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CHAPTER ONE

HEARING THINGS

‘All life’, W.B. Yeats remarked in Reveries over Childhood and Youth, ‘weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.’1 It is tempting to take this as an epigraph to the comparative lives of Yeats and Samuel Beckett and trace how their distinctive biographies and literary work intersected. Indeed, reading around the lives they knew in Ireland, what looms large alongside their upbringing, their families, their education and what Terence Brown, Yeats’s biographer, describes as the Butler ‘caste, obsessively alert to gradations of calling and breeding’,2 is the inner world and crucial influence of Irish Protestantism which the writers shared. The social customs associated with both men’s families, their religious and educational backgrounds seem so strikingly similar at one level and yet so utterly different at another. (In passing, there is also the curious fact – given this relatively small if variable ‘Protestant’ group – that it should produce three Nobel Prize laureates in literature. This is quite exceptional when one thinks about the global context and the likelihood of such a thing happening elsewhere.)

From the opening chapter of James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, ‘Images of Childhood 1906–1915’, the stability of Beckett’s childhood and youth in his south County Dublin home is as clear as day:

On Sunday mornings, the bell of Tullow Church called all good local Protestants to worship. May Beckett was an assiduous attender at the church and ensured that, from an early age, her two sons accompanied her regularly. They had, Beckett remembered, a pew close to the pulpit, which they shared with a market gardener called Matt Tyler, and across the aisle from another well-known Foxrock family, the Orpens. Beckett was never happy to go to church and hated wearing the hard, chaffing collars that ‘Sunday-best’ entailed. So he used to sit scowling at Beatrice Orpen and at the world in general. His father never came with them to Tullow Church. Instead he used to say ‘that he’d go to Church with the birds up the mountains’ and take himself off into the Dublin hills … Later on, Beckett used to accompany him on these Sunday walks.3

Thirty and more years earlier, Yeats’s family had started well into the peripatetic roving from their south County Dublin origins, as father John Butler Yeats, Yeats’s ‘profoundly unhappy mother’, Susan, sisters and brothers, moved back and forth to England, living with difficulty in and out of homes there and also back in Dublin and Sligo. The contrast in the start in life from which both writers emerged is striking. Yet the more one reads Beckett with Yeats in mind, the more compelling and lasting is Yeats’s presence felt and heard. In what follows I am going to rehearse some of these points of contact before ending with an unlikely parallel between both men and the wider reaches of the culture from which they came.

As several scholars in the past, such as D.E.S. Maxwell,4 Katharine Worth,5 Gordon Armstrong6 and Enoch Brater in his essay, ‘Intertextuality’,7 have identified, the intertextual play between Beckett and Yeats runs deeply through Beckett’s poetry, his fiction and his drama. In a sense, Beckett’s reading of Yeats’s plays reworked the latter’s drama and revivified scholarly (if not artistic) interest in Yeats’s ideas about theatre and the dramatic image. From Beckett’s earliest fiction and literary criticism, Yeats surfaces as a critical and/or parodic point of order or departure. As Enoch Brater puts it, Beckett’s ambivalence in dealing with Yeats ‘begins in parody and ends as eloquence’.8

Yeats provides the in-joke from Dream of Fair to Middling Women with its ‘fat June butterfly’ about ‘to pern in a gyre’, to Beckett’s signature play, Waiting for Godot, as Estragon discusses Vladimir’s cue: ‘I thought it was he.’

E: Who?

V: Godot.

E: Pah! The wind in the reeds.9

Between the unpublished Dream of Fair to Middling Women of 1931–2 to Waiting for Godot (1954), it is possible to list the Yeatsian references that clearly sparked off Beckett’s needs.

He had, after all, watched Yeats’s plays as a young man as they were performed in Dublin in 1926 and subsequently, and he wasn’t greatly impressed; although it has been repeatedly identified that At the Hawk’s Well and Purgatory mattered significantly to Beckett in his search for a theatrical experience fundamentally physical and spoken but without the encumbrances of plot or ‘design’. As Maxwell has it, Beckett’s stage characters brought ‘Yeats’s heroic figures down in the world. Formally, he parodies Yeats’s Noh-business … and burlesques Yeats’s stage.’10 Think perhaps of Winnie in Happy Days (1963):

One loses one’s classics (Pause). Oh not all (Pause). A part (Pause). A part remains (Pause). That is what I find so wonderful, a part remains, of one’s classics, to help one through the day (Pause). Oh yes, many mercies. Many mercies (Pause). And now? (Pause). And now, Willie? (Long pause). I call to the eye of the mind …11

Of the opening of (Willie) Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well, that is:

I call to the eye of the mind

A well long choked up and dry

And boughs long stripped by the wind,

And I call to the mind’s eye

Pallor of an ivory face,

A man climbing up to a place

The salt sea wind has swept bare.12

Beckett would create in his later drama testimonials to Yeats and ultimately, in … but the clouds …13 (1976), channel one of Yeats’s greatest poems from The Tower. By which time Beckett was entering his seventies and looking back as Yeats’s senior, so to speak, on how in 1928 Yeats had grappled with age in his sixties. It is all about sustaining examples, for along with much else, The Tower as a collection of poems, as much as the individual sequence of poems called ‘The Tower’, is obsessed with the verifiability of memory, the landscapes of home reimagined and the meaning, or meaninglessness, of artistic achievement and of what remains post-event, post-experience. As the final stanza of part II of ‘The Tower’ enquires:

Does the imagination dwell the most

Upon a woman won or woman lost?

If on the lost, admit you turned aside

From a great labyrinth out of pride,

Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought

Or anything called Conscience once;

And that if memory recur, the sun’s

Under eclipse and the day blotted out.14

Clearly Yeats’s clerical inheritance did not completely evaporate in the occult.

So whether we cite Beckett’s Yeats from the beginning, in references in the early stories such as ‘Walking Out’,15 in the literary polemical crossfire of ‘Recent Irish Poetry’16 where Yeats’s ‘A Coat’ is quoted, as well as ‘The Tower’, and the ‘attar of far off, most secret and inviolate rose’ from ‘The Secret Rose’ (The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899) or in one of his most important early letters – to Axel Kaun in 1937, which John Pilling17 glosses as a Yeatsian riff – the ‘idea of the “trembling of the veil”, no doubt familiar to Beckett by way of Yeats’s prose’, Yeats is a crucial defining presence:

It is indeed getting more and more difficult [Beckett writes], even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it.18

It is important to state the obvious here: that Beckett’s engagement with Yeats was public, published and contemporaneous. Yeats was, after all, still very much alive during the writing of these early flourishes of Beckett.

So too the private correspondences contain further passing remarks, jokes, avoidances, notes, recommendations – all of which connect with Yeats. One could name each and every one contained in those amazing volumes of Beckett’s Letters and it would make for a very long list indeed – along with the extensive citing of Yeatsian echoes, reverberations and allusions that critics have heard or seen in Beckett, such as W.J. McCormack’s spotting of possible typographical links in County Clare between Yeats’s Dreaming of the Bones and Watt.19

On a more basic level, some of the younger Beckett’s spleen – that which produced ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, say – can be heard in a letter he wrote from his Foxrock fastness to his pal Thomas MacGreevy in 1936. The letter is full of gossip and is rich pickings for the social historian, but it is the following extract that caught my eye: ‘I was down at the mailboat last Monday week meeting Frank [his brother] returning from Anglesea [sic] and WB stalked off with his bodyguard, Lennox, Dolly, Gogarty, Walter Starkie, O’Connor, Hayes, Higgins, all twined together.’20 This is 7 July 1936 to be exact. Yeats was actually recovering from a heart condition and finishing off work on the Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935,21 a publication that was to cause all kinds of controversy, much to Yeats’s delight. Incidentally, in a letter written a few weeks after Beckett’s, Yeats writes to Dorothy Wellesley on 26 July from ‘Riversdale’, his home in Dublin: ‘I get up every morning about 4, work at proof sheets until about 5.30, then go to bed again, breakfast at 7.30, and then write poetry, with interruption for rest, till 12’22 – not bad working habits for a 71-year-old!

According to W.J. McCormack,23 in a further letter to Dorothy Wellesley the following year, May 1937, and only partially republished, Yeats relates in the original the story of a libel case in which Beckett had appeared against Yeats’s friend Oliver St John Gogarty and his autobiography, As I was Going Down Sackville Street (1936):

In his book [Yeats is quoted as writing to Dorothy Wellesley] Gogarty has called a certain man a ‘chicken butcher’ meaning that he makes love to the immature. The informant, the man who swears that he recognised the victim[,] is a racketeer of a Dublin poet or imatative [sic] poet of the new school. He hates us all – his review of the Anthology was so violent the Irish Times refused to publish it.

He & the ‘chicken butcher’ are Jews … Two or three weeks ago Gogarty & the chicken butcher were drinking in our ‘poet’s pub’ laughing at the work.

There is no corroboration that I know of but if the ‘imitative poet of the new school’ is (if I read McCormack’s suggestion correctly) Beckett and not, say, Leslie Daiken, an important Dublin Jewish left-wing radical poet and anthologist of the time, Yeats clearly had Beckett in his sights. Yet it is curious that Yeats did not recall Beckett’s name, if, that is, we take it that the two men had met only a few years previously. Lots of ‘ifs’. But it also depends on which story one takes as fact.

Anthony Cronin’s biography of Samuel Beckett emphatically states that while Beckett had both opportunities and a network of mutual connections (Alan Duncan for one), ‘there is no evidence that [he] met any of [the prominent Dublin literary figures] who attended soirées such as Walter Starkie’s’ and ‘in fact [Beckett] was never to meet [Yeats] the greatest poet of the age, there or anywhere else’.24 Deirdre Bair’s biography of two decades earlier tells it differently:25

Just as he sought Jack B’s company, Beckett avoided introduction to his brother, whom he regarded as pompous and posturing, fatuously slobbering over all the wrong aspects of Ireland and Irish society.

But she continues:26

Beckett actually met W. B. Yeats only once, during a brief encounter in Killiney, where he was disgusted with the way W. B. Yeats simpered over his wife and made an inordinate fuss with his children.

For her sources, Bair cites A.J. Leventhal, John Montague, John Kobler, the papers of Thomas MacGreevy and a letter to H.O. White (15 April 1957)27 – both in TCD library – and an anonymous source. Following suit, in his lively Contemporary Irish Drama from Beckett to McGuinness (1994), Anthony Roche confidently identifies Killiney and 1932 as the place and year of the meeting, set up through Thomas MacGreevy, and remarks that ‘the young Beckett could find little to identify with in the persona Yeats was then projecting, of a family man with wife and children’. However, according to Roche, Beckett was ‘taken aback when the older poet praised a passage from Beckett’s “Whoroscope”, his first published poem of two years earlier [1930]’.28

Roche’s sources include Richard Ellmann, who in Four Dubliners (1986) elaborates a little further: ‘Beckett and Yeats met only once, at Killiney, south of Dublin … At this single meeting Yeats astonished Beckett by quoting a passage from “Whoroscope”’:29

A wind of evil flung my despair of ease

against the sharp spires of the one

lady.

And yet, unless I have simply missed it, I cannot see any mention of the encounter in Beckett’s published correspondence of the time, although he was, as it happens, in Killiney in 1932, dining with the Hones in December of that year. Calling up H.O. White’s letter will probably solve it all. But what does it matter, anyway? Far more important is that the following year, 1933, was to be an extremely difficult and tragic year for Beckett, with a permanent effect upon his life, as well as marking perhaps the real beginnings of his life as a writer.30

First there was the loss through tuberculosis of his cousin Peggy Sinclair in May, and then the heart attack that led to his father’s death in June. These tragedies were followed by (at last) a publishing contract for More Pricks Than Kicks, published the following year, and the writing of the story ‘Echo’s Bones’, originally to cap the collection of stories but rejected and unpublished until 2015 with the impressive edition of Mark Nixon, who notes possible Yeatsian inflections here and there, particularly Beckett’s ‘nod’ to Yeats’s A Vision (1927, revd. 1934).31 Of those who knew Beckett, it is clear that like so many of his generation in Ireland and subsequently until the late 1960s or 1970s, poetry was considered a ‘spoken’ art. As such, Beckett would have been schooled from an early age to remember poems (hymns, songs) by reciting them. Testimonials record his great ability, ‘even in delirium’,32 to recite poetry.

In Four Dubliners, Richard Ellmann remarks, ‘among Yeats’s poems Beckett had distinct preferences’33 and it is clear from the recollections of John Montague in both his memoirs,34 along with other anecdotal evidence, that Beckett identified with Yeats’s poetry the processes of his own maturity and ageing as a man and as a writer. He ‘singled out unerringly’, Ellmann notes, ‘the one [of Yeats’s early poems] that was most extraordinary … “He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead”’.35

We know from several sources that Beckett would quote from memory lines from The Countess Cathleen and, as Ellmann tells it, so much else was quick to Beckett’s mind, even towards the very end of his own life. Anne Atik movingly reveals this ability in her poignant memoir, and Gerry Dukes relates the time when he and the critic Hugh Kenner called upon Beckett ‘at the cheerless nursing home’ the month after his wife’s funeral in July 1989:36

Just before we left, Beckett recited, in a quavering voice, the last verse paragraph of W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘The Tower’ … [It] had first appeared in book form in 1928, the very year that Beckett had first arrived in Paris. It made a most moving valedictory.

Between both Ellmann and Atik, a cluster of poems emerges. Indeed to quote Ellmann, ‘There were bundles of memories’:37 ‘The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water’ (In the Seven Woods, 1904), ‘A Drinking Song’ (The Green Helmet, 1910), ‘Girl’s Song’ (The Winding Stair, 1933), ‘Why Should Old Men Not Be Mad’ (On the Boiler, 1939), ‘Crazy Jane’, ‘Mad Tom’, as well as the Swift play, The Words Upon the Window Pane, Yeats’s Oedipus, At the Hawk’s Well, Purgatory, of course, and Yeats’s Byzantium poems, constructed as artifice, yet contained within that lonely solo voice’s rhetoric which so captivated Beckett:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress[.]38

Beckett’s mother had kept him informed back in 1948 with an account in the Irish Times of Yeats’s reburial in Ireland;39 four years later, in 1952, Beckett is recommending to a friend that he should look out Yeats’s and Synge’s Deirdre plays, pointing to Yeatsian references when the subject of Ireland comes up with his correspondents; responding to requests, such as Cyril Cusack’s, for a Beckett response to a Shaw festival with the famous line: ‘What I would do is give the whole unupsettable apple-cart for a sup of the Hawk’s well, or the Saints’, or a whiff of Juno, to go no further.’40 A little later, in July 1956, he writes to the Irish novelist Aidan Higgins:

The Yanks want the Proust but I hesitate. Shall be sending you Malone. Suppose you are glad to be getting shut of London. Queer the way you all go to Ireland when you get a holiday. Piss on the White Rock for me and cast a cold eye on the granite beginning on the cliff face.41

It is from a little later again, 1959, that Anne Atik’s memoir shows the full force of Yeats breaking through Beckett’s own imaginative contact with others that will last until the very end of his life. Indeed, Deirdre Bair has Beckett only a couple of years later, in 1961, absorbed in reading W.B. Yeats’s Collected Poems.42 In Atik’s recollections, Yeats’s poetry features prominently in conversation.43 Beckett also refers Atik to ‘the correspondence between Yeats and Dorothy Wellesley,44 saying he thought it would interest me’. ‘Each time he came back to Yeats’s last poems, and each time would urge me to read them again. A standard of comparison.’45

This may be why James Mays hears in Beckett’s Lessness (1970), ‘an extended meditation on the line from Yeats’s poem “The Black Tower”’.46Atik’s memoir revisits Beckett’s recitation in 1983, as Beckett ‘wobbling on his legs … from ageing’47 talks about Synge, Lady Gregory and Yeats and incidentally writes from memory and without error a Synge poem – ‘Epitaph’:48

A silent sinner, nights and days,

No human heart to him drew nigh,

Alone he would his wanton ways,

Alone and little loved did die.

And autumn Death for him did choose,

A season dank with mists and rain,

And took him, while the evening dews

Were settling o’er the fields again.

Later still, towards the end, Beckett is retelling stories about ‘Yeats, and Yeats’s father who stayed in New York for seventeen years’.49 Atik’s final recollection of Beckett I repeat without comment; it is about ‘Joyce’s admiration for Yeats, the showy wreath he sent to his [friend’s] funeral’: ‘“He liked to make that sort of gesture,” says Beckett, who then continues to recite poems of Yeats, who “had written some great poems”, including “The Tower” – a poem Beckett had read after his friend’s Con Leventhal’s cremation.’50

The death of friends, or death

Of every brilliant eye

That made a catch in the breath –

Seem but the clouds in the sky.51

Beckett is also reported to have told his friend Eoin O’Brien that the lines on the poet ‘making his soul’ were Yeats’s greatest – the concluding third part of ‘The Tower’:

Till the wreck of body,

Slow decay of blood,

Testy delirium

Or dull decrepitude,

Or what worse evil come –

‘About old people,’ Beckett remarked, ‘Yeats has written a good poem about old age, “a tattered thing”.’52 Ten days after making this comment, Beckett himself had passed away.

During this final stretch, in John Montague’s recollection Beckett had been reading Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘It’s very beautiful,’ Beckett said. Montague suggests he had ‘gone back to the pleasant discoveries of boyhood’, and Montague reflects that he had not heard Beckett ‘use the word “beautiful” before, except in connection with Yeats. I mention that to him, and he nods. “Ah, yes, yes, beautiful, too.”’53

It is therefore apt that Nicholas Grene should summon Beckett’s Molloy to his side to act as the epigraphic opening to his subtle and restorative study, Yeats’s Poetic Codes:54 ‘All I know is what the words know.’55 And thinking of what we all now know it is precious wonder that Beckett should deem it fitting in … but the clouds … to rewrite Yeats’s great concluding lines of ‘The Tower’ with a piece of theatre all his own – a teleplay that Yeats would surely have understood as the act of praise it is. But also as an acknowledgement that Terence Brown, in concluding his Yeats biography, sees as much an act of ‘creative appropriation’ as it is ‘fitting’, more:

that Beckett’s ghost play for television … but the clouds … (first televised 1977) should salute Yeats, one great twentieth-century writer recognizing another, in employing the final lines of ‘The Tower’ as a haunting conclusion to a haunted work. In this work a man in old age seeks to recall the image of a lost love … only to have the words she inaudibly speaks, at last come fully to his own mind, like a communication from the dead; ‘but the clouds of the sky … when the horizon fades … or a bird’s sleepy cry … among the deepening shades’.56

And so the ghostliness of … but the clouds … brings us to one abiding element in both writers since, in the words of Katharine Worth, ‘Beckett’s are ghost plays too in Yeats’s sense of a ghost as a clinging presence, an emanation from some obscure region of consciousness or a mysterious continuation of mind outside the body: “An earth-bound shell, fading and whimpering in the places it loved.”’57 But for one addendum – a final curious, random, utterly unexpected and probably unconnected piece in this sketch of Beckett’s Yeats.

In his contribution to a centenary celebration, Reflections on Beckett (2009), Terence Brown wrote about how Beckett was ‘wonderfully alert to how modern media with their machines were altering the ways in which human beings would experience selfhood’ and, what is more, that ‘Beckett hints at an irreducible ghostlike presence of the human in his late works for television.’58 Brown contrasts this with Yeats’s obsession with the spirit world, something that started early in his life and lasted until the very end.

Brown goes on to mention that in the 1930s Beckett would visit Thomas MacGreevy in his London lodgings at 15 Cheyne Walk Gardens, a house owned by Hester Dowden. Miss Dowden was a famous spiritualist, and while there is no evidence that Beckett had anything to do, or would have had anything to do, with such a carry-on, he did occasionally play duets with Dowden and, according to Brown, ‘enjoyed the musical evenings she arranged’. Quoting Knowlson’s biography, it seems clear that Beckett ‘got terribly tired of all the psychic evidence [and wondered] what it has to [do] with the psyche as I experience that old bastard’.59 Unlike Yeats then in every way, one would think; the Yeats fascinated by spiritualism, automatic writing, spirit guides, absent healing, and all the rest of it. Beckett never travelled down that strange path although I can’t help thinking that some of his characters might ‘dabble’ a bit.

Clearing out my late mother’s books, I came across This is Spiritualism by Maurice Barbanell (1959). I remember the book from my childhood – a rather transgressive feeling of dabbling in the dark arts pervaded the book, and remarkably still does. The book, like its subject, belonged to a time between the wars she and her family had lived in London and, by all accounts, spiritualism was quite fashionable. Flicking through the pages of this book, in which Hester Dowden and W.B. Yeats feature, along with information on clairvoyance, ectoplasm, materialisation, mediums, psychic eye and faculties, psychosomatic disease, reincarnation, spirit bodies, spirit clothing, spirit healing, trance, vibrations, and umbilical cords, I chanced upon an image of the clairvoyant Jack Webber, one of several dealing with séances, ghostly presences, afterlives, self-communing with the past, voices from beyond the grave.

Notwithstanding his understandable scepticism and impatience with Yeats’s fantastic flights of fancy, did Beckett happen in upon one such session in Hester Dowden’s Cheyne Walk Gardens, hearing things, imagining what was going on elsewhere in the house? Were similar books lying about the place or descriptions circulated to his displeased if curious mind – who can tell? Did Beckett retain Hester in his novel Murphy as Miss Dew (‘no ordinary hack medium, her methods were original and eclectic’)60 while for the image of Murphy in his ‘medium-sized cage’ in ‘his rocking-chair of undressed teak’61 the entranced medium Jack Webber, bound hand and foot in his chair, looks unerringly like Beckett’s anti-hero – or is it just that I am beginning to see things?