Beckett’s work has become increasingly topical. Over
the past six months, comparisons between the British government’s Brexit
negotiations and Endgame have cropped up regularly in the press, and Waiting
for Godot has been staged at the Irish border between the counties of Cavan and
Fermanagh. Prior to that, Beckett’s canonical plays on stasis, inaction and
circularity were regularly evoked in accounts of the Syrian Civil War and
articles describing the endless plight of Syrian refugees. And prior to that, the
idea that ‘this’ – any international crisis or difficult episode in European or
American politics – ‘is like Waiting for Godot’ provided many journalists with
some convenient one-liners. Everyone is waiting, nothing happens, and no one
knows what to do: who else but Beckett can help us think about that?
The great paradox is that, on the surface, there seems
to be little about Beckett’s work that might enable us to think about politics.
His texts deal with uncertainty, displacement and postponement – ideas that are
not easily compatible with other types of writing that openly define themselves
as political. He has long been thought of as someone who had a deeply abstract
way of thinking and was only interested in pure philosophical problems, rather
than the problems of the world in which he lived. However, to many among his
acquaintances, he came across rather differently: as someone who had an
instinctive and deep understanding of pain and suffering, and as someone who
knew that times of genuine political tension also bring to light many otherwise
hidden truths. He was deeply interested in those moments when what appears to
be the set course of history is overturned, and witnessed many such moments
over the course of his lifetime.
To some, the situations represented in his work – in
his plays in particular – can seem divorced from any recognisable reality. To
others, however, the situations of torture, dispossession and subjugation that
Beckett’s work depicts are intimately familiar, and its insights into the
importance of memory, courage and solidarity are unrivalled. When war and
conflict edge closer, Beckett’s writing becomes strangely real and visceral.
Many across the world have seen, and continue to see, deep and immediate
political resonances in a body of work revolving around ruins, ashes, mud and
stones, around waiting and suffering, and around terror, devastation,
internment and forced exile.
The political knowledge that the work carries is a
political knowledge that Beckett acquired in the hard way, through experience
and observation. The wars and severe political convulsions that made modern
Europe shaped his worldview, and he had an unusually extended knowledge of what
war does to nations and to peoples. The key themes in his writing – violence,
exploitation, dispossession – are politically profound, yet the writing itself
doesn’t conform with what is normally expected of openly politicised
literature. We can’t expect to find directly identifiable, unambiguous representations
of real events in Beckett. What we get are evocations, layers, suggestions,
echoes, cultural ciphers, lone allusions. It is clear from the manner in which
he wrote that he sought inspiration in the world he knew, and that the
political tensions and tragedies that he witnessed were often what inspired him
to write in the first place; yet, at the same time, he actively wrote all of
this out, and avoided describing specific events directly.
His experience of political history was unusually
extensive and unusually direct. He witnessed the impact of the Irish Civil War
and the Irish War of Independence in his childhood and early youth, and gained
first-hand exposure to Nazi Germany’s belligerent rhetoric in adulthood. During
the Second World War, he experienced Nazi occupation in wartime France and
contributed to the war effort and to the work of resistance networks,
translating military information for a French resistance cell under the command
of the British SOE. There were other Irish nationals working for French
resistance cells, but he is the only Irish writer to have fought so directly in
an anti-Nazi resistance movement. The resistance cell was wiped out following a
denunciation; Beckett escaped but other members of the group – over a hundred
of them – were caught and shot or deported to the Nazi camps. He remained
haunted by what had happened around him. He never bragged about what he had
achieved, however. When he was asked why he had joined the French Resistance,
he simply said that he ‘couldn’t stand [by] with [his] arms folded’. For the
rest of his life, he followed the same principle: he observed what was taking
place around him and took action when he could, without drawing attention to
himself or seeking to claim credit for his actions. Wars followed one another;
in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he followed the political debates ignited by
the Algerian War of Independence attentively, registering some of these
tensions in his texts from the period, and he supported his French editor, who
was a close collaborator and friend, through hard times, through censorship and
through struggles with the courts.
He counted among his collaborators and friends many
artists and figures who were strongly politicised and left-leaning, and who
sometimes paid a high price for their political activities. For his part, he
gave steadfast support to campaigns for justice and freedom of speech and
movement, and began to sign petitions when he decided to become a professional
writer in the early 1930s; that same decade, he became one of the translators
involved in a large anthology of Black writing. Over his lifetime, he signed a
vast number of petitions to defend the rights of figures as varied as the
Scottsboro Boys, Salman Rushdie or Soviet political prisoners such as Mikhail
Stern, Anatoly Sharansky and Semyon Gluzman. He wasn’t politicised in the usual
ways – he wasn’t a member of a political party, for example – but he sustained
different kinds of political commitments, and looked upon political figures
such as François Mitterrand and Václav Havel with interest and admiration. He
signed petitions against human rights violations beyond the Iron Curtain, in
Chile under Pinochet and elsewhere across the world. He made regular donations
– among them, a manuscript for auction to the ANC, rare editions of his works
to Oxfam and Amnesty International, and money to help cover judicial support
for four members of the Black Panther Party –George Brown, Jean and Melvin
McNair, and Joyce Tillerson – who were detained in France after hijacking a
plane. He joined artists’ groups associated with the British and Irish
anti-apartheid movements and with the defence of civil liberties. He
contributed a poem to a volume conceived as a tribute to Nelson Mandela. And
much more. He was someone to whom people turned when they were in difficulty;
someone who helped others.
Beckett’s political legacy is much more extensive than
we might think. For many among his contemporaries who aspired to see change,
not simply in art, but in world politics, his writing held strong historical
significance. Radical political theorists such as Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno
and Herbert Marcuse, politically transformative playwrights such as Lorraine
Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy and Amiri Baraka, and theatre companies such as the
Free Southern Theater, tied to the American civil rights movement, displayed a
deep interest in his work. The places in which his plays have been performed
tell us of the deep political realisations that many have seen in his writing.
In the 1960s, Waiting for Godot was performed across the black American South
alongside Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious, a satire of segregation and a tale
of revolt and emancipation that became a crucial cultural landmark for African
Americans. In 1993, it was performed in Sarajevo under siege, in an adaptation
directed by Susan Sontag, and in 2007, on the devastated streets of New Orleans
after Hurricane Katrina, in a production directed by Paul Chan. In 2011, the
Freedom Theatre’s Acting School in the Jenin Refugee Camp staged an adaptation
of the play as a tribute to their mentor, Juliano Mer Khamis, after his
assassination, transforming Waiting for Godot into a reflection on what waiting
means for Palestinians. Other artists – notably the American playwright
Antoinette Nwandu – have sought inspiration in Beckett’s writing to reflect on
waiting as a fundamentally dangerous and life-threatening activity for African
Americans.
Beckett was well aware of the power that his words
have for those who are waiting – for a better life, for peace, for justice.
When the Swedish theatre director Jan Jönson showed him photographs of the
black inmates rehearsing Waiting for Godot at San Quentin prison, he responded
by saying that he could see in these photographs ‘the roots of [his] play’. His
work encourages us to look at what is in front of us – to, as he put it, ‘open
our eyes and see the mess’. Opening our eyes: that may well be the most
difficult political gesture of all.
Beckett's Political Imagination. By Emilie Morin.
IAI TV , January 22, 2019
In this interview with Emilie
Morin, author of Beckett's Political Imagination, we discuss what prompted
Emilie to write a book on Beckett's politics, and why Beckett traditionally is
not considered to be a political playwright. Emilie also explains how Beckett's
political outlook is reflected in his writing, and she tells us what has
surprised her the most when researching for this new book.
Could you tell me a little bit about yourself and your
research interests?
My research revolves around modernism and post-1945
literature, and the essays and books that I have published on Beckett’s work
explore its relation to politics, its historical dimensions, and its Irish and
European influences. I have been working in the Department of English at the
University of York for over ten years.
How did you first encounter Samuel Beckett’s writing?
I must have been about fifteen, I think, when I first
heard about Beckett. A friend of mine told me about a play that she had seen in
which two actors were trapped in rubbish bins, and I was intrigued! Soon after
I came across copies of the early absurdist plays, in the lovely Editions de
Minuit versions. I was particularly struck by Oh les beaux jours, with its
memorable cover featuring Madeleine Renaud stoically holding her umbrella.
t seemed to me remarkable that a whole play could be
made to unfold from that situation, from that image. The author was of no
concern to me then, but from that first reading I recall being convinced that
the work dealt with colonialism and with colonial wars, and I remember seeing a
very literal political dimension within it. The French texts have a peculiar
texture; they refract much of what is unsaid about colonial history, and much
of what is culturally unsayable about historical injustice, and I was sensitive
to that. These were powerful impressions, which stayed with me thereafter. When
I began to study Beckett’s work properly, many years later, I did so in light
of its Irish literary and historical contexts, and my first monograph was a
reappraisal of Beckett’s relation to Ireland. For me, the work is never
abstract: it is inseparable from war memory and from the long colonial
histories that it invokes. In a sense, this new book was a return to my first
impressions: when I started researching, I worked on what is now the final
chapter on Beckett and the Algerian War of Independence.
Some people think of Beckett as the author of
apolitical works set in hermetically-sealed environments. In what ways do you
think your book unsettles or challenges this image?
