Samuel Beckett: Quotations (2)

A similar collation of Beckettian quotations appears in the RICORSO Classroom
- via Index [in a separate window] or direct [in this frame].

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‘Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’, in Our Exagmination [...] &c.], 1929) - his essay on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake [1]: ‘The danger is in the neatness of identifications. And here am I, with my handful of abstractions, among which, notably: a mountain, the coincidence of contraries, the inevitability of cyclic evolution, a system of Poetics, and the prospect of self-extension in the world of Mr. Joyce’s “Work in Progress” [...] Must we wring the neck of a certain system in order to stuff it into a contemporary pigeon-hole, or modify the dimensions of that pigeon-hole for the satisfaction of analogymongers? Literary criticism is not book-keeping. (Our Exagmination, in 1961, pp.1, 3-4; quoted in Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature, London: Pluto Press 1998, p.86.)

‘Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’ (1929) [2]: ‘The conception of Philosophy and Philology as a pair of nigger minstrels out of the Teatro di Piccolo is soothing, like the contemplation of a carefully folded ham-sandwich [...] This social and historical classification is clearly adapted by Mr. Joyce as a structural convenience - or inconvenience. His position is in no way a philosophical one.’ (ibid. q.p.); ‘... form is strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. This intensive skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of salivation.’ (ibid.; q.pp.)

‘Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’ (1929) [3]: ‘Hell is the static lifelessness of unrelieved viciousness. Paradise the static lifelessness of unrelieved immaculation. Purrgatory a flood of movement and vitality released by the conjunction of these two elements. There is a continual purgatorial process at work, in the sense that the vicious cycle of humanity is being achieved [...]’ (Rep. in Disjecta, John Calder 1983, p.33; quoted in David Pattie, The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett, Routledge 2000, pp.15-16.)

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Proust ([1931] NY: Grove edn. 1957): ‘Proust’s creature are victims, then, of this predominating condition and circumstance - Time; victims as lower organisms, conscious only of two dimensions and suddenly confronted with the mystery of height, are victims, victims and prisoners. There is no escape from the hours and the days. Neither tomorrow nor yesterday. There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place. Yesterday was not a milestone that has passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday. A calamitous day, but calamitous not necessarily in content. The good and evil disposition of the object has neither reality nor significance. The immediate joys and sorrows of the body and the intelligence are so many superfoetations. Such as it was, it has been assimilated to the only world that has reality and significance, the world of our latent consciousness, and its cosmography has suffered a dislocation. So that we are rather in the position of Tantalus [...]’ (p.13.) [Cont.]

Proust (1931; Grove Edn. 1957) - cont.: ‘The laws of memory are subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals; the world being a projection of the individual’s consciousness (an objectivation of the individual’s will, as Schopenhauer would say), the pact must be continually renewed, the letter of safe-conduct brought up to date. The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day. Habit then is the generic term for countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitutes the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptions (because by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave sheets serve as swaddling clothes) represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being.’ (p.19.) [Cont.]

Proust (1931; 1957) - cont.: ‘The suffering of being, that is, the free play of every faculty. Because the pernicious devotion of habit paralyses our attention, drugs those handmaidens of perception whose co-operation is not absolutely essential.’ [20] ‘The old ego dies hard. Such as it was, a minister of dullness, it was also an agent of security [...] when [...] it betrays its trust as a screen to spare its victim the spectacle of reality, it disappears, and its victim, now an ex-victim, for a moment free, is exposed to that reality - and exposure that has its advantages and its disadvantages. It disappears - with wailing and gnashing of teeth. The mortal microcosm cannot forgive the relative immortality of the macrocosm.’ [...; 22] (pp.20-22; also quoted in Pattie, op. cit., 2000, pp.16 - and there cited as Proust and Three Dialogues, pp.19.)

Proust (1931; 1957) - cont. ‘[I]f love, for Proust, is a function of man’s sadness, friendship is a function of his cowardice [...] Friendship is a social expedient, like upholstery or the distribution of garbage buckets. It has no spiritual [63] significance. For the artist, who does not deal in surfaces, the rejection of friendship is not only reasonable, but a necessity. [...] The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn to the core of the eddy. He cannot practise friendship, because friendship is the centrifugal force of self-fear, self-negation. (Proust and Three Dialogues, pp.65-66; quoted [in part] in Pattie, op. cit., 2000, p.72.) [Cont.]

