Portrait of the Artist as a Nervous Wreck

Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson.  Grove Press.  800 pp. $22.00.

I don’t know what I expected from a biography of Samuel Beckett, but it wasn’t this.  I actually owned the Deidre Bair bio, but couldn’t get into it.  In more recent years, I read—and was stunned by—Beckett’s famous Three Novels, and various people praised his Collected Letters as one of the best books of the century.  They seemed like a bit of an investment ($82.00, even on Amazon).  I thought I’d try a biography first.

This is an interim report.  I’m halfway through.  But from the start I knew I was in the hands of a masterful biographer, who knew Beckett’s work and knew the man personally.

I was first introduced to Beckett in a class of 20^th century French drama, taught by my great professor Wallace Fowlie.  We read both Waiting for Godot and Endgame.  One day when Fowlie and I were having dinner, he made a statement that startled me.  “I think he’s the writer from our time who will survive.”

I now suspect the old boy was right.

Beckett had an ordinary middle class Irish boyhood, did well at school.  He was an excellent athlete, played cricket, golf, tennis, billiards; he was just good at games, including chess, which he played (and was obsessed with) all his life.  He attended Trinity College and was veering toward an academic career when he did a kind of postdoc in Paris, and met—of all people—James Joyce.  The thing I’d always heard was that he was Joyce’s secretary, and I guess that describes it; the two Irishmen got along well; both had an interest in literature and in language, and Joyce’s eyesight was failing him, so he needed some help with reading.  Beckett had decided teaching was not for him, and it was in those early years when he knew Joyce that he decided to give himself to writing.

He was a depressive all his life; from an early age he suffered from anxiety, a racing heart, panic attacks, and insomnia.  He was a loner, somewhat aloof, and had a touch of arrogance as a young man, probably just a defense mechanism.  His parents were not wealthy but always looked after their son, and in his early twenties they allowed him to travel to London to undergo psychoanalysis.  He threw himself into it as he did with everything, reading widely in the literature (he took twenty single-spaced typewritten pages of notes on one book), seeing his analyst three times a week.  In the meantime, he went to museums, attended plays, and read widely; for a supposedly depressed person he had huge energy.  And his opinions on everything—in the snippets we see from letters—are always interesting.

Beckett got along well with his father; even as adults the two men hiked together, and seemed to have the same values.  His mother was more narrowly religious, didn’t approve of the bits of writing she saw around the house.  Though his father seemed healthy, he developed heart trouble in his early sixties, and Beckett was actually with him as he died, slowly, of a final heart attack.  His last words to his son were, “Fight.  Fight.  Fight.”  Then he said, “What a morning.”

People admired Beckett’s early writing, seeing him as a disciple of Joyce, but there weren’t many who wanted to publish it, and he lived in poverty well into his forties, relying on a small bequest from his father’s will and what little he could make from his writing.  For a time he lived at home, but had a final break with his mother and vowed to leave for good, moving back to Paris.  He did occasionally go back to visit his mother, but made his home in France for the rest of his life.

He wrote an early book on Proust, published a book of stories with the engaging title More Pricks Than Kicks, an early novel named Murphy.  Nothing sold well (I read somewhere that his first book of stories sold just two copies on the first sales report, which made me feel better about my own sales).  He spent two years in Germany during which he seemed to do little but visit museums and look at paintings.

So how did this aloof, depressive, morose, slightly arrogant young man become the great writer and the extremely courteous and helpful person that Beckett eventually was, to say nothing of his greatness as a writer?  Some credit his psychoanalysis.  There was also a weird incident in Paris when a pimp wanted him and some other people to visit his women, and got so angry when Beckett refused that the man stabbed him.  He missed his heart and lungs by just inches, and Beckett underwent a slow recovery.  There was also the long period of the Second World War, when Beckett worked in the resistance and constantly fled the Nazis.  For year he and his woman friend, Suzenne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, lived in extreme poverty and dreadful conditions, and though he finished a novel entitled Watt, he had little time for writing.  Often he did farm labor just to have enough food.

Narrowly averting death, as Beckett did on more than one occasion, tends to energize the creative juices.  For all the years of the war Beckett lived in France and spoke nothing but French.  When the war was over he made the decision to write in French, which may have simplified his prose.  He also had a major ah-ha moment, about the depression he’d spent his life trying to overcome.  He realized there was another way to deal with it.

Knowlson describes this insight at some length.  He was Beckett’s friend at the end of his life, and had his blessing to write the biography.

“Beckett tended to focus on the recognition of his own stupidity . . . and on his concern with impotence and ignorance. . . . He reformulated this for me, while attempting to define his debt to James Joyce.  ‘I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s own material. . . . I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than adding.’

“. . . He wrote that the dark was ‘in reality my most . . . precious ally, meaning his true element at last and key to the opus magnum.’  Light was therefore rejected in favor of darkness.  And this darkness can certainly be seen as extending to a whole zone of being that includes folly and failure, impotence and ignorance.”

In darkness he would make his home: that beautifully describes the work he was about to do.  A talented but word-drunk Irish writer would fade away, and a great French writer be born.