Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Page 6

  Georges Belmont (Pelorson) I was nineteen years old and I was the only Anglicist in the 1928 year. We started by reading some Shakespeare together - but that was never Sam’s forte. I am not even sure we ever reached the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.* He was as embarrassed as I was by this and asked me what I wanted to do. We met first in his room. I no longer remember how often each week - but regularly. And then Sam said it might be more interesting if we were to meet outside in a café or a bar. And that is what we did. We soon started just to talk rather than to read Shakespeare. We didn’t have actual lessons; we just chatted. It was purely social. Always in English. He was very scrupulous about that. He would ask me what I was reading … and we spoke about literature, mostly modern French literature and theatre and cinema. It was a conversation, nothing academic about it at all. Later on, when I was in Dublin as the lecteur, he used to speak to me in French.

  As soon as I got some money then, I went out and bought myself an expensive gramophone and tried to persuade Beckett that he would come to love Wagner. So I forced him to listen to it. Not being at all impressed when he was listening to Wagner’s Le Crépuscule des Dieux - in which there would be all these cymbals clashing - he would get his own back by going up to the gramophone and saying: ‘That’s a beautiful flute you can hear there. Ça, c’est merveilleux’ [“Now that, that’s wonderful”]’.

  Emile Delavenay The summer of 1928 was the time when I presented my Mémoire de Diplome on Barrie to my examiners. I had just got married and this was the time when McGree-vy [MacGreevy] arranged for the meeting with Joyce. Beckett arrived in the following autumn term. I was then again in Cambridge, coming to Paris for the periods when the Cambridge term was over or not started, and the Sorbonne operated.

  Emile Delavenay before his wedding, Stratfield Saye, 1928.

  McGreevy was still living at the rue d’Ulm and I saw quite a lot of him although his teaching duties were over. Péron and I were preparing for the Agrégation competition and worked hard with Beckett when we could lay our hands on him … most of our study times with Beckett were at the [Café] Mahieu or the less resplendent café next door, the Départ, opposite the Gare de Sceaux … He was a late riser. So was McGreevy and we used to go after eleven in the morning and he had his breakfast then … Our Sorbonne professors were there for the hard, methodical work on the history of literature, and the comradeship of people like Tom McGreevy and Beckett introduced into our studies something vividly different. It is difficult to put it into words, but I am sure that, on balance, we learnt more from those extremely informal and almost casual encounters with McGreevy and Beckett at the Mahieu than from the formal teaching …*

  [Beckett] was not sociable. He was brusque and he always gave me the impression of great purity of character. And when I saw him when we were, after all, in our late seventies and early eighties, I found he hadn’t changed. He was the same, the eyes, the blue eyes, the friendly look. He looked you straight in the face. We all liked him.

  It was after I retired from UNESCO. We talked a good deal about the old days and we talked about old friends. Perhaps the last time but one that I met him at the PLM St Jacques I was writing my memoirs at the time* and I said, ‘Look, we’ve come to an age where there isn’t much future, there is only the past to talk about.’ And he sort of looked up and said, ‘Oh not at all, don’t you believe it.’

  Lucien Roubaud (with whombBeckett played rugby for the Ecole Normale team) I have a very different picture of Samuel Beckett as a rugby player from that of Jean Rolland.† Like him, I ran behind Beckett, expecting him to pass back to me, and saw him go flying, as his feet could not keep up with him. Like him, I heard Beckett twice mutter to himself ‘Never again’. But my impression was very different from that of Jean Rolland. The graphic picture presented by the incident was for me quite secondary. As I was a Toulonnais and had played rugby far more than the other members of the team, I understood that Beckett was going to execute a manoeuvre which was performed by a famous scrum-half in the Toulon Rugby Club and which I later saw executed by Gareth Edwards. Beckett failed to exploit what would have been, in itself, remarkable, creating a hole in the opposing defence. He tried the classic scrum-half’s dummy, feigning a move in one direction which forced the opposing backs to rush to defend, so leaving a gap into which Beckett, with a sudden change of direction, thrust himself. It was worthy of a real rugby player, even of a great rugby player. And after the game as Beckett left the changing rooms, saying to himself ‘Never again’, I felt really sad at heart for his tone was both resolute and bitter, almost desperate.

