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Sam's happy days
Samuel Beckett was never a curmudgeon, but a man of
compassion, courage and humour, as his friend John Calder
remembers
The Observer, Sunday 29 August 1999 18.53 EDT
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It is nearly ten years since Samuel Beckett died, and so many of his friends and
colleagues have followed him during that decade it is not surprising, despite the two
major biographies that have since appeared, that misunderstandings and
misconceptions are often found among those who admire his work but never knew the
man.
At a recent conference in Paris I heard an American composer, who had set his poems,
speak of him as a misogynist with a dislike of women and a cold late-Stravinskyian
attitude to art. The truth was the very opposite. His distrust of journalists, after a few
bad experiences, caused him to be often described as a kind of hermit, which was
equally untrue. Nor was he buried in permanent gloom, as some might have assumed.
Beckett was always part of his family background, that of the Irish Protestant
ascendancy, with its respect for education, good manners and civilised comforts, but he
reacted sharply against the bigotry that went with it. In his student days he frequented
Dublin pubs where his father would rather be dead than seen, and at an early age he
rejected the strict religious dogma to which he had been subjected, both by his mother
and the Protestant school to which he was sent in Ulster. Nevertheless the Christian
symbolism and mythology he knew so well is constantly present in his work, not out of
belief or piety, but because the terrible death of Christ as described in the gospels
inspired his pity and horror. He was moved by the words, not the metaphysics.
Among friends Beckett was cheerful, convivial, much given to jokes and laughter and
excellent company. He had the kind of memory that enabled him to quote at length
from favourite authors in the four languages he read, and he had a keen interest in
world events, as much a part of his conversation as the arts, about which he knew a
great deal, often having opinions very different from the accepted or fashionable one.
He loved music, in particular composers of the late classical and early romantic school
Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert but not Mozart so much, because the levity and ease of
composition that characterised Mozart's work clashed with his instinctive conviction
that artistic creation had to be difficult, requiring an effort that could be painful and
filled with self-doubt. Art was not necessarily a means of expression, but rather an
admission and exploration of impotence, the inability of the artist to really change
anything for the better.
In a series of conversations with a friend after the war, the art critic Georges Duthuit,
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which he recorded from memory, he faithfully puts the usual argument for art that it
enhances life, comforts and awakens aesthetic appreciation and pleasure and then puts
his own view that art is an admission of the failure of mankind to create anything of
any real value, and by implication to do anything to change our tragic lot.
Religion is, of course, the main comfort for the conventionally religious at the
tribulations of life and the prospect of death, and art plays a similar role for others. But
not for Beckett, who saw tragedy as inescapable and looked it squarely in the face
without blinking. It is this refusal to look for any panacea that makes his work so
powerful. His extreme honesty shames those who lack the courage to face reality and
see life as having no real meaning. Beckett sees no force guiding our destiny, and if he
did, it would be malevolent in the sense that Schopenhauer, a favourite author, saw
man as ruled by his own evil will.
The tragedy of living a meaningless life, and being quickly forgotten at the end of it, has
been so beautifully projected in Beckett's work that it has become accepted by most of
his readers and audience and, paradoxically, gives much comfort. It takes any guilt out
of failure, which is the inevitable fate of us all. Beckett makes it clear that the only
comfort, short-lived but real, has to be in shared experience: there is always someone
worse off to comfort, misery is bearable if shared, and good times and the everyday
pleasures of the world can be enjoyed more intensely with the knowledge that
everything is shortlived.
Beckett lived as intensely as his work is intense. Art can make nothing better, but it
passes the time better than doing nothing, as all work does, and the artist, creates art
because he cannot stop himself: it is an obligation without meaning, a compulsion that
cannot be resisted. Beckett worked in a void that he constantly filled with new ways of
seeing things, of imaginatively stating what was obvious to him, but not to others until
they encountered the result, nearly always with shock. He used all the things he did not
believe in, the Christian God of the Bible, taking the dogma mock-seriously in a playful
way to expose the absurdities. There is much amusement to be derived from the
tongue-in-cheek humour and the irreverence behind his portrayal of the reverent,
especially in the late prose texts.
