Beckett before “Godot”
by Denis Donoghue
I n February 1985 and again in a letter of
March 18 to Martha Dow Fehsenfeld,
Samuel Beckett authorized an edition of his
letters, to be gathered during his lifetime and
published after his death. But there was
a caveat: the correspondence was to be
reduced “to those passages only having
bearing on my work.” It was not clear what
he meant by “my work.” Jérôme Lindon,
Beckett’s literary executor, maintained that
the letters to be published must be only
those that mentioned individual works or
Beckett’s oeuvre. This would have entailed
publishing only letters such as those that
Beckett addressed to Alan Schneider on the
production of Endgame and other plays that
Schneider was to direct under Beckett’s in-
structions: these letters have been published
as No Author Better Served: The Correspon-
dence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider
edited by Maurice Harmon (1998). But the
editors of the present letters, Martha Feh-
senfeld and Lois Overbeck, held, modifying
the caveat, “that the letters themselves are
important acts of writing, and signal Beck-
ett’s relation to other writers and artists.”…
Neither side yielded, but Lindon resolved
the dispute in April 2001 by dying. His suc-
cessor, Beckett’s nephew Edward, agreed
with Fehsenfeld and Overbeck. The caveat,
in e¸ect, has lapsed.
–––––––––––
1 The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940, edited by
Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck;
Cambridge University Press, 749 pages, $50.
12 The New Criterion May 2009
In any case, the editors have taken a
relaxed view of it. For instance, if any of the
15,000 letters they have collected refer to
Beckett’s amours—but they probably don’t,
Beckett guarded his privacy—they will not
be published. Otherwise there appears to be
no serious restriction. Many of the letters in
the first volume refer to Beckett’s health, his
moods, his reading, and his comings and
goings between Dublin, London, and Paris,
but they have only the most remote bearing
on his published work or even his work in
progress. The editors plan to publish about
2,500 of the 15,000 letters in four volumes:
Many of them in the first volume are pub-
lished incompletely; there are lots of ellipses.
Editorial work on them was complicated by
Beckett’s habit of discarding most of the let-
ters he received: It is often hard to know the
context of his references. Some of the letters
are handwritten and di˝cult to decipher.
But the editors have done the hard work of
research. I found only a few false transcrip-
tions and even fewer annotations that missed
the point. On the whole, the editorial labor
in this first volume is immensely impressive.
I don’t know why all the letters are not to be
published, like Yeats’s, for instance.
Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in the
family home, “Cooldrinagh,” in Foxrock, a
suburb south of Dublin, on April 13, 1906.
His father William (Bill) was a well-to-do
quantity surveyor with a firm, Beckett and
Medcalf, in Clare Street, Dublin. His
mother, formerly Maria (May) Roe, had

been a hospital nurse. They married in 1901.
Samuel was sent to good Protestant schools,
culminating in a choice boarding school, the
Portora Royal, in Enniskillen, County Fer-
managh. He went on to Trinity College,
Dublin, reading French and graduating bril-
liantly in December 1927. Meanwhile, he
studied Italian and picked up enough Ger-
man to get by on an extended stay in Ger-
many from September 1936 to April 1937. It
was assumed that, after graduate study in
Paris, he would return to Dublin and take up
a teaching career in modern language and
literature at Trinity.
And so he did, to begin with, but he
found he hated teaching. He resigned from
Trinity in January 1932, much to his mother’s
disgust. Already started on a frail literary
career, he published—to no acclaim—a
study of Proust (1931), a book of related
short stories (More Kicks than Pricks, 1934),
a thin volume of poems (Echo’s Bones
and Other Precipitates, 1935), and a novel
(Murphy, 1938). Letters in this volume docu-
ment the frustrations he met in trying to
write these books and then trying to have
them published, experiences that justified his
claim, in the book on Proust, that “the heart
of the cauliflower or the ideal core of the
onion would represent a more appropriate
tribute to the labours of poetical excavation
than the crown of bay.”
Meanwhile, he had the problem of his
mother. His father was an a¸able clubman,
and Sam got on well with him. They often
went walking together in the hills of Dublin
and Wicklow. When Bill died on June 26,
1933, Beckett was desolated; he told his
friend Thomas MacGreevy, “I can’t write
about him, I can only walk the fields and
climb the ditches after him.” Life with
mother continued to be painful. She was
emotionally erratic, swinging from tender-
ness to violence. Sometimes Beckett con-
trived a state of reserved contentment with
her, but that was the best he could manage.
There were horrible rows. May Beckett was a
stern Protestant and required people to live
up to her moral standard. When Sam moved
into his twenties, she could not abide his
Beckett before “Godot” by Denis Donoghue
idleness, his drinking, and the disgraceful
quality of his fiction, so far as she could bring
herself to look at it. Not that he didn’t try to
get work. Later, in nearly penniless times, he
applied, or thought of applying, for various
jobs—an assistantship in the National Gal-
lery, London (“Apart from my conoysership
that can just separate Uccello from a hand-
saw I could cork the post as well [as]
another”). There was talk of a teaching job in
Milan, a lectureship in Italian at the Univer-
sity of Cape Town, or maybe a job in some
advertising firm in London. When he be-
came interested in film, he wrote to Sergei
Eisenstein asking to be admitted for a year
or more to the Moscow State School of
Cinematography: “I have no experience of
studio work and it is naturally in the scenario
and editing end of the subject that I am most
interested.” No reply.
W hen Sam left home for London and Paris
on October 16, 1937, he wanted to put some
distance between himself and his mother
and to surround himself with new images,
new sounds, streets not Dublin’s, voices not
May’s. There was evidently a particularly
dreadful row between him and his mother,
sometime between September 21 and 28,
1937. The immediate cause is not known. It
may have been, as his biographer James
Knowlson thinks, Beckett’s determination
to contest, in court, a car accident that was
clearly his fault; or his decision to give
evidence for the plainti¸, his uncle Harry
Sinclair, in a libel case against Oliver St.
John Gogarty that arose from a passage in
Gogarty’s As I Was Going Down Sackville
Street. Whatever the cause, there was a full-
blown quarrel. Beckett accompanied his
brother Frank on a trip to Waterford, per-
haps to give himself a break. His mother, in
turn, left Cooldrinagh for a while. On Oc-
tober 6, Beckett wrote to MacGreevy:
Instead of creeping about with the agenbite, as
I suppose I ought, I am marveling 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
The New Criterion May 2009 13
 Beckett before “Godot” by Denis Donoghue
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.
As it has been all this time, she wanting me to
behave in a way agreeable to her in her October
of analphabetic gentility, or to her friends
ditto, or to the business code of father ide-
alized-dehumanised—(“Whenever in doubt
what [to] do, ask yourself what would darling
Bill have done”)—the grotesque can go no fur-
ther. It is like after a long forenoon of the
thumb screws being commanded by the bour-
reau to play his favourite song without words
with feeling. I simply don’t want to see her or
write to her or hear from her. And as for the
peace in the heart and all the other milk pud-
dings that the sun is said to set on so much bet-
ter, they will never be there anyway, least of all
as the fruit of formal reconciliation.
Worse still, as if one venomous phrase in-
cited another:
There are the grey hairs that will go down in
sorrow, that want to go down in sorrow, as
they came up in sorrow, because they are that
kind. And if a telegram came now to say she was
dead, I would not do the Furies the favour of
regarding myself even as indirectly responsible.
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. If she does
not return home before, I shall leave for Lon-
don probably next Monday.
London, then after a few days Paris, where
he lived for the next fifty-two years. He had
an allowance from his father’s estate, but it
was barely enough to survive on. He con-
tinued to visit his mother now and again at
Cooldrinagh, bringing her his ailments if
not his love: She tended to him as patiently
as she could. When Beckett was stabbed to
near-death on the Avenue d’Orléans on
January 6, 1938, May, Frank, and his wife
rushed to Paris to be at his bedside. The day
before he was released from hospital, he
wrote to MacGreevy: “I felt great gusts of
a¸ection & esteem & compassion for her
14 The New Criterion May 2009
when she was over. What a relationship!”
May Beckett died at the age of seventy-nine,
on August 25, 1950, of Parkinson’s disease.
Most of the letters in this first volume are
to MacGreevy. There are some to George
Reavey, Beckett’s agent, but they are not
particularly informative. A few are to other
friends. Beckett first met MacGreevy in Paris
in November 1928, when he arrived at the
Ecole Normale Supérieure. MacGreevy was
already pretty well established there; he
knew his way around and was on visiting
terms with James and Nora Joyce. He intro-
duced Beckett to the Joyces, and to Jean
Beaufret, Richard Aldington, and Eugene
Jolas. Within a few months, Beckett became
part of the circle and, early in 1929, at Joyce’s
suggestion, wrote “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico
. . . Joyce,” a chapter in the cheerleading
book Our Exagmination Round his Factifica-
tion for Incamination of Work in Progress.
MacGreevy also wrote a chapter. He was a
man of letters, born in Tarbert, County
Kerry—supposedly the most westerly village
in Ireland—an avant-garde poet, critic, art
historian, especially familiar with Italian
Renaissance painting. In 1931, he published
the first monograph on T. S. Eliot and, in
1945, a study of Jack B. Yeats’s paintings. In
1948, he started a correspondence with Wal-
lace Stevens which lasted till the poet’s death
in 1955 and resulted in Stevens’s two-part
poem “Our Stars Come from Ireland”: the
first part “Tom MacGreevy, in America,
Thinks of Himself as a Boy,” the second—
after some doodling about westwardness—
“The Westwardness of Everything.” Mac-
Greevy was Director of the National Gallery
of Ireland from 1950 until his retirement in
1963. A devout Roman Catholic, he often
pressed Beckett to read edifying books, in-
cluding Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi.
The first volume of letters does not
produce any news, though it is good to have
such a large spread of evidence. Some letters
are familiar to anyone who has read the stan-
dard biographies, those by Deirdre Bair
(1978), Anthony Cronin (1996), and the
authorized one, Damned to Fame, by James

Knowlson (1996). The themes are well iden-
tified. Beckett tells MacGreevy about his ail-
ments: palpitations of the heart, boils, a cyst
in his neck, constipation, insomnia, pleurisy,
bad teeth, intestinal pains, gastric flu—and
later, beyond the first volume, we will hear of
glaucoma in both eyes. In 1933, devastated
by his father’s death, he decided that his
illnesses might be psychosomatic, and he put
himself in the hands first of his friend Dr.
Geo¸rey Thompson; later, in London, he
resorted to the psychotherapist Wilfred
Bion. He had sessions with Bion three times
a week—May paid—for the next two years,
to no dramatic healing e¸ect, although
Beckett concluded afterward that Bion’s
analysis had done him some vague good.
Then there was the question of Joyce, the
Master, whom Beckett following Work in
Progress called Shem or the Penman. He ad-
mired Joyce as he deserved, a great, heroic
writer, subject to the consideration that he
himself must write otherwise. On May 5,
1956 he told Israel Shenker: “The more Joyce
knew, the more he could. He’s tending
toward omniscience and omnipotence as an
artist. I’m working with impotence, ig-
norance.” On August 15, 1931, Beckett ac-
knowledged to Charles Prentice of Chatto
and Windus that the story “Sedendo et
Quiescendo” “stinks of Joyce in spite of
most earnest endeavours to endow it with
my own odours.” In June 1932, he told
Samuel Putnam: “I vow I will get over J.J.
ere I die. Yessir.” On a personal level, there
was a breach between Beckett and the Joyces
in May 1930, but it was repaired after a
while; the fact of their mentally distraught
daughter Lucia’s unrequited love for
Beckett made for tension nonetheless. In
December 1937, Beckett helped Joyce with
proofs of Finnegans Wake. He reported to
MacGreevy:
Joyce paid me 250 fr. for about 15 hrs. work on
his proofs. That is needless to say only for your
ear. He then supplemented it with an old over-
coat and 5 ties! I did not refuse. It is so much
simpler to be hurt than to hurt. I am invited to
dine with them Xmas night.
Beckett before “Godot” by Denis Donoghue
Two weeks later, the hurt was healed:
He was sublime last night, deprecating with
the utmost conviction his lack of talent. I
don’t feel the danger of the association any
more. He is just a very lovable human being.
