Beckett’s Double-Vision of Yeats in …but the clouds…

Abstract

As a young writer struggling to carve out a niche for himself, Samuel Beckett had a special loy to grind with William Butler Yeats. And like Christy Mahon, who dealt two mighty loy blows to Old Mahon in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Beckett would learn that patriarchs are not dispensed with so easily. Fathers stubbornly refuse to stay dead. They keep returning for more praise and more abuse and must be buried anew. Young Beckett’s attitude toward Old Yeats is best captured in “Recent Irish Poetry,” a review published in the August 1934 issue of The Bookman. The 28-year-old Beckett literally “makes a name for himself” in this essay, adopting the pseudonym “Andrew Belis.”¹ Five years earlier, an even younger Beckett had warned, “The danger is in the neatness of identifications” (“Dante” 19). But “Andrew Belis” promptly ignores this advice, beginning “Recent Irish Poetry” with a neat identification: “I propose, as rough principle of individuation in this essay, the degree in which the younger Irish poets evince awareness of the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again, namely the breakdown of the object,” or the “breakdown of the subject. It comes to the same thing—rupture of the lines of communication” (70). With recognition of this rupture as his litmus test, Beckett divides contemporary Irish poets into two groups, “antiquarians and others, the former in the majority” (70).