Helping others was not just an admonition and a way of explaining an escape from the
rat race, which is in any case pointless and not worth the effort. It was the way Beckett
lived. He was always willing to help others to the limits of his ability and his pocket;
when he died there was nothing in his bank account despite a sizable royalty income,
because everyone who came to him for help, and it was mainly financial help they
wanted, received something. He helped students with their fees, friends and sometimes
complete strangers with their debts, paying medical bills, holidays for others. No one
knows where most of the money went, but he spent almost nothing on himself. He also
usually paid the bill whenever he was part of a group eating or drinking together.
In this he was a gentleman of the old school as in most other things; he was inevitably
polite and courteous, only occasionally exploding at a persistent photographer
following him down the street or getting irritable when someone wanted to use his
work in an inappropriate way or when he was misquoted, as often happened, by
journalists or academics. His little kindnesses were legendary, but so secret that one
only found out about them by accident or when told by another. He gave comfort as
well as money to the bereaved, appropriate presents, which must have occasioned
much thought, on special occasions, and found ways to mitigate the disappointments of
others. The standards he set for himself were not those he expected of others and he
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had a sympathy for rogues, who often took advantage of him.
Actors would visit him, hoping for an unknown stage work, and often he would find a
text that could be used as a monologue, which would then be wrongly claimed as
having been specially written for that actor. The extreme embarrassment of one
American professor, who became tongue-tied at their first meeting, so great was his
awe, was compensated by a play sent to him a month later, Ohio Impromptu, the first
time that Beckett had given a place name to a work. Ohio University had the rights to
the first performance. On one occasion when Beckett went to the Irish Consulate in
Paris to renew his passport, he was shocked by the story in the waiting room of an
Irish tourist who had been mugged, gave him all his money to pay for a meal, and then
could not pay for his passport and had to walk home. Such stories about Beckett are
legion.
The myth of his being a hermit has its origin mainly in his reluctance to talk to
journalists, unless they were trusted friends, but is also the result of his shyness. He
had little light conversation of the kind casual strangers use when they meet, but could
become animated over sport, which he followed, and over subjects of real import. He
became embarrassed by lion-hunters. Friendship was everything. His shyness applied
especially to women. He got on best with the more aggressive and forthright members
of the opposite sex. His wife, whom he married more than 20 years after meeting and
living with her, had that kind of strength. Peggy Guggenheim, with whom he had a brief
affair, made it clear in her memoirs that his shyness (although he was always attractive
to women) obliged the female partner to take the initiative.
In the Fifties I spent many white nights with Beckett, first dining, then touring the bars
of Montparnasse, talking and playing chess or billiards, and we would often meet his
other friends and acquaintances. I could not help observing, where ladies were
concerned, his attraction to them, and his slowness to overcome his natural reserve.
The jollier and more outspoken they were, the more relaxed he became.
Now that London is about to be treated to an orgy of his stage works with the visit
from the Gate Theatre of Dublin of his entire theatrical oeuvre, it is possible to view
Samuel Beckett, not as a rather difficult genius as the academics have liked to portray
him, needing to be explained through their analyses in their books about him, but as a
wonderfully human and enjoyable writer, certainly the greatest novelist since Joyce,
and a playwright and poet of the stature of Shakespeare, quotations from whom
abound in his work. It is the extreme honesty in portraying the human condition, the
lives and sufferings that we all have to endure, that dismays those who have difficulty
in facing the realities and fears we all share, rich and poor, those who seem fortunate
and those who are certainly not. Beckett is very funny. It may be black humour, but
humour is the only way that misfortune can be faced, the alternative to despair.
Only the complacent and those who prefer to live in a world of dogmatic faith, and
cannot face reality until the hour of tragedy strikes, can fail to enjoy and benefit from
Beckett's work. It requires greater concentration than other literature, as all great art
does, but it is absorbing and always thought-provoking, sometimes quite shocking. But
above all it is about courage, and therein lies the paradox of Beckett's appeal: the
blacker it may appear at first, the more gripping it becomes, and the more life-
enhancing. He is the last of the great romantics, but there is no sentimentality in
Beckett. He often portrays the selfish, the self-important and the tyrannical, and
contrasts them to the weak and unfortunate, who have to live through their wits, but
know the value of kindness, of sharing and of stoical humour. It is they who have the
real courage and who convey it to the audience. Beckett can change people and never
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real courage and who convey it to the audience. Beckett can change people and never
for the worse.