Beckett Reviewing MacGreevy: A Reconsideration

Beckett Reviewing MacGreevy: A ReconsiderationAuthor(s): Seán KennedySource: Irish University Review, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 2005), pp. 273-287Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25517264 .

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Sean Kennedy

Beckett Reviewing MacGreevy: A Reconsideration

Beckett's friendship with Thomas MacGreevy was one of the most

important sustaining bonds of his young adult life, particularly during the nineteen thirties. The pair exchanged letters on a regular basis, and

MacGreevy's patient ear was an important outlet for a frustrated

young writer who had yet to find his own voice. James Knowlson

confirms that theirs was 'a genuine dialogue in which for a long time

Beckett was passionately involved'.1 For this reason, J.C.C. Mays's contention that the pair carried on a 'complicated dialogue' in their

work and correspondence is an insight worthy of development.2 Here, I shall re-examine Beckett's opinion of MacGreevy's poetry, as evinced

in two short pieces: the Bookman essay 'Recent Irish Poetry' (1934), and

the Dublin Magazine review 'Humanistic Quietism' (1934). The critical consensus is that Beckett viewed MacGreevy's work

benevolently, complimenting it in letters, poems, and reviews. Susan

Schreibman, for example, finds that MacGreevy is the only poet that

Beckett 'unequivocally praises' in 'Recent Irish Poetry',3 while Sinead

Mooney describes the 1934 review as an 'unexpectedly moving and

sensitive appreciation of the devout Catholic MacGreevy's rapt

lyricism'.4 Mary Bryden also believes that Beckett promotes

MacGreevy's 'Humanistic Quietism' as a 'positive value' in his review,

suggesting that it forms a basis for Beckett's own intellectual position.5 Chris Ackerley denies this claim, offering a different reading of

Beckett's views on quietism, but he still reads the review benevolently, as an 'expression of friendship'.6 Terence Brown describes the review as 'an admiring celebratory essay'.7 I want to suggest that Beckett and

MacGreevy differ quite sharply in their views on poetry, that these

views reflect tensions arising from their different attitudes to religious faith, and that Beckett's published responses to MacGreevy's work are

more usefully read as a tactful equivocation on his part. As is well known, Beckett set out his stall on the requirements for

modern poetry in his 1934 essay 'Recent Irish Poetry'.8 There, he argues that communication between a given subject and the world of objects

has broken down. He gives us a principle of individuation, decrying as

antiquarian those Irish poets that continue to ply poetry concerned

with the (now inaccessible) historical or mythical object, and lauding

273



IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

those 'others' who are willing to 'state the space that intervenes

between [them] and the world of objects' (p.70). The antiquarians are

poetical reactionaries engaged in a 'flight from self-awareness' (p.71), in whom any confrontation with the breakdown of the subject /object

relationship 'was suppressed as a nuisance at its inception' (p.70). Such

poets, Beckett claims, are of no more than academic interest, and he

associates them specifically with Yeats's recently established Irish

Academy of Letters (p.71). By contrast, Beckett describes an artist who

is willing to confront the new thing that has happened. This artist

assumes the 'rupture of the lines of communication' between subject and object as given, and proceeds to try to state man's predicament

(p.70). Beckett claims the poems of Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey 'constitute already the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland' (p.76), since

these writers are 'least concerned with evading the bankrupt

relationship' between man and world (p.75). Their poems are

innovative because they foreground the existence of the author, and

refuse the option of flight from self-awareness. They decline the

reactionary strategies that Beckett ascribes to the antiquarians, and try to 'celebrate the cold comforts of apperception' (p.70).

Ignoring his comments regarding Devlin and Coffey, Susan

Schreibman has argued that Thomas MacGreevy is 'the only poet that

Beckett unequivocally praises' in the essay,9 voicing the common

perception that Beckett was well disposed to his work. However, in

terms of the priorities established by the essay itself, Beckett's remarks

on MacGreevy

are curiously

evasive:

Mr Thomas MacGreevy is best described as an independent,

occupying a position intermediate ... in the sense that he neither

excludes self-perception from his work nor postulates the object as inaccessible. But he knows how to wait for the thing to happen ... And when it does happen

... it is the act and not the object of

perception that matters. Mr MacGreevy is an existentialist in

verse, the Titchener of the modern lyric (p.74).

By placing MacGreevy in an intermediate position, Beckett refuses to

allow him into that small pantheon of poets who constitute the

'nucleus of a living poetic' in Ireland. MacGreevy's poems are

accomplished in their own right, but in the terms set up by Beckett's

essay they refuse to grapple with the new thing that has happened in

Irish poetry: 'he neither excludes self-perception from his work nor

postulates the object as inaccessible'. In other words, MacGreevy's

poems have nothing to say on this most important development that

Beckett has made the litmus test for all poets working in Ireland at that

time. As such, although Beckett himself does not develop the point,

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BECKETT REVIEWING MacGREEVY: A RECONSIDERATION

they are of limited interest to those concerned with more radical

innovations and have little to contribute to the further development of

a radical Irish poetic. At best, MacGreevy seems to be a transitional

figure, one whose radical potential is undermined by the persistence of

the object in his work.

The more positive reading of Beckett's comments is understandable, since he does describe MacGreevy's work as 'probably the most

important contribution to post-War Irish poetry' (p.74). This certainly sounds like unequivocal praise. However, it may not be as

straightforward as one might think. Beckett is very careful to link

MacGreevy's work with a specific historical period, and it is not certain

that the poems are of as much interest now as they were then. Mervyn Wall recalls that younger Irish poets, men like Denis Devlin and Brian

Coffey, were not interested in Ireland's past: 'a world which to us young men in 1930 was dead and pushed beneath the carpet of history':

In Ireland at the time there was the inevitable reaction to the

heroism and high sentiment of the War of Independence period. One saw patrols become place-hunters. All was to be well if

Ireland was free ... We saw public figures laying ceremonial

wreaths, in effect in honour of themselves, and listened to

boastful freedom fighters than whom one slum-born Dublin

Fusilier had more experience of warfare in one whole afternoon

than the whole lot of them put together.10

Wall claims that this grating nationalist culture in Ireland sponsored the disengagement of writers like Coffey and Devlin, who were more

likely to be influenced by contemporary French poetry. For this reason, Beckett's specific reference to the 'post-War' nature of MacGreevy's work is problematic. The fact that MacGreevy is not included with

those that Beckett sees as constitutive of Ireland's living nucleus of

poetry suggests that he may have felt that MacGreevy's poems were

accomplished in their own time, but dated; an important contribution

to 'post-War poetry' in Ireland, but of less interest to the poets who

were actively trying to break free of recent Irish history Beckett's

qualified praise for MacGreevy is appreciative only to a limited extent, and MacGreevy may well have felt that he was damning his work with

faint praise. Beckett does not deny that there are moments of magic in

MacGreevy's work, but neither does he place him at the centre of

important developments in Irish poetry This is not to suggest that Beckett's review is a fair assessment of

MacGreevy's work. J.C.C. Mays has observed how Beckett's own

interests at this time led him to characterize MacGreevy in terms

reminiscent of the solipsistic Belacqua of his own early fiction.11

275




Certainly, by comparing MacGreevy's poetry to the work of structural

psychologist E.B. Titchener, Beckett suggests that it inclines to

hermeticism. His most likely source for his views on the psychologist, Robert Woodworth's Contemporary Schools of Psychology, summarizes

Titchener's ideas thus:

Conscious experience has direct relations, not with the

environment, but only with processes occurring within the

organism, especially in the nervous system.12

Hence, according to Beckett, in MacGreevy's poetry 'it is the act and not the object of perception that matters' (p.74). This is hardly a just

response to MacGreevy's Poems, which is remarkable, among other

things, for its 'double investment in modernism and nationalism'.13

Accordingly, John Pilling has noted how Beckett fails 'absolutely' to

address the distinctively Irish dimension of MacGreevy's work.14 And Tim Armstrong defends MacGreevy against the charge of introversion,

pointing up MacGreevy's 'refusal to contemplate utter withdrawal'

from the world in a body of work that is clearly 'conditioned by historical realities'.15 In fact, MacGreevy probably envisioned himself as occupying the same aesthetic territory as poets like Devlin and

Coffey. However, Beckett was not disposed to see it in this way, and his

partial reading of MacGreevy's work precludes it from participation in

the 'new thing that has happened' in Irish poetry (p.70). Beckett spelt out his views in greater detail in a review of

MacGreevy's Poems (1934) published as 'Humanistic Quietism' in

Dublin Magazine.16 Again, the consensus has been that Beckett's review

is positive: an 'unexpectedly moving and sensitive appreciation of the

devout Catholic MacGreevy's rapt lyricism'.17 This is a common

perception, and it was in this capacity that the review was to re-appear as the foreword to the Raven Arts Press re-issue of MacGreevy's work

in 1971.18 However, a closer reading suggests that Beckett is more

reserved. Once again, MacGreevy's poetry is described in a way that

makes it sound curiously self-involved, almost solipsistic. He describes

Poems as a 'small volume of shining and intensely personal verse' that

issues from a 'nucleus of endopsychic clarity', and proceeds by 'self

absorption into light' (p.69). More importantly, Beckett adverts to MacGreevy's own criticism in

order to characterize the significance of his achievement. He claims:

To the mind that has raised itself to the grace of humility 'founded' ? to quote from Mr MacGreevy's T. S. Eliot ? 'not on misanthropy but on hope', prayer is no more (no less) than an act of recognition. A nod, even a wink ... This is the adult mode of prayer syntonic to

276




Mr MacGreevy, the unfailing salute to his significant from which

the fire is struck and the poem is kindled (p.68).

MacGreevy's study of T. S. Eliot was published in 1931, and Beckett's

quotation is lifted from a passage that lauds Eliot's work for its

'humility, that penitential Catholic virtue, founded not on misanthropy but on hope, that is so utterly alien to the puritanical mind'.19 In this

remarkable statement, MacGreevy assumes that humility is solely the

prerogative of the Catholic faith. Given Beckett's impatience with

religious orthodoxy, it is doubtful that his recovery of this distinction

in his review is wholly sympathetic. It is more likely a tongue-in-cheek reference to MacGreevy's tendency to make aesthetic judgments based on his religious beliefs. By recovering MacGreevy's contention from

Eliot, I would suggest, Beckett takes a subtle swipe at the sectarian

discriminations on which MacGreevy's aesthetic is based.

This is, perhaps, where Mary Bryden's reading gets into trouble.

Bryden believes that Beckett himself subscribes to the view that prayer is an act of recognition, and this allows her to suggest that MacGreevy's

humanistic quietism stands as a positive value in the review.20 In fact, since prayer of this nature is the sole prerogative of the Catholic

sensibility, Beckett cannot hope to achieve such intimacy Far from being in agreement with MacGreevy's aesthetic, he is drawing attention,

obliquely, to its exclusive sectarianism. His comments incorporate a

subtle reminder that MacGreevy's work is limited in its appeal only to

the penitential Catholic mind that has raised itself to the grace of

humility. Impenitent puritans need not apply In this, Beckett was probably reacting to the poem 'Sour Swan' that

MacGreevy had included in his collection. Mays has pointed out that

the poem is addressed to Beckett, and that it enjoins him to 'moderate'

his sense of contradiction and 'Go to God'.21 Once again, MacGreevy

distinguishes between Catholic humility and 'puritan' obduracy. Beckett is depicted as an arrogant intellectual, whom MacGreevy derides as a 'victim to terrestrial hallucination/Then violence to self

deluding self. However MacGreevy, on the basis that 'The anti-puritan is no better than the puritan', asks the Lord to give him patience with

this 'wise fool!', and offers to be His instrument of instruction:

Lord!

Have mercy on me, a sinner ...

And then, in my turn, I will, if it be Your Will,

Cry ? to make him realize

That the first virtue does not necessarily Contradict the greatest

?

277




This is what Beckett is referring to when he suggests that prayer, for

MacGreevy, is an act of recognition, as the latter, speaking to God like

an old friend, offers to intervene in order to redeem Beckett who is

'Sounding orders and counter orders/In abysses of insignificance'.22 It

is likely that Beckett did not see himself as being in particular need of

redemption, and one may discern a subtext to the review that

constitutes a veiled critique of MacGreevy's religious presumption. In

'Humanistic Quietism', as Bryden has remarked, Beckett characterizes

the sentiment 'God be merciful to me a sinner' as the 'publican's

whinge', contrasting it to the 'pharisee's taratantara', before claiming that MacGreevy's poetry does not belong at either extreme.23 Yet, that

is the very prayer MacGreevy uses in 'Sour Swan' when offering his

services to God in the matter of Beckett's intransigence, and both

MacGreevy and Beckett would have known this. Is MacGreevy being

subtly indicted for resorting to the publican's whinge? The rest of Beckett's review reads less benevolently if we see it as a

response to MacGreevy's sectarian aesthetic. MacGreevy's poems are all

described as occasions of faith resulting from an 'adult mode of prayer

syntonic to Mr MacGreevy, the unfailing salute to his significant from

which the fire is struck and the poem is kindled' (p.68). The key words are

'unfailing', 'syntonic', and the italicized 'his'. MacGreevy's salute to God

is unfailing: blind faith. And the significant involved ? God as conceived

in Catholic terms by MacGreevy ? is very much MacGreevy's own, his,

and is not available to anyone that does not share his faith. Since his faith

is unquestioning, God is always what MacGreevy believes him to be; hence prayer is always 'an act of recognition. A nod, even a wink' (p.68).

MacGreevy sees what he wants to see, and so, like the blind horse of the

adage, one gesture is much the same as another. Also, MacGreevy's faith

is 'syntonic': 'responsive to and in harmony with one's situation and

personality' (OED). As such, it is always likely to be consonant with one's own needs. MacGreevy's

own preference

is decisive.

At the heart of Beckett's argument is the conviction that MacGreevy's

unerring Catholic faith precludes him from an adequate treatment of

the human condition. This is not poetry postulating the 'breakdown' of

the object, as demanded in 'Recent Irish Poetry' (p.70). It is, rather, a

'blaze of prayer creating its object' (p.69, emphasis added), making the

world in the likeness of its own desires. For this reason, I would

suggest that Beckett does not regard MacGreevy's adult mode of

prayer as a positive value. Rather, he describes it as a curiously limiting and self-involved way of creating a relationship (between man and

God) that it merely purports to describe. In Eliot, MacGreevy privileges an aesthetic position founded 'not on misanthropy but on hope'. In

'Humanistic Quietism', Beckett sees little basis for this hope in

anything other than the desire that it should exist.

278




This is also the reason why Beckett makes it sound as if MacGreevy writes the same poem over and over

again, since he can only conceive

of matters in terms of his own faith: 'He has seen it before, he shall see

it again. For the intelligent Amiel there is only one landscape' (p.69).

Explicating this reference, Mays argues that it 'suggests MacGreevy's effort was in one direction and was relatively colourless; that it drove

towards a vacant, nameless consciousness [which! Amiel... defined ...

as "consciousness of consciousness"'.24 Consciousness of consciousness

is the correct project for the 'Titchener of the modern lyric' perhaps,25 but it has nothing to say about the rupture of the lines of

communication between subject and object that Beckett considered

decisive. The lines of communication between this subject

(MacGreevy) and his object (God) can never be ruptured, since faith

will never admit impediment to the relationship. It will ignore

anything that threatens to belie it, and remain largely unaffected by the

vagaries of religious doubt. In Beckett's analysis, even when

MacGreevy writes about the Irish struggle for independence the poem 'climbs to its Valhalla ...

obliterating the squalid elements of civil war'

(p.69). With MacGreevy, the closest we come to apostasy is the

conclusion of 'De Civitate Hominum', in which he says merely that

'Holy God makes no reply/Yet'.26 Beckett's reservations are understandable.

Re-reading MacGreevy's critical works from the nineteen thirties, it is remarkable the extent to

which they operate on a crude sectarianism. Mervyn Wall remembered

MacGreevy for his 'fierce Irish Catholicism', and felt that he was often

'embarrassingly silly in his uncontrollable expression of prejudices'.27 And more recent, and perhaps more impartial, commentators have

also been critical of MacGreevy for his unconscious recourse to a

'hierarchical Catholicism' in his critical writings.28 Often, MacGreevy uses faith as the basis for a simplistic sociology of knowledge: the fact

that Joyce has 'more faith and more joy in existence' than Eliot, for

example, is explained by 'the difference between Catholic and

puritanical Protestant training'.29 Richard Aldington's The Death of a

Hero is 'a very Protestant book',30 whilst Joyce's Ulysses exhibits a

'deep-rooted Catholicism'.31 You get the sense, at times, that there is

little the distinction will not explain, and we know that Beckett was

impatient of this kind of analysis.32 Nor was MacGreevy afraid to criticize Protestant writers outright for

their religious beliefs, condemning the 'Protestantism that, for four

centuries, has hated art and the life of the senses everywhere it has

found them'.33 He repeatedly claims that Protestants lack humility before the miracle of Christ, as in the following passage:

In a world of self-appointed judges it would be more than

sufficient if the countries that use the Protestant languages ...

279




could learn to renounce the attempt to explain the inexplicable and, without condescension ? who or what is any of us to

condescend where Christ Himself did not condescend? ? to

practise the charity of the New Testament ... 'Neither will I

condemn thee!'34

The error of Protestantism is its failure to submit in awe. The thrust of

MacGreevy's study of T S. Eliot is that he will improve as a poet to the

extent that he manages to absorb the dictates of Catholicism. His best

poetry will be written, MacGreevy suggests, when his mind has

'completely absorbed and grown habituated to the new set of spiritual values that it has been grasping at in recent years' (pp.70-1).

It is because Beckett was keenly aware of this that I would question the assumption that Beckett's reviews are

necessarily, or in any sense

unequivocally, appreciative. MacGreevy seems to be a transitional

figure whose radical potential was compromised by his religious faith, and it may be that 'Recent Irish Poetry' and 'Humanistic Quietism' constitute a tactful evasion on Beckett's part. Even then, they over

emphasize MacGreevy's capacity for withdrawal, depict his ardent

Catholicism as an impediment to genuine self-awareness, and

singularly fail to include his works among those that are relevant to a

living poetic in Ireland in the nineteen thirties Read in this light, the

1934 review concludes with a curiously evasive commendation:

To know so well what one values is ... not a common faculty; to

retain in the acknowledgement of such enrichment the light, calm

and finality that composed it is an extremely rare one. I do not

know if the first of these can be acquired; I know that the second

cannot (p.69).

All this passage says is that MacGreevy knows what he believes, believes it to be true, and is lucky to be in a position to believe it.

MacGreevy's faith is a source of comfort whatever the circumstances, but Beckett has already drawn tacit attention to the fact that this comfort

is only available to the devout Catholic. The kind of unerring recourse

to faith that MacGreevy's work exhibits is something that Beckett

knows is simply unavailable to him.35 However, what MacGreevy would have denounced as arrogance, Beckett preferred to call integrity.

We know this because Beckett described himself to MacGreevy as a

'dirty low church P [rotestant] even in poetry, concerned with integrity in a surplice'.36 He made the claim in a letter written to MacGreevy in

1932, and Sinead Mooney has pointed up the interest of Beckett's

'slightly over-emphatic choice of the sectarian rhetoric of the Ireland of

his time to indicate an aesthetic stance' in his letter.37 It is most likely

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BECKETT REVIEWING MacGREEVY': A RECONSIDERATION

that Beckett's recourse to sectarian rhetoric was an impatient response to MacGreevy's own intemperate pronouncements about the spiritual

benefits of Catholicism in his critical works of the previous years. All

of which must have been difficult for Beckett to take, and should be

sufficient to explain his somewhat exasperated response. Beckett is

elaborating an alternative aesthetic position in the terms set out by

MacGreevy's own criticism. If those are the requirements of a Catholic

poet, Beckett suggests, then I must be a dirty low church Protestant, even in poetry

Specifically, Beckett was complaining about what he termed

'Jesuitical' poetry:

There is a kind of writing corresponding with acts of fraud and

debauchery on the part of the writing-shed ... I don't know why

the Jesuitical poem that is an end in itself and justifies all the means

should disgust me so much. But it does

? again

? more and more.

I was trying to like Mallarme again the other day and couldn't, because it's Jesuitical poetry, even the Swan and the Herodiade.38

The term Jesuitical is used here in the sense of equivocation, a sort of

intellectual dishonesty. Beckett's gripe is that Mallarme's aesthetic

produces poems that are unable to articulate anything other than their own formal pre-occupations. As a result, the content of the poem, the

experience out of which the urge to write has arisen, is made to play second fiddle to merely formal concerns.

Beckett's rejection of the Mallarmean aesthetic in these terms is

clarified by his depiction of a Jesuit in his novel Dream of Fair to

Middling Women (1932). In a scene set on a city bus, after sparring with a character called the Polar Bear about the comforts of faith, a Jesuit

priest exits the scene:

'Observe' he said T desire to get down, I pull this cord and the bus

stops and lets me down/

'Well?' Tn just such a Gehenna of links' said this remarkable man, with

one foot on the pavement, T forged my vocation'.39

The Jesuit is admitting that his vocation is founded on deceit. His

desire is to get off the bus, and, in order to do so, he realizes that he

must pull the cord. By analogy, his vocation is forged in the following manner: I desire a vocation, and in order to achieve it I must believe in

God. Therefore, I believe in God and, as a result, I forge my vocation.

The Jesuit's belief is a piece of end-directed analysis as opposed to a

sincere theological position. Whatever else it is, it is precisely not faith.

281




The best reason for believing, according to the Jesuit, 'is that it is more

amusing' (p.210). All this is good clean fun, but behind the comedy lies

the conviction that the Jesuitical strategy is entirely disingenuous, and

the Polar Bear's indignation is clear: 'You make things pleasant for

yourselves ... I must say' (p.210). For Beckett, the term Jesuitical is

synonymous with what WJ. McCormack describes, in another context, as 'analysis by way of pre-disposed need'40

What I would suggest is that Beckett's review lays a similar charge

against MacGreevy: both MacGreevy and the Jesuit of Dream have

developed belief systems that might be characterized as syntonic. Mallarme was in bad odour with a number of experimental Irish poets of the nineteen thirties, including MacGreevy, who felt his 'inhuman

quality of classical perfection' was no longer an option after World War

One.41 Yet, Beckett seems to have thought that MacGreevy's staunch

Catholicism prevented him from fully realizing the radical potential of a new, experimental poetics. MacGreevy's poems are all affirmations of

faith, and, as such, they must always maintain his relationship with his

significant ? God. To this end, his poems eschew an unflinching

examination of man's post-war predicament in order to climb to their

Valhalla of religious affirmation. MacGreevy's work sounds like

another example of the Mallarmean poem that is 'an end in itself and

justifies all the means'.42 This is not to say that Beckett doubted

MacGreevy's sincerity, only that he found the poems that resulted from

MacGreevy's relationship with God to be dissatisfying in the sense that

they created the terms of their own engagement with the world.

By contrast with this Jesuitical poetry, Beckett is seeking 'integrity in a surplice', by which he means that the writing should not be

conditioned by pre-disposed need, but should rather constitute a

sincere and spontaneous expression of emotion. He tells MacGreevy:

Genuinely again my feeling is, more and more, that the greater

part of my poetry, though it may be reasonably felicitous in its

choice of terms, fails precisely because it is fac u It a tif whereas the 3

or 4 I like ... never did give me that impression of being construits.

I cannot explain very well to myself what they have that

distinguishes them from the others, but it is something arborescent or of the sky,

not Wagner,

not clouds on wheels ... I'm

in mourning for a pendu's emission of semen ... the integrity of the

eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind.43

According to Beckett, poetry that is optional (facultatif) is artificial and

dishonest, comparable to the clouds on wheels of a stage set; whereas

the proper poem answers to a spiritual imperative, and is analogous to

the involuntary emission of semen by the hanged man, or the reflex

282




action by which the eye shuts to protect itself independently of the

brain. The ideal poem is not optional, but rather an urgent attempt to

give expression to experience. The proper function of the poem is to

express the two donnees of Beckett's world: man and mess. Here, and in

his earlier letter of October 1932, Beckett replaces MacGreevy's Catholic focus on humility with a new, more avowedly Protestant,

priority ?

'integrity'. For Beckett, integrity is synonymous with self-reliance. During the

nineteen thirties, MacGreevy often tried to persuade him that a

modified reading of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis might serve him as the basis for a more positive engagement with the

world.44 MacGreevy considered Beckett's scepticism to be the source of

his psychological problems, and urged him to return to the Word for

comfort. Beckett responded at length in a remarkable letter:

All I ever read of the Imitation went to confirm and reinforce my own way of living

... a quietism of the sparrow alone upon the

housetops ? the solitary bird under the eaves. An abject self

referring quietism indeed beside the alert quiet of one who

always had Jesus for his darling, but the only kind that I who seem never to have had the least faculty for the supernatural could elicit from the text. I mean that I replaced the plenitude that

he calls "God" with a pleroma to be sought only among my own

feathers and entrails ... [a] sceptical position (which I hope is not

complacent in my case, however it may be a tyranny).45

Beckett's reading of Kempis has encouraged him to believe that the

correct path for him is that of self-sufficiency. He cannot accept the

comforts of faith, and so can only posit a faith in himself, one that is

'personal and finite of fact'46 The only kind of prayer Beckett can

envisage is one that is conceived 'in the depths where demand and

supply coincide and the prayer is the god'.47 Beckett's sense here is that

the comfort is derived not from a supernatural God, but from a self

referring process of poetic composition that he likens to prayer. The

poem/prayer must be its own comfort. He quotes a number of excerpts from Kempis that he claims support his decision, most notably the Latin

'Nolle consolari ab aliqua creatura magnae puritatis signum est' (To desire no

comfort from any creature is a sign of great purity).48 In short, a principle of self-reliance is the only one that Beckett can invest in, and, at best, it

sponsors an abject, secular equivalent to Kempis's inward life.49

This debate was continued indirectly in a number of works written

by both authors in and around this time. In 1935, Beckett was putting the finishing touches to his second novel, Murphy. Despite differences

of opinion, Beckett kept in close contact with MacGreevy during the

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composition of his novel: he sent him the manuscript, and told him that

he valued his opinion more than anybody's.50 As J.C.C. Mays has

pointed out, the character of Mr Endon is based on MacGreevy, and is

born of frustration stemming from the fact that Beckett's intellectual

dialogue with the latter is essentially hopeless, since MacGreevy meets

Beckett's intelligence and logic with an irrepressible will to believe.51

Accordingly, the intimations of solipsism that are discernible in

'Humanistic Quietism' develop in Murphy into a full-blown pathology of withdrawal. MacGreevy is depicted as being hopelessly out of touch

with reality. However, MacGreevy did not take all of this lying down. At this time,

he was working on a monograph on Jack B. Yeats that was completed in

January 1938,52 and there is a passage in Jack B. Yeats in which MacGreevy appears to take a swipe at Beckett's self-portrait in Murphy, as if stung by his own appearance in the novel. If MacGreevy did apprehend that Mr

Endon was a parody of his ideas, then this constitutes his response, most

likely written after he had read Murphy in manuscript and immediately before the completion of Jack B. Yeats in January 1938. The passage comes

at the end of the monograph when MacGreevy is outlining,

characteristically, the importance of religious faith:

Man's life on earth is a warfare ... In such a world, the intelligent man cannot but realize that there is only reassurance to be drawn

from the deeper contemplation of the Kingdom of God ... and

that he must, consequently, be of more actual use in the world

than if he remained fighting it out, arguing the point, chewing the

rag, all the time. Withdrawal is only dangerous when it is dictated

by cowardice or by egotism, by the desire to pose as an indifferent or as an infallible expert

on the unseen.53

A number of details suggest that MacGreevy is criticizing Beckett's

isolationist aesthetics here. Beckett had used the image of an artist

chewing the rag as a way of describing his own aesthetic convictions in

the letter decrying Jesuitical poetry of October 1932. He told

MacGreevy: T am not ashamed to stutter like this with you ... who

understands that until the gag is chewed fit to swallow or spit out the

mouth must stutter or rest'.54 MacGreevy disagreed, suggesting that

there comes a time when the artist should stop chewing the rag and

accept the gift of serene contemplation offered by communion with the

Almighty. For Beckett, chewing the rag was an image of artistic

tenacity. In Yeats, it signifies the arrogance of the intellectual who will

not submit to God's will.

Also significant is MacGreevy's contention regarding the dangers of

withdrawal through egotism. In MacGreevy's reading, Beckett's stated

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principle of self-sufficiency stems from a desire to pose as an

'indifferent' or as 'an infallible expert on the unseen'. These comments

may be read as a response to the 'Murphy's Mind' chapter of Beckett's

novel, and to the eponymous hero's attempts to become utterly indifferent to the contingencies of the contingent world: 'a mote in the

dark of absolute freedom' (p.66). They are, in effect, a restatement of

the criticisms that MacGreevy had made of Beckett's disposition in

'Sour Swan'. MacGreevy denounces retreat from the world, and, by

implication, Beckett's rejection of God, as a dangerous, egotistical exercise. He conflates Beckett with his own ironic self-portrait in his

second novel, and argues that the proper goal of the artist is a balance

achieved by introducing God into his active life: 'There is a time to

withdraw as there is a time to stay, a time for contemplation and a time

for action'.55

This difference of opinion was never resolved. Beckett's equivocal reviews indicate that MacGreevy's avowedly Catholic poetics was of no

interest to the author of 'Recent Irish Poetry', who wanted to explore the

breakdown of the subject /object relationship rather than affirm it as an

unfailing salute to God. MacGreevy, for his part, was impatient with

Beckett's posturing as a 'wise fool', and his arrogant refusal to

acknowledge the power of faith. Beckett's use of the sectarian rhetoric of

the nineteen thirties in his letter of 1932 was a response to MacGreevy's own propensity for intemperate pronouncements about the puritan

mind. He believed that his own low church Protestantism at least allowed

him the integrity of being self-reliant. For Beckett, the artist could either

write of himself, or explore the impossibility of apprehending the world.

This was an art of failure that would soon develop into a fully elaborated

aesthetic position, an art, to invert MacGreevy's distinction in Eliot, founded not on hope but on misanthropy. Mooney has described

Beckett's 'stripped, bleakly-lit brand of negative capability' as a

'secularised Protestant, or post-Protestant, poetics' (p.224). During the

nineteen thirties, this residual affiliation to Protestantism helped to

distinguish Beckett's aesthetics from those of his good friend MacGreevy, and their dialogue throughout this period was a good deal more robust

than is commonly acknowledged.

NOTES 1. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomshury,

1996), p. 90. I thank the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social

Sciences for the award of a doctoral scholarship for the period 2000-3, during which

this essay was researched and written.

2. J.C.C. Mays, 'How is MacGreevy a Modernist?', in Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry

of the 1930s, edited by Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis (Cork: Cork University

Press, 1995), p.103.