  Finally I’ll give you an example of Beckett’s style which seems to me rather piquant. The team had all gone to the station at Moulins and were in a rather sleazy bar, waiting for the train. I was sitting at a table with Beckett when a brassy-looking waitress came up to us and asked for a cigarette. Beckett held out a packet and told her to keep it. The woman hitched her skirt up as far as possible and tucked the packet into her stockings. Beckett, looking very solemn, said: ‘So, Madame, do you put everything in your stockings?’ Then, after a silence, he added enquiringly: ‘Even your legs?’

  Beckett on the Joyces

  On James Joyce

  Samuel Beckett I was introduced to Joyce by Tom MacGreevy. He was very friendly - immediately, to the best of my recollection. I remember coming back very exhausted to the Ecole Normale and, as usual, the door was closed and I climbed over the railings. I remember that: coming back from my first meeting with Joyce. I remember walking back. And from then on we saw each other quite often. I can still remember his telephone number! He was living near the Ecole Militaire. I used to come down sometimes in the morning from the Ecole Normale to the concierge and he used to say ‘Monsieur Joyce a téléphoné et il vous demande de vous mettre en rapport avec lui’. [Mr Joyce telephoned and wants you to get in touch with him.] And I remember the concierge, he was a southerner. He used to say ‘Ségur quatre-vingt-quinze vingt’ [pronounced ‘vent’]. And it was always to do with going for a walk or going for dinner. I remember a memorable walk on the ‘Ile des Cygnes’ [The Isle of Swans, the island on the Seine] with Joyce. And then he’d start his ‘tippling’. And we’d have an appointment with Nora at Fouquet’s. And there was another one we used to go to at that time, not Fouquet’s. Léon’s or some such place. No, that was later, another time. It was there I remember meeting [Ezra] Pound with Joyce in that restaurant.

  James Joyce in the 1930s.

  I was very flattered when Joyce dropped the ‘Mister’. Everybody was ‘Mister’. There were no Christian names, no first names. The nearest you would get to a friendly name was to drop the ‘Mister’. I was never ‘Sam’. I was always ‘Beckett’ at the best. We’d drink in any old pub or café. I don’t remember which. He was very friendly. He dictated some pages of Finnegans Wake to me at one stage. That was later on when he was living in that flat. And during the dictation, someone knocked at the door and I said something. I had to interrupt the dictation. But it had nothing to do with the text. And when I read it back with the phrase like ‘Come in’ in it, he said ‘Let it stand’.

  We shared our … [common background]. He was at the National University, of course, and I was at Trinity - but we both took degrees in French and Italian. So that was common ground. It was at his suggestion that I wrote ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico … Joyce’ because of my Italian. And I spent a lot of time reading Bruno and Vico in the magnificent library, the Bibliothèque of the Ecole Normale. We must have had some talk about the ‘Eternal Return’, that sort of thing. He liked the essay. But his only comment was that there wasn’t enough about Bruno; he found Bruno rather neglected. Bruno and Vico were new figures for me. I hadn’t read them. I’d worked on Dante, of course [at Trinity College, Dublin]. And we did talk about Dante. But I knew very little of them. I knew more or less what they were about. I remember I read a biography of one of them. I can’t remember which.

  I remember going to see Joyce in the hospital. H
e was lying on the bed, putting drops in his operated eye. I don’t remember having read to him though. I used to go there in the evening sometimes, when he had dinner at home. It was at the later stage when he was living in the little impasse off the long street. There wasn’t a lot of conversation between us. I was a young man, very devoted to him, and he liked me. And he used to call on me if he needed something. For instance, someone to walk with him before dinner.

  He was a great exploiter. Not perhaps an exploiter of his friends. In the Adrienne Monnier book, it’s told how we did the translation of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’, [Alfred] Péron and I. And Joyce liked it. But he organised a committee of five, which used to meet in [Paul] Léon’s house to revise it, including Adrienne Monnier (who was quite unqualified) so that he could talk about his septante, those five and Péron and myself. Why he wanted to talk about his septante devoted to him I don’t know. I remember at Adrienne Monnier’s a reading of our fragment of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’, Péron’s and mine, as corrected, so-called, by the Joyce clan. But there was a reading of this with Joyce in Adrienne’s bookshop, a public reading. I remember being there and Joyce was there; [Philippe] Soupault read it, I think.

  And I brought him home drunk one night, but I won’t go into that! [He drank a lot] but in the evenings only. I remember a party. He was a great man for anniversaries. Every year he would celebrate his father’s anniversary, ‘Father forsaken, forgive thy son’. On that occasion he would give me a note, in francs. I don’t know how many francs it would be. A note. To give to some poor down-and-out in memory of his father. Towards the end of the year, in December, the date of his father’s birth was celebrated or commemorated every year and I was given on several occasions, when I was available, this note to give to some down-and-out in memory of his father. [Recites his own version of Joyce’s moving poem ‘Ecce Puer’ on the death of Joyce’s father and the birth of his grandson, Stephen]: ‘New life is breathed upon the glass etc.’

  It’s a poem of Joyce. It’s not in Pomes Pennyeach. I don’t know where it will be. It’s part of a longer poem but I remember the verse, ‘A child is born. An old man gone’. When his father died, he was very upset.

  I played the piano once at the Joyces’. I forget what I played. But he, when he had enough taken, at these ‘at home’ parties, receptions at home, with various friends, he would sit down at the piano and, accompanying himself, sing, with his marvellous remains of a tenor voice [sings]:

  Bid adieu, adieu, adieu

  Bid adieu to girlish days.

  I remember myself accompanying Giorgio. When he was living with Helen. I remember accompanying him - in what? Ah yes. [Then he sings part of Schubert’s Lieder, An die Musik.] Oh, by the way, I’ve found the name of the street where Joyce lived when I first met him in Paris. Yes, it’s a little street off the rue de Grenelle; this goes from the Latin Quarter to the Avenue Bosquet near the Ecole Militaire. It goes through the … And just before it comes to the end of the rue de Grenelle near the Avenue Bosquet, before it ‘débouches’ on the Avenue Bosquet, there’s a little street on the right-hand side. It was an impasse in those days. It still exists but it’s a square. The Square Robiac. I remember it as an impasse. You go in to the right off the rue de Grenelle. It was very short. And on the right-hand side was the house where Joyce had his flat.

  I admired Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There was something about it. The end - when he is so self-sufficient at the end. He got pompous about his vocation and his function in life. That was the improved version; he reworked it.

  On His Debt to Joyce

  Beckett to James Knowlson It was Maurice Nadeau who said it was an influence ab contrario. I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, 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, subtracting rather than adding. When I first met Joyce, I didn’t intend to be a writer. That only came later when I found out that I was no good at all at teaching. When I found I simply couldn’t teach. But I do remember speaking about Joyce’s heroic achievement. I had a great admiration for him. That’s what it was: epic, heroic, what he achieved. I realized that I couldn’t go down that same road.

  Beckett to Martin Esslin [On being asked by Esslin, ‘Are you influenced by Joyce?’ Beckett replied] ‘Not really, except that his seriousness and dedication to his art influenced me. But’, he added, ‘we are diametrically opposite because Joyce was a synthesizer, he wanted to put everything, the whole of human culture, into one or two books, and I am an analyser. I take away all the accidentals because I want to come down to the bedrock of the essentials, the archetypal’.* And that is exactly what the clown/tramp [in Waiting for Godot] is. The clown is not an allegorical figure but is a man who hasn’t got any possessions and can’t be defined by the fact that he runs a Mercedes car. In other words, if you take away all the unimportant accidentals, you come to a human figure that is completely real but at the same time not encumbered by any sort of accidentals. Whether somebody has got a nice suit or not a nice suit has nothing to do with his essential soul. And therefore if you put him into a tramp’s clothes, people don’t think about the suit.

  Joyce, Giorgio, Lucia and Nora in the 1920s.

