Abstract
The first Bloomsbury Academic publication under review is a volume of essays based on papers given at a conference at the University of Kent in 2016. It explores ‘the world-literary nature of Beckett’s work’ and addresses the question of the world-wide ‘translation, adaptation and circulation’ of his writings (p. xvii). The scope is appropriately vast, ranging from a comparative study of Molloy in the original French and its German and English versions, to ‘Brazilian Becketts’, to ‘tracing Beckett in the avant-garde theatre of mainland China’ and taking in, on the way, how ‘Godot travels from an Irish country road to the whole world’. As the editors put it, their volume examines ‘Beckett as a cosmopolitan author; the ways in which the idea of nation and nationality figure in his writings; and how and why his work has been culturally reciprocated, refracted and circulated globally’ (p. 9).
Beckett was bilingual in English and French, and in both literatures is recognized worldwide as one of the greatest of twentieth-century writers. He was not always a respectful son of his native Ireland, it is true – one language he had no time for was Gaelic – but he was one who bore the motherland in the depths of his soul, and at the same time, as an immigrant, gave France a number of great works that have enriched and made a permanent mark on its literature, and through French literature, on world literature.
An example not examined specifically in the book but very much in its spirit is a little-known two-hander for radio by Beckett’s Swiss-born friend Robert Pinget, La Manivelle (‘The Old Tune’, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1960). The play itself is not remarkable, but Beckett’s adaptation certainly is, skilfully transposing into pure Dublin the colloquial French of Pinget’s characters. His choice of names for the protagonists is inspired : ‘Toupin’ becomes ‘Gorman’ and ‘Pommard’, the name of a famous red burgundy, becomes ‘Cream’ (a sweet sherry) . And ‘they’d tear you to flitters’ for ‘ils vous écharperaient bien’ (pp. 14–15) is one of many felicities in the English version. Long after he had given up translation as a way of keeping the wolf from the door Beckett undertook the task out of kindness, not only towards Pinget, but also towards the BBC producer who commissioned the work, Barbara Bray, later to become his wife in all but name. And it coincidentally enabled the embrace of world literature to extend to and include Pinget, otherwise a minor writer.
To move from world literature and the broad sweep of Chakraborty and Toribio Vazquez’s volume to the narrower focus of William Davies’ study of the Irishman during and immediately after World War II is to be reminded, some 30 years after his death, how ever-present among us Beckett remains. His life between 1939 and 1945–6 has been well-documented, not least in James Knowlson’s magisterial biography Damned to Fame (1996), but William Davies adds much detail, and his book is certain to become the standard work on the subject. But he has done far more than provide new information: he adds fresh strands to the narrative. His book explores, for instance, the issue of Vichy’s Révolution nationale and Beckett’s sarcastic depiction of the Pétain paradox as a ‘poor old misled man and hero of Verdun’ (p. 78). This is followed by a brilliant exposé of Beckett’s relationship to Irish neutrality and a fine analysis of his greatest poem ‘Saint-Lô’ (1946).
Beckett was visiting family in Dublin when war was declared in 1939, and unlike many who could not get out of France quickly enough, he returned to Paris at once, saying that he preferred France at war to Ireland at peace. He had visited Nazi Germany before the war, so knew what to expect when the French army was overwhelmed and the country occupied. He made his way south, ending up in Arcachon on the Atlantic coast. I rented a flat in Arcachon many years later. It was a stone's throw from the villa Samuel and Suzanne Beckett briefly stayed in. I was naturally interested, and took photographs of the villa from the road. Typically bourgeois, indeed typically French, the owner came out. He was very suspicious. I explained that one of France's greatest writers had lived in the house in 1940. I doubt if he had ever heard of Beckett: he certainly was not interested and made it clear he did not take kindly to my photographing the place. I simply went round to the beach side of the villa and took more photos. He did not pursue me there.
After Arcachon the Becketts ended up in Roussillon, a village in the department of Vaucluse in south-eastern France. There, like Estragon and Vladimir in En attendant Godot, they made a living as occasional agricultural labourers. Beckett devoted his leisure time to finishing his last major work in English, Watt, published in 1953, and to working for the Resistance as a gatherer of military intelligence and translator of secret documents for onward transmission to London. It was a very brave thing to do: had he been caught, his Irish passport would not have saved him from torture at the hands of the Gestapo. Davies is especially informative on what everyday life was like for the Becketts in Roussillon, and on the echoes in Godot of the penury everybody experienced. Root vegetables were available – alluded to in the ‘carrots v. turnips’ dialogue in Act I – but were not popular: to this day swede and parsnip, the staple of a British roast dinner, are not widely consumed in France.
At the Liberation Beckett took a job at a hospital set up by the Irish Red Cross in the ruins of Saint-Lô in Normandy, an experience which led to the poem of the same name. By 1946 he was back in Paris and began work on the central core of his oeuvre, Godot and the novels Molloy, Malone meurt and L’Innommable, works deeply marked by the reality of living with secrets, in daily fear of arrest.
Davies’ penultimate chapter takes us to the short story Suite (1946) and Beckett’s fraught relationship with Sartre and post-war French humanism. For Beckett, ‘human’ was reserved for times of ‘huge slaughters’ and ‘his work during the post-war years reaffirms this point with biting and sometimes disturbing exactitude’ (p. 172). A Sartrian, even less a Beauvoirian, Beckett was not. In fact there was an acrimonious falling-out when de Beauvoir refused to publish in the pro-communist bimonthly Les Temps modernes (which she and Sartre edited) the sequel to Suite because of its mockery of Marxist rhetoric (p. 163).
But Beckett was on the right side of history: Sartre and his disciples were not. Of those writers who dominated Paris in the late 1940s, as Davies makes clear, only Camus and Beckett now survive as living forces in world literature. A Bloomsbury volume on ‘Albert Camus as World Literature’ must surely follow.