Beckett’s lifelong love of German classical literature originated in his extended reading of the 1930s. Anne Atik in her memoir of Beckett, for example, relates his admiration for Goethe and Heinrich Heine (2001, 62 and 67). He could recite large portions of Matthias Claudius, using the image of Death, or ‘Freund Hain’, as a ghostly image threatening Krapp.
Indeed, fragments of German literature, in particular passages from Goethe, resurface or, rather, linger on under the textual surface. Thus the ‘mixed choir’ from Goethe’s Faust appears in Watt (26), also heard (‘or I am greatly deceived’) by Malone, where the reference is underlined by the possibility that it is Easter Week (MD, 34). Furthermore, in his correspondence Beckett often uses German quotations to describe his emotional state and events in his life: ‘Alle Schuld rächt sich auf Erde[n] [The debt all guilt
exacts from mortal men]’ he tells Ruby Cohn in 1981 as he prepares to go Stuttgart for the television production of Quadrat I and II, quoting Goethe’s
‘Lied des Harfners’ (Beckett, letter to Ruby Cohn, 24 May 1981). Another writer whom Beckett never tired of quoting was Hölderlin.
Beckett’s study of German literature in the 1930s culminated in his reading of Friedrich Hölderlin in 1938 and 1939. His encounter with the great German writer followed a typical pattern: the use of a fragment in the early work, the notation of biographical and literary details from Robertson’s History of German Literature, and fi nally a concentrated reading of the primary texts. And once again, Beckett’s notation of the fi rst two and a half lines of ‘Mnemosyne’ (Third Version) in the Dream notebook (DN, item 1087), unacknowledged and with no obvious source, seems to have been made with scant awareness of the larger context of Hölderlin’s writing. It is strange that Beckett omits the second half of the third line in his notebook, transcribing only
Reif, sind, in Feuer getaucht, gekochet
Die Frücht und auf der Erde geprüfet und ein Gesetz ist Das alles hin[eingeht, Schlangen gleich
[Ripe are, dipped in fi re, cooked
The fruits and tried on the earth and it is law, that all must (enter in, like serpents)]
Yet when Beckett came to use the third line in Dream, he complemented it in accordance with the complete line, ‘alles hineingeht[,] Schlangen gleich’ (Dream, 138). The opening lines of ‘Mnemosyne’, hinting at death as well as mortal life, can be set beside Beckett’s attention to Faust’s ‘Die Erde hat mich wieder’. Moreover, the ‘ripe’ and ‘rotten’ imagery is one that crops up again and again in Beckett’s writing, as in his evaluation of language as ‘only ripe, then falls behind’ (GD, 11 March 1937).
After noting the details of Hölderlin’s life (his insanity from 1802 onwards) and work (its ‘passion for Greece’ and ‘melancholy’ nature) from Robertson (TCD MS10971/1, 31v), Beckett proceeded to purchase (or he received) an edition of Hölderlin’s complete works. His personal copy, preserved in the Beckett Archive at the University of Reading, contains various annotations, and carries the inscription ‘24/12/37’.47 The underlined passages show Beckett still susceptible to expressions of nostalgia and melancholy, mark-ing for example the line ‘Wohin könnt ich mir entfl iehen, hätt ich nicht die lieben Tage meiner Jugend? [Whither could I fl ee from myself if I had not
Beckett Reading German Literature 81
the sweet days of my youth?]’ from Hyperion (Hölderlin 1930, 441; 1965, 31) or the poem ‘Ehemals und Jetzt’ (‘Then and Now’):
In jüngren Tagen war ich des Morgens froh, Des Abends weint ich; jetzt, das ich älter bin, Beginn ich zweifelnd meinen Tag, doch Heilig und heiter ist mir sein Ende.
[In younger days each morning I rose with joy, To weep at nightfall; now, in my later years, Though doubting I begin my day, yet
Always its end is serene and holy]. (Hölderlin 1930, 88; 1967, 41) Further annotations establish echoes with other passages from German lit-erature. Thus two lines Beckett marked from the fi rst book of Hyperion relate to Goethe’s ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’: ‘da ich wandelt unter herrlichen Entwürfen, wie in weiter Wäldernacht [when I roved among beautiful pro-jects as through the night of a vast forest]’ (Hölderlin 1930, 442; 1967, 31), and Hyperion’s answer to Alabanda’s question why he had become so monosyllabic: ‘In den heissen Zonen, . . . näher der Sonne, singen ja auch die Vögel nicht. [In the tropical regions, nearer the sun, . . . the birds do not sing either]’ (Hölderlin 1930, 454; 1967, 43). Evidence of Beckett’s reading of Hölderlin can be found in his 1938 writing: the late poem ‘Der Spaziergang’ is quoted in the critical review ‘Intercessions by Denis Devlin’, published April–May 1938 in transition (Dis, 94), and the same poem also inspired Beckett’s own poem ‘Dieppe’.
