Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Read online

  Samuel Beckett We had French lessons with Lep. But he wasn’t too reliable a character. I think - I don’t want to speak ill of the dead - that he was a bit of a rogue. I remember he tried once to borrow money off my father. I think he was a homosexual. He liked friendly physical contact, you know. The serious fellow who ran the school was the man who taught maths, called Exshaw (I think that’s how you spell it). My father had a nickname for him; he called him ‘Eggshell’. My father had a nickname for everyone!

  I played a lot of sport there. On the Leinster sports ground. That’s where I first played cricket and tennis. I used to play tennis with Mr Eggshell! I was quite good at tennis - until I was about fourteen, I guess. And I did a lot of running. I was a fairly good runner at middle to long distances. I remember winning a race, coming into the sports ground and seeing my father leaving. He had to go to a meeting just before I went up to the tape.

  At Portora, I used to run in cross-country races organized by one of the masters, called Keith Meares. He lived quite near us in Foxrock. Another boy who used to be involved was [A. M.] Buchanan. I think he played rugger for Ireland.† I did some boxing fairly young too.

  Portora Royal School, Enniskillen

  Samuel Beckett Portora had a good reputation as a Protestant school, a good Protestant school. That was important. But it was to get us away from the troubles. There were some good schools in Dublin: St Columba’s High School and Wesley [College]. But it was to get us as far away as possible in Ireland from the troubles. I was in Connaught House. There were Connaught, Munster, Leinster and Ulster. The Connaught President was Micky Murphet. I have very clear memories of Portora.

  A. M. Buchanan, Beckett’s cricket captain at Portora, is in the centre holding the bat. 1923. Samuel Beckett is seated, the third from the right.

  Charles Jones (fellow pupil; later General Sir Charles Jones) Sam Beckett and I were the closest of friends and moved through the school together. During the holidays he stayed at my home more than once. We moved up the school in the same classes. I had a great affection for him.

  Although withdrawn and sometimes moody, he was a most attractive character. His eyes, behind his spectacles, were piercing and he often sat quietly assessing in a thoughtful, and even critical, way what was going on around him and the material that was being presented to him. However, he had a keen sense of the ridiculous and a great sense of humour; from time to time his face would light up with a charming smile and change his whole appearance.

  Portora Royal Cricket XI. Beckett is seated third from the left. His friend, Geoffrey Thompson, stands to his left, 1922.

  From the start, it was obvious that he was very able - most discriminating and critical in thought and blessed with a wonderful memory. His tastes, as one might expect from his subsequent achievements, lay on the literary and linguistic sides and I well remember that he was almost word-perfect over the whole range of Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

  Sam Beckett was good at games, playing in the back division for the first XV and as a bat - though he bowled also if I remember aright - for the first [cricket] XI. He was a keen and effective bridge player.*

  John A. Wallace (fellow pupil) My main recollections of him at Portora are of his cricketing ability, being a member of a small group of regular morning cold-bathers and of playing some sort of bird-call in a prize-day performance of Haydn’s Toy Symphony. He also must have been one of the few boys in V and VI in my time who took music lessons.

  Cyril Harris (fellow pupil) Sam Beckett was somewhat different from any of the boys that I had been associated with. He was not particularly odd - but he gave the impression of being a solitary, withdrawn person. He was naturally athletic and excelled at games. I shall never forget the way he dealt with me in a school boxing tournament. I met him in a semi-final bout and he quickly knocked me through the side ropes and out of the ring. That was the end of my boxing career.*

  Herbert Gamble (fellow pupil; later Governor of the Windward Islands) I was in the same form as Beckett at Portora. I remember that he was already very good at French and English composition but I don’t think he shone particularly in the general examinations, e.g. I don’t believe he ever obtained either a Junior or Senior Exhibition.

  University: Trinity College, Dublin

  Samuel Beckett My professor at Trinity College was a very human sort of man and an excellent scholar. He introduced me to Racine and passed on his dislike of Corneille. We did The Kid, you know - a spoof [of Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid] - as a play! He was very familiar with contemporary developments in poetry as well: he taught Viélé-Griffin, Le Cardonnel, Jammes. But I didn’t meet them, contrary to what Deirdre Bair [a previous biographer] says. The only one of the writers that Rudmose-Brown knew that I met was Valery Larbaud. I suppose he [i.e. Rudmose-Brown] started me working [after graduating] on l’Unanimisme and Jules Romains. I was teaching at Campbell College in Belfast at the time. I remember when I was working on that.

  Ruddy was a very warm, friendly person. You could talk to him as a student. We used to go out for drives in the country together in his car. We didn’t talk about literature all the time, of course! We visited him at his house in Malahide and in a flat he had in Dublin. He used to have parties when he used to entertain his students. Very sexy they were! He had the lights down low to make it more relaxed and easier. He was Professor of Romance Languages, you know.

  Thomas Rudmose-Brown and a student, Eileen O’Connor, at Trinity College, Dublin, c. 1926.

  You had to do two languages at TCD at the time, so I chose Italian as my second language. Did I tell you about Sir Robert Tate, who used to teach us Italian language? A bit of a ‘dead beat’ he was. He wasn’t too good at it. But it was my good luck

  Thomas Rudmose-Brown and a student, Eileen to meet Bianca Esposito. She was a private tutor and she helped me with my literature as well as my Italian language. She used to go through the difficult bits of the Divina Commedia with me, I remember. I went to Florence in 1927. My father let me go to improve my Italian before my final exam. I stayed in Florence. Most days I used to go out to Fiesole to see and talk to Bianca Esposito’s sister, Vera. She had been married to an Irishman and had lived in Dublin. She had done some acting - she appeared in one or two plays at the Abbey Theatre. You would find her name in some of the programmes from the twenties. She was divorced at the time. Things hadn’t worked out with her husband. She’d had a bad time. She went back to look after her mother in Florence (or in Fiesole) while Bianca looked after her father, Michele, in Dublin.* I told you he was director of music at the [Royal Irish] Academy [of Music], didn’t I? He played all Beethoven’s twelve piano concertos in three separate concerts. He was Commendatore Esposito too. He came from Naples. It is a Neapolitan name, of course. There was a son called Mario. He became very distinguished. He had lived in Dublin, too. But there had been some problem and he couldn’t stay. I knew him very well. I even went on holiday one year to the north of Italy with him, for a trip into the mountains, near Lake Como.*

  Beckett’s notes on Dante - based on Cary’s ‘The Vision of Dante’, 1926.

  Sport and Theatre

  Bill Cunningbam (friend) It was at Carrickmines Golf Club that I first met Sam. He was also a student member and our friendship struck up on the golf course. I played a lot with him and on at least one occasion we played in a golf match that was part and parcel of the series of matches that the Golfing Union of Ireland sometimes had. This was called the Barton Cup. It was a foursome and he and I were beaten. I remember we played two people from the Royal Ireland Golf Club and we were beaten at the 21st hole. We were representing Carrickmines. But at the same time I played matches for Trinity and so did he … Sam’s handicap was always a bit higher than mine: I was a 4 and he was a 7. But he was a good golfer.

  In those days he had a motorcycle. I occasionally went out with him to a place called the Royal Dublin Golf Club which was really the centre for the Trinity Golf Club and, when we went out there to play in Trin
ity competitions, or maybe perhaps in Trinity matches, I used to go out on the back of his motor-bicycle. In those days we had a lot of cobbled streets in Dublin and I remember falling off the back of the motorcycle one frosty morning in a street which we now know as Pearse Street, on the way out to the Royal Dublin. I didn’t come to any harm. We didn’t have helmets, of course, in those days. ‘I like driving fast’, Sam said. But I didn’t have fear on the back of that motorbike and I would be carrying a bag of clubs as well. It was … well, primitive.

  Samuel Beckett I had an AJS motorbike. In fact I had two of them. My father bought me them. It was a four-stroke motorbike, I remember. My brother, Frank, had a Douglas. That was a two-stroke. I used to ride it into Trinity College from Foxrock. I remember bumping into Sir Robert Tate [his Italian teacher and Junior Dean of Students] once on my motorbike with all my gear on.

  Beckett with his golf partner, Bill Cunningham

  Bill Cunningbam I used to make my own golf shoes. Money was important in those days. I put brags into my own golf shoes, hammered them in; I had a last. So that was the background. Neither of us dressed very extravagantly. Sam always had the old pair of slacks and a grey suit on. In the photograph, he has the old grey suit, the Galway tweed sports-coat. I had the blazer which was burnt in the Carrickmines fire twenty years ago. And he was the only one, he said, ‘Oh my golf clubs were old’. They all claimed a hundred and twenty or thirty pounds [for their losses in the fire], and he claimed thirty bob [shillings] or something.

  Carrickmines is a very simple nine-hole course set up round about the beginning of this century. When Sam and I were members there, it was very much a club that had a strong background of conservatism. And if you like to put it as far as that, there was an element of snobbishness about it … It was a very pleasant, quiet place, with not a great membership and no great stress laid on the winning of things at golf.

  It was a good place for young people to play and there was a very good professional called James Barrett who came from the Grey-stones area. He used to teach young people like us how to play golf and Sam was very friendly with him. Sam used to play golf with the son. He used to come over here on occasions and used always to go and play, have a round with the son. Sam was what I would have said [was] a very natural golfer.

  Samuel Beckett I suppose I must have had my first clubs when I was about ten. I used to play a lot on my own at Carrickmines Golf Course. A lovely golf course. It’s still there. I used to spend hours there hitting the ball by myself. But I had a lot of help from the professional there. I remember his name. It was ‘Jem’ Barrett. I think his real name was Jim. I remember the groundsman’s name too. His name was Condell. He looked after the greens. Isn’t it odd the sort of thing you remember?

  I used to play cricket for Trinity College. There were only about forty men who played in all, so you didn’t have to be too good to get into the team! We played various local Dublin teams. I used to enjoy batting on Trinity Square. It was a very good wicket. I also remember when we played Northants, they were a happy band, drinking and whoring and so on between matches, and I’d go off alone and sit in the church. I wasn’t at all what you would call a sociable sort of boy. The main requirement was to be alone.

  I also played for Trinity at chess. There were various chess teams all over Dublin. And Trinity had their chess team of six players, I think it was. We used to tour. There was a competition between the various chess groups. There was one in Dun Laoghaire, I think. I forget the names. The Dublin Chess Club was in Grafton Street too. It was called the Café Cairo. That was the headquarters of the Dublin Chess Club. It was not peculiar to Trinity.

  Bill Cunningbam We were in the university and the university had a wall around it and, you know, we would talk about our education and what we were learning in the university and various things involved with that sort of world, including the interest in English literature and things like that. We were both interested in literature, so we used to talk fully about all sorts of things, literature and so on and he was brilliant at modern languages. Neither of us had sisters and I would say that we were both completely unaware of the female side of life. This was in 1922-4 and Sam was intensely shy and I was intensely shy.

  I admired Sam’s brain. I looked upon him as a man of intense ability and intense academic stature. But he was more rounded than that. He had a piano in his rooms and I remember him playing to me. He sat me down and played in his rooms at Trinity. We still used to meet when I went into business and we used to go to the theatre.

  There was a play we saw at the Gate Theatre - these were all instances when he came over from France or wherever he was -called Payment Deferred by C. S. Forrester, the man who wrote the novel about Captain Horatio Hornblower.* And this was a ‘whodunnit’. It wasn’t the greatest of plays, but Sam was sitting in the front row of the stalls at the Gate Theatre, and there was some comment made on the stage, and Sam rose to his feet and he said out loud, ‘My God, what a profound remark!’ And, of course, I shrank down in my seat because everybody was looking at us. Now that’s where I saw that Sam was moving away from me: because he was prepared to make such an outburst. It was a very trite remark but I wouldn’t have thought to comment.

  The second time that disclosed that our minds were going in a different way was - I said to him ‘Look, I’m going round Dublin, I’m doing little jobs round town and I went to a little builder’s place there the other week and I found a man there whom I would have looked upon as a person who wouldn’t have done anything like the reading that you or I would have done and I found that his leisure-time reading was a book called The Decline and Fall of tube Saracens [sic]’. Now it was probably Gibbons [sic] because I know that Gibbons wrote The Decline and Fall of tube Romans [sic] but I had never heard of this.* I said, ‘What I am finding out now, going out now into the world round me in Dublin, I am finding ordinary people who can give you a lot of interesting information and who are very interesting in themselves, normal people,’ I said. Sam looked at me and said: ‘I’m not interested in the normal, I’m only interested in the abnormal.’

  Geoffrey Perrin I was friendly with Frank and Sam Beckett, especially in 1925 and 1926 during the summer vacation when Sam was in TCD … I went to Kenya in January 1927 when Sam was still at home. At that time he was an ordinary, intelligent citizen with a considerable flair in the realm of sport. I had no idea he was to become an intellectual genius. The only sign I can recollect was his enthusiasm for the Abbey Theatre and his liking for abstruse plays. He took me to a performance of ‘Oedipus Rex’ [Oedipus tube King] which I thoroughly enjoyed, largely due to the wonderful acting of Frank McCormick.†

  Samuel Beckett They had wonderful actors at the Abbey Theatre: Barry Fitzgerald, Frank McCormick. Beautiful actors. And they all - what’s the word? - ‘finished up’ in the States, Barry Fitzgerald having an international reputation. They were all good. But I admired above all Frank McCormick.* Frank McCormick and Barry Fitzgerald in Juno and the Paycock were unforgettable.† Frank refused to go abroad. He was so attached to the Abbey and home that he wouldn’t go. Anyhow he died young. But what infuriated me at the time - it was so stupid on the part of [W. B.] Yeats - was to refuse The Silver Tassie. They’d done The Plough and the Stars and the next play that Seán [O’Casey] came up with was The Silver Tassie. And it was turned down by Yeats. It was a monumental mistake. O’Casey left Ireland as a result.

  I was a weekly visitor to the Abbey. I always occupied the same seats. Have I told you that story? The balcony was semi-circular with two aisles: a central triangle and two aisles. And if you got a seat at the centre end of the aisles you were as well off as if you were sitting in the centre. You got as good a view. It also only cost you one and six for a side seat as opposed to three shillings in the centre. So (laugbs) I always had the seat next to the centre! I saw the Synge revivals there. I don’t think he finished Deirdre of the Sorrows, you know. But The Well of the Saints is a beautiful play.

  The Gate wa
s hardly really going again [when I was there] and I had no feeling for the two who ran it: Hilton Edwards (who died three or four years ago) and Micheal MacLiammoir; they lived together.‡ MacLiammoir was a very well-known theatre man. He used to travel. He was very good. And he died before Hilton Edwards, who continued to run the Gate until a few years ago when it was taken over [in 1983] by the present chap, Michael Colgan, who has made a great success of the place. I remember seeing a play [Youth’s the Season] there by Mary Manning, Mary Manning Howe. Denis Johnston’s plays were also put on at the Gate. Then there was The Gaiety. And The Queen’s was in Dame Street. I remember well The Theatre Royal, The Queen’s, The Olympia, The Abbey, The Gate, and The Peacock. Lennox Robinson was a director at the Abbey. The Abbey was destroyed by fire, of course, years ago.