The view of Beckett as an apolitical author is very
deeply enshrined; I would say that this is how the vast majority of people
think of Beckett, rather than just some. Distinctive reading habits have formed
around Beckett’s work: his writing has always posed formidable challenges to
interpretation, and the close reading that it necessitates has an unusual
intensity – an intensity that encourages the perception that its political
undertones are irrelevant, and that its intellectual and factual moorings are
of marginal significance. Beckett is read as a metaphysical writer by default;
as someone who was preoccupied about pure philosophical problems, and had
little interest in what was taking place around him. In hindsight, now that the
field is really shifting, it is amazing to see the persistence with which these
assumptions about Beckett have been upheld; when they have been questioned, the
questioning has been met with strong resistance, confined to the margins of
critical debate, or remained fairly light-touch. Fields of research dealing
with other major twentieth-century authors have evolved differently and haven’t
made such assumptions quite as forcefully.
My book is about unsettling this image, and it
unsettles it in different ways. The Beckett that I present is a writer deeply
interested in politics, who is working in a densely politicised world. In my
view, the political Beckett is a much more compelling figure than the lonely
hermit concerned about the nature of being. The great difficulty, of course,
when it comes to connecting Beckett’s writing to political history, is that the
work invokes but does not represent directly. For that reason, my book seeks to
reconcile different traditions of scholarship oriented towards historical,
theoretical and aesthetic questions. Framed in that way, a dialogue between
these different traditions of interpretation becomes possible, and that
dialogue is the way forward in my view.
What is at stake in countering received wisdoms about
Beckett’s political disaffection is a much broader question about how
literature functions within history: the relation between literature and
politics is always complicated, particularly in the twentieth century. The
belief that literature can or should be divorced from politics is one that I
don’t ascribe to. In my view, the consensus around Beckett as apolitical at
best and disaffected at worst is like any other powerful consensus around
literary history, in that it has articulated itself in spite of abundant
evidence to the contrary, against many other counter-currents.
Previously, when critics have looked at Beckett’s
relation to politics, they have mostly discussed his involvement in the French
Resistance during the Second World War, but in my view his resistance work was
only the tip of the iceberg. He had other political commitments too, and I show
that he knew much about the political work of many groups and individuals –
about the ANC in South Africa, the British and Irish anti-apartheid movements,
the Black Panthers and political dissenters imprisoned by the Soviet regime in
Eastern Europe and Russia, for example. He signed numerous petitions in defense
of other writers, artists and editors over the course of his career, while
backing campaigns against censorship and international human rights movements.
These petitions had not been discussed before, largely because Beckett’s
political work was done behind the scenes, and I believe that the critical
volume of petitions that I document in the book changes the equation. I should
perhaps clarify that the kind of petition that I discuss has nothing to do with
contemporary online petitions: these were politically significant documents
that had a different profile, in which each signature mattered and could have
consequences.
As I was researching the book, I became particularly
interested in documenting Beckett’s networks in Ireland, Britain, France and
elsewhere, and in showing how his professional career was supported and
sometimes made possible by these networks. He was a well-connected artist,
animated by a great curiosity, and there are fewer degrees of separation than
we often think between him and the more openly politicised artists and thinkers
of his time. He was knowledgeable about the long history of colonialism, the
long history of Europe, the workings of political propaganda and the ideologies
of far-right movements. He wasn’t politicised in the usual ways – he wasn’t a
member of a political party, for example – but he sustained different kinds of
political commitments, like many other writers of his generation, and was
broadly committed to a liberal left agenda, particularly in his late career.
Some of his most important friendships were cemented by shared beliefs in the
politically transformative power of literature. His close friends and
collaborators sometimes paid a high price for their political activities –
Nancy Cunard and his French editor Jérôme Lindon come
to mind in this respect. His friends also included figures who stood on the
other side of the political fence, particularly during the Second World War.
For his part, Beckett had a strong interest in the politics of the left and in
the radical left; this interest permeates many facets of his work, and many of
the factual details that are invoked in his texts. When he translated texts by
other authors, his translation practice was also unusually politicised. He did
much rewriting when he worked as a translator for UNESCO after the Second World
War, when he collaborated with Octavio Paz on an anthology of Mexican poetry,
and when he contributed to an anthology by Nancy Cunard that brought together
texts by black authors and reflections on imperialism, segregation and colonial
exploitation. What Beckett brought to these works were political insights as
well as translations; that much is clear from the content of his translations.
What is the significance of the title, Beckett’s
Political Imagination?
The title is a challenge to established ways of
reading Beckett: Beckett is commonly thought of as someone who had a brilliant
yet deeply abstract and decontextualised way of thinking about representation.
