Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett

Praise for Damned to Fame

‘Throughout Knowlson’s 900 pages one senses Beckett at his shoulder, keeping him on the qui vive for nothing but the truth … Knowlson had – and shares with us – the unique benefits of in-depth interviews with his subject over the last five months of his life, plus detailed introductions and access to virtually all existing source materials.’

Michael Horovitz, Mail on Sunday.

‘James Knowlson’s biography of Beckett is as complete and clinically intimate as we are ever likely to need.’

Brian Morton, Scotland on Sunday.

‘The Knowlson version is a formidable work of scholarship and documentation which seems unlikely ever to be superseded, the equivalent of Ellmann on Joyce.’

David Sexton, Spectator.

‘Knowlson has provided an account of Beckett’s life that will not be superseded in our time.… His account of the betrayal of the resistance network in which Beckett was active by a venal and lecherous Catholic priest in 1942 is almost as gripping as John Le Carré or Robert Harris, with the extra frisson that this was for real. Beckett came within an ace of capture and deportation.’

John Fletcher, New Statesman.

‘Knowlson is able to strip away some of the Krapp-like austerity of Beckett’s image and reputation … He is particularly good on the visual side of Beckett’s stagework.’

Steve Grant, Time Out.

‘Knowlson has assembled the huge mass of information into a coherent and engrossing narrative, rich in detail.’

Gerry Dukes, Irish Times.

‘Knowlson has written a fine and wonderfully readable biography, essential for true Beckett fans.’

Ronan Farren, Irish Sunday Independent.

‘Damned to Fame is a magnificent biography.’

J.D. O’Hara, New York Times.

‘Damned to Fame immediately becomes the single basic source for anyone interested in Samuel Beckett’s life and career.’

Michael Dirda, Washington Post.

‘James Knowlson’s study of Samuel Beckett is a heroic enterprise of literary biography, an exhilarating assault on a craggy, enigmatic genius.’

Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle.

‘An exhaustive and loving work; it tells you as much as anyone can about Samuel Beckett.’

Edward Albee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Three Tall Women.

‘Brilliant and engrossing, this examination of Beckett’s life fulfils biography’s highest aim; it enriches our understanding of his life and work.’

Brian Moore, author of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and The Statement.

‘James Knowlson has written an absolutely brilliant, intelligent, sensitive, meticulous and – yes – affectionate book that corrects many mistakes, misunderstandings, misreadings about the life and work of Samuel Beckett.’

Raymond Federman, Melodia E. Jones Distinguished Professor of Literature, State University of New York at Buffalo.

‘Damned to Fame is a sensitive appreciation of a rare individual and a unique oeuvre. With scrupulous scholarship, James Knowlson depicts the foreground and background of Samuel Beckett’s writing. Knowlson surrounds Beckett’s dogged lessness with exceptionally rich moreness.’

Ruby Cohn, Professor Emerita of Comparative Drama, University of California, Davis.

FOR ELIZABETH

I

A Bible-reading man, he came and left

between two holy days he didn’t much observe:

the Good Friday of his birth, near the Christmas of his death.

His life between, a pilgrim’s progress with a smile

for what he saw along the way and wrote of,

oversleeping, age and hope and sloth.

Then saw, and wrote of, wrenched along the way,

age and hope and helpless weeping. But

he would have, reading those two states, rejected both

as most remotely holding but one part

or more than minute dose

of the inexpressible, whole truth

of how it is, it was.

II

He showed the shortest way to get across

a line like this:

crossed out such words as these to get to

speechlessness.

He crossed out rivers to get to their stones.

To get to the bottom, when the crisis is reached

and truth-telling begins.

Whatever he knew he knew to music.

He found the pace for misery,

matched distress to syncope, and joke

to a Beethoven stop at the punch line.

But thought that he’d failed to find failure’s pulse.

What that says about failure,

music, and us.

From ‘The Uses of Poetry’ in Offshore by Anne Atik

(Enitharmon Press, London, 1992)

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

1 Images of Childhood 1906–15

2 Schooldays 1915–23

3 The Growth of a Mind 1923–6

4 Academic Success and Love 1927–8

5 The Paris Years 1928–30

6 Academe: Return and Flight 1930–1

7 Dream of Fair to Middling Women 1932–3

8 The London Years 1933–5

9 Murphy 1934–6

10 Germany: The Unknown Diaries 1936–7

11 A Permanent Home 1937–9

12 Exodus, Occupation and Resistance 1940–2

13 Refuge in Roussillon 1942–5

14 Aftermath of War 1945–6

15 ‘A Frenzy of Writing’ 1946–53

16 Godot, Love and Loss 1953–5

17 Impasse and Depression 1956–8

18 Censorship and How It Is 1958–60

19 Secret Wedding and Happy Days 1960–3

20 ‘Theatre theatre theatre’ 1964–7

21 Accident, Illness, and ‘Catastrophe’ 1967–9

22 Vision Restored 1970–4

23 Shades 1975–7

24 Politics and Company 1977–9

25 ‘Fail better’ 1979–82

26 Winter Journey 1983–9

Acknowledgements

Image Section

Bibliography

Notes

List of illustrations

Also by James Knowlson

Preface

This biography of Samuel Beckett could be said to have started its life twenty-five years ago. Organising an exhibition to honour Beckett’s work after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and founding the Beckett Archive in the University of Reading, I met Beckett and got to know him – increasingly well over the years. As early as 1972, an American publisher invited me to write his biography. I declined when Beckett indicated that he would prefer me not to do this. He always hoped that it would be his work rather than his life that was placed under the microscope. So, over the next two decades, fascinated by his writing and particularly by his stage and television plays, I went on to write about that work, corresponding with him regularly and meeting him many times every year. In the meantime, a first biography was written by Deirdre Bair, which was published in 1978.

