Books: Deirdre Bairs - Life of Samuel Beckett

"You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on". Denis Donoghue reviews Deirdre Bairs - Life of Samuel Beckett

The first full biography of Samuel Beckett, Ireland's greatest living writer, is published this month. When the author, Deirdre Bair, approached Beckett, he wrote to a friend 'I will neither help nor hinder her.' In the event he helped her. The book, which first appeared in America, has been widely acclaimed. Denis Donoghue reviews it for Magill. We have added a series of studies of the writer, many shounng him at the time of rehearsals for a prooduction of his work with Jack McG(JUJran. The quotations are from Beckett's published works.

IF you were to read Samuel Beckett's books in the spirit in which they are apparently written, you would not necessarily shoot yourself: if the author has not resorted to the gun, the reader is under no obligation to exceed him in logic or virtue. But you would imagine not only the possibility of your suicide but, more prudently, a change of values by which your normal sense of life would be reversed.

Most of us regard life as a good thing rather than a bad thing. We also think of value in terms of plenitude of experrience, diversity, a certain liveliness of circumstance. But suppose you were to regard life as merely an enforced evil, a long disease, a boring farce: it would follow that the less life you had, the more tolerable your situation. Plenitude would be replaced by poverty of experience, attenuation of fellowship, the reduction of daily life to those constituents which a recluse would find congenial: enough food to keep body and soul together, peace, silence, shelter, isolation. Instead of trying to have life more abundantly, you would insist upon having it barely, and on your own choice terms. You would conduct your life by the strategy of negation and good riddance. If something offered itself to your interest, you would exorcise it; like Beckett's Watt, who got into the habit of evolving, "from the metiiculous phantoms that beset him, a hypothesis proper to disperse them, as

often as this might be found necessary." In The Unnamable the compulsive voice banishes all the Murphys, Molloys, and Malones who impeded the only act worth performing-the reduction of expression to its smallest possible form as a preparaation for the boon of silence.

The philosophical tradition in which this attitude is praised is not popular, but it is respectable: its motto is that "never to have been born is best." To be cast out of the womb is a disaster. Deirdre Bair reports, in her biography of Beckett, that he once attended a lecture in which the psychologist lung said, of a little girl who was brought to him for treatment, that 'I "she had never been born entirely."

Beckett regarded his own birth not only I as a disaster in principle but as an incom- i plete or bungled affair in fact, a mess cons- II istent with the universal mess of human life. Bair has much to say of Becken's mother-fixation, and I do in part believe what she says. Clearly, the relation bet-I ween Beckett and his mother was appallling, and while she was obviously a tedious, whining woman, she hardly deserved the resentment visited upon her by her son. Beckett's relation to his father was amiable enough and sometimes cordial, but he seems to have concentrated upon his I mother the venom and then the guilt which a more judicious man would direct against life itself. Bur a mother is only an immediate provocation, the true cause of Beckett's sense of life was his feeling that mind 'and body were mutually alien.

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"I have been up and down these steps five thousand times and still I do not know how many there are. When I think there are six there are four or five or seven or eight and when I remember there are five there are three or four or six or sezJen and when finally I realise there are seven there are five or six or eight or nine. Sometimes I wonder if they do not change them in the night." - All That Fall, 1957
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Suppose this innocent metaphysical notion were taken seriously: suppose you really' felt that your mind and your body were separate and hostile forces. And supppose further that you identified your true self with your mind, and thought your body your jailor. Such a structure of feellings would certainly result in a general passivity, suppression of the will, the negaation of action in favour of indolence, immmobility, Oblomov's way. You would reduce life to its basic gestures; doing nothing, waiting, passing the time, letting one damn thing happen after another.

Beckett found philosophic justification for this attitude partly in Descartes, then in Descartes's disciple, Arnold Geulincx, who maintained that since a man can only control his mind he should not waste any time or energy trying to control the external world, which includes his own body. Action is transferred to the mind: the logical attitude to everything else is passivity, indifference. But Beckett did ; not need a philosopher to tell him how . to live; his own knowledge, such as it was, was native to him, an aboriginal temper.

Deirdre Bair's account of Beckett's childhood and adolescence is not an essay in psychiatric eplanation. She is decorous , in such matters. A reader is free to take or : leave the mother-fixation and to say that Beckett's indolence and drunkeness amounted to nothing more than an artist's reaction against a stuffy, bourgeois home in upper-class Foxrock. All the ingredients are available: Foxford, afternoon tea on the lawn, respectability on every side, Portora, Trinity College, the decencies of Anglo-Irish Protestantism.

Bair provides most of the facts, and leaves the reader to assemble them accordding to his favourite principle. The precise relation between life and work is left open. Certairtly there is a strong autobiographical element in Beckett's writings from More Pricks than Kicks (1934) to Play (1964). The scene in How It Is (1964) where a mother teaches her child to pray is clearly drawn from Foxrock. Endgame is, among other things, an 'abstract expressionist' version of Beckett's marriage. "I say it as I hear it": this phrase, a constant motif in "How It Is", does not mean that Beckett takes dictation from life, contingency, or even from the Furies. But it is true to his creative spirit,· which never disengages itself completely from childhood and the pain of growing up. In Endgame when Clov says, "Do you believe in the life to come?" Hamm answers, "Mine was always that." And so was Beckett's, as Bair relates; he was always waiting, in disstinguished silence and hauteur, for someeone to notice him and publish his books. Meanwhile his life was fertile in vicisssitudes.

Reasonably, Bair's biography is mainly concerned with Beckett's life: she is not a literary critic, her account of his art is rudiimentary. She spends most of her pages reciting external events, chances, misforrtunes, arrivals and departures. Beckett's friendships are duly narrated; mostly with Joyce, Thomas McGreevy, Nancy Cunard, Richard Aldington, Alfred Peron, Jack B. Yeats, Peggy Guggenheim and Jack MacGowran. When discretion is reequired, Bair is discreet: an occasional lover is allowed to remain anonymous. Beckett's wife seems to have taken no part in the biography and remains in the shadows: when she is mentioned, the tone of the narrative becomes severe. Time will be more informative than Bair on these and a few other matters.

But on one matter, Bair's narrative is as copious as any reader could wish it to be. I was vaguely aware that Beckett's life has been plagued with illness, but I had no idea what a dreadful plague it has been: compounded of boils, anal cysts, constipaation, insomnia, and latterly glaucoma in both eyes. No wonder Beckett often assocated himself with Samuel Johnson and tried to write a play about him.

Bair narrates the long disease of Beckett's life, but she does not discuss the bearing of illness upon the question of body and mind. It is my understanding that illness makes it impossible for the sick person to detach his mind from his body. Pain deals hard with such a conceit. But if you were of Beckett's mind in the general question of body and mind, you would reject the body more violently than ever, if you suffered from his ailments and surrvived them. I am guessing now; but if you think of body as ignominiously sick and wretched, and surround that body with the general mess and malice of life, you find it easy to understand a man who withhdraws as much as possible into his mind and fills it not with things but with the sounds of things, echoes, reverberations, tones, and silence. A mind thus beeleaguered would find relief only in Language-as his body would find it in drink. "Words have been my only loves, not many". Many enough, God knows.

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"I have spoken of a voice telling me things. I was getting to know it better now, to underrstand what it wanted. It did not use the words that Moran had been taught when he was little and that he in his tum had taught to his little one. So that at first I did not know what it wanted. But in the end I understood this language. I understood it, I understand it, all wrong perhaps. That is not what matters. It told me to write the report. Does this mean that I am jreer now than I was? I do not know. I shall learn, Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not middnight. It was not raining." - Molloy, 1951

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Reading Bair's biography, I am more convinced than ever that the only thing' Beckett really loves in life is Language. "It's here words have their utility the mud is mute;" and on the next page of How It Is, "a word from me and I am again I strain with open mouth so as not to lose a second a fart fraught with meaning issuing through the mouth no sound in the mud." The only tolerable part of the bad job of life is Language; the rest is need-body, drink, sex, sleep, things taking their course. No sound in the mud.

