inclinations to a priest, he was told to kick himself every time he had such thoughts.) He was a dapper little fellow who wore a bow-tie; he managed to be Catholic and queer, patriotic and cosmopolitan all at the same time. When he lived in Paris, he often went for a walk during the day to ‘make sure the world was where [he] had left it the evening before’. In the years between Beckett’s arrival in Paris in 1928, where he and MacGreevy taught at the Ecole Normale Superieure, and the outbreak of the Second World War, MacGreevy was Beckett’s confidant and his closest friend.
Although Beckett was brought up in what was effectively suburban Dublin, the house was close enough to the mountains south of the city, and to the sea and the bare Wicklow Mountains even further south, to make this landscape one of abiding importance to Beckett, who, like his father, was a great walker. The letters in the first volume of his correspondence make clear that, despite his lack of interest in Ireland or Irishness, he loved the Irish landscape. In 1932 he wrote to MacGreevy about a trip to the west of Ireland with his brother Frank, describing Galway as:
a grand little magic grey town full of sensitive stone and bridges and water. We… spent a day walking on Achill right out over the Atlantic… Altogether it was an unforgettable trip and much too short, through bog and mountain scenery that was somehow far more innocent and easy and obvious than the stealthy secret variety we have here. I would like to go back to Galway and spend a little time there.
Ten days later, he described the Wicklow Mountains:
I walk immeasurably & unrestrainedly, hills and dales, all day, and back with a couple of pints from the Powerscourt Arms under my Montparnasse belt through the Homer dusk. Often very moving and it helps to swamp the usual palpitations. But I disagree with you about the gardenish landscape. The lowest mountains here terrify me far more than anything I saw in Connemara or Achill.
This habit of walking would fill one of Beckett’s miraculous late pieces,
It being a public holiday your father left the house soon after his breakfast with a flask and a package of his favourite egg sandwiches for a tramp in the mountains. There was nothing unusual in this. But on that particular morning his love of walking and wild scenery was not the only mover. But he was moved also to take himself off and out of the way by his aversion to the pains and general unpleasantness of labour and delivery. Hence the sandwiches which he relished at noon looking out to sea from the lee of a great rock on the first summit scaled. You may imagine his thoughts before and after as he strode through the gorse and heather.
Beckett seems to have had an uncomplicated relationship with his father. In April 1933 he wrote to MacGreevy:
Lovely walk this morning with Father, who grows old with a very graceful philosophy. Comparing bees & butterflies to elephants & parrots & speaking of indentures with the leveller. Barging through hedges and over the walls with the help of my shoulder, blaspheming and stopping to rest under colour of admiring the view. I’ll never have any one like him.
Two months later, when his father died, Beckett wrote to MacGreevy:
He was in his sixty first year, but how much younger he seemed and was. Joking and swearing at the doctors as long as he had breath. He lay in the bed with sweet pea all over his face, making great oaths that when he got better he would never do a stroke of work. He would drive to the top of Howth and lie in the bracken and fart… I can’t write about him, I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him.
Beckett’s father’s late interest in not doing a stroke of work made its way with many complications and much guilt to his son. Lassitude is one of Beckett’s great subjects. In August 1930, as he worked on his book on Proust, he wrote: ‘I can’t do the fucking thing. I don’t know whether to start at the end or the beginning.’ In December, the book finished, he wrote to the editor in London to say that he had added nothing. ‘I can’t do anything here — neither read nor think nor write. So I am posting it back to you within the next day or two with practically no changes made. I must apologise for the absurdity of the entire proceeding. I expected more generous rifts in the paralysis.’ The following month he wrote to MacGreevy: ‘You know I can’t write at all. The simplest sentence is a torture.’ Soon, he wrote to MacGreevy again from London: ‘If I could work up some pretext for writing a poem, short-story, or anything at all, I would be all right. I suppose I am all right. But I get frightened sometimes at the idea that the itch to write is cured. I suppose it’s the fornicating place & its fornicating weather.’ Two weeks later, nothing had changed: ‘I don’t believe I could put a dozen words together on any subject whatsoever.’ A year afterwards, back in Ireland, there was still no advance. ‘I find it more and more difficult to write and I think I write worse and worse in consequence.’ In 1934 he wrote to his cousin: ‘I can’t do any work, no more than a man can pick his snout and thread a needle at the same time. So I’ve nearly given up trying.’ In 1936 he wrote from Hamburg to the writer Mary Manning in further despair:
My next work shall be on rice paper wound about a spool, with a perforated line every six inches and on sale in Boots. The length of each chapter will be carefully calculated to suit with the average free motion. And with every copy a free sample of some laxative to promote sales. The Beckett Bowel Books, Jesus in farto.
(He referred to his Proust book as ‘my Proust turd’.) His interest in the toilet might have been awakened by what he described to Arland Ussher early in 1936 as ‘a sebaceous cyst in my anus which happily a fart swept away before it became operable’. As late as 1939 he was writing to MacGreevy: ‘I drowse through the days & do nothing. I try now & then to get started, but it comes to nothing. If it is to be like that, let it be like that.’
His problem in these years was very simple and not easy to solve: it was how to live, what to do, and who to be. He was clever, well educated, he spoke French and Italian fluently; his German was very good. But his first book of stories had not sold and he could not find a publisher for his novel. He had no idea how he would earn a living, and he was also deeply unhappy. He was not always the saintly figure, full of shy politeness and withdrawn courtesy, that he subsequently became. His loathing for the poet Austin Clarke emerges freely in his letters. He openly satirized him in
His famous despair is not always on display here, though there are hints of it. In a letter to his cousin in 1934, he wrote about the coming of spring:
The strange, gentle pleasures I feel at the approach of spring are impossible of expression, and if that is a sentence inviting ridicule, so much the worse for me. I have positively never watched it coming with so much impatience and so much relief. And I think of it as a victory over darkness, nightmares, sweats, panic and madness, and of the crocuses and daffodils as the promise of a life at least bearable, once enjoyed but in a past so remote that all trace, even remembrance of it, had been almost lost.
At times in his letters, it is easy to see him slowly and laboriously becoming the writer and the man he later was; at other times, it is clear that he could have become someone else. In 1933 he wrote to MacGreevy about the possibility of a career in advertising (‘It has been in my mind for a long time’). In 1936, when he was thirty, he thought of training to be a commercial pilot (‘I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously’). He also considered training to be a film-maker and sent a letter to Eisenstein that same year asking to be admitted to the Moscow State School of Cinematography. As well, he applied to be a lecturer in Italian at the University of Capetown. In the
