'A brief glow in the dark': Samuel Beckett's presence in modern Irish poetry.

One definition of 'Irish' that I liked a lot was Samuel Beckett's. When he was interviewed by a French journalist, the journalist said: 'Vous etes Anglais, Monsieur Beckett?'. To which Beckett replied: 'Au contraire'.

(Seamus Heaney) (1)

In 1982, the same year he harnessed Samuel Beckett's quip to define a notion of Irishness, Seamus Heaney protested at his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's anthology The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry by pointing out that his passport was green. It is somewhat surprising that Heaney would invoke Beckett in a discussion of Irish national identity, as the latter's attachment to the national colour--and much else--was rather problematic. A week after the 1931 publication of Beckett's first book, Proust, in Chatto & Windus's 'Dolphin' series, the editor Charles Prentice wrote to Beckett apologizing for the fact that the front cover was brown rather than green: 'Clearly I have been trying to steal you from Ireland.' (2) Beckett's answer, that he had 'not noticed whether the Dolphin was green or brown', represents an early instance of what would become a lifelong ambivalence towards his native country. (3) This studied indifference is evident again in 1938, when Beckett describes Routledge's 'effort to make an Irishman of me' in the blurb to his novel Murphy as 'touching'. (4) Such efforts largely disappeared, however, following his permanent departure from the 'land of my unsuccessful abortion' for France, where 'the little operation is cheap, safe, legal + popular', not to mention his adoption of French as his creative medium. (5) Resurfacing only briefly during the 1956 Dublin production of Waiting for Godot, Beckett remained largely outside further developments in Irish cultural events until the early 1970s. (6) The timing of this (re)integration into collective cultural consciousness naturally owes much to the award of the Nobel Prize in 1969, but is surely also related to the eruption of the Troubles in that same year. In a climate where questions of identity, place, and displacement, and the role of the artist within society were highly charged, many Irish poets looked to Beckett's experiences when wondering, as Paul Muldoon does in '7, Middagh Street', 'Which side was I on? | Not one, or both, or none.' (7) This development is somewhat like that observable in post-war Germany, where Adorno's essay 'Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen' made Beckett central to socio-cultural and philosophical debates over the role, and possibility, of art in a society irredeemably altered by the Holocaust. (8) Yet in contrast to the efforts of German sociologists and philosophers to set Beckett into a more abstract and universal context, in Ireland, creative writers have entered into a more textual dialogue with Beckett's work, in an effort to investigate their own roles in the Irish community. In this undertaking, they have concentrated on Beckett's writings as creative texts, not merely as philosophical texts, whereby their religious and political aspects as well as largely ignored parts of his oeuvre have been explored. Thus the neglected field of Beckett's poetry has been discussed by Irish poets, amongst others Derek Mahon, Thomas Kinsella, and David Wheatley, often in scholarly Beckett journals. This essay will trace and explore the presence of Beckett in modern Irish poetry, particularly in that of Derek Mahon.

Ruptures

The Irish revival of critical interest in Beckett's work in the 1970s started a process of reappropriation, leading, for example, to John Montague's solicitation of Beckett (a few months before his death in 1989) for a contribution to The Great Book of Ireland compiled by 'Poetry Ireland'. (9) The first, most important event in the process of reintroducing Beckett into Irish cultural discussions after the Second World War was the republication of his 1934 essay 'Recent Irish Poetry' in the fourth number of The Lace Curtain in 1971 by the poets Michael Smith and Trevor Joyce. Within this essay, originally published pseudonymously under the name Andrew Belis, Beckett divides the poetry of his time into two groups. He derides the poets of the Revival for being 'antiquarians, delivering with the altitudinous complacency of the Victorian Gael the Ossianic goods'. (10) In contrast, those writers acknowledging the 'rupture of the lines of communication' are championed. Against an insular literature, privileging Irish national experience and myth, Beckett advocates the European modernism of 'self-perception', which he detects in Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, and, to a lesser degree, in Thomas MacGreevy (Disjecta, p. 71).

Having laid most of his poetic peers, including Yeats, symbolically to rest in the acronymic essay 'RIP', Beckett continued in the thirties and beyond to attack both Ireland itself and those authors going through the 'Celtic drill of extraversion'--attacks more often than not crouched in 'bog' imagery (Disjecta, p. 73). Thus the revivalists, derided in the 'Recent Irish Poetry' essay as mechanically delivering 'segment after segment of cut-and-dried sanctity and loveliness', are personified in Murphy (1938) as Austin Ticklepenny (a thinly disguised Austin Clarke), whose 'duty to Erin' is to write poetry 'bulging with as many minor beauties from the Gaelic prosodoturfy as could be sucked out of a mug of Beamish's porter'. (11) Indeed, Murphy's prime fear is of 'falling among Gaels', and Beckett's mordant attacks on Ireland in that novel and elsewhere are sufficiently well known and need not be rehearsed here. That Beckett's distaste for national myths was not restricted to his inability to comprehend a 'phrase like "The Irish People"' is evident from diary entries noted during his journey through Nazi Germany in 1936-37, as in the statement that 'the expressions "historical necessity" + "Germanic destiny" start the vomit moving upwards'. (12) Yet it would be misleading to think of Beckett as entirely shunning the Irish cultural scene of the thirties. Although his critical attitudes to his native country even drove a wedge into his friendship with the 'Ireland-haunted' MacGreevy, Beckett was eager to be published not only in Parisian but also Irish literary magazines. (13) Indeed, the editor of The Dublin Magazine, Seumas O'Sullivan, must have deemed Beckett to be integrated sufficiently to propose that he take over the editorship of the magazine. (14)