Proust (1931; 1957) - cont.: ‘The most successful evocative experiment can only project the echo of past sensation, because, being an act of intellection, it is conditioned by the prejudices of the intelligence which abstracts from any given sensation, as being illogical and insignificant, a discordant and frivolous intruder, whatever word or gesture, sound or perfume, cannot be fitted into the puzzle of a concept. But the essence of any new experience is contained precisely in this mysterious element that the vigilant will rejects as an anachronism.’ [67] (Proust and Three Dialogues, Calder Edn. 1967, &c.) [Cont.]

Proust (1931; 1957) - cont.: ‘Tragedy is the statement of an expiation [...] the expiation of an original sin [...] The sin of having been born.’ (Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duhuit, London: John Calder 1965; quoted in Pattie, op. cit., 2000, p.15.)

Proust (1931): ‘By his impressionism I mean his non-logical statement of phenomena in the order and exactitude of their percepton, before they have been distorted into intelligibility in order to be forced into a chain of cause and effect. ... And we are reminded of Schopenhauer’s definition of the artistic procedure as “the contemplation of the world independently of the principle of reason”. In this connection Proust an be related to Dostoievski, who states hsi cahracters without explaining them. It may be objected that proust does little else but explain his characters. But hsi explanations are experimental and not demonstrative. He explains them in order that they may appear as they are - inexplicable. He explains them away.’ (Proust, pp.66-67 [1967 Edn.]; quoted in Josephine Jacobsen & William R. Muellar, The Testament of Samuel Beckett, Faber 1964; 1966 - as attached].)

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‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (1934): Here Beckett characterises Literary Revival and its tradition as a group of writers ‘in flight from self-awareness’: ‘What further interest can attach to such assumptions as those on which the convention has for so long taken its ease, namely, that the first condition of any poem is an accredited theme, and that in self-perception there is no theme, but at best sufficient vis in tergo to land the practitioner in the correct scenery, where the self is either most happily obliterated or else so improved and enlarged that it can be mistaken for part of the decor? None but the academic.’ (‘Recent Irish Poetry, in Bookman, No. 86, 1934, rep. in Michael Smith, ed., The Lace Curtain, 1971, p.59; quoted in Elmer Andrews, Introduction, Contemporary Irish Poetry, Macmillan, 1992, p.10.) [Cont.]

‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (1934) - cont.: ‘Thus contemporary Irish poets may be divided into antiquarians and others, the former in the majority [...]. This position, needless to say, is not confined to Ireland or anywhere else. The issue between the conventional and the actual never lapses, not even when the conventional and the actual are most congruent. But it is especially acute in Ireland, thanks to the technique of our leading twilighters’; ‘the antiquarians, delivering with the altitudinous complacency of the Victorian Gael the Ossianic goods.’ (Ibid.; quoted [prob. from Smith, op. cit.,] in Anthony Cronin, Heritage Now: Irish Literature in English, Brandon 1982, p.13.) [Cont.]

Note that Beckett’s asservations about the ‘Cuchulanoid’ tendency of recent Irish poetry [not quoted here] employs a term which had been coined by J. M. Synge in a letter to Stephen McKenna.

‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (1934) - cont.: ‘segment after segment of cut and dried santity and loveliness’ (cited in Cronin, op. cit., p.194); ‘[Devlin’s work] does not proceed from the Gossoons Wunderborn of that Irish Romantic . combination, Sir Samuel Ferguson and Standish O’Grady, and that it admits - stupendous innovation - of the existence of the author.’ (idem.)

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Charles Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, trans. Janey Tucker, intro. & notes by Adrian van der Weel & Ruud Hisgen, Leiden: Academic Press 1995): ‘I have always had the feeling that somebody inside me had been murdered. Murdered before I was born. I had to find that person and try to bring him back to life. [...] I once went to a lecture given by Jung [...] He talked about one of his patients, a little girl [...] At the end, when the audience were already filing out, Jung stood there in silence. And then he added, as if to himself, in amazement at a sudden discovery: “In fact, she had never really been born.” / I have always had the feeling that I had never been born either’. [138]

Charles Juliet (Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde) - cont: [summary]: Beckett revisited Dublin in 1946 and ‘realised that things couldn’t go on as they were.’ Tells about that night, on the end of the jetty in Dublin [viz., south pier of Dun Laoghaire harbour], with the storm raging about him, as recounted in Krapp’s Last Tape: ‘Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indigence [...&c., as supra; vide Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 1996, p.319]; ‘I had to eliminate all the poisons [...] and find the right language [...] When I wrote the first sentence of Molloy, I had no idea where I was heading. And when I finished the first part, I didn’t know how I was going to go on. It all just came out like that. Without any changes. I hadn’t planned it, or thought it out at all.’ [140; note that Juliet characterises ‘poisons’ as ‘intellectual decencies, knowledge, certainties [...]. On the view that artistic enterprise is impossible without rigorous ethical standards: ‘What you say is correct. But moral values are not accessible and not open to definition. To define them, you would have to make value judgements, and you can’t do that. That’s why I have never agreed with the idea of the theatre of the absurd. Because that implies making value judgements. You can’t even talk about truth. That is part of the general distress. Paradoxically, it’s through form that the artist can find a kind of solution - by giving form to what has none. It is perhaps only a that level that there may be an underlying affirmation.’ [149; cont.]

Charles Juliet (Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde) - cont. [in summary]: SB says that he ‘behaved very badly’ in resigning his TCD job; reached Paris just after the assassination of Paul Doumer; trans. Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre for American magazine; returned to London to avoid deportation; attempted literary criticism but made no progress with journals; lived off his family; death of father in 1933; lived frugally in lodgings; personal crisis; travelled in Germany on foot and train; reached Paris, summer 1937; became friends with Geer and Bram van Velde; saw a lot of Giacometti and Duchamp; fled to Rousillon with wife, 1942; travelled to see his mother, 1945; spent months at Saint-Lô, as storekeeper and interpreter; returned to Ireland, 1946; experienced vision; ‘Up to that point, I had thought I could rely on knowledge. That I had to equip myself intellectually. That day, it all collapsed.’ [150] quotes a previous comment, ‘I wrote Molloy and the rest [of] the day I understood my stupidity. Then I began to write down what I feel.’ [150] ‘I caught a glimpse of the world I had to create to be able to breathe’ [151] Commenced Molloy at his mother’s; continued it in Paris and at Menton in the house of ‘an Irish friend’, being cousin Maurice Sinclair; carried along by frenzy to write Molloy, Malone Meurt, En attendant Godot, L’innomable, and Texte pour rien; regards the pieces written after 1950 as mere sketches [151] says his ambition is to capture life and death in the narrowest of spaces, citing momento mori paintings such as St. Jerome meditating on a skull [151] admires Yeats’s old age, ‘the active, productive old age of great creative minds.’ [152; cont.]

Charles Juliet (Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde) - cont. [in summary]: Beckett told Juliet, ‘Getting published isn’t the important thing. You write in order to be able to breathe’; ‘I’ve always got something on the go. It may start off long, but it gets shorter and shorter’ [156] ‘Yes, up to 1946 I always wanted to know, in order to be able to act. Then I realised that I was going about things the wrong way. But perhaps there are only wrong ways. All the same, you do have to find the wrong way that suits you.’ [156] denies that he studied mystics ‘in depth’, or that he ever studied anything ‘in depth’; accepts that he may have something in common with mystics, adding ‘perhaps at times the same way of coping with the unintelligible’ [157] acknowledges that he has increasingly eliminated himself from his writings: ‘in the end, you don’t know who is speaking any more. / The subject disappears completely. That’s the end result of the identity crisis.’ [157; cont.]

Charles Juliet (Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde) - cont. [in summary]: Beckett regards the survival of his faith in writing and in communication as a mystery [157] ‘In Ireland there are not just two brands of fanaticism, but three or four or five, and each of those are being torn apart by other factions’ [149]; responds positively but wordlessly to mention of Van Gogh; talks about the importance of footsteps [163-64]; ‘The fall of a leaf and the fall of Lucifer are the same thing [...] It’s marvellous, isn’t it? The same [...] But the problem is how to express that [...] There is no pronoun .. I, he, we - nothing is quite right. [...] It is this confounded world, there’s every reason for indignation [...] [164] But at the level of work .. What can one say? [...] nothing is expressible.’ [164-65] Of Leopardi and Schopenhauer: ‘[...] perhaps they did still have some hope of an answer, a solution, while I haven ‘t.’ [165] Further: ‘negation is no more possible than affirmation. It is absurd to say that something is absurd. That’s still a value judgement. It is impossible to protest, and equally impossible to assent.’ [165] ‘You have to work in an area where there are no possible pronouns, no solutions, no reactions, or standpoints [...]. That’s what makes it so diabolically difficult.’ [165] (On freeing himself from religion:) ‘Outwardly, I suppose. But otherwise ...’ [166] (discussing Biblical prophets:) ‘And Job.’ [167] (On the mystics:) ‘Yes, I like [...] their [...] their illogicality [...] their burning illogicality [...] that flame .. that flame .. that burns away filthy logic.’ [167]

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Letter to Axel Kaun ([9th] July 1937): ‘[I]t is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn part in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. Or is literature alone to remain behind in the old lazy ways that have been so long ago abandoned by music and painting? At first it can only be a matter of somehow finding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words. In this dissonance between the means and their use it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All. With such a program, in my opinion, the last work of Joyce has nothing whatsoever to do. [...] from time to time I have the consolation of sinning willy-nilly against a foreign language, as I should love to do with full knowledge and intent against my own.’ (Disjecta, 71-72 [var. 171 &c.]. (Quoted in Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett, Repetition, Theory and Text, 1988, p.17; cited in Mark Harman, ‘Obsessive Fantasies: Beckett and Kafka’, Bruce Stewart, ed., Beckett and Beyond, Colin Smythe, 1998).

Note that Beckett adds: ‘With such a program, in my opinion, the latest work of Joyce has nothing whatever to do.’ (Quoted in Tim Parks, ‘Still stirring’, review of Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, ed. Paul Auster, and other works, in The New York Review of Books, 13 July 2006 [online; accessed 30-08-2010] - see also copy in Library, “Criticism > Major Authors > Beckett”, via index, or direct.) The above quotation is also give in part in Colm Toibin, review of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, in London Review of Books (8 April 1993), pp.14-15, p.14.

See longer version as given in Letters, 1929-1940, ed. Martha Fehsenfeld, et al. (Cambridge UP 2009), pp.512-21 - being a letter in German, addressed from 6 Clare St., Dublin IFS [Irish Free State]; 2nd part of letter here translated by the editors, pp.518-20 [with notes, pp.520-21].

[...] I am always delighted to receive a letter from you. Therefore do write as often and as extensively as possible. Do you absolutely want me to do the same for you in English? Do you get as bored reading my German letters as I composing one in English? I would be sorry if you had the feeling that perhaps this was a matter of a contract which I am not fulfilling. An answer is requested.  It is indeed getting more and more difficult, 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. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have irrelevant as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anyting undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through - I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.  Or is literature alone to be left behind on that old, foul road long ago abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralysingly sacred contained within the unnature of the word that does not belong to the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved, as for example the sound surface of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is devoured [518] by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence? An answer is requested.  I know there are people, sensitive and intelligent people, for whom there is no lack of silence. I cannot help but assume that they are hard of hearing. For in the forest of symbols that are no symbols, the birds of interpretation, that is no interpretation, are never silent.  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 silence underlying all.  In my opinion, the most recent work of Joyce had nothing at all to do with such a programme. There it seems much more a matter of an apotheosis of the word. Unless Ascent into Heaven and descent into Hell are one and the same. How nice it would be to be able to believe that in fact it were so. For the moment, we will limit ourselves to the intention.  Perhaps, Gertrude Stein’s Logographs come closer to what I mean. The fabric of the language has at least become porous, if regrettably only quite by accident and, as it were, as a consequence of a procedure somewhat akin to the technique of Feininger. The unhappy lady (is she still alive?) is undoubtedly still in love with her vehicle, if only, however, as a mathematician is with his numbers; for him the solution of the problem is of very secondary interest, yes, as the death of numbers, it must seem to him indeed dreadful. To connect this method with that of Joyce, as is fashionable, appears to me as ludicrous as the attempt, as yet unknown to me, to compare Nominalism (in the [519] sense of the Scholastics] wth Realism. On the road toward this, for me, very desirable literature of the non-word, some form of nominalistic irony can of course be a necessary phase. However, it does not suffice if the game loses some of its sacred solemnity Let it cease altogether! Let’s do as that crazy mathematician who used to apply a new principle of measurement to each individual step of the calculation. Word-storming in the name of beauty.  In the meantime I am doing nothing. Only from time to time have I the consolation, as now, of being allowed to violate a foreign language as involuntarily as, with knowledge and intent, I would like to do against my own language, and - Deo juvante - shall do. Cordially yours [...]

Note: The editors quote Beckett’s letter to Mary Manning Howe (11 July 1937): ‘I am starting a Logoclasts’ League. [...] I am the only member at present. The idea is ruptured writing, so that the void may protrude, like a hernia.’ (Letters, 1929-1940, 2009, p.521, n.8.) The annotations also contain a precès of F. C. Copleston’s definition of scholastic Realism and Nominalism (Hist. of Philosophy, II, 1955).

Cf. an alternative translation given in Harry White, ‘The Imperium of Music’, in Voices on Joyce, ed. Anne Fogarty and Fran O’Rourke (UCD Press 2015), pp.107-17:

‘[Beckett wonders if] there is any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable aysses of silence?’ (No ref.; p.116.)

[This is presumably the version given in Martin Esslin, transcription and trans., in Beckett, Disjecta, pp.51-54, as cited in the notes to the German version of the said letter in Fehsenfeld, et al., eds, Letters 1929-1940, p.516). A prefatory editorial caption readaing: ‘SB’s letter to Axel Kaun below exists only as a draft, correctd by various hands over time; it is presented here without editorial corrections.’ (p.512.)

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Letter to Thomas MacGreevy (1938), on TMcG’s study of Jack Yeats: ‘[...] your interest was passing from the man himself to the forces that formed him [...] But perhaps that is also the fault of my mood and my chronic inability to understand [...] a phrase like “The Irish People” or to imagine that it ever gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever [...] or that it was ever capable of any thought or act other than rudimentary thoughts and acts delved into by the priests and demagogues in service of the priests, or that it would ever care to know that there was once a painter in Ireland called Jack Butler Yeats. This is not a criticism of the criticism that allows as a sentient subject which I can only think of as nameless and hideous whether in Ireland or in Finland, but only to say that I as a prod of prejudices prefer the first half of your work with its real and radiant individuals to the second with our national scene’. (quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett, 1978, p.381-82; also, more fully, in Bair, ‘Man’s-Land, Hellespont or Vacuum: Samuel Beckett’s Irishness’ (Crane Bag, 1.2, 1997; rep. in Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies Dublin 1982, p.104.)

Letter to Alan Schneider: ‘It would be impertinent for me to advise you about the article you are doing and I don’t intend to. But when it comes to journalists I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind. And to insist on the extreme simplicity of dramatic situation and issue. If that’s not enough for them, and it obviously isn ‘t, it’s plenty for us, and we have no elucidations to offer of mysteries that are all of their making. My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin. Hamm as stated, and Clov as stated, together as stated, nec tecum nec sine te, in such a place, and in such a world, that’s all I can manage, more than I could.’ (Quoted in Alec Reid, All I Can Manage, More than I Could, Dolmen 1969, p.33; also in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett, 1978, p.397.)

Letter to Donald McWhinnie (6 April 1960), on The Unnamable: ‘A “man” is lying panting in the mud and dark murmuring “life” as he hears it obscurely uttered inside him. This utterance is described throughout the work as the fragmentary recollection of an extraneous voice once heard “quaqua on all sides”. In the last pages he is obliged to take the onus of it on himself and of the lamentable tale of things it tells. The noise of his panting fills his ears and it is only when this abates that he can catch and murmur forth a fragment of what is being stated within. The work is in three parts, the first a solitary [461] journey in the dark and mud terminating with discovery of a similar creature know as Pim, the second life with Pim both motionless in the dark and mud terminataing with the departure of Pim, the third solitude motionless in the dark and mud. It is in the third part that occur[s] the so-called voice “quaqua”, its interiorisation and murmuring forth when the panting stops. That is to say the “I” from the outset of the third part and the first and second, though stated as heard in the present, already over.’ (SB Archive, Reading U.; quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, 1996, pp.461-62.)

“German Notebooks” (1936-37): ‘[T]he art (picture) that is a prayer sets up prayer, releases prayer in the onlooker, i.e., Priest: Lord have mercy upon us. People: Christ have mercy upon us.’ (Quoted in John Taylor, reviewing James Knowlson, Samuel Beckett: Damned to Fame, London: Bloomsbury 1996, in Times Literary Supplement, 27 Sept. 1996.)

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Bad old times: ‘The heart bursts about one night in seven (or, in the old saving clause, about one night in the seven I remember its having done so) and the pubic bone pain never quite stops its whispering and I have brief dissolving panic without ever working up to the dithers of the old days. I am quite convinced, with that barren numb conviction of birth having sprung the trap, that at this rate it is only a matter of a few years before a hideous crisis compared to which the last was a cold in the nose and which I shall be as little fit to deal with as a bull calf with its castrators.’ (Letter to Tom MacGreevy, 7 July [1937], quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, 1996, pp.265.

Where Irish writers come from [...]: ‘When you are in the last ditch, there is nothing left but to sing. [...] It’s the English Government and the Catholic Church - they have buggered us into existence.’ (Quoted in John Harrington, The Irish Beckett, Syracuse UP 1991, p.76.)

