Love too, often in my thoughts, when a boy, but not a great deal compared to other boys, it kept me awake I found.
(‘From An Abandoned Work’)1Three years or so before Beckett left a ‘classico-romantic’ country churchyard scene in the gathering darkness to a groundsman initially ‘at a loss’ but in due course supposedly ‘comfortable’ – first in ‘Draff’, and then again in the subsequently jettisoned story ‘Echo’s Bones’ – he drew a more abstract and conventional distinction in his book-length
Proust essay (published 1931) between ‘the classical artist’ as best exemplified by his friend James Joyce, and what he saw as a ‘romantic strain’ in
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. In the case of the latter Beckett identified four ‘alternatives’ intended to make what might otherwise be ‘difficult to follow’ a little less of a challenge: a) ‘substitution of affectivity for intelligence’; b) ‘opposition of the particular affective evidential state to all the subtleties of rational cross-reference’; c) ‘rejection of the Concept in favour of the Idea’; and d) ‘scepticism before causality’.
2 In noting these characteristics Beckett was at once both seeking out aspects typifying any ‘romantic strain’ wherever it might manifest itself, and also striving to adopt and adapt them to purposes wholly specific to himself. He, for one – he could tell himself with apparent impunity – was not given to ecstatic solitary reveries; he had convinced himself that ‘For the intelligent Amiel there is only one landscape’,
3 and later, in distancing himself from the ‘Romantic’ aspects of Irish scenery for the benefit of his art critic friend Georges Duthuit, he could portray himself as nothing more than ‘a dry old stick of a traveller’ (‘
promeneur bien sec’)
4, a traveller obviously not travelling well. No doubt the ‘
promeneur’ whom Beckett would have most wanted to be older and drier than was Rousseau, ‘without the madness and the distortion’.
5 But what would it mean to be ‘without’ them?
