Authors: Declan Kiberd
It is in the trilogy that Beckett evolves the most beautiful forms, as the linear plot of the western novel makes way for a structure which is the artistic equivalent of meditation and for a narrative which is the artistic equivalent of confession. Beckett reported that he conceived its first volume
Molloy
on the day he became aware of his past stupidity in not writing out of personal experience, in his refusal to accept the dark side as the "commanding side of my personality".
21
That phrase might be an inadvertent summary of the "plot" of
Molloy,
which chronicles the attempt by the prim, bourgeois Catholic Moran to confront the primeval Molloy within, to locate the panting antiself that struggles to emerge, divesting Moran of his illusions of property, industry, purpose, and, above all, traditional religious belief. Where the uncovering of this antiself was for Yeats a finally artistic imperative, it had for Beckett all the confessional qualities of a religious testimony, a point made when the author insists that he has no intention to "give way to literature".
22
The first book of the trilogy contains a parody of the Roman Catholic confession and substitutes for its perceived formal insincerities
the muscular summons to a confessional testimony: by the end, however, even such Protestant testifying is exposed as self-defeating, since the self-reliance preached by the Protestant can result only in the death of the Old Testament God, as man listens instead to those inner voices which require "no vengeful deity" to make themselves heard. That voice can liberate Molloy, unchain his innermost self – the needle-point of the mystic – and allow him to expiate by confessing the sins of the past. Moreover, the man who once "found it painful to not understand" can now accept the incomprehensible pattern of dancing bees. Part of his comfort is the knowledge that the bees are an impermeable closed system of their own and that he will, therefore, never be tempted to offload responsibility for himself onto them: "And I would never do my bees the wrong I had done my God to whom I had been taught to ascribe my angers, fears, desires, and even my body".
23
All forms of authority throughout the trilogy induce irresponsibility: for instance, Moran's son always loses his way when accompanied by his father, who keeps him rope-bound, but he survives handsomely on his own. Like Murphy, each protagonist of the trilogy discovers that he cannot resign his fate to an exterior godhead or cosmology, since in every case the individual is "the prior system". Instead, as in
Buddhist practice, the godhead is increasingly ironized by multiple jocularities and courted in expectant silences; and, while all this is going on, the protagonists try to sink into that needle-point where the mystic achieves both darkness and illumination. There is an undeniable "eastern" element in this progress, as is clear in the Buddha-like postures adopted by protagonists in the knees-and-elbow position, in the desire of the adept to please the master with a wisdom which nonetheless can never be verbalized, in the attempt to cure all desire by ablating it. But – though Beckett clearly learned much eastern wisdom from his reading of
Schopenhauer – there is no necessity to posit an eastern influence in a more direct sense. After all, the mystic moments thus attained were central to the Protestantism of Luther in its pristine phase: what is enacted is nothing other than the search embarked upon by countless mystics. Even the noted prayer-meetings of
Quakers were characterized by long silences designed for just the kind of meditation during which the godhead might be wooed to announce itself.
24
It may be that the voice which speaks in the last fifty pages of
The Unnamable
is the voice of God, insofar as that word has meaning in this century: not any reassuringly traditional godhead, rather a core of selfhood towards which all of Beckett's mystics move. He was interested in studying the mind of God, which is perhaps why he once said that
poetry is
prayer. He is one of those very rare writers who have captured the mystery of being in the world. He did this in religious language which was completely devoid of pretence or the accretions of institutional discourse.
But he was not utterly alone in this: for his example and endorsement inspired a group of young Catholic modernists to use poetry as a method of metaphysical exploration. In a famous review of 1934 Beckett praised
Thomas MacGreevy for his recognition that "it is the act and not the object of perception that matters",
25
since self-perception was the primary theme. MacGreevy grew up in Tarbert, County Kerry, and had his cruel introduction to the wider world in the trenches of the Somme, where he was wounded twice. Out of that experience came "De Civitate Hominum", a war poem which runs well beyond an outraged Georgianism and whose fragmentary method was far more adequate to the dislocations it reported:
I cannot tell which flower he has accepted
But suddenly there is a tremor,
A zigzag of lines against the blue
And he streams down
Into the white,
A delicate flame,
A stroke of orange in the morning's dress.
My sergeant says, very low, "Holy God!
'Tis a fearful death."
Holy God makes no reply Yet.
26
MacGreevy's brilliant deployment of
vers libre
was his way of retaining some kind of hold
on a world no longer felt to be regular:
My rose of Tralee turned gray in its life,
A tombstone gray,
Unimpearled
But a moment, now, I suppose.
For a moment I may suppose,
Gleaming blue,
Silver blue,
Gold,
Rose,
And the light of the world.
27
That devotion to an epiphanic moment in the midst of a fallen universe had, of course, another sponsor in Joyce, whose rejection of all narrowing national traditions inspired
MacGreevy, as it had impressed Beckett. The two young men came to know and esteem one another on the boulevards of Paris after 1928: but very different fates lay in store for them. MacGreevy returned to an Ireland which had little use for his brand of Catholic modernism: his poetic output all but ceased and after 1950 he was known only as the Director of the
National Gallery in Dublin. It was a measure of the cultural introversion of post-war Ireland that, when he died on St. Patrick's Day 1967, there were few references in the obituaries to his achievement as a poet.
28
Had MacGreevy remained in exile, he might have found for his mystic muse an environment more conducive to its kind of poetry: but he was nationally-minded and wished to live in Ireland. His contemporaries,
Denis Devlin and
Brian Coffey, perhaps by dint of embracing exile as their natural condition, managed to sustain longer poetic careers, although their work went uncelebrated in Ireland, except by the discerning few. Coffey studied in Paris with the Catholic writer
Jacques Maritain, and subsequently worked as a professor of philosophy in St. Louis, Missouri, from where in 1962 he composed a free verse-letter, teasing out his divided feeling about Ireland and addressed to MacGreevy:
Midnight now.
Deepest winter perfect now.
Tomorrow early we shall make the lunches
for the children to take to school,
forgetting while working out the week
our wrestling with the sad flesh
and the only Ireland we love
where in Achill still
the poor praise Christ aloud
when the priest elevates
the Saviour of the world.
29
Coffey in many respects provided a comprehensive answer to Beckett's summons to self-perception as the central challenge of the age. His is not a God who on the last day will ask the sinner why he was not more
like Jesus; rather he is one who will enquire just how fully he managed to become himself.
The struggle for saintliness
in a world apparently abandoned by God engrossed Denis
Devlin; but his vision is somewhat more optimistic, for he senses in the poetic act the power to heal the split between body and soul, between sexual and religious identity. Whereas Beckett's sexual partners remain eternally "twain", observing the workings of one another's bodies with mounting incredulity, Devlin's do know a moment of healing oneness. This he elevated into an aesthetic principle which annihilated the distance between subject and object, achieving that very fusion which Beckett had pronounced impossible in his early book on Proust. Inspired by French poets who had preached the marriage of Catholic art and symbolism, Devlin countered the provincializing tendencies of his native religion. "Lough Derg", his marvellous poem of 1946, locates the Irish penitential rites against the backdrop of a shattered Europe:
We pray to ourself. The metal moon, unspent
Virgin eternity sleeping in the mind,
Excites the form of prayer without content;
White thorn lightens, delicate and bland,
The negro mountain, and so, knelt on her sod,
This woman beside me murmuring
My God! My God!
30
This was yet another split to be healed: again and again Devlin's poetry insists that Ireland and Europe are not opposed complexes of meaning, and so he dedicates his elegy for Michael Collins to the anti-fascist novelist
Ignazio Silone.
As a diplomat who knew the great cities of Catholic Europe in all their sensuous beauty, Devlin challenged the puritanical excesses of Irish Catholicism in lines of unambiguous eroticism, lines which may also owe something to the
Dánta Grá,
those
amour courtois
lyrics by Gaelic poets who saw in man's love for woman an image of a divine love for the human soul:
Women that are loved are more than lovable,
Their beauty absolute blows:
But little, like the urgent, carnal soul,
More than its leaves so mortal in the rose.
O rose! O more than red mortality!
What can my love have said
That made me her imagine mote than be?
Her mind more than mind, blood more than red?
