Images of Beckett - Index of

feeling over the past few weeks, he asked if I knew
the poem by Heine in which the poet (whom
Beckett loved) wrote of the ‘grinding out of life’,
the ‘old round’. 17 This led seamlessly into a
revealing insight as to how he felt about old age
in relation to his own writing. ‘Between the
weaknesses of childhood and the senility of age’,
he said, ‘there lies all the nonsense of striving and
searching for knowledge – this parabola. I always
hoped though from an early age that old age
offered a chance of seeing the essentials away from
all the agitation of being.’ 18 He went on to speak of
the wonderful writings that Goethe and W. B. Yeats
had produced in the final years of their lives and of
how he had himself always associated old age with
light and with the spirit. He felt deeply the need for
spirit. ‘It has been the malaise of our time’, he said
to Patrick Bowles. ‘People are not in touch with
their spirit. What counts is the spirit.’ 19 When he
was being as open and as expansive as this, you
wondered how the myth of a difficult, silent,
uncommunicative Beckett could possibly have
evolved.
More fascinating and more fundamental still
were some of the late-night conversations that
were reported by the Dartmouth College professor,
Lawrence Harvey, and the writer-translator, Patrick
Bowles. He trusted both these friends and
confided to them some of his most striking
thoughts about the relations that he perceived
between life and art. The great task for the artist,
Pierre Chabert in Fin de partie, 1999
A PORTRAIT OF BECKETT 15