Landscapes of memory

Painting brought out Beckett's most passionate enthusiasm and even influenced his writing, writes John Banville

Although the great modernist writers of the 20th century were notable for their erudition in the arts, Samuel Beckett was more erudite than most. He read widely in half a dozen languages, and knew almost the entirety of Western literature from the classics to his own time. He had a deep love too of music, especially that of Schubert, and was a keen pianist. It was painting, however, that brought out his most passionate enthusiasm, and his interest in it was, in the words of his biographer James Knowlson, "highly serious and long-lasting".

Here, as in everything, Beckett was exhaustive. Knowlson suggests that his ability to discern even the most subtle affinities between paintings from different hands and periods indicates that he had a photographic memory. His friend, the painter Avigdor Arikha, said in Knowlson's account that Beckett "could spend as much as an hour in front of a single painting, looking at it with intense concentration, savouring its forms and its colours, reading it, absorbing its minutest detail".

Given such a capacity to concentrate, it is no surprise that he passed much of his time in the great galleries, especially in the early years - he even applied, unsuccessfully, for a job as assistant curator at the National Gallery in London, and when he lived there for nearly two years after the death of his father in 1933 the National was a regular haunt. He was in London to undergo an extended course of therapy with the celebrated psychiatrist WR Bion, and no doubt the tranquillity of the London galleries - besides the National there was the Tate, the V&A, the Wallace Collection and Hampton Court - and the beauty of the pictures were a balm for his deeply troubled soul.

He loved in particular Poussin and the Dutch masters of the Golden Age, and of course Caspar David Friedrich, whose little painting Two Men Contemplating the Moon was one of the inspirations for Waiting for Godot. However, at times Beckett the artistic iconoclast and innovator displayed a violent impatience with the assurance and poise of painters for whom he had a high regard. In 1934, after looking at the Cézannes in the Tate collection he wrote to his friend Thomas MacGreevy, later to become director of the National Gallery in Dublin: "What a relief the Mont Ste Victoire after all the anthropomorphised landscape - van Goyen, Avercamp, the Ruisdaels, Hobbema, even Claude. . . ", against whose work Cézanne's is "alive the way a lap or a fist is alive".

Beckett at this time was seeking desperately for a way out of the artistic impasse in which he was trapped, and which he would not begin to escape from until the famous revelation, on Dún Laoghaire pier one stormy night at the end of the war, half-described in Krapp's Last Tape - in fact, as Beckett insisted Knowlson make clear, it was not at Dún Laoghaire but in his mother's room that he experienced his "revelation" - when he at last began "to write the things I feel".

In Beckett's words, he "realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than adding."

As Knowlson shrewdly points out, "in defining what he saw as Cézanne's recognition that landscape had nothing to do with man, that man was quite separate from and alien to it, [ Beckett] was defining a view that was excitingly close to his own . . ."

In another letter to MacGreevy Beckett wrote: "What I feel in Cézanne is precisely the absence of a rapport that was all right for Rosa or Ruysdael for whom the animising mode was valid, but would have been fake for him, because he had the sense of his incommensurability not only with life of such a different order as landscape, but even with life of his own order, even with the life . . . operative in himself."

THE FACT OF this general "incommensurability", of man's predicament as a figure in a landscape - a mere figure in a hostile or at least an indifferent landscape - was what (as he discovered that night on the stormy pier or the afternoon in his mother's room) he must find a way of affirming in his work, in full acknowledgment of the bitter irony implied by such an effort of affirmation.

Yet the paradox is that Beckett in his own way was a landscape artist of the old school. It is not often remarked how discerningly and tenderly Beckett writes of nature.

Even in the comically bleak wastes of Watt, the novel he published after the war and which is probably the first of his works to be informed by the "revelation", there are passages of extraordinary beauty and even homely charm, such as this one, in which the mysterious gentleman in the "fine full apron of green baize", delivering a "short statement" of 26 unparagraphed pages, seems to renounce nature's dependable variousness - "a cat's flux" - yet manages to portray the seasonal round with the loving particularity of a Hobbema or a Ruisdael, or even a Breughel: "The crocuses and the larch turning green every year a week before the others and the pastures red with uneaten sheep's placentas and the long summer days and the new-mown hay and the wood-pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in the afternoon and the corncrake in the evening and the wasps in the jam and the smell of the gorse and the look of the gorse and the apples falling and the children walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others and the chestnuts falling and the howling winds and the sea breaking over the pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman whistling The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy and the standard oil-lamp and of course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your heart the slush and every fourth year the February debacle and the endless April showers and the crocuses and then the whole bloody business starting over again."

ONE COULD FIND similar and even more ruefully tender perorations even in the most austere of the late works. At a time when he was championing the severe minimalism of his friend, the Dutch painter Bram van Velde, he was in his own work producing some of his lushest celebrations of the natural world, in the three novels of the trilogy and such pieces as the morning-fresh From an Abandoned Work.

Even towards the end, after the arid, dehumanised studