reburial in Ireland;39 four years later, in 1952, Beckett is recommending to a friend that he should look out Yeats’s and Synge’s Deirdre plays, pointing to Yeatsian references when the subject of Ireland comes up with his correspondents; responding to requests, such as Cyril Cusack’s, for a Beckett response to a Shaw festival with the famous line: ‘What I would do is give the whole unupsettable apple-cart for a sup of the Hawk’s well, or the Saints’, or a whiff of Juno, to go no further.’40 A little later, in July 1956, he writes to the Irish novelist Aidan Higgins:
The Yanks want the Proust but I hesitate. Shall be sending you Malone. Suppose you are glad to be getting shut of London. Queer the way you all go to Ireland when you get a holiday. Piss on the White Rock for me and cast a cold eye on the granite beginning on the cliff face.41
It is from a little later again, 1959, that Anne Atik’s memoir shows the full force of Yeats breaking through Beckett’s own imaginative contact with others that will last until the very end of his life. Indeed, Deirdre Bair has Beckett only a couple of years later, in 1961, absorbed in reading W.B. Yeats’s Collected Poems.42 In Atik’s recollections, Yeats’s poetry features prominently in conversation.43 Beckett also refers Atik to ‘the correspondence between Yeats and Dorothy Wellesley,44 saying he thought it would interest me’. ‘Each time he came back to Yeats’s last poems, and each time would urge me to read them again. A standard of comparison.’45
This may be why James Mays hears in Beckett’s Lessness (1970), ‘an extended meditation on the line from Yeats’s poem “The Black Tower”’.46Atik’s memoir revisits Beckett’s recitation in 1983, as Beckett ‘wobbling on his legs … from ageing’47 talks about Synge, Lady Gregory and Yeats and incidentally writes from memory and without error a Synge poem – ‘Epitaph’:48
A silent sinner, nights and days,
No human heart to him drew nigh,
Alone he would his wanton ways,
Alone and little loved did die.
And autumn Death for him did choose,
A season dank with mists and rain,
And took him, while the evening dews
Were settling o’er the fields again.
Later still, towards the end, Beckett is retelling stories about ‘Yeats, and Yeats’s father who stayed in New York for seventeen years’.49 Atik’s final recollection of Beckett I repeat without comment; it is about ‘Joyce’s admiration for Yeats, the showy wreath he sent to his [friend’s] funeral’: ‘“He liked to make that sort of gesture,” says Beckett, who then continues to recite poems of Yeats, who “had written some great poems”, including “The Tower” – a poem Beckett had read after his friend’s Con Leventhal’s cremation.’50
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath –
Seem but the clouds in the sky.51
Beckett is also reported to have told his friend Eoin O’Brien that the lines on the poet ‘making his soul’ were Yeats’s greatest – the concluding third part of ‘The Tower’:
Till the wreck of body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come –
‘About old people,’ Beckett remarked, ‘Yeats has written a good poem about old age, “a tattered thing”.’52 Ten days after making this comment, Beckett himself had passed away.
During this final stretch, in John Montague’s recollection Beckett had been reading Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘It’s very beautiful,’ Beckett said. Montague suggests he had ‘gone back to the pleasant discoveries of boyhood’, and Montague reflects that he had not heard Beckett ‘use the word “beautiful” before, except in connection with Yeats. I mention that to him, and he nods. “Ah, yes, yes, beautiful, too.”’53
It is therefore apt that Nicholas Grene should summon Beckett’s Molloy to his side to act as the epigraphic opening to his subtle and restorative study, Yeats’s Poetic Codes:54 ‘All I know is what the words know.’55 And thinking of what we all now know it is precious wonder that Beckett should deem it fitting in … but the clouds … to rewrite Yeats’s great concluding lines of ‘The Tower’ with a piece of theatre all his own – a teleplay that Yeats would surely have understood as the act of praise it is. But also as an acknowledgement that Terence Brown, in concluding his Yeats biography, sees as much an act of ‘creative appropriation’ as it is ‘fitting’, more:
that Beckett’s ghost play for television … but the clouds … (first televised 1977) should salute Yeats, one great twentieth-century writer recognizing another, in employing the final lines of ‘The Tower’ as a haunting conclusion to a haunted work. In this work a man in old age seeks to recall the image of a lost love … only to have the words she inaudibly speaks, at last come fully to his own mind, like a communication from the dead; ‘but the clouds of the sky … when the horizon fades … or a bird’s sleepy cry … among the deepening shades’.56
And so the ghostliness of … but the clouds … brings us to one abiding element in both writers since, in the words of Katharine Worth, ‘Beckett’s are ghost plays too in Yeats’s sense of a ghost as a clinging presence, an emanation from some obscure region of consciousness or a mysterious continuation of mind outside the body: “An earth-bound shell, fading and whimpering in the places it loved.”’57 But for one addendum – a final curious, random, utterly unexpected and probably unconnected piece in this sketch of Beckett’s Yeats.
In his contribution to a centenary celebration, Reflections on Beckett (2009), Terence Brown wrote about how Beckett was ‘wonderfully alert to how modern media with their machines were altering the ways in which human beings would experience selfhood’ and, what is more, that ‘Beckett hints at an irreducible ghostlike presence of the human in his late works for television.’58 Brown contrasts this with Yeats’s obsession with the spirit world, something that started early in his life and lasted until the very end.
Brown goes on to mention that in the 1930s Beckett would visit Thomas MacGreevy in his London lodgings at 15 Cheyne Walk Gardens, a house owned by Hester Dowden. Miss Dowden was a famous spiritualist, and while there is no evidence that Beckett had anything to do, or would have had anything to do, with such a carry-on, he did occasionally play duets with Dowden and, according to Brown, ‘enjoyed the musical evenings she arranged’. Quoting Knowlson’s biography, it seems clear that Beckett ‘got terribly tired of all the psychic evidence [and wondered] what it has to [do] with the psyche as I experience that old bastard’.59 Unlike Yeats then in every way, one would think; the Yeats fascinated by spiritualism, automatic writing, spirit guides, absent healing, and all the rest of it. Beckett never travelled down that strange path although I can’t help thinking that some of his characters might ‘dabble’ a bit.
Clearing out my late mother’s books, I came across This is Spiritualism by Maurice Barbanell (1959). I remember the book from my childhood – a rather transgressive feeling of dabbling in the dark arts pervaded the book, and remarkably still does. The book, like its subject, belonged to a time between the wars she and her family had lived in London and, by all accounts, spiritualism was quite fashionable. Flicking through the pages of this book, in which Hester Dowden and W.B. Yeats feature, along with information on clairvoyance, ectoplasm, materialisation, mediums, psychic eye and faculties, psychosomatic disease, reincarnation, spirit bodies, spirit clothing, spirit healing, trance, vibrations, and umbilical cords, I chanced upon an image of the clairvoyant Jack Webber, one of several dealing with séances, ghostly presences, afterlives, self-communing with the past, voices from beyond the grave.
Notwithstanding his understandable scepticism and impatience with Yeats’s fantastic flights of fancy, did Beckett happen in upon one such session in Hester Dowden’s Cheyne Walk Gardens, hearing things, imagining what was going