Dialogues on Beckett - Authors’ Note

 The 12 dialogues in this book arose out of a seminar on Samuel Beckett offered in 2012–13 by the the Dominican Philosophy and Theology Studies programme in that year’s ‘School of Reading’, conducted under the auspices of the Polish Province of the Dominicans.

Our discussions were so lively and inspiring, and so conducive to further analysis and enquiry that we thought them worth elaborating, editing and preserving in written form. Thus arose these twelve conversations about 12 of Beckett’s plays – those which we considered to be the most important, the most interesting or the most representative of his work.

We have included what we hope is a judicious balance of basic information about Beckett’s life and work, brief sketches of some interpretations of his plays and a few words on the critical reception of each; and we have set out some possible criticisms of the vision of the world expressed in them. These last are particularly interesting given the many references and allusions to Christian theology to be found in the plays. They are, admittedly, heavily ironic, but they testify to the importance in Beckett’s thought of the Christian vision of the universe and the eschatological dimension of human existence.

Beckett, through the radicalism of his thought and his crystalline and very distinctive style, succeeds better perhaps than anyone else in getting at the heart of the disquiet which has marked our age; and he identifies its cause as a metaphysical transformation which is taking place before our eyes. That transformation is the disenchantment of the world. A number of factors have contributed to it; the progress of science is just one among many. But whatever the causes, the sphere of the sacred has lost its power and can no longer explain the course of history. The temple lies in ruins, and we have found nothing to supplant it, no new way of making sense of the world and our place in the universe. Western Man has lost his bearings and can see no way forward; beyond the ancient and familiar paths of the Judeo-Christian tradition, increasingly difficult now to return to, lies unknown territory, empty and dark and cold. This state of suspension and disorientation gives rise to a profound disquiet, though we may not always be aware of its nature or its source.

An analysis of Samuel Beckett’s major plays is an excellent introduction to a broader debate not only on the current state of Western culture and civilization but also, more generally, on the spiritual condition of modern man. We hope that the dialogues we present here will inspire readers to reflect on these issues and encourage such a debate.

Antoni Libera

Janusz Pyda OP

White children in chains

The kidnapping of English children into slavery in America s actually legalized during the first quarter of the 17th century. In that period a large number of the children of poor parents, as well as orphan children, were targeted for the White slave trade. These poor White children were described as a “plague” and a “rowdy element.” Aristocrats who ran the Virginia Company such as Sir Thomas Smythe and Sir Edwin Sandys viewed the children as a convenient pool of slave laborers for the fields of the Virginia colony. In their petition to the Council of London in 1618 they complained of the great number of “vagrant” children in the streets and requested that they might be transported to Virginia to serve as laborers. 

A bill was passed in September of 1 61 8 permitting the capture of children aged eight years old or older, girls as well as boys. The eight year old boys were to be enslaved for sixteen years and the eight year old girls for fourteen years, after which, it was said, they would be given land. (Robert C. Johnson, “The Transportation of Vagrant Children from London Virginia, 1618-1622,” in Early Stuart Studies, p. 139). 

A directive was issued for the capture of children in London, empowering city aldermen to direct their constables to seize children on the streets and commit them to the prison-hospital at Bridewell, where they were to await shipment to America (Johnson, pp. 139-140). “...their only ‘crime’ was that they were poor and happened to be found loitering or sleeping in the streets when the constable passed by.” (Johnson, p. 142). 

The street was not the only place child slaves were to be procured however. The homes of indigent parents with large families were also on the agenda of the slave-traders. Poor English parents were given the “opportunity” to surrender one or more of their children to the slavers. If they refused they  32 were to be starved into submission by being denied any further relief assistance from the local government: 

“To carry out the provisions of the act the Lord Mayor (Sir William Cockayne)... directed the alder-man ...to (make) inquiry of those parents ‘overcharged and burdened with poor children’ whether they wished to send any of them to Virginia... those who replied negatively were to be told they would not receive any further poor relief from the parish.” (Johnson, p. 142). 

The grieving parents were assured that the shipment of their children to Virginia would be beneficial to the children because it was a place where ‘under severe masters they may be brought to good-ness.” (Johnson, p. 143). 

