New Ways to Kill Your Mother

I have had to put up with a huge composition by [Bach], humorously entitled: Suite for Orchestra, conducted by the ignoble Furtwangler, who, it appears, has had the better part of his nudity covered with interwoven swastikas. He has the charming modesty of letting himself be led by his brass-players, who blow as only beer-drinkers can, while making with his left hand very daring gestures towards his first violins, who fortunately paid not the least attention to them, and swinging the soft fleshiness of his posterior as if he longed to go to the lavatory. Hardly had I recovered from this assault when he had the impertinence to launch into Schumann’s Fourth Symphony, which is less like a symphony than like an overture begun by Lehar, completed by Goering, and revised by Johnny Doyle (if not his dog).

A small rift with the family arose after Beckett published the story ‘The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux’, in which he used a letter from Peggy Sinclair just a year after her death. In a letter to Morris, Beckett wrote: ‘Glad to hear that Boss bears me no ill-will. But that I knew beforehand.’ James Knowlson writes in his biography:

His uncle seems to have understood better than his aunt the needs of fiction and not been too cross. As for Cissie, she was very upset at first. But she quickly forgave him, after he wrote a letter pleading with her to see him during his summer trip home. The reconciliation was so successful that, after meeting her during the summer, he could write to MacGreevy that all was well ‘with only a minimum of constraint with Smeraldina’s Ma’.

In her biography, Deirdre Bair wrote: ‘Yet he seems to have had little remorse for deeds such as this, complaining only of the loss of visiting privileges, as if someone else, a complete stranger, had committed the transgression.’

A problem arises in the edition of his letters with the sources for this information. Beckett insisted that only letters ‘having bearing on my work’ needed to be published after his death. Edward Beckett, Beckett’s nephew, who represents the estate, is cited in the introduction to Volume I of his letters as ‘a working partner in the preparation of this edition’. The editors acknowledge that ‘he has responded generously where there was disagreement over what counts as “having bearing on the work”.’ But they also make clear that while they followed a policy of including as much as possible, there were disagreements between them and the estate. ‘To take one example,’ they write, ‘it is the editors’ view that Beckett’s frequent, at times almost obsessive, discussion of his health problems — his feet, his heart palpitations, his boils and cysts — is of direct relevance to the work; with this the Estate of Samuel Beckett has disagreed.’ The editors point out that while there are ‘some ellipses’ in the letters as published, they have ‘tried to limit these’. Calling Cissie Sinclair, whom Beckett dearly loved, ‘Smeraldina’s Ma’, just a year after the death of her daughter Peggy, the model for Smeraldina, in a letter to MacGreevy may not improve Beckett’s status among right-thinking people. But for the rest of us, who are interested in his work, it is not merely of prurient interest, though it is that as well. It is of importance how Beckett dealt with people in his family who objected to real people being used as models for characters. In the case of Beckett, whose relationship with the world of ‘real people’ would become increasingly strained as he produced his masterpieces after the war, this early use of his dead cousin, and his own response when problems arose, has ‘bearing on the work’, whether his estate likes it or not.

Bair, in her footnotes, cites ‘the papers of Thomas MacGreevy’ for her information on the strain between Beckett and the Sinclairs over the use of Peggy’s letter. Knowlson cites two different letters to MacGreevy written in August 1934, only one of which is included in the edition of his letters. The one here is printed with three ellipses, and there is no use of the term ‘Smeraldina’s Ma’ to describe Cissie Sinclair. The first paragraph reads:

My dear Tom, Your letter this morning. Somehow things at home seem to be simpler, I seem to have grown indifferent to the atmosphere of coffee-stall emotions […] But people’s feelings don’t seem to matter, one is nice ad lib. to all & sundry, offender & offended, with a basso profundo of privacy that never deserts one. It is only now I begin to realise what the analysis has done for me.

The next paragraph also begins with ‘…’, and another ‘…’ appears at its end.

The problem for the reader, in a book so filled with detailed and informative footnotes, is that in this case there is no footnote, no clue given as to who might be offender or the offended here. In May 1937, after the death of Boss Sinclair, Beckett wrote to MacGreevy: ‘I suppose you have read about the action for libel that Harry [Boss Sinclair’s twin brother] is taking against [Oliver St John] Gogarty. I am in it up to the neck. And gladly in so far as Boss wanted it done, having seen the offending passage some weeks before his death.’ Gogarty had written an autobiography, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street, and included a passage about

an old usurer who had eyes like a pair of periwinkles on which somebody had been experimenting with a pin, and a nose like a shrunken tomato, one side of which swung independently of the other. The older he grew the more he pursued the immature, and enticed little girls into his office. This was bad enough, but he had grandsons, and these directed the steps of their youth to follow in grandfather’s footsteps, with more zeal than discrimination.

There were also references to ‘the twin grandchildren of the ancient Chicken Butcher’ and to an antique dealer called Willie (William was Boss’s original name).

In his statement of claim, Harry Sinclair accepted that his grandfather had in fact enticed little girls into the back room of his premises and interfered with them sexually, but denied that he and his brother had followed in their grandfather’s footsteps, as it were, in this matter. He insisted that he and his brother were easily identifiable and were clearly libelled.

Beckett came back from Paris to give evidence that he recognized the Sinclairs as the subject of Gogarty’s libel. Earlier he had written to MacGreevy: ‘All kinds of dirt will be raked up & I suppose they will try & discredit me as author of the Pricks.’ He was right. The barrister for the defence read out a passage from More Pricks than Kicks, which had been banned in Ireland, that referred to Jesus’s ‘interference in the affairs of his boyfriend Lazarus’. He also made mention of Whoroscope, a book of poems, and forced Beckett to correct his deliberate mispronunciation of the name Proust and admit that he wasn’t a Christian, a Jew or an atheist, alienating the jury as much by his French accent as by his lack of religion or his non-religion. In the summing-up, the barrister referred to Beckett as ‘a bawd and a blasphemer’ and this was used the next day as a column subheading in The Irish Times. In his summing-up the judge said that he himself would not put much faith in the evidence of ‘the witness Beckett’.

In his biography Knowlson writes: ‘Although he rarely discussed the case in his correspondence with friends, his remarks about Ireland became more and more vituperative after his return to Paris.’ It is easy to imagine his mother’s view on the matter as she read about the trial daily in The Irish Times. Beckett did not stay with her when he returned to give evidence. When the trial was over, he went to see his brother, who advised him to go back to Paris without seeing her. Beckett did so. His mother, in retaliation, never spoke to the Sinclairs again.

Although Beckett wrote many letters — 15,000 have been found and transcribed by the editors, and there may be more — he was not, on the evidence of the first volume, a great letter-writer. We are lucky that he put his real energies into his work. And yet there are passages and entire letters in this volume that throw significant light on the development of his thinking about language and prose, as much as about art and music. The most interesting is his letter from Dublin to the writer and translator Axel Kaun, written in 1937 in German:

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write informal 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. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask… Of course, for the time being, one makes do with little. At first, it can only be a matter of somehow inventing a method of verbally demonstrating this scornful attitude vis-a-vis the word. In this dissonance of instrument and usage perhaps one will already be able to sense a whispering of the end-music or of the silence underlying all.