Images of Beckett - Index of

story ‘Draff’ she became Mrs Shuah – he borrowed and then caricatured a few
features from a real-life person, that of his cousin, Peggy Sinclair, with whom
he had had a love affair: her body ‘mammose, slobbery-blubbery,
bubbubbub, the real button-bursting Weib, ripe’ was indeed in reality a little
out of kilter with ‘the sweetest little pale Pisanello of a bird-face ever’, 58
although nothing like as grotesquely as this account might suggest. But, as
John Pilling has demonstrated, Beckett also borrowed for his description of
the Smeraldina entire quotations from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (‘she
was pale, pale as Plutus’; ‘blithe and buxom and young and lusty’; ‘the
double-jug dugs’, etc.), which he juxtaposed with quotations from Dante
about Sordello (‘Posta sola soletta’ and ‘tutta a se romita’). 59 He also drew on
his knowledge of painting: the Smeraldina/Mrs Shuah has ‘Botticelli thighs’
as well as the ‘Pisanello of a bird-face’ and, he wrote, varying his allusion only
slightly in the two works, ‘She was like Lucrezia del Fede, pale and belle,
a pale belle Braut.’ 60 This reference to the portrait of Lucrezia del Fede by
Andrea del Sarto in the Prado in Madrid or another in the national gallery in
Berlin is of particular interest, because it bears an uncanny resemblance to
photographs of Peggy Sinclair that have been preserved.
Later in his career, Beckett became much less allusively dense, weaving
both fewer literary quotations and fewer allusions to art into his plays and
prose texts, although such echoes were not entirely lacking in his
post-Second World War writing. The plays, as well as the novels, were,
however, still heavily influenced by the visual arts. As we saw with
autobiographical material, both literary reminiscences and artistic imagery
were more fully absorbed, sinking deep beneath the surface, or were more
successfully integrated into the creative process itself. One feels,
nonetheless, that, if it were possible to take X-ray pictures of Beckett’s stage
images, they would reveal some of the ghost-like figures of the Old Masters
that have inspired visual elements in his plays.
The impact of Beckett’s great interest in art is even discernible in his directing
of his own plays. Billie Whitelaw commented aptly that, when he directed her
in Footfalls, ‘he was not only using me to play the notes, but I almost felt that
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