31
In the 1934 essay Beckett praised MacGreevy for "probably the most important contribution" to Irish poetry since the Great War; and he identified Devlin
and Coffey as affording "the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland". These he cast under the modernist aegis of
Laforgue, the surrealists, Eluard, Eliot and Pound, contrasting them with the "Gossoons wunderhorn" of Irish revivalism, those antiquarian imitators of
Gaelic prosody who were "delivering with the altitudinous complacency of the Victorian Gael the Ossianic goods".
32
Their flight from self-perception he considered to be the ultimate cowardice.
Chief among the offenders was
Austin
Clarke, whom Beckett went on to satirize mercilessly in
Murphy
as "Austin Ticklepenny". The libel was not only ill-judged but undeserved, for Clarke in truth used Gaelic tradition to confront rather than evade his own inner demons. A free version of the Middle Irish romance "The Frenzy of Sweeney" enabled him to explore the mental breakdown which resulted from his own youthful clash with a censorious Catholicism: and his employment of the Gaelic past was often deeply subversive of present rigidity. As early as 1929, in
Pilgrimage and Other Poems,
he invoked the Celtic-Romanesque world of medieval Irish Christianity as a place or state of grace in which rigour was qualified by imagination, duty chastened by a sense of beauty, and Gaelic values harmonized with libertarian visions. If this was a method which owed something to the example of Synge, it was also by no means opposed to the codes by which Denis Devlin reconstructed his world. The later, wonderfully erotic, works of Clarke were as calculated an assault on narrow-gauge Catholicism as anything penned by Devlin. Like his critiques, they had the additional merit of coming from within the communion.
For Clarke was a truly religious writer, yet another who yearned for the condition of the Prorholic or Cathestant. He wanted a return to the loose, local structure of medieval monasticism, seeing in the hegemony of priests and bishops evidence that "the imperial and evangelical spirit of the British race"
33
had, since independence, been appropriated by Irish Catholicism. A poem like "Tenebrae", taking for theme the draping of all statues during Holy Week, asks whether the crucifixion may not carry within its imagery a dreadful negativity and masochism; and yet the artist knows that enlightenment models of reason, which cause his doubts, cannot fully account for the darker sense of life. There is no easy resolution of these dilemmas. "The Straying Student", who
turns his back on the priestly vocation for fulfilment in a woman's arms, is left unsatisfied in old age:
Awake or in my sleep, I have no peace now.
Before the ball is struck, my breath has gone.
And yet I trouble lest she may deceive me
And leave me in this land, where every woman's son
Must carry his own coffin and believe,
In dread, all that the clergy teach the young.
34
Confronted by the increasing intolerance and inflexibility of the official church, Clarke astutely suggested that the large numbers of vibrant young men and women who left Ireland for missionary work in Africa were a serious loss to the emerging Irish state, which stood badly in need of their flair:
Too many are professed –
He argued – boys, girls, all in black,
Brown, white. The Church unbeds the State:
Charity taught to emigrate.
Farmyard and scythe gone. Grain unsacked . . .
35
The imperial pretensions of the bishops were leading to a dreary repetition of all the old colonial mechanisms: the "Flight to Africa" resulted in an aged and repressive church, the sponsor of a new penal age which might set the educational ideals of Pearse at nought:
Pearse founded St. Enda's, forbad
All punishment: pupils were happy
At task and play.
Our celibates raise cane and strap,
Smiling at May
Processions that hide their cruel slapping.
Children obey
In dread.
36
Clarke's answer to all this had been implicit in his first play,
The Son of Learning.
MacConglinne, the wandering medieval student, gives free rein to his senses in it, even to the point of blasphemy: yet his is a challenge offered secure in the knowledge that his church and his God
are strong enough to survive all assaults. A major figure in Gaelic literature, his spirit had been revived by
Synge who prefaced
The Tinker's Wedding
with the hope that country clergy could tolerate non-malicious mockery, "as the clergy in every Roman Catholic country were laughed at through the ages that had real religion".
37
Clarke
is
MacConglinne, presenting himself as one who is just what the latter-day Irish church needs, a member of a loyal but strictly internal opposition.