Mr Denis Devlin is a mind aware of its luminaries.
12. MacGreevy on Yeats
This is the earliest connected account of Mr Yeats’s painting. To it future writers on the subject will, perhaps, be indebted, no less than writers on Proust to Madariaga’s essay, or writers on Joyce to Curtius’s — indebted for an attitude to develop, or correct, or reject. It is rare for the first major reaction to art of genius to come, as here, from a compatriot of the artist. The causes of this are no doubt profound and forcible. It is agreeable to find them coerced.
The greater part of this essay was written in London, in 1938. A postscript, written this year in Ireland, covers Mr Yeats’s development from 1938 to the present day. The past seven years have confirmed Mr MacGreevy in the views that a dozen London publishers, not yet so fortunate as to lack paper, declined to publish. This is not to be wondered at. It is difficult to formulate what it is one likes in Mr Yeats’s painting, or indeed what it is one likes in anything, but it is a labour, not easily lost, and a relationship once started not likely to fail, between such a knower and such an unknown.
There is at least this to be said for mind, that it can dispel mind. And at least this for art-criticism, that it can lift from the eyes, before rigor vitae sets in, some of the weight of congenital prejudice. Mr MacGreevy’s little book does this with a competence that will not surprise those who have read his essay on Mr Eliot, or his admirable translation of Valery’s Introduction à la Métbode de Léonard de Vinci, nor those who follow, in the Record, his articles on writers and artists little known, as yet, in the Republic.
The National Painter
Mr MacGreevy sees in Mr Yeats the first great painter, the first great Irish painter, that Ireland has produced, or indeed, could have produced; the first to fix, plastically, with completeness and for his time finality, what is peculiar to the Irish scene and to the Irish people. This is the essence of his interpretation, and it permeates the essay in all its parts. The position is made clear at the outset:
… What was unique in Ireland was that the life of the people considered itself, and was in fact, spiritually and culturally as well as politically, the whole life of the nation. Those who acted for the nation officially were outside the nation. They had a stronger sense of identity with the English governing class than with the people of Ireland, and their art was no more than a province of English art. The first genuine artist, therefore, who so identified himself with the people of Ireland as to be able to give true and good and beautiful artistic expression to the life they lived, and to that sense of themselves as the Irish nation, inevitably became not merely a genre painter like the painters of the petit peuple in other countries, and not merely a nation’s painter in the sense of Pol de Limbourg, Louis le Nain, Bassano, Ostade or Jan Steen were national painters, but the national painter in the sense that Rembrandt and Velasquez and Watteau were national painters, the painter who in his work was the consummate expression of the spirit of his own nation at one of the supreme points in its evolution.
This, the Constable and Watteau analogies, the statement of the political backgrounds to the first (until about 1923) and the second periods, the elucidations of ‘Helen’ and ‘The Blood of Abel’, seem to me art-criticism of a high order, indeed. They constitute an affirmation of capital importance, not only for those who feel in this way about mr Yeats, or for those who as yet feel little or nothing about Mr Yeats, but also for those, such as myself, who feel in quite a different way about Mr Yeats.
The Artist
The national aspects of Mr Yeats’s genius have, I think, been over-stated, and for motives not always remarkable for their aesthetic purity. To admire painting on other than aesthetic grounds, or a painter, qua painter, for any other reason than that he is a good painter, may seem to some uncalled for. And to some also it may seem that Mr Yeats’s importance is to be sought elsewhere than in a sympathetic treatment (how sympathetic?) of the local accident, or the local substance. He is with the great of our time, Kandinsky and Klee, Ballmer and Bram van Velde, Rouault and Braque, because he brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence, reduces the dark where there might have been, mathematically at least, a door. The being in the street, when it happens in the room, the being in the room when it happens in the street, the turning to gaze from land to sea, from sea to land, the backs to one another and the eyes abandoning, the man alone trudging in sand, the man alone thinking (thinking!) in his box — these are characteristic notations having reference, I imagine, to processes less simple, and less delicious, than those to which the plastic vis is commonly reduced, and to a world where Tir-na-nOgue makes no more sense than Bachelor’s Walk, nor Helen than the apple-woman, nor asses than men, nor Abel’s blood than Useful’s, nor morning than night, nor inward than the outward search.
B. SELF
1. The Possessed
[We are given to understand that the following is a reply to our reporter’s criticism of the M. L. S. Plays; as such we publish it. — Ed. T. C. D.]
Ladies and Gentlemen!
On my left, torturing his exquisite Pindaric brolly, the Divine Marquis of Stanfor (cries of ‘What?’ ‘Whom?’ ‘Never!’). On my right and slightly to my rere, ineffably manipulating his celebrated tipstaff, his breastfallen augs sorrowfully scouring the arena for two snakes in the grass, Professor Giovannino Allcon, direct from the Petites Maisons. Order gentlemen please! This is a respectable stadium. These are two honest boys. Ladies! Ladies! This unprecedented contest — shall I say competition? — is timed to begin from one minute to another. Silence for the mal sacre. Now please.
