Revisioning Beckett

Samuel Beckett's Decadent Turn

S. E. Gontarski

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501337642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Revisioning Beckett reassesses Beckett's career and literary output, particularly his engagement with what might be called decadent modernism. Gontarski approaches Beckett from multiple viewpoints: from his running afoul of the Irish Censorship of Publications Acts in the 1930s through the 1950s, his preoccupations to "find literature in the pornography, or beneath the pornography, " his battles with the Lord Chamberlain in the mid-1950s over London stagings of his first two plays, and his close professional and personal associations with publishers who celebrated the work of the demimonde. Much of that term encompasses an opening to the fullness of human experience denied in previous centuries, and much of that has been sexual or decadent. As Gontarski shows, the aesthetics that emerges from such early career encounters and associations continues to inform Beckett's work and develops into experimental modes that upend literary models and middle-class values, an aesthetics that, furthermore, has inspired any number of visual artists to re-vision Beckett.

PART ONE

A Professional Life

1

Samuel Beckett and Lace Curtain Irish Modernisms

Lacking traditions one must make them; having traditions one must break through them.” Brian Coffey, “Extracts from ‘Concerning Making,’” The Lace Curtain 6, p. 31.

Dublin is as ever only more so. You ask for a fish & they give you a piece of bog oak. SB 1935.

This particular state, Ireland, is no longer young [ ….] It is time we grew up, forgot about Cathleen and all her hang-ups and hangovers. Time to forget about the Celts, time to face the reality that Irish unification may never happen, and it does not matter much anyway. Time to embrace a post-nationalist Ireland in a post nation-state Europe. Dennis Kennedy, October 2010.

In August of 1934, The Bookman, a London literary monthly, published an essay called, innocently enough, “Recent Irish Poetry” (86.515 [August 1934] 235–44). It turned out to be a provocative if not pugnacious assault on Ireland’s literary patrimony, its national, artistic endowment, if not on nationalism itself. It drew a line in the turf for the relatively new, postcolonial Irish Free State delineating what the essay’s author saw as a parochial preoccupation with place, established alternatives, rather antitheses to a received nationalist narrative, and challenged its ethos and aesthetics. Terence Brown put the matter in broadly general terms thus: “the 1930s would certainly give the cultural historian apparently sufficient ground for concluding that modernism and post-colonial nationalism […] are antithetical in their particular manifestations” (Coughlan and Davis, 25). J. C. C. Mays concurs, “the thesis of the Revival [which] focused on the myth and folklore of the Irish countryside produced an antithetical interest in the modern urban world” (Coughlan and Davis 104). The line that marked out that divide between the “Irish countryside” and “the modern urban world” was the one delineated in “Recent Irish Poetry,” written by one “Andrew Belis,” pseudonym, it turned out, of a recent Trinity College alumnus (1923–7) and acolyte of James Joyce. Samuel Beckett had already produced a witty if, to the few intimates who read it, baffling critique of Dublin’s intellectual life in his academic novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932), which became something of a dead-end for its author as it failed to find a publisher. Beckett rewrote that autobiographical, Trinity College send-up into a collection of shorter, less experimental pieces and called it, in a biblical echo that itself doomed the book, finally, More Pricks than Kicks (1934). It quickly ran afoul of the new nation’s Censorship of Publications Acts (of July 16, 1929). Beckett’s persistent attacks on his homeland’s politics and aesthetics–in the 1932 novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and the 1934 collection of stories extracted from it, More Pricks than Kicks–culminate in the 1934 essay; they were and would continue to be pervasive and trenchant, particularly his denunciation of that Censorship of Publications Acts, which went hand in glove, according to Beckett, with Catholic Ireland’s total ban on contraception to express the Free State’s stifling ultraconservatism, what Beckett wittily called in 1934 the “sterile nation of the mind and apotheosis of the litter” (Disjecta 87, see also Letters 2009, 176). Not long after, in 1935, Beckett would write a more direct critique called “Censorship in the Saorstat” (i.e., Saorstát Eireann, the official name in Irish of the Irish Free State) also commissioned by The Bookman, but the journal ceased publication before it could print Beckett’s attack which he concluded, finally, by citing his own censorship registry number, 465.¹ Although the “Saorstat” would lift its ban on More Pricks than Kicks in 1952, it went on to ban Watt in 1954 and Molloy in 1956 (both published in Paris). Beckett’s troubles with his homeland would continue further into the 1950s and 1960s, as John Banville outlines the issues of Irish provincialism and theocracy in The Irish Times:

[…] in 1958 the egregious Archbishop John Charles McQuaid refused to offer votive Mass at the opening of Dublin Theatre Festival because he disapproved of a play by Sean O’Casey and an adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses that were due to be staged in the festival. Beckett was furious, and wrote to [American publisher] Barney Rosset, “The Roman Catholic bastards in Ireland yelped Joyce and O’Casey out of their ‘Festival’, so I withdrew my mimes and the reading of All That Fall to be given at the Pike [theatre]” [Beckett Letters 2014, 106, to Alan Simpson; the quotation to Rosset cited only in a note, 107n2]. The following year he wrote to his agent: “I do not wish my plays to be performed in Eire whether by amateurs or by professionals” [Beckett Letters 2014, 224, 225n3]. […] and in the summer of 1960 a half-dozen copies of the trilogy were seized from Hanna’s bookshop by the Garda. Beckett’s friend Robert Pinget recorded, “We talk about the duplicity of the Irish, all niceness outside and enemies within. Sam takes all this very badly.” (Banville 2014)

In “Recent Irish Poetry” Beckett’s target was less the affront of censorship than the national literary revival that contributed to The Rising and to Ireland’s at least partial independence, as a Dominion of the British Commonwealth of Nations (complete with Oath of Allegiance to the Crown), and simultaneously to an atmosphere that stifled innovation for a new generation of Irish writers, according to Beckett, of which Beckett felt himself or was trying to be a part. As John Harrington outlines the issues,

If the Yeats-Synge vision of Ireland was the single object of ridicule in More Pricks than Kicks, Beckett’s stories would, in effect, endorse the obvious alternative in local literary culture, that of the contemporary stories of O’Faolain, O’Connor, and others. That alternative to Celtic twilight centered on escape from restrictive affiliations and allegiances previously constructed as a means to cultural identity and autonomy. […] The literary models for this view were Joycean, especially Dubliners. (Harrington, 64)

The Bookman would simultaneously publish Beckett’s very curious, mystical short story, “A Case in a Thousand,” and he may have adopted a pseudonym for the essay less to mask his identity (few were fooled by it, and, moreover, he and his “lace curtain,” Dublin 4 family had already been humiliated by his literary efforts when More Pricks than Kicks wound up on the “Index of Forbidden Books in Ireland”) than to differentiate his twin efforts, diminishing the possibility that the Dublin-based story would be seen as an exemplum of the critique. Outlined in “Recent Irish Poetry,” in a brash, even superior sort of way, then, is a set of reservations, something of an argument for what will come to be called Modernism, and it segregates Irish writers, at least Irish poets of the 1930s, on either side of that marshy, shifting demarcation, parochial, bog-bound on one side and urban-cosmopolitan on the other, a demarcation between western and eastern, between archipelago and continental, between Romanticism and Modernism, perhaps, and finally between exiles and homebodies.

But Beckett’s demesne is neither so easily geographical nor national, and so not overtly binary. The pseudonymous author proposes as his principle of individuation or segregation (which he applies consistently) the degree to which Irish writers are aware of “the breakdown of the object,” a theme in the fore of his own critical and creative writing. He accuses the majority, those whom he calls “antiquarians,” of “delivering with the altitudinous complacency of the Victorian Gaels the Ossianic goods,” and further condemns the mysticism, what he calls the “iridescence of themes” of such poetic luminaries as George Russell (pen name AE, short for Aeon), James Stephens, Austin Clarke (unmistakably lampooned as Austin Ticklepenny in Murphy), and poetic patriarch, William Butler Yeats. Among those approved, on the other hand, are most notably friends, Denis Devlin, one of the few, for example, who is “aware of the vacuum which exists between the perceiver and the thing perceived,” and Beckett’s epistolary confidant, Thomas MacGreevy, praised for his clear elucidations, “the vision without the dip,” that is, insights without aid of a candle. Beckett’s imagery here denigrates The Candle of Vision (1918),² George Russell’s essays on Celtic mysticism to which Miss Carriage of Murphy will allude shortly thereafter (102, 155). The narrator of Murphy will acknowledge, moreover, that Murphy shared Neary’s greatest fear, to “fall among Gaels” (Murphy 6).

Despite such harsh treatment of Irish literary patrimony, especially in a nation fully secure in neither its tentative independence nor its national identity, the essay turned out to have staying power, a certain longevity, or at least it was resurrected, reprinted anyway, in the summer of 1971 in the fourth issue (of six) of another short-lived literary venture, The Lace Curtain: A Magazine of Poetry and Criticism,³ part of an ongoing attempt to situate a new and younger generation of Irish writers within a larger, less provincial Modern urban world, the journal’s editorials and selections suggesting something of a second generation of Modernism, a post-1930s Irish Modernism, or what the editors of the 1995 critical anthology, Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s (Cork University Press), Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis, call an “exploration of the fate of modernism in Irish literature.” In a retrospective essay in that volume, one of the founders of that journal and its associated New Writers’ Press, Trevor Joyce, notes of the Beckett reprint, “This was, to the best of my knowledge, the first time he allowed his piece on Devlin to come out under his own name” (Joyce, 293). Joyce’s memory is only partially accurate. He seems to confuse the essays reprinted in The Lace Curtain nos. 3 and 4, since the Beleis/Beckett effort in issue 4 featured Devlin so little, and Joyce continues his confusion: “It had originally appeared anonymously in The Bookman in the 1930s” (Joyce 293)—well, “pseudonymously” anyway. The poetic heir to Brian Coffey in some senses and one of the leaders in this postcolonial redefinition of Irish Modernism, if not Irish nationalism, Joyce offered his own treatment or redrafting of the received Irish literary patrimony with his translation or reworking of the Buile Suibhne, edited by his Lace Curtain cohort Michael Smith and published in 1976 by their own New Writers’ Press as The Poems of Sweeney Peregrine: A Working of the Corrupt Irish Text,⁴ which, as the subtitle suggests, offers a satirical reworking of the tale, particularly “The Man of the Wood” segment, and so shares some characteristics with the Finn MacCool rendering of Buile Suibhne, itself redrafted as St. Ronan’s curse on Sweeney-Trellis in Orlick’s assault on his own patrimony in At Swim-Two-Birds (Plume, 246–7), these, perhaps, in consort with Beckett’s lampoon of Cuchulain in Murphy. The fourth number of The Lace Curtain, then, took a decidedly defiant stand against the Celtic Twilight, even out Becketting Beckett’s 1934 attack into which Flann O’Brien’s antiquarian lampoons, his own Working of the Corrupt Irish Text, might have fit nicely, had the editors chosen to use them.