Approached again about writing his biography in 1989, I wrote to Beckett saying that this time too I would not proceed without an unambiguous ‘yes’ from him. He replied with a one line note: ‘To biography of me by you it’s Yes’. When we met to discuss this, he told me that he regarded his life as separate from his work but that, since someone else would certainly be commissioned to write a new biography, he had decided to cooperate very fully with me, expressing satisfaction that his biographer would at least be someone who knew his work well. Finally, he wrote formally to my publisher that this was to be ‘his sole authorized biography’ and pledged his active support. For five months we had weekly interviews and he provided me with letters of support, many names and addresses, and other vital sources of information. He allowed me to visit his cottage in Ussy and work in his study at 38 Boulevard Saint-Jacques. Generously, as well as self-protectingly, he wrote that he did not want the book to be published until after his death and that of his wife, ‘because it will give you more freedom’. Sadly, he died six months after I began research on the book.

Since then, no attempt has been made to censor or change what I have written. If the book is authorized, then, it is certainly not sanitized. His heirs, Edward and Caroline Beckett and his literary executor and publisher, Jérôme Lindon, kindly continued the help that Beckett gave by lending me his student notes, a 1931–2 workbook, the notes that he made in the mid 1930s on his readings in philosophy, psychology, and literature, his appointment books from 1964 to 1986, many family photographs, and some material related to his work with the French Resistance. This was in addition to the scores of manuscripts and notebooks that Beckett had already donated to the Beckett Archive in Reading – now a charitable trust, the Beckett International Foundation – which were, of course, close at hand. The most exciting major new source, however, for chapter ten of this biography, was discovered by Edward Beckett in a trunk in Beckett’s cellar after the writer’s death. It consists of six long, tightly written notebooks of a detailed diary that Beckett kept of his travels in Germany in 1936–7.

Beckett kept scarcely any of the thousands of letters addressed to him. But his friends, with only two or three exceptions, made his letters to them available to me and, with his encouragement, talked to me freely in more than a hundred interviews. So, as some measure of compensation for the absence of friends who had died in the period between the earlier biography and my own, I have had access to many more private letters and documents, as well as to correspondences only recently acquired by libraries (Alan Schneider’s at Boston College, A. J. Leventhal’s and Ethna MacCarthy’s and Kay Boyle’s at the Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, Nick Rawson’s at Trinity College, Dublin) and to the vast archive of Les Editions de Minuit. Believing that important issues have so far been passed over somewhat hastily, I have also used the major correspondence between Beckett and his friend and confidant, Tom MacGreevy, rather differently from his earlier biographer, focussing on its relevance to his work.

Access to another major source of information helped to soften the blow that Beckett’s death represented for me as his biographer. In the early 1960s, Beckett was friendly with an American professor of French and Italian, Lawrence Harvey. Harvey talked long into the night with Beckett on dozens of occasions about his life and his beliefs for his book, Samuel Beckett Poet and Critic, and for a potential biography. Harvey took detailed notes on all his conversations and his widow, Sheila Harvey Tanzer, generously offered me unlimited use of this material. It made a difficult task much easier and I am most grateful to her.

In the first interview with Beckett intended specifically for this book, I said that although I understood perfectly well what he meant when he spoke of a separation between his life and his work, I could not agree that such a separation was as absolute as he claimed. I then quoted some of the images of his childhood in Ireland that appear often in his work, even in his late prose texts: a man and a boy walking hand in hand over the mountains; a larch tree turning green every year a week before the others; the sounds of the stone cutters chipping away in the hills above his home. Dozens of such images could be cited, I maintained, which bridge his life and his work. At this point, Beckett nodded in agreement: ‘They’re obsessional,’ he said, and went on to add several others.

In spite of his antipathy towards naturalism in literature, much of his early work quite unsurprisingly draws, like that of many a young writer, from his own personal experiences. But there is a vast difference between the way that such experiences are used and transformed in his earliest work and in his post-Second World War writing. When I look at the relations between his life and his work, I have tried to make my approach respond to such changes, finding sources of inspiration at a much deeper level. In the later period, he does indeed seek to escape from any direct depiction of life by writing himself out of the text, by making the text self-referential, or even, in some cases it would seem, virtually self-generating. Yet life material remains. It is simply located at several removes below the surface. Beckett’s late work seeks to explore the nature of being and is consequently less concerned with the superficial and the transitory. He has often been treated as if he were a cold formalist dealing in abstractions. Yet there is an intense concern in his writing with the physical, the concrete, the here and now. As the Irish novelist John Banville wrote in 1969: ‘Now that the Fifties murk has lifted and the labels – Absurdist, Existentialist, whatnot – have fallen into disuse, we can see how firmly his writings are rooted in the solid, the commonplace … In his work the thing shines. All is immanence, thereness. The moment in Beckett carries an extraordinary weight’ (Observer, 31 December 1969). One of Beckett’s best friends, the painter, Bram van Velde, once said: ‘Beckett never wrote anything that he had not lived.’ By this van Velde was not alluding to simplistic life-work equivalences but, as I am, to experience at a deep level.

This book must speak for itself. I hope, however, to have brought out something new in three areas in particular. The interests of Beckett that have been least explored in the past forty years of Beckett criticism are music and art. I reveal that he was a passionate connoisseur of painting and sculpture and his startling post-Modern images appear to have been influenced by his love of the work of the great masters: Dürer, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Mantegna, Antonello, Giorgione, Blake and Jack B. Yeats. While stressing the radically innovative nature of Beckett’s writing, I have aimed to place it in an artistic as well as a literary continuum.

Beckett has often been labelled ‘apolitical’ and his attitudes have sometimes been misunderstood or misinterpreted. When as an Irishman, he could have been neutral in the Second World War, he chose to join a Resistance cell of the British SOE and won the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française. He was deeply committed to human rights; he firmly and totally opposed apartheid and was hostile from an early age to all forms of racism; he supported human rights movements throughout the world, including Amnesty International and Oxfam; he supported the freedom movement in Eastern Europe; and, although as a foreigner living in France he was wary of having his residential permit withdrawn, he was involved in a number of specific political cases.

Beckett has frequently been regarded as an arch ‘miserabilist’. This seems to me to be a misrepresentation of the man and a distortion of his work. Though he was intense and often depressed, the hundreds of letters from which I quote reveal a Beckett whom his friends knew extremely well: a witty, resilient man whose reflex response to adversity was often humour and the determination to go on. His work was his prime concern and his prime reason for keeping going: weighing every word, balancing every phrase, listening for every false note. This did not prevent him, however, from giving his understanding and undivided attention to his many friends. While devoting a lot of space to his work, I have tried to present the private man more than the public figure: complex, genuinely intellectual, yet dismissive of pretentiousness, self-critical yet tolerant of others, and capable of inspiring deep affection in his friends and admirers.

Beckett would not have wanted to be treated like a saint. And I have not attempted to do so. If my own affection for him shines through this book, it is, at least I hope, counter-balanced by the wish to paint the fuller portrait that he would have expected from me.

Abbreviations

All interviews are conducted by James Knowlson (JK) unless otherwise stated.

GD refers to Beckett’s unpublished German diaries.

NAMES OF PERSONS

Beckett’s letters to the following friends were written in French and I have supplied my own translations:

Avigdor and Anne Arikha (AA), Henri and Josette Hayden (HH), Georges Duthuit, Jérôme Lindon (JL), Jacoba van Velde and, in the case of a few letters, Morris Sinclair.

LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES

MANUSCRIPT AND LETTER SOURCES

I have consulted manuscripts and letters of Samuel Beckett at or from all of the institutions abbreviated above and, in addition, have had access to similar material at: the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet; Bibliothèque Nationale; Bibliothèque Polonaise, Paris; The University of California, San Diego; Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio; Harvard College Library; University of Kansas Libraries, Lawrence, Kansas; National Library of Ireland, Dublin; State University of New York at Buffalo Library; New York Public Library; University College, London Library. Beckett’s friends allowed me to have copies of their letters from him. Those from which I have quoted are attributed in the notes; others, which are not quoted, have still supplied me with much background information.

One

Images of Childhood 1906–15

Samuel Barclay Beckett, who was to become one of the major writers of the twentieth century, was born at Cooldrinagh in Foxrock, County Dublin, on Good Friday, 13 April 1906. There has been a lot of debate as to whether this was or was not the true date of his birth. His birth certificate records the date as 13 May, not April. And his father registered the event on 14 June, a month later, it is argued, than he would, or at least should, have done, if the birth had been in April. So it has been claimed that Beckett deliberately created the myth that he was born on Friday the thirteenth – and a Good Friday at that: a fitting date for someone so conscious of the Easter story and so aware of life as a painful Passion.¹

The truth is much less dramatic. A mistake was clearly made. Everyone who knew Beckett as a child thought of his birthday as being on 13 April. This never changed. But, fortunately, and, surely conclusively, even for those who believe in Beckett’s propensity for myth-making, the birth was announced in the Births and Deaths column of the Irish Times of 16 April 1906, that is, a month before he was officially recorded as having been born. The confusion is ironic, but no more significant than that. One explanation is that his father simply forgot to register the birth, which is by no means impossible; a second is that there was some doubt as to whether the child would survive or not; a third is that the Registrar of Stillorgan District Registry Office wrote down May instead of April by mistake. Beckett himself could throw no light on the reasons for the discrepancy, except to say that he could remember his mother telling him about it as an error when he was a child and to repeat that his birthday had always been celebrated on 13 April.²

More interesting, and far more revealing, is how Beckett spoke about his birth. He claimed to have clear prenatal memories of life within his mother’s womb. The womb is commonly thought of as a sheltered haven, where the foetus is protected from harm. Occasionally, that is how it is reflected in Beckett’s writing: in the poem, ‘Sanies I’, for instance, which looks back to his birth, he writes nostalgically, ‘ah to be back in the caul now with no trusts/no fingers no spoilt love’.³ Yet the memories that, as an adult, he claimed to have of the womb, deriving probably from the period shortly before birth, were associated more often with feelings of being trapped and unable to escape, imprisoned and in pain.⁴

In his writings, Beckett has offered several different versions of his own birth. Characteristically, all of them are imbued with pain: ‘where I was born with a pop with the green of the larches … oh the larches the pain drawn like a cork’.⁵ And the pain is associated not only with the single event of a difficult childbirth, but with the beginning of a long and painful Odyssey. In the fullest account in his late prose text, Company, his father goes off alone on Good Friday morning for a lengthy tramp in the mountains south of Dublin. On that particular day he is inspired, however, not just by his love of walking and wild scenery, but by his general aversion to the ‘pains and general unpleasantness of labour and delivery’.⁶ He carries a flask and a package of his favourite egg sandwiches. At midday, he stops to rest and to relish the sandwiches, gazing out to sea from the summit of a mountain. On his return home at nightfall, he learns from the maid that the labour, which has been in progress for ten hours, is still in full swing. So he walks into the garage and sits in his car, wondering anxiously what can possibly be happening. Eventually, a maid runs out of the house to tell him that it is all over at last. ‘Over!’ comments the narrator of this story ironically.

Although the coincidence of his own birth with Good Friday, the thirteenth, was not created by Beckett, it was assimilated by him into a view of life which sees birth as intimately connected with suffering and death and which sees life as a painful road to be trod.

II

Beckett’s first name, Samuel, came from that of his grandfather on his mother’s side, Samuel Robinson Roe. No one in the family seems to know where his middle name, Barclay, came from. Samuel Roe, a large, jovial man with an enormous beard, was widely respected in the farming community of County Kildare and much revered on the corn exchange in Dublin.⁷

The Roe family can be traced back locally in Leixlip as far as the late seventeenth century.⁸ Several of grandfather Samuel’s forebears appear to have been land surveyors. But his own father was the Reverend Samuel Roe, and one of his brothers was the vicar of Gartree.⁹ Samuel himself became a miller and owned a grain mill, Newbridge Mills, in Celbridge. On the outskirts of Leixlip, he also owned a very grand house, almost a mansion, dating from 1760, with imposing pillars at the front door, a flight of stone steps and a cast-iron balustrade, stables, a large, walled garden and an orchard, overlooking the river Liffey with the famous Salmon Leap (from which Leixlip takes its name) at the foot of its 65 acres of grounds. The house, known locally as Roe Hall, was actually called Cooldrinagh House,¹⁰ a name that comes from the Gaelic and means the ‘back of the blackthorn hedge or copse’.¹¹ So when the man who was to become Samuel Beckett’s father decided to build a substantial house for himself and his bride, May Roe, in 1902 in Foxrock, a fashionable village to the south of Dublin, they named the house after her family home. In the 1870s, when Beckett’s mother was a girl, the family was exceedingly well-to-do and employed many servants and gardeners.¹²

Samuel Robinson Roe’s wife, Anne or Annie, was known to her grandchildren as ‘Little Granny’, in contrast to ‘Big Granny’, who was Beckett’s father’s mother, Frances, née Crothers. Physically, this was apt since, as a family photograph taken about 1910 shows, she was a tiny, frail woman. Born in December 1839,¹³ she was seventy when Beckett was four. After her husband died, she always dressed sombrely and primly in black. She was an extremely devout Christian. Her grandchild, Sheila Page, could remember saying to her once how much she adored chocolates. ‘You shouldn’t love something to eat, my dear,’ answered Little Granny. ‘You should only love God.’¹⁴

It was with the Roe side of the family that Beckett identified a Quaker background, although he descended both on his mother’s and his father’s side from Protestant families living in a mainly Catholic society. Annie Roe survived for several decades after her husband’s death and kept in constant touch with Beckett’s mother. Beckett recalled that ‘she used to come and see us. And actually came to stay in the house – and died in the house. Granny. Little Granny. A little, wizened woman, always embroidering.’¹⁵ Annie Roe also came from a well-to-do Leixlip family called Belas. Her father, George Henry Belas, was a solicitor. She married Samuel Robinson Roe in July 1863.¹⁶ In 1934, when Samuel Beckett was looking for a name with which to sign his pseudonymous article on ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, he chose that of ‘Andrew Belis’, going back three generations on the Roe side.¹⁷

‘Little Granny’ gave birth to a large family. Beckett’s mother, who was christened Maria Jones Roe but was known widely as May, was born on 1 March 1871.¹⁸ She had three older brothers, George Henry (born 1865), John Littledale, born the following year, and Edward Price Roe (born 1869), who was the nearest in age and the closest to her in her affections.¹⁹ In later years, he became the Roe uncle best known to May’s own two children. They called him ‘Uncle Ned’. He was the father of Molly, Sheila and Jack, three cousins who were to play an important part in Beckett’s early life.²⁰ But May also had a sister called Annie Frances (born in 1873) and another called Esther Maiben, who was seven years younger than May.

The death of Samuel Roe, at the age of fifty-four, in Cooldrinagh House on 14 October 1886 dramatically changed the life of Beckett’s mother, May. It has been suggested that, as the daughter of a well-to-do gentleman, she did not need to work and could have confined herself to working for charities, as many gentlewomen did.²¹ Before her father’s death, that would probably have been true. After it, Beckett said it certainly was not.²² Although the Roe family was indeed once wealthy, Samuel’s grain business took a serious downward turn in the early 1880s. When he died, it was believed in the family that he left sizeable debts, although a record in the Index of Wills and Administrations in the National Archives shows that the sum of £17,500 was granted to his solicitors. But this was probably assigned to pay off his creditors, for when his wife, Annie Roe, died in 1924, she left only £130.

His granddaughter, Sheila Page, explained the reversal in the family fortunes by changes that had occurred in the world trade in grain: in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the Americans and Canadians began to export grain in huge quantities to flood a European market that, traditionally, had been the main customer for the grain grown in Ireland. This increased competition and brought down world prices.²³ To this explanation of the Roes’ fall into comparative hard times, Samuel Beckett added that, in order to compete more efficiently,

the old man, Samuel, had just invested a lot of money in new equipment and then he died, leaving quite a numerous family, with my mother not the youngest. I don’t know exactly where she came. But they were left without much money. So, at the age of fifteen, she had to make a living. That’s how she came to be a nurse in the Adelaide Hospital where she met my father. That’s how from the family prosperity they were all brought down.²⁴

May Roe was educated in Ballymena at the Moravian Mission School, where, by all accounts, she was not an easy pupil. Samuel’s somewhat rebellious nature and stubborn streak of independence probably had their source in May’s own mercurial temperament. May seems to have been sent home – whether temporarily or more permanently is not clear from this distance in time – for chatting to a young man over the school wall.²⁵ Such behaviour was not condoned in so strict an environment. And it is most unlikely from what is known of ‘Little Granny’ that her daughter would have received anything other than disapproval and possibly even further punishment when she returned home. As she grew older, May was herself to become extremely strict and demanding.

May grew tall with a long face, large nose and ears and a formidable glare. Even as a young woman she seemed somewhat masculine in appearance. She had an imposing bearing, a regal elegance, and a strong, forceful personality. She suffered fools badly and could be very forthright in her criticisms when she felt that someone was in the wrong. But she had a keen sense of the ridiculous, laughed at her husband’s jokes and was capable herself of the occasional shaft of acerbic wit. She was an eminently practical woman, and, when she married Bill Beckett in 1901, she ran the new Cooldrinagh with ruthless efficiency and a rod of iron. She had ‘a dramatic kind of temperament’²⁶ and a violent temper and used to have fierce arguments with one of her two maids, Mary Foran, when they would shout at each other at the top of their voices in scenes that May’s parlour maid described as ‘holy murder between them’.²⁷ Then she would dismiss Mary, only to take her back a few days later, for her outbursts of temper subsided almost as quickly as they flared up. She also had a genuine strain of unselfishness and kindness, giving practical help to her relatives, visiting sick neighbours or maintaining a friendship with a widow long after the husband, who had been a friend of Bill, had died. Her behaviour seems to have been dominated, however, by a rigid code of conduct and a concept of decorum which promised trouble once her second son started to behave in rather wild, bohemian ways of which she strongly disapproved. She used to have moods of dark depression that would last for days on end, when she was extremely difficult to deal with: ‘strange’, ‘ill-tempered’, ‘bottled up’, ‘tricky’, and ‘difficult’ were among the words used by those trying to convey this side of her personality.²⁸

III

May’s husband, Bill Beckett, also came from a largish family of five boys and one girl. The third child in order of birth, Henry Herbert, called Harry, born in 1880, was hardly ever talked about in the family.²⁹ ‘He wasn’t mentioned. I think I met Harry once,’ said Beckett. ‘A thin grey man. Not a bit like the jovial brothers.’³⁰ But Beckett knew the other members of his father’s family well and, because they stayed in Ireland, they played a far more important part in his life than did the Roe uncles and aunts, who emigrated to Honolulu, Canada, Africa or England and, with the single exception of Edward Price Roe, were scarcely known to him.

The Becketts descended from Huguenot émigrés who came from France probably in the eighteenth century. Beckett’s great-great-grandfather, William, rose rapidly to become head of Richard Atkinson and Company, ‘Poplin Manufacturers to the Queen, Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent, His Excellency the Lord Lieutenant, the Irish Court and the Most Illustrious Order of St Patrick’. From 31 College Green, Dublin, it produced ‘gold and silver tissue poplins for gentlemen’s waistcoats’, ‘brocaded poplin vestings’ and ‘silk for clergymen’s and lawyers’ gowns’.³¹ William Beckett married Elizabeth Hartston. Their son, James, born in 1803, followed his father as a weaver of silk and poplin. He married Eleanor Whitehead in 1826 and had eleven children by her, the first five of whom (four girls and a boy) died as children, two as infants. The family were by this time extremely well-to-do, and had their own family crest with ‘Prodesse Civibus’ (Serve the Citizens) as its motto. The genial, heavily side-burned James was a pillar of Dublin society, so well respected for his integrity that he served for ten years as the secretary of the Liberal Friendly Brothers Society.³²

William Frank Beckett, born in November 1843, was the fourth of Eleanor’s children to survive. William was the grandfather whom Samuel Beckett knew in Ballsbridge when he was a small boy and who used to come to the Foxrock Cooldrinagh from time to time to dine with the family. A Beckett family photograph shows him at sixty, burly in build, with a full beard, looking benign and proud in the presence of his whole family.

Both William and his elder brother, James, became master builders, maintaining the respectable image that the earlier weaver Becketts had established in middle-class Dublin society. In partnership for a long time as ‘J. and W. Beckett Builders’, one of their first big contracts was to build part of the Adelaide Hospital.³³ Later, they constructed several important civic buildings in Dublin, including the National Library of Ireland and the Science and Art Museum (now the National Museum) which still stand imposingly in Kildare Street.³⁴ By the turn of the century, both James and his brother, William, had amassed a considerable amount of money.

The partnership between the two brothers was dissolved, however, soon after the completion of the National Library.³⁵ Then, Beckett’s grandfather, William, went on to concentrate on buying land and building large, impressive houses on it in the city of Dublin and its growing suburbs.³⁶ He handed on many of his professional contacts in the building trade and with architects, as well as his keen business acumen to his first surviving son, Samuel Beckett’s father, Bill, or ‘Willie’ as he was widely known, who was to become a busy and respected quantity surveyor.

Beckett’s grandfather married Frances Crothers. Frances, known as Fannie Beckett, had a sensitive, artistic face with a piercing stare that was inherited by her eldest son and by his sons. She was extremely musical and wrote songs herself, as well as adapting pieces for the piano and setting various poems to music, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar’.³⁷ But she lost three children who died in infancy. It is said that she was shut up with them in strict quarantine while they were ill and dying to prevent the illness from spreading any further.³⁸ After the deaths, she was often found wandering around the streets of Dublin quite distraught and much the worse for whiskey: ‘Do you blame her for being driven to drink after all that?’ Beckett used to ask members of his family.

Grandmother Beckett passed on her musical interests and her talent to two of her children, Gerald and Frances, also known as Fannie, or, more commonly, ‘Cissie’ to distinguish her from her mother. Gerald read medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, and became the county medical officer for Wicklow. He was a talented pianist, who enjoyed playing piano duets with his young nephew, Samuel. Gerald’s son, John (the pianist, conductor of ‘Musica Reservata’ and composer), remembered them playing together:

My father was a good pianist, a very good sight-reader, but also the sort of person who could go to a cinema and hear a song and come back and play it. The piano was in the dining room of our house and he and Sam would play for hours. My father didn’t really approve of Sam’s playing because he used to play the bass part. For the catch is that the bass-player controls the sustaining pedal which must catch sound at the right moment and, even more important, must release it at the right moment, otherwise you get a shambles. And Sam didn’t understand that. This used to offend my father – not that he said anything about it … They would have played what we had in the house. We had volumes of Haydn symphonies, Haydn quartets, Mozart symphonies, Beethoven symphonies and our favourites were arrangements for four hands of the late quartets of Mozart. I remember the oblong volumes, in blue binding; we loved those particularly … I also remember we had a volume of Mozart symphonies, again oblong.³⁹

The daughter, Aunt Cissie, also played the piano well. She loved Mozart and Beethoven sonatas and Chopin’s piano pieces. But she was particularly good at picking out popular music-hall numbers, songs like ‘I feel so funny when the moon comes out’.⁴⁰ She played, mostly by ear, songs chosen from a vast repertoire of Irish and English songs. But she displayed even more talent as an artist and was sent to The Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, where she was a fellow pupil of Beatrice and Dorothy Elvery and Estella Solomons and where she was taught painting by Walter Osborne and William Orpen.⁴¹ Contrary to the wishes of her family, she married a Jewish art dealer, William ‘Boss’ Sinclair, and she and ‘the Boss’ were to play what was probably a crucial part in Beckett’s own early artistic development.

