Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett Read online

  Meta Buttnick (née Bloom) I recall Samuel Beckett’s lectures very well. He lectured on Racine. I especially remember his talks on Phèdre, how her appearance engenders a sense of darkness. I have quoted many times how he said you can never quantify how a human being will react. You can put a bunch of tongs in the fire and they will all turn red. Ten human beings faced with a situation will react in different and unexpected ways. As he said, ‘we do not know what a human being is made of.’ My memories of him as a lecturer are that he was brilliant and interesting. A listener could develop a whole treatise from one of his sessions. I remember Ruddy [their Professor, Thomas Brown Rudmose-Brown] standing with us after an examination, saying that Beckett had written ‘a laconic letter’ saying that he was not returning next term [the spring term, 1932] ‘telling nothing else, where he was going or what he was going to do’.

  Evelyn Nora Goodbody (née Strong) The authors Beckett lectured on were André Gide, Maurice Barrès, François Mauriac, and of course his great love, Proust. He talked of D. H. Lawrence, Lafcadio Hearne, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer - strangely I don’t think he ever spoke of Joyce. I only knew him as a lecturer but have always heard and talked about him to my friends, the Sinclair family [Cissie Sinclair was Beckett’s aunt]. His dislike of lecturing to us was almost tangible but when he warmed to his subject he was really inspiring. Here I’ll add my personal feeling at the risk of your finding me rather tiresome. To me the thoughts he expressed were so new, so unusual and so different to any I had heard before that I felt this is a new sort of mind, I’m really in the presence of someone outstanding. Now I’m sure you will think - easy to say that now when his fame is worldwide.

  Sheila Jones (née Dobbs) I think Sam Beckett was there only for one term, perhaps two. He gave one the impression of being a tall thin streak of misery - standing in front of the fireplace, leaning against the mantelpiece, a large lock of hair falling down on his forehead. He hardly ever looked up at us. The term he was missing, I asked ‘Where’s our Sam?’ Someone replied: ‘Gone to Paris to commit suicide.’

  Mary A. McCormick (née Arabin Jones) Sam Beckett was not a good lecturer - in fact even the most earnest and serious students found him boring … My first memory of him is of a tall, gaunt, bespectacled, pock-marked man gazing out of the window into the New Square. I can only remember his lectures on Proust and I wish I had been more attentive then as for a long time I have been very interested. I remember him drawing diagrams on a blackboard and saying ‘The Proustian equation is not a simple one’ etc.* Once I plucked up courage and asked him the meaning of the word ‘persiflage’ and he translated it in such a convoluted fashion that I was completely confused. I can’t have been the only student who was so baffled, as soon afterwards in the Valentine edition of the T.C.D. magazine there was one addressed to him with the quotation ‘I wish you would explain your explanations’. I haven’t any notes of his lectures, am afraid that all thought him rather odd, and I know how he despised us all and that wouldn’t make him an inspiring lecturer. On one occasion he told one of his really very intelligent students that if she weren’t interested and continued to read novels throughout his lectures she might as well leave the room. Things were different in those days!

  Elliseva Sayers Sam always fascinated me, rather than the stuff he taught. I wondered about him. He was so unlike the other teachers or lecturers as they were called. As I was about nineteen then, and understood little or nothing of the subjects he talked about - more like rambled on about, to us, anyway - except that it was way above our heads - he was like in the clouds, did not look at us or address any of us but appeared to be talking to himself. Our (or rather my) thoughts were more the romantic kind - he was tall, handsome, mysterious - so I imagined having personal conversations with him in which he explained himself or whatever susceptible nineteen-year-olds think. Anyway, when we lunched in Paris at the Closerie des Lilas in the 1950s, I asked him about it. He said he was terrified of us and didn’t himself know what he was talking about - as if he were in a trance of some kind - it looked that way … Beckett lectured on Proust, which I tried to read and understand, but though I am told I was a good student, I could not summon up much interest in him.