T he letters show what a highbrow Beckett
was: severe books, concerts, art galleries,
high culture; not necessarily Beckett’s own
books, but books he was reading, usually
with dissatisfaction unless the author was
his beloved Schopenhauer or the Fielding of
Joseph Andrews. The concerts, too, classical
recitals, were often disappointing: Cortot
(whom I recall with renewed pleasure) had
a bad day, Horowitz was o¸ form, Beecham
had some other problem. As for “the ig-
noble Furtwängler, who, it appears, has had
the better part of his nudity covered with
interwoven swastikas,” Beckett reported of
his concert with the Berlin Philharmonic
Orchestra in Queen’s Hall, London on
January 22, 1934:
He has the charming modesty of letting him-
self be led by his brass-players, who blow as
only beer-drinkers can, while making with his
little left hand very daring gestures towards his
first violins, who fortunately paid not the least
attention to them, and swinging the soft flesh
of his posterior as if he longed to go to the
lavatory. Hardly had I recovered from this as-
sault [on Bach’s Suite for Orchestra No. 2 in B
Minor] 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), and which is not really worth think-
ing about, let alone launching into. Needless
to say that the murderous Furtwängler, with
the connivance of his damned souls, was vic-
torious, if massacring a score that has certainly
never been alive can count as a victory.
The only concerts in London he enjoyed,
apparently, were chamber music recitals,
performances by the Pro Arte Quartet and
the Busch Quartet, especially the Busch
The New Criterion May 2009 15
 Beckett before “Godot” by Denis Donoghue
performance of Beethoven’s Quartet No. 13
in B-flat major, Op. 130:
Although it is only his penultimate quartet it
has as its finale the last composition we have
from his hand, an incomparably beautiful Al-
legro. But it is the Cavatina that immediately
precedes that Allegro that made the greatest
impression on me. A movement which in
calm finality and intensity goes beyond any-
thing I have ever heard by the venerable Lud-
wig, and which I would not have believed him
capable of.
I t has been claimed that Beckett was im-
mensely learned. He wasn’t. He would
never have made a good professor; he had
no time for method, system, or com-
munication. The writers who meant most
to him were Dante, Milton, Swift, and
Samuel Johnson. He tried with no success
to write a play about the relations between
Johnson, Hester Thrale, her husband, and
Gabriel Piozzi, whom she married after her
husband’s death. I doubt that he ever read
the Complete Works of any of these writers.
He was an intellectual, a man of capricious
Culture rather than of Nature. He liked the
countryside as much as anyone. When
Frank brought him on a trip to the West of
Ireland in October 1932—Frank paid—he
found it charming: Galway, “a grand little
magic grey town full of sensitive stone and
bridges and water.” Altogether, as he wrote
to MacGreevy from Cooldrinagh, “it was an
unforgettable trip and much too short,
through bog and mountain scenery that was
somehow far more innocent and easy and
obvious than the stealthy secret variety we
have here.” But that was as far as his interest
in nature went, he was not tempted toward
any neo-Wordsworthian intimations of im-
mortality or spiritual power inherent in
da¸odils—he felt no “natural piety” in the
presence of scenery.
But his sense of culture was opportunis-
tic, never disinterested. In the books he
read, he was always looking for some-
thing—a phrase, a sentence—that he might
use in the book he was trying to write at the
16 The New Criterion May 2009
time. Take, for instance, his dealings with
the Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx
(1624–1669). I don’t know who set him on
to reading Geulincx; it may have been the
Irish poet Brian Co¸ey. Whoever it was, he
had Beckett spend the best part of the first
four months of 1936 in the Long Room of
Trinity College transcribing fifty pages of
Geulincx’s Latin from the Ethica, to be con-
strued later, I assume. I don’t believe that
Beckett was seriously interested in the ver-
sion of Occasionalism that Geulincx
adumbrated, according to which any ap-
pearance of mind a¸ecting body or body
a¸ecting mind must be explained as the re-
sult of a special intervention by God, who
on the occasion of a change in one sub-
stance produces a corresponding change in
the other. Beckett immediately replaced
God in that transaction by an innocuous
entity he called eternity. He told MacGreevy
about reading the Ethica:
The work [is] worth doing, because of its
saturation in the conviction that the sub specie
aeternitatis vision is the only excuse for
remaining alive. He does not put out his eyes
on that account, as Heraclitus did & Rimbaud
began to, nor like the terrified Berkeley
repudiate them.
He also recommended Geulincx to his
philosopher friend Arland Ussher, “above all
the second section of the second chapter of
the first tractate [of Ethica] where he dis-
quires on his fourth cardinal virtue, Hum-
ility, contemptus negativus sui ipsius.” In
Molloy, Molloy describes himself, in a
beautifully extended phrase, as “I who had
loved the image of old Geulincx, dead
young, who left me free, on the black boat of
Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the
deck.” But Beckett put Geulincx to best use
in Murphy, giving his most memorable tag
to the passive hero: Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil
etiam veles [“where you are worth nothing,
there you should wish for nothing”]. He
used Geulincx for Murphy just as he used the
linguistic skepticism of Fritz Mauthner’s
Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache for Watt.

Paintings, too, Beckett looked at for his
needs. In the months he spent in Germany,
he ran from one gallery to another, taking
notes. He appreciated some of the old mas-
ters that he saw or remembered from else-
where—Bordone’s “Portrait of a Man” in
Munich, Poussin’s “Echo and Narcissus”
in the Louvre, Giorgione’s self-portrait in
Brunswick—but when modern painting was
in question, his ideology started insisting.
Painting began with Cézanne:
Cézanne seems to have been the first to see
landscape & state it as material of a strictly
peculiar order, incommensurable with all hu-
man expressions whatsoever. Atomistic land-
scape with no velleities of vitalism.
He admired Jack Yeats for the same reason:
Watteau put in busts and urns, I suppose to
suggest the inorganism of the organic—all his
people are mineral in the end, without pos-
sibility of being added to or taken from, pure
inorganic juxtapositions—but Jack Yeats does
not even need to do that. The way he puts
down a man’s head & a woman’s head side by
side, or face to face, is terrifying, two ir-
reducible singlenesses & the impassable im-
mensity between. I suppose that is what gives
the stillness to his pictures, as though the con-
vention were suddenly suspended, the conven-
tion & performance of love & hate, joy & pain,
giving & being given, taking & being taken. A
kind of petrified insight into one’s ultimate
hard irreducible inorganic singleness. All han-
dled with the dispassionate acceptance that is
beyond tragedy. I always feel Watteau to be a
tragic genius, i.e. there is pity in him for the
world as he sees it. But I find no pity, i.e. no
tragedy in Yeats. Not even sympathy. Simply
perception & dispassion.
Two letters throw a dim irreligious light on
Beckett’s writings. The first, of March 10,
1935, was to MacGreevy, who had evidently
been commenting warmly on Thomas à
Kempis. Beckett acknowledged that the Im-
itation of Christ had some lovely phrases, but
what was one to make of them “but a
Beckett before “Godot” by Denis Donoghue
quietism of the sparrow alone upon the
housetop & the solitary bird under the
eaves?”:
An abject self-referring quietism indeed, beside
the alert quiet of one who always had Jesus for
his darling, but the only kind that I, who seem
never to have had the least faculty or disposi-
tion for the supernatural, could elicit from the
text, and then only by means of a substitution
of terms very di¸erent from the one you
propose. I mean that I replaced the plenitude
that he calls “God,” not by “goodness,” but by a
pleroma only to be sought among my own
feathers or entrails, a principle of self the pos-
session of which was to provide a rationale &
the communion with which, a sense of Grace.
The other was a letter to Mary Manning on
August 30, 1937, while Beckett was failing to
get Murphy published:
I do nothing, with as little shame as satisfac-
tion. It is the state that suits me best. I write the
odd poem when it is there, that is the only
thing worth doing. There is an ecstasy of ac-
cidia—willess in a grey tumult of idées
obscures. There is an end to the temptation of
light, its polite scorchings & consolations. It is
good for children & insects. There is an end of
making up one’s mind, like a pound of tea, an
end of patting the butter of consciousness into
opinions. The real consciousness is the chaos, a
grey commotion of mind, with no premises or
conclusions or problems or solutions or cases
or judgments. I lie for days on the floor, or in
the woods, accompanied & unaccompanied, in
a coenaesthesia of mind, a fullness of mental
self-aesthesis that is entirely useless. The
monad without the conflict, lightless & dark-
less. I used to pretend to work, I do so no
longer.
The first letter in the volume (“Dear Mr.
Joyce”) is dated March 23, 1929; the last, to
Marthe Arnaud, is dated “Monday” [June
10, 1940]. On June 12, Beckett and his
partner Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil left
Paris for Vichy. Two days later, German sol-
diers occupied Paris.
The New Criterion May 2009 17