The book demonstrates that his writerly imagination was political and
politicised. It relates how Beckett responded to the events taking place around
him in his writing, and it shows that political history is reimagined in his
work in ways that are sometimes deeply idiosyncratic, and at other times
sharply attuned to the debates taking place around him. Of course, his work
deals with ideas that are not easily compatible with political writing: his
texts don’t offer any certainties or clear aspirations, but deal with
uncertainty, with exile, with various forms of displacement and deferment. We
can’t expect to see directly identifiable, unambiguous representations of real
events in Beckett. What we get are evocations, layers, suggestions, echoes,
cultural ciphers, lone allusions. So, as such, his writing doesn’t conform with
what is normally expected of openly politicised literature. But there is no
doubt that his work has spoken to, and continues to speak to, conflict and
suffering in ways that other texts by other writers do not. The key themes in
his writing, when we think about it, are violence, suffering, exploitation,
dispossession, torture and internment. These are politically significant and
politically profound themes.
How do you think the political and cultural context of
Beckett’s time shape his manuscripts and published texts?
Many of Beckett’s texts have connections to, and can
be related to, situations and events that he experienced directly over the
course of his life, in Ireland, in Germany, in France and elsewhere. From the
manner in which he wrote, it is clear that he tried not to write directly about
specific events, but that the political tensions that he witnessed frequently
inspired him to write in the first place. So, in a sense, he often wrote
against his own political sensibilities. There are some interesting manuscripts
that attempt to deal with specific political and economic contexts, in Ireland
during the 1930s or in France in the aftermath of the Second World War and
during the Algerian war of independence, but these were discarded, abandoned or
altered beyond recognition. It is important, I think, to pay heed to the work’s
capacity to askdifficult questions about its own connections to the contexts in
which it was composed, and about the remit of representation more broadly.
Beckett, for his part, had a very strong sense that his own political remit as
a writer was limited, by virtue of the fact that he was an artist, not a
political activist. Yet over the course of his career he witnessed many of the
events that shaped the modern history of Ireland, Germany, France, and Europe
as we know it. He knew what war and conflict really meant, and he was scarred
by some of his experiences. He was deeply interested in those moments when the
set course of history is overturned. But the life is one thing, of course, and
the work is another. The work is not representational in the usual sense. The
work is plural, and deals with many pasts and many presents at the same time.
The contexts to which it responds are plural, shifting, simultaneous. The
work’s cross-cultural and cross-linguistic dimensions are of crucial importance
and are always challenging.
There are different ways of contextualising an
author’s work: it is possible to sketch out broad historical lines and frame a
body of texts in that way, and this can be done relatively easily, but context
can remain distant and the links can remain speculative and tenuous. I tried to
go beyond that: I tried to bring political history as close as possible to the
work. I wanted to join the dots, to return fromhistorical facts back to
Beckett, to the political worlds in which he was immersed, and to his own
reimagining of political history. This close historical work was a necessity:
the political contexts to which Beckett’s writing responds are not necessarily
well known to us today, and multiple forms of war memory – notably, the memory
of the Algerian war – leave traces in the texts that are delicate, and
difficult to fathom without careful contextualisation.
Could you tell me a little bit about your research for
the project?
The research and writing took over ten years, which
seems like a very long time (and felt like a long time!) but this was
unavoidable: big monographs require this kind of slow research, and the pace at
which they progress is often opposed to the pace of contemporary academia. The
book was written in small increments, whenever it was possible to write: my job
keeps me busy, and I did many other things during that time as well. It began
as a project with a strong theoretical dimension, but as time went by the
theoretical arguments lost prominence and biographical and historical details
expanded. What was most time-consuming in terms of the research was honing the
book’s overall frame, and collecting all the documents and evidence
demonstrating Beckett’s close interest in politics and political activism,
because much of this came from newspaper articles and microfilms that are not
indexed or easily available. The anecdotes and episodes related in the book
emerged gradually. I visited archives in Ireland, in France, in Britain and in
the US – the Beckett archives are surprisingly scattered – and I spent as much
time in research libraries as I could. When it came to writing, some sections
took longer than others: the chapter on the Algerian war, for example, took ten
years to reach its final form. Crafting a narrative for the first chapter,
which deals with the 1930s and Beckett’s efforts as a historical writer and
political essayist, also took years. The chapter on testimony and the
aftermaths of the Second World War was challenging to write, for other reasons:
it deals with materials that affected me deeply.
Did you encounter any shocks or surprises during the
course of researching the book?
The most unlikely find was probably the detailed map
of the Santé prison that I cite in the final chapter (in 1960, Beckett moved to
a flat – where he remained thereafter – situated next to the prison). Maps of
high-security prisons are not in the public domain, for obvious reasons, but I
found one by chance, buried in the Law section at the University of Caen
library, when I was working at the IMEC.
Beyond that, yes, shocks and surprises were frequent,
particularly when I started to accumulate a significant number of petitions
bearing Beckett’s signature. Petition-signing is one of the most common
measures of political activity in the twentieth century, and Beckett was said
to have signed either none, or just one, or else a handful – and these were
mostly rumours which came without footnotes or references. So I had to do a lot
of chasing, and I had to go about it in imaginative and counter-intuitive ways
sometimes. It proved to be a strange process: after a while I began to develop
a good sense of the kinds of documents that he may have endorsed, and whenever
I had time to look I found more petitions bearing his signature. Once I realised
that he began to sign petitions around the time he decided to become a
professional writer (the first was an appeal issued by Nancy Cunard in defense
of the Scottsboro Boys), the trajectory became clearer, and the task became
easier. Many of the petitions that he signed later, between the late 1960s and
the late 1990s, were published in national newspapers that had a large
circulation, and were also supported by artists known for their political
activities. But Beckett’s contributions went by and large without comment. It
is astonishing, I think, that such a well-known figure could sign so many
public petitions and be so widely perceived as apolitical.
The situations that are represented in Beckett’s texts
can seem far removed from the world we know, but they are also dimly
recognisable; his plays, for example, evoke situations of hardship that many
people have faced over the course of history. His work also offers wonderful
insights into memory and the importance of courage and solidarity. It is no
wonder that in some parts of the globe Beckett continues to be seen as a writer
who sheds light on the world’s cruelties and ironies: Waiting for Godot,
notably, is consistently received as a text that has a political weight. There
have been press reports in the past few years commenting on the significance of
Beckett’s writing for people in Syria, or on the West Bank, or in cities
devastated by war or natural catastrophe elsewhere. People across the world
continue to read Beckett and find strength and solace in his writing. We can
also look to him, of course, as an interesting model for what political
principle can look like: he occasionally took real risks, and privileged action
over words. But there is a big difference between the world in which Beckett
lived and the world that most of us reading Beckett, in the West, know today.
Personally, I don’t turn to literature or to modernism when I want to think
about the times we are living in – I look elsewhere – but I wouldn’t dissuade
anyone from doing so either: I can understand the many people who find in
Beckett an evocative mirror for their own political angst. The work is full of
fabulous lines and aphorisms that acquire striking resonances once they are
pitted against real events, real situations of injustice and suffering.
Do you have a favourite Beckett text?
I enjoy returning to the late plays – Ohio Impromptu
and the plays for television – as well as the prose fragments – Lessness, for
example. These are endlessly fascinating texts, which just about bear to be
read and looked at. In general, I see new things in the work every time I
return to it, and that’s largely because I’ve had such wonderful students over
the years.
What’s next for you?
Other horizons… Right now, I am writing a piece on
prison writing during the Algerian war, and thinking about radio.
Samuel Beckett’s Political Imagination. Interview by Rhys
Tranter. Rhys Tranter , July 5, 2018.
Since his emergence to international fame with the
success of En Attendant Godot in the early 1950s, Samuel Beckett has been
largely perceived as an apolitical writer. Martin Esslin’s critical bracketing
of him as a practitioner of the “theatre of the absurd” removed his writing
from having any direct social or political application. As Emilie Morin says,
“interviews and memoirs portray a writer peculiarly unqualified for political
activity, ill-at-ease with mundane realities and more comfortable with
philosophical abstraction”; what tended to be stressed was the broad
universality of Beckett’s humanism rather than any more narrow political
allegiance. Beckett certainly offered comments that fed this interpretation,
even when commenting on his intelligence work for the French Resistance during
World War Two – rare political activism which has attracted increasing critical
attention in Beckett studies. His response to the question of whether he was
ever political was: “No, but I joined the Resistance.”
He was moved to do so by the fate of Jewish friends in
Paris in the early years of the war, such as Joyce’s secretary, Paul Léon, and
his wife, Lucie, as the full extent of Nazi antisemitism became all too
manifest. Beckett was most frequently moved to political action by the fate of
friends, but though he may term this an act of friendship rather than a
political act, it can be best seen as a strategy to retain his freedom. He was
also capable of intervening on behalf of writers whose work he may have known
but with whom he was personally unacquainted when it came to important issues
of freedom of expression and censorship. Where his literary production is
concerned, it was only with the appearance of the late play Catastrophe (1982)
that a more political Beckett was discerned; the play was dedicated to the
imprisoned Czech playwright Václav Havel.
In the wake of Catastrophe, it became clearer that
there was a political subtext to Beckett’s plays, “with their numerous
portrayals of violence, torture, dispossession, internment and subjugation”.
That subtext could be brought out more explicitly by a particular social and
political context, as when the American intellectual Susan Sontag staged
Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo in 1993. But it is not at the well-known texts of
Beckett’s writing career that Morin looks in the main. The more overt political
engagement is to be found in the margins of his writing: in the important works
of translation he did for Negro: Anthology Made by Nancy Cunard, 1931-1933
(1934) and Octavio Paz’s Anthology of Mexican Poetry (1958).
Morin’s own bilingualism in French and English is
central to her informed examination of how Beckett brought the politics of the
works he was translating more to the fore. She shows the extent to which
Beckett’s three main publishers, Jérôme Lindon in Paris at Les Éditions de
Minuit, John Calder in London and Barney Rosset in New York, consistently
published works with an overt politics and a dedication to civil liberties; and
that this context was one which mattered to Beckett in terms of where his work
appeared. Although these interests continued from the beginning to the end of
his life and literary career, Morin discerns three quite demarcated periods of
intense activity: the 1930s, “during which Beckett’s identities as writer,
translator and critic were formed” and where the Irish interest is uppermost;
the artistic turning-point known as the “siege in the room” between 1946 and
1948, when Beckett wrote his great prose trilogy and first two plays in the
aftermath of war; and the period between 1958 and 1962, where the Algerian war
looms large in the writer’s consciousness.
In her previous book, Samuel Beckett and the Problem
of Irishness (2009), Morin displayed an enviable depth of knowledge on Beckett
and the Ireland of the 1930s. That knowledge is deepened and extended here in
the first of the book’s four major sections. In part, this is because so many
of Beckett’s literary projects at the outset of his career did not come to
fruition (of course, failure to complete a work or the decision to abandon a
work remained constants throughout his career). The most interesting case here
is the “Trueborn Jackeen”, a “discarded satire for which he kept notes on Irish
history, myth and the cattle trade”. Morin refers to this work as “mysterious”,
not just because it is so little known but also because it is not clear from
the materials assembled what final form the “Trueborn Jackeen” would have
taken.
This problem of form is a constant in all of the cases
where Beckett opts for a more overtly political work. Allied to “Trueborn
Jackeen” is a typescript called “Cow”, made up of “a list of jokes, puns,
citations about the cattle trade and cattle rearing, and jottings about Irish
medieval legends”. As Morin rightly concludes, “these fragments reveal an
attempt to work with precise political coordinates, and resonate with
determining debates about Irish agriculture and the economy”.
Beckett’s few but important pieces of Irish literary
journalism in the 1930s, “Censorship in the Saorstat” and “Recent Irish
Poetry”, are examined. WB Yeats would have been none too pleased with the
latter, attacking as it does the Celtic Twilighters and promoting the claims of
an Irish poetic modernism with Thomas MacGreevy, Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey.
It was the national poet’s followers, like FR Higgins and Austin Clarke (a
particular bugbear of Beckett’s in the 1930s), who were the true objects of
Beckett’s attack. But Morin’s researches have brought to light something I was
unaware of, that Beckett had been asked by The Irish Times to review Yeats’s
1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse. The review never appeared; presumably, it was
negative and rude about Yeats’s poetic and political conservatism as evidenced
by his choices in the book. In a letter to Dorothy Wellesley, Yeats wrote: “He
[Beckett] hates us all – his review of the Anthology was so violent the Irish
Times refused to publish it.” Morin’s first chapter reveals how isolated
Beckett became in Dublin as the decade wore on. As she puts it: “These
troubling anecdoes [she cites others] reveal the degree to which Beckett was
labouring under the weight of many creative and critical impossibilities. By
the mid-1930s, he had increasingly little support in Dublin and seems to have
violated some powerful political codes, knowingly and unknowingly.”
That isolation was made publicly and graphically clear
when Beckett took the stand in November 1937 to support his cousin, Morris
Sinclair, who had taken a libel case against Oliver St John Gogarty for remarks
made in Gogarty’s memoir As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937). The nub
of the issue was antisemitism (Sinclair was Jewish). As Morin notes: “Several
accounts of the trial have been offered, and all of them fail to convey the
degree to which Judeophobic discourse remained ubiquitous, accepted and
unchallenged.” Beckett was asked by Gogarty’s lawyer, JM Fitzgerald, “whether
he was a Jew, a Christian or an atheist (‘None of the three’, he replied)” and
his recent monograph on Proust was held up (Fitzgerald deliberately
mispronouncing the French novelist’s name) to support the claim that this
witness who had come to Sinclair’s defence was “a bawd and a blasphemer”.
Beckett had little choice at this stage but to return to Paris.
He spent much of the 1930s trying to get out of
Ireland: Paris (naturellement); a period in London which he drew on for his
first novel, Murphy; visits to art museums in Nazi Germany on which Mark Nixon
has done much valuable work and which Morin discusses here. The German sojourn
convinced him that war was imminent: “in September 1938, from his new Parisian
home on Rue des Favorites, he listened with dread to yet another speech by
‘Adolf the Peacemaker’”. But the most unusual foreign country Beckett tried to
move to, not once but twice, failing on each occasion, was Russia. I knew he
had written to the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein hoping to train
under him as a film editor (he received no reply); but I did not realise he had
then followed that up with a letter to Vsevolod Pudovkin “about the virtues of
the naturalistic silent film”, also unanswered. So Paris it was, in the Rue des
Favorites, to await the coming of war.
