Samuel Beckett and the Second World War

Politics, Propaganda and a 'Universe Become Provisional'

William Davies

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350106857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria moderna

In the wake of the Second World War, Samuel Beckett wrote some of the most significant literary works of the 20th century. This is the first full-length historical study to examine the far-reaching impact of the war on Beckett's creative and intellectual sensibilities.
Drawing on a substantial body of archival material, including letters, manuscripts, diaries and interviews, as well as a wealth of historical sources, this book explores Beckett's writing in a range of political contexts, from the racist dogma of Nazism and aggressive traditionalism of the Vichy regime to Irish neutrality censorship and the politics of recovery in the French Fourth Republic. Along the way, Samuel Beckett and the Second World War casts new light on Beckett's political commitments and his concepts of history as they were formed during Europe's darkest hour.

1

Beckett and the Second World War

France and Britain declared war on Nazi Germany on 3 September 1939, following the invasion of Poland on 1 September. Beckett was in Ireland at the time. Five months prior, he had written to Thomas MacGreevy from Paris that ‘[i]f there is a war, as I fear there must be soon, I shall place myself at the disposition of this country’ (LSB I: 656). By 4 September, Beckett had travelled via England to France to rejoin his friends and his partner, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, in Paris. Within the month, Beckett had applied for papers to allow him to stay in France. He also offered to drive ambulances for the city.

‘Under the blue glass’: The declaration of war and the invasion of France

While the declaration of war came rapidly after the invasion of Poland, Beckett’s life in Paris between September 1939 and May 1940 involved few major upheavals. That is not to say the war was not felt in the city, particularly with the mobilization of French soldiers and increasing media reports on the German advances. Nevertheless, Beckett’s life and work continued apace: he persisted with his translation of Murphy, finishing most of it by the end of the year; he saw James Joyce and helped him in various capacities; and he continued to meet friends and artists in the city. Yet if there were no major changes to Beckett’s routines, small changes were indicative of the uncanny nature of this phase of the war. Where before Alfred Péron had been on hand to assist in the Murphy translation, now Beckett was alone, Péron having been mobilized with his regiment (26 September 1939, LSB I: 668). Georges Pelorson, another candidate for translation assistance, was also on hold for his regiment at the time (Cronin 1999: 310).

Behind the veneer of normality, however, France underwent significant changes. With the declaration of war, the French government put into effect legislation to intern German foreigners, formally designating them as ‘hostile’ on 10 September 1939. The altered implications of a ‘foreign’ status in wartime France were palpable only a few days after Beckett’s return to Paris, as was the degree to which administration and bureaucracy had already come to define many of the everyday aspects of the war. ‘Being foreign’ gained a heightened tension, though at this point Beckett’s Irish nationality was of little concern compared to those with German connections who were declared étrangers non désirables. Approximately 12,000 Germans and 5,000 Austrians were sent to French camps, many of which had been built before the war as provisional holding centres to contain the tens of thousands of Spanish refugees who had fled Franco’s victory. The French government’s internment policy unwittingly pre-empted the practices of the Nazis and the Vichy regime once arrests of Jews and ‘other perceived enemies’ commenced (Riding 2011: 29). Indeed, accounts of Le Vernet camp from before the fall of France, used by the Vichy regime to hold suspected ‘dissidents’ and later by the Nazis to hold Jewish detainees destined for Dachau, suggest that hunger and the degrading use of forced nudity were commonplace in the camps interning Germans and other ‘enemy’ foreigners (Riding 2011: 31).

Throughout the early stages of the war, Beckett continued to make it known to his adopted country that he was willing to help should Paris come under threat (LSB I: 668). Paris now had to be maintained and defended against not only physical destruction but Nazism itself. If the true horrors of the regime’s racist policies were yet to be recognized, Beckett was already aware of the exclusionary and essentialist politics of the Reich to which his relatives the Sinclairs, particularly Boss, had been subjected (DF: 183). He had also encountered first-hand Nazi Germany’s repression of ‘degenerate’ artists during his travels in 1936–7. For Beckett and the circles he moved in, Paris was a liberal, artistic and multinational melting pot.¹ However, with the threat of invasion, Beckett’s relationship with the city was unavoidably modified. Paris no longer represented a space of sanctuary and artistic opportunity. When Nazi forces were progressing closer to France with each passing day in early 1940, this life would have seemed increasingly precarious, distant though the German soldiers remained from the city itself. Yet if a certain Parisian life was under threat at the time, Paris itself was relatively safe from physical harm compared to cities like London. In preparing for invasion, Joseph Goebbels argued that Paris should be preserved as he planned to use the French capital as a seat of cultural power in the new Nazi empire, the city’s heritage supplying the cache that some believed German cities lacked (Riding 2011: 51).

The significance of Beckett’s foreign status in a country at war was made apparent to him when he did not receive travel documents at the beginning of 1940. His lack of ‘safe-conduct’ pass prevented him from travelling to see the Joyces in Saint-Gérand-le-Puy. France had yet to be invaded, but Beckett’s freedom of movement was already radically altered by wartime legislation. The requirement that one had the right document on hand for travel, collecting rations or even simply walking the street quickly became a hallmark of life during the war. As we will see, Beckett’s works repeatedly register the anxieties, frustrations and dark comedy of a life of doc umentation and hunger.

Eventually, in March 1940, Beckett was able to join the Joyces and Jolases for Easter. His return to Paris from Saint-Gérand-le-Puy at the beginning of April coincided with the fall of Norway and Denmark to German forces. On 10 May 1940 (Saint Joan of Arc’s Day), the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg were invaded, clearing a path for the German army to enter France through the Ardennes, emerging in Sedan. Though Beckett remained safe in Paris, the failure of the Maginot Line was a significant blow to the city’s morale. The arrival of the invasion through the eastern forests was also symbolic, as Sedan and the Ardennes are sites with long military histories. The Battle of Sedan in 1870 ended with the defeat of Napoleon III, the last emperor of France, and ushered in the Third Republic, the very institution which was to be overthrown by Vichy and the occupiers. It was also a key site in the Ardennes battle in 1914, which saw the French repelled by superior German forces. The Ardennes and Sedan resonate so widely with French military history that they press themselves on the memories of Nell and Nagg in Endgame (E: 13).² This is a site of significant French war memory, recurring in a series of major French military defeats that each precipitated great change for the nation.

Though most of the letters written by Beckett from the period include little direct commentary on the events of the war and invasion, their language is marked by the sense of incomprehension and apprehension which many shared in France and across Europe at the time. Nine days after the invasion of France, on 21 May 1940, Beckett could only register the war in ellipses in a letter to George and Gwynedd Reavey: ‘I have had several visits from Péron, on leave. He was in good form. But now . . . ?’ (LSB I: 680). Those three dots suggest an acknowledgement of the possibility of imminent change in the country; they also mark the threshold of unknowability and ineffability that the invasion represented. We see a similar sense of the unspeakable in the 10 June 1940 entry in Agnès Humbert’s occupation diary: ‘We have to get used to this appalling possibility: Paris may fall. It’s one thing to think it, but it’s quite another to say the words out loud: “Paris may fall.” I’m stopped by a superstitious dread: I can’t do it. Some things should never be said out loud, for fear they may come true . . . ’ (2009: 3). Two days prior, Humbert had recorded her concerns in proto-‘Beckettian’ terms: ‘The silence is deadly. There is nothing to do but wait’ (2009: 2).

Throughout the early stages of the invasion of France, Beckett continued to work in Paris. He tried to place his translation of Murphy, attempted a ‘sketch’ for Paris Mondial that was ‘cancelled because of recent events’ (LSB I: 678) and had another attempt at his play, ‘Human Wishes’, based on the life of Samuel Johnson (BC: 86–7). Again, in the letter regarding Mondial, as in his letter to the Reaveys, the war remains an unspoken thing, an ‘event’ present but not fully realized. By May 1940 cultural activity in Paris had stalled to a halt with the closure of concert halls and theatres, the suspension of activity at institutions such as the Conservatoire de Paris, and the shutdown of major periodicals.³ With the increasing occupation of northern and eastern France and the bombing of Paris and its suburbs on 3 June – notably the Citroën factory and the airport – the possibilities of fleeing the country quickly shrank.

On 28 May, Belgium surrendered and, by 4 June, almost all British forces in France had fled via Dunkirk. Like millions of others, Beckett was forced to confront the real possibility of an utterly changed Europe and, perhaps more importantly, a changed notion of what France represented for natives and foreigners alike.⁴ In the first two weeks of June, France collapsed against the German military. The invasion of Paris loomed. In a letter to Marthe Arnaud on 10 June, Beckett followed a despairing ‘where would we go, and with what?’ with an account of looking at one of his cherished van Velde paintings:

Under the blue glass Bram’s painting gives off a dark flame. Yesterday evening I could see in it Neary at the Chinese restaurant, ‘huddled in the tod of his troubles like an owl in ivy’. Today it will be something different. You think you are choosing something, and it is always yourself that you choose; a self that you did not know, if you are lucky. Unless you are the dealer. (LSB I: 684)

The ‘blue glass’ is the blackout solution that was applied to windows in Paris (LSB I: 684, n.4). It is the lens through which the people of Paris witnessed the fall of France. Beckett did not yet know that he was only two days from ‘choosing’ to depart Paris to escape the invading forces, but his tone is melancholic, reflective, already starved of the light he imagines emitted from his van Velde piece. In the scene from Murphy that Beckett recalls, Neary sits in near silence, in a Chinese restaurant, ‘sad with the snarling sadness of the choleric man’ (Mu: 74). For Beckett, the war meant reck oning with a new status, that of a foreigner in an occupied nation he had chosen as his permanent home. Very soon, France would be re-conceptualized by the collaborationist Vichy regime as a nation fit to join Hitler’s Nazified Europe.

On 12 June, Beckett and Déchevaux-Dumesnil escaped the city with two million other refugees. Their train, like many that left the city during this time, had no fixed destination. They reached the Joyces in Vichy the same day. German forces entered Paris two days later, after the French government had fled the city. Vichy was the government’s destination too and, on reaching the spa town, they declared that there would be no organized resistance to German forces in Paris. Following the resignation of Paul Reynaud on 16 June, Marshal Philippe Pétain announced in a radio broadcast that hostilities were to cease;⁵ Charles de Gaulle flew to London the following morning. This was Pétain’s first broadcast as the head of what was now the État français, a nation soon to be divided in two: the north administered by the Germans, the south by the government in Vichy, or the ‘Nono zone’, as Beckett called it (LSB III: 56). Though the Vichy regime did not have governing control over the north, they could broadcast to it, hold rallies there and disseminate propaganda literature.

In mid-June 1940, the French government announced that ‘all centres of population above 20,000 were to be declared open cities’ and the Germans were to be welcomed (Jackson 2004: 180). The brief, devastating conflict cost France the lives of 50,000 soldiers at a conservative estimate, and somewhere in the region of 1.5 million soldiers were taken prisoner.⁶ It was these losses and their apparent implications for the French race, alongside a cult of Pétainism steeped in the marshal’s own military record, which underpinned the Vichy government’s drive for a new, authoritarian vision of France. As we will discuss in later chapters, on Pétain’s coming to power, Vichy’s Révolution nationale (National Revolution) was disseminated across the country in a flurry of radio broadcasts, propaganda documents and community initiatives devoted to Vichy’s ideal of national spirit.

The material hardships of war and occupation

Between 14 and 22 June 1940, the Nazi occupiers and the Vichy regime drew up their armistice agreement and division of the nation. During this time, Beckett had his last meeting with the Joyces in Vichy, also attended by Georges Pelorson (Cronin 1999: 316). Joyce gave Beckett a letter of recommendation to Valery Larbaud who ‘saved’ him from penury with a loan of 20,000 francs (DF: 299). On 23 June, Beckett and Déchevaux-Dumesnil took a train to Toulouse on which refugees and fleeing soldiers – many still in their uniforms (DF: 299) – were hoping to put distance between themselves and any further conflict, even if it meant homelessness and hunger. The sight of fleeing soldiers had a notable effect on France’s morale at this crucial stage of the war. Agnès Humbert recorded on 20 June 1940 that her encounter with ‘six haggard soldiers’ in ‘shreds’ of uniforms ‘haunt[ed]’ her (2009: 5...