Images of Beckett - Index of

But his ready sympathy and evident
vulnerability laid him wide open to exploitation.
He was notorious for being a soft touch. As a
result, his friends tried to protect him from his
own generosity. He often seemed like an innocent,
unaware that he was being exploited or even, very
occasionally, well and truly conned. There is one
sense in which he was indeed an innocent. He
always inclined to believe the best of someone,
unless and until events proved the contrary. And
because of his own loyalty and integrity, few people
let him down. When one or two did, he was upset
and mostly (though not always) forgave them for
their (to use Winnie’s phrase from Happy Days)
‘human weakness...natural weakness’. 40
Sometimes he knew perfectly well that he was
being manipulated or even duped. His attitude was
complicated by the fact that he rather liked rogues.
One of the reasons for this was that he found their
company a lot more fun than that of dour,
respectable citizens, who quickly bored him.
He had, after all, run away from respectable,
middle-class, Protestant Foxrock, first to the less
genteel, but more relaxed, convivial atmosphere
of the Dublin bars, then to Paris, where the cult
of laissez-aller prevailed, in artistic milieux at least,
where your sexual preferences and conduct were
a matter of more or less total indifference, and
where no one worried if you drank too heavily. So
a number of likeable rogues figured with the needy
and the indigent among his acquaintances. And he
Barry McGovern in Happy Days, 1999
A PORTRAIT OF BECKETT 29