  Beckett to Duncan Scott: Comparing his way of working with that of James Joyce, whose method he called accretion, he said ‘Joyce was a greedy writer’.†

  On Nora Joyce (née Barnacle) and the son, Giorgio

  Samuel Beckett to James Knowlson Nora was in many ways distant, you know. She wasn’t interested in the work at all. There’s a book on her. [Brenda Maddox’s Nora. The Biography of Nora Joyce which we know Beckett read.] But I liked Nora. She was an extraordinary woman.

  Giorgio was a baritone; he had a good voice. I liked him very much. He married that woman, Helen Fleischmann. She had lots of money; very wealthy. I saw a lot of Giorgio. I used to go out with him and I used to go to the house near the Ecole Militaire. I remember he had an audition somewhere but was turned down. In England, I think.

  On Lucia Joyce

  Lucia was there [when I went to see her father], already very disturbed mentally. Sometimes she was perfectly normal. I had to tell her finally that I went to the house not to see her, but to see Joyce. Joyce was my interest. And, according to some accounts, Joyce was very upset. What the bloody hell is the book I’ve been reading? I think it was in the book on Adrienne Monnier.* And, according to that, my relationship with Joyce was poisoned at that stage. I used to go out to see her in that place where Artaud was [at Ivry] and Joyce used to go to see her too. And we used to walk, when she was perfectly normal. And then she had these crazy spells. I never saw her in them though. They all understood that she was incurable. But Joyce could never agree with them. He was all for trying different treatments, with Jung and so on.

  Lucia Joyce in the early 1930s.

  She was very good-looking. She had a slight squint but she was still very attractive. And I remember seeing her dance - at the Bal Bullier. She danced in a dancing competition at the old Bal Bullier. We all met afterwards at the Closerie des Lilas, including Joyce and the whole family. She was very gifted as a dancer.

  [Joyce in Vichy in 1940] I think there was some sort of problem with his passport or visa, I think it was. He was very anxious about Lucia as well. She had been moved from the hospital at Ivry, to somewhere down south, near Toulouse I think it was. You know Joyce was the only one who believed she could be cured. Everyone else had written her off. Giorgio thought she was mad and nothing at all could be done for her. Joyce tried so often to get her help - he was the one who got her to see Jung at the Tavistock Clinic. It’s possible I think that Jung had her in mind at the lecture I went to in London when he spoke about the girl ‘who had never really been born’. She would suddenly get violent. When I used to visit her in Ivry, we would go for a walk in the gardens. Everythi
ng would be calm and peaceful and all of a sudden she would become extraordinarily violent and aggressive.

  On Paul Léon

  I remember Paul Léon [Joyce’s amanuensis] very well. I used to call on them [Paul and Lucie Léon]. You know when Joyce left Paris in 1940, Léon did too. And I was told that he was advised very strongly by the Jolases, who had a school near Vichy, not to return to Paris. But he was so concerned with his son’s baccalauréat or something that, against all advice, he returned to Paris and was arrested.

  Paul Léon used to go to Fouquet’s. He didn’t join the Joyce table, because he would sit on his own at a nearby table and have his meal and say goodbye and go. But he did all the dirty work for Joyce. He was his secretary. Léon was an enormous help to Joyce. It was he who collected the books Joyce left behind; he collected all the materials, the papers and so on and eventually gave them to the National Library in Dublin with an injunction not to open them for i00 years or something like that. They could tell you all about that in Dublin. I liked Paul. He was a nice man.

  Paul Léon in the late 1930s.

  Trinity College, Dublin*

  ‘I don’t want to be a professor (it’s almost a pleasure to contemplate the mess of this job).’†

  Robert Burkitt I fear that my memories of Sam Beckett are very inadequate. It is not that I don’t remember his lectures - I remember them extremely well and can still see his tall, lean frame, leaning rather nonchalantly against the wall as he gave his lectures - in very informal attire, but with a gown, which was of course obligatory in those days. I rather think he only lectured to us for one year and I am ashamed to say that I have no recollection as to the writers on whom he lectured or on the sort of information that he imparted. All I can remember was that he didn’t take the whole thing very seriously, and we didn’t either. They were in the form of personal opinions and friendly chats rather than formal lectures.