Homo historicus?: ‘I am not interested in the “unification” of the historical chaos any more than I am in the “clarification” of the individual chaos, and still less in the anthropomorphisation of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos. What I want is the straws, names, dates, births and deaths, because that is all I can know.’ (Cited in David Sexton reviewing biographies of Beckett by Knowlson and Cronin, in Spectator, 21 Sept. 1996.)

On Waiting for Godot (1): ‘He [Ralph Richardson] wanted the low-down on Pozzo, his home address and curriculum vita, and seemed to make the forthcoming of this and similar information the condition of his condescending to illustrate the part of Vladimir. Too tired to give satisfaction I told him that all I knew about Pozzo was in the text, that if I’d known more I would have put it in the text, and that this was true also of other characters [...] I also told Richardson that if by Godot I had meant God I would [have] said God, and not Godot. This seemed to disappoint him greatly.’ (Quoted in James Knowlson, Samuel Beckett: Damned to Fame, London: Bloomsbury 1996, p.105; cited in David Pattie, The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett, Routledge 2000, p.412; cited in David Pattie, The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett, Routledge 2000, p.37.)

On Waiting for Godot (2): ‘It is a game, everything is a game. When all four of them are on the ground, that cannot be dealt with naturalistically. That has got to be done artificially, balletically. Otherwise everything becomes an imitations, an imitation of reality. [...] It should become clear and transparent, not dry. It is a game in order to survive.’ (Quoted in James Knowlson, Samuel Beckett: Damned to Fame, London: Bloomsbury 1996, p.607; cited in Pattie, op. cit., p.45.)

On Waiting for Godot (3) - Letter to Michel Poloc (ed. of Radiodifussion, which broadcast a reading of Godot on 6 Feb. 1952): ‘I know nothing about it. I do not go to it. That is allowable ... What is less so, no doubt, is first of all, in these conditions, writing a play, and then having done so, having no ideas about it either. This is unfortunately my case. It is not given to everyone to be able to move from the world that opens under the page to that of profit and loss, then back again, unperturbed, as if between the daily grind and the pub on the corner. I know no more about this play than anyone whomanages to read it attentively ... I know no more of the characters than what they say, what they do, and what happens to them ... I do not know who Goner is. I do not even know whether he exists. And I do not know if they believe he does, these two who are waiting for him ... All that I have been able to understand I have shown. It is not much. But it is enough, and more than enough for me. I shall even say that I could have made do with less.’ (Letters, Vol. II, 1941-1956; quoted in review by Hugh McFadden, in Books Ireland, Nov. 2011, p.209.)

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On Endgame: ‘Rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw, more inhuman than Godot.’ (Quoted in Reid, Beckett/Beckett, 1968, p.71.)

On Not I: ‘I knew that woman in Ireland, I knew who she was - not “she” specifically, one single woman, but there were so many of these old crones, stumbling down the lanes, in the ditches, beside the hedgerows. Ireland is full of them. And I heard “her” saying what I wrote in Not I. I actually heard it.’ (Quoted in Knowlson, op. cit., 1996, p.590; cited in Pattie, op. cit, 2000, p.43.)

On James Joyce (1): ‘When I first met Joyce, I didn’t intend to be a writer. That only came later when I found out that I was no good at all at teaching. When I found I simply couldn’t teach. But I do remember speaking about Joyce’s heroic achievement. I had a great deal of admiration for him. That’s what it was; epic, heroic, what he achieved. But I realised that I couldn’t go down that road.’ (Quoted in Knowlson, op. cit., 1996, p.105; cited in Pattie, 2000, p.12.)

On James Joyce (2): ‘[T]he difference is that Joyce was a superb manipulator of material - perhaps the greatest. [...] the kind of work I do is one in which I’m not master of my material. The more Joyce know the more he could. He’s tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance. I don’t think ignorance has been exploited in the past. There seems to be a kind of aesthetic axiom that expression is achievement - must be an achievement. My little exploration is that whole zone of being which has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - as something by definition incompatible with art.’ (See Israel Shenker, ‘Moody Man of Letters’ [interview], New York Times, 6 May 1956; rep. in Lawrence Graver & Raymond Federman, eds., Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1974; quoted in Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett, OUP 1977, p.8; quoted in Antony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama, 1994, p.14; also in Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics, London: Granta 2001, p.591.)