The Lace Curtain republication of “Recent Irish Poetry,” now under Beckett’s own name, was simultaneously something of a repatriation as well, suggesting at least a postwar or post-Nobel rapprochement between the apostate, Beckett, and his homeland as Smith and Joyce used Beckett’s stinging critique of at least certain forms of hermetic Irishness to develop and legitimize their own realignments. The 1934 essay was then embraced in an attempt to carve out a native Irish Modernism and simultaneously to introduce to the Irish reading public more non-Irish writing, Beckett, perhaps, straddling those categories.

As early as its second issue (spring 1970), Smith and Joyce took the “criticism” subtitle of their journal’s title seriously and opened their “Editorial” with a look behind the genteel “lace curtain” of Irish literary respectability: “The awarding of the Nobel Prize to Samuel Beckett affords the Irish literary Establishment another occasion for publishing the lie that Ireland is an incorrigibly literary country and that Dublin is an internationally important centre of literary activity” (2). The editors dispute that “lie” since most of its internationally noted writers had fled the land of their birth in order to develop creatively, and the editors take on the political issues of the day as well, noting that “Mr [Charles] Haughey’s tax concessions are irrelevant to the Irish artist who must work full time at some mundane livelihood job or else never earn enough to be taxed away” (2). The editors cite their most prominent examples:

It was only through an almost miraculous moral tenacity and integrity that such writers as Patrick Kavanagh⁵ and Brian O Nualain (Flann O’Brien) survived (even if somewhat scarred).⁶ [Both had been closely associated with the Pre-Lace Curtain journal, Envoy: A Review of Literature and Art, 1949–51.] Their survival was their own individual achievement; they were wise enough and great enough not to care for the plaudits and “respect” of uncivilized and hypocritical “educated” Dublin society. The Lace Curtain salutes the living spirit of these two great writers [both dead by then, we might add, O’Brien on April Fool’s Day in 1966, Kavanagh a year later], and while it admires the work of Mr Beckett, it should have been happy—and now especially since he hardly needs the money—to see him—like Mr Sartre, reject that soiled prize. (2)

In the following issue, No. 3, Michael Smith offers a longish editorial/review, contrasting “Irish Poetry and Penguin Verse,” which editorTrevor Joyce called, “a rebarbative attack on Brendan Kennelly’s Penguin Book of Irish Verse”⁷ that Smith characterizes as one that features “a nostalgic backward look” (Coughlan and Davis, 8, 281). Much of the editorial half of the review is an all-out attack on the patriarch of Irish poetry, William Butler Yeats, and Smith suggests that “Even a superficial look at the Literary Revival reveals Yeats as the arch-manipulator, encouraging here, criticizing there, always suppressing, hoisting, punishing” (4). In a gesture of inclusion if not appropriation, perhaps, Kennelly includes a single Beckett poem translated from the French and retitled generically as “Poem,” that is, “I would like my love to die,” and a single poem by Denis Devlin, “The Colours of Love,” who, Kennelly says, in the “Contents” not in the “Introduction,” “Deserves more attention” (20); both are poems of failed love. Smith’s editorial, then, retraces the battle lines set out in Beckett’s 1934 essay on Irish poetry, Kennelly subsuming it all under a grand meta-narrative of native Irish myth around which Irish poetry is seen to be unified and so defined. And Smith lays out Kennelly’s biases (while deflecting his own): “In all the reviews of the anthology I have read, none has failed to comment on the ludicrously unjustified preponderance of space allotted to Frank O’Connor [22 poems and whom Kennelly calls ‘Ireland’s Ezra pound’ (30)], James Clarence Mangan [of ‘Dark Rosaleen’ fame (q.v.), 18 poems⁸] and Sir Samuel Ferguson [of Lays of the Western Gael (1865) fame, 11 poems],” translators, real or fake, all (8).

Smith’s pointed response to Kennelly’s highly influential, defining anthology (which is published in a second, expanded edition in 1981 and which adds a...