckett and the Idea of God. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bryden, Mary, Julian Garforth and Peter Mills (eds) (1998), Beckett at Reading: catalogue of the Beckett manuscript collection at The University of Reading. Reading: Whiteknights Press/ Beckett International Foundation. Cohn, Ruby (1980), Just Play: Beckett’s Theater. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —(2001), A Beckett Canon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Coughlan, Patricia (1995), ‘ “The Poetry is Another Pair of Sleeves”: Beckett, Ireland and Modernist Lyric Poetry’, in: Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s, eds Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis. Cork: Cork University Press, pp. 173–208. Davies, Paul (2000), Beckett and Eros – Death of Humanism. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Dittrich, Lutz, Carola Veit and Ernest Wichner (eds) (2006), Obergeschoss still closed – Samuel Beckett in Berlin; Texte aus dem Literaturhaus Berlin, Band 16. Berlin: Verlag Matthes & Seitz. Doherty, Francis (1992), ‘Mahaffy’s Whoroscope’, in: Journal of Beckett Studies n.s. 2.1 (Autumn), 27–46. Duffy, Brian (1996), ‘Malone meurt: The Comfort of Narrative’, in: Journal of Beckett Studies n.s. 6.1 (Autumn), 25–47. Esslin, Martin (1992), ‘Patterns of Rejection: Sex and Love in Beckett’s Universe’, in: Women in Beckett, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Federman, Raymond (1965), Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Federman, Raymond, and Lawrence Graver (eds) (1979), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. London, Henley and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Feldman, Matthew (2004), ‘Sourcing Aporetics: An Empirical Study on Philosophical Influences in the Development of Samuel Beckett’s Writings’, PhD thesis, Oxford Brookes University. —(2005), ‘Beckett’s “Poss” and the Dog’s Dinner: An Empirical Survey of the 1930s Psychology and Philosophy Notes’, Journal of Beckett Studies 13.2 (Spring), 69–94. —(2006), Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’. London: Continuum. —(2008), ‘ “A suitable engine of destruction”? Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx’s Ethics’, in: Beckett and Ethics, ed. Russell Smith. London: Continuum Publishers, pp. 38–56. —(2009a), ‘ “Agnostic Quietism” and Samuel Beckett’s Early Development’, in: Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive, eds Seán Kennedy and Katherine Weiss. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 183–99. Fletcher, John (1964), The Novels of Samuel Beckett. London: Chatto & Windus. Fries-Dieckmann, Marion (2007), Samuel Beckett und die deutsche Sprache: eine Untersuchung der deutschen Übersetzungen des dramatischen Werks. Trier: , Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Frost, Everett C. (2006), ‘‘Catalogue of Notes Diverse Holo[graph]’, in: Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui 16, ‘Notes diverse holo’, eds Matthijs Engelberts and Everett Frost, with Jane Maxwell, pp. 19–173. Giesing, Michaela, Gaby Hartel and Carola Veit (eds) (2007), Das Raubauge in der Stadt: Beckett liest Hamburg. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Gontarski, S. E. (1985), The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —(ed.) (1993), The Beckett Studies Reader, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Gunn, Dan (2006), ‘ “Until the gag is chewed”: Samuel Beckett’s letters – eloquence and “near speechlessness” ’, in: Times Literary Supplement (21 April). Harvey, Lawrence E. (1970), Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Harmon, Maurice (ed.) (1998), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hayman, David (2004), ‘Beckett’s Watt: the Art Historical Trace’, in: Journal of Beckett Studies 13.2, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (Spring), 95–109. Haynes, John, and James Knowlson (2003), Images of Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herren, Graley (2002), ‘Nacht und Träume as Beckett’s Agony in the Garden’, in: Journal of Beckett Studies, n.s. 11.1, 54–70. Hüneke, Andreas (2006), ‘ “The campaign against Art-Bolshevism is only just beginning”: Die kunstpolitische Situation in Deutschland 1936/37’, in: Obergeschoss still closed – Samuel Beckett in Berlin. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, pp. 83–94. Hunkeler, Thomas (2000), ‘ “Cascando” de Samuel Beckett’, in: Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui 8, ‘Poetry and other Prose/Poésies et autres proses’, eds Matthijs Engelberts, Marius Buning and Sjef Houppermans. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 27–42.

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—(2002), ‘Un cas d’hyperthermie littéraire: Samuel Beckett face à ses “juveniles expériences allemande” ’, in: Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui 10, ‘L’affect dans l’œuvre Beckettienne’, eds Matthijs Engelberts, Sjef Houppermans, Yann Mével and Michèle Touret. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 213–22. Juliet, Charles (1995), Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, trans. Janey Tucker. Leiden: Academic Press Leiden. Kaspar, Frank (2007), ‘Beckett is listening. Herbst 1936: Hamburger O-Töne und frühe Radiowahrnehmung’, in: Das Raubauge in der Stadt: Beckett liest Hamburg, eds Michaela Giesing, Gaby Hartel and Carola Veit. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, pp. 60–78. Kelly, Lionel (1992), ‘Beckett’s Human Wishes’, in: The Ideal Core of the Onion: reading Beckett Archives, eds John Pilling and Mary Bryden. Reading: Beckett International Foundation, pp. 21–44. Kennedy, Seán, and Katherine Weiss, (eds) (2009), Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kenner, Hugh (1973), A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Knowlson, James (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury. —(2002), ‘Beckett in the Musée Condé 1934’, in: Journal of Beckett Studies, n.s. 11.1, 73–83. —(2005), ‘Beckett in Kassel: Erste Begegnungen mit dem deutschen Expressionismus’, in: Der unbekannte Beckett. Samuel Beckett und die deutsche Kultur, eds Therese Fischer-Seidel and Marion Fries-Dieckmann. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 2005, pp. 64–94. —(2008), ‘Beckett the Tourist: Bamberg and Würzburg’, in: Beckett at 100: Revolving It All, eds Linda Ben-Zvi and Angela Moorjani. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 21–34. —(2009), ‘Beckett and Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Art’, in: Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui 21, ‘Where Never Before; Beckett’s Poetics of Elsewhere / La poétique de l’ailleurs’, eds Sjef Houppermans, Angela Moorjani, Danièle de Ruyter, Matthijs Engelberts, Dirk Van Hulle. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 27–44. Labrusse, Rémi (1990), ‘Beckett et la peinture: Le témoignage d’une correspondance inédite’, in: Critique 519–20 (August–September), 670–80. Lawley, Paul (1997), ‘Samuel Beckett’s Relations’, in: Journal of Beckett Studies, n.s. 6.2, 1–61. Lawlor, Seán (2008), ‘Making a Noise to Drown an Echo: Allusion and Quotation in the Early Poems of Samuel Beckett’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Reading. —(2009), ‘ “O Death Where Is Thy Sting?” Finding Words for the Big Ideas’, in: Beckett and Death, eds Steven Barfield, Matthew Feldman and Philip Tew. London: Continuum, pp. 50–71. Love, Damian (2005), ‘Doing Him into the Eye: Samuel Beckett’s Rimbaud’, in: Modern Language Quarterly 66.4 (December), 477–503. Löwe, N. F. (1999), ‘Sam’s Love for Sam: Samuel Beckett, Dr. Johnson and Human Wishes’, in: Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui 8, ‘Poetry and other Prose/Poésies

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Index Numbers in italics refer to illustrations

Abbott, H. Porter 190, 198n. 16, 218n. 6, 222n. 5 Ackerley, Chris 55, 100 Adler, Alfred 40 Albrecht, Günter 50, 52, 89, 90, 95, 137, 185, 194n. 6, 205n. 45, 206n. 8, 214n. 18 Alverdes, Paul 91, 92–3, 209n. 3, 209n. 4 Anton, Karl 86 Antonello da Messina 146, 146–7 Arikha, Avigdor 37 Ariosto, Ludovico 106, 124, 126 Aristotle 44, 105 Asher, Claudia 87 Atik, Anne 79, 210n. 18 Aubarède, Gabriel d’ 182, 187, 192 Augustine, St 13, 48 autobiography 13, 21–2 Bacon, Francis 27 Baker, Phil 42, 197n. 2, 201n. 51 Ballmer, Karl 138, 144, 154–7, 156, 172 Balzac, Honoré de 182 Bargheer, Eduard 144 Barlach, Ernst 138, 141 Barthes, Roland 197n. 15 Baudelaire, Charles 101 Bauer, Felice 50 Bauer, Walter 73, 95, 97, 117 Beauvoir, Simone de 48 Beckett, Edward 2, 214n. 26 Beckett, Maria ‘May’ (mother) 7, 38, 39, 45, 99, 113, 153 Beckett, Samuel Barclay and artistic incompetence 2, 82, 143, 177, 181

and censorship, see censorship in Germany, censorship in Ireland and the German language 9–10, 16, 19, 60–1, 68, 71, 99 and irrationality 2, 177 and the melancholic tradition 9, 38, 42–4, 57–8, 128, 130, 143 and Nazism 6–7, 84–93, 134–8 and psychoanalysis 4, 7, 16, 38–42, 45–7, 58–9, 97 and quietism 51–6, 58, 74–6, 170–2 and sculpture 148–52 and the visual arts 2, 119, 132–61 Beckett, Samuel Barclay – Works Plays Eh Joe 151 Eleutheria 42, 211n. 25 Endgame 34, 108, 116, 179, 202n. 14, 209n. 13, 222n. 2 Human Wishes 42, 57, 105, 107, 118, 125–31, 186, 201n. 49, 211n. 36, 212n. 39 Krapp’s Last Tape 10, 28, 36, 124, 128, 194n. 7, 219n. 18, 221n. 46 Ohio Impromptu 151 Quad 80 Waiting for Godot 42, 116, 117, 142, 148, 201n. 50, 221n. 43, 223n. 8 Poetry ‘Alba’ 179, 184 ‘Cascando’ 46, 72, 106, 107, 110–12, 114, 118, 185, 199n. 21, 208n. 3, 210n. 16, 220n. 32 ‘Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin’ 101, 185, 189, 212n. 3 ‘C’n’est au Pélican’ 175

240

Index

Poetry (Cont’d) ‘Da tagte es’ 48, 63, 67, 110, 202n. 9 ‘Dieppe’ 81 ‘Dortmunder’ 14, 184, 203n. 17 Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates 14, 63, 67, 158, 197n. 15, 200n. 46, 203n. 20 ‘Enueg II’ 197n. 3 ‘For Future Reference’ 198n. 15, 210n. 18 ‘Gnome’ 67, 202n. 9 ‘Moly’ (‘Yoke of Liberty’) 184 ‘musique de l’indifférence’ 117 ‘Sanies I’ 15, 194n. 4 ‘Sanies II’ 116 ‘Serena I’ 116, 174, 180 ‘Serena II’ 195n. 4, 220n. 29 ‘Spring Song’ 203n. 17 ‘The Vulture’ 67, 156, 203n. 20 ‘Whoroscope’ 5, 21, 101 Prose All Strange Away 108 ‘Assumption’ 101 ‘Calmative, The’ 48, 188, 199n. 28, 202n. 12, 209n. 10 Company 30, 35 ‘Dante and the Lobster’ 215n. 27 ‘Ding-Dong’ 2, 44, 194n. 4, 197n. 15 Dream of Fair to Middling Women 4, 7, 8, 9–15, 17, 18, 23, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 44, 45, 48, 54, 58, 60, 65, 66, 69, 71, 75, 80, 94, 96, 100, 102–5, 106, 108, 114, 120, 122, 133, 134, 153, 154, 162, 163, 164–5, 173, 174, 175–7, 179–80, 182, 183, 184, 186, 188, 192, 194n. 4, 195n. 8, 195n. 9, 195n. 12, 195n. 14, 195n. 15, 195n. 18, 196n. 4, 197n. 3, 198n. 15, 202n. 7, 203n. 17, 204n. 35, 207n. 2, 208n. 5, 208n. 1, 209n. 9, 210n. 17, 211n. 26, 213n. 6, 214n. 23, 216n. 37, 216n. 44, 217n. 50, 218n. 7, 218n. 11, 219n. 23, 220n. 27, 220n. 34, 222n. 53, 222n. 2

