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Thursday, 07 January 2010
In the November/December 2009 Boston Review, Roger Boylan writes about Samuel Beckett on the occasion of the
twentieth anniversary of Beckett's death. He also reminisces about his
unfulfilled desire to meet the writer in Beckett's old age, and I must say
his visit to Beckett's Montparnasse grave echoes my own response when I
visited the same grave a few years ago:
I subsequently learned from those who knew him that he was
as content in that nursing home as one of his temperament could be in such
a place: He had plentiful whiskey (Jamesons, Tullamore Dew) and smokes
(Havanitos Planteros cigarillos), a TV, select books (mostly collections
of English verse, plus Dante), a stereo on which he could listen to his
beloved Schubert, and a small ground-floor room facing onto a
courtyard. He reminisced about the youthful days of his walks in the
Dublin hills, according to visitors such as the poets John Montague and
Derek Mahon. Like all old people, Beckett went back, in his mind. Like all
old people — like his own creations Krapp, Winnie, Hamm, etc.
— he was, in the end, alone. And like all old people, he welcomed
the rare visitor. It would have been my opportunity. But I was too young
to understand old age except as something to be pitied. So what would I
have said?
Many years later, I did finally visit him, where his
remains and Suzanne's lie in the Montparnasse cemetery, under a slab of
granite upon which, when I was there, admirers had deposited an unused
Metro ticket; a used Dublin bus ticket, one-way to Foxrock; and a
packet of Havanitos. I left nothing. Except, perhaps, a stain upon the
silence.
Read Boylan's essay here.
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