Most importantly, it was Beckett's anti-national stance, his emphasis on an investigation of the complexities of individual existence, within and without society, that proved to be of interest to modern Irish poets. When Derek Mahon, in his 1970 essay 'Poetry in Northern Ireland', registered an impatience with Irish poets being 'either unwilling or unable to come to terms with the "twentieth century"', he was echoing Beckett's 1934 call for a revision of the diseased relationship between literary text, the artist, and social reality. (15) John Montague noted the necessity of shifting the focus for artistic creation when he 'advocat[ed] a deliberate program of denationalization' as 'all true experiments and exchanges only serve to illuminate the self, a rediscovery of the oldest laws of the psyche'. (16) Already in his 1956 review of Waiting for Godot, Patrick Kavanagh praised Beckett for confronting the lack of 'over-all purpose' underlying the 'human condition', whereas 'the "Ireland" writers continued as if nothing had happened'; specifically, that they continued to write a national literature 'as if society were a solid unified Victorian lie'. (17) It is precisely this distrust of any national cultural ideas, indeed the disavowal of any possibility of unifying or clarifying the individual and historical chaos, which lies behind the appeal of Beckett's essay in the 1970s, at a time when this very emphasis on societal coherence was disintegrating into sectarian violence. (18) This distrust of historical propositions is visible in much of the poetry written during the decade, as in Paul Muldoon's 'History': 'And into the room where MacNeice wrote "Snow",| Or the room where they say he wrote "Snow".' (19)

Despite the longing to be 'through with history' in Mahon's 'The Last of the Fire Kings', the pressures of living within a community cannot be ignored; as Derek Mahon emphasizes in his early poem 'Glengormley': 'By | Necessity if not choice, I live here too.' (20) This ineradicable relationship gives rise to the pervasive quest to come to terms with notions of place and displacement, and provokes questions regarding the autonomy of art. If Mahon states that 'my mind must learn to know its place' in the poem 'Spring in Belfast', it is because

      this desperate city
   Should engage more than my casual interest,
   Exact more interest than my casual pity.

   (Collected Poems, p. 13)

'Here is my only elsewhere'

Beckett's 'artist who stakes his being is from nowhere, has no kith', encapsulates the necessary rootlessness and solitariness of the artist. (21) Indeed, in an attempt to liberate themselves from cultural confines, many modern poets left Ireland at one time, only to return: journeys of this kind are recorded in poems such as Muldoon's 'Why Brownlee Left' or Mahon's 'Afterlives'. For Mahon, the example of Beckett's imaginative 'nowhere' has proved particularly enticing, frequently assuming a cultural orientation that avoids regional (Belfast) or national identification, let alone membership of an artistic 'school'. (22) In an open letter published in The Irish Times (16 July 1987), Mahon revealingly disassociated himself from the 'Belfast Group' by stating that at that time he was 'sitting in Dublin reading Graves, Crane and Beckett'.

Yet Beckett's path towards exile was not one sustained easily. Molloy's 'it's misery to stay, misery to go' reveals a tension not easily resolved by geographical dislocations. (23) But ultimately, living in a foreign country was always preferable to what All that Fall terms the 'lingering dissolution' felt in Ireland, an atmosphere not conducive (in Beckett's eyes at least) to artistic creation. (24) Beckett's statement that he would merely have sat around in pubs had he stayed in Dublin was substantiated by his experience in 1956 of sitting 'with Paddy Kavanagh for 2 hours while he drank 10 whiskies, one lung and all'. (25) Nevertheless, as Thomas Kinsella succinctly discerned in an essay on Beckett's poetry, 'it is the act of uprooting that matters', so much so that 'it would not have mattered whether Beckett had stayed at home or left'. (26) Indeed, in the 1930s, Beckett was sporadically what Paul Durcan in his poem 'Ireland 1977' described as a 'native who is an exile in his native land'. (27) What is of importance, then, is the self-examination of the uprooted mind, whether this be within a literal or metaphorical framework.

The struggle with this 'elsewhere' is manifest in Mahon's poetry, which frequently invokes the yearning for other places:

   The Muse is somewhere
   Else, not here
   by this frozen lake--

   ('Ovid in Tomis', Collected Poems, p. 161)

Within an intratextual dialogue, Mahon responds to this urge to transcend in 'A Garage in Co. Cork' with the realization that 'we might be anywhere but are in one place only' (Collected Poems, p. 131). Echoing Beckett's 'here is my only elsewhere' in The Unnamable, literal displacement is replaced by the metaphorical creation of an alternative literary context, by entering into what Mahon's The Yellow Book calls a 'forest of intertextuality' (Collected Poems, p. 239). (28)

In a 1977 review of the Collected Poems in English and French entitled 'The Existentialist Lyric', Mahon pointed out that Beckett's 'work owes its beginnings to a quite different set of premises from that to which the English poet is accustomed'. (29) Yet these premises may also encompass an 'Irish Beckett', as Beckett's notebooks from the thirties reveal that he drew on all European cultures, including both the Irish and the English. Mahon is surely right to draw attention to the French influences upon Beckett, just as his own work owes much to both continental and American literature. This openness towards other literary contexts aligns Mahon with Beckett's project, and in published reviews and interviews Mahon has repeatedly admitted being drawn to Beckett's work, an admiration resisting 'conventional Samolatry' but grounded in a comprehensive knowledge of his texts. (30)

'Soul landscapes'

Although Mahon's work is more firmly rooted in a recognizably external world, his imaginative debt to Beckett is founded upon his characteristic use of imagery. When Terence Brown mentioned the 'imagery of loneliness and desolation, bleak landscapes' pervading his poetry, Mahon pointed to 'what Beckett in his appendix to Watt calls "soul landscape"'. (31) Mahon had already some years previously discussed this very passage in a 1976 review of John Pilling's Samuel Beckett, where its 'highly pictorial quality' is discerned. (32) The passage in Beckett's 'Addenda' certainly evokes an atmosphere that can be found in Mahon's own texts: the interplay between dark and light, 'waste', and silence are all pervasive themes in the poet's oftentimes bleak landscapes and seascapes and urban devastations.

In 'An Image from Beckett' Mahon confesses to being 'haunted | By that landscape' glimpsed in an 'instant' before 'darkness once again' (Collected Poems, p. 40). The title of the poem reveals the importance of Beckett to Mahon's poetics. Having described Beckett as 'an intensely musical writer as well as an imagistic one', the poem offers precisely such a snapshot of an epiphanic moment (Journalism, p. 59):

   A northern landscape
   And a huddle
   Of houses along the shore.

   Also, I think, a white
   Flicker of gulls
   And washing hung to dry--

Transporting Beckett's 'waste' to a Northern Irish coastline, the minimalist style here corresponds to what Mahon perceives in Beckett's How It Is to be 'a matter of texture rather than incident'. (33)

In understanding Beckett's writing as 'painterly prose' and poetry, Mahon anticipated what has become one of the prime fields of study in Beckett Studies (Journalism, p. 63). As manuscript material has become available, the extent of Beckett's substantial knowledge of the visual and plastic arts has been revealed. Indeed, if Beckett was never 'happy with a picture till it was literature', so too his own writing could not be literature without the casting of striking images. (34) Furthermore, the encounter with art enabled Beckett to clarify, shape, and formulate his aesthetic preoccupations and find new approaches to his writing. Yet unlike many modern Irish poets such as Mahon, Paul Muldoon, or Paul Durcan, Beckett never wrote poems or fiction about specific paintings, although his work frequently alludes to, or was inspired by, the visual arts. (35) Thus Beckett's French poem 'bon bon il est un pays' (1947-49) draws on Geer van Velde's work and was designed to accompany an exhibition by that painter, yet was non-specific enough to be reused for an Avigdor Arikha exhibition. (36) Whereas Muldoon's use of the visual arts has frequently been pursued via allusion, Derek Mahon in particular has periodically turned paintings into poetry. The narrative and psychological potential of pictures is explored in poems such as 'Girls on the Bridge' (after Munch) or 'Courtyards in Delft' (after Pieter de Hooch). Yet it is the poem 'Edvard Munch / The Studio', based on a photograph of Munch's studio, which reveals yet another Beckettian background:

The studio's photo connected for me with a phrase in a review by Beckett of a Jack Yeats exhibition; the being in the room when it happens in the street, the being in the street when it happens in the room. [...] The phrase in turn suggested the oblique, and possibly escapist relationship of the Artist to his historical circumstances, particularly where those circumstances include a violent upheaval. (37)

Beyond addressing once again the dichotomy between artist and community through a Beckettian filter, the poem registers the hermeticism of the artist's workshop in the inactivity of its contents:

   You would think with so much going on outside
   The deal table would make for the window,
   The ranged crockery freak and wail
   Remembering its dark origins, the frail
   Oil-cloth, in a fury of recognitions,
   Disperse in a thousand directions.

   (Collected Poems, p. 36)

Anthropomorphized into a kind of entropic passivity, the room is instead filled with

      this quivering silence
   In which, day by day, the play
   Of light and shadow (shadow mostly)
   Repeats itself, though never exactly.

There is a sense of diminution here, from the movement of the objects and the oscillating light to something approaching, but never achieving, rest: silence is not absolute and darkness withheld. Just as the human element is evoked yet absent, the poem is located between two poles, in what Beckett's 'Recent Irish Poetry' calls the 'space that intervenes' (Disjecta, p. 70). This inbetweenness is observable in many Mahon poems and also echoes the Beckettian refusal of ending. This is visible in 'Exit Molloy' (which forms the last part of the poem 'Breton Walks'), another piece that clearly takes its bearings from Beckett. Here Mahon imaginatively recasts the end of the first part of Molloy, where the eponymous protagonist stumbles into a ditch and seemingly awaits his end. Although Mahon's Molloy admits to being 'now at the end' or even 'already dead', existential finality is suspended by the last line: 'But still I can hear the birds sing on over my head' (Collected Poems, p. 22). Adopting the impossibility of ending, of being still but stirring still, so bedevilling Beckett's characters, Mahon's interest here is in enriching the pictorial texture of the scene. Although most of the details in the poem correspond to Beckett's text, and the style of writing is itself unadorned, Mahon enlarges the sense of foreboding with a reference to a tolling bell, which does not appear in the conclusion to the first part of Beckett's Molloy. (38)

Mahon must be particularly attracted to this passage from Molloy, as it reappears in 'Beyond Howth Head' with the reference to the 'ditch' 'where once Molloy, uncycled, heard | thin cries of a surviving bird' (Collected Poems, p. 55). There is within this Beckettian scene a concentration of various themes corresponding to Mahon's thematic and aesthetic project: Molloy's emblematic fall towards extinction and the apocalyptic atmosphere is contrasted by the 'surviving bird'. Birds literally pervade Mahon's poetry and are often seen as redemptive creatures (as in 'Bird Sanctuary'), and here the bird not only evokes the (albeit meagre, considering its 'thin cries') possibility of flight denied to the 'uncycled' Molloy, but also acts as the symbolic foreteller of an end, just as the bells had done in 'Exit Molloy'. Moreover, the speaker of 'Beyond Howth Head' specifically partakes in Molloy's situation by admitting 'I too, uncycled'.

The same cluster of themes evident in this textual dialogue can be found in Mahon's discussion of the 'luminous and compelling' Beckett poem 'Saint-Lo' (1946) in the 1984 essay 'A Noise Like Wings: Beckett's Poetry' (Journalism, pp. 50-54). (39)

   Vire will wind in other shadows
   unborn through the bright ways tremble
   and the old mind ghost-forsaken
   sink into its havoc.

Having commented upon the 'picturesque evocation of landscape' in the first line, Mahon proceeds to state that 'with the introspection of the next and last two lines we move abruptly into a post-lapsarian, indeed apocalyptic sphere, where the landscape is rather one by Max Ernst [...] and the music by Ligeti'. What is striking here, beyond the repeated comprehension of Beckett via music and the visual arts, is the acknowledged apocalypticism also suffusing Mahon's poetry. Universal dereliction, bleakness, and the encroaching darkness of extinction are both implied and explicated in poems such as 'Dark Country'. Often a departure of humanity is envisaged, without regret, and the process of natural reclamation, as in 'The Antigone Riddle':

   Shy minerals contract at the sound of his voice,
   Cod point in silence when his bombers pass,
   And the windfall waits
   In silence for his departure
   Before it drops in
   Silence to the long grass.

   (Collected Poems, p. 66)

Whether a post-apocalyptic landscape is evoked or the threat of engulfing darkness registered, the poems seem to hover on precarious edges. (40) They owe as much to Camus's plague ('never imagined the plague to come' in 'Death and the Sun') (41) as to the lonely and deserted landscape surrounding the last bastion of humanity in Beckett's Endgame.

Mahon's posthumous and entropic scenarios undoubtedly stem from a perception of existence as being irredeemably connected to what 'Glengormley' terms 'metaphysical pain' (Collected Poems, p. 14). Giving voice to this anxiety is a motivating force behind Mahon's poetry. Moreover, for him, it is the only justification for writing poetry at all, as his comments on the older generation of Irish poets in his introduction to The Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry clarify:

Their assumptions and credulities were those of the Irish country people of the time; and the Irish, for many years, returned the poets' reverence with reverence for a poetry which evaded the metaphysical unease in which all poetry of lasting value has its source. (42)

