The Weight Of Compassion E-Book

Countess of Fingall Elizabeth

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 495

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Seventy Years Young is one of the great Anglo-Irish memoirs. Originally published in 1937, it now appears for the first time in paperback, with an introduction by Trevor West. It tells the remarkable story of Daisy Fingall (nee Burke) of County Galway, who in 1883, aged seventeen, married the 11th Earl of Fingall of Killeen Castle, County Meath. Daisy's vitality possessed and transformed that twilit world of Catholic Ascendancy Ireland, a world in transition – from viceregal, country-house Ireland of Dublin drawing-rooms and Meath hunting-fields, now as remote as pre-revolutionary Russia – to the Great War, Easter rising and civil war Ireland of the early 1920s and beyond, when 'the country houses lit a chain of bonfires', and the tobacco-growing 'Sinn Fein Countess' tempered a life of privilege with work for Horace Plunkett's Co-operative Societies and the United Irishwomen. Daisy Fingall writes from an intimate knowledge of the leading figures of her day and their milieu. A sparkling parade of personalities – Parnell, Wyndham, Haig, Markievicz, Edward VII, AE, Shaw, Moore and Yeats – comes alive under her pen. Seventy Years Young reanimates a proximate but forgotten past with all the power of first-class fiction, and the glitter and rarity of a Faberge egg.

Leseprobe

THE LILLIPUT PRESS | DUBLIN

In gratitude to the discipline of medicine for endowing me with the ability to reason on the basis of scientific evidence, and to the humanities for tempering any intuitive deductions with the sensibilities of compassion and feeling for the human condition.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Forewordby Gerald Dawe

Introduction: Influence of the Arts on a Doctor’s Life and Work

PART ONE:The Weight of Compassion

Samuel Beckett

The Weight of Compassion, 1990

The Beckett Country, 1986

Zone of Stones, 1996

Humanity in Ruins, 1990

A.J. (Con) Leventhal

From the Waters of Zion to Liffeyside, 1981

The Writings of A.J. Leventhal, 1984

Nevill Johnson

Paint the Smell of Grass, 1978

Denis Johnston

Nine Rivers from Jordan, 1978

Mícheál MacLiammóir

On the Saint Patrick, 1978

Petr Skrabanek

The Cantos of Maldoror, 1997

Two Russian Portraits

Anton Chekov, 1988

Nicolai Koroktoff, 1982

George Frideric Handel

Messiah: An Oratorio, 1986

Dominic Corrigan

The Dublin School, 1983

Irish Doctors and Literature

Let Verse and Humour Be Our Music, 1988

Dom Peter Flood

Lunch at Ealing Abbey, 1979

PART TWO:The Corruption of Privilege

Medical Education

Six Years Shalt Thou Labour ... , 1979

History, Diagnosis and then Examination, 1979

The Dangers of the Dublin Disease, 1982

What is a Professor?, 1979

The Medical Establishment

Strike and the Medical Profession, 1987

Medical Journalism

Stephen Lock: Hibernian in Disguise, 1991

Humanitarian Involvement

The Tragedy of the Medicine Man in the Underdeveloped World, 1989

Walk in Peace: Banish Landmines from our Globe, 1997

Human Rights and the Making of a Good Doctor, 2003

The Weight of Concern

The Island of Dilmun, 1989

Bahrain – Continuing Imprisonment of Doctors, 2011

Doctors in Bahrain Merit More than Platitudes, 2011

References

Index

Acknowledgments

The Weight of Compassionwould never have come into being were it not for Gerald Dawe, who in his gentle but persuasive way suggested some years ago that I should bring a selection of my non-scientific writings together for publication. Gerald being Gerald did not let the matter rest there; once I had undertaken to draw essays from times past into what I hoped would be a coherent form he was a constant editorial presence. The collection owes much to his guidance and advice and I only hope his belief in the work is justified by their content. The collection owes much to Edith Fournier, who, not for the first time, gave me helpful advice on structure and content as well as applying an eagle-like editorial eye to the text. I am grateful to her also for the translation of the poem ‘Mort de A.D.’ by Samuel Beckett.

Kieran Taaffe and the late Daniel McGing were receptive to my request for assistance in bringing the past to light through the use of illustrative historical material, highlighting the role in particular of The Charitable Infirmary in the illustrious Dublin School; and I am grateful to The Charitable Infirmary Charitable Trust for its support.

These essays inThe Weight of Compassionare drawn from many publications dating back to the nineteen-seventies and I am grateful to the various authors and publishers who gave me copyright for text and illustrative material. I am especially grateful to David Davison whose photography has been so important to many of my writings.

To Michael Colgan, my sincere thanks for agreeing to launchThe Weight of Compassionon the trust of friendship, ahead of his having read the book.

The staff of Lilliput Press – in particular Antony Farrell, Fiona Dunne and Kitty Lyddon – have been most patient and tolerant in seeing the collection into print, and Jonathan Williams has been a kindly Welsh source of encouragement. I am grateful to my daughter Aphria for compiling the index at short notice.

Finally, to Tona, my thanks for her advice, patience and tolerance.

Foreword

IT CAN HARDLY BEA coincidence that when he looks out one of his front windows Eoin O’Brien looks across Dublin Bay – at the seascape hundreds of thousands viewed leaving from and arriving in to the Irish capital; a wonderful vista which carries the private histories of so many. For the sense of historical movement and flux that underpins these fascinating essays is itself rooted in a deeply felt ethical understanding of individual experience. History may well be tidal but the human story in Eoin O’Brien’s writing and practice as a doctor is highly tuned to the personal.

The men and women – doctors, writers, artists, actors and scientists – who inhabit these pages are not cut-out ‘representative’ figures who stand in for large scale ideas on politics or artistic ‘movements’.The Weight of Compassionis about individual lives. Indeed the bounty of these essays and the intellectual narrative that underlines them is the essential value of individuality at a time when bureaucratic mission statements and administrative ‘targets’ occlude the much more important human contact between doctor and patient, writer and reader, artist and audience, teacher and student. While the politics of the medical profession are robustly challenged with a series of forthright analyses in ‘The Corruption of Privilege’ – a phrase that will be long remembered from this book – the critical balance is always placed upon the individual conscience and the individual imagination.