On James Joyce (3), ‘The difference between Joyce and myself is that Joyce was a synthesiser, he tried to pack the whole world into a book, in as much detail as possible, and I am an analyser, I try to take as much of the detail away as possivble.’ (Quoted in Rosemary Poultney, The Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama, 1956-76, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1988, p.156, quoting Beckett Symposium, in New Theatre Magazine, Vol. XI, No. 3, Bristol 1973, p.12.)

On James Joyce (4), ‘I realised that Joyce had gone as far as he could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in substracting rather than adding.’ (Quoted in Knowlson, op. cit., 1996, p.352; cited in Pattie, op. cit., 2000, p.30.)

[See also letter to Axel Kaun of 9 July 1937 - as supra.]

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Language as gift of God?: ‘There is not the slightest Biblical authority for the conception of language as a direct gift of God, any more than there is any intellectual authority for conceiving that we are indebted for the “Concert” to the individual who used to buy paint for Giorgione.’ (‘Dante [...] Bruno. Vico. Joyce’, in Disjecta, p.31-32; cited by P. J. Murphy, ‘On first looking into Beckett’s The Voice’, in The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives, ed. John Pilling & Mary Bryden, Reading University (UK): Beckett International Foundation 1992, p.67.)

Childhood: ‘You might say I had a happy childhood ... although I had little talent for happiness. My parents did everything that could make a child happy. But I was often lonlely. We were brought up like Quakers. My father did not beat me, nor my mother run away from home.’ (Quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett, 1978, p.22.)

Mother love: ‘I am what her savage loving has made me, and it is good that one of us should accept this finally. As it has been all this time, she wanting me to behave in a way agreeable to her [...], or to her friends [...], or to the business code of Father idealised and dehumanised - (“Whenever in doubt what to do, ask yourself what would darling Bill have done”) - the grotesque can go no further.’ (1937; quoted in Knowlson, op. cit., 1996, p.273; cited in Pattie, op. cit., 2000, p.25; also [in part] in Christopher Ricks, Pref., First Love, Syrens Edn. 1994, p.vii.)

Father’s death: ‘After my father’s death I had trouble psychologically. The bad years were between when I had to crawl home in 1932 and after my father’s death in 1933. I’ll tell you how it was. I was walking down Dawson Street [Dublin]. And I felt I couldn’t go on. It was a strange experience I can’t really describe. I found that I couldn’t go on moving ... and I felt I needed help. So I went to Geoffrey Thompson’s surgery ... When I got there ... he gave me a look over and found nothing physically wrong. Then he recommended psychoanalysis for me. Psychoanalysis was not allowed in Dublin at that time. It was not legal. So, in order to have psychoanalysis you had to come to London.’ (Quoted in Samuel Knowlson, Samuel Beckett: Damned to Fame, London: Bloomsbury: 1996, pp.172-73.)

Unhappy Days: ‘For years I was unhappy, consciously and deliberately ever since I left school and went into TCD so that I isolated myself more and more, undertook less and less and lent myself to a crescend of disparagement of others and myself. But in all that there was nothing that struck me as morbid. The misery and solitude and apathy and the sneers were an index of superiority and guaranteed the feeling of arrogant “otherness”, which seemed as right and natural and as little morbid as the ways in which it was not so much expressed as implied and reserved and kept available for a possible utterance in the future. It was not until that way of living, or rather negation of living, developed such terrifying physical symptoms that it could no longer be pursued, that I became aware of anything morbid in myself. In short, if the heart had not put the fear of death into me I would still be boozing and sneering and lounging around and feeling that I was too good for anything else.’ (Knowlson, op. cit., 1996, pp.179-80; quoted with the foregoing in David Pattie, The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett, London: Routledge 2000, pp.22-23.)

Value of the theatre: ‘One must make a world of one’s own in order to satisfy one’s need to know, to understand, one’s need for order . There for me lies the value of the theatre, one turns out a small world with its own laws.’ (Juliet, ‘Conversations with Samuel Beckett’; cited in Eric Griffiths, review of Peter Brook’s production of Oh Les Beaux Jours, Royal Court; in Times Literary Supplement, 5 Dec. 1997). Further: ‘For me, the theatre is not a moral institution in Schiller’s sense. I want neither to instruct nor to improve nor to keep people from getting bored. I want to bring poetry into drama, a poetry whcih has been through the void and makes a new start in a new room-space. I think in new dimensions and basically am not very worried about whether I can be followed. I couldn’t give the answers that were hoped for. There are no easy solutions.’ (Quoted in James Knowlson, Samuel Beckett: Damned to Fame, London: Bloomsbury 1996, p.447; cited in David Pattie, The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett, Routledge 2000, p.40.)