It is surely not coincidental that the sentiment and terminology here is reminiscent of Beckett's essay 'Recent Irish Poetry', where the antiquated writers are similarly attacked for 'evading the bankrupt relationship' and the 'breakdown' of the subject and object (Disjecta, p. 75). That Mahon equates his 'metaphysical unease' with this very defunct relationship is illustrated in his 1977 essay on Beckett, proposing that the schism between subject and object is not a 'social and cultural phenomenon' but 'rather a metaphysical disjunction' (Journalism, p. 56). I would argue that it is precisely within this 'disjunction' that Mahon's poetry manoeuvres, between the 'smells of spring' and the 'dark ditch' where Molloy lies 'wintering'. The shifting borders of this sphere are indicated by the use of light, usually a twilight light, which offers a last moment of respite before, as in the poem 'Girls in their Seasons', 'we go plunging into the dark for ever'. (43) It is this moment occurring immediately before this apocalyptic threshold, and what may remain thereafter, that interests both Mahon and Beckett. In 'An Image from Beckett' there is a last glimmer of light before darkness falls

   This, I have left my will.
   I hope they have time,
   And light enough, to read it.

   (Collected Poems, p. 41)

There is a bleak sense of foreboding here, a finiteness that offers no escape routes, no hope for transcendence. Indeed, although the messianic and millenarian discourse in Mahon's poetry carries religious overtones, it is one offering no palliative for a sense of abandonment. Either God is absent, or the gods have been banished, and are thus reduced to 'promising nothing under the sun' ('Ecclesiastes', Collected Poems, p. 35). Yet the desolate imagery, the displacement and the introspection at the heart of Mahon's writing has frequently been viewed as a product of a marginalized Protestant (Ulster) heritage; a background, moreover, that is cited when establishing a Protestant line from Beckett via Louis MacNeice to Mahon. Yet MacNeice was one of the first to show that Beckett, although surely a religious writer, was more fruitfully regarded as being concerned (in The Unnamable) with 'the metaphysical territory that we find in the more esoteric Hindu scriptures or in the accounts of the Negative Way given by Christian mystics'. (44) MacNeice's approach here has in recent years been substantiated by extended studies of Beckett's relationship with various spiritual fields. Yet, if anything, we could term Beckett's attitude an individual form of secular quietism, drawn from his reading of Schopenhauer, Thomas a Kempis's Imitation of Christ, and the Occasionalist philosopher Geulincx. Such a quietist attitude can equally be detected in Mahon:

   Meanwhile the given life goes on;
   There is nothing new under the sun.

   ('The Sea in Winter', Collected Poems, p. 45)

The scriptural allusion (Ecclesiastes 1.9), which echoes the first line of Beckett's novel Murphy, coupled with an existence mechanically taking its course, offers a resigned acknowledgement of the cosmic indifference to the small world of humanity. (45) The same sentiment is also visible in Beckett's Endgame, when Clov responds to Hamm's question 'What's happening?' with 'Something is taking its course.' (46) The absence of the gods, and the sense of life as something that must be endured, resurface in Mahon's poem 'Tithonus':

   The irony here
   Is that I survive
   While the gods

   Who so decreed,
   And so many more,
   Are long since dead. (47)

Mahon is here rewriting the story, with a sideways glance to Tennyson's poem of the same name, of the Greek figure who was granted immortality by Zeus at the request of Eos. Yet having forgotten to demand perpetual youth, Tithonus grew older and more decrepit by the day. Condemned to disintegrating immortality, he begged for death and was eventually turned into a cicada. Sparely written and located where 'nature is dead', the poem is both stylistically and thematically Beckettian, and it thus comes as no surprise that one of the epigraphs stems from The Unnamable: 'Worm will see the light in the desert.' (48) The failed strategy of termination also carries echoes of Hamm and Clov playing out a routine in Endgame, or The Unnamable's concluding 'you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on'. Beckett often referred to this facet of the human condition by way of Schopenhauer's pensum. Even the element of telling a story to pass the time, as Malone does in Malone Dies, is incorporated into Mahon's poem:

   But if I told
   Everything in detail--[...]
   I would need
   Another eternity,
   Perish the thought. (49)

Even the humorous aside here in the last line is straight out of Beckett, as is Tithonus's envy of Endymion, who in contrast was granted 'eternal youth' yet 'placed in a coma | To obviate insomnia'.

These are the 'terminal ironies' (in 'Rage for Order') that remain necessary in the face of Belfast's burning buses, the dark humour that mounts a defence against the otherwise bleak circumstances (Collected Poems, p. 47). It is the redeeming value of the humorous elements of Beckett's work that have often been acknowledged, as in Kavanagh's use in 'The Mermaid Tavern' of Beckett's iconic dustbins in Endgame:

   Beckett's garbage-can
   Contains all our man
   Who without fright on his face
   Dominates the place
   And makes all feel
   That all is well. (50)

Far from letting bleakness take over, there is a striving towards equilibrium and even moments of epiphany within Beckett's writing, which more often than not comes from his unflinching gaze, a refusal to close one's eyes despite the darkness. When Vladimir, in Waiting for Godot, points to the fact that one of the thieves was saved, the other damned, he is addressing both the harsh reality of damnation and the possibility of salvation. Mahon similarly posits (in 'Spring in Belfast') that 'we could all be saved', and his poems include redemptive moments which equally occur amidst scenes of bleakness (Collected Poems, p. 13):

   Yet there are mornings when,
   Even in midwinter, sunlight
   Flares, and a rare stillness
   Lies upon roof and garden--

   ('North Wind in Portrush', Collected Poems, p. 100)

Stillness, a coming to rest, is something aspired to in many of Mahon's poems, and more often than not it is the silence which the universe achieves after the departure of humanity that is celebrated. 'My consolation | Will be the unspoilt paper when you have gone', says Mahon's table in 'The Drawing Board Talk', implying that art itself is what Beckett called a 'stain on silence' (Collected Poems, p. 125). With his 'doubts | about this verse-making', Mahon enters that entire Beckettian aesthetic stratum predicated on writing oneself from the page; a strategy of erasure moreover which accommodates the fundamental misgivings Beckett has about the aptitude of language to convey any meaning. (51) Yet as Beckett famously stated in the 'Three Dialogues', even if 'there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express', there remains the 'obligation to express', whereby the source of this obligation forms the focus of artistic enquiry (Disjecta, p. 139). If Mahon in 'Heraclitus on Rivers' similarly defines the notion of language as something that will pass away along with everything else on that impending, apocalyptic day, it is with a concomitant feeling of necessity towards poetry, however flawed its tools, to witness its own dissolution and, as we have seen, the running down of the world, of existence. This is evidenced by the second epigraph to Mahon's poem 'Tithonus', taken from the Book of Kings: 'and after the fire a still small voice'. As in Beckett's Trilogy and the late prose, Mahon's 'residual poetry' seems to be wrestled from the encroaching neant and silence. (52) Moreover, there also remains a residual delight in 'lyric lunacy' ('A Curious Ghost', Collected Poems, p. 62) in Mahon, just as what John Montague in the poem 'Salute, in passing, for Sam' terms Beckett's 'icy human mathematics' is conveyed in an often wonderfully poetic style. (53)

'Forbidden poetry'

Beckett has been acknowledged and praised by many modern Irish poets for his integrity as a writer, for confronting the human condition with all its vicissitudes and complexities, for writing How It Is. Louis MacNeice thus acknowledges Beckett's project of 'articulating (which is not quite the right word) questions that have no answer--but merely to put these questions is a worthwhile gesture'. (54) Paul Muldoon serves up a veritable Best of 'His Nibs Sam Bethicket' in the poem 'Incantata' when 'trying to make sense' of the refusal of the artist and Thomist Mary Farl Powers to accept standard medical treatment during her final illness. (55) And Seamus Heaney has located Beckett's 'poetic genius' in 'not flinching from the ultimate bleakness of things' and going on 'to do something positive with the bleakness'. (56) Yet it is Derek Mahon who has, more than any other Irish poet (and possibly any other poet), integrated Beckett into the very texture of his writing.

Mahon's affinity with Beckett is primarily cultural and aesthetic, and as in the case of Heaney and MacNeice, part of this affinity is predicated upon an awareness of Beckett's artistic integrity in writing against the grain. His sensitivity to Beckett's formal aspects and exhausted language is evident in his translations (or transpositions) from the French of eight of Beckett's Mirlitonnades (1976-78). (57) The proximity of their artistic projects can further be seen in statements the two writers made about their writing:

Now, poetry written with permission in warm spaces, there's far too much of that--and that is the voice of community. What interests me is forbidden poetry written by solitaries in the cold, written by solitaries in the open, which is where the human soul really is. That for me is where poetry really is.

(Interview with Mahon, 1995) (58)

My little exploration is that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable--as something by definition incompatible with art.

(Interview with Beckett, 1956) (59)

The shared poetic exploration therefore is to bring light to the hidden depths of being, a charting of the interior topography, or the 'soul landscape'. Beckett gives Mahon a position from which to proceed, as he states in the poem 'Beyond Howth Head':

   The pros outweigh the cons that glow
   from Beckett's bleak reductio--
   and who would trade self-knowledge for
   a prelapsarian metaphor,
   love-play of the ironic conscience
   for a prescriptive innocence?

   (Collected Poems, p. 53)

The key word here is 'glow', for as in 'An Image from Beckett', it is the moment of illumination, derived from Beckett's 'rare vision' struggling against the darkness (Journalism, p. 60). Mahon ends his 1976 essay 'Sam's Think' by referring to the 'brief scattered lights' of Malone Dies, and proceeds to quote a line from Beckett's work equally applicable to his own poetics: 'They were things that scarcely were, on the confines of silence and dark, and soon ceased' (Journalism, p. 60). (60) It encapsulates Mahon's hope, expressed in 'The Sea in Winter':

      One day,
   perhaps, the words will find their mark
   and leave a brief glow in the dark,

   effect mutations of dead things
   into a form that nearly sings--
   waste paper left to indicate
   our long day's journey into night. (61)

For permission to quote from unpublished material, I am grateful to the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading, The Board of Trinity College Dublin, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and in particular for his overall consent Mr Edward Beckett on behalf of the Estate of Samuel Beckett.