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"I noticed a scratch on her thigh and asked her how she came by it. Picking gooseberries, she said. I said again I thought it was hopeeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes. (Pause.) I asked her to look at me and after a jew moments-(Pause)-ajter a jew moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because oj the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low.) Let me in. (Pause.) We drifted in among the jlags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause.) I lay down across her with my jace in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, andjrom side to side." - Krapp's Last Tape, 1958.

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Samuel Barclay Beckett was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, if we can take his word for it. Bair thinks the true date is May 13, and she is severe with his pretention in claiming to have been thrown into the pit of life on Good Friday.

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"Then I raised my eyes and saw my mother ' still in the window waving, waving me back' or on I don't know, or just waving, in sad i helpless love, and I heard [ainily her cries. i The window jrame was green, pale, the; house-wall grey and my mother white and so ! thin I could see past her (piercing sight I had: then) into the dark of the room, and on all that jull the not long risen sun, and all small because oj ihe distance, very pretty really the whole thing, I remember it, the old grey and then the thin green surround and the thin white against the dark, ij only she could have been still and let me look at it all."

- From an Abandoned Work, 1958.
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Be that as it may; the evidence is inconclu- j s.ive, either way. Beckett's early life was, . like Foxrock, extremely dull; Boswell could not make such years interesting. Beckett made what he could of his late adolescence in More Pricks than Kicks, but it is not much. Indeed, his life did not transcend the limitations of suburban debauchery until he committed himself to Paris in 1937 and determined to make himself a writer. Bair's account of the Parisian years is extremely interesting, and she is even more rewarding on the warryears which Beckett and his consort Suzanne Deschevaux-Durnesnil spent mainly in Roussillon. After the war, when they went back to Paris, Beckett took up the dreary struggle to write and the even drearier struggle to be published.

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"I would like to die and the rain to be falling on the graveyard and on me walking the streets mourning the first and last to love me"

- One of Beckett's Four Poems, 1948 (Transslated from the French by the author).
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Bair's detail on these matters is relenttless, and properly so: after reading these chapters we renew our sense of what 'waiting' meant for Beckett. His official stance was that the writing was everything, its reception a matter of no significance: he affected indifference to success and proonounced himself more interested in failure. Bair does not go into the question of his sincerity in this attitude, presumably because she believes that he is sincere in every respect. The stance is, on Beckett's part, reasonable enough. The crucial relation was between himself and his work; between his imagination and the mess and mud of things. Still, he wanted to be heard, or at least he wanted to have his books published, if only for the relief of secreting himself in them. We are to believe that success as such meant little or nothing to him. I recognise the logic of that position, but I see no good reason to think that Beckett's public success, startting belatedly with En Attendant Godot in 1952 and including the Nobel Prize in 1969 meant nothing to him, even though it also meant that he was pestered by critics and journalists.

The most impressive aspect of Bair's book is that she managed to write it at all. When she approached Beckett in 1971 with a proposal to do his biography, he told her that she could do whatever she liked, he would neither help nor hinder her. In the event, he helped. Many details in the book could only have come from him.

The book is well worth having. If nothing else, it will help to take away the mystification surrounding Beckett's life, while leaving the mysteries and the probblems where they belong, in the works he has written. Most th ings can be explained, short of the true mysteries. There is an element of Garbo in Beckett. ostenntatiously determined to remain alone. There is no harm in it. But it is time to go back to the writings.

Samuel Beckett, a biography by Deirdre Bair, published by Jonathan Cape.