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3. Susan Schreibman, Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy: An Annotated Edition

(Dublin: Anna Livia Press, 1991), p.xxxiii. 4. Sinead Mooney, '"Integrity in a Surplice": Samuel Beckett's (Post-)Protestant

Poetics', in Beckett and Religion, edited by Mary Bryden, Lance St John Butler, and

Peter Boxall (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), p.229. 5. Mary Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (London: Macmillan, 1998), p.29. 6. Chris Acker ley, 'Samuel Beckett and Thomas a Kempis: The Roots of Quietism', in

Beckett and Religion, p.88. 7. Terence Brown, 'Ireland, Modernism and the 1930s', in Modernism and Ireland: The

Poetry of the 1930s, p.28. 8. Samuel Beckett, 'Recent Irish Poetry', in Disjecta, edited by Ruby Cohn (London:

Calder, 1983), pp.70-6. 9. Schreibman, p.xxxiii. 10. Michael Smith, 'Michael Smith asks Mervyn Wall Some Questions about the

Thirties', Lace Curtain (Summer 1971), p.77, p.81. 11. Mays, p.115. 12. Robert S. Woodworth, Contemporary Schools of Psychology (London: Methuen, 1931),

p.29. 13. Lee Jenkins, 'Minor Poet among the Major Players', Irish Review 19.113 (1996), p.119. 14. John Pilling, Beckett before Godot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),

p.121. 15. Tim Armstrong, 'Muting the Klaxon: Poetry, History and Irish Modernism', in

Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s, pp.54-5. 16. Beckett, Disjecta, pp.68-9. 17. Mooney, p.229. 18. Thomas MacGreevy, Collected Poems (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1971), p.ll. 19. Thomas MacGreevy, Thomas Stearns Eliot: A Study (London: Chatto and Windus,

1931), p.16. 20. Bryden, pp.6-7. 21. Mays, p.125. 22. MacGreevy, Collected Poems, p.66. 23. Bryden, p.ll. 24. Mays, p.115. 25. Beckett, Disjecta, p.74. 26. MacGreevy, Collected Poems, p.17. 27. See Smith, p.84. 28. Armstrong, pp.50-1. 29. MacGreevy, Eliot, p.35. 30. MacGreevy, Richard Aldington: An Englishman, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931),

p.54. 31. Thomas MacGreevy, The Catholic Element in Work in Progress', in Our Exagmination

Round His Factification For Incamination of Work in Progress, (Paris: Shakespeare and

Company, 1929), p.121. 32. On a visit to UCD in 1936, T S. Eliot claimed that Joyce's character Shem was 'an

unconscious tribute to a Catholic education', a stance that Beckett denounced as 'the

old fall back on pedagogies'. Samuel Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy in a letter

written on the 29 January 1936 (Trinity College, Dublin MSI 0402). Subsequent references to this archive will be given as SB to TM, and noted by date.

33. MacGreevy, Aldington, p.,56. 34. MacGreevy, Aldington, p.54. 35. Pilling, p.123. 36. SB to TM, 18 October 1932.

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37. Mooney, p.223. 38. SB to TM, 18 October 1932.

39. Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1992),

p.210. 40. WJ. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary

History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994), p.338. 41. MacGreevy, Aldington, pp.25~31 42. SB to TM, 18 October 1932.

43. SB to TM, 18 October 1932.

44. Knowlson, p. 179.

45. SB to TM, 10 March 1935.

46. SB to TM, 10 March 1935.

47. SB to TM, 8 September 1935.

48. SB to TM, 10 March 1935.

49. See Ackerley for a fuller discussion of Beckett's attitude to Kempis. 50. SBtoTM, 7 July 1936.

51. J.C.C. Mays, 'Mythologized Presences: Murphy in its Time', in Myth and Reality in Irish

Literature, edited by John Ronsley (Waterloo: Layner University Press, 1977), p. 209.

52. It was later published as Jack B. Yeats: An Appreciation and An Interpretation (Dublin:

Waddington, 1945).

53. Thomas MacGreevy, Jack B. Yeats, pp.31-2. On the subject of Beckett and

MacGreevy's differing assessments of Jack B Yeats, see Sean Kennedy, "The Artist

Who Stakes His Being is From Nowhere": Beckett and Thomas MacGreevy on the

Art of Jack B. Yeats', in Samuel Beckett TodayjAujourd'hui 14.1, edited by Anthony Uhlmann, Sjef Houppermans and Bruno Clement (Amsterdam and Atlanta:

Rodopi, 2004), pp. 61-74.

54. SB to TM, 18 October 1932.

55. MacGreevy, Jack B. Yeats, p.31.

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Beckett Reviewing MacGreevy: A Reconsideration

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