Samuel Becketts German diaries 1936-1937

As Beckett departed Dublin for Germany on 28 September 1936, the question of how to ‘go on’ was uppermost in his mind. Beckett’s journey was an attempt to counter the feelings of personal and creative disorientation he had felt since the completion of Murphy in June 1936, and thus undertaken with the desperate hope of reversing what he called the ‘trickle down hill’ (SB to TM, 9 September 1936). The six-month tour of Germany was, like Belacqua’s walks in ‘Ding-Dong’, a ‘moving pause’ (MPTK, 32). Yet if Belacqua derived ‘in the intervals a measure of ease’, the lack of creative stimulus during this period was a rather more distressing affair for Beckett.
Nevertheless, although Beckett told MacGreevy ‘I do no work’ (SB to TM, 7 March 1937), there is also a sense in which he was mentally shaping the aesthetic and creative direction his work was to take. Beckett’s intense encounter with the visual arts during these six months, for example, offered a new impetus for his writing, as Beckett studied, and took notes on, literally hundreds of paintings he saw in German galleries. Furthermore, both the choice of the diary form as well as the thoughts inscribed in its pages testify to Beckett’s increasing concern with notions of authenticity, the moment of writing and the inadequacies of language. Cutting across these preoccupations is Beckett’s overwhelming desire to find a manner in which to inscribe himself into, and at the same time remove himself from, his texts. Despite having at an early stage decided that he wanted to be the opposite of Carducci, whom he deemed to be an ‘excellent university professor but an excessively bad poet’ (TCD MS10965, 16v), Beckett throughout the 1930s struggled to remove the layers of erudite references on which he relied in his enquiry into his, and the human, condition. From 1936 onward, a growing emphasis on irrationality and incompetence contributed to a shift in Beckett’s aesthetic thinking, and he began to seek a way to express his emotions without concession or loss of substance. The German trip marks the fulcrum of this development, as Beckett’s choice of diary writing, with its concomitant use of the first person, and his recorded aesthetic pronouncements, illustrate. That Beckett was trying to capitalise on such preoccupations is evident from his creative enterprises while in Germany, in particular the ultimately unwritten new work entitled ‘Journal of a Melancholic’.

The object of my inquiry, the German diaries, consists of six notebooks found by Edward Beckett in a trunk following Samuel Beckett’s death in 1989. Written mainly in English, yet with German and French words and phrases playfully interwoven, the diaries comprise roughly 120,000 words.

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Travel diary, aide-mémoire and creative notebook in one, the German diaries call for an intergeneric as well as an interdisciplinary discussion. Such a multi-faceted approach is further determined by the fact that, even as they offer a unique opportunity to eavesdrop on Beckett speaking, or rather writing, to himself, the diaries are fundamentally private documents. Molloy’s ‘Oh it’s only a diary’ (Mo, 61) indicates the difficulty of discussing a form of writing that in its nonfictionality adheres to different (and, moreover, unstable) criteria than those commonly analysed by literary criticism.

Nevertheless, several of Beckett’s texts draw on aspects of diary writing, particularly when characters, such as Molloy, ‘recall my present existence’ (Mo, 61). Furthermore, although it was not intended for publication (or, for that matter, for any public reading), Beckett remarks of his diary that ‘at least it is not self-communion’ (GD, 6 October 1936).

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Chapter 5 will look at Beckett’s encounter with contemporary German literature during his time in Germany in 1936–1937, charting the influence this reading had on his negation of the trope of the journey and on his creative thinking in general. This chapter will also explore Beckett’s response to the political situation in Nazi Germany. The impact German literature had on Beckett in moving toward a compositional process liberated from intertextual  references is subsequently analysed in Chapter 6 through a study of Beckett’s evolving strategy of note-taking. Chapter 7 explores Beckett’s creative enterprises while in Germany, which reveal an emphasis on ‘feeling’, as well as a developing interest in drama. Central to Beckett’s artistic movements during his journey is the ‘Journal of a Melancholic’, an ultimately abandoned literary project. The penultimate Chapter 8 will focus on Beckett’s profound study of art in German galleries, which both clarified his aesthetic preoccupations at this time and influenced his creative endeavours. Finally, Chapter 9 focuses on the shift in Beckett’s aesthetics, formulated in 1936–1937 but only creatively expressed after 1945. Beckett’s emphasis on an authentic inscription of the self and an unflinching inquiry into the human condition in texts such as Malone Dies is thus the subject of the conclusion, which reveals Beckett’s creation of a textual space which ties being to writing.
Beckett’s German diaries crucially prepare the ground for this development.

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Although becoming increasingly restrictive to foreigners, Germany was still accessible; it is conceivable that the political developments led Beckett to wish to explore the country before the curtain came down. Furthermore, as both John Pilling and Thomas Hunkeler have pointed out, Germany and its culture were very much tied up with Beckett’s personal feelings and aesthetic inclinations (Pilling 2005; Hunkeler 2000). Even the most cursory glance through the early poetry, prose, critical essays and correspondence reveals the extent of his encounter with German literature and philosophy. This is markedly evident from the numerous notebooks (discussed in Chapter 4) that Beckett kept during the fi rst half of the thirties.

Beckett’s first profound encounter with German thought was through the philosopher Schopenhauer, whom he started reading in 1930 (SB to TM, undated [25? July 1930]). Schopenhauer furnished Beckett with a system that, on the basis of all surviving biographical material from this period, was remarkably coincident with his own: an essentially negative evaluation of human existence wherein the path to any semblance of redemption was through the artistic creative act. Beckett’s reading of what he termed Schopenhauer’s ‘intellectual justification of unhappiness’ in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea) had a lasting effect on both his work and his view of life (SB to TM, undated [25? July 1930]).

Beckett immediately purloined the Schopenhauerian combination of philosophy and emotional utterance for his critical monograph Proust, written in late August and early September 1930. More importantly, the discovery instigated a persistent exploration of a distinct strand in German culture, not only in literature and philosophy, but also in the visual arts and music.

The frustrated striving of the individual in a meaningless universe, preoccupations with melancholy, solitude and loss were themes Beckett found within this tradition, and the dark and heavy, even tragic, quality of the German language coincided with feelings he was trying to come to terms with on a personal level and express in his own writing. Beckett’s awareness of the effect which the German language had on his emotional state is illustrated by a (as so often self-deprecatory) passage in Dream: ‘Scraps of German played in his mind in the silence that ensued; grand, old, plastic words’ (Dream, 191).

Mark Nixon

from the book Samuel Becketts German diaries 1936-1937