Tosurvive and flourish in spite of difficulties, including illness, politicalchicanery, folly, and stern tests of one kind or another – such as Samuel Beckett’sexperiences working for the Irish Red Cross at the end ofWW2or Nevill Johnson’s restless artistic journeys throughout England and Ireland in the forties, fifties and beyond – is the moral focus ofThe Weight of Compassion. The book is also a powerful witness to great literary and scientific innovatorsincluding Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett, Denis Johnston, and Nicolai Korotkoff.

As a collection,The Weight of Compassionreveals the work of a widely read and astute scholar whose professional life as a doctor and specialist has been dedicated to the alleviation of pain and suffering and who, as an academic, has spent decades exploring the circuitry of the heart. ‘No symbols where none intended.’ Precious wonder that Samuel Beckett, along with Chekhov, should prove to be the book’s pre-eminent influence, for in many ways Eoin O’Brien, who did so much in his ground-breaking study,The Beckett Country, introduces the general reader to their unique company as an equal.

The torment that afflicted so many during the twentieth century – from the persecution of the Jewish minority of Europe to the abominable legacy of landmines in our own day, to the current plight of medical doctors in Bahrain, to the bureaucratic and social struggle for a ‘fit-for-purpose’ medical system in Ireland, is viewed with hope, commitment and, critically, an energetic enthusiasm; its democratic vision of what makes a decent egalitarian society possible is inspiring.

Eoin O’Brien expresses his wish in these pages that the essays, ‘written at different stages of [his] career’, reflect ‘a progression rather than a retrospection’. He need have no worries on that score.The Weight of Compassionis a spirited, playful, humorous, forthright and impassioned self-portrait of a great Irish man of letters. What makes a doctorgood, an artist or writersignificant, a mentortrustworthy, authorityjust, an experiment abreakthrough,are questions at the formidable core of this timely, necessary and provocative book.

Professor Gerald Dawe

School of English, Trinity College Dublin

Introduction: Influence of the Arts on a Doctor’s Life and Work

I WAS PERSUADEDby Gerald Dawe to bring together the essays of a non-scientific nature I had written over many years. He sensed, correctly I hope, that there was ample diversity in what had intrigued me outside of scientific medicine to be of wider interest, but I approached the task with some trepidation. I had, it is true, been attracted to write on art and history and on issues related to the generality of medicine rather than its science, which has been, of course, my main preoccupation, but these essays scattered over many years and numerous journals and periodicals had to be collected and then made acceptable for contemporary printing.

The task of assembling the essays into an order that would give the whole a coherence that was not chaotic was more daunting. After all these essays had been written according to the demands of editors and the topicality of the subject to its time; how then could they be given a semblance that might bring to the whole an order that was not contrived? In gathering the essays I had to ask myself on more than one occasion if my interests in the humanities and friendship with artistic talents had influenced me for the better as a doctor, or had I been distracted from what I had been trained to do, namely caring for sick people? This leads inevitably to the question as to what are the essential ingredients that constitute a good doctor? And the answer lies of course in the eye of the beholder insofar as any definition will be influenced by the vantage point from which the view of ‘goodness’ in a doctor is perceived.

The academicians, whose business it is to train doctors and who are given as many as six years to do their job, will define the ‘best doctor’ as the one who achieves first class honours and heads the class. To these pundits the qualities of compassion and feeling for fellow man in the doldrums is, as often as not, a far remove in their exegesis of what constitutes a ‘good doctor’.

To the patient, however, the academic achievement of the newly qualified doctor will pale to insignificance in the shadow of unkindness or a lack of empathy with the human condition of pain, suffering or hopelessness. And yet this view taken to extremes can be misleading. A dullard full of human kindness yet oblivious to the scientific advances in medicine can be the antithesis of the good doctor for an ill patient. So in pursuing this theme – no extremes where moderation is likely to be the essence of reality!

Then there is the administrative or health-care provider’s interpretation of the ‘good doctor’, and this will focus on getting the job done at the least cost to society; there will be little or no room for the caring spirit or academic excellence, though our teaching hospitals now belatedly pay lip service to the importance of research and scientific advancement. In truth, however, these administrative stewards are driven more often by fiscal rather than altruistic motives. When I embarked on a research path back in the 1970s I moved around the hospital quietly lest I draw the attention of the authorities to the nefarious practices in which I was engaged. I also tended to be discreet about circulating my research publications lest I be called to account for the time or hospital resources dissipated in such endeavours. Now it is common practice for hospitals and universities to levy ‘overhead’ charges on research projects.

I recall one professor of surgery admonishing me for devoting time to ‘high falutin’ research pointing out that my job was to look after sick people, and that the hospital needed ‘belt and braces men’ (the term still irritates me but conveys tersely a philistinic outlook) who would concentrate on what they were being paid to do – and this from a professor!

To the university leaders of academe a ‘good doctor’ will be assessed on his productive output measured by the only scientific standard that permits the use of the term ‘productive’, namely publications in peer-reviewed international journals and the impact they are judged to have on science. This assumes, of course, that the university administration understand the complex intricacies of clinical and scientific research, which, alas, is not always so.

What then do organizations dealing in humanitarian affairs have to say about the ‘good doctor’? These bodies are plentiful, ranging from small non-governmental organizations to massive bodies, such as the World Health Organization, but all have a common remit, namely the improvement of health in underprivileged countries torn by strife or decimated by poverty. And here we see another quality being asked of the ‘good doctor’; he or she should be concerned enough to give of their time and expertise to help the disadvantaged societies of the world rather than being driven solely by career ambition or being obsessed with self-aggrandizement. Notably these sentiments are not peculiar to doctors emanating from affluent societies but also apply to those graduating from the medical schools of low-resource countries who may be seduced by the rewards to be gained in more affluent societies. The dilemma facing an altruistically minded young doctor is that our universities effectively penalize those who are prepared to jump off the academic treadmill to devote time to humanitarian activity.

What does an interest in the humanities do to our definition of the ‘good doctor’? I was humbled once by a woman I much admired, Joan O’Sullivan, the matron of the City of Dublin Skin and Cancer Hospital, where I was visiting physician. On seeing an essay I had just published on some aspect of literature now forgotten she said, ‘You should be concentrating on medicine and not allow distractions such as this to deter you.’ At face value this viewpoint is perfectly plausible, and indeed literary interests did deflect me from my patients at times but no more so, I suspect, than the golf course, should I have chosen to chase a little white ball across green pastures. However, my feeble refutation of her admonishment ignored what perhaps I did not see at the time, namely that literature and the humanities in general can bring a new understanding, a heightened sensitivity, to the harsh realities of being a doctor.

The bodies responsible for governance of the medical profession have, of course, rigid stipulations as to what constitutes a ‘bad doctor’ and they have constructed rules to ensure that society is protected from deviant behaviour by doctors. These bodies are largely self-governing but increasingly the departments of government responsible for health care are exerting more influence in medical governance if for no other reason than they are paying both the salaries and the malpractice insurance for its employees. So in the end the legal system of society itself decides if a doctor is ‘bad’. However, this is the very antithesis of the ‘good doctor’ and the crux of the problem is how many ‘poor doctors’ lurk between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. It is fair to say that society is not (or certainly perceives that it is not) well served by a self-regulating body, the members of which will not expose colleagues whose performance is below that which society rightly expects and deserves.

Finally there is yet another, often forgotten, view of what constitutes being a ‘good doctor’ and that is the doctor being true to himself, having the capability to delve into one’s self, to deny the apathy of routine from smothering the qualities inherent in simply being ‘good’. I am at the close of a career that has spanned half a century and all I know is that I have been a ‘good doctor’ too little of the time; but I can in honesty say that I have tried to keep an open mind on the subject and to search for influences that might help to make me a ‘better doctor’, and these have often been at some remove from medicine. And who should have the last word in judgment of my ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ as a doctor? I think it must be my patients – how many thousands I know not – and neither they nor I can be fully aware of the influences that have made me what I am, but to seek and search for these is the essence of this book.

The essays that make upThe Weight of Compassionwere written at different stages of my career and reflect, I hope, a progression rather than a retrospection, which would be all I could attempt if I now wished to write a mere reminiscence on my career in medicine. They are statements of the influences that seemed important to me at perhpas a particular time and as such provide an insight into aspects of development that may in some measure allow future doctors and their mentors to come closer to defining and producing a ‘good doctor’.

The essays inThe Weight of Compassionare confined to those I wrote on non-medical or non-scientific subjects. It would be remiss of me, nonetheless, not to make brief mention of my life-long association with scientific research and, more importantly, to acknowledge my many friends and colleagues who allowed me to participate in clinical research without knowing of my ‘secret life’, or as Chekov would have it, ‘my mistress’.

The advancements in the management of high blood pressure (now recognized as the leading cause of mortality across the world) are mirrored, I believe, in the history of the Blood Pressure Unit that was founded in The Charitable Infirmary in 1978. This unit, the first of its kind in Ireland, was dedicated in name and purpose to bringing the most efficient and up-to-date management of this serious illness to the Irish people, while also being determined to bring an Irish influence to international hypertension research. The latter endeavour was based on the belief that successful research in medical science could only be achieved through collaborative research – there was no longer a place for the scientist or institution to be an island unto themselves. The Blood Pressure Unit at The Charitable Infirmary, later theADAPTCentre at Beaumont Hospital, published close on a thousand papers in the scientific literature, and presentations were made at international meetings in many countries in all continents of the world.

The Weight of Compassionhas ‘matured’ through a number of drafts, with as nearly as many essays being discarded as have finally been included; it has been distilled from a four-part treatise to a more cohesive, thematic, and hopefully more readable, compilation that pays homage in the first part to those personalities in art and medicine whose contributions to the humanities compelled me to write about and research their endeavours in more detail, with the second part consisting of essays that reflect my involvement in humanitarian activities and how that influence was to alter my perception of medical decorum and behaviour, which inevitably lead me into conflict with what might be euphemistically called the medical establishment.

The essays in the first part were influenced by personalities I knew and admired. I have always respected talent, be it in music, painting, literature or science. As a doctor I have had to care for many gifted people and this has brought me to appreciate how their sensitivities and needs are unique, often very demanding, but always, in my opinion deserving attention, if for no other reason than that the demands of being endowed with a particular talent brings with it an imperative to serve the genius; the struggle between obligation and the eccentricities that so often comprise the persona of the intellectual can, whether successful or not, result in a tortuous and painful odyssey, which may see the talent dissipated more often than it thrives. A doctor can accompany an artist on this odyssey, and if he is appreciative of the pain of the struggle for achievement and expression, he can provide solace with advice and medical support.

In revisiting these essays many years after their execution I can be critical, of course, of style and the quality of prose, but not of the content or time spent in attempting to capture something of genius and personality. Each friendship left me changed in many ways, that are not always easy, nor indeed possible, to determine.

PART ONE

The Weight of Compassion

Samuel Beckett

I FIRST METSamuel Beckett in October 1977. I had sensed in Beckett’s writing an Irishness that was most manifest in humour and dialogue, personality and place. However, this essential characteristic was not being acknowledged in the rapidly growing secondary literature on his work. I began researching place and terrain and the inferences of subtle and often occult humour in the Beckettœuvre, appropriately on my bicycle, and, what had started as an inkling, soon became a daunting reality.

I discussed this with Con Leventhal, who readily agreed with my thesis and said that I should meet Sam to seek his views. Our first of many meetings took place in the Café de Paris in thePLMHotel on boulevard Saint Jacques. We began by discussing Alan Thompson, who had been my mentor in medicine and for whom I had cared during his last illness. He had remained, with his brother Geoffrey, a close friend of Sam’s throughout his life and he had cared for Beckett’s family. Sam was particularly keen to know about his widow Sylvia, with whom I remained in close contact, and his sons Geoffrey, Marcus and Piers. I wondered if we would ever get round to talking about his writing, which I believed (erroneously as I would later learn) should not be an item of discussion unless broached at his behest. Eventually he said, ‘Con tells me that you are a cycling authority on the topography of my past!’ I then told him I thought the critics had failed to see the relevance of Ireland in his work and that I believed much of the apparently surrealistic in his writing was linked with the reality of existence, and that much of this actuality emanated from his memories of Dublin – or words to that effect; he seemed intrigued by my reasoning. It was I think, a Japanese treatise on the deep surrealism of a passage fromCompanythat evoked a warm chuckle in the Café de Paris:

Nowhere in particular on the way from A to Z … As if bound for Stepaside. When suddenly you cut through the hedge and vanish hobbling east across the gallops.

To the reader unaware that a place with the remarkable name Stepaside actually existed and, given the context of the piece, a surrealistic interpretation was, of course, quite reasonable, and indeed the very name allowed Beckett to cast a mantle of unreality over the prose.

To my surprise he agreed wholeheartedly with what I was doing and he encouraged me to persist with ‘the project’, offering to help if assistance was needed: ‘Just make me a sign!’ We parted on this happy note and my researches now became more detailed, more intense – researches that would lead ultimately to the publication ofThe Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Irelanda decade later to celebrate his eightieth birthday. He often became quite engrossed in the memories of times past and he asked me from time to time for details of place names around Foxrock. I recall him having a particular fascination for the name Ballyoghan, which I researched at some length. I did not trouble him for explanations of the obvious in my researches and there were times when I had to leave the obscure anchored in obscurity.

I made many trips to Paris bearing hundreds of photographs so that between us we could select the fraction that was ultimately used in the book. Those days walking through the Luxembourg Gardens with ‘Beckett on my back’ are full of warm memories – it was a wonderful period in my life. On one poignant visit I produced a photograph of Bill Shannon, the ‘consumptive postman’ in one of Beckett’s most beautiful pieces of prose inWatt: ‘The crocuses and the larch turning green every year a week before the others … and the consumptive postman whistling The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy …’ This photograph brought tears to his eyes and I realized it was time to bid farewell, pack my bag of photographs and slip away without words, just a hand on his shoulder to show I understood and would return anon.

On another occasion, I laid out David Davison’s wonderful photographs of the storm-lashed Dún Laoghaire pier and the anemometer ‘flying in the wind’ inKrapp’s Last Tape. Sam confided to me, not quite apologetically but rather in the tone of one who had pulled a fast one and is proud of having done so, that the revelatory moment – that moment when he ‘saw the whole thing at last’ – had taken place on the much more humble pier at Greystones harbour on a black stormy night when he had been staying in the house his mother had rented in this then seaside resort.

The Beckett Countrystarted life well with a tribute from Samuel Beckett that read: ‘My gratitude for this kindly light on other days.’ This tribute was extended, not only to me, but also to the loyal team that had made the book a reality against many odds – my wife Tona, Ted and Ursula O’Brien, David Davison, Bobby Ballagh, Kieran Taffee, Pat Lawlor, and the late Harry O’Flanagan.

The popularly held view that Sam did not read anything that was written about him was not quite true as I found out on one occasion to my cost. A photographic exhibition based onThe Beckett Countrywas designed to celebrate Sam’s eightieth birthday and was first displayed at the University of Reading in May 1986 with readings by the late Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Ronald Pickup.1James Knowlson and I published a book to accompany the exhibition, which I sent to Sam. When I visited him a week later in Paris I noticed that he had a grubby brown cloth bag with him and after some pleasantries he withdrew the book – the only content – from the bag and opened it at page 14 saying hesitatingly, ‘Eoin, I cannot reconcile this quotation fromWattwith the original publication and I have even checked back to the manuscript.’ I paled as we unravelled a curious happening. The piece of prose inWattthat describes Watt’s journey on the train from Harcourt Street to Foxrock was read thus to me by Sam:

The racecourse now appearing, with its beautiful white railing, in the fleeing lights, warned Watt that he was drawing near, and that when the train stopped next, then he must leave it. He could not see the stands, the grand, the members’, the people’s, so ? when empty with their white and red, for they were too far off.

The question mark, as Sam explained, was a device he rarely used, perhaps only when he was tired, that left the reader to find the most appropriate word – but this was too much for a typesetter in Reading who took it upon him or herself to insert the words ‘six chairs’ so that the passage now read, ‘He could see the stand, the grand, the members’, the people’s, so six chairs when empty with their white and red, for they were too far off.’ My planned route from Paris to Dublin (much against Sam’s wishes) was immediately changed to Reading where I sought out this compositing genius in vain but established that the proofs were correct and thence to the printers to pulp the entire run and re-print one thousand corrected copies.

Though Beckett, with characteristic humour, proposed his own epitaph, perhaps the most fitting tribute to the genius of his work is, I believe, simply to acknowledge that he reached the zenith of expression, ‘the sum of the world’s woes in nothingness enclose’. We must not see Beckett’s enormous gift to humanity as being confined to his power of expression in prose, poetry and drama; we must look further afield to that largely unexplored realm of this talent – to his influence as a philosopher, and perhaps it is here that he holds hand so easily with a doctor in search of some meaning to the suffering of existence. The essays that follow encapsulate for me much of what is the ‘heart and soul’ of Beckett’s writing. The first is ‘The Weight of Compassion’,2which gives the title to the book; the next two essays, ‘The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Ireland’3and ‘Zone of Stones’4examine how Beckett’s memories of Ireland, and in particular South Dublin, may have influenced his prose, poetry and drama. The last essay, ‘Humanity in Ruins’,5returns to the theme of compassion and recounts the remarkable story of the Hôpital Irlandais de Saint-Lôwhere Beckett served as storekeeper and translator along with many volunteers from Ireland in 1946.

The Weight of Compassion, 1990

THERE ARE MANYfacets to Samuel Beckett’s writing – humour, despair, love, poignancy, suffering – but for me there is one dominant characteristic:compassion,compassion for the human condition of existence. What I propose is to illustrate the influence of this pervading quality and in so doing show that this tenderness was present from the moment Beckett first took pen to paper. It is this compassion, tempered, as it so often is, with humour, that makes the suffering Beckett felt for fellow man bearable for the reader. In making this observation we should spare a thought for the pain Beckett had to endure to portray so vividly the state of the world and man’s, at times, heroic ability to contend.

Beckett’s confinement to Ireland occurred during a period of his life when influences are formative and lasting; a period when the culture, mannerisms and eccentricities of one’s society are not only fundamental to the development of personality, but may provide also the raw material of creativity should a sensitive talent be among its youth. To feel compassion, as Beckett did so forcefully, for fellow man is one thing, to express it another. At least two moments on Beckett’s path to realization can be highlighted here, each of which illuminate in differing ways the magnitude of the task he was to impose upon himself. The first in terms of chronology (though not publication) is recounted inKrapp’s Last Tapewhere the location is readily identifiable in the early draft of the play as the large granite pier at Dún Laoghaire:

Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indigence until that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision at last. This I fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening, against the day when my work will be done and perhaps no place left in my memory, warm or cold, for the miracle that … (hesitates) … for the fire that set it alight. What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely – (Krapp curses, switches off, winds tape forward, switches on again) – great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most – (Krapp curses louder, switches off, winds tape forward, switches on again) – unshatterable association until my dissolution of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire …

Dún Laoghaire lighthouse and anemometer (D. Davison).

The second moment of realization arose out of his wartime experiences in France, among which the period spent in Saint-Lô with the Irish Red Cross Hospital was to leave lasting impressions. Beckett served as storekeeper and translator to the complex of huts established by the Irish Red Cross in this Normandy town, which had been annihilated by an Allied bomb blitz in June 1944. Here Beckett, and his Irish medical compatriots, saw and shared the suffering of a devastated community. Beckett often discussed Saint-Lô with me, curious as to the fate of those doctors and nurses with whom he had served, and many of whom became colleagues of mine in later years.

From these discussions I came to realize how deeply he had been affected by his experiences there. I never sought, and none can ever know (perhaps not even Sam himself) the abstract influences of Saint-Lô in his writing. There are, however, two works that arise directly from Saint-Lô – a poem simply entitled ‘Saint-Lô’ and a prose piece, which was written for Radió Éireann; whether or not it was ever broadcast is not known. The pervading sense of compassion, not only for the impoverished people of Saint-Lô, but also for his compatriots, for their naiveté, their difficulty in grappling with the immense tragedy of war, is evident from this emotive report.

That moment on the pier may have fired Beckett’s literary vision, but the fulfilment of its arduous demands had to be defined, clarified, and then gathered into a truevade mecum,to drive him unerringly and relentlessly towards the achievement of what then seemed the unattainable. This, Beckett did in the remarkable ‘Tailpiece’ toWatt:

who may tell the tale

of the old man?

weigh absence in a scale?

mete want with a span?

the sum assess

of the world’s woes?

nothingness

in words enclose?

That Beckett should have postulated so demanding an avocatory vision was astounding; that he had the courage and discipline to fulfil it in every detail is testimony to the magnificence of his achievement. Once the course was charted, the process of drawing on the past began, and what treasures Beckett’s prodigious memory was to provide for his writing! Back, back to childhood (and at times beyond), to the mosaic of compassion woven from the developmental threads of the people who occupied a growing child’s world, tiny when viewed from afar, a metropolis when seen from within.

The coincidence of Beckett’s arrival on Good Friday, 13 April 1906 with the remembrance of an auspicious departure could, if taken at face value, be dismissed lightly, or even misinterpreted as an example of Beckettian humour, but no, its profundity is deliberate and those who ignore, or demean this, fail to appreciate the morality that is central to all Beckett’s work. I have written somewhere that Beckett’s writing is for me more beautiful, more edifying, than the Bible. This is not to demean one of the greatest works we own, but rather to make the point that time changes our perception of great works and with this our ability to be moved and influenced by them. In likening Beckett’s work to the Bible, I do so only to state its profound morality and not to impart an unwelcome religiosity on Beckett – Sam was a non-believer, who saw all too clearly the pain inflicted by the intolerance of religion on mankind – his was a message of tolerance.

You were born on an Easter Friday after long labour. Yes I remember.

The sun had not long sunk behind the larches. Yes I remember.

Or if only, You first saw the light and cried at the close of the day when

in darkness Christ at the ninth hour cried and died.

Beckett’s childhood was a happy one and he cherished its memories, which recur in his work, often with greater force and poignancy in his later writing. Foxrock was then a rural, untroubled hamlet. ‘In such surroundings,’ he wrote, ‘slipped away my last moments of peace and happiness.’ The smallest incidents, the most insignificant characters were given heroic proportions:

The crocuses and the larch turning green every year a week before the others and the pastures red with uneaten sheep’s placentas and the long summer days and the new-mown hay and the wood-pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in the afternoon and the corncrake in the evening and the wasps in the jam and the smell of the gorse and the look of the gorse and the apples falling and the children walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others and the chestnuts falling and the howling winds and the sea breaking over the pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman whistling The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy and the standard oil-lamp and of course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your heart the slush and every fourth year the February debacle and the endless April showers and the crocuses and then the whole bloody business starting all over again.

Such, in fact, was the pastoral tranquillity of Foxrock, nestling at the foothills of the Dublin Mountains, that on certain spring evenings it became ‘a matter of some difficulty to keep God out of one’s meditations’. But this peaceful harmony between land, sky, and youth was shattered betimes by the suffering that lurked at every corner if one chose to see it. One growing boy saw clearly and was moved by the tragic figures around him; he observed them carefully in their decrepitude and later restored their dignity:

In the ditch on the far side of the road a strange equipage was installed: an old high-wheeled cart, hung with rags. Belacqua looked around for something in the nature of a team, the crazy yoke could scarcely have fallen from the sky, but nothing in the least resembling a draught-beast was to be seen, not even a cow. Squatting under the cart a complete down-and-out was very busy with something or other. The sun beamed down on this as though it were a new-born lamb. Belacqua took in the whole outfit at a glance and felt, the wretched bourgeois, a paroxysm of shame for his capon belly.

The down-and-out in many guises is recognized as central to the Beckettian theme. Tramps and dishevelled figures illustrate theatre programmes, books by, and books about Beckett; yet such images are but a shallow representation, a one-dimensional view, of the whole. Deprived of the words that express Beckett’s compassion, such pictures cannot impart the sense of dignity with which Beckett has endowed his tragic creations. A picture, however, tender and evocative, cannot convey the poignancy of Beckett’s childhood beggar woman:

An old beggar woman is fumbling at a big garden gate. Half blind. You know the place well. Stone deaf and not in her right mind the woman of the house is a crony of your mother. She was sure she could fly once in the air. So one day she launched herself from a first floor window. On the way home from kindergarten on your tiny cycle you see the poor old beggar woman trying to get in. You dismount and open the gate for her. She blesses you. What were her words? God reward you little master. Some such words. God save you little master.

When Beckett left the childhood environs of Foxrock to become a student, and later a lecturer, at Trinity College, the characters surrounding him changed but the compassionate eyes continued to observe the tragic vignettes of city life that would later influence much of his writing. During this period Beckett lived in a garret on the upper floor of No. 6 Clare Street, where the family business, Beckett & Medcalf, was situated. From here he was within easy reach of humanity, an abundance of which was to be had in Dublin’s many public houses. He chose his observational post carefully:

Here he was known, in the sense that his grotesque exterior had long ceased to alienate the curates and make them giggle, and to the extent that he was served with his drink without having to call for it. This did not always seem a privilege. He was tolerated, what was more, and let alone by the rough but kindly habitués of the house, recruited for the most part from among dockers, railwaymen and vague joxers on the dole. Here also art and love, scrabbling in dispute or staggering home, were barred, or, perhaps better, unknown. The aesthetes and the impotent were far away.

In such pleasant surroundings, the proximity of suffering humanity coping, often majestically, with the cruelty of life, became tolerable and provided, moreover, an almost theatrical illusion temporarily blunting the pain of realization:

Sitting in this crapulent den, drinking his drink, he gradually ceased to see its furnishings with pleasure, the bottles, representing centuries of loving research, the stools, the counter, the powerful screws, the shining phalanx of the pulls of the beer-engines, all cunningly devised and elaborated to further the relations between purveyor and consumer in this domain. The bottles drawn and emptied in a twinkling, the casks responding to the slightest pressure on their joysticks, the weary proletarians at rest on arse and elbow, the cash-register that never complains, the graceful curates flying from customer to customer, all this made up a spectacle in which Belacqua was used to take delight and chose to see a pleasant instance of machinery decently subservient to appetite. A great major symphony of supply and demand, effect and cause, fulcrate on the middle C of the counter and waxing, as it proceeded, in the charming harmonies of blasphemy and broken glass and all the aliquots of fatigue and ebriety. So that he would say that the only place where he could come to anchor and be happy was a low public-house and that all the wearisome tactic of gress and dud Beethoven would be done away with if only he could spend his life in such a place.

But such reveries were short, necessarily so in the haunts frequented by Beckett,the student. Both inside and out, the pain of poverty abounded; the beggar woman again, this time selling the impossible, seduces Belacqua with the rhythm of her language:

‘Seats in heaven’ she said in a white voice ‘tuppence apiece, four fer a tanner.’

‘No’ said Belacqua. It was the first syllable to come to his lips. It had not been his intention to deny her.

‘The best of seats’ she said ‘again I’m sold out. Tuppence apiece the best of seats, four fer a tanner’ …

‘Have you got them on you?’ he mumbled.

‘Heaven goes round’ she said, whirling her arm, ‘and round and round and round and round.’

‘Yes’ said Belacqua ‘round and round.’

‘Rowan’ she said, dropping the d’s and getting more of a spin into the slogan, ‘rowan an’ rowan an’ rowan.’

On 31 March 1926, a house named La Mancha,in County Dublin, was found in flames, and six bodies were removed from the blaze: two brothers, two sisters and their two servants. Only the gardener, Henry McCabe, who raised the alarm, survived. A number of inconsistencies in McCabe’s account of the event led to his arrest, trial, and conviction for arson and the murder of six people. In passing the death sentence, the judge urged McCabe to spend his remaining days preparing to meet his Maker. McCabe’s fate burned on in Beckett’s mind, eventually finding expression – a plea for mercy if not acquittal – inMore Pricks than Kicks:

Why not piety and pity both, even down below? Why not mercy and Godliness together? A little mercy in the stress of sacrifice, a little mercy to rejoice against judgement. He thought of Jonah and the gourd and the pity of a jealous God on Nineveh. And poor McCabe, he would get it in the neck at dawn. What was he doing now, how was he feeling? He would relish one more meal, one more night.

On long, straight Pearse Street, which permitted ‘a simple cantilena’ of the mind, many adventures ordained by the Bovril sign dancing ‘through its sevenphases’ were enacted, few more poignant than that of two beggar girls on an eveningof human vicissitude in Dublin:

It was a most pleasant street, despite its name, to be abroad in, full as it always was with shabby substance and honest-to-God coming and going. All day the roadway was a tumult of buses, red and blue and silver. By one of these a little girl was run down, just as Belacqua drew near to the railway viaduct. She had been to the Hibernian Dairies for milk and bread and then she had plunged out into the roadway, she was in such a childish fever to get back in record time with her treasure to the tenement in Mark Street where she lived. The good milk was all over the road and the loaf, which had sustained no injury, was sitting up against the kerb, for all the world as though a pair of hands had taken it up and set it down there. The queue standing for the Palace Cinema was torn between conflicting desires: to keep their places and to see the excitement. They craned their necks and called out to know the worst, but they stood firm. Only one girl, debauched in appearance and swathed in a black blanket, fell out near the sting of the queue and secured the loaf. With the loaf under her blanket she sidled unchallenged down Mark Street and turned into Mark Lane. When she got back to the queue her place had been taken of course. But her sally had not cost her more than a couple of yards.