Value of religion: ‘Christianity is a mythology with which I am perfectly familiar, and so I use it. But not in this case!’ (on Godot; Bair, Samuel Beckett, 1978, p.327.) See also interview with Tom Driver: ‘Well really there is none at all, I have no religious feeling. Once I had a religious emotion. It was at my first Communion. No more. My mother was deeply religious. So was my brother. He knelt down at his bed as long as he could kneel. My father had none. The family was Protestant but for me it was only irksome and I let it go. My brother and mother got no value from their religion when they died. At the moment of crisis it had no more depth than an old-school tie. Irish Catholicism is not attractive, but it is deeper.’ (Laurence Graver Raymond Federman, eds. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1979, p.220; quoted in Anthony Cronin, The Last Modernist, 1997, p.21; also [var.] in Terence Brown, ‘Beckett and Religion: A Note on Molloy’, The Irish Readers: Essays for John Devitt, ed. Michael Hinds, Peter Denman & Margaret Kelleher, Clonliffe: Otier Press [Mater Dei] 2007, p.5.)

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Beckett at St. Lô: ‘[...] Saint-Lô was bombed out of existence in one night. German prisoners of war, and casual labourers attracted by the relative food-plenty, but soon discouraged by housing conditions, continue, two years after the liberation, to clear away the debris, literally by hand. Their spirit has yet to learn the blessings of Gallup and their flesh the benefits of the bulldozer. One may thus be excused if one questions the opinion generally received, that ten years will be sufficient for the total reconstruction of Saint-Lô. But no matter what period of time must still be endured, before the town begins to resemble the pleasant and prosperous administrative and agricultural centre that it was, the hospital of wooden huts in its gardens between the Vire and Bayeux roads will continue to discharge its function, and its cures. ‘Provisional’ is not the term it was, in this universe become provisional. It will continue to discharge its function long after the Irish are gone and their names forgotten. But I think that to the end of its hospital days it will be called the Irish Hospital, and after that the huts, when they have been turned into dwellings, the Irish huts. I mention this possibility, in the hope that it will give general satisfaction. And having done so I may perhaps venture to mention another, more remote but perhaps of greater import in certain quarters, I mean the possibility that 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 is to be thought again. These will have been in France. [End]’ (Text for Radio Eireann broadcast, [1946]; printed as “The Capital of the Ruins”, in Eoin O’Brien, The Beckett Country, Dublin 1986, p.337; rep. as Postscript in Earth Voices Whispering: An Anthology of Irish War Poetry 1914-1945, ed. Gerald Dawe (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 2008), pp.394-97; quoted [from Eoin O’Brien, op. cit., in Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 1995, p.550.) [See full-text copy in RICORSO Library, “Authors> Classic”, via index, or as attached.]

Writing in French: ‘It was [...] easier, Beckett maintained, to write in French “without style.” He did not mean by this that his French had no style, but that, by adopting another language, he gained a greater simplicity and objectivity. French offered him the freedom to concentrate on a more direct expression of the search for “being” and on an exploration of ignorance, impotence and indigence. Using French also enabled him to “cut away the excess, to strip away the colour”, and to concentrate more on the music of the language, its sounds and its rhythms.’ (James Knowlson, Samuel Beckett: Damned to Fame, London: Routledge, 1996, p.357.)

Beckett’s Last Poem

folly - folly for to - for to - what is the word - folly from this - all this - folly from all this - seeing - folly seeing all this - this - what is the word - this this - this this here - all this this here - folly given all this -

—Quoted by Hugh McFadden on Facebook (13 April 2017).

On Paul Cézanne: ‘Cézanne had the sense of his own incommensurability not only with life of such a different order as landscape, but also with life of his own order, even with life - one feels looking at the self-portrait in the Tate - operative in himself. [...] He seems to have been the first to see landscape and state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever.’ (Quoted in T. J. Clark, ‘Cezanne’s Portraits’, in London Review of Books, 25 Jan. 2018):

Note: Clark remarks, ‘Beckett’s verdict on the artist (it crops up in letters from 1934), but one suspects he would not have been surprised by its reversal of right-wing sympathies [then quoting as above.] I think of Woman with a Cafetière as sister to the immured (but undefeated) heroines of Beckett’s late monologues.’ (Available online; accessed 30.01.2018.)