‘I am what her savage loving has made me’
Samuel Beckett's road trip with his mother May
In Ireland, January 6th is traditionally Nollaig na mBan, the ‘women’s Christmas’, when men take over the household chores, and women have the day off to celebrate with friends. Today’s post is about a 1935 driving holiday taken by an Irishwoman, May Beckett with her son Samuel in England when he was still failing to become a published writer. Their shared love of English literature, cathedral towns and travel allowed them, for a few weeks, to set aside their differences - and led to Beckett’s first published book.
When Samuel Beckett’s much-loved father Bill died suddenly in 1933, his mother’s grief alternated with a fierce conviction that her younger son - who had turned down a prestigious teaching post at Trinity College Dublin in order to write - now needed a steady job. Beckett realized that to gain the freedom that he needed to write, he would have to escape from Dublin. In January 1934 he managed to persuade May to finance his move to London to enrol in a course of psychoanalytical treatment, then illegal in Ireland. But with only a small inheritance from his father and minimal earnings from his writing, Beckett was soon in a state of penury. Worse, by the middle of 1935 his inspiration for writing seemed to have completely dried up, and he knew that soon he would have no option but to return to his family home in Ireland.
But first, there would be a holiday. Beckett invited his mother to join him on a three-week road trip through England, in which they would visit the places associated with the writers they both loved. With May paying all expenses, he hired a small car and took her on what he described as a ‘lightning tour’ of English market towns and cathedral cities. They visited St Albans, Canterbury, Winchester, Bath and Wells, and covered hundreds of miles, driving as far as the West Country and spending almost three weeks together.
Beckett described the trip in letters to his friend, the poet Thomas MacGreevy, later director of the National Gallery of Ireland. He told MacGreevy that after they reached the West Country their hired car struggled with the ‘demented gradients,’ around Porlock and Lynton, and they decided not to spend a night in the seaside resort of Minehead: ‘one look at it was enough’. Instead, they spent almost a week in a comfortable hotel in Lynmouth, close to where the poet Shelley was said to have stayed. From there they went on day excursions around the coast and toured the literary locations of North Devon, including the Exmoor of Lorna Doone and the seaside village of Westward Ho! near Bideford, named after Charles Kingsley’s bestselling novel of 1855, Westward Ho! (In 1983 Beckett would write his novella ‘Worstward Ho’, his parody of Kingsley’s novel.)1
This driving holiday in 1935 was, according to the writer Margaret Drabble, ‘a most extraordinary interlude’ in Beckett’s long, tempestuous relationship with his mother. It forms the centrepiece of her essay ‘The Maternal Embrace: Samuel Beckett and his Mother May’ in Dale Salwak’s collection Writers and their mothers (2018). Drabble knows the West Country well: her home is in Porlock Weir, overlooking the Bristol Channel, and she loyally speaks up for the charms of nearby Minehead. Writing about the Becketts’ unlikely westward journey that summer, she points to a rare moment of relative harmony between mother and son that has been overlooked but is important in understanding their relationship. The trip is mentioned only in passing in Deirdre Bair’s 1978 biography, though James Knowlson’s acclaimed Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (1996) gives the background more fully, drawing on the letters to MacGreevy held at Trinity College Dublin.
Most of Beckett’s biographers characterize his mother as ‘austere’ and ‘domineering’ and her outward appearance is seen as significant. She wore plain dark dresses and tailor-made mannish suits, but kept her hair pinned up under a series of fashionable hats. It was ‘her one vanity’ according to Bair, who describes Samuel Beckett as ‘his mother’s child... thin, with the same angularity and sternness of bearing, the cold blue eyes and fair hair.’ But their physical similarities did not mean that they thought alike. As James Knowlson puts it, from Beckett’s childhood onwards ‘they rarely saw eye to eye on anything concerning himself’.
Yet mother and son did have one important thing in common: their love of English literature. Accompanying his mother on this road trip allowed Beckett briefly to forget about his own struggles as a writer, and enjoy a literary tour in the company of someone he knew would share his enthusiasm. Although some parts of the journey were disappointing (Beckett found Stratford-on-Avon ‘unspeakable’) the holiday also provided them both with welcome distraction and solace, May from her debilitating grief, Samuel from his ongoing anxiety over his failure to write.
There was one last thing that Beckett wanted to do, alone. After dropping his mother off at the ferry port at the end of their holiday, he made a pilgrimage to Lichfield, the home of Samuel Johnson, author of The Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Coincidentally or not, this visit to honour Johnson’s great work - and the holiday as a whole - seemed to do the trick as far as his own writing was concerned. After returning to London his writer’s block lifted and in August 1935 he began working on his first novel, Murphy. He would finish it in the house he grew up in, Cooldrinagh in Co. Dublin, the following year.
Sadly, the mother-son truce did not last for long, and their familiar pattern of bitter disagreement resumed. By October 1937 Beckett had finally had enough, and was preparing to move to Paris permanently. His mother too was leaving Cooldrinagh, exchanging the family home for a bungalow called New Place. As he packed up his books and looked around his old home for the last time, Beckett saw things through clear eyes.
‘I am what her savage loving has made me,’ he told MacGreevy, ‘and it is good that one of us should accept that finally.’
He knew that to become the writer he wanted to be, he would have to make a complete break with May and living in Ireland. But he also knew that his ‘mother and motherland’ would always be part of who he was.
Less than three months later, on the 6th of January 1938, Beckett was stabbed by a pimp in a Paris street and the knife entered close to his heart. He spent weeks recovering in hospital, and his mother was among the family and friends who rushed to the city to be at his bedside. Vulnerable and weak as he was, Beckett was touched by her concern. ‘For a few days she had him where she needed him to be’, Drabble writes, ‘dependent, grateful, in need of her care.’ After Beckett recovered, the relationship went back to its old warpath, and there would be no more reconciliations.
Samuel Beckett was both there, and not there, in 1950 when May died of Parkinson’s Disease in the Merrion Nursing Home in Dublin. Eight years later, he evoked the experience of waiting for her death in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958):
‘…the house on the canal where mother lay a-dying, in the late fall, after her long viduity... There I sat, in the biting wind, wishing she were gone. Hardly a soul, just a few regulars, nursemaids, old men, dogs... the blind went down, one of those dirty brown roller affairs... I happened to look up and there it was. All over and done with at last.’
In an early version of the play, the ageing protagonist of the play forgets what the word ‘viduity’ means. He looks it up in Johnson’s Dictionary and discovers that it means ‘widowhood’.
May’s death after her own long widowhood allowed Beckett to feel tenderness towards her, perhaps for the first time in his adult life. As Knowlson says, ‘Beckett felt peculiarly alone in his sorrow... he whose relationship with his mother had been the stormiest but also the closest felt that her loss left him suddenly alone.’ The closer he drew to old age himself, the more pity he felt. Drabble suggests that Footfalls (1976) captures the insomniac May’s restless pacing, ‘haunting Cooldrinagh, haunting New Place, haunting her son’, while Rockaby (1981) shows Beckett’s compassion for the old, frail and grief-stricken.
Beckett’s continued references to his mother show his growing understanding of her importance in his early life. In his allusion to a forgotten word from Johnson’s Dictionary, he pays an oblique tribute to the love of English literature that he and his mother shared, and the lasting memory of happy days they spent together, touring the west of England in their little hired car.
An earlier version of this essay first appeared in the Dublin Review of Books. See also my post about Philip Larkin’s correspondence with his mother Eva below.
Sources
Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (Vintage, 1978); Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett (C.U.P., 2009-14); ‘Beckett, Samuel Barclay’ in Dictionary of Irish Biography; Margaret Drabble, ‘The Maternal Embrace: Samuel Beckett and His Mother May’ in Writers and their mothers, ed. Dale Sawak (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (1996).
In 1983 Samuel Beckett wrote ‘Worstward Ho’, a parody of CharlesKingsley’s novel (published in Nohow On, 1995). It contains Beckett’s most famous line: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
This book - writers and their mothers - looks fascinating! I've always felt that the maternal relationship seemed so significant in so many writers' lives. I always think of JRR Tolkien whose mother instilled such a great faith in him and was the first one to introduce him to languages. And of course she died when he was so young. The same goes for CS Lewis. It often seems that the mother's presence, or sometimes her lack of presence, can shape so much of what comes after.. thanks for this fascinating look into such a complex mother son dynamic!
Great piece, Ann! This section really stuck with me: "Most of biographers characterize May Beckett as ‘austere’ and ‘domineering’ and her outward appearance is seen as significant. She wore plain dark dresses and tailor-made mannish suits, but kept her hair pinned up under a series of fashionable hats." ...isn't it interesting to consider how a man would be characterized if he wore plain dark clothing? Probably not as "domineering"...but of course it was a different time. Even today, however, I feel like we attach different words to women's fashion than we do to men's. Food for thought! :)