Sir, Gerry Dukes (May 4th) severely misrepresents my depiction of Samuel Beckett in my book The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946. Most troubling are his concluding remarks, since they distort my overview.
When discussing Beckett's work in the humanitarian restoration of Saint-Lo, Mr Dukes says that I display a "complete failure to enter into a sympathetic understanding" of the man. He actually accuses me of taking Deirdre Bair's position, which I challenge throughout and answers this by presenting my very own argument as his.
I wrote the book, in fact to argue that Beckett was a great hero of this century who, from his childhood, lived in a broken world that prepared him to be both a great Writer and a heroic, altruistic human being. I trace his life from Dublin during the Rising when he was 10 through his various environs until his work with the French and Irish Red Cross in Saint-Lo, when I writer the following
"I believe that the same altruistic impulses that had motivated Beckett's earlier Resistance activities prompted him to join the ranks in Saint-Lo. Although he performed the most menial and boring of tasks the important element is that everything he did was in the service of rebuilding and healing. In addition, the radio announcement he wrote in 1946 reveals that he felt a deep sense of national pride in joining his Irish kinspeople in an active contribution to the war effort."
Bair reports that Beckett's initial activities at Saint Lo were satisfying, but the chores became "time consuming" and frustrating "He went back and forth to Paris, which only added to, his frustration ... waiting for various decisions to be made in various bureaucracies. Even more galling, he discovered that the store keeper part of his title was meant literally... He... often found himself working seven days a week with no respite from the constant good cheer of the Irish staff, the recalcitrance of the German prisoners ... and the abject misery and sickness of the patients." Although Beckett continued to assist the Red Cross even after he returned to Paris, he did this, Bair claims, only to relieve his guilt "about abandoning his post before the work was completed".
This explanation, seems to me both unkind and unlikely. It seems more probable that Saint-Lo provided Beckett with an opportunity to continue his activities in the service of humanity. Saint-Lo was a logical extension, and perhaps consummation, of his prewar and wartime experiences. Beckett seems to have been determined to battle suffering whether combating an evil invading force or alleviating the destruction caused by friendly fire.
He would now become a healer, an active participant in the restoration of one of the postwar ruins of the world. He would again wear the uniform of the medical assistant, the orderly dress, which he had worn more than ten years before when he worked at a London mental hospital. Indeed, at this time in history, the world might well have seemed a madhouse without walls. In addition as a one time Irish "exile" now work banish group in France, Beckett could connect his past with the nation that would become his future, permanent home.
Finally the Saint Lo experience illustrated the combination of human misery and human resilience and the absurd victory that Beckett would shortly write about. The townspeople had achieved liberation through unspeakable suffering. They had sustained the bizarre paradox of a relatively peaceful, if humiliating, enemy occupation, followed by a destructive, if liberating, victory. Gratitude at salvation freedom gained at the cost of incomprehensible despair would be an ingredient of Beckett's future tragicomedy a gloss, perhaps, on Lucky's "lucky" relationship to the brutal Pozzo in Godot.
Ultimately, Beckett's experience in Saint-Lo provided him with a long awaited equanimity in a larger, metaphysical sense. It gave him a sense of balance, of what in Godot he would call the "tears" and "laughter" of the world the black comic alternation of elation and despair that is the individual's lot, as well as the nature of history.
Beckett's activities in Saint Lo, as described by those who worked with him, attest to those attributes of the man described in the introduction his generosity, kindness, sense of responsibility, and modesty. His own comments, when he later reflected on this period, tell us much about the conclusions he had reached thus far concerning his life's experiences. In his 1946 radio speech, The Capital of the Ruins, he specifically celebrated the dignity of mere survival in a "contingent" universe.
I might add that the following (and concluding) chapter is entirely in this vein.
Finally, as Mr Dukes concludes, Yale University Press did indeed produce a handsome book, but I take issue with his last, insidious comment about the book's "slipshod copy editing". Perhaps Mr Dukes fears that someone might be tempted both by the book's appearance and the high praise on the dust jacket from Harold Pinter, who knew Beckett very well, the great Irish American novelist, Maureen Howard, and Harvard professor Robert Scanlan, president of the Samuel Beckett Society. Yours, etc., Central Park West, New York.