(1) Seamus Heaney in an interview with Frank Kinahon, Critical Inquiry 8.3 (Spring 1982), 405-14 (p. 407). Beckett's reply frequently resurfaces in Irish cultural debates, and has most recently been used by Tom Paulin in his poem 'On Being Dealt the Anti-Semitic Card' (Guardian, 8 January 2003), where it is interpreted and employed as evidence of an anti-national sentiment on Beckett's part.

(2) Letter from Charles Prentice to Beckett, 12 March 1931, Reading University Library (hereafter RUL), MS2444 (CW24/9).

(3) Letter from Beckett to Charles Prentice, 13 March 1931, RUL MS2444 (CW24/9).

(4) Letter from Beckett to George Reavey, 8 March 1938, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (hereafter HRHRC).

(5) Letter from Beckett to Arland Ussher, 20 December 1938 (HRHRC).

(6) Having read Leventhal's article in The Dublin Magazine which argued against an 'Irish reading' of the play, Beckett wrote to his friend that he could not 'see any more than you in what the play is particularly Irish', pointing to 'some Irishisms in the translation liable to mislead' (letter from Beckett to A. J. Leventhal, 26 January 1956 (HRHRC)).

(7) Paul Muldoon, New Selected Poems 1968-1994 (London: Faber, 1996), p. 129. The Troubles provoked Beckett's most overt political statements in interviews, telling Mel Gussow, for example, 'Get the British out of Ireland' (Mel Gussow: Conversations with (and about) Samuel Beckett (London: Nick Hern, 1996), p. 52).

(8) See Werner Huber, 'Notes on Beckett's Reception in Germany', in The Crows behind the Plow: History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Poetry and Drama, ed. by Geert Lernout (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), pp. 29-39.

(9) John Montague, 'A Few Drinks and a Hymn: My Farewell to Samuel Beckett', New York Times, 17 April 1994. Beckett's choice of the poem 'Da tagte es', written in 1934, is an interesting one:

   redeem the surrogate goodbyes
   the sheet astream in your hand
   who have no more for the land
   and the glass unmisted above your eyes

(Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems in English and French (New York: Grove Press, 1977), p. 27).

(10) Samuel Beckett, 'Recent Irish Poetry', in Disjecta, ed. by Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), p. 70.

(11) Samuel Beckett, Murphy (London: Calder, 1993), p. 53; 'Recent Irish Poetry', in Disjecta, p. 71, with the 'sanctity and loveliness' of course coming from Yeats's 'Coole and Ballylee, 1931'. See also Beckett's First Love on the importance of 'history's ancient faeces': 'Wherever nauseated time has dropped a nice fat turd you will find our patriots, sniffing it up on all fours, their faces on fire' (London: Calder & Boyars, 1973), pp. 30-31.

(12) Letter from Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy, 31 January 1938 (Trinity College Library, Dublin (hereafter TCD), MS10402); Samuel Beckett: 'German Diaries', entry for 15 January 1937 (RUL).

(13) Letter from Beckett to Mary Manning Howe, undated [December 1937] (HRHRC).

(14) Letter from Beckett to MacGreevy, 9 September 1936. In The Irish Literary Periodical 1923-1958 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), Frank Shovlin does not discuss Beckett in connection with pre-war periodicals, dismissing Beckett as one of the authors who has gone into exile.

(15) Derek Mahon, 'Poetry in Northern Ireland', Twentieth Century Studies, 4 (November 1970), 89-93.

(16) John Montague, The Figure in the Cave and other Essays, ed. by A. Quinn (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1989), p. 219.

(17) Patrick Kavanagh, 'Some Reflections on Waiting for Godot', Irish Times, 28 January 1956, repr. in Peter Kavanagh, Sacred Keeper: A Biography of Patrick Kavanagh (Curragh: Goldsmith Press, 1979), pp. 296-97. There is a striking similarity in terminology adopted by Kavanagh here and by Beckett in 'Recent Irish Poetry': both turn against heroes and academics and compare contemporary literature with Victorian attitudes. For an illuminating discussion of the relationship between Kavanagh and Beckett, see Declan Kiberd's 'Beckett and Kavanagh: Comparatively Absurd?', in Hermathena, 141 (Winter 1986), 45-55.

(18) See 'German Diaries' entry for 15 January 1937 (RUL): 'I am not interested in a "unification" of the historical chaos any more than I am in the "clarification" of the individual chaos'.

(19) Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998, p. 87.

(20) Derek Mahon, Collected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1999), p. 14.

(21) Samuel Beckett, 'Homage to Jack B. Yeats' (1954), in Disjecta, p. 149.

(22) See, for example, Mahon's (and Peter Fallon's) dismissal of the existence of a distinct 'Northern' poetry in the introduction to The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. xx.

(23) Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder, 1959), p. 42. See also the Addenda to Beckett's Watt (1953): 'For all the good that frequent departures out of Ireland had done him, he might just as well have stayed there' (London: Calder, 1998), p. 249.

(24) Samuel Beckett, All that Fall (London: Faber, 1965), p. 10-11.

(25) Letter from Beckett to Aidan Higgins, 23 November 1956 (HRHRC). Compare Beckett in conversation with Martin Esslin: 'If I were in Dublin I would just be sitting around in a pub', quoted in Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), p. 265.

(26) Thomas Kinsella, 'Poems of Samuel Beckett', Journal of Beckett Studies, 2.2 (Spring 1993), 15-18 (p. 16-17).

(27) Paul Durcan, A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems (London: Harvill, 1993), p. 40.

(28) Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, p. 406. See also Hugh Haughton's insightful discussion, '"The Importance of Elsewhere": Mahon and Translation', in The Poetry of Derek Mahon, ed. by Elmer Kennedy-Andrews (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 2002).

(29) Derek Mahon, 'The Existentialist Lyric', in Journalism; Selected Prose 1970-1995 (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1996), p. 56.

(30) Derek Mahon, 'A Noise like Wings: Beckett's Poetry' (1984), in Journalism, p. 50. Mahon's Poems 1962-1978 incidentally elicited words of praise from Beckett (letter from Samuel Beckett to Derek Mahon, 26 May 1982 (Derek Mahon Papers, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University)).

(31) Terence Brown, 'An Interview with Derek Mahon', Poetry Ireland Review, 14 (Autumn 1985), p. 19.

(32) Derek Mahon, 'Sam's Think', in Journalism, p. 58.

(33) Derek Mahon, 'A Tribute to Beckett on his Eightieth Birthday' (1986), in Journalism, p. 63.

(34) Letter from Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy, 28 November 1936 (TCD).

(35) Beckett for example cited Kaspar David Friedrich's painting Two Men Observing the Moon as a visual influence on Waiting for Godot. See James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 378. See also Edna Longley's discussion of the relationship between painting and modern Irish poetry: 'No more poems about paintings?', in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. by Michael Kenneally (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1992), pp. 90-111.

(36) I am grateful to John Pilling for this information.

(37) Derek Mahon, 'Edvard Munch', in Choice, ed. by Desmond Egan and Michael Hartnett (Curragh: Goldsmith Press, 1999), p. 80. This quote does not appear in the 'Homage' written for a Yeats exhibition in 1954, but in Beckett's 1945 review of MacGreevy's book on Yeats (Disjecta, p. 97).

(38) Molloy does however hear a gong in the forest, before falling into the ditch (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, p. 89).

(39) 'Saint-Lo' is included in a list of fourteen poems by Beckett that Mahon finds worthy of interest, and it is striking that whereas the more typically 'modernist' and lengthier pieces such as Whoroscope are missing from the list, those selected are marked by brevity.

(40) In an interview Mahon acknowledged that it is 'important for me to be on the edge' [In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland by John Brown (Cliffs of Moher: Salmon, 2002), p. 124].

(41) Derek Mahon, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 192.

(42) The Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. by Derek Mahon (London: Sphere, 1970), p. 14.

(43) Derek Mahon, Poems 1962-1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 24.

(44) Louis MacNeice, Varieties of Parable; The Clark Lectures 1963 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 146.

(45) The first sentence of Murphy reads: 'The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new' (p. 5). Note that this biblical line contradicts the dictum of Heraclitus: 'The sun is new every day'. The element of flux inherent in the world-view of Heraclitus is a theme in both Beckett and Mahon (as in the poem 'Heraclitus on Rivers').

(46) Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986), p. 107.

(47) Mahon, Selected Poems, p. 168.

(48) Selected Poems, pp. 168-69; Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, p. 369.

(49) Selected Poems, pp. 169-70. Compare Molloy: 'For if you set out to mention everything you would never be done' (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, p. 41).

(50) The Complete Poems of Patrick Kavanagh, ed. by Peter Kavanagh (New York: Peter Kavanagh Hand Press, 1972), p. 331.

(51) Mahon, Selected Poems, p. 116.

(52) Derek Mahon, 'Going Home', in Poems 1962-1978, p. 63.

(53) John Montague, Collected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1995), p. 231.

(54) Louis MacNeice, 'Godot on Television', New Statesman, 7 July 1961.

(55) Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968-1998, pp. 332, 336.

(56) Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971-2001 (London: Faber, 2002), p. 328.

(57) Derek Mahon, 'Burbles (after Samuel Beckett)', in Hermathena, 156 (Summer 1994), 59-60.

(58) Interview with John Brown, in In the Chair, p. 124.

(59) Samuel Beckett in interview with Israel Shenker, 1956, quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 772.

(60) Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, p. 207.

(61) Mahon, Selected Poems, p. 117.

MARK NIXON

University of Reading