  Dorothy Scott (née Pearse) My very hazy recollection of him is of a very quiet, possibly almost shy young man, perhaps even not altogether completely happy in his role of ‘teacher’. As we got on with our work, he would stand facing out of the window that was beside his desk, as if perhaps deep in thought - as no doubt he was. Naturally I had no idea, then, of the genius that was inside him, and even though I was so unsuccessful [she failed her French exams], I feel proud, now, to think that I had actually been in his class. As far as books on the course are concerned, I can only recall one - Balzac - but what it was called, or what it contained, I can no long remember.

  I felt rather sorry to think that my term with him was his last as a Trinity lecturer. It would be a sad thought, wondering if we could really have been so bad, that he wanted to leave. Trinity was such a happy and delightful place really - a little world of its own - that it is hard to imagine anyone not being happy there.

  Emily Skillen (née Lisney) Yes, I attended Samuel Beckett’s lectures but do not recall specific authors on which he lectured, but remember being fascinated by his ideas, especially his idea of ‘motion in a stasis’ which I suggest is the main theme of his plays in line with ancient mystery plays and Greek drama - to hold an admonitory mirror up to people in every walk of life. So many lives are merely a minimum of motion in a moribund stasis.

  Jesse Forbes Yates (née Brown) I attended Samuel Beckett’s lectures and the only author I can remember is Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey with which he seemed obsessed and made us translate into French. He was such a dull lecturer and such a dull man, as he thought himself too good for the job and held his students in contempt. The only thing which roused us from our somnolent lethargy was when he set himself on fire by letting the sleeve of his gown drop into the open fire when he was leaning his fevered brow on the marble fireplace.

  Moira Symons (née Neill) Sam Beckett wasn’t with us for very long, as far as I remember. I do not remember a thing about what he lectured on. But one thing came across very clearly: that he hated the job. I can see his face now in the classroom. We had a saying that ‘he despised us with the utmost despision’.

  RachelBurrows (née Dobbin) Professor Rudmose-Brown had such admiration for his junior lecturer that he gave him his lectures on Racine, which he usually took himself. Beckett shared his liking for Racine and his dislike for the heroics of Corneille. I remember so well his search for the subconscious in Racine, his pinpointing the solitary nature of every human being. In his essay on Proust, which began, ‘the Proustian equation is never simple,’ he said, ‘We are alone. We cannot know and we cannot be known,’ a theory which could be applied to his own work. But in those days, you see, we didn’t think of Beckett as a writer … I don’t believe any of our year knew him well, except perhaps Leslie Daiken [Yodaiken], who wrote to me shortly before he died saying, ‘Sam is in London. We are having great fun.’ Seems an odd word to use in connection with Sam Beckett. He seldom smiled. His Valentine in T.C.D. [college magazine], February 1931,reads as follows: ‘An exhausted aesthete who all life’s strange poisonous wines has sipped and found them rather tedious.’ He was a very impersonal lecturer. He said what he had to say and then left the lecture room. But he was very courteous and always willing to elucidate a point, if anyone had the courage to ask him a question.

  I believe he considered himself a bad lecturer and that makes me sad because he was so good. Many of his students would, unfortunately, agree with him, and they made little effort to try and understand him … This may have been why we so seldom saw the genial side of his personality. He probably felt that we were as bored with him as he was with us. In my case, it was far from the truth. Looking back, I’m glad, as young as I was, I was just nineteen, I was aware that here was a brilliant mind. Here was
exciting material that could not be found in a book …

  He had an odd delivery. He would make long pauses between phrases, or very often pause in the wrong place, after a word, which might make you lose the thread of his thought … In lecturing, some people like Beckett are creating as they go along. Suddenly he would come up with something better than what he’d been going to say … People would say he couldn’t teach, but he even got down to the nitty-gritty of showing us how to write an essay on the lesson, with proper headings. He was really trying to help us pass the exam. And this is what people will not give the man credit for.*

  Grace West (née McKinley) My years at Trinity College were from 1928 to 1932 so I was one of a class in 1931 taught by Samuel Beckett and I remember him with admiration. We were a small class, I think, perhaps ten to fifteen (the memory dims!) and 1931 was within a year of Moderatorship, so we regarded his lectures very seriously and recognized a very original mind. As far as I can recall, he lectured entirely without notes, which impressed us greatly, so it is sad to think that he considered himself a failure as a teacher at that time. I think I particularly enjoyed his lectures on Racine but he also dealt with twentieth-century French Poetry and the Novel.

