Images of Beckett - Index of

wooden leg.’ 30 ‘Up to the cataracts in work’, 31
he wrote or, since he had to wear dental plates
following an operation for a cyst in his mouth,
‘fed up to the plates with theatre’. 32 Here are a few
of my personal favourites. It has been, he wrote,
‘the worst Spring in the memory of daffodils’, 33
a variant on ‘no gardener has died within the
memory of roses’ from Diderot’s Le Rêve de
d’Alembert, over which he had chuckled as a young
man, recycling the quotation several times in his
early fiction. 34 When he found himself unable to
write, he had, he wrote to a friend, ‘nothing in [his]
head but false teeth’; 35 and, finally, speaking as an
old man about his own health, he was ‘on an even
keel in the crooked last straight, there’s metaphors
for you’. 36 He always had the capacity to transform
the cliché wittily, or to borrow another writer’s bons
mots and give them an unusual, idiosyncratic twist.
Even in old age, humour was an automatic
reflex response to adversity. This very Irish trait
was a constant lifeline for Beckett. It did not mean
that he took harsh blows lightly. Humour is not
always escapist. It can leave you still stranded,
floundering in the eye of the storm, but it can
also help to resist its buffeting by a kind of
battening-down of the hatches. The things that
Beckett laughed at were often the very issues that
were gnawing away most painfully inside him:
above all, ill health, physical degeneration and the
failure to write. For years he joked openly about his
‘bloody old bladder’ and the state of his mouth, his
Samuel Beckett, 1973
A PORTRAIT OF BECKETT 21