Still enjoying Deirdre Bair's biography of Samuel Beckett, in which I've now progressed to the World War II years. The last passage I read, page 325, made me laugh out loud in a coffeeshop. The Vaucluse is a region in southeast France where Beckett was hiding from Nazis:
People in the Vaucluse were able to go on with their lives throughout the war with relatively little interference from either warring side because the area was out of the way in the unoccupied zone. They had adequate food, never lacked wine and seldom went without cigarettes.
He had to hide because he was active in the underground resistance to the Nazis. Up to that point in his life, Beckett had been determinedly apolitical, but, as he later explained to an interviewer:
I was so outraged by the Nazis, particularly by their treatment of the Jews, that I could not remain inactive. . . . I was fighting against the Germans, who were making life hell for my friends, and not for the French nation.
Beckett made light of his resistance activities, which he described as "Boy Scout stuff." After the war, however, he received a citation from the French government, signed by Charles de Gaulle, that read:
BECKETT, Sam: A man of great courage, who over the course of two years, demonstrated his effectiveness as an information source in an important intelligence network. He continued this work well past the limit of personal security. Betrayed to the Germans, from 1943 he was forced to live clandestinely and with great difficulty.
Lived "with great difficulty," though with lots of wine and cigarettes. During peacetime it's perpetual Mardi Gras in The Vaucluse.
I promised two anecdotes relating to the absurd romantic entanglements to which Beckett as a young man was subject, and then only delivered one. Here is the passage describing the other I had in mind:
As the summer drifted on, [Beckett] grew silent and tight-lipped when friends mentioned Betty, but he never asked about her. He drifted into a sexual relationship instigated by the woman he called Frica, but almost before it began it was ended by both their mothers, who realized the unsuitability of the liaison and saw to it that both their errant children were separated by great physical distance.
The absurdity of this small episode in the history of parental helicoptering derives mainly from the fact that Beckett was at the time precisely 30 years old. His father had recently died, and he was living at home, in the suburbs of Dublin: there was a profitable family business in which he refused to work, but neither could he live independently, as there wasn't much of a market for freelance intellectuals. Another reason he lived through the war with relative ease is that his brother, who did work in the family business, regularly sent checks to him in occupied France.
Comments