Furthermore, Beckett admired the poem ‘Hyperions Schicksalslied’
(1789), taken from the second book of Hyperion. The poem, with its anti-thetical relation between the gods, imperceptible to fate (‘schicksallos’), and the mortal human being’s helplessness at the hands of fate, naturally appealed to Beckett, who had already admired a similar thematic exposition in Goethe’s ‘Prometheus’. Beckett used the closing stanza, albeit in an extremely fractured manner, towards the end of Watt (207):
Doch uns ist gegeben Auf keiner Stätte zu ruhen Es schwinden, es fallen Die leidenden Menschen Blindlings von einer Stunde zur andern,
Wie Wasser von Klippe Zu Klippe geworfen,
Jahrelang ins Ungewisse hinab.
[But we are fated
To fi nd no foothold, no rest And suffering mortals Dwindle and fall Headlong from one Hour to the next, Hurled like water From ledge to ledge
Downward for years to the vague abyss]. (Robertson, 410; Hölderlin 1967, 79)
Beckett had originally copied this stanza from Robertson into his notebook, but when he came to use it in Watt, he prolonged the mortal torment by replacing ‘Jahrelang’ with the endless ‘endlos’ (TCD MS10971/1, 31v).
In terms of his own developing poetics, Beckett read Hölderlin at a suit-able time. Charles Juliet related Beckett’s admiration for the ‘mad poems’, but also the opinion that ‘there are whole pages that mean little to him’
(Juliet 1995, 167). These late poems, marked by fragmentation and, simul-taneously, obscurity and inspired insight, were indeed written by Hölderlin at a time when he had lost his sanity. Crucially, Beckett started reading Hölderlin at the precise moment when he himself was moving towards a more complete integration of utterance and self, a more immediate and unadorned style of writing that admitted incoherence and unknowing. In a sense, Hölderlin replaced Goethe as a writer from whom Beckett could learn. In the July 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, Beckett had tellingly remarked that Goethe was the kind of writer that pursued a strategy of ‘Lieber NICHTS zu schreiben, als nicht zu schreiben [better to write NOTHING than not write at all]’ (Dis, 52; trans. 170).48 This opinion undoubtedly grew out of his earlier criticism of the amount of ‘irrelevance’ in Faust. In contrast, Hölderlin, as Beckett told Patrick Bowles in 1955,
ended in something of this kind of failure. His only successes are the points where his poems go on, falter, stammer, and then admit failure, and are abandoned. At such points he was most successful. When he tried to abandon the spurious magnifi cence. (Bowles 1994, 31)
Beckett Reading German Literature 83
With respect to the time at which it was made, the comment has a bearing on the Trilogy, but also on the impact Hölderlin had on Beckett in 1938–9.
Indeed, Beckett’s initial attraction to Hyperion and poems written before the German writer retired to his tower at Tübingen gradually made way to a focus on the ‘terrifi c fragments of the Spätzeit [late period]’.49 Anticipated by the fragmented transcription from ‘Mnemosyne’ (Third Version) in the Dream notebook, Beckett’s expression of the incoherent nature of self and world, within a creative form that admitted fragmentation, spaces and silence, is formulated at this time.50 His incomplete rendition of the last stanza of ‘Hyperions Schicksalslied’ in Watt is thus all the more fi tting.
Throughout the 1930s, Beckett had been creatively inspired and person-ally attracted to German literature. A long passage from Hyperion which Beckett marked in his copy of Hölderlin crystallises this profound infl uence in its quietist attitude, melancholy movement and poetic beauty.
Beckett marked the entire passage with pencil and appended at the top of the page ‘Nox animae’:
Es gibt ein Vergessen alles Daseins, ein Verstummen unsers Wesens, wo uns ist, als hätten wir alles gefunden. Es gibt ein Verstummen, ein Vergessen alles Daseins, wo uns ist, als hätten wir alles verloren, eine Nacht unsrer Seele, wo kein Schimmer eines Sterns, wo nicht einmal ein faules Holz uns leuchtet. Ich war nun ruhig geworden. Nun trieb mich nichts mehr auf um Mitternacht. Nun sengt ich mich in meiner eigenen Flamme nicht mehr.
[There is a forgetting of all existence, a silencing of our being, when we feel as if we had found everything. There is a silencing, a forgetting of all existence, when we feel as if we had lost everything, a night of our soul, in which no glimmer from a star nor even a rotting log gives us light. I had now become quiet. Now nothing drove me up around midnight. Now I no longer scorched myself in my own fl ame]. (Hölderlin 1930, 466–7;
my translation)