  Grace West (seated on the left) with a group of Trinity College, Dublin students, 1930-1.

  He seemed a sad young man - almost depressed - and it was rumoured that this was due to an unhappy love affair. I believe none of us knew him personally as a man or were aware of his home background. We knew he had just returned from the Ecole Normale and would have been aged twenty-five and had written his short book on Proust, a copy of which I possessed much later when I had moved to England.

  There was something unique about Beckett. He lectured to us in a mixture of English and French. I loved his lectures on Racine. [See Appendix for extracts from Mrs. West’s unpublished notes.] He was always talking about Dostoievsky, ‘Crime and Punishment’. I once said to Leslie Daiken that there are one or two phrases of Beckett that I remember so well. One of his favourite phrases was ‘Phèdre is bathed in white light’. I think that is a wonderful phrase. It was a dark play. And all of the lightis on the front of the stage. Beckett seemed very conscious of lighting. He had a very acute sense of dramatic effects. Leslie Daiken could remember most clearly Beckett’s thoughts on Rimbaud and Verlaine: ‘Rimbaud harpooned his similes, but Verlaine netted his.’

  I also remember that he lectured to us on Balzac and I have notes on his lectures on Balzac. I also seem to remember that he lectured on Stendhal but I don’t seem to have those notes … With Beckett’s lectures, it always seemed to be winter and his gloom matched the weather!*

  Beckett on Jack B. Yeats

  Samuel Beckett I knew Jack Yeats well. I had two pictures by him. I gave one to Jack MacGowran and Edward [Beckett, his nephew] has the other. [This picture is now in the Jack B. Yeats collection of the National Gallery of Ireland.] Of course, I lost touch with him for six years during the war years. I used to go to his ‘at homes’ in Fitzwilliam Square. You used to go up there, and he was very hospitable. His wife never appeared. And he’d greet you in his studio. Tom MacGreevy would often come. He was very close to him, Tom MacGreevy. He was with him when he died in the Portobello Nursing Home, the Private Nursing Home. And he would go behind a sort of screen and bring out a painting and put it on the easel for me or anyone to look at. And then he would produce some sherry I think it was. I remember the gesture he used when he served the sherry. Then he would squeeze a lemon with a gesture of his hand. We used to go for walks, through the Park. We didn’t talk much. I didn’t admire his writing too much. He had one play at the Abbey. What was it called? In Sand, that’s it.

  But his paintings were wonderful. He said he was completely impervious to influence. I think he thought he was the only painter. He said all the painting must have some ‘ginger of life’ in it. He was detached … He was very Republican. And he didn’t at all agree with his brother’s [W. B. Yeats] attitude in 1916, when the rebellion broke down. He was exclusively Republic. He broke up indefinitely with his brother, with whom he had never been close. He dismissed all that senatorial activity. He used to go off with [John Millington] Synge, you know. They got permission to go to the North for a tour. He was always polishing up his Irish.

  Jack Yeats at his easel, 1950.

  I would make an appointment to go for a drive or for a walk. We’d drive out to a park and leave the car. Then we’d walk. To Leixlip or somewhere. Then have a meal together and then walk back. Then I’d drive him back along the quays.

  I was in Ireland just before the war, seeing my mother, about 1939 [probably 1936]. It was at that period that I bought the painting Sligo Morning for 20 pounds [30 pounds] I think. And I paid him in instalments. Then six years later after the war, on my return to see my mother, I again contacted him and bought the second painting, Regatta Evening, for 40 pounds! I had it with me in Saint-Leo [after the war when he went as a storekeeper and interpreter with the Irish Red Cross Hospital], hanging on the wall.

  Francis Stuart* on Beckett

  Francis Stuart.

