MERTON ON THE MOVE
Baker, James T.
SAMUEL BECKETT, BIBLE READER VIVIAN MERCIER Despite loss of faith, he has exploited his Protest t heritage Samuel Beckett, according to his own account, "soon lost faith." He told Harold...
...It is not generally known, however, that Beckett's Anglican training was almost as thorough...
...One thing at least is certain: there is no stage of that development which does not possess a religious dimension...
...Confrontation Obviously quotations like these do not take the Bible or its message very seriously: Job's cry of utter despair has nothing in common with the temporary inconvenience being undergone by Neary...
...In the second act, he is blind and long-suffering, almost Christlike...
...Founded by none other than the King James I of England who gave his "special command" for the famous Bible translation, Portora has usually had a Church of Ireland clergyman as Headmaster...
...Looking up the individual words in any standard dictionary will only compound confusion, yet the expression is crystal-clear to an Irish Episcopalian...
...Beckett has remarked that if he knew who or what Godot is, he would have said so in the play, but it certainly can be read as a play about waiting for God, or the Revolution, or the Millennium: although Godot seems not to come, who is to say that he won't turn up tomorrow...
...The horse leech's daughter is a closed system...
...The religious education he received at his mother's knee is vividly dramatized by the famous photograph of him kneeling to pray there at an early age...
...Its biographical notes told us that Henry Francis Lyte, author of "Abide with me" and other fine hymns, was educated at Portora and Trinity...
...One could quote, for example, the notorious line from Endgame...
...How It Is, itself a text of barely 150 pages, has been followed only by very much shorter prose works: all of them are described by their author as fragmentary, as Residua or Fi~les...
...I have already mentioned the photograph of Beckett praying at his mother's knee...
...Waiting for Godot suggests that when the Savior comes he is never Commonweal: 267 recognized, but this is perhaps less depressing than the idea that he does not care enough for us to come at all...
...Throughout Beckett's and my time there, the post was held by the Rev.Edward Gilbert Seale, who---unlike some of his eighteenthcentury predecessors--was devout, conscientious, and a demanding teacher of Latin and Greek...
...One is probably safe in assuming that Beckett took at least one public examination in religious knowledge, because of a cryptic reference in More Pricks Than Kicks (1934...
...Although "horseleech" could mean "veterinarian" when the King James was written, the horseleech referred to is a large bloodsucker...
...His next important work, Murphy, a novel published in 1938, is positively sly in its biblical ~allusions...
...Every weekday morning, Scale read prayers and a portion of Holy Scripture at Assembly...
...Yet the meaning of Beckett's first play, Waiting tot Godot, is deeply ambiguous...
...Perhaps every great writer longs to write a sacred book: the late Herbert Howarth, in his brilliant book The Irish Writers, suggested that this is an aspiration to which Irish authors are especially prone...
...He or some other master read prayers and Scripture again at the end of homework preparation in the evening...
...Beckett told Colin Duckworth, "Christianity is a mythology with which I am perfectly familiar, so I ~aturally use it...
...Much has been written by critics about the influence of Dante on Beckett's writing, but surely it is most unlikely that he would have become susceptible to that influence at Trinity if he had not first received such a thorough grounding in the Bible...
...This blasphemy affirms God's existence even in denying it: how can He be a bastard (or un salaud, as the French put it) if He doesn't exist...
...More important for Beckett, I imagine, than all this liturgy was the almost daily teaching of Holy Scripture as a regular school 28 April 1978:266 subject at every level, except perhaps the Sixth Form (senior class...
...On Sunday evenings in summer, we walked to church again in the country parish of Rossory...
...The idea of life as a syndrome made up of innumerable symptoms is clear enough, but who is "the horse leech's daughter...
...One could argue that all his Portora religious training was wasted on Beckett because he lost his faith soon after leaving the school...
...The mother's eyes burn with "severe love," a seemingly contradictory phrase until we remember that "Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth" (Hebrews 12:6), and "As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten" (Revelation 3:19...
...Her quantum of wantum cannot vary...
...In the same chapter of Murphy he uses a more familiar quotation in the same disrespectful style...
...The roll call before breakfast was also followed by a brief prayer, read by the master on duty...
...All That Fall takes a bleaker view: after Mrs...
...The idea that the sky "with time shah pass away" seems to have two biblical sources: Saint Matthew (5:18), "till heaven and earth pass," and Revelation (10:5, 6), "and the angel . . . sware . . . that there should be time no longer . . . . " The mention of "the so-caUed Apostles' Creed" is not intended as mockery: it's more like a piece of pedantry...
...How It Is contains an extraordinary evocation of the moment captured in the photograph, as experienced by the child: next another image . . . it's me all of me and my mother's face I see it from below we are on a veranda smothered in verbena the scented sun dapples the red flies . . . the huge head hatted with birds and flowers is bowed down over my curls the eyes burn with severe love I offer her mine pale upcast to the sky whence cometh our help and which I know perhaps even then with time shall pass away in a word bolt upright on a cushion on my knees whelmed in a nightshirt I pray ac~Ording to her instructions that's not all she closes her eyes and drones a snatch of the so-called Apostles' Creed I steal a look at her lips she stops her eyes burn down on me again I cast up ~nine in haste and repeat awry This passage reveals to us both the beginning of a religious education and its final result...
...We liked the many hymns at these services and made a specially "joyful noise" with Lyte's...
...It refers to an annual examination in religiotls knowledge inaugurated about a century ago by the Board of Education of the General Synod of the Church of Ireland...
...It is not until after World War II that Beckett confronts the basic teachings of Christianity in his work...
...He doesn't exist...
...SAMUEL BECKETT, BIBLE READER VIVIAN MERCIER Despite loss of faith, he has exploited his Protest t heritage Samuel Beckett, according to his own account, "soon lost faith...
...On learning that all the bars in Dublin are closed for the "holy hour" between 2:30 and 3:30 p.m., Wylie's friend Neary "leaned against the...
...If there is any mockery in the passage, it comes from the child's being too young to understand the words and repeating them awry...
...His years from four to nearly fourteen doubtless saw little slackening in that training, and the ensuing three-and-a-half years as a ,boarder at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, unquestionably subjected him to a sternly evangelical regime...
...It was natural, given his loss of faith, that Beckett's early works should treat his religious heritage with selfconscious irony...
...the rest of the year, Sunday evening service was in the Dining Hall, usually conducted by the Headmaster...
...At first sight, this confrontation may be mistaken for a total denial and rejection...
...Whatever tradition may say, scholars agree that this creed was composed long after the last apostle was dead...
...I believe, on the contrary, that it reinforced his earlier upbringing in certain ways and helps to explain why, at different stages of his literary development, different aspects of his religious heritage come to the fore...
...Christians are also warned that the Second Coming of Christ may be as stealthy as "a thief in the night...
...On Sunday mornings the Anglican boarders paraded to EnniskiUen Cathedral, wearing Harrow-style straw boaters if the weather was suitable...
...He told Harold Hobson, "I don't think I ever had it after leaving Trinity [College, Dublin...
...Harem, Cloy and Nagg pray silently to God...
...Among these shorter works, several seem to offer a prophetic vision of the end of a world that has not yet quite ended, or (to put it another way) the moments before entropy, or (to put it yet another ~vay) time just before it stops...
...God does exist, they imply, but He never intervenes in the workings of His universe...
...28 April 1978:268...
...Integrated with Beckett's own prose are familiar and less familiar passages from the King James Bible...
...Loss of faith, however, clearly has not prevented him from exploiting his Protestant heritage, any more than it prevented James Joyce from exploiting his Catholic one...
...Clov answers, "Not yet...
...He might well have added that he is also familiar with the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and the Irish Church Hymnal, all of which he frequently quotes in his works without acknowledgement...
...his mother, on the other hand, was deeply religious in a rather narrow evangelical way...
...Belacqua Shuah "had underlined, as quite a callow boy, a phrase in Hardy's Tess, won by dint of cogging in the Synod . . . . " Thomas Hardy's novel Tess o/ the D'UrberviUes is undoubtedly meant, but what is "cogging in the Synod...
...The lessons that Mary Roe Beckett gave Samuel, her younger son, may have been repeated awry to begin with, but eventually they were learned by heart...
...Rooney quotes "The Lord upholdeth all that fall . . . . " (Psalm 145 in the King James 144 in the Vulgate) she and her husband "loin in wild laughter...
...A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man has made millions of readers aware of the thoroughness of Joyce's Catholic education under the Jesuits...
...Clearly the proverb stuck in Beckett's mind because of the oddity of its expression and its quaint image of insatiable desire...
...After mockery and serious confrontation there comes the third stage of religious influence upon Beckett's literary development, dating from the publication of Comment c'est in 1961 (translated as How It Is, 1964...
...We used the Public Schools Hymnal, bound in the school colorsmthe British royal arms in yellow on a black ground...
...Hamm shouts, "The bastard...
...Roll that on your tongue while you consider its implications: God and Man together again, believing in each other, blaming each other, afflicting each other...
...These phrases would not be out of place among the Minor Prophets or in the Book of Revelation...
...I myself have suggested more than once that Pozzo is in fact Godot, and therefore Godot arrives in both acts without being recognized...
...But the quotation as a whole shows .how thoroughly, the mature Beckett, then nearly sixty, had assimilated the language of the King James version (though the word "whelmed" doesn't in fact occur in it), and also many of the religious ideas expressed therein...
...One of the great ironies of the New Testament, from the Christian point of view, is that Jesus was not recognized as the Messiah by most of the Jews he came to save...
...We have seen something of this already in More Pricks Than Kicks...
...I, like Beckett before me, took part in this ritual...
...Not "happy days" exactly, but blessed days, and certainly happier than those after the recent greatly exaggerated death of God, when Man suddenly found it hard to believe in his own existence...
...In Proverbs (30:15), we read, "The horseleech hath two daughters, crying, Give, Give...
...they are disappointed when they get no response...
...Take this passage, for example: "I greatly fear," said Wylie, "that the syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation...
...For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse...
...railings and cursed, first the day in which he was born, thenmin a bold flash-6ack--the night in which he was conceived...
...The first, from Psalm 121, contains an odd mistake which Beckett also makes elsewhere: the first verse of the psalm says, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help," but the next verse reads, *'my help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth," SO the child shows a firm grasp of essentials...
...Occasionally there would be a. missionary~ sermon, by an "old boy" (alumnus) who was already laboring in the vineyard, whether in the British colonies or the slums of Belfast...
...At the end of Act Two and of the play, Didi and Gogo are still waiting, like Jews expecting the Messiah, or Christians awaiting the Second Coming...
...No hint is given that these were not original remarks, but I need hardly refer readers to the Book of Job (3:3) "Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, there is a man child conceived...
...Stretches of them are written without verbs and read like notes for a coldly precise scientific report, but suddenly we find a turn of phrase that reminds of the King James Bible, without being in any way a quotation...
...I am deliberately mixing religious and scientific terms to convey the paradoxical style of these late works...
...Beckett has given up wrestling with the angel: instead of continuing his love/hate relationship with Christianity, he is now writing a sort of Scripture of his own...
...My favorite, both for its rhythm and for its ironic message of hope, comes from Lessness: "He will curse God as in the blessed days face to the open sky the passing deluge...
...Perhaps because his father was not religious, Beckett seems to have felt no anguish in turning away from the Anglican beliefs of his youth...
...Even if Beckett, like his surrogate Shuah, had in fact done a spot of "cogging" (the Portora word for copying or plagiarizing), it seems highly unlikely that he could have won a novel by that notorious agnostic/atheist Thomas Hardy as a prize in such an examination...
...The first time, he is rather cruel, like the God of the Old Testament...
Vol. 105 • April 1978 • No. 9
