Chapter 4 - ‘The Nucleus of a Living Poetic’

Summary

In August 1934, The Bookman published ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ under the nom de plume ‘Andrew Belis’; the two-page review by twenty-eight-year-old Samuel Beckett was drenched in local literary politics.¹ Ironically, Beckett was at this time struggling to find his bearings as a man and as a writer; notwithstanding the authority with which he dispenses judgement, he was undergoing intense personal difficulties. Bearing in mind that he had been an athletic young man, an accomplished cricketer, golfer and rugby player, the physical ailments Beckett was experiencing were extensive: boils, cysts (which necessitated his being hospitalised twice), psoriasis, eczema, night sweats, tachycardia, back pain, insomnia, all culminating in a deeply upsetting moment recounted in James Knowlson’s biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame (1996):

I was walking down Dawson Street [in Dublin]. And I felt I couldn’t go on. It was a strange experience I can’t really describe. I found I couldn’t go on moving. So I went into the nearest pub and got a drink just to stay still. And I felt I needed help. So I went to Geoffrey Thompson’s surgery. Geoffrey wasn’t there; he was at Lower Baggot Street Hospital; so I waited for him.²

It was on foot of this experience that Beckett’s good friend Geoffrey Thompson suggested Beckett should go to Tavistock Clinic in London for therapy. His physical and mental health were undergoing serious challenges as Ursula Thompson, Geoffrey Thompson’s wife, recalled in Remembering Beckett (2006):

[Geoffrey] mentioned Sam very early to me. Sam was really ill in 1934 and Geoffrey was very worried about him. And in those days, there was little help for any kind of psychosomatic illness (panic attacks and so on).³

A couple of years earlier, Beckett’s belief in his role as lecturer in French at his alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, had also reached crisis point and he had resigned in 1932. Family life, along with the fractured existential life of this period, was likely the source of much of this trauma. His beloved father died in 1933, leading to a long, drawn-out mourning in which his mother, a hugely influential and problematical figure in his life, seemed inconsolable. His cousin, Peggy Sinclair, of whom he was extremely fond, died earlier that same year from TB. Four years later, Beckett would be involved in a very public court case involving the Sinclair family and Oliver St. John Gogarty’s memoir As I walked down Sackville Street.⁴ So, in a relatively short space of time during the 1930s, Beckett’s life in Dublin was in one form of crisis or another. At a fairly young age, Beckett, of whom so much had been expected as both a scholar and future academic, was plagued with indecision and seemed increasingly disenchanted with his existence and achievements at home.