Stanfor: Telephus and treachery!
Allcon: I spy a Guy
with the G. P. I.
passing woeful
in a B. A. shroud.
S. (rending stays from bis umbrella, torn by the violence of bis epileptical intimations):
How square, O Lord, how square!
Kiss me Stanley.
Tom’s in his hedge
creeping and peeping.
Doom in a desert!
A. (clenching the caducceus):
I am from the North,
from Bellyballaggio
where they never take their hurry
minxing marriage in their flaxmasks
omygriefing and luvvyluvvyluvving and wudiftheycudling
from the fourth or fifth floor of their hemistitched hearts
right and left of the Antrim Road.
That’s why I like him
Ulster my Hulster!
Daswylyim! (Weeps.)
S. (Postponing inarticulation):
In the chiarinoscurissimo
I was unable to distinguish the obvious balloons.
The Infanta might have cantered
like a shopwalker
through the Dämmerung
but she was not in training.
The Cid (or hero, whose death, we understand, occurred in 1199)
could have been transmitted with a seriousness
more in keeping with the spiritual ancestor of the centre-forward.
A production, Professor,
from every centre of perspective
vox populi and yet not
platotudinous
cannot entertain
me.
A. (bravely sustaining the impact of bis refracted imaginings):
O saisons! o châteaux!
I will play now a little song on my good grand.
I will be very, very heartily
too, too fascinating
on my sickroom aelopantalion
Purchè por —
ti la gonne! —
la
or a Godsent Dumka at prima vista
inspired in the early morning
by the Marquise de Brinvilliers.
O the bitter giggle and the grand old cramp
of a cold heart and a good stomach!
O saisons! o châteaux!
S
. Wheat barley beans lentils millet fitches.
A. Shall we prepare our bread therewith?
S. When the cows come home
when the cows come home.
A. And consider the case of a lesser known author?
2. On Murphy
Excerpt from a letter of July 17, 1936 to Thomas McGreevy
The point you raise is one that I have given a good deal of thought to. Very early on, when the mortuary and Round Pond scenes were in my mind as the necessary end, I saw the difficulty and danger of so much following Murphy’s own ‘end’. There seemed two ways out. One was to let the death have its head in a frank climax and the rest be definitely epilogue (by some such means as you suggest. I thought for example of putting the game of chess there in a section by itself). And the other, which I chose, and tried to act on, was to keep the death subdued and go on as coolly and finish as briefly as possible. I chose this because it seemed to me to consist better with the treatment of Murphy throughout, with the mixture of compassion, patience, mockery and ‘tat twam asi’ that I seem to have directed on him throughout, with the sympathy going so far and no further (then losing patience) as in the short statement of his mind’s fantasy on itself. There seemed to me always the risk of taking him too seriously and separating him too sharply from the others. As it is I do not think the mistake (Aliosha mistake) has been altogether avoided. A rapturous recapitulation of his experience following its ‘end’ woud seem to me exactly the sort of promotion that I want to avoid: and an ironical one is I hope superfluous. I find the mistake in the mortuary scene, which I meant to make more rapid but which got out of hand in the dialogue. Perhaps it is saved from anticlimax by presence of M. all through. I felt myself he was liable to recur in his grotesque person until he was literally one with the dust. And if the reader feels something similar it is what I want. The last section is just the length and speed I hoped, but the actual end doesn’t satisfy me very well.
3. On Murphy
Excerpt from a letter of November 13, 1936 to George Reavey
Let me say at once that I do not see bow the book can be cut without being disorganized. Especially if the beginning is cut (and God knows the first half is plain sailing enough). The latter part will lose such resonance as it has. I can’t imagine what they want me to take out. I refuse to touch the section entitled Amor Intellectualis quo M. se ipsum amat. And I refuse also to touch the game of chess. The horoscope chapter is also essential. But I am anxious for the book to be published and therefore cannot afford to reply with a blank refusal to anything.
Will you therefore communicate … my extreme aversion to removing one-third of my work proceeding from my extreme inability to understand how this can be done and leave a remainder? But add that if they would indicate precisely what they have in mind, and the passages that cause them pain, I should be willing to suppress such passages as are not essential to the whole and adjust such others as seem to them a confusion of the issue. … Do they not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and that to compress it further can only result in making it more obscure? The wild and unreal dialogues, it seems to me, cannot be removed without darkening and dulling the whole thing. They are the comic exaggeration of what elsewhere is expressed in elegy, namely, if you like, the Hermeticism of the spirit. Is it here that they find the ‘skyrockets’? There is no time and no space in such a book for mere relief. The relief has also to do work and reinforce that from which it relieves. And of course the narrative is hard to follow. And of course deliberately so.
4. On Works to 1951
10.IV.51
Cher Monsieur Lindon,
Bien reçu ce matin votre lettre d’hier. Je vous remercie vivement de votre généreuse avance.1
J’ai fait faire la photo cet après-midi. Je l’aurai après-demain et vous l’enverrai aussitôt.
