CALCULOS JUSTIFICATIVOS

Self-portraiture contributed to one of the most important developments in Beckett’s poetics, observable in two remarkable letters to MacGreevy describing his responses to Cézanne’s work. Beckett had already alluded to Cézanne in Dream as being ‘very strong on architectonics’, although one suspects that his knowledge of Cézanne’s work at this time was rather negligible (178). However, two letters written to MacGreevy, dating from September 1934, reveal a more profound study of Cézanne. Discussing the painting Montagne Sainte-Victoire (Figure 5; 1905–1906) in the Tate Gallery, Beckett argues that whereas the ‘anthropomorphized’ reality as portrayed by Dutch painting had become insuffi cient, ‘Cézanne seems to have been the fi rst to see landscape & state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever’

(SB to TM, 8 September 1934).⁴⁶ The problematic subject-object relation lying at the heart of Beckett’s interpretation of Cézanne occurs immedi-ately after the publication of the essay ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, in which the

‘rupture’ in this relation forms the measuring stick by which contemporary writers are judged (Dis, 70).

The awareness of this ‘rupture’, the impossibility of communicating the reality of the external, or even the internal world, corresponds to the

‘unsaid’ he detected in Grimm and Ballmer two years later. Ballmer, an advocate of the anthroposophist teachings of Rudolf Steiner, was the one

Beckett and the Visual Arts 155

painter Beckett met in Germany who had the most profound impact on his thinking. Beckett, it appears, admired Ballmer for his work as much as his personality, noting that the Swiss artist was ‘[m]ild, lost almost to point of apathy & indifference’ (GD, 26 November 1936). Beckett’s interest in this painter was such that he spent considerable effort trying to understand Ballmer’s Aber Herr Heidegger! and the manuscript of Deutschtum und Chris-tentum (GD, 20 March 1937).⁴⁷ Although there was much that interested Beckett in the former book, he ultimately deemed both ‘too Steinerisch for the non-initiate’.⁴⁸ In his essay ‘La peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon’, Beckett referred to Ballmer and his writings:

Quand Sauerlandt se prononce . . . sur le cas du grand peintre inconnu qu’est Ballmer, ou cela retombe-t-il? Das geht mich nicht an, disait Ballmer, que les écrits de Herr Heidegger faisaient cruellement souffrir.

[When Sauerlandt pronounces . . . on the case of the great unknown painter that is Ballmer, where does that leave us? That does not concern me, Ballmer would say, that the writings of Mr Heidegger would make one suffer cruelly]. (Dis, 118)

Beckett is here misusing Ballmer’s words, despite relying on his diary and quoting his words verbatim. Ballmer had stated his disinterest when Beckett Figure 5 Paul Cézanne: Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 1905–06, watercolour on paper, Tate, London; © Tate, London, 2010.

mentioned Sauerlandt’s comments on his work (GD, 26 November 1936).

Beckett had noted Sauerlandt’s opinion that Ballmer was one of the most important avant-garde painters in Die Kunst der letzten dreissig Jahre (1935), but felt that the critic’s ‘passage on Ballmer strikes me as quatsch’ (GD, 27 November 1936). Beckett’s own response to the Germany painter is evident from a diary entry describing his visit to Ballmer in his Hamburg studio in November 1936, where he saw the painting Kopf in Rot (Figure 6;

Female Head, c.1930):

Wonderful red Frauenkopf, skull earth sea & sky, I think of Monadologie

& my Vulture. Would not occur to me to call this painting abstract.

A metaphysical concrete. Not Nature convention, but its source, fountain of Erscheinung [phenomenon]. Fully a posteriori painting. Object not exploited to illustrate an idea, as in say [Fernand] Léger or [Willi]

Baumeister, but primary. The communication exhausted by the optical experience that is its motive & content. Anything further is by the way. Thus Leibniz, monadologie, Vulture, are by the way. Extraordinary stillness. (GD, 26 November 1936)

Figure 6 Karl Ballmer: Head in Red, c. 1930–31, tempera and oil on plywood;

courtesy of the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau.

Beckett and the Visual Arts 157

Similar to the ‘incommensurability’ between landscape and subject located in Cézanne, Beckett found a lack of communication in Ballmer’s painting that resembled the isolated nature of the monad. More import antly, Ballmer did not seek to express appearances but rather the ‘essence’ of objects. This reduction of pictorial content to the ‘primary’ is exemplifi ed in Ballmer’s painting by a tendency of objects and fi gures to disappear into space, generating a kind of threshold between what can and what cannot be visua-lised or represented, or Beckett’s ‘said’ and ‘unsaid’. It amounts to what Beckett in his essay on the van Velde termed ‘un métier qui insinue plus qu’il n’affi rme [a skill which insinuates more than it states]’ (Dis, 130).

Beckett’s notion that in Ballmer the object was ‘not exploited to illustrate an idea’ is anticipated in his discussion of Cézanne, where nature is similarly rooted in a space separate from the one occupied by the painter.

He extended this lack of relation between the artist and the world to encompass the artist’s alienation from his own self, arguing that Cézanne

‘had the sense of his incommensurability not only with life of such a different order as landscape, but even with life of his own order, even with the life – one feels looking at the self-portrait in the Tate . . . – operative in himself’ (SB to TM, undated [16 September 1934]). Beckett’s sensitivity to Cézanne’s self-portrait occurs at a time when he was in psychoanalysis, and there is a hint in his observations that, beyond its theoretical implications, the irredeemable solitude governing human existence was of personal interest to Beckett.⁴⁹ This is particularly visible in his view, again formulated against the background of Cézanne’s self-portrait, that ‘[e]ven the portrait beginning to be dehumanized as the individual feels himself more & more hermetic & alone & his neighbour a coagulum as alien as a protoplast or God, incapable of loving or hating anyone but himself or of being loved or hated by anyone but himself’ (SB to TM, 8 September 1934).

Beckett returned to this alienation, representing one of the most important subjects in his thinking throughout the 1930s, when discussing the paintings of Jack B. Yeats in a letter of 14 August 1937, which offered a ‘kind of petrifi ed insight into one’s ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness’, ‘handled with the dispassionate acceptance that is beyond tragedy’.⁵⁰ In this same letter, written to his aunt Cissie Sinclair (herself an accomplished painter), Beckett also drew attention to the ‘impassable immensity’ between two people, and the ‘stillness’ of Yeats’s pictures. In a letter written to MacGreevy the same day as the one to Cissie Sinclair, Beckett rephrases these thoughts, but also continues the discussion of Cézanne from three years earlier:

What I feel he gets so well, dispassionately, not tragically like Watteau, is the heterogeneity of nature & the human denizens, the unalterable

alienness of the 2 phenomena, the 2 solitudes, or the solitude & the lone-liness, the loneliness in solitude, the impassable immensity between the solitude that cannot quicken to loneliness & the loneliness that cannot lapse into solitude. There is nothing of the kind in Constable, the land-scape shelters or threatens or serves or destroys, his nature is really infected with ‘spirit’, ultimately as humanised & romantic as Turner’s was

& Claude’s was not & Cézanne’s was not. (SB to TM, 14 August 1937)