Beckett’s athletic prowess was prefigured in his uncles, ‘the jovial brothers’, Gerald and James, as well as in his father, who won cups for his swimming. Both of his uncles were excellent sportsmen. Gerald played rugby, first for Wesley College, then for Ireland. He was a scratch golfer too, good enough to be captain of the golf club at Greystones. But he seems to have had a relaxed, uncompetitive approach to sport that was similar to that of his nephew. His daughter, Ann, summed up this attitude rather well:

He swam for the love of swimming rather than beating people. Jim was much more competitive than he was. Father was a rather solitary athlete, if you know what I mean. He liked ambling around, walking and playing golf. He used to love coming home from work and going off to the outer nine in the golf links at Greystones just, as he used to say, to knock a ball about for a few hours.⁴²

Gerald was a quiet, thoughtful man with wide-ranging interests for whom Beckett felt a great deal of affection. He had a dry sense of humour and, like Beckett’s own father, had the habit of applying humorous nicknames to local people. He called his young nephew, Samuel, ‘the frog footman’ because of his way of walking with his feet splayed outwards. He was quite irreligious and used to describe life morbidly as ‘a disease of matter’.⁴³

Gerald’s brother, James, was highly competitive and won numerous trophies, cups and medals, which were kept in a display case in their house in Fitzwilliam Place. He

was captain of the Old Wesley [Rugby] team that won the Leinster Cup two years running; he captained the Dublin hospitals against the London hospitals at least twice, played several times for the province of Leinster and later, in the 1920s, was an international referee.⁴⁴

But swimming was his real strength. He represented Ireland at water polo internationally for twenty-five years⁴⁵ and held national records over all distances in the first decade of the century. The 100 yards free-style record which he set in 1909 was not equalled for thirty-five years. Beckett’s close friend, A. J. Leventhal, always known as Con, used to say ‘All the Becketts can either sing or swim.’⁴⁶ James had a wicked sense of humour and used to delight in the ridiculous. Like Gerald, he studied medicine at Trinity College, but went on to become an anaesthetist. Samuel Beckett never felt as close to him as he did to Gerald.⁴⁷

The youngest brother, Howard, was called ‘the Kraken’ by his elder brothers, ‘Poyntz’ by James, and ‘Eyebrows Beckett’ by the younger generation, on account of his very bushy eyebrows. He was far less outgoing than his two sporting brothers (‘He was a loner; he wasn’t the hail fellow-well-met the others were’, commented Beckett)⁴⁸ and was rather looked down on by the other members of the family. He had been in the Ambulance Corps during the First World War and witnessed horrors that were thought to have affected him deeply. Beckett could ‘remember him coming home on leave. Coming to Cooldrinagh in uniform. He had a dreadful time. He was more or less pushed into it, blackmailed into it by the family. To join up.’⁴⁹ Like many young, unmarried men of the time, Howard lived for a long time with his father, the retired building contractor, until he married late and had one son.

Beckett became quite fond of his uncle Howard, who played a distinctive role in developing some of the more intellectual of his own interests when he was in his teens. For Howard was an excellent chess player and acquired a high reputation in Dublin by beating the famous chess grandmaster, José Raúl Capablanca y Graupera, the Cuban diplomat who was world chess champion from 1921 to 1927. This happened during an exhibition match in Dublin, when Capablanca was, admittedly, playing against several opponents at the same time. Nevertheless, it represented a remarkable achievement for a local player. Samuel Beckett, who had been taught to play the game by his brother, Frank, and had quickly become an addict, used to play chess with his uncle when he went to call on his grandfather in Ballsbridge or whenever Howard accompanied his father to Cooldrinagh. Many of his best moves were learned from Howard. Chess was to play an important part in Beckett’s life, and appears several times in his writing. His uncle also encouraged Beckett’s early interest in the cinema by taking him and his brother to films showing in Dublin or in a little cinema in Dún Laoghaire.⁵⁰ Film too remained one of Beckett’s enduring interests.

IV

Samuel Beckett’s father, Bill Beckett, was in his late twenties when he first met May Roe. He was handsome and thick-set, almost six feet tall, with a thick, dark moustache. Like his younger brothers, he was very athletic, an excellent swimmer⁵¹ and a fair tennis player and golfer. He was very much of a ‘man’s man’, a ‘hail fellow-well-met’.⁵² A close friend of Bill’s first-born son, Frank, said of his father that he ‘was a terrific character, a charmer, a real charmer … Tremendously energetic, large in figure, heavily built. All he knew about was to get on with things.’⁵³ He had a highly developed sense of humour, a ready wit, and a bonhomie that more sensitive souls found somewhat overbearing; this was accompanied by a fiery temper that could flare up quickly from time to time. ‘He was known to have found a cat in his bed and [loathing cats, as he did] thrown it out of the window … He’d get angry very easily.’⁵⁴ Beckett himself described his father as ‘absolutely non-intellectual. He left school at fifteen. He was taken away. Couldn’t stay. And was put to work. He had a big case of books, Dickens and Encyclopedias that he never opened. He used to read Edgar Wallace.’⁵⁵ And it was with a mixture of amusement and envy that he described his father’s way of reading in his early novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women.

His father assembled his arsenal of cold pipes, turned on the book, connected up, and it did the rest. That was the way to read – find out the literary voltage that suits you and switch on the current of the book. That was the mode that everyone had known, the corduroy trousers and bunch of blue ribbon mode. Then it goes … To the convalescent, well again and weak, the old mode may come back; or in winter, in the country, at night, in bad weather, far from the cliques and juntas. But his Father had never lost it. He sat motionless in the armchair under the singing lamp, absorbed and null. The pipes went out, one after another. For long spells he heard nothing that was said in the room, whether to him or not. If you asked him next day what the book was like he could not tell you.⁵⁶

In the early decades of the century it was customary for men of a certain social standing in Dublin to meet for drinks and a friendly chat in gentlemen’s clubs, rather than drink in pubs, which remained the preserve of the working class. A lot of business was done in the clubs too. Beckett’s father, like his own father before him, was a member of several such clubs. When he went in to work, for instance, he used to leave his sports Delage at the Royal Irish Automobile Club in Dawson Street and go there for a drink or a pot of tea after work. His wife, May, was also a member and used to meet him there sometimes to be driven home after she had been shopping in Dublin.⁵⁷ Or he would lunch at the Kildare Street Club, where he was also a member, with a friend like the architect, Fred Hicks, or another good family friend called Fry. In the early years of his marriage, according to Beckett, he would entertain some of his male friends at home:

My father used sometimes to have bridge parties when I was young with his men friends. I remember them sitting round the card table with plenty of drinks by the fire. I was sometimes allowed to sit and watch. That was before he took to going up to his little room to smoke his pipe and read his Edgar Wallace.⁵⁸

Bill found a lot of satisfaction in his work, throwing himself with apparently inexhaustible energy into creating his business contacts, once Medcalf, the senior partner in the quantity surveying firm, had died. Fortunately, he was not desk-bound, as his job took him out to building sites, where he found even more pleasure in keeping up with the progress that was being made on a house and admiring its completed appearance than he did in arranging the initial deal. After working hard, he used to relax by playing golf at Foxrock Golf Club (where he was captain in 1920) and at Carrickmines or, on Saturday night, playing more bridge in a regular bridge school at the golf club.⁵⁹

He was interested in horse racing, although his son commented:

I don’t remember him betting. He liked the races. But he wasn’t a regular there. He knew Fred Clarke, the Clerk of the Course. He gave my father permission to take a little back entrance of the racecourse. Then he walked through it on his way home. But I don’t remember him betting on the horses. I remember being on the bridge at Foxrock Station. You could see the horses well from there. They came very close to the station at that point. The railings were nearby.⁶⁰

When his father went to the races with Fred Clarke, who became General Manager of the racecourse and moved into nearby Leopardstown House, they used to watch the racing from a privileged official position in the stand. Sometimes Beckett accompanied him and, in All That Fall, Beckett’s first radio play, Mrs Rooney reflects his familiarity with the Leopardstown Racecourse when she evokes: ‘The entire scene, the hills, the plain, the racecourse with its miles and miles of white rails and three red stands, the pretty little wayside station’.⁶¹

Bill Beckett adored the great outdoors. He used to dive from the rocks at Sandycove into the famous, deep ‘Gentlemen Only’ Forty-Foot or swim, often with his two sons, at some of the numerous bathing places around Dublin Bay. But his regular pastime was walking. He loved the Dublin mountains and, on Sunday mornings and public holidays, accompanied by the family’s Kerry Blue Terrier, he used to go for walks in the country that were three or four times longer than most people could manage. When first married, and before he bought a car to drive in to Dublin to his office at 6 Clare Street, according to Beckett, he regularly used to take the train as far as Rathfarnham and then complete the hour-and-a-half walk home in time to sit down to a hearty dinner.

It was for his straightforwardly affectionate, uncomplicated, chummy relationship with his two sons and for the simple things that they shared that Beckett best remembered his father. ‘They sort of understood each other,’ said Sheila Page. ‘They played golf together and went for wonderful walks. They were absolutely tuned in.’⁶² One of the most moving images in Beckett’s late prose is that of an old man and a boy walking hand in hand across the foothills.⁶³

Although, like many heads of Edwardian families, Bill Beckett kept his feelings mostly under strict control and was not overtly affectionate, he was not lacking in emotion. Before he ever met Beckett’s mother, he had fallen head over heels in love with a young woman named Eva Murphy, the daughter of a fairly wealthy Catholic, William Martin Murphy. A friend of the family, Mary Manning, recalled how her mother, Susan, then a Bennett, had similarly fallen in love with Eva Murphy’s brother. The Murphys were fiercely opposed to either of their children marrying into two such deeply Protestant families.

The Murphy man said he would despise his son who was a lawyer if he married my mother and his daughter could go on to the streets, he would never talk to her again, if she married Bill Beckett. It ruined both their lives. Bill never got over it, never, and neither did mother. They were madly in love, both of them.⁶⁴

She recounted how Bill would call for her mother and herself and take them out for a drive in his car, long after both of them were married and after her own father had died. As they drove past a castellated mansion near Rathgar, she heard her mother announce angrily that this was ‘where the murder took place’. ‘What murder?’ Mary asked her mother. ‘William Martin Murphy’s house. He murdered love. Didn’t he, Bill?’ The driver nodded in silent agreement. Apparently not only had both son and daughter been forbidden from marrying the Protestants but the daughter had then been married off to an old widower who, Mary Manning heard her mother mutter darkly, ‘did certain things with her … not only in bed but on the dining room table’. ‘Dirty wretch,’ growled Bill Beckett.⁶⁵

The wound went deep and a stay in the Adelaide Hospital may have resulted from a depression occasioned by the abrupt guillotining of this misbegotten love affair. It was at the hospital that Bill Beckett first met May Roe, who was working there as either a nurse or a nursing aide on his ward. May was at her best in periods of crisis and her mixture of practical skills, no nonsense approach and genuine kindness and thoughtfulness seem to have quickly won over someone who was vulnerable to the attentions of this capable woman who offered him support as well as affection and who came, on this occasion, from a respectable Protestant family. She responded to his friendly banter and, in a matter of weeks, they were engaged, and, within the year, married.

They shared a love of the countryside, although May was not a great walker like Bill. And so, early in their marriage, Bill bought a motorbike and sidecar, a Sparkbrook, in which May used to travel with a scarf tied firmly around her head, while one of the boys rode on the pillion. Later on, Bill acquired a Fiat two-seater car and, in the 1920s and early 1930s, he bought the far more expensive Delage.⁶⁶ The impression given by Bill and May as a couple was of a marriage that was never seriously under strain but was based on habit as much as on affection, with each of them, increasingly, pursuing his or her own interests: Bill in his business, sport, walking, and playing cards; May in the running of the household, the welfare of her sons, Tullow Parish Church, local events such as dog shows, the garden, her dogs, and a donkey called Kish.⁶⁷

V

Their first child, Frank Edward, was born on 26 July 1902, soon after they moved into the new house in Foxrock; their second son, Samuel Barclay, was born almost four years later. The new Cooldrinagh was a fine house in which to bring up two lively boys. It had large, beautiful gardens, lawns and a tennis court. There was an acre of land, with a summerhouse, a double garage and outbuildings in which May kept her donkey. To the left of the house was a little spinney in which the children built tents out of branches covered by leaves and a rug; they played at wigwams or lay there reading their story-books.⁶⁸ The larches growing in the garden figure prominently in Beckett’s poetry, prose and drama. They denote the season of Beckett’s birth (‘Born dead of night. Sun long sunk behind the larches. New needles turning green.’)⁶⁹ But they also remind him of his childhood (‘Larches however he knew, from having climbed them as a little fat boy, and a young plantation of these, of a very poignant reseda, caught his eye now on the hillside.’)⁷⁰ As in his novel, Watt, one of the larches really did, according to Beckett,⁷¹ turn ‘green every year a week before the others’ in the Spring and ‘brown a week before the others’⁷² in the Autumn.

The spacious, Tudor-style house was built on a favoured corner site at the junction of Kerrymount Avenue and the Brighton Road. It was designed by Beckett’s father’s friend, Frederick Hicks, a well-known architect and surveyor with an office in South Frederick Street in Dublin.⁷³ Around the red-tiled outside porch grew a heavily scented lemon verbena that is evoked many times in Beckett’s writing.⁷⁴

The sitting hall, as it was called on the original plans, had (and still has) a large, elegant fireplace with small, rectangular, dark green tiles both on the hearth and on the fireplace itself with an elaborately carved, wooden surround framing an open fire. Heavy curtains were drawn across the room to separate the hall from the doorway when the family wanted to sit on the huge settee that stood in the bay window in front of a log fire. Leopardskins were spread across the polished wooden floor and on the wall hung the long spiral horns of the kudu (or African antelope) that May’s brother, Edward Price Roe, had brought back from Africa. On one wall were a pair of large crossed swords and a brass helmet.⁷⁵ When the curtains were drawn to shut out the draughts, the hall managed to feel quite cosy, in spite of the dark brown wooden panelling. On the opposite side of the hall to the staircase, Sam and Frank scratched their signatures, which are still faintly discernible. To the left on the ground floor was the drawing room in which the piano was kept, next to a dining room with a large table and a few conventional pictures, including one of a vase of yellow tulips. May Beckett loved flowers and the sitting room was often perfumed by a large, blue bowl of sweet peas.⁷⁶

The room in which May gave birth to the two boys was on the first floor, directly above the drawing room. It, too, has a large bow window which, as Beckett wrote in Company, ‘looked west to the mountains. Mainly west. For being bow it looked also a little south and a little north. Necessarily. A little south to more mountain and a little north to foothill and plain.’⁷⁷ The two brothers shared an attic bedroom on the top floor, where first the nurse, then the maid, also had a room. ‘Close by,’ said Beckett, ‘there was a place with the water tank, where the water supply was stored. Frank turned it into a workshop. And he used to shut himself there and make things: you know, wood and so on.’⁷⁸ Frank was by far the more practical of the two boys and Sam’s role often turned out to be one of holding things for his older brother, watching him devotedly as he worked and learning from him all he knew about woodwork.

For the first three years of his life, Beckett’s brother was looked after by a nurse called Annie Bisset. Then, when Annie left to get married and Sam was born, May employed a young woman named Bridget Bray who came from the neighbouring County of Meath. She was known as ‘Sam’s nurse’ and remained with the Becketts for almost twelve years before she too left to marry a gardener called Cooney. During Sam’s childhood, she lived in the house at Cooldrinagh and exercised an important influence on her young charge.

Bridget was a friendly, loquacious Catholic, rich in stories, folk tales and home-spun wisdom. She was a big woman with a ‘strawberry nose’ and an expression that, in Beckett’s own words, had ‘the quality of ruined granite’.⁷⁹ She sucked cloves or peppermint. The boys used to call her ‘Bibby’, a name which figures several times in Beckett’s writings: in Winnie’s story of Milly and the mouse in Happy Days, for example, and, again, in Texts for Nothing III, where, nostalgically, the narrator recreates her baby-talk:

She’ll say to me, Come, doty, it’s time for bye-bye. I’ll have no responsibility, she’ll have all the responsibility, her name will be Bibby, I’ll call her Bibby, if only it could be like that. Come, ducky, it’s time for yum-yum.⁸⁰

More than half a century later, Beckett still remembered some of his nurse’s common sayings and remonstrances. As a small child, he was often taciturn and would reply to her questions with a hesitant, irritating ‘Well, well …’, ‘How many wells make a river?’ Bibby would ask him sharply. He was often obstinate too, refusing stubbornly to eat his dinner whenever he did not feel like it. Her picturesquely alliterative response first intrigued, then annoyed him: ‘One day you’ll follow a crow for a crust,’ she used to say.⁸¹ Along with his mother, she was the main source for the commonplace sayings that appear (and are ironically undercut) in Beckett’s writing: ‘If a thing was worth doing at all it was worth doing well, that was a true saying’ and ‘We live and learn, that was a true saying’.⁸² Yet Bibby had a great sense of fun and rainy days were made sunny, as she taught Beckett to recite rhymes and catches: ‘Rain, rain, go to Spain’ was one that they chanted in unison, the little boy dancing around the nursery.⁸³ Sometimes she went too far and instead of amusing the children, terrified them, as when, on one occasion, she dressed up as an old man in a dark overcoat and hat and chased them around the garden.⁸⁴ At night, Bibby told her charge fairytales of old Meath that are alluded to in Beckett’s poem ‘Serena II’:

the fairy-tales of Meath ended

so say your prayers now and go to bed

your prayers before the lamps start to sing behind the larches

here at these knees of stone

then to bye-bye on the bones⁸⁵

Every night, the two boys recited their prayers before climbing into bed. One was the Lord’s Prayer; the other was ‘God bless dear Daddy, Mummy, Frank, Bibby and all that I love and make me a good boy for Jesus Christ sake Armen’, which is reproduced almost verbatim in Dream of Fair to Middling Women.⁸⁶ Beckett was taught his prayers