Images of Beckett - Index of

Rodin, Uccello, Andrea del Sarto and Velazquez); in Murphy (Avercamp,
Bellini, Parmigianino, Rembrandt and Tintoretto); in Watt (Bosch, Jan de
Heem); and in his correspondence with MacGreevy (the Master from Delft,
Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Elsheimer, Fabritius, Hercules Seghers, the School of
Patinir, Ruisdael, Cézanne, etc.). In ‘Love and Lethe’, one of the stories of the
1934 collection, More Pricks than Kicks, for instance, the figure of the
Magdalene is proposed as a visual approximation to the 33- or 34-year-old
Ruby Tough: ‘Those who are in the least curious to know what she looked
like at the time in which we have chosen to cull her we venture to refer to the
Magdalene in the Perugino Pietà in the National Gallery of Dublin, always
bearing in mind that the hair of our heroine is black and not ginger.’ 37 In
1931, only a few weeks before he left Dublin to resign his lectureship from
Germany, Beckett had raced breathlessly round to the National Gallery of
Ireland as soon as he heard that Perugino’s newly purchased Pietà was on
display. And, in a letter to MacGreevy, written only after he had seen the
picture several times, he wrote: ‘The Christ and the women are lovely. A
clean-shaven potent Xist [Christ] and a passion of tears for the waste. The
most mystical constituent is the ointment pot that was probably added by
Raffaela ...alovely cheery Xist full of sperm, and the woman touching his
thighs and mourning his secrets.’ 38
Paintings were not uncommonly invoked in his early prose to evoke the
mood expressed by a face, by the eyes in particular, to which, as in his own
life, Beckett was hyper-sensitive. The face of the woman in the Dublin pub
selling seats in heaven in his story ‘Ding-Dong’ (‘tuppence a piece . . . four fer
a tanner’) is compared, for example, with the face in the National Gallery by
the Master of Tired Eyes that, like other tormented faces Belacqua had seen,
‘seemed to have come a long way and subtend an infinitely narrow angle of
affliction, as eyes focus on a star’. 39
Most striking of all, perhaps, by way of a parallel is the evocation of the
changes that take place in the Alba’s eyes in Beckett’s first novel, Dream of Fair
to Middling Women, written in 1932 but published only posthumously: ‘Her
great eyes went black as sloes, they went as big and black as El Greco painted,
with a couple of good wet slaps from his laden brush, in the Burial of the
62 IMAGES OF BECKETT