Images of Beckett - Index of

Beckett said to Harvey, is to express ‘being’. But ‘being’, he argued, is
formless, chaotic, enigmatic and mysterious, ‘a collection of meaningless
movements’; man himself is inadequate, suffering, and disordered. Even
though he is part of that meaninglessness, the artist is constrained to speak
of it and in a language that will itself therefore be necessarily inadequate. Art,
he went on, had commonly been thought of as a sign of strength and had
never exploited that dark, chaotic area that constitutes ‘being’. Seeking to
explore what he called ‘the authentic weakness of being’, he commented to
Harvey that ‘whatever is said is so far from the experience’ and ‘if you really
get down to the disaster, the slightest eloquence becomes unbearable’. To
express ‘being’ more truthfully, he aimed at a breakdown of form, aspiring to
what he termed a ‘syntax of weakness’. 20 Some of the consequences of these
views will be explored in the next essay.
Talks with Beckett did not always include such major insights into his
attitudes towards life and art. But they were almost invariably of more than
passing interest. During one dinner, for example, I remember that we had
a conversation about schizophrenia, in which he talked of the nature and
seriousness of Joyce’s daughter Lucia’s illness and of his doubts as to how
definable such a condition really was. He confessed that he had not read
R. D. Laing’s book, The Divided Self, in which I suggested similar radical
doubts were cogently expressed. The conversation then moved on naturally
to the time when he himself had written about mentally ill patients in his
1938 novel, Murphy. It was then that he provided me with the interesting
aperçu that he had actually seen his fictional character, Mr Endon (against
whom Murphy plays a highly unusual game of chess), at the Bethlem Royal
Hospital while visiting his psychiatrist friend, Geoffrey Thompson, who
worked as a doctor there in 1934–5.
Over the years, I remember a number of discussions – informal ‘chats’
would be a more appropriate term – on philosophical questions with Beckett.
Meeting for dinner once at the Hyde Park Hotel, where he often stayed when
directing his plays in London, for example, Beckett asked me what I was
(Right) Robert O’Mahoney and Johnny Murphy in Ohio Impromptu, 1999
16 IMAGES OF BECKETT