In January of 1620 a group of desperate, terrified English children attempted to break out of Bridewell where they had been imprisoned while awaiting the slave-ships to America. They rose up and fought: 

“...matters were further complicated by the refusal of some of the children to be transported. In late January a kind of ‘revolt’ occurred at Bridewell, with some of the ‘ill-disposed’ among the children de-claring ‘their unwillingness to go to Virginia...” (Johnson, p.143). 

“A hasty letter from (Sir Edwin) Sandys to the King’s secretary (Sir Robert Naunton) quickly rectified the situation.” On January 31 the Privy Council decreed that if any of the children continued in their “obstinance” they would be severely punished. It is possible that one of the children was actually exe-cuted as an example to the others. What is certain is that a month later the children, mostly boys, were forced on board the ship Duty and transported to Virginia. 

From thence onward, English male child slaves came to be known as “Duty Boys” (Alexander Brown, The First Republic in America, p. 375). There would be many more shipments of these doomed children bound for the colonies in the years ahead. 

“From that time on little is known about them except that very few lived to become adults. When a ‘muster’ or census of the (Virginia) colony was taken in 1625, the names of only seven boys were listed (of the children kidnapped in 1619). All the rest were dead... The statistics for the children sent in 1 620 are equally grim ...no more than five were alive in 1625.” (Johnson, p. 147). 

On April 30, 1621 Sir Edwin Sandys presented a plan to the English parliament for the solution of the threat poor English people posed to the fabulously wealthy aristocracy: mass shipment to Virginia, where they would all be “brought to goodness.” When control of the colony of Virginia passed from the privately-held Virginia Company directly to the king, it was deemed more expedient, as time went on, to privatize the traffic in White children while placing it on an even larger basis to meet the cheap labor needs of all the colonies. In this way the Crown avoided the opprobrium that might have been connected with the further official sale of English children even as the aristocracy covertly expanded this slave trade dramatically. 

The early traffic in White children to Virginia had proved profitable not only for the Virginia Company but for the judges and other officials in England who administered the capture of the children: 

J. Ferrar, treasurer of the Virginia Company, indicated that he had been approached by the Marshal of London and other officials who had been involved in procuring children for the colony, proclaiming that they were owed a financial reward “for their care and travail therein, that they might be encour-aged hereafter to take the like pains whensoever they should have again the like occasion.” The officials subsequently received the handsome “cut” for their part in the loathsome traffic in kidnapped White children which they had desired. (Susan M. Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Com-pany of London, vol. one, p. 424 and Johnson, pp. 144-145). 

This collusion between the public and private sphere generated profits and established a precedent for many more “occasions” where “like pains” would be eagerly taken. The precedent established was the cornerstone of the trade in child-slaves in Britain for decades to come; a trade whose center, after London, would become the ports of Scotland: 

“Press gangs in the hire of local merchants roamed the streets, seizing ‘by force such boys as seemed proper subjects for the slave trade.’ Children were driven in flocks through the town and confined for shipment in barns... So flagrant was the practice that people in the countryside about Aberdeen avoided bringing children into the city for fear they might be stolen; and so widespread was the collusion of merchants, shippers, suppliers and even magistrates that the man who exposed it was forced to recant and run out of town.” (Van der Zee, Bound Over, p. 210). 

This man was Peter Williamson who as a child in 1743 was captured in Aberdeen and sold as a slave to the Planter, a “White Guineaman.” The Planter was destined for America with 70 other kid-napped Scottish children in addition to other freight. After eleven weeks at sea, the ship ran aground on a sand bar near Cape May on the Delaware river. As it began to take on water, the crew fled in a lifeboat, leaving the boys to drown in the sinking ship. The Planter managed to stay afloat until morn-ing however, and the slavers returned to salvage their “cargo.” Peter Williamson was twice-blessed. He not only survived the Planter but had the great good fortune to have been purchased by a former slave, Hugh Wilson, who had also been kidnapped in Scotland as a child. Wilson had fled slavery in another colony and now bought Williamson in Pennsyl-vania. He did so solely out of compassion, knowing the boy would be bought by someone else had Wilson not bought him first. Wilson paid for Williamson’s education in a colonial school and years later on his death, bequeathed to the lad his horse, saddle and a small sum of money, all Wilson had in the world. 

With this advantage, Williamson married, became an Indian-fighter on the frontier and eventually made his way back to Scotland, seeking justice for himself and on behalf of all kidnapped children including his deceased friend Hugh Wilson. This took the form of a book, The Life and Curious Adven-tures of Peter Williamson, Who Was Carried Off from Aberdeen and Sold for a Slave. But when he attempted to distribute it in Aberdeen he was arrested on a charge of publishing a “scurrilous and infamous libel, reflecting greatly upon the character and reputations of the merchants of Aberdeen.” The book was ordered to be publicly burned and Williamson jailed. He was eventually fined and banished from the city. 

Williamson did not give up but sued the judges of Aberdeen and took sworn statements from people who had witnessed kidnappings or who had had their own children snatched by slavers. Typical was the testimony of William Jamieson of Oldmeldrum, a farming village 1 2 miles from Aberdeen. In 1741, Jamieson’s ten year old son John was captured by a “spirit” gang in the employ of “Bonny John” Bur-net, a powerful slave-merchant based in Aberdeen. 

After making inquiries, Jamieson learned that his son was being held for shipment to the “Plantations.” Jamieson hurried to Aberdeen and frantically searched the docks and ships for his boy. He found him on shore among a circle of about sixty other boys, guarded by Bonny John’s slavers who brandished horse whips. When the boys walked outside the circle they were whipped. Jamieson called to his son to come to him. The boy tried to run to his father. Father and son were beaten to the ground by the slavers. 

Jamieson sought a writ from the Scottish courts but was informed “that it would be vain for him to apply to the magistrates to get his son liberate; because some of the magistrates had a hand in those doings.” Jamieson never saw his son alive again, “having never heard of him since he was carried away.” The testimony from Jamieson and from many others helped Peter Williamson to prevail. The Aberdeen merchants were ordered by the Edinburgh Court of Sessions to pay him £100. Williamson was personally vindicated and his book was printed in a new edition. The kidnapping continued, however. 

The enslavement of White children from Great Britain later became the subject of a much better known book, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, which was based on the real-life case of James Annesley whose uncle, the Earl of Anglesey, had arranged for him to be seized and sold into slavery in America, in order to remove any challenge to the Earl’s inheritance of his brother’s estates. 

Annesley was savagely whipped and brutally mistreated in America and it appeared he would die in chains. He was eventually resold to another master who accepted his story that he was an English lord and the heir to the Anglesey barony. 

 Annesley managed to make his way back to Scotland where he wrote a book, Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, Returned from Thirteen Years’ Slavery in America, which years later came to the attention of Robert Louis Stevenson. Unfortunately this rare case involving the enslavement of a member of the English nobility attracted attention only because it involved royalty. The far more common plight of hundreds of thousands of poor British children who had languished and died in slavery in the colonies was ignored and awareness of the history of their ordeal remained unchanged in the wake of the publication of Stevenson’s classic. 

The head of one kidnapping ring, John Stewart, sold at least 500 White youths per year into slavery in the colonies. Stewart’s thugs were paid twenty-five shillings for Whites they procured by force— usually a knock in the head with a blunt instrument— or fraud. Stewart sold the Whites to the masters of the “White Guineaman” slave ships for forty shillings each. 

One eyewitness to the mass kidnapping of poor Whites estimated that 10,000 were sold into slavery every year from throughout Great Britain (information in a pamphlet by M. Godwyn, London, 1680). 

From THEY WERE WHITE AND THEY WERE SLAVES The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America by Michael A. Hoffman II 

Foreword to James Bacque "Other Losses"

  OVER MOST OF THE WESTERN FRONT in late April 1945, the thunder of artillery had been replaced by the shuffling of mil-lions of pairs of boots as columns of disarmed German soldiers marched wearily towards Allied barbed wire enclosures. Scat-tered enemy detachments fired a few volleys before fading into the countryside and eventual capture by Allied soldiers. 

The mass surrenders in the west contrasted markedly with the final weeks on the eastern front where surviving Wehrmacht units still fought the advancing Red Army to enable as many of their comrades as possible to evade capture by the Russians. 

This was the final strategy of the German High Command then under Grand Admiral Doenitz who had been designated Commander-in-Chief by Adolf Hitler following Reich Marshal Goering's surrender to the west. 

From the German point of view this strategy delivered mil-lions of German soldiers to what they believed would be the more merciful hands of the Western Allies under supreme military commander General Dwight Eisenhower. However, given General Eisenhower's fierce and obsessive hatred not only of the Nazi regime, but indeed of all things German, this belief was at best a desperate gamble. More than five million German soldiers in the American and French zones were crowded into barbed wire cages, many of them literally shoul-der to shoulder. The ground beneath them soon became a quagmire of filth and disease. Open to the weather, lacking even primitive sanitary facilities, underfed, the prisoners soon began dying of starvation and disease. Starting in April 1945, the United States Army and the French army casually annihilated about one million men, most of them in American camps. Not since the horrors of the Confederate-administered prison at Andersonville during the American Civil War had such cruel-ties taken place under American military control. For more than four decades this unprecedented tragedy lay hidden in Allied archives. 

Howat last did this enormous, lar crime come to light? The first clues were uncovered in 1986 by the author James Bacque and his assistant. Researching a book about Raoul Laporterie, a French Resistance hero who had saved about 1,600 refugees from the Nazis, they interviewed a former German soldier who had become a friend of Laporterie in 1946. Laporterie had taken this man, Hans Goertz, and one other, out of a French prison camp in 1946 to give them work as tailors in his chain of stores. 

Goertz declared that "Laporterie saved my life, because 25 percent of the men in that camp died in one month." What had they died of? "Starvation, dysentery, disease." Checking as far as possible the records of the camps where Goertz had been confined, Bacque found that it had been one of a group of three in a system of 1,600, all equally bad, according to ICRC reports in the French army archives at Vincennes, Paris. Soon they came upon the first hard evidence of mass deaths in U.S.-controlled camps. This evidence was found in army reports under the bland heading "Other Losses." The terrible significance of this term was soon explained to Bacque by Colonel Philip S. Lauben, a former chief of the German Affairs Branch of SHAEF. 

In the spring of 1987, Mr Bacque and I met in Washington. 

Over the following months we worked together in the National Archives and in the George C. Marshall Foundation in Lexing-ton, Virginia, piecing together the evidence we uncovered. The plans made at the highest levels of the U.S. and British governments in 1944 expressed a determination to destroy Germany as a world power once and for all by reducing her to a peasant economy, although this would mean the starvation of millions of civilians. Up until now, historians have agreed that the Allied leaders soon canceled their destructive plans because of public resistance. 

Eisenhower's hatred, passed through the lens of a compliant military bureaucracy, produced the horror of death camps unequaled by anything in American military history. In the face of the catastrophic consequences of this hatred, the casual indif-ference expressed by the SHAEF officers is the most painful aspect of the U.S. Army's involvement. 

Nothing was further from the intent of the great majority of Americans in 1945 than to kill off so many unarmed Germans after the war. Some idea of the magnitude of this horror can be gained when it is realized that these deaths exceed by far all those incurred by the German army in the west between June 1941 and April 1945. In the narrative that follows, the veil is drawn from this tragedy. 

DR. ERNEST F. FISHER JR., COLONEL ARMY OF THE UNITED STATES (RETIRED) ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA, 1988

Graham Greene on Hans Andersen

 THERE are men whose lives seem arguments for the existence of a conscious providence, lives fashioned as it were deliberately for one purpose with a cruelty that has deprived them of any obscure and friendly retreat. Hans Andersen is one of these, and there is a sense of unusual brutality in the ingenuity which providence expended for so small a result, a few volumes of children’s stories and a shelf of poetic dramas without merit.  

To fashion this writer what was required? First and foremost a raw sensibility, a bundle of shrieking nerves which barred the possessor hopelessly from any easy comfort. The son of a cobbler of unbalanced mind, the grandson of a lunatic, Andersen might as easily have become a madman as an artist. When he was a child, his parents tried to cure his nerves at the holy well of St Regisse on St John’s Eve; but during the night which he spent by the spring he was woken by a thunderstorm and the screams of a lunatic girl who had been sleeping at his feet. It is possible that one thought saved the boy and the man from madness: ‘I am going to be famous. First you suffer the most awful things, and then you get to be famous.’ The same idea is expressed again and again in his work. ‘All who see you,’ the witch says to the mermaid who seeks a human form, ‘will say that you are the most beautiful child of man they have ever seen. You will keep your gliding gait, no dancer will rival you, but every step you take will be as if you were treading upon sharp knives, so sharp as to draw blood. If you are willing to suffer all this I am ready to help you.’ And in the story of The Wild Swans the heroine to save her brothers has to weave eleven shirts from stinging-nettles. ‘The sea is indeed softer than your hands, and it moulds the hardest stone, but it does not feel the pain your fingers will feel. It has no heart and does not suffer the pain and anguish you must feel.’  

Andersen has been held up as an example of supreme egotism, because everything which he and those he loved suffered he related to his own future, wondering of his family’s early bitter disappointment at a failure to find a livelihood on a country estate whether God had not ruined their hopes to save him from becoming a mere farmer. But this was not egotism; it was an artist’s parallel to the Catholic ideal of the acceptance of pain for a spiritual benefit. If he had not found a reason to accept pain, his mind might well have broken; he might have been happy in the manner of his grandfather who wandered singing and wreathed in flowers through the streets of Odense or of his father who imagined himself on his deathbed one of Napoleon’s captains, instead of the broken private that he was, and cried aloud, ‘Hats off, you whelps, when the Emperor rides by.’  

His nerves, too, supplied what fate next demanded in completing the artist – persistence, an inability to find happiness even when he had won his fame. In Sweden, when the students of Lund marched in a body to acclaim him, he could not believe in their sincerity; he thought they were making game of him and searched their faces for smiles. When he left Odense for Copenhagen, at the age of fourteen, without work or friends, a wise woman had declared that one day his native place would be illuminated in his honour, so that when, 48 years later, he returned to receive the freedom of the city, it might have been expected that he would enjoy a few moments of unmixed happiness. But at night, as he watched from the City Hall the torches and the lamps and the crowd singing in his honour in the square, the cold wind touched a tooth into almost unbearable pain, so that he could only count the verses still remaining and long for the programme to end. It is impossible, at times, not be convinced of the actuality of this purposeful fate; for it was an extraordinary coincidence, if it was not a malignant providence, which caused him to overhear, as he stood at his window in Copenhagen, just returned from his triumphal visit to England, a man say to his companion: ‘Look, there is our orang-outang who is so famous abroad.’  

Most men have one earth into which they can creep to rest the nerves, but for Andersen it was stopped. He was deprived even of the satisfaction of sex. Again his life was curiously of a piece, as if no opportunity was to be wasted to warp his nature to the required shape. As a boy alone in Copenhagen, chance found him lodgings in a street of red lights. His surroundings must have continually aroused desires which he had not the money to satisfy. And they were never satisfied. He was as passionate as most men, three times he tried to marry, but he retained the exhausting innocence which, to quote Miss Toksvig,*3 ‘he described himself as the kind which reads the Bible and always finds the Song of Songs; the innocence that ruins sleep’.  

There remained for fate to limit and define his range as an artist. The son of a washerwoman and a cobbler Andersen inherited the folk, tradition; his earliest fairy stories were transcripts of tales he had heard as a child. Witches were part of his everyday life; they were called in by his mother to foretell his future, to heal his father’s sickness, and the little medieval court of Odense supplied one of the commonest ingredients of his tales, the ease with which a poor child can talk with royalty. Odense had only 7,000 inhabitants, but it had a palace and a governor and a regiment of dragoons, and the cobbler’s son was admitted to audience. But Andersen did not submit easily to the claims of this environment. It was his ambition to be a dramatic poet; with extraordinary persistence he followed this aim to the end of his life, and because his plays almost invariably failed he was convinced that he was not appreciated in his own country.  

Miss Toksvig’s is a most satisfying biography of this unhappy man in all his curious glassy transparency. She writes with sympathy and without sentimentality; and it is a pleasure to watch her masterly choice and arrangement of incident into a story which is always exciting. One can only wish that she had not confined herself to Andersen’s life. She throws off suggestions for a new estimate of his work, which I should like to have seen pursued. ‘In Hans Christian,’ Miss Toksvig writes, ‘the Unconscious was made flesh and dwelt unashamed and bewildered among men,’ and perhaps the chief importance of Hans Andersen today to adult readers lies in the frequency with which he allowed his unconscious mind to take control of his pen. There are passages in The Snow Queen which anticipate the method of the Surréalistes. His contemporaries complained that his stories contained no moral, but it is in their occasional passages of pure fantasy, as when the flowers speak their irrelevant messages to Gerda, that his stories have their greatest importance for the contemporaries of M. Philippe Soupault.  

1933 

From Collected Essays 

The majestic patriarch of Catholic letters—a genius of immense authority—had invited Waugh...

 In everyday life, Waugh was constantly casting acquaintances and friends into fantastic roles, and generally turning the people he met into characters in a private charade; often he would use this myth-making talent to hilarious effect. A good illustration is provided, for instance, by his visit to the great poet Paul Claudel. The majestic patriarch of Catholic letters—a genius of immense authority—had invited Waugh and Christopher Sykes to have lunch in his Paris apartment. This is how Waugh related the meeting in his diary:

The old man was deaf and dumb. All his family—wife, sons and daughters-in-law—sat round the table. He greeted me by putting into my hands a newly printed édition de luxe of some   verses of his. A present? I began to thank him. He took it away and put it on a table. I had the impression it was to be my prize if I behaved well. Lively conversation mostly in English. Every now and then the old man’s lips were seen to move and there would be a cry: “Papa is speaking!” and a hush broken only by unintelligible animal noises. Some of these were addressed to me, and I thought he said: “How would you put into English potage de midi?” I replied: “Soup at luncheon.” It transpired that he was the author of a work named Partage de midi. His tortoise eyes glistened with hostility. After luncheon there was a great deal of fuss among the womenfolk as to whether or not Papa was to have cognac. He got it, brightened a little, called for an album and made me sit by him, as his arthritic fingers turned the pages . . . Anything that caught his fancy had been pasted [in the album]. Some were humorous, some not. There was a group of the Goebbels family. “That’s funny,” I said, feeling on safe ground. “I think it very sad,” he mumbled . . . When we left, he came to the drawing room door and laid his hand on the édition de luxe, gave me another look of reptilian hate, and left it on its table. Next day, he told a daughter-in-law that both Christopher [Sykes] and I were “très gentlemen.”

Christopher Sykes, however, gave a completely different account. Not only had Claudel been perfectly hospitable, genial and lively, but virtually none of the grotesque incidents mentioned in Waugh’s narrative did actually take place. In particular, Waugh’s horrible gaffe was pure fiction. One would have guessed as much: it is very difficult to believe that Waugh, who admired Claudel, would not have known even the title of one of his masterpieces: “It transpired that he was the author of a work named Partage de midi . . .” It transpired indeed! (One is reminded of Philip Larkin’s tranquil impudence: “Deep down, I think foreign languages irrelevant.”) Shortly after the encounter with Claudel, Sykes was astonished to hear Waugh describing for the first time this fictitious incident to a common friend; he stuck to his invention after that, as he obviously had come to believe it sincerely. Perhaps it was not simply one more instance of the novelist’s instinct   at work; more exactly, “the novelist’s instinct” was itself an expression of a deeper defence against the threats which reality was directing at his self-esteem: from Sykes’ testimony, we know that, immediately before the visit, Waugh was virtually paralysed with nervousness—a most uncharacteristic and humiliating condition for a man whose powerful personality usually inspired fear in all those who approached him. (On their way to Claudel’s apartment, Waugh insisted that they first stop in a church to pray for success; and then during the entire visit, he feigned total ignorance of the French language, for fear of making mistakes and bringing ridicule upon himself.) Obviously, meeting Claudel had momentous meaning for him, and he was desperately eager to make a favourable impression on the grand old man. Yet, things did not work out the way he would have wished; as Sykes observed, “he somehow detected that Claudel, for all his geniality, did not like him.” In Waugh’s version, however, the mot de la fin was provided by Claudel commenting the next day to his daughter-in-law: “Waugh is très gentleman.” Actually this is probably a clue for the deep wound which may have triggered the entire fiction: according to Sykes, Claudel’s impression was precisely the opposite: “Later, Claudel told a friend of mine that he had been very interested to meet Evelyn Waugh, ‘Mais,’ he added, ‘il lui manque l’allure du vrai gentleman’ (‘he does not look like a real gentleman’)!”

Similar examples of bizarre incidents abound in Waugh’s life and make his biography remarkably colourful. (Stannard’s work, which is masterful and seems definitive, should not make us neglect the earlier study by Sykes, with its wealth of anecdotes; and more recently, in his autobiography, Auberon Waugh has produced a portrait of his father which, in its utterly unsentimental truthfulness, is deeply affecting.[  1]) There was, however, a dark side to his imaginative power: he had suffered from recurrent bouts of persecution mania since his early twenties, and after his first wife’s traumatic desertion he exhibited symptoms of schizophrenia. In late middle age, his most frightening slide into hallucinations and lunacy was faithfully chronicled in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Eventually this latter breakdown was diagnosed as having resulted from a progressive poisoning induced by his protracted abuse of strong sleeping drugs; yet it is interesting to note that at first he consulted a priest, as he wondered if he was not possessed by the Devil. (Some twenty-five years earlier, when Belloc first met the brilliant young novelist, Waugh’s future mother-in-law asked the old sage’s opinion of Waugh, and Belloc made the startling reply: “He has a devil in him.”)

While in the army during the war he had been forced to submit to a psychological examination, because of his erratic and impossible behaviour: “The doctor appears to have been told that Waugh was a drunkard and tried to impute to him (with some good reason) unhappiness and frustration through adolescence. Waugh suffered ninety minutes of this and managed at last to turn the tables: ‘You have been asking me a great many questions. Do you mind if I now ask you one?’ The psychiatrist offered no objection. ‘Why then,’ Waugh asked, ‘have you not questioned me about the most important thing in a man’s life—his religion?’”

There is no doubt that religion was indeed the most important thing in Waugh’s life. Any biographer who failed to recognise this would be wasting their time—and ours. Such a reproach was directed at Stannard by one critic, but seems to me unwarranted. Stannard not only provides a wealth of inspiring quotes from Waugh’s writings, but has also unearthed impressive evidence of charitable deeds which Waugh secretly performed as a form of spiritual cultivation, and which bear eloquent testimony to the absolute seriousness of his commitment. If he sometimes brought to the everyday practice of his Catholic faith some of the eccentricity which also characterised most other aspects of his life (for instance, as an acquaintance recalled, during Lent, when having lunch in a restaurant, he would produce miniature scales at the table to weigh out precisely the quantities of allowable food!), his faith was not a matter for posturing; it cost him too dearly, in every respect, for its sincerity to be questioned. In his remarkable correspondence, whenever the subject of religion is being discussed, he relinquishes his usual whimsicality and writes with simplicity, depth, gravity and a most touching sense of urgency. For all his gluttony and drunkenness, his passionate attachment to all things of beauty, his selfishness, his impatience, his unkindness and anger (a close friend once asked how he could reconcile his generally beastly behaviour and his Christianity; Waugh replied: “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid, I would hardly be a human being”), what he derived from his Catholicism was a fundamental ability not to take this world too seriously. Stannard shows a sound grasp of this central issue in his choice of a subtitle for the second and final volume of his biographical study, No Abiding City—a reference to St. Paul (Hebrews XIII, 14): non enim habemus hic manentem civitatem, sed futuram inquirimus (“For we have here no abiding city, but we seek one that is to come”), which Waugh was particularly fond of quoting. Chesterton had already observed: “The Church is the only thing that can save a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of one’s own time,” but for Waugh, the Church not only secured liberation from the world, it also provided a force and an inspiration to go against the world—contra mundum.

From THE HALL OF USELESSNESS

Simon Leys

Burckhardt on our astrological impatience ...

To know the future, however, is no more desirable in the life of mankind than in the life of the individual. And our astrological impatience for such knowledge is sheer folly. Whether we imagine a man, for instance, knowing in advance the day of his death and the situation it would find him in, or a people knowing in advance the century of its downfall, both pictures would bear within themselves the inevitable consequence-a confusion of all desire and endeavour. For desire and endeavour can only unfold freely when they live and act ''blindly," i.e. for their own sakes and in obedience to inward impulses. After all, the future is shaped only when that happens, and if it did not happen, the future life and end of that man or that people would be different.
A future known in advance is an absurdity.

Foreknowledge of the future, however, is not only undesirable, it is probably beyond our power as well. The main obstacle in the way is the confusion of insight by our wishes, hopes and fears; further, our ignorance of everything which we call latent forces, physical or mental, and the incalculable factor of mental contagions, which can suddenly transform the world. Nor must we forget the acoustic illusion in which we live. For four centuries past, thought and argument; multiplied to ubiquity by the press, have drowned every voice but their own, and seem to hold even material forces in dependence on themselves. And yet it may be that those very forces are on the eve of a triumphant expansion of another kind, or that a spiritual current is at the door ready to carry the world in the opposite direction. If that current wins the day, it will take thought and its trumpets into its service until another comes to take its place. And finally, as regards the future, we must not forget the limitations of our knowledge of racial biology from the physiological side.

Quote from the book Reflections on history

Jakob Burckhardt: An essential condition of scholarship

An essential condition of scholarship is a definite branch of study : theology, jurisprudence, or whatever it may be, must be taken up and carried through to its academic conclusion, and that not only for private, professional reasons, but in order to acquire the habit of steady work, to learn respect for all branches of a particular subject, to fortify the seriousness necessary to learning.

Side by side with it, however, we must continue those pre-liminary studies which give access to all that comes later, in particular the various world literatures, i.e. the two classical languages and, if possible, two modern ones. We can never know too many languages. And however much or little we may have known of them, we should never quite let them lapse. All honour to good translations, but none can replace the original expression, and the original language, in word and phrase, is historical evidence of the first rank.

Further, we should avoid anything which exists simply as a pastime, for time should be welcomed and turned to account, and secondly we should maintain an attitude of reserve towards the present-day devastation of the mind by newspapers and novels.

We are only concerned here with such minds and hearts as cannot fall victim to common boredom, which can carry through i train of thought, and have imagination enough to be able to do without the concrete imaginings of others or, if they do turn to them, are not enslaved, but can keep their own integrity.

In any case, we should be capable from time to time of turning completely away from intentions to knowledge simply because it is knowledge. In particular, we should be able to contemplate the process of history even when it is not concerned with our own well or ill being, directly or indirectly. But even when it is, we should be able to behold it with detachment.

Further, intellectual work must not aim at pure enjoyment.

All genuine records are at first tedious, because and in so far as they are alien. They set forth the views and interests of their time for their time, and come no step to meet us. But the shams of today are addressed to us, and are therefore made amusing and intelligible, as faked antiques generally are. This is especially true of the historical novel, which so many people read as if it were history, slightly rearranged but true in essence.

For the ordinary half-educated man, all poetry (except political verse), and, in the literature of the past, even the greatest creations of humour (Aristophanes, Rabelais, Don Quixote, etc.) are incomprehensible and tedious because none of all this literature was written specifically for him, as present-day novels are.

Yet, even to the scholar and thinker, the past, in its own utterance, is at first always alien, and its acquisition arduous.

A complete study of the sources of any important subject according to the laws of scholarship is an enterprise which demands the whole of a man.

from the book Reflections on history ...