  Francis Stuart I knew Beckett when he was on the staff of Trinity College [in 1930-1]. I had come down from Antrim. I hadn’t published anything; nor had Beckett. We were both from Protestant backgrounds, although I had become a Catholic when I married, which I did when I was very young. We were both awkward, as I remember, Sam Beckett and I. We used to go to this pub, Davy Byrne’s. There was a back room there which we used to go to. When I say ‘we’, there was a varying collection of would-be writers I think, mostly, and what in those days were called ‘bohemians’, I suppose, and people who weren’t really writers, sort of hangers-on to the arts. Some were quite wealthy people, actually. There was Cecil Salkeld and ‘Con’ Leventhal, who, later on, was a close friend of Beckett’s. I was very uncouth. I don’t know if Beckett was uncouth but he felt ‘out of it’ and that brought us together.

  I remember he used to have a ploy, which I didn’t have. He would ask one of the girls for a pair of nail scissors and then he would be doing his nails, which gave distance to him. I would sit, miles from anyone, more awkward than he. He never missed anything but he was doing something, you know, and that struck me as … [rather odd]. And there was another funny thing I remember. We had a game: whoever could stick a stamp highest on the wall got a free round of drinks or something like that. Beckett was tall, but he wasn’t the tallest. We had a heavyweight boxer in Ireland called Jack Doyle who used to come there.* I knew him quite well. He was from Cork. He was one of the Irish … not quite a stage Irishman but with a sort of panache about him. I think he got friendly with the then Prince of Wales, who became Edward VIII. He moved in those circles. But he didn’t train. In his first fight he knocked out quite a good English heavyweight, but then he didn’t train. Anyway, he was there with us and it was a foregone conclusion that he would put the thing [highest] and when he came, he put his stamp, of course, beyond our reach. The rule was that you couldn’t take your feet off the ground, naturally, so when it came to Beckett’s turn, Beckett put a stamp just higher than Jack Doyle’s and yet we never saw how he did it; he was so lithe, reaching up. He was very athletic.

  I also saw Beckett in Paris. I went to Paris with the typescript of my first novel, which I had also left with Cape [his publisher] to read.* I met Tom MacGreevy there, whom I knew already - well I knew Beckett, too, already and we used to meet in the Café Dome at teatime and I remember how we walked back, towards evening, to the Closerie des Lilas, which is very fashionable and expensive now, but it wasn’t then. It was a bistro. It’s surprising how it came [into fashion]. Now it’s only a wealthy tourist haunt. So we’d go along the Boulevard Montparnasse and I always remember the way we’d stop, Beckett would stop, for some messages and he’d buy two ounces of cheese in a little charcuterie, presumably for his supper. And then we’d go on to the Closerie des Lilas and have a last drink and Beckett would say ‘Goodnight’ and disappear up towards his [lo
dgings] - I never knew exactly where he lived. I used to see MacGreevy more.

  Then, much later, during the war, I was living in Berlin and Sam Beckett was in occupied Paris. We couldn’t write home, at least I couldn’t write home. I imagine Beckett couldn’t have written home, I don’t know, but we could write to each other. And he wrote to me a long letter which very unfortunately disappeared under strange circumstances. Among other things, he said, ‘I’ve nearly finished a novel, that is to say, I’ve written the first chapter.’ I understand that as a novelist myself, if I’ve written a chapter which I’m not going to tear up, which I consider is two-thirds of the way there. I don’t know what novel it could have been [the novel was Watt]. I treasured this letter and when we left Paris, that is myself and my late wife - although we were not married then - in the early ‘50s I should think, I left a lot of stuff with my French publisher, who had offices in the rue Jacob and who had a lot of space to store books and manuscripts and so on, and I left this letter.† We moved to London. When I went back to Paris and went to see him, he had no recollection of this at all. I said, ‘Well, will you have a search made of your cellars or archives?’ and I don’t know whether he did or didn’t but nothing came up. Quite a long time later, when I told the story to Geoffrey Elborn, a close friend of mine, who was writing my biography, he said, ‘I’ll go to Paris’ but he had no more success.* In the course of this letter, Sam Beckett said, ‘When I was walking up to Long Hill’ (that’s a long hill going down to where I lived in Ireland) ‘I saw you coming down in your car’, but he didn’t even stop me, you know. It must have been shortly before the war. Then there was the war and our paths diverged.