The deranged in society, whether they be poor, deformed, or mentally ill, are special to Beckett. As with the poor, he treats the insane with humour, sympathy and admiration, never with disrespect. In madness, the insane sometimes achieve the perfect escape from a chaotic society; no mean feat in Beckett’s view. Moreover, absorbed in their worlds, the mentally disturbed are protected from the contamination of society and retain an integrity not to be found in the sane. Asylums are sanctuaries, where the dualities that compose the Beckettian personality are permitted expression and dialogue free of the interference that would necessarily stifle their existence in so-called normal society. Deranged man, for such are those in mental institutions said to be, is given a dignity generally denied him even by the most sympathetic of observers simply because the condition is notfelt.Though the House of Saint John of God and Portrane Lunatic Asylum feature in Beckett’s early writing, and his compassion for the condition of the inmates is expressed in ‘Fingal’ andMalone Dies,it is in the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, stinking of ‘paraldehyde and truant sphincters’, that Beckett creates his ‘bower of bliss’:

The pads surpassed by far all he had ever been able to imagine in the way of indoor bowers of bliss. The three dimensions, slightly concave, were so exquisitely proportioned that the absence of the fourth was scarcely felt. The tender luminous oyster-grey of the pneumatic upholstery, cushioning every square inch of ceiling, walls, floor and door, lent colour to the truth, that one was a prisoner of air. The temperature was such that only total nudity could do it justice. No system of ventilation appeared to dispel the illusion of respirable vacuum. The compartment was windowless, like a monad, except for the shuttered judas in the door, at which a sane eye appeared, or was employed to appear, at frequent and regular intervals throughout the twenty-four hours. Within the narrow limits of domestic architecture he had never been able to imagine a more creditable representation of what he kept on calling, indefatigably, the little world.

In the pursuit of the quality of compassion, so closely allied to love, one is drawn to Beckett’s relationship with his parents. Take the father first, ostensibly shining through history (in the portrayals of those who knew him not) as a simple man, but in his son’s writing he rises to a higher plane, if we choose to see it, a plane on which he provides the support so craved for and so much needed by his son in childhood and adolescence:

Yes, this evening it has to be as in the story my father used to read to me, evening after evening, when I was small, and he had all his health, to calm me, evening after evening, year after year it seems to me this evening, which I don’t remember much about, except that it was the adventures of one Joe Breem, or Breen, the son of a lighthouse-keeper, a strong muscular lad of fifteen, those were the words, who swam for miles in the night, a knife between his teeth, after a shark, I forget why, out of sheer heroism. He might have simply told me the story, he knew it by heart, so did I, but that wouldn’t have calmed me, he had to read it to me, evening after evening, or pretend to read it to me, turning the pages and explaining the pictures that were of me already, evening after evening the same pictures till I dozed off on his shoulder. If he had skipped a single word I would have hit him, with my little fist, in his big belly bursting out of the old cardigan and unbuttoned trousers that rested him from his office canonicals.

However Beckett’s relationship with his mother may be misinterpreted by those who fail to appreciate the mores of the Irish family during the first fifty years of the last century, the fact is that Beckett bore deep love for his mother albeit, perhaps, with less intensity, than for his father. Ireland is a land where the spoken word has many meanings and affection often masquerades under the guise of derision. So, in this regard, a plea for ‘no symbols where none intended’. May Beckett’s death, in a nursing home overlooking the Grand Canal in Dublin, caused her son intense distress, expressed in one of Beckett’s most powerful pieces of writing, one which captures not only the profound sense of loss, and relief that his mother’s suffering is over, but also the inevitability of death and the timelessness of age, the inexorable cycle of death and birth and life, the whole business of existence:

– bench by the weir from where I could see her window. There I sat, in the biting wind, wishing she were gone. (Pause.) Hardly a soul, just a few regulars, nursemaids, infants, old men, dogs …

– the blind went down, one of those dirty brown roller affairs, throwing a ball for a little white dog as chance would have it. I happened to look up and there it was. All over and done with, at last. I sat on for a few moments with the ball in my hand and the dog yelping and pawing at me. (Pause.) Moments. Her moments, my moments. (Pause.) The dog’s moments.

My discipline demands compassion and feeling, or such at least would be the public’s perception of the ‘medicine man’, as Lenny Bernstein affectionately liked to call us doctors. Paradoxically, the practice of medicine makes the exclusion of sentiment a prerequisite for the survival of self, and the process, begun in early studentship, soon becomes so integral a part of the scientific persona that the dissipated gems of idealism, among which, of course, may be found compassion, become unrecognizable. The years of training, so carefully constructed by our institutions, initially blunt and finally pervert the purity of vocation and the sensibility of youth, essences to be found in most medical students but so few doctors. It is chastening, but not necessarily a balm to existence, to have this protective wall around one annihilated. I can do no better, in closing with a great sense of sadness that the Sam I once knew is no more, than quote what I wrote with a much lighter heart for afestschriftfor his eightieth birthday in 1986:

The occasion is too great, my ability to express too feeble, other than to gasp in gratitude, to acknowledge the greatness of his sum, to admit that I for one will never be as before. Whether for worse or better I know not. But changed as no other ever could. Possessing now an understanding of and feeling for fellow-man as no other could inculcate in a long apprenticeship designed to do just that. The problem now is feeling too much. Not being able to go on but having to do so, as only Sam knows how. Man unadorned: ugly, decrepit, depraved, laughing, despairing, majestic in his nothingness, not always without hope. A life spent with humanity in the doldrums but only seen from afar. Now terrifyingly close. Can’t endure the pain once not felt, necessarily so. What now? Still gratitude for the profundity of realization. Might not have come from any other. Might never have come. What then?

The Hubband Bridge on the Grand Canal (N. Johnson).

