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