The second chapter focuses on translation, work
undertaken by Beckett for Nancy Cunard’s anthology in the 1930s and Octavio
Paz’s in the 1950s. Beckett’s considerable contribution to the former, where he
translated the majority of the French-language contributions into English, was
not sufficiently recognised for a long time: his name was not listed in the
contents nor the acknowledgements, but only appended to the individual works.
This section is a disturbing reminder of just how callow in his racial
attitudes this young Irishman could be. As so often in the book, remarks
Beckett makes in letters can be contradictory and difficult to reconcile, above
all on the key question of whether he is political or not; but there is also
considerable ambivalence on the subject of race. On the one hand, Beckett is
happy to sign Cunard’s petition on the freeing of the Scottsboro boys, “the
nine teenage black boys accused of rape of two white women in Alabama [and] the
infamous series of trials that began in 1931”. On the other hand, he begins his
first published essay, “Dante ... Bruno. Vico ... Joyce”, “by comparing
philosophy and philology to ‘a pair of nigger minstrels’”. Nancy Cunard was
partnered by the jazz musician Henry Crowder. On the one hand, Beckett
dedicates a poem to Crowder with the title “From the Only Poet to a Shining
Whore. For Henry Crowder to sing”; and both Cunard and Crowder speak of Beckett
with unalloyed affection in their memoirs. On the other hand, there is a
disturbing amount of lazy racism about Crowder in Beckett’s correspondence with
MacGreevy, mocking his Southern drawl and perceived lack of erudition. They
remind me of Philip Larkin’s letters to Kingsley Amis; like Beckett Larkin is
also clearly playing up to the prejudices of his friend, this from a man who
revered Louis Armstrong and loved American jazz. It is ironic for Beckett to
display such attitudes upon occasion (at others, he speaks warmly of Crowder
and his talent) since Beckett himself was subject to racism in England (on the
grounds of being an Irish “Paddy”) and in France (where he was “not French”).
He may not have been unaware of these ironies. When Louis Armstrong shows up in
one of the translations, the great jazz trumpeter was “reimagined by Beckett
[as] speaking Irish English”.
There is no room here to go into Morin’s detailed and
persuasive demonstrations of how Beckett in his translations “consistently
improves on the style of the originals and politicises their terminology” in
order to indict colonialism. With the Paz volume, although Beckett “lamented
the inclusion of poor poets and his uneven grasp of Spanish”, Morin works to
show that he brought the same “intensity of attention and insight” to this
anthology as he had to the earlier volume. At this point, in the last ten pages
of the chapter, the reiterated repetition of the same essential point – that
Beckett further politicises the works he is translating –becomes rather
wearying, blurring the effect of the Spanish poems themselves.
Things pick up again in the third chapter, which has a
strong overall argument and is fascinating about World War Two and its
aftermath. Beckett would take action in defence of Jewish friends like Paul and
Lucie Léon who were under threat from the Nazis. But he was as likely to help a
friend whose politics were of a very different stripe, as was the case with George
Pelorson, whom he knew from the École Normale Supérieure. Pelorson “worked for
the Vichy regime and disseminated pro-Nazi propaganda”; after the war, Beckett
only referred to Pelorson’s activities in “covert” terms and tried to help him
get his work published under his new identity. He was also generous towards
fellow Irish writer Francis Stuart, whose wartime activities were scarcely
exemplary. But most of his friends Beckett knew from his wartime activities in
the Resistance and, as Morin puts it, “he perceived his own political identity
through the lens of the French Resistance”.
The book makes clear how muddied the political waters
were in France in the years immediately after the war. A good many of those who
had collaborated in the Vichy regime remained in power and it was not always
clear what their earlier allegiances had been (as was the case with Pelorson).
This was also the period when Beckett resumed his writing with a vengeance,
commencing what he described as the “siege of the room”, in which the prose
trilogy, his first two plays – En Attendant Godot and Eleutheria – and other
writing came into being, all of it in the French language for the first time.
The ambiguities of the prose trilogy replicate those of postwar French
politics, as Morin carefully explicates. One example will have to serve: in
Molloy the title character “answers to a ‘patron’ whose sinister name, Youdi –
a term of abuse designating a Jew in colloquial French, used in the late
nineteenth century and revived under the Vichy regime – further invokes the
shadow of wartime persecutions”. Adorno has memorably used the phrase “after
Auschwitz” to refer to the radical changes the act of representation had
undergone as a result of the extremities of World War Two. Beckett’s own
version of this profound sea change in the nature of his writing is quoted by
Morin: “in 1949, he writes ... that he is ‘no longer capable of writing
about’”.
Beckett adumbrates the same topic in a talk he wrote
about his time working with the Irish Red Cross at the bombed French town of
Saint-Lô. This talk, written in English in June 1946, was originally intended
to be broadcast on Radio Éireann, and hence was written with an Irish audience
in mind; but apparently it was never broadcast. Entitled “The Capital of the
Ruins”, its resonant conclusion imagines how the experience of working there
will have affected the Irish nurses and doctors:
some of those who were in Saint-Lô will come home
realising that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed
what they could hardly give, a vision and sense of a time-honoured conception
of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our
condition may be thought again. These will have been in France.
Radio Éireann may have found Beckett’s account too
grim for its listenership. As Morin points out, it “could not be further
removed from that of the Irish Times correspondent, who in August 1946
described the Saint-Lô hospital as a remarkably ‘happy’ place where visitors
were ‘pleasantly entertained’, in the midst of a region that still had much to
offer to the sightseer”.
What has become clearer in recent Beckett criticism is
his close involvement in tracking the Algerian war. Morin notes that the
introduction to the third volume of the recently published Letters of Samuel
Beckett “points to the Algerian war as one of the broader contexts shaping How
It Is”. Her analysis of the novel demonstrates this in detail: “it [the novel]
presents a simulacrum of military training and traces the movements of a figure
crawling in mud, pulling along an old jute bag full of rotting tinned food
reminiscent of army rations”. Over ten pages earlier, Morin has mentioned in
passing that Beckett had read Roger Casement’s Black Diaries when they were
published by Grove Press in May 1959. She might have made a connection with
practices of colonial torture in How It Is for, as Patrick Bixby has shown,
Beckett’s reading of the Diaries had a considerable impact on his writing of
the novel. This fourth and final chapter focuses on torture as key to the
implementation of the Algerian war and notes its foregrounding in several works
Beckett wrote at the time. From the writer’s point of view, there is the
fascinating deployment of a wide range of euphemisms to describe practices that
must remain covert (the Algerian conflict was only officially recognised as a
war in 1999): “rock ’n’ roll” designates torture by electricity (which had the
“advantage” of leaving no marks on the body); “sunbathing” the burning of
flesh, and so on. In Rough for Radio II, which involves three men extracting
information from their victim, who wears a hood, a blind, a gag and earplugs,
one of the euphemisms employed to describe a method of torture is “embrasser
... au sang” (to kiss to bleeding point). The other focus of the chapter is on
Beckett’s publisher/editor, Jérôme Lindon of Les Éditions de Minuit. The two
men were very close; Beckett chose Lindon to represent him in Stockholm when he
declined to pick up his Nobel Prize in person in 1969. Lindon published many
volumes relating to the Algerian conflict and later remarked that “his small
publishing house would not have survived the Algerian war if it hadn’t been for
Beckett, who lent him the money necessary to avoid bankruptcy”. In December
1961 Lindon was prosecuted by the French government for publishing Maurienne’s Le
Déserteur, “a novel whose main character advocates desertion”. The one occasion
when Beckett broke to the surface and publicly acknowledged his opposition to
the Algerian war was when he signed a petition to express solidarity with
Lindon’s position. The only newspaper to take note of this was The Irish Times,
where an eagle-eyed Peter Lennon wrote about it in “The Case of M Lindon” on
January 31st, 1962.
The conclusion of Beckett’s Political Imagination
invokes the much-circulated image of Beckett with a gag over his mouth,
signifying his opposition to censorship. The playwright Tom Stoppard, who had
originally solicited Beckett’s support for the Index on Censorship, was
embarrassed by this development. Beckett had originally supplied a photograph
which the advertising company Saatchi and Saatchi then doctored. As Morin
relates: “Beckett’s reply to Stoppard’s embarrassed apology was
characteristically brief: ‘nothing against it’.” It is also
uncharacteristically relaxed from a writer who was now happy enough to be
identified with an interest in political matters, a position which earlier he
had shied away from. Similarly, Morin can now show the late play Catastrophe as
a full flowering of a politics which had been there from the start. Her book
traces Beckett’s political maturation as a writer and as a human being. The
research is impressive, in terms of all the material it contains, not just from
the Beckett archive but from the wider world of political discourse. The
closest Beckett ever came to a dramatic political statement was to write
“¡UPTHE REPUBLIC!” when asked by Nancy Cunard where he stood on the Spanish
Civil War. More often, his remarks were oblique, qualified, in the margins of his
literary works rather than occupying centre stage. But the case is built by
Morin’s patient accumulation of telling details across two-hundred and fifty
pages until finally the conclusion seems inescapable: Samuel Beckett was a
political animal.
