On a more basic level, some of the younger Beckett’s spleen – that which produced ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, say – can be heard in a letter he wrote from his Foxrock fastness to his pal Thomas MacGreevy in 1936. The letter is full of gossip and is rich pickings for the social historian, but it is the following extract that caught my eye: ‘I was down at the mailboat last Monday week meeting Frank [his brother] returning from Anglesea [sic] and WB stalked off with his bodyguard, Lennox, Dolly, Gogarty, Walter Starkie, O’Connor, Hayes, Higgins, all twined together.’20 This is 7 July 1936 to be exact. Yeats was actually recovering from a heart condition and finishing off work on the Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935,21 a publication that was to cause all kinds of controversy, much to Yeats’s delight. Incidentally, in a letter written a few weeks after Beckett’s, Yeats writes to Dorothy Wellesley on 26 July from ‘Riversdale’, his home in Dublin: ‘I get up every morning about 4, work at proof sheets until about 5.30, then go to bed again, breakfast at 7.30, and then write poetry, with interruption for rest, till 12’22 – not bad working habits for a 71-year-old!
According to W.J. McCormack,23 in a further letter to Dorothy Wellesley the following year, May 1937, and only partially republished, Yeats relates in the original the story of a libel case in which Beckett had appeared against Yeats’s friend Oliver St John Gogarty and his autobiography, As I was Going Down Sackville Street (1936):
In his book [Yeats is quoted as writing to Dorothy Wellesley] Gogarty has called a certain man a ‘chicken butcher’ meaning that he makes love to the immature. The informant, the man who swears that he recognised the victim[,] is a racketeer of a Dublin poet or imatative [sic] poet of the new school. He hates us all – his review of the Anthology was so violent the Irish Times refused to publish it.
He & the ‘chicken butcher’ are Jews … Two or three weeks ago Gogarty & the chicken butcher were drinking in our ‘poet’s pub’ laughing at the work.
There is no corroboration that I know of but if the ‘imitative poet of the new school’ is (if I read McCormack’s suggestion correctly) Beckett and not, say, Leslie Daiken, an important Dublin Jewish left-wing radical poet and anthologist of the time, Yeats clearly had Beckett in his sights. Yet it is curious that Yeats did not recall Beckett’s name, if, that is, we take it that the two men had met only a few years previously. Lots of ‘ifs’. But it also depends on which story one takes as fact.
Anthony Cronin’s biography of Samuel Beckett emphatically states that while Beckett had both opportunities and a network of mutual connections (Alan Duncan for one), ‘there is no evidence that [he] met any of [the prominent Dublin literary figures] who attended soirées such as Walter Starkie’s’ and ‘in fact [Beckett] was never to meet [Yeats] the greatest poet of the age, there or anywhere else’.24 Deirdre Bair’s biography of two decades earlier tells it differently:25
Just as he sought Jack B’s company, Beckett avoided introduction to his brother, whom he regarded as pompous and posturing, fatuously slobbering over all the wrong aspects of Ireland and Irish society.
But she continues:26
Beckett actually met W. B. Yeats only once, during a brief encounter in Killiney, where he was disgusted with the way W. B. Yeats simpered over his wife and made an inordinate fuss with his children.
For her sources, Bair cites A.J. Leventhal, John Montague, John Kobler, the papers of Thomas MacGreevy and a letter to H.O. White (15 April 1957)27 – both in TCD library – and an anonymous source. Following suit, in his lively Contemporary Irish Drama from Beckett to McGuinness (1994), Anthony Roche confidently identifies Killiney and 1932 as the place and year of the meeting, set up through Thomas MacGreevy, and remarks that ‘the young Beckett could find little to identify with in the persona Yeats was then projecting, of a family man with wife and children’. However, according to Roche, Beckett was ‘taken aback when the older poet praised a passage from Beckett’s “Whoroscope”, his first published poem of two years earlier [1930]’.28
Roche’s sources include Richard Ellmann, who in Four Dubliners (1986) elaborates a little further: ‘Beckett and Yeats met only once, at Killiney, south of Dublin … At this single meeting Yeats astonished Beckett by quoting a passage from “Whoroscope”’:29
A wind of evil flung my despair of ease
against the sharp spires of the one
lady.
And yet, unless I have simply missed it, I cannot see any mention of the encounter in Beckett’s published correspondence of the time, although he was, as it happens, in Killiney in 1932, dining with the Hones in December of that year. Calling up H.O. White’s letter will probably solve it all. But what does it matter, anyway? Far more important is that the following year, 1933, was to be an extremely difficult and tragic year for Beckett, with a permanent effect upon his life, as well as marking perhaps the real beginnings of his life as a writer.30
First there was the loss through tuberculosis of his cousin Peggy Sinclair in May, and then the heart attack that led to his father’s death in June. These tragedies were followed by (at last) a publishing contract for More Pricks Than Kicks, published the following year, and the writing of the story ‘Echo’s Bones’, originally to cap the collection of stories but rejected and unpublished until 2015 with the impressive edition of Mark Nixon, who notes possible Yeatsian inflections here and there, particularly Beckett’s ‘nod’ to Yeats’s A Vision (1927, revd. 1934).31 Of those who knew Beckett, it is clear that like so many of his generation in Ireland and subsequently until the late 1960s or 1970s, poetry was considered a ‘spoken’ art. As such, Beckett would have been schooled from an early age to remember poems (hymns, songs) by reciting them. Testimonials record his great ability, ‘even in delirium’,32 to recite poetry.
In Four Dubliners, Richard Ellmann remarks, ‘among Yeats’s poems Beckett had distinct preferences’33 and it is clear from the recollections of John Montague in both his memoirs,34 along with other anecdotal evidence, that Beckett identified with Yeats’s poetry the processes of his own maturity and ageing as a man and as a writer. He ‘singled out unerringly’, Ellmann notes, ‘the one [of Yeats’s early poems] that was most extraordinary … “He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead”’.35
We know from several sources that Beckett would quote from memory lines from The Countess Cathleen and, as Ellmann tells it, so much else was quick to Beckett’s mind, even towards the very end of his own life. Anne Atik movingly reveals this ability in her poignant memoir, and Gerry Dukes relates the time when he and the critic Hugh Kenner called upon Beckett ‘at the cheerless nursing home’ the month after his wife’s funeral in July 1989:36
Just before we left, Beckett recited, in a quavering voice, the last verse paragraph of W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘The Tower’ … [It] had first appeared in book form in 1928, the very year that Beckett had first arrived in Paris. It made a most moving valedictory.
Between both Ellmann and Atik, a cluster of poems emerges. Indeed to quote Ellmann, ‘There were bundles of memories’:37 ‘The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water’ (In the Seven Woods, 1904), ‘A Drinking Song’ (The Green Helmet, 1910), ‘Girl’s Song’ (The Winding Stair, 1933), ‘Why Should Old Men Not Be Mad’ (On the Boiler, 1939), ‘Crazy Jane’, ‘Mad Tom’, as well as the Swift play, The Words Upon the Window Pane, Yeats’s Oedipus, At the Hawk’s Well, Purgatory, of course, and Yeats’s Byzantium poems, constructed as artifice, yet contained within that lonely solo voice’s rhetoric which so captivated Beckett:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap