SOURCE: Connelly, Joseph F. “The Shared Aesthetic of Jack Yeats and Beckett: More Pricks than Kicks.” Notes on Modern Irish Literature 13 (2001): 47-54.

[In the following essay, Connelly investigates the relationship between the short stories in More Pricks than Kicks and the visual arts, particularly the work of the Irish painter Jack Yeats.]

When the Irish short story comes under scrutiny, Samuel Beckett's collection More Pricks than Kicks (1934) is neither at the forefront nor, at least, even mentioned. As a writer of prose fiction, Beckett is an anomaly as he is considered more French than Irish, and his reputation rests in theater and the novel originally in French and later translated into English. The collection MPTK [More Pricks Than Kicks] is regarded as apprentice work, a curiosity that interests a handful of readers who then may label the stories as neglected in light of the later and more thought provoking fiction.

My approach in examining MPTK as short pieces that constitute a whole is twofold: to analyze Beckett's relationship with the visual artists, and to establish an aesthetic from which the stories may have evolved. The Irish painter Jack B. Yeats, whom Beckett befriended in 1931, demonstrates the major connection between Beckett and the visual artists, in particular their shared aesthetic, which various commentators have acknowledged.¹ This early attitude he brings to the writing of fiction does not readily apply to the later and longer works whose character portrayal becomes almost exclusively interior, unlike the combination of narrative and still worked throughout MPTK. The analysis of the short fiction in this manner suggests an awareness that enhances appreciation of the collection based in visual perspectives. When placed against the framework of the visual artists, the stories emerge more formally and less avant garde than previously considered.

Anne Cremin's article “Friend Game” establishes a beginning in this study by outlining Beckett's numerous associations with European visual artists and by focusing on themes, styles, and in general the modernist mode of abstract imagery and thought associated with Beckett's chosen contemporaries. She uses a quotation from Beckett's review of Thomas MacGreevy's monograph, Jack B. Yeats: An Appreciation and an Introduction (1945), to show Beckett's emphasis on artistry when he ranks the painter

… with the great of our time, Kandinsky and Klee, Bellmer and Bram van Velde, Roualt and Braque, because he brings light as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless Predicament of existence, reduces the dark where there might have been, mathematically at least a door.

(85)

In disagreeing with MacGreevy's praise of Yeats' nationalism and citing “the issueless Predicament of existence,” Beckett notes the objectivity and the disengagement of the artist from his or her subject matter, and in listing Yeats among the recognized moderns. He brings the painter to the forefront when he is just becoming known on the continent while MacGreevy places Yeats within the literary revival, viewed by Beckett as restrictive.²

Commentators have noted the relationship of writer and painter in their depictions of figures on the edge of society, the pairing of characters and the subtle humor in their handling.³ More recent studies focus on the nature and effect of their relationship. Hilary Pyle, in Yeats: Portrait of an Artistic Family (1997) explains “… the young writer was immediately impressed, as much by Yeats' self-reliance in his work and determination to remain independent, as by the individual canvases which became a constant visual stimulus to him” (232). He purchased three Yeats' paintings, as well as other artists' over his lifetime, and his studied interest in the visual arts displays a broad and meticulous knowledge. In the late 1920s, as Lois Gordon notes, Beckett kept a notebook of the design of paintings he had studied which were later used in stage settings (33). More important to the considerations of this paper are the seven sketchbooks of Yeats, on display in his studio where Yeats, Beckett, and others met on a regular basis. They have practical considerations in the painter's development as individual pictures and in their narrative qualities. As Bruce Arnold states:

They have the realization of his art and not its starting. Something has happened to him as a storyteller … in the way his books are narratives, a succession of images running through the individual pages and from page to page, even from book to book, for the total work consists of no less than seven volumes of drawings. He achieves a creative transmutation, from the static singleness of the moment with no before or afterwards, which is peculiar to painting, towards the progression of narrative idea, the moment through a tale or story, a sequence of events, peculiar to writing. He comes near to achieving the virtually impossible synthesis of two quite different forms.

(259)

The relationship begins at an opportune time when Beckett is writing and publishing MPTK; their developing friendship displays mutual appreciation and discovery of like sensibilities. Yeats is painting hybrid picture-narratives at the same time that Beckett is writing narratives that employ detailing and positioning of imagery associated with the visual arts.

Beckett maintains his friendship with Yeats despite long separations during the war and Beckett's permanent residence in Paris. While abroad, his circle of companions includes the visual artists Avigdor Arikha, Bram van Velde, Alberto Giacometti, Jasper Johns, and Stanley William Hayter. He did collaborative projects with some, and also purchased individual works that he gave away as personal gifts. What characterizes the varied relationships is a common taste among the contemporaries based on the mystery of human existence and more particularly on the space and silence that encompass and separate individuals. This distancing also marks the modernist principle of artistic detachment from the matter of the work as Beckett wrote of Hayter: “[the] bare presence of he who does, bare presence of what is done. Impersonal, unreal work … Everything is recognizable, but not to be known. Strange order of things made from an order lacking objects, from objects without order” (qtd. in Cremin 87).

Commentators on Yeats emphasize his working from memory, rather than from model (Pyle, JBY 127-29) which may also be compared to Beckett's desire to draw from his creative imagination and not copy life. Yeats' sketchbooks and Beckett's notebooks, along with careful meditations,—perhaps silences—serve as selected memory from which painter and writer work. In relying on memory, years preceding the sketchbooks, Yeats is able to paint watercolor illustrations for Canon Hanny's Irishmen All (1913), by working from the chapter titles alone. They collaborated without meeting or reviewing each other's contribution (Pyle, JBY 105-06). In Yeats' scholarship, the watercolor “Memory Harbor” (1920), set at Rosses Point in Silgo, becomes the representation of his memory.

From childhood and during student years, Beckett is remembered for a remarkable memory from which he later develops keen awareness of and response to the difficult lives of the lower class. Sharing middle class upbringings, Beckett and Yeats observed and depict the marginalized, travelers, circus performers, laborers, and the rootless in general. Their working from memory differs in the degree each relies on it. The painter's early work as illustrator caused him to follow more faithfully external reality than did Beckett whose sympathies, formed from the past, permeated his characterizations, without reproducing types he encountered or recalled from memory. At the beginning of their friendship, Yeats' style and tone have undergone alteration. Like Beckett he visions the limitations of the human condition in light of changing world events, and the paintings reflect these complexities, especially the poverty and violence of the lower class. The overwhelming space on many of the canvases expresses the vast universe that diminishes the individual, and the flash of color and thick brush strokes points to the unknown that likewise burdens humankind. Beckett's almost total depiction of his major figures from within, especially the later fiction in French, indicates a more philosophical approach than the traditional characterization, while spacing and positioning of image and secondary characters, presented by the distant and omniscient author, reflect little reliance on memory's storehouse. Though Bair explains that four of the ten stories of MPTK employ personal material (161-64), the overall portrayal of Belacqua is the creation of imagination focused on his singularity. He is neither traditional nor unique in his portrayal. The later major figures and pair of figures have less active lives than Belacqua.

The concept of space and distance identified with the creative powers is also necessary in collaborative efforts, such as Still (1973), with William Stanley Hayter. Out of respect for Beckett's work methods, the engraver-artist estimates seven years to complete the project, though much of the writing is already done. Over four years they meet, and except for the change of one face Beckett judged as too particular each worked independently and without editorial oversight. This collaboration differs from Yeats and Hanny's; both reveal the dependence on memory as the repository of the other artist's work, but more importantly both conserve the awareness and sensitivity of each other's approach to the completed book.

Aside from memory, collaboration requires the ability to combine, abstract, and correlate. These basic characteristics of the creative mind are extended by Yeats and Beckett in melding picture and narrative in their respective media. Arnold refers to this junction in describing Yeats' sketchbooks, while Pyle cautions the viewer to give attention to the titles of paintings as Yeats is a literary painter (Pyle JBY, 129). In the fragmented pieces of MPTK, Beckett has Belacqua alert the reader to the narrative method when he labels it “moving pauses” which he rightly judges to be an oxymoron (38). This occurs in “Ding-Dong”, story three, that ends in the hero's flight from the woman selling prayers for her customers' salvation. The author gradually works in characters of greater eccentricity than Belacqua, such as the revelers in “A Wet Night.” They further isolate him, as he is more thoughtful and perceptive, but still erratic and asocial, though not a figure of satire. The best synthesis of Belacqua comes from the omniscient narrator of “What a Misfortune,” who comments: “Say what you will, you can't keep a dead mind down” (140). While not an oxymoron, it contains a similarly dual effect that evokes the image of the lobster, from story one, and the idea that if his mind is dead, what are the minds of the others. Are they more dead?

One of Beckett's purchases, “A Morning” (also cited as “A Morning in Silgo” 1935), provides insight into their shared aesthetic. The top of the painting is bright sky, creating a clear space that becomes a characteristic of Beckett's work. The reader notes this as early as MPTK, in the story “yellow,” when Belacqua desires to curtail the dawn, as if to stop time in his hospital room because it activates the mind. As in the Yeats' painting, the morning brings anticipation in the horseman ready to embark. Though the horseman's eyes convey apprehension, the horse and a cat have a moment of communication. This note of humor is reinforced by the pose of rearing horse and rider looking back, from the popular westerns of the time. The prelude to the action has resonance in the lives of both the painter and writer. While Silgo connotes Yeats' formative years, the date and purchase of the painting signify for Beckett the deepening of their friendship and recognition of their shared aesthetic. For Belacqua, in “Dante and the Lobster,” the discovery that the lobster is alive indicates his own movement to death and beyond, encapsulated in the nine stories that follow.

Yeats painted a number of singular works in series. “On the Broads” (1899) are three watercolors of the sailing vessel “The Broads,” distinguished in the titles by numbers and in content by perspectives. Two are above deck, the first from behind the boat and the second on mid-deck. The third is below deck looking out at a passing ship and shore. Each is self-contained; together they form a series of stills in motion. No person is present. In “Love and Lethe,” the fifth story, Beckett writes the basic three scene story: post mid-day dinner conversation of mother and daughter, Belacqua's calling on Ruby and departure with her, and the stayed double suicide which the narrator explains: “… on this occasion, if never before or since, he achieved what he set out to do; car, in the words of one competent to sing of the mother: L'Amour et la Mort-caesura-n'est queune mesme chose” (100). Belacqua, the romantic, has resisted intimacy, accidentally firing the weapon, and tuned their quest into a non-scene worked in parody. Beckett consciously plays with the reader's anticipation when he intervenes and warns about prescribing motivations, at the end of scene one: “How he had formed this resolution to destroy himself we are quite unable to discover. The simplest course, when the motives of any deed are found subliminal to the point of defying expression, is to call that deed ex nihlo and have done. Which we beg leave to follow in the present instance” (89). We are asked to take in the scenes and their lively humor, and suspend judgment to the end of the story or the book or both. Beckett's building of parody through the story's rising action, the hero's bungling of its purpose, and Ruby's vision of “her life as a series of staircase jests” (88) reminds the reader of a Charlie Chaplin film with its dualities of joys and sorrows, misconceptions and unrealized achievements. While Yeats' scenes of the sailboat look to the late modern number paintings or Marilyn Monroe faces by Jasper Johns, Beckett's vignettes of Ruby and Belacqua culminate in his later dramatic work of the two tramps.

“Love and Lethe” prepares us for the next two linked stories, “Walking Out” and “What a Misfortune,” connected by Belacqua's marriages, first to the bedridden Lucy and then to Thelma Bloggs. As in Yeats' rose paintings and those depicting performing clown and equestrian, where image or characters serve the narrative function, the sequence or movement has little consequence in that each incident is separate and contained. Yeats states his intent in a letter to Thomas Bodkin: “… I painted the rose alive and then followed it into the ante room of the Rose's Shadow Land, and painted another little panel of it departing. But there's nothing piano about it, not yet fussy digame” (White 151). In plan and execution his emphasis is series, not sequence, and as such discourages allegorical interpretation.

The most revealing series is the clown and the equestrian, whose relationship extends beyond their singular performance. In the first painting, “The Haute École Act” (1925), the rider and horse appear to be leaving the performance; as she rides side saddle, cradles a rose in her left arm, her eyes are lowered. The title is important as it indicates the social distinction of performance in the world of circus. In “This Grand Conversation was under the Rose” (1943), the title and picture convey the conversation's intimate nature, as it occurs sub rosa, the rose above their heads. The horse seems to be listening adding a note of humor. The last painting, “When the Cat's Away” (1949), further carries the humor when the clown now rides the horse; his face appears masked like Pan in a Greek drama, as she watches, relaxes, her riding hat removed, and holds what looks like a bouquet. Their roles are reversed as the horse is actively at play and enjoying the light reprieve from their usual routine. Their privacy is secure for no others are present as they are in the foreground or background of the other paintings. The title reveals what they are doing is not what the viewer has come to expect. Clown and horse are centered in a shift from their previous stances, and the imagery is less clear as Yeats now works with more vibrant coloration, whirling brush strokes, and feelings that direct the eye, in the substantive change from the earlier linear and more representative approach. Not only does the rose image indicate the private relationship of equestrian and clown; it has permanently become the painter's signature of how he works sub rosa. In the series' last painting, the equestrian is the onlooker, who offers her bouquet in homage to clown and horse, a gesture of mutual recognition. The depth of feeling sets off this series from the previous sailboats and roses.

A similar and gradual shift in MPTK comes through in “yellow,” the next to last story. In the placement of stories, Beckett causes the reader to reconsider Belacqua's character as he dies in bed prior to surgery. He is now more thoughtful, though no less humorous, as he thinks of death and his various ways to handle it. His only human contacts are the nurses who remain distant. His wife, the Smeraldina, whom we learn of in the concluding story, is not by his side, as Beckett centers on Belacqua's aloneness and singularity. Statements like “The mixture is too rich,” referring to the anesthetic, and “His heart was running away, the terrible yellow yerks in his skull” (174) indicate how unsuited his person is among the flow of humanity and his uniqueness in dealing with what his nature will allow. The quotations taken metaphorically lead naturally to the concluding sentence that affirms his neglect. “They had clean forgotten to osculate him” (174)! His death is an ironic compliment that raises Belacqua in the reader's esteem, as do the words of the surgeon overheard by the hero. “One of the best …” (174), though not spoken about him.

Amid these ironies and the compacted comic imagery of the closing pages of “yellow,” Beckett prepares the reader for the fiction's final irony, which is another reconfiguration of Belacqua after his demise in the previous story. To the person Harry Capper Quin, whom we meet as the hero's best man in “What a Misfortune,” Beckett gives another chance on a new life and one to Belacqua also.

… (Hairy) seemed to have taken on a new lease of life. … Perhaps the explanation of this was that while Belacqua was alive Hairy could not be himself, or, if you prefer, could be nothing else. Whereas now the defunct, such of his parts at least as might be made to fit, could be pressed into service, incorporated in the daily ellipses of Capper Quin without having to face the risk of exposure. Already Belacqua was not wholly dead, but merely mutilated.

(187)

Whether the characters undergo a reversal or one character assimilates into another, Belacqua now can continue though cold in the ground in an added twist reminiscent of Yeats' clown and equestrian, in “When the cat's away.” Though in different media, writer and painter retain common human nature shared by very different characters and a comic rendering that borders on the burlesque. They employ imagery of a similar nature that meets the materials of their chosen arts well. Brush strokes and words, scenes and stories, make for lively narratives that are singular moments as well; Harry as Belacqua, clown as equestrian, and vice versa heighten the liveliness.

The principle supporting the twists and turns of the stories and paintings is basic irony. Beckett works the technique to its full extent by cloning character from a different character, and in the process of Belacqua's dying integrates the imagery of marriage and holy orders. The hero's passing is a multisided and broad comedy without the crudity of slapsticks or the harshness of parody. Its realism is absurd and differs from Yeats' as the painter is less fanciful than the writer is, at this stage of development, though his works will gradually become more visionary.

A good example of a painting that coincides with the development of MPTK is “The Clown among the People” (1932). Leaving the performance, the clown is portrayed centering the picture in ironic position to those he passes, two of whom are distinguishable as they look contentedly at him. His face has a preoccupied look in contrast to theirs, and though he is among spectators he is alone. A tent pole behind the figure on the right is the only identifiable object except for the three figures. Short and overlapping brush strokes, among muted shadowy coloring, create a weight as if the clown is burdened. Sadness and joy mingle in the perfectly executed composition. A slight note of humor in the scene is the one figure's glance of satisfaction and admiration beside the clown who passes her and ironically may not even notice. James White commends the characters' universal quality and the significance of the human condition (14). At the time of the painting and stories of MPTK viewers and readers were accustomed to Yeats' subtle form of realism and confused by Beckett's convolutions which he will temper and simultaneously deepen the complexities in later writings.

In analyzing the aesthetics of Yeats and Beckett, the paper examines the backgrounds of each, and in selected paintings of Yeats interprets their approaches and concepts with those of Beckett's writing in MPTK. In placing pictures and stories in relative position to each other, the artists' shared and modernistic sensibilities come through. The principle of distance, so important to early modernists, is consciously maintained in the respective works at the onset of their relationship. Though neither artist is a social reformer, their blend of realism and humor suggests more than a passing interest in the human condition, as both deal sympathetically with the outcasts and rootless who people their work. They portray humanity in acts of sustaining itself, rather than justifying and evoking moods of pity and despair.

In contrast to mirroring, their realism represents as both rely on active and disciplined imaginative memories as the source of their artistry. I have attempted to present Beckett's stories as the visual artist may approach a canvas by exploring and creating scenes that utilize imagery, color and form in detailing the pictures. The latter is important in MPTK as the collection appears chaotic and lacking causation, and in hindsight alone are our apprehensions rectified when they are least appropriate, such as the death of Belacqua in “yellow,” preceded by the lamenting “The Smeraldina's Billet Doux.” The conscious detailing and positioning of stories and characters create a sense of detachment, like pictures in a museum, while serving the humorous tone and ironic coherence that surprise and delight the reader. In Beckett's words about Yeats' paintings, “(they reduce) the dark where there might have been … a door” which is also applicable to the writing of MPTK.

The 1930s are the appropriate decade for the young writer and seasoned painter, in the process of stylistic and conceptual adjustments, to come together and discover their mutual working endeavors. What more can we expect of consummate artists in their respective media than their unique excellences!

Notes

1. Dierdre Bair refers to the relationship as father-son (119). The Yeats commentators, Hilary Pyle in both citations and Bruce Arnold, rely on the writing of Yeats in dealing with their friendship, as does Marilyn Gaddes Rose in “Solitary Companions in Beckett and Jack B. Yeats.” Eire Ireland IV (Summer 1969): 66-80.

2. Brian Fallon. Irish Art 1830-1990. Appleton, 1994, uses the term “painter of Literary Renaissance” to describe Yeats. He agrees with McGreevy in placing the nationalist tag on the painter.

3. Marilyn Gaddes Rose is the first to make the comparison.

Works Cited

Arnold, Bruce. Jack Yeats. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.

Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. New York and London: Harcourt Brace and Javanovich, 1978.

Beckett, Samuel. More Pricks Than Kicks. New York: Grove, 1972.

Cremin, Ann. “Friend Game,” Art News 84 (May 1985): 82-89.

Gordon, Lois. The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996.

Pyle, Hilary. Jack B. Yeats, A Biography. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970.

———. Portrait of an Artistic Family. London: Merrell Halberton, 1997.

White, James. “Memory Harbor”: Jack B. Yeats's Painting Process.” Yeats Studies 2 (Bealtaine 1972): 9-17.

———. Ed. Jack B. Yeats: Drawings and Paintings 1871-1951 A Centenary Exhibition. London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1971.