From Germany, on 1 April 1937, Beckett returned to Ireland, home and scrapping with his mother. He was chronically adrift, or, as he put it himself, ‘deterioriating now very rapidly’.1 There is a story of him crawling drunkenly from under a table at a party, having vainly pestered his hostess for sexual favours.2 This seems indicative of his state of mind. Not surprisingly, he was reading about the eminently stoic sufferer Samuel Johnson, and that gloomiest of philosophers, Schopenhauer, deciding that ‘he was one of the ones that mattered most to me’.3 There was really nothing left for him in Ireland. ‘Even mother suggests my leaving this country’, he wrote, ‘une fois pour toutes’.4
Crucially, the final break came, and was sealed, as a result of two confrontations with Irish authorities and institutions. Firstly, Beckett had another car accident. No one was hurt, but the Gardai prosecuted him for dangerous driving. Beckett disputed the charge, declaring in the process that there was no animal he loathed ‘more profoundly than a civic guard, a symbol of [post–1922] Ireland with his official, loutish Gaelic complacency’.5 If ‘there is a definite note of Foxrock unionism’ about this prejudice,6 there was equally a note of recrudescent Anglo-Irish lèse-majesté about the second confrontation. Beckett’s uncle Harry Sinclair had claimed that, in his recently published memoir, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street, Oliver St John Gogarty had characterized his grandfather as a usurer. Sinclair filed a libel suit against Gogarty, and Beckett agreed to appear as a witness for the prosecution. In October, he left Ireland for Paris. He came back in November, when the case was brought.
Beckett had his reasons for siding as he did, though he was no doubt more conscious of some of them than others. Joyce had thought of Gogarty as one of his principal Irish betrayers. Yet it is hard not to feel that there was more than loyalty to Joyce or his uncle at stake in Beckett’s role in Gogarty’s downfall (for Sinclair eventually won, and Gogarty had to leave Ireland as a result). Gogarty came from an affluent Catholic middle-class background. He was a sleek figure with a country house and a Rolls-Royce (both of which he lost in the case). He had supported the Free State, served as a Senator and successfully established himself on the Dublin literary scene. His star had therefore been in the ascendant whilst Beckett’s had appeared to sink. More generally, the rise of Gogarty’s class had been proportional to the decline of Beckett’s. From Beckett’s point of view, this clearly lent a certain edge to the situation. But he also had to endure the contumely of defending counsel John Mary Fitzgerald, his crass sneers at what he saw as the Frenchified, atheistic decadence of a ‘“bawd and blasphemer” from Paris’,7 his satirical reading aloud from More Pricks than Kicks, and his gloating reference to its falling foul of the Irish censor.
If Beckett had been in any doubt as to where his roots nowlay, Fitzgerald must have smothered it for good. From the end of 1937 to the outbreak of the war, he began to shift his ground. He went back to Paris and its literary circles, to Joyce and the avant-garde. At the same time, he was now finding it difficult to write about Joyce, as the Nouvelle revue française had asked him to. Then, in early January, whilst out with friends in the fourteenth arrondissement, he was stabbed by a pimp who had been pestering them. He was taken to hospital, where the Joyces and other friends pampered him. One of his visitors was Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil. Suzanne was an interesting woman, a gauchiste with Communist friends and a social conscience. Beckett had known her slightly since his time at the École Normale. Once he emerged from hospital, they grew close. Since the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim was also competing for his attention, it might seem as though he was caught on the horns of a dilemma. But whatever the other factors involved, Beckett was never likely to choose wealth and privilege. Suzanne prevailed, and the relationship flourished. She was to be the most important woman in Beckett’s later life.
Beckett was hardly about to abandon Joyce. The reverse: not only did he more and more recognize the deep streak of humility and self-abnegation in the great writer; he also increasingly saw him as an ordinarily lovable man. All the same, between 1937 and 1940, Joyce and Suzanne represented the twin poles in Beckett’s life, with Beckett himself gravitating from one to the other. It was ever more clear that even Joyce’s identification with Ireland at one remove was not going to work for the younger Anglo-Irishman. Beckett began to write poetry in French, asserting that any future poems would probably be in French, too. With hindsight, this looks almost like a declaration of allegiance. He was ‘already evolving in1938–9 specifically into a French writer’.8 He turned to writing in French as the language of his actual historical situation – for Beckett, immediate historical experience repeatedly manifested itself in and as language. He committed himself to Suzanne at the same point in time. Then, on 18 April 1939, just two weeks after de Valera had visited Mussolini in Rome and ten days after the Dáil Éireann had discussed the Irish policy of neutrality in European affairs, Beckett wrote that ‘If there is a war, and I fear there must be soon, I shall place myself at the disposition of this country’;9 by which, of course, he meant France. When war was declared, he was in Ireland, but set out immediately for Paris.
The Second World War began in September 1939. In May 1940, Hitler invaded France and the Low Countries. The German Blitzkrieg was devastatingly effective, and France surrendered on 22 June. For the French, the war was brief and disastrous, with 90,000 dead and nearly two million soldiers taken prisoner. But if the defeat was unexpected and humiliating, the German occupation was still more so. The country’s institutions fell apart. The Wehrmacht took over the north of France, and a new French government constituted itself in Vichy, in the unoccupied south, but with legal authority in both the northern and the ‘free zone’. Led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, it referred to itself as the French State, not the Republic, and to its reactionary programme as the National Revolution. Meanwhile, the French Resistance began its operations against both the Nazis and Vichy. In London, General Charles de Gaulle disputed the legitimacy of Vichy France and Pétain’s leadership, and claimed to incarnate the very spirit of France. De Gaulle’s Free French Forces carried on the struggle alongside British troops and in the French colonies. They joined in the Allied invasion of France, incorporating the Resistance as the French Forces of the Interior. Upon the dissolution of the Vichy regime, in June 1944, de Gaulle proclaimed the Provisional Government of the French Republic.
Our picture of France between 1940 and 1949, however, is no longer quite what it was. The flowering of Beckett criticism coincided with a revolution in the historical study of modern France of which Beckettians have so far taken little account.10 The ‘Paxtonian revolution’11 – initiated by the great American scholar Robert O. Paxton, and subsequently fomented by Maurice Rajsfus, Dominique Veillon, Henry Rousso, Roderick Kedward, Pierre Azéma and others – has had profound implications for French culture, chiefly in the past two decades. Among other developments, it led, for example, to the longest trial in French history, that of Maurice Papon, which finally ended in 1998, and at which some of the historians gave evidence; and, most starkly of all, in 1995, to President Jacques Chirac’s formal acknowledgement of the support the French State had given to the ‘criminal folly’ of the Nazis and, in its deportation of Jews, to the Final Solution.12 The Paxtonian revolution markedly changes the meaning of a set of terms (Vichy, the Resistance, the maquis, Gaullism, collaboration and so on) which define the period of French history in which Beckett came to prominence as a French writer. Unless we see him in relation to the work of these historians – as, in 1940–44, wandering through and surviving in a degraded France, then, in the late 1940s, devising his masterpiece, the Trilogy, in a France that had torn itself apart – we don’t quite get him at all.
The Liberation brought with it a relatively benign interpretation of the Nazi occupation of France that was well established by the 1950s and ‘supported by popular and scholarly opinion until the 1970s’.13 If, after 1945, France was inclined to mourn its recent past, political contradictions swiftly brought that process to a halt. These contradictions proved to be insuperable.14 Since reason could not resolve them, the French turned to myth. The mythic narrative presented the Vichy years as a historical parenthesis in which the French had been forced to compromise with a monstrous evil. According to this fable, Pétain had manfully shielded his country from a fate far grimmer than mere occupation. However, a small cabal of collaborators, notably prime minister Pierre Laval, had betrayed him and increasingly co-operated with the Nazis. Aside from the cabal and a few sympathizers, the French nation had been united in stubborn hostility and often active resistance to the invader.
The Paxtonian historians have shattered this myth. Vichy saw the French defeat as the result of the decay of the Republic, above all, under the leftist Popular Front in the 1930s. Its mission was therefore to regenerate France, not least by suppressing the ‘impure elements’ responsible for the alleged decay. It is now clear, for example, that Vichy repeatedly offered the Germans more assistance than they actually requested, notably with regard to the deportation of French Jews and the transportation of French workers. Vichy even sued to be part of Hitler’s New Order, but was turned down by the Führer himself. The consequence of Vichy policy, however, was deep division. In fact, France was riven by the occupation, and the rifts snake their way through French society till this day. According to Rousso, occupied France was actually in a state of savage ‘civil war’, notably but by no means only between Pétain’s paramilitary Milice and the Communists and Resistance.15
The historians, however, have also repeatedly shown that the old labels, like resistance and collaboration themselves, designate not homogeneous categories, but highly differentiated and ambivalent entities. There were ‘Vichyist-resisters’, for example. Many individuals changed allegiance very quickly during the progress of the war. Some historians have even questioned, or at least radically complicated, what Jean-Marie Guillon calls the ‘legendary’ history of the maquis,16 the armed resistance in the hills and forests, of which Beckett had some knowledge and a little experience. True, one or two scholars have recently also begun to wonder whether the concept of a uniformly myth-driven postwar France should not itself be questioned.17 It is nonetheless the case that the spectre of Vichy has yet to be altogether exorcized. As Conan and Rousso put matters, borrowing a phrase from German historian Emil Nolte, far from being an unfortunate historical aberration now mercifully buried, Vichy is a Vergangenheit, die nicht vergangen will, a past that refuses to lie down and die.18
Beckett’s wartime journey took him through a wide range of experiences of France, from the German occupation of Paris to the Resistance, Vichy France, the maquis, the Allied invasion and the Liberation. At the start of the war, he offered to drive an ambulance, but events overtook him. By early June, having neatly outflanked the Maginot line, the Wehrmacht was powering its way towards Paris. As the French government fled to Tours, so, too, Beckett and Suzanne fled, arriving in Vichy itself on 12 June. There they joined the Joyces in the Hôtel Beaujolais, which, by a quaint irony, was soon to be commandeered by government ministers, including Beckett’s old friend Georges Pelorson, who was to direct Vichy’s youth propaganda progamme. Pelorson was in Vichy when Beckett arrived, but his extreme views meant that their relationship had already cooled. From Vichy, Beckett and Suzanne travelled to Toulouse, along with many others in flight from the invader. Beckett possessed no formal proof of his nationality or status, and therefore ran the risk of ‘being detained indefinitely as an unregistered alien’.19 From Toulouse, he and Suzanne headed for Bordeaux, but were dumped at night in a rainswept Cahors, where Suzanne collapsed from exhaustion, and Beckett wept. They moved on to Arcachon. For all the presence of German troops, Beckett might have lived there comparatively untroubled. But it was not where his ties or his loyalties lay. So, in September, he and Suzanne returned to Paris.
Once back in the capital, of course, they had to bear with its despondency, its ration queues, its meagre resources and its German-controlled police. Many of Beckett’s old friends had left and not returned. But this was not the case with Alfred Péron. Péron introduced Beckett to the Resistance network known as ‘Gloria SMH’. It is characteristic of Beckett that he should have later played his Resistance work down and attached no great importance to it. He no doubt joined the Resistance partly because of his appalled awareness of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews (including, more and more, Parisian Jews). He also did it out of loyalty to friends. At the same time, it is important that he came to Resistance work via a normalien. French historians repeatedly emphasize how far, for men like Péron, joining the Resistance meant ‘a commitment made out of principle’, an act of faith, ‘a bet from which there was nothing to gain’ and which therefore ran counter to common sense.20 In this sense at least, the famous résistant Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie was right to claim that ‘one could only be a resister if one was maladjusted’.21 For the intellectual turned fighter, working for the Resistance also meant an intellectual choice, made according to an intellectual logic. In the case of normaliens, this logic evolved from the ‘granite point’ at which, however absurd one might appear, one knew oneself to be morally beyond all compromise. The supreme example of it was that great normalien Cavaillès, who was tortured, shot and buried as ‘unknown no. 5’ in 1944, and with whom Beckett had more in common than is often suspected.
Not that Beckett’s work for ‘Gloria’ was obviously very heroic. His job was to process information provided for him by agents, putting it in order, condensing and translating it so that it could then be miniaturized and sent on to London. Eventually, like Cavaillès’ network, ‘Gloria’ was betrayed, the man responsible being the great villain of the Beckett biography, the monster and churchman Robert Alesch. Beckett and Suzanne narrowly escaped the Gestapo. Others, including Péron, were not so fortunate. Beckett and Suzanne went into hiding in Paris. Their predicament was nerve-racking. A Jewish companion committed suicide. They sought refuge outside Paris with Nathalie Sarraute, with whom Beckett seems to have had a very Sarrautian relationship, thick with tension and half-suppressed dislike. He and Suzanne subsequently escaped to the ‘free zone’. They reached Vichy, where Beckett’s foreign passport and their lack of valid travel documents left them vulnerable.
Eventually, they arrived in Roussillon in the Vaucluse, not far from Avignon. Roussillon was not occupied by Germans, though there were Germans aplenty nearby, and a former résistant was not exactly safe. Nor of course were Jews, and, since either Beckett or Suzanne was often taken for Jewish, this, too, left them at risk. They bunkered down obscurely, making local friends, and worrying like the locals about the availability of food and clothing, especially footwear. They worked on farms, grubbed for potatoes, kept up with the news of Vichy and the war as best they could, and avoided German patrols. They were never far away from a world in which betrayals, denunciations and arbitrary violence were the order of the day. Meanwhile, Beckett worked on the novel Watt. In May 1944, he rejoined the Free Forces of the Interior, working with the local maquisards. Finally, in August, the Americans liberated the village.
Beckett distilled his wartime experience in his best-known work, the play En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), which he wrote in French in late 1948 and early 1949. As Dominique Veillon’s research makes clear, under Vichy, waiting was both a common and a significant experience.22 In wartime France, one waited interminably, whether it was for cartes d’alimentation or parachute drops. The word attente was very much a part of the universe of those who worked in the Resistance, and waiting was a constant feature of their everyday life.23 Beckett himself was clearly familiar with it as such. But the word attendant also evokes an attitude that was known as attentisme. The term was commonplace in Vichy France. Many if not most of the members of Beckett’s original Parisian audiences would have been aware of it.
There were many different positions within Vichy culture regarding the German occupation, involving widely different degrees of support, acquiescence and resistance. The word attentisme designated one set of them.24 Attentisme was the attitude of those who did not believe that ‘the Pétain experiment’ would succeed, but argued that there was no possibility of an immediate return to the battlefield. It was necessary to defer any final decision until the situation ‘clarified itself’. France should wait for the right moment ‘to jump back into war’.25 In reality, this frequently meant that it should wait until the Americans were obviously coming out on top. Versions of attentisme ranged from mild collaborationism to the cynicism of those aware that it would pay not to be associated with Vichy once the Allies landed. The term also designated stoical or foot-dragging attitudes within the Resistance itself:26 hence, in part, the historians’ revisions of the maquis legend. Attentisme involved a particular kind of ambiguity, and a particular disposition towards it. Paxton suggests that it was probably the philosophy of the majority of Frenchmen and women under Vichy.27 To intellectuals, radicals and anti-Fascists, it was the least objectionable position outside the Resistance.28 The Vichy government hated it.
One reason for this was that attentisme flouted if it did not actively oppose Vichy ideology. It took revenge on Petainism on behalf of the obstinately unreconstructed and resiliently commonplace strata of Vichy society. For Vichy called for the moral renewal of France.29 This involved bans on corrupting modern art (like jazz), and occasional book-burnings. It also involved a major programme for ‘the physical development and the moral revival of [the] race’.30 Vichy was notable for its youth movements, its promotion of group activities, physical education and outdoor sports. The aim was to improve the moral fibre of the French, particularly the young, and their sense of unity, discipline, hierarchy and community.31 Above all, however, as we noted earlier, the Vichy regime wanted to rid France of those marked out as a threat to French morale, the ‘impure elements’ infesting the nation. The principal ‘impurities’ were Jews, métèques, Freemasons, communists, gypsies, homosexuals and, in general, foreigners both real and ‘internal’, like Beckett himself. Vichy did it best to intern or deport them. Indigents and the stateless were amongst those most likely to find themselves in camps.
The baleful figure of Alexis Carrel looms particularly large in this. Carrel was a Nobel prizewinner and celebrity. He was also the guiding spirit of the Fondation Française pour l’Étude des Problèmes Humaines, created by Vichy decree in November 1941 to study, safeguard, improve and develop the French population via an ‘experimental science of man’.32 Carrel was a eugenicist. He was intent on countering what he took to be the organic decay of the French nation. He urged that this be effected by eugenic means. He argued the need for voluntary or forced sterilization or confinement for those suffering from natal insanity, maniac and depressive psychoses, hereditary epilepsy, blindness and other serious defects.33 Carrel went so far as to advocate gas chambers as a means of ridding humanity of its ‘inferior stock’.34 He enthusiastically praised the German government for its treatment of criminals and the mentally defective and diseased, and advocated the ‘suppression’ of such degenerate life-forms as soon as they proved ‘dangerous’.35 He promoted the anthropological study of peasants and immigrants (who were categorizable as either ‘desirable’ or ‘undesirable’) to help determine the ethnic features best suited to the French.
That Beckett was conscious of the invidiousness of Vichy policy, and probably also of Carrel, is clear from Lucky’s great monologue in En attendant Godot. Critics have often read this as absurdist gobbledygook. In fact, a rigorous moral logic underpins it. It is in large measure a reductio ad absurdum of Vichy ideology. The monologue takes, as its principal points of reference, empty academic or pseudo-scientific discourses of knowledge and discourses of cultural ‘improvement’. These clearly bear traces of Vichy: Lucky talks of ‘la culture physique de la pratique des sports’ (EAG, p. 38); ‘augmentation’ and élimination’ (ibid.) were key terms in the discourses dominant in Carrel’s Fondation. So, too, Lucky’s phrase ‘élimination des déchets’ suggests elimination of social trash as well as physical waste matter (ibid.). Whilst the nonsense Lucky produces is comic and even satirical, it also insists that Vichyite and eugenicist discourses are at best irrelevant to and at worst a noxious violation of limited, deficient, suffering human being. In effect, the monologue is a defence of indigent forms of humanity or, in Agamben’s terms, ‘bare life’.36
The historians of the Paxtonian revolution finally provide us with a description of Vichy France as profoundly traumatized, both by defeat and by Vichy policy itself. ‘All that remains’, said painter Jean Bazaine, in 1942, ‘is man confronting life’.37 ‘Everything was called into question’, writes Veillon.38 Jean-Pierre Rioux describes the culture of wartime France as one of ‘sufferings and privations’, ‘nomadic wanderings’, ‘all-too-obvious tragedies and ruined hopes’ – but also unexpected freedoms of thought.39 Marjorie Perloff argues very strikingly that Beckett’s Stories are about this condition.40 But to many of his French contemporaries, it was his great play, above all, that seemed to capture it exactly. En attendant Godot is rooted in life under Vichy, as Veillon’s account makes clear. Cartoons of broken-down bourgeois who look like tramps appear in the newspapers of the period.41 The concern with cold, footwear, ‘nourritures terrestres’, small scraps of that rarity, meat, violence perpetrated on outcasts, travel restrictions or the lack of them; the obsession with ‘faits anodins’, with the experience of being ‘engluée dans une banalité journalière’: all are in the play, and all were commonplace aspects of Vichy life, as they were of Beckett’s and Suzanne’s.42 So, too, were random manifestations of peremptory and brutal power, as embodied in the play in the relationship between Pozzo and Lucky. Beckett lodges En attendant Godot in a specific experience of historical deprivation.
A contemporary cartoon commenting on poverty under the Vichy regime.
‘Broken-down bourgeois who look like tramps’ in another Vichy cartoon.
More importantly, the play refuses to look beyond that experience. It rather insists on its significance, as opposed to the discourses of a bankrupt positivity. It offers us no superior perspective on and does not attempt to redeem the experience of deprivation. Beckett’s bleak, rich, abundant laughter identifies with collapsed and impotent creatures, with beings at the limits of their feeble capacities, with the myriad forms of depletion. The play takes an extravagant delight in Unfähigkeit, the fact of not being able, in the radical imperfection of ‘impure elements’. It resists any temptation to make practical use of uselessness. That is why political moralists like Brecht so distrusted it. In relishing a degree zero of point and purpose, in turning ordinary futility into a source of ample pleasure, En attendant Godot performs one of the most hallowed functions reserved for art. The same identification also makes the play attentiste, if comically and ironically. For all his own work with the Resistance, in En attendant Godot Beckett deliberately refuses to look beyond attentisme (which seems cognate with the fact that he set his work as a résistant at naught). This attitude was clearly connected to his experience in Roussillon. In all these respects, Godot is a fierce rejoinder to the inflated, humourless, inanely vicious discourses of Vichy ideology.
But it also stands haplessly against another drive. In the end, the suspect positivities at stake in the play are not merely Vichy’s. Beckett wrote the play in a climate of pompous Gaullist triumphalism, vigorous protestations of a morality of engagement (a term which Sartre had first put into circulation in 1945) and the cultural cleansing involved in the self-righteous and vindictive persecution of those thought to have worked with the enemy. France was determined to rid itself of shame, thereby swiftly achieving historical amnesia. Meanwhile, Carrel’s Fondation discreetly converted itself into the handsomely funded Institut National d’Études Démographiques, and continued and developed certain aspects of his work, still existing to this day. To understand this context, and grasp Beckett’s writings of the late 1940s as a response to it, we need to retrace our steps.