An emotional farewell from Ireland’s master of existential doom
LETTERS
The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 4, 19661989 Edited by: George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck Cambridge University Press €29.99
ON October 2, 1935 the Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Carl Jung, gave a lecture in London’s Tavistock Institute where he recalled how a woman patient he once treated said she felt like she had “never been properly born.”
A 29-year-old diffident Dublin writer who was in attendance that day — who had recently undertaken psychotherapy for depression — remarked to a friend at how closely the story resembled his own life. His name was Samuel Beckett.
Leaving Dublin to make Paris his permanent home in 1937, Beckett was under-appreciated in the mainstream literary world for the first two decades of his career. Outside of a small group of committed Dublin wordsmiths, and Parisian symbolists, surrealists and existentialists, his work was largely unknown. Things didn’t get much better when he went to Paris initially either. In 1938, for instance, his first novel, Murphy, was published. But only after getting rejected 42 times. He was also stabbed in the chest that same year by a street pimp called Prudent. Beckett did eventually hit upon global fame in the 1950s: with plays like Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, and the novel trilogy: Molly, Malone, and The Unnamable.
Through the process of stripping back language to its primal state, Beckett sought to convey in prose, poetry, and drama, the inherent torture, confusion, suffering, and utter pointlessness of human existence. If James Joyce’s modernist vision dragged the entire contents of western civilisation into his episodic narratives, Beckett’s interpretation of modernity was far darker, sparser, and crucially, less sure of itself. But one suspects this may have been very much to do with a moment in history, rather than a conscious decision of the artist as such.
The Second World War had an enormous impact on Beckett’s life and work. Primarily because he bore witness in France to its barbarity: both as a fighter in the Resistance and a volunteer for the Irish Red Cross. Beckett believed, outside of one’s own subjective experience, the individual has no objective knowledge from which they can conceptualise the world with rationality. His own subjective experience would be one burdened by chronic shyness; constant uncertainty; the continual threat or fear of physical and mental illnesses; frustration that his best work was always behind him; and the inevitability of death looming quietly in the background.
Beckett treated language as a double edged paradox. Outside of it, there is no means to express, and yet, within the constraints of its cultural, political, philosophical and historical connotations, it makes a prisoner of the human spirit. Thus, bleak, solitary silence, and those unspeakable, oddly undefinable, and yet seemingly very familiar, and ever present moments within human behaviour, is something that emerges from his work at all times. In a typical Beckett narrative, form is turned inside out; the beginning and end often don’t connect in linear fashion; while characters can find themselves stuck in a kind of dark no-man’s-land or existential purgatory: merely counting the endless passing of time; existing in that moment between birth and death, always looking towards the grave.
The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1966-1989