The Beckett Country, 1986

THE SEEDS FORThe Beckett Country; Samuel Beckett’s Irelandwere sown, I suspect, when I readMurphy,my first taste of the Beckettœuvre.After this, I was compelled to read everything Beckett had published. I found myself drawn back irresistibly time and again to one work after another, relishing new sensations at each visit, seeing in the prose or poetry (distinction between the two is not always possible in Beckett’s writing), at one time pathos and humour, at another beauty and outrage. Then the works began to blur as the one blended into the other, so that I could no longer, and still cannot (many readings later), always determine the origins of a particular piece of prose. This no longer upsets me, for I now view Beckett’s writing as a total composition, each work being a different treatment of sensation, event or emotion, originating often from a single experience.

With this realization, came another. Much of the apparently surrealistic in Beckett’s writing is linked, sometimes forcefully, often only tenuously, with the reality of existence, and much of this actuality emanates from Beckett’s memories of Dublin, a world he renders almost unrecognizable as he removes reality from his landscape and its people (while also annihilating time) in his creation of the ‘unreality of the real’. Compelling though this reality is in Beckett’s writing, an awareness of that reality serves only one function, albeit an important one, in that it marks a point of commencement for Beckett’s creative art. An obsessional diligence in identifying realities could blight the creative beauty of Beckett’s imagination – the ‘soul-landscape’.

Samuel Beckett is an Irishman. This simple statement should be taken for what it is, a mere declaration of fact. It should not be seized upon by the patriotic purveyors of national character and genius for public display. Beckett’s nationality, taken at face value, is nothing more than an accident, as a consequence of which he was brought up in a small island with a people peculiar to that region. But there is more to it than that. Beckett’s confinement to Ireland occurred during a period of his life when influences are formative and lasting; a period when the culture, mannerisms and eccentricities of a particular society are not only fundamental to the development of personality, but may provide also the raw material of creativity should a sensitive talent be among its youth.

It is these influences that are the concern ofThe Beckett Country.I approached my task aware, however, that artistic issues relative to place and person must be interpreted with great care and, never more so, than with Beckett.

Beckett has a justified abhorrence of anyone attributing to minutiae a personal significance that does not, or did not exist, and this has greatly influenced the structure of my book, which concerns itself more with topography than with personality, more with the ambience of a life-style than with those who participated in that life.The Beckett Countryis not biographical; if it veers towards the genre of biography it is then closer to autobiography, in that it allows the story of Beckett’s life to unfold in the only way with which he would be in agreement, that is through his art. Yet, to treat Beckett’s writing as a whole as autobiographical would be to reduce its artistic value, and to detract from its beauty.

Proust (a figure whose technique bears a much closer resemblance to Beckett’s than that of Joyce) sees art ‘put together out of several intercalated episodes in the life of the author’, and this is certainly as true for Beckett as it was for Proust. The inspirational influences of time past on the art of Samuel Beckett constitute the dominant theme ofThe Beckett Country.The ‘posse of larches’ is every bit as potent as the ‘madeleine’ was to Proust, the granite rocks of Dún Laoghaire pier as revelatory to Beckett’s art as the granite kerbstone on the Guermantespavement was in awakening in Proust the vision that inspired his masterpiece.

I believe that knowledge of the geography and custom of a writer’s habitat may enhance appreciation of his art. Indeed Sighle Kennedy goes so far as to suggest that ‘entry to certain spirals of his [Beckett’s] art will continue to require the possession (in sympathy at least) of a green Eire passport’. I take support for this view also from Martin Esslin, who sees in Beckett’s poetry a compression almost to the point of being in code, and this analogy could be extended to much of the later prose:

A single line may carry multiple meanings, public and private allusions, description and symbol, topographic reference, snatches of overheard conversation, fragments in other languages, Provencal or German, the poet’s own asides … learned literary allusions together with brand names of cigarettes or shop signs in Dublin. Four lines may thus require four pages of elucidation, provided, that is, that the full information were at hand …

PerhapsThe Beckett Countrywill provide some of that necessary information.

Twenty years ago the late Con Leventhal, Beckett’s close friend and confidant, identified in Beckett scholarship the neglect of the visual, that aspect of art which Beckett himself prizes so highly: ‘In parenthesis and a new paragraph may I ask when are we going to have an illustrator of B’s work? Both Blake and Dali have interpreted Dante; it would require a mixture of both their qualities, a power of illumination plus magic.’ Con had a painter in mind and one of considerable genius at that; I decided instead to endow the Beckett country with a visual perspective through the art of photography. The portrayal of that land could only be achieved by an artist willing to familiarize himself with the terrain, its people and its fickle sky and light. I was fortunate in obtaining the support of David Davison, who developed an empathy with the mood of the land and the Beckettian character. Together, we walked this land, often returning many times to a particular place to catch the moment when light, sky and object were in harmony with the Beckett spirit, a harmony that was to be further enriched by the delicate manipulation of processing techniques, to create through the art of photography a series of compositions that would be a tribute to the writer who had inspired them.

In spite of a massive secondary literature, it is early days in Beckett scholarship. As is customary, the Irish academic beacon (with a few honourable exceptions), has been directed elsewhere, with the result that the specifically Irish references in Beckett’s writing have, for the most part, passed unnoticed. But in the face of such few Irishmen as are aware of Beckett’s Irishness, there are those who, whilst in no position to deny him the facts of his birth, nevertheless do not consider him to be truly Irish. The reasons traditionally cited are his Anglo-Irish origins and education, his prolonged absence from the homeland (though allowances seem to have been made for Joyce in this regard), his adoption of a foreign tongue, and the fact that his writings are at variance with the popular pieties of Irish literature.

Beckett’s adoption of France as a homeland does not lessen the relevance of Ireland to his writing. He left Ireland for good reasons, having found himself at odds with the canons of propriety. Moreover, the inebriating ambience of Dublin had lain to rest many a budding flower, in ‘lakes of boiling small-beer’. Nor should his physical departure from Ireland be equated with a spiritual exodus. He brought with him to France the tools of his trade, the back-drop against which his dramas would be acted out, his models and their dialogue to be spliced on occasion to another language, their aspirations and despairs. He did not as one critic has put it, ‘cast off race and genius’, and thereby become ‘a Frog’. No, as for the protagonist ofThe Calmative,so too for Beckett, ‘there was never any city but the one … I only know the city of my childhood, I must have seen the other, but unbelieving’.