sequence of poems called ‘The Tower’, is obsessed with the verifiability of memory, the landscapes of home reimagined and the meaning, or meaninglessness, of artistic achievement and of what remains post-event, post-experience. As the final stanza of part II of ‘The Tower’ enquires:
Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or woman lost?
If on the lost, admit you turned aside
From a great labyrinth out of pride,
Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought
Or anything called Conscience once;
And that if memory recur, the sun’s
Under eclipse and the day blotted out.14
Clearly Yeats’s clerical inheritance did not completely evaporate in the occult.
So whether we cite Beckett’s Yeats from the beginning, in references in the early stories such as ‘Walking Out’,15 in the literary polemical crossfire of ‘Recent Irish Poetry’16 where Yeats’s ‘A Coat’ is quoted, as well as ‘The Tower’, and the ‘attar of far off, most secret and inviolate rose’ from ‘The Secret Rose’ (The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899) or in one of his most important early letters – to Axel Kaun in 1937, which John Pilling17 glosses as a Yeatsian riff – the ‘idea of the “trembling of the veil”, no doubt familiar to Beckett by way of Yeats’s prose’, Yeats is a crucial defining presence:
It is indeed getting more and more difficult [Beckett writes], even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it.18
It is important to state the obvious here: that Beckett’s engagement with Yeats was public, published and contemporaneous. Yeats was, after all, still very much alive during the writing of these early flourishes of Beckett.
So too the private correspondences contain further passing remarks, jokes, avoidances, notes, recommendations – all of which connect with Yeats. One could name each and every one contained in those amazing volumes of Beckett’s Letters and it would make for a very long list indeed – along with the extensive citing of Yeatsian echoes, reverberations and allusions that critics have heard or seen in Beckett, such as W.J. McCormack’s spotting of possible typographical links in County Clare between Yeats’s Dreaming of the Bones and Watt.19
On a more basic level, some of the younger Beckett’s spleen – that which produced ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, say – can be heard in a letter he wrote from his Foxrock fastness to his pal Thomas MacGreevy in 1936. The letter is full of gossip and is rich pickings for the social historian, but it is the following extract that caught my eye: ‘I was down at the mailboat last Monday week meeting Frank [his brother] returning from Anglesea [sic] and WB stalked off with his bodyguard, Lennox, Dolly, Gogarty, Walter Starkie, O’Connor, Hayes, Higgins, all twined together.’20 This is 7 July 1936 to be exact. Yeats was actually recovering from a heart condition and finishing off work on the Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935,21 a publication that was to cause all kinds of controversy, much to Yeats’s delight. Incidentally, in a letter written a few weeks after Beckett’s, Yeats writes to Dorothy Wellesley on 26 July from ‘Riversdale’, his home in Dublin: ‘I get up every morning about 4, work at proof sheets until about 5.30, then go to bed again, breakfast at 7.30, and then write poetry, with interruption for rest, till 12’22 – not bad working habits for a 71-year-old!
According to W.J. McCormack,23 in a further letter to Dorothy Wellesley the following year, May 1937, and only partially republished, Yeats relates in the original the story of a libel case in which Beckett had appeared against Yeats’s friend Oliver St John Gogarty and his autobiography, As I was Going Down Sackville Street (1936):
In his book [Yeats is quoted as writing to Dorothy Wellesley] Gogarty has called a certain man a ‘chicken butcher’ meaning that he makes love to the immature. The informant, the man who swears that he recognised the victim[,] is a racketeer of a Dublin poet or imatative [sic] poet of the new school. He hates us all – his review of the Anthology was so violent the Irish Times refused to publish it.
He & the ‘chicken butcher’ are Jews … Two or three weeks ago Gogarty & the chicken butcher were drinking in our ‘poet’s pub’ laughing at the work.
There is no corroboration that I know of but if the ‘imitative poet of the new school’ is (if I read McCormack’s suggestion correctly) Beckett and not, say, Leslie Daiken, an important Dublin Jewish left-wing radical poet and anthologist of the time, Yeats clearly had Beckett in his sights. Yet it is curious that Yeats did not recall Beckett’s name, if, that is, we take it that the two men had met only a few years previously. Lots of ‘ifs’. But it also depends on which story one takes as fact.
Anthony Cronin’s biography of Samuel Beckett emphatically states that while Beckett had both opportunities and a network of mutual connections (Alan Duncan for one), ‘there is no evidence that [he] met any of [the prominent Dublin literary figures] who attended soirées such as Walter Starkie’s’ and ‘in fact [Beckett] was never to meet [Yeats] the greatest poet of the age, there or anywhere else’.24 Deirdre Bair’s biography of two decades earlier tells it differently:25
Just as he sought Jack B’s company, Beckett avoided introduction to his brother, whom he regarded as pompous and posturing, fatuously slobbering over all the wrong aspects of Ireland and Irish society.
But she continues:26
Beckett actually met W. B. Yeats only once, during a brief encounter in Killiney, where he was disgusted with the way W. B. Yeats simpered over his wife and made an inordinate fuss with his children.
For her sources, Bair cites A.J. Leventhal, John Montague, John Kobler, the papers of Thomas MacGreevy and a letter to H.O. White (15 April 1957)27 – both in TCD library – and an anonymous source. Following suit, in his lively Contemporary Irish Drama from Beckett to McGuinness (1994), Anthony Roche confidently identifies Killiney and 1932 as the place and year of the meeting, set up through Thomas MacGreevy, and remarks that ‘the young Beckett could find little to identify with in the persona Yeats was then projecting, of a family man with wife and children’. However, according to Roche, Beckett was ‘taken aback when the older poet praised a passage from Beckett’s “Whoroscope”, his first published poem of two years earlier [1930]’.28
Roche’s sources include Richard Ellmann, who in Four Dubliners (1986) elaborates a little further: ‘Beckett and Yeats met only once, at Killiney, south of Dublin … At this single meeting Yeats astonished Beckett by quoting a passage from “Whoroscope”’:29
A wind of evil flung my despair of ease
against the sharp spires of the one
lady.
And yet, unless I have simply missed it, I cannot see any mention of the encounter in Beckett’s published correspondence of the time, although he was, as it happens, in Killiney in 1932, dining with the Hones in December of that year. Calling up H.O. White’s letter will probably solve it all. But what does it matter, anyway? Far more important is that the following year, 1933, was to be an extremely difficult and tragic year for Beckett, with a permanent effect upon his life, as well as marking perhaps the real beginnings of his life as a writer.30
First there was the loss through tuberculosis of his cousin Peggy Sinclair in May, and then the heart attack that led to his father’s death in June. These tragedies were