Je sais que Roger Blin veut monter la pièce.2 Il devait demander une subvention à cet effet. Je doute fort qu’on la lui accorde. Attendons Godot, mais pas pour demain.
La nouvelle dont la première moitié, sous le titre Fuite, a paru dans les Temps modernes, est à votre disposition.3 Cela peut-il atten-dre jusqu’à mon retour? C’est mon premier travail en français (en prose). Le Calmant que Madame Dumcsnil a remis à Monsieur Lambrichs, ferait peut-être mieux l’affaire.4 Ce sera à votre choix.
Je suis très content que vous ayez envie d’arriver rapidement à L’Innommable. Comme je vous l’ai dit, c’est à ce dernier travail que je tiens le plus, quoiqu’il m’ait mis dans de sales draps. J’essaie de m’en sortir. Mais je ne m’en sors pas. Je ne sais pas si ça pourra faire un livre. Ce sera peut-etre un temps pour rien.5
Laissez-moi vous dire encore combien je suis touché par l’intérêt que vous portez à mon travail et par le mal que vous vous donnez pour le défendre. Et croyez à mes sentiments sincèrement amicaux.
Samuel Beckett
5. On Endgame
Extracts from Correspondence with Director Alan Schneider
December 27, 1955
Dear Alan:
If I don’t get away by myself now and try to work I’ll explode, or implode. So I have retreated to my hole in the Marne mud and am struggling with a play. Yours,
Sam
January 11, 1956
Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel much more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years. … When in London the question arose of a new production [of Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’], I told the [producers] that if they did it my way they would empty the theatre. … For the moment all I can say and all I want to say is that this Miami fiasco [the Florida production of ‘Godot’] does not distress me in the smallest degree, or only in so far as it distresses you.
P. S. I am writing an even worse affair and have got down the gist of the first act (of two).
April 12, 1956
Afraid no plays to show you. I did finish another, but don’t like it. It has turned out a three-legged giraffe, to mention only the architectonics, and leaves me in doubt whether to take a leg off or add one on.
June 21, 1956
I have no clear picture of the [New York] production [of ‘Godot’]. Much seems to get across, but to the exclusion of too much else, probably. … Have at last written another, one act, longish, hour and a quarter I fancy. Rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw, more inhuman than ‘Godot’. My feeling, strong, at the moment, is to leave it in French for a year at least. … I’m in a ditch somewhere near the last stretch and would like to crawl up on it.
October 15, 1956
I don’t in my ignorance agree with the round and feel ‘Godot’ needs a very closed box. … Have begun to work on the new play with Blin and Martin [Roger Blin, French director of’Godot’ and director and star of ‘Endgame’, and Jean Martin, who played Lucky and Clov in the Paris productions of ‘Godot’ and ‘Endgame’]. A very long one act, over an hour and a half I shd think. … I am panting to see the realization and know if I am on some kind of road, and can stumble on, or in a swamp.
April 16, 1957
I can’t face my typewriter these days, so you’ll have to make the best you can of my foul fist. We created ‘Fin de Partie’ (‘Endgame’) at the Royal Court in London. We go on here at the end of the month at the Studio des Champs-Élysées. ‘in de Partie’ is very difficult to get right. Perhaps I have the wrong idea as to how it should be done. Blin and Martin have done a very good job — in spite of me! And the work in London improves our chances here.
April 30, 1957
I have not even begun the translation. I have until August to finish it and keep putting off the dreaded day… It seems funny to be making plans for a text which does not yet exist and which, when it does, will inevitably be a poor substitute for the original (the loss will be much greater than from the French to the English ‘Godot’)??
? We opened here last Friday at the Studio des Champs-Elysées… The reactions so far are good and I have not much misgiving as to the outcome. Blin, after a shaky start in London, is now superb as Hamm. I have nothing but wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come.
P. S. I quite agree that my work is for the small theatre. The Royal Court is not big, but ‘Fin de Partie’ gains unquestionably in the greater smallness of the Studio.
August 12, 1957
I have finished translation and am sending it to Barney [Barney Rosset of the Grove Press] today… Now it’s up to Barney and you — if your interest survives a reading of the script. Whatever the two of you decide is, in advance, O.K. with me.
The creation in French at the Royal Court [the London production of ‘Endgame’ had been done in French] was rather grim, like playing to mahogany, or rather teak. In the little Studio des Champs-Élysées the hooks went in… It would be fine if you get over to see it. You know by experience what little help I am with my own work and I have little or no advice for you. But simply to see the production here, for which I am very grateful, while not altogether agreeing, might be of some use to you.
September 30, 1957
If you want to be absolutely sure of seeing this production, you need to arrive on the 10th at latest and in time to get to the Avenue Montaigne by 21 hours GMT approx… I think it would help you considerably to see it… In any case you’ll have the great benefit of seeing me and getting another dose of my stutterings.
October 26, 1957
It was good seeing you. Sorry I wasn’t of more help about the play but the less I speak of my work the better. The important thing was for you to see the production.
December 29, 1957
It would be impertinent of 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, nee tecum nee sine te, in such a place, and in such a world, that’s all I can manage, more than I could.