‘Echo’s Bones’ 7, 64, 67, 108, 126, 173, 174, 180, 195n. 15, 196n. 2, 196n. 5, 207n. 3, 209n. 9, 210n. 17 ‘End, The’ 123 Enough 116, 163 ‘Expelled, The’ 209n. 10 ‘Fingal’ 196n. 4 ‘First Love’ 61, 115 ‘For to end yet again’ 34 From an Abandoned Work 34, 175 How It Is 19, 129, 190, 209n. 13 Ill Seen Ill Said 216n. 36 Malone Dies 1, 5, 24, 29, 34, 36, 79, 96, 108, 122, 124, 142, 188–90, 192, 204n. 37, 211n. 25, 215n. 26, 222n. 5, 223n. 6 Mercier and Camier 6, 118, 187, 201n. 48 Molloy 3–4, 27, 57, 97, 100, 109, 118, 142, 183, 188, 198n. 15, 200n. 38, 201n. 51, 204n. 28, 219n. 21, 220n. 27, 222n. 3 More Pricks Than Kicks 15, 37, 89, 130, 133 Murphy 2, 3, 7, 16, 23, 24, 31, 34, 35, 36, 39–40, 45, 55–6, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 104–6, 110, 114, 115, 126, 129, 141, 148, 158–60, 162, 166, 167, 177, 178, 180, 182, 185, 187, 189, 191, 197n. 3, 198n. 6, 199n. 20, 199n. 23, 200n. 41, 200n. 47, 201n. 48, 202n. 14, 211n. 27, 211n. 32, 215n. 27, 218n. 3, 220n. 24, 220n. 26, 221n. 41, 221n. 45 ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’ 50, 74, 203n. 15 ‘Smeraldina’s Billet-Doux, The’ 10 Stirrings Still 203n. 12 Texts for Nothing 17 Unnamable, The 118, 188, 189, 192, 199n. 34, 222n. 4 Watt 31, 32, 33, 35, 48, 53, 67, 72, 79, 81, 82, 83, 88, 96, 100, 110, 116, 119, 130–1, 160–1, 162, 164, 178,

Index 187, 190, 194n. 4, 198n. 10, 200n. 36, 203n. 18, 203n. 22, 208n. 8, 213n. 6, 217n. 54, 219n. 18, 220n. 26, 221n. 45, 222n. 55 ‘Yellow’ 103, 115, 194n. 15 Other Works ‘An Imaginative Work!’ [review of Jack B. Yeats’s The Amaranthers] 122, 185 ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’ 89 ‘Concentrisme, Le’ 23–4 ‘Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’ 10, 101, 162, 163, 179 ‘Denis Devlin’s Intercessions’ 50, 73, 81, 107, 182, 210n. 14, 215n. 30 ‘For Avigdor Arikha’ 1, 37 ‘Humanistic Quietism’ [review of Thomas MacGreevy’s Poems] 55, 64, 116 ‘Letter to Axel Kaun’ 66, 70, 82, 98–9, 111, 122, 123, 165, 167, 170, 172, 178, 203n. 18, 218n. 7, 218n. 11, 218n. 12 ‘MacGreevy on Yeats’ 218n. 1 ‘Peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon, La’ 122, 135, 145, 155, 157, 215n. 29, 218n. 10 ‘Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke’ 23, 120, 176 Proust 9, 20, 23, 29, 31, 34, 40, 43, 47, 53–4, 60, 102, 143, 163, 168–70, 175, 177, 179, 183, 184, 186, 199n. 26, 207n. 1, 217n. 50 ‘Proust in Pieces’ [review] 55 ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ 50, 64, 69, 95, 154, 164 ‘Schwabenstreich’ [review of Eduard Mörike’s Mozart on the Way to Prague] 64 Unpublished Material ‘Clare Street’ notebook 19, 46–7, 74, 106, 126, 129, 169–72, 208n. 3 Dream notebook 21, 24, 56, 80, 83, 100, 104, 113, 183, 184, 194n. 4, 195n. 11, 195n. 12, 196n. 4,

241

199n. 19, 199n. 31, 203n. 17, 207n. 2, 207n. 4, 208n. 5, 209n. 6, 209n. 9, 218n. 7, 220n. 24, 220n. 36 ‘Journal of a Melancholic’ 2, 4, 119, 121–5, 127, 130, 143, 160, 167, 181, 192, 220n. 31, 223n. 6 ‘Lightning Calculation’ 158–9, 199n. 23, 200n. 41 Sottisier notebook 54, 201n. 3, 208n. 10 ‘Trueborn Jackeen’ 196n. 2 Whoroscope notebook 19, 40, 48, 55, 61, 71, 72, 77, 78, 94, 96, 97, 104, 105, 106, 108, 116, 163, 183, 196n. 3, 198n. 6, 199n. 19, 199n. 34, 201n. 4, 202n. 14, 204n. 26, 205n. 38, 205n. 40, 206n. 2, 206n. 7, 208n. 9, 208n. 12, 211n. 27, 214n. 24, 215n. 29, 221n. 40 Beckett, William ‘Bill’ (father) 38, 42–4, 53, 61, 63, 123, 153 Beckmann, Max 139, 141 Beer, Ann 187 Beethoven, Ludwig van 73, 165–6, 179, 218n. 11 Benjamin, Walter 92 Benstock, Bernard 21 Biely, Andrey 162 Bienert, Ida 86, 140 Bion, Wilfred 38–9, 40, 44–6, 51 Bloch, Ernst 84 Blunck, Hans Friedrich 90 Böcklin, Arnold 153 Boener, Peter 31 Bonaparte, Napoleon 21, 113 Bookman, The (journal) 64 Bosch, Hieronymous 134, 145 Boswell, James 127, 191 Botticelli, Sandro 153 Bouts, Dierick (the Elder) 145 Bowles, Patrick 82 Brecht, Bertolt 90 Breton, André 42 Bright, Timothie 58 Britting, Georg 95

242

Index

Brod, Max 31 Brouwer, Adriaen 143, 154 Brueghel, Pieter van (the Elder) 152 Brueghel, Pieter van (the Younger) 142 Burrows, Rachel 23, 182 Burton, Robert 40, 44, 57, 102, 127 Campendonk, Heinrich 158 Carducci, Giosuè 2, 54, 101–2 Carossa, Hans 91, 93–5 Cecil, David 20 Celan, Paul 1–2 censorship in Germany 62, 84, 88–90, 135–6, 138–9, 141 censorship in Ireland 89 Cézanne, Paul 154, 155, 157–9, 164, 182 Chatto & Windus (publishers) 23, 34, 102, 133, 184, 207n. 1 Claparède, Edouard 41–2 Claudius, Matthias 79 Coffey, Brian 41, 163 Cohn, Ruby 49, 80, 130, 192, 211n. 38 Corneille, Pierre 182 Cowper, William 20, 127 Cranach, Lucas 143, 147 Cuyp, Aelbert 158–9 Dali, Salvador 28 Dante Alighieri 74, 105, 107, 174 ‘decadent’ art 88, 135 Defoe, Daniel 180 Dekker, Thomas 104 diary writing 20, 22–36, 122, 190 Döblin, Alfred 22, 88 Doherty, Francis 21 Dossi, Dosso 123–4 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 34, 175, 220n. 36 Driver, Tom 181 Dublin Magazine The 67, 122 Dürer, Albrecht 14, 134, 147–8, 215n. 34 Durrieu, Margaritha 87–8, 138 Duthuit, Georges 132, 147 Eggers-Kestner, Kurt 141, 166–7, 218n. 9 Eisenstein, Sergei 86 Eliot, T. S. 37, 107, 184

Elsheimer, Adam 124, 133, 143, 159, 160–1 Eluard, Paul 165 Ende, Edgar 166 Esslin, Martin 201n. 3, 218n. 7 European Caravan, The 101, 184 expressionism 135, 136, 138–41 Feldman, Matthew 39, 199n. 31, 200n. 42, 208n. 6, 219n. 14 Feininger, Lionel 137 Fera, Helene 88, 138 Fielding, Henry 23, 34 Fontane, Theodor 10, 48, 194n. 6 Franke, Günther 139 Freud, Sigmund 12, 13, 16, 40, 41, 42–3, 44, 47, 198n. 12, 201n. 51 Friedrich, Kaspar David 142, 160–1, 190 Garnier, Paul 184 George, Stefan 91 Geulincx, Arnold 55–6, 105–6, 115, 144, 170, 200n. 42, 200n. 43, 201n. 48, 204n. 34 Giacometti, Alberto 159 Gide, André 20, 22, 23, 28, 29, 30, 31, 39, 49, 103, 108, 176, 179, 182, 196n. 5 Giorgione 143–4, 144 Goebbels, Joseph 86, 87, 89, 93, 135, 137, 141, 206n. 4 Goering, Hermann 85 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 21, 25, 60, 61, 62, 65–74, 76–7, 79–82, 93, 94, 105, 106, 109, 110–11, 144, 167, 185, 196n. 10, 201n. 1, 203n. 17, 203n. 20, 204n. 30, 204n. 31, 205n. 40, 207n. 4, 217n. 52, 220n. 32, 222n. 4 Dichtung und Wahrheit 21, 68–71, 76–7, 105, 110–11, 167, 204n. 31, 205n. 40 Faust 65, 66, 68, 71–5, 79, 80, 82, 97, 105, 106, 109, 112, 185, 202n. 7, 215n. 29 Wahlverwandschaften, Die 69, 93, 201n. 1, 203n. 22

Index Gogh, Vincent van 148 Gombrowicz, Witold 29 Gorgias of Leontini 181 Goyen, Jan van 142, 143, 159 Gredt, R. P. 115 Griese, Friedrich 90 Grillparzer, Franz 60, 74–6, 144 Grimm, Hans 90–1 Grimm, Willem 138, 144, 154, 210n. 22, 211n. 29 Grohmann, Will 48, 52, 139–40, 166 Grünewald, Matthias 148 Harvey, Lawrence 102 Hassam, Andrew 25 Hearn, Lafcadio 99 Hebbel, Friedrich 53, 78, 126 Heidegger, Martin 155 Heine, Heinrich 79 Heinemann, Karl 62 Heraclitus 115 Hesse, Hermann 95–6 Heyse, Hans 90 Higgins, Aidan 191 Hitler, Adolf 7, 85, 87, 88, 92, 206n. 4, 206n. 6, 213n. 15 Hobbema, Meindert 158–9 Hölderlin, Friedrich 60, 79–83, 92, 215n. 30 Homer 14, 102, 174 Howe, Mary Manning 8, 21, 95, 125, 127, 152, 185, 191 Hudtwalcker, Heinrich C. 140 Huizinga, Johan 202n. 4 Hulle, Dirk Van 72–3, 218n. 11, 222n. 4 Hunkeler, Thomas 9, 10–11, 112 Innere Reich, Das (journal) 92–3 Irish Censorship Act 89 Isherwood, Christopher 85 Johnson, Samuel 21, 28, 35, 42, 46, 57, 76, 105, 106, 107, 125–31, 169, 171, 191, 196n. 10, 219n. 18, 223n. 10 Jolas, Eugene 50

243

Jones, Ernest 41, 58, 197n. 6, 198n. 12, 199n. 17, 222n. 54 journaux intimes 22, 26, 29 Joyce, James 10, 21–2, 34, 101, 103, 162, 163, 166–7, 173, 179, 181, 218n. 11, 221n. 50 Finnegans Wake [Work in Progress] 21, 167, 179 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 21–2, 34, 204n. 33 Ulysses 21, 166–7, 173 Joyce, Stanislaus 22 Juliet, Charles 82, 182–3 Jung, C. G. 40 Kafka, Franz 22, 30–31, 49–50, 58 Kandinsky, Wassily 135, 139 Kaufmann, Vincent 5 Kaun, Axel 52, 62, 66, 70, 82, 87, 89–90, 93, 98–9, 111, 120, 122, 123, 163, 165, 167, 170, 172, 177, 178, 206n. 8, 206n. 9, 214n. 21, 218n. 8 Keats, John 123, 142 Keller, Gottfried 78–9 Kelly, Lionel 128 Kempis, Thomas à 8, 30, 51, 53, 55–6, 58, 76, 97, 144, 170, 199n. 31 Kenner, Hugh 30 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 137, 139, 140 Klee, Paul 135, 137, 139, 166 Kluth, Karl 138, 219n. 9 Knowlson, James 3, 11, 38, 42, 45, 132, 133, 134, 141, 148, 181, 195n. 8, 202n. 7, 213n. 5, 214n. 5, 214n. 26 Kraft, Adam 14, 117, 119, 134, 151 Kristeva, Julia 44 Lacan, Jacques 42, 47 Lawlor, Seán 102, 202n. 9, 207n. 22, 212n. 3 Leibniz, Gottfried 116, 156, 162–3 Lejeune, Phillipe 28 Leopardi, Giacomo 54, 100 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 78, 166, 201n. 4

244

Index

Leventhal, A. J. 7, 41, 63, 171, 181 Liebermann, Max 137–8

Ohlsdorf cemetery (Hamburg) 112–15, 118, 119, 121, 180, 191

MacCarthy, Ethna 11, 15, 192, 222n. 55 MacGreevy, Thomas 2, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 26, 30, 34, 29, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 51, 52, 55–8, 64, 65, 67, 68, 71, 72, 74, 76, 88, 94, 96, 103, 110, 114, 116, 118, 120, 131, 132–3, 134, 138, 143, 145, 154, 157–9, 164, 174, 182, 183, 184, 191, 200n. 46, 221n. 45 McIntyre, J. Lewis 162 McNaughton, James 178 McQueeny, Terence 162 Maeterlinck, Maurice 5 Mahaffy, J. P. 21 Mahrholz, Werner 62 Mäleskircher, Gabriel 147 Malraux, André 56 Mann, Heinrich 90 Mann, Thomas 55, 84, 88, 90, 171–2 Mantegna, Andrea 146 Marc, Franz 135, 136–7, 164, 177 Marlowe, Christopher 104 Martens, Lorna 23 Mauthner, Fritz 70–1, 104, 187, 217n. 51, 219n. 13, 219n. 17, 221n. 40 Milton, John 44 Minotaure (journal) 41 Mitchell, Pamela 190 Modersohn-Becker, Paula 120, 163 Morungen, Heinrich von 63 Müller, Otto 140 Munch, Edvard 140–1, 142 Musil, Robert 22, 31 Musset, Alfred de 195n. 12

Petsch, Robert 71, 73, 215n. 29 Pferdmenges, Hans 91 Picasso, Pablo 166 Pilling, John 9, 12, 13, 71, 100, 104, 114, 159, 168, 173, 179, 195n. 11, 195n. 16, 195n. 17, 199n. 19, 199n. 31, 205n. 40, 207n. 2, 208n. 1, 209n. 10, 210n. 16, 211n. 26, 219n. 23, 220n. 28, 222n. 53 Piper, Reinhard 141 Plato 105 Praz, Mario 195n. 12 Prentice, Charles 34, 184, 194n. 1, 203n. 15 Proust, Marcel 21, 47, 53, 55, 91, 92, 102, 107, 168, 183, 204n. 32 Putnam, Samuel 173

Nazi cultural policies 84 Nazi Germany New Review, The (journal) 173 Nietzsche, Friedrich 199n. 9 Nolde, Emil 135, 137, 138, 140, 214n. 21 nominalism 70, 115, 122, 178, 221n. 40

Quadflieg, Roswitha 3, 206n. 5 Rabelais, François 105 Racine, Jean 39, 77–8, 101, 106, 141, 174, 179, 180, 182 Radden, Jennifer 44 Rank, Otto 40, 41, 42, 45, 205n. 40 Reavey, George 15, 24, 53, 59, 88, 130, 198n. 16 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn 30, 143, 153–4, 176 Renard, Jules 24, 25, 31, 107 Ricoeur, Paul 48 Riemenschneider, Tilman 119, 151 Rilke, Rainer Maria 22, 23, 36, 59, 84, 91, 97, 108, 119–21, 163, 176, 183, 190, 220n. 31 Rimbaud, Arthur 101, 118, 173–4, 175 Ringelnatz, Joachim 98–9 Roberti, Ercole dei’ 123 Robertson, J. G. 61–4, 68, 73, 74–6, 80, 82, 105, 219n. 16 Rosenberg, Alfred 137 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 21, 28, 29, 48, 52, 104, 211n. 36, 216n. 49

Index Rubens, Peter Paul 15, 143 Ruysdael, Jacob 138, 158 Sartre, Jean-Paul 36, 223n. 6 Sauerlandt, Max 136, 140, 155–6 Schapire, Rosa 114, 116, 139, 208n. 3, 214n. 18 Scherer, Wilhelm 62 Schiller, Friedrich 67, 72, 77, 126 Schmidt, Michael 20 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl 116, 137, 139, 144 Schneider, Alan 108, 179, 221n. 43 Schopenhauer, Arthur 9, 40, 53–4, 56, 60, 72, 94, 102, 107, 144, 168–70, 172, 173, 177, 186, 201n. 4, 205n. 40, 219n. 20, 220n. 29, 221n. 40, 221n. 41 Schubert, Franz 60–1, 64, 65, 67 Schumann, Gerhard 90–1 Schwitters, Kurt 135 Seghers, Hercules 159–61, 160 Sinclair, Frances ‘Cissie’ 15, 157, 175 Sinclair, Morris ‘Sonny’ 15, 39 Sinclair, Nancy 158 Sinclair, Peggy 8, 10–11, 14, 60, 195n. 17 Sinclair, William ‘Boss’ 6, 133, 216n. 38 Spinoza, Baruch 76, 163 Steiner, Rudolf 154–5 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 103, 114, 126, 208n. 5, 211n. 26, 220n. 35 Stephen, Karin 39, 40 Stepun, Fyodor 162 Stieve, Friedrich 62, 177 Stifter, Adalbert 205n. 44 Stockton, Elizabeth Farley 8, 110 Stoss, Veit 151 surrealism 39, 41, 135 Svevo, Italo 23 Swift, Jonathan 103 Thiel, Rudolf 92 This Quarter (journal) 39, 173

245

Thompson, Geoffrey 38, 46 Thrale, Hester 42, 57, 126–8 Tiedtke, Irma 92, 107, 208n. 7 Tieopolo, Giovanni Battista 5, 108, 190 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) 143, 153 Tonning, Erik 212n. 43, 216n. 46, 217n. 2 Trakl, Georg 98 transition / Transition (journal) 50, 73, 81 Trinity College Dublin 7, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24, 39, 61, 100, 102, 105, 114, 115, 173, 174 Tura, Cosimo 123 Uhland, Ludwig 64–5 Ussher, Arland 55, 200n. 43 Valéry, Paul 23 Vermeer, Jan 133, 145 Vischer, Peter 134 Vogelweide, Walter von der 63–4, 67, 74, 152 Watteau, Antoine 157 Werfel, Franz 90, 205n. 44 Wessel, Horst 86–7 Wiechert, Ernst 91 Wilenski, R. H. 133 Windelband, Wilhelm 105 Witz, Konrad 147 Wohlwill, Gretchen 139 Woodworth, R. S. 16, 39–40, 105, 198n. 13 Wordsworth William 38 Wouwermann, Philips 142 Yeats, Jack B. 30, 48, 122, 124, 133, 157, 185 Yeats, William B. 93 Zilcosky, John 31 Zweig, Stefan 90

Samuel Beckett's German Diaries 1936-1937 (Historicizing Modernism)

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