Walking in Samuel Beckett’s footsteps: In some mysterious way, the landscape captures the soul of the artist

In recent months, I have been making my way through the four volumes of Samuel Beckett’s letters. As ever, I’m struck by his humanity, humour and kindness, traits somewhat at odds with his austere and semi-mythical public image. But I was also surprised by his engagement with the natural world, in the garden of his small country house, near the village of Ussy-sur-Marne outside Paris, but especially when he remembers his boyhood walks with his father in the Dublin and Wicklow mountains not far from his childhood home at Cooldrinagh in Foxrock, Co Dublin. In his late twenties, in an early letter to his great friend, Thomas McGreevy, Beckett writes:
“Lovely walk this morning with Father, who grows old with a very graceful philosophy. Comparing bees and butterflies to elephants and parrots and speaking of indentures with the leveller. Barging through hedges and over the walls with the help of my shoulder, blaspheming and stopping to rest under colour of admiring the view. I’ll never have anyone like him.”
Not long after this memorable morning, Bill Beckett collapsed with a heart attack and, some weeks later, died. His final words, his son would recall, were “What a morning”. This tragic event would resonate through the days and months that followed and, in later years, the writer would continue to find solace walking or cycling in the hills, up the Glencullen road and into the beyond. Afterwards, perhaps, he would stop for a pint or two “in the mountain inns – they’re not inns, just bars, with the lovely names of dead proprietors, Fox, Lamb, Silke, and finally evening will come, and the sea light up – the harbour, the town the headlines. Romantic landscape, but dry old stick of a traveller.”
Beckett would write later, in a letter again to McGreevy: “All the little things come back – mémoire de l’escalier. I can’t write about him, I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him.” Beckett’s biographer, James Knowlson, noted too in Damned To Fame that memories of these walks with his father would haunt him in the years to come.
During my early film-making days, driving across the wilds of Wicklow scouting for possible locations, there were often commonplace references to “the Beckett road” or “the Beckett tree”. These were acknowledged landmarks on that wind-blown landscape which captured something of Beckett’s imaginative terrain. I hesitate to use that over-used word but there is something liminal about this vast empty bogland, something that captures the uncompromising but beautiful spirit of Beckett’s sparse imagery and language, although undoubtedly the desolation of post-war Europe must have also played a role here too.
Now, wondering how these casual place-names came about, I imagine that they entered common lore through their evocative use as visual imagery in Séan O’Mórdha’s landmark documentary Samuel Beckett: Silence to Silence (beautifully shot by Peter Dorney) and especially in David Davison’s monochrome photographs in Prof Eoin O’Brien’s magisterial 1986 book The Beckett Country.
O’Brien, a physician, scholar and friend of Beckett, lovingly and painstakingly connected Beckett’s writings to their physical and historical environment. One of the iconic photographs in that book – an older man and a small boy, walking, hand in hand, on a snow-covered landscape – captures something of Beckett’s childhood walks with his father across the Wicklow hills and was recreated for the photograph by the figures of Eoin O’Brien himself and his own son.
These days, I sometimes think about Beckett and his father, walking as I often do, up through Curtlestown Wood – here in the Glencree valley – and on up to the almost otherworldly expanse above. As the light dims and the clouds roll by like shapeshifters, it is easy to imagine their ghostly presences here. One can stand at the Ordnance Survey marker on Prince William Seat, on the very border of Cos Wicklow and Dublin, and gaze about you. It is truly Beckett country indeed.
Looking eastward, one can see the distant Dublin City lights beginning to twinkle. Closer by, the floodlights might illuminate the old Leopardstown Racecourse, close to the Beckett homestead on Kerrymount Avenue, and, beyond, Dún Laoghaire pier where Krapp supposedly had his epiphanic “vision at last”. Further to your right, south-eastwards, is Redford cemetery, on the forlorn coast between Bray Head and Greystones, where Beckett’s parents are buried. Elsewhere, all around, the place names echo with the footfalls of Beckett and son – Raven’s Rock, Three Rock, the Hellfire Club, Old Boleys, Glencree, Tonduff, Maulin.
As Belaqua observes in Love and Lethe in More Pricks Than Kicks:
The first thing they had to do of course when they got to the top was admire the view, with special reference to Dún Laoghaire framed to perfection in the shoulders of Three Rock and Kilmashogue, the long arms of the harbour like an entreaty in the blue sea. Young priests were singing in a wood on the hillside. They heard them and they saw the smoke of their fire. To the west in the valley a plantation of larches nearly brought tears to the eyes of Belaqua, till raising those unruly members to the slopes of Glendoo, mottled like a leopard, that lay beyond, he thought of Synge and recovered his spirits. Wicklow, full of breasts with pimples, he refused to consider. Ruby agreed. The city and the plains to the north meant nothing to either of them in the mood they were in.
Beckett’s novel Mercier and Camier – written just after the second World War but not published until 1970 – captures this too:
A road still carriageable climbs over the high moorland. It cuts across vast turfbogs, a thousand feet above sea-level, two thousand if you prefer. It leads to nothing any more. A few ruined forts, a few ruined dwellings. The sea is not far, just visible beyond the valleys dipping eastward, pale plinth as pale as the pale wall of sky. Tarns lie hidden in the folds of the moor, invisible from the road, reached by faint paths, under high over-hanging crags. All seems flat, or gently undulating, and there at a stone’s throw these high crags, all unsuspected by the wayfarer. Of granite what is more.
Standing here in the gloaming, a sudden chill setting in to your bones, Samuel Beckett’s remarkable body of work makes sense in some way that is hard to articulate. In the plays in particular, one begins to discern a profound concern for nature – in all its fear and wonder – that seems so prescient today. In some mysterious way, this natural landscape captures something of the soul of the artist and the artist returns the compliment.
But here, in the dusk, on this seemingly endless Wicklow landscape, you might also see two distant figures, lonely pilgrim souls, making their way across the nothingness. As Beckett puts it himself in his short prose piece Worstward Ho:
Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands – no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed. Joined by held holding hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade.
Alan Gilsenan will lead a morning walk titled Samuel Beckett: Walking After My Father on Sunday, September 15th, as part of the Shaking Bog Festival of Arts & Nature in the Glencree Valley, Co Wicklow. See: shakingbog.ie