New Ways to Kill Your Mother

end, in a splendid ruse, he decided to be an art critic and convinced his mother that she should pay for a lengthy stay in Germany so that he could look at pictures.

His letters to MacGreevy about paintings are serious and well informed. He writes about paintings in his early letters better than he writes about anything else, including his own life. There is a sense of his complex personality — on the one hand, his sternness of judgement, on the other, his ability to take pleasure in what he saw — in the way he goes into exacting detail about the paintings he was looking at, including work in the National Gallery of Ireland, which was around the corner from the office in Clare Street where the family quantity surveying business was run. In December 1931, he took in Perugino’s Pieta, newly acquired by the gallery.

It’s buried behind a formidable barrage of shining glass, so that one is obliged to take cognisance of it progressively, square inch by square inch. It’s all messed up by restorers, but the Xist and the women are lovely. A clean-shaven, potent Xist, and a passion of tears for the waste… Rottenly hung in rotten light behind this thick shop window… a lovely cheery Xist full of sperm, & the woman touching his thighs and mourning his jewels.

In his story ‘Love and Lethe’ in More Pricks than Kicks, Ruby Tough from Irishtown is likened to the Mary Magdalene in this picture: ‘Those who are in the least curious to know what she looked like at the time in which we have chosen to cull her we venture to refer to the Magdalene in the Perugino Pieta in the National Gallery of Dublin, always bearing in mind that the hair of our heroine is black and not ginger.’ The following year he wrote: ‘I seem to spend a lot of time in the National Gallery, looking at the Poussin Entombment and coming stealthily down the stairs into the charming toy brightness of the German room to the Brueghels and the Masters of Tired Eyes and Silver Windows. The young woman of Rembrandt is splendid.’ In his story ‘Ding-Dong’, he described the face of the pedlar woman: ‘Yet like tormented faces that he had seen, like the face in the National Gallery in Merrion Square by the Master of Tired Eyes, it seemed to have come a long way and subtend an infinitely narrow angle of affliction, as eyes focus on a star. The features were null, only luminous, impassive and secure, petrified in radiance.’

His letters from Germany, too, are filled with the names of paintings and a sense of his fierce concentration on the task in hand. Sometimes, the descriptions and lists go on for pages. Although he wrote mainly from Germany about paintings he saw and his own melancholy, he didn’t ignore what was happening around him. From Hamburg he wrote to Mary Manning in 1936: ‘All the lavatory men say Heil Hitler. The best pictures are in the cellar.’ Soon afterwards, he wrote to MacGreevy: ‘I have met a lot of friendly people here, mostly painters… They are all more or less suppressed, i.e. cannot exhibit publicly and dare sell only with precaution. The group was broken up in 1933, their library confiscated.’ In January 1937 he noted that Thomas Mann’s citizenship had been rescinded. The following month he wrote about an art historian he had met: ‘He was removed from his post in the Real Gymnasium here at the Gallery in 1933, like all the others of his kidney.’

While this might seem like nonchalance, it should be placed beside Beckett’s general refusal to write letters filled with news of the day and his subsequent determination to stay in France once war broke out and become involved in the Resistance. It is hard not to underline the passages where Beckett took pleasure in the image of the Pieta, in pictures of the tearful mother and her headstrong son who was lying finally in her lap, hers at last. Beckett was the sort of young man who was made to break his poor mother’s heart. Home from Paris and then London and then Germany and feeling very sorry for himself, he must have been an awful nuisance lounging around the house, or in bed with hangovers — he was drinking a lot — or other unnamable complaints. His mother was neurotic enough in any case, and sad, often depressed, after the death of her husband. Beckett’s brother Frank, who was as solid as his father, took over the family business, and he was now on the point of getting married. For Beckett’s mother, her wayward son became the focus of her worry.

There is an interesting letter written from London in 1935 to MacGreevy that deals with Beckett’s reason for undergoing psychoanalysis there. He went three times a week. ‘For years,’ he wrote,

I was unhappy, consciously & deliberately ever since I left school & went into TCD, so that I isolated myself more & more, undertook less & less & lent myself to a crescendo of disparagement of others & myself… It was not until that way of living, or rather negation of living, developed such terrifying physical symptoms that it could no longer be pursued, that I became aware of anything morbid in myself… It was with a specific fear & a specific complaint that I went to Geoffrey [Thompson, a shrink], then to Bion [Wilfred, also a shrink] to learn that the ‘specific fear & complaint’ was the least important symptom of a diseased condition that began in a time which I could not remember, in my ‘pre-history’.

In other words, it was all about his mother.

In October 1937, when his mother had left him alone (with a cook, of course) in the family house, he wrote a letter marvelling at the pleasantness of Cooldrinagh without her.

And I could not wish her anything better than to feel the same when I am away. But I don’t wish her anything at all, neither good nor ill. I am what her savage loving has made me, and it is good that one of us should accept that finally… I simply don’t want to see her or write to her or hear from her… Which I suppose all boils down to saying what a bad son I am. Then Amen. It is a title for me of as little honour as infamy. Like describing a tree as a bad shadow.

In Paris in January the following year, when he was recovering from being stabbed in a serious assault, he wrote to MacGreevy about a visit by his mother and brother: ‘Hope you met Mother & Frank in London. He was relieved to be getting back, and she sorry. I felt great gusts of affection & esteem & compassion for her when she was over. What a relationship!’ In May, when he heard that she had burned her hands badly, he wrote: ‘Of course she kept it from me. I feel sorry for her often to the point of tears. That is the part that was not analysed away, I suppose.’ The following month he wrote: ‘As you can imagine I am not anxious to go to Ireland, but as long as mother lives I shall go every year.’

Beckett’s mother disapproved of her in-laws, the Sinclairs, as much as she would have disapproved of the Joyces, had she heard much about them. Beckett, however, was closely involved with both families: they offered him a way out of his own family; they opened paths for him towards certain freedoms that he sought, though they created problems for him along the way. The Becketts had a lovely habit, over the generations, of producing one or two really sensible members of the family, such as Beckett’s father and his brother, who never put a foot astray, and then various complex figures, such as Beckett’s Aunt Cissie and Beckett himself and indeed his first cousin John Beckett, whose serious, intelligent and eccentrically minimalist style of conducting Bach cantatas in Dublin, and wonderfully laconic and informative introductions, were, for me, one of the very great pleasures of the city in the 1970s. Cissie Sinclair was Beckett’s father’s only sister. She had studied art in Paris with Estella Solomons and Beatrice Elvery, later Lady Glenavy, both artists who regularly showed in the Dublin galleries. Cissie married Boss Sinclair, a Dublin antiques dealer and friend of the painter William Orpen; in the early 1920s the Sinclairs moved to Germany, where they dealt in contemporary German art, as well as antiques. Beckett often visited them there and became emotionally involved with their daughter, his first cousin Peggy, who died of tuberculosis in 1933 aged twenty-two. Her ghost is all over his collection of stories More Pricks than Kicks, and there are stray references to her throughout his work. (And there are elements of Cissie’s last years, when she was confined to a wheelchair and watched the world through a telescope, in Beckett’s play Endgame.) When Hitler rose to power, making life for Jewish art dealers impossible, the Sinclairs returned to Dublin.

They were serious art collectors and interested in music and literature. Both Boss and his son Morris played the violin. Their priorities were rather different from the stolid, dull ones that dominated Beckett’s own household. They were bohemians. They gave parties at which, as Anthony Cronin noted in his biography of Beckett, ‘people sat on the floor and afterwards quite possibly slept on it’. No one among the Sinclairs minded Beckett staying in bed all morning and having no worldly ambitions and many vague and high-toned dreams. Beckett could write to them easily about art and music. There is a marvellous letter to Morris from London in 1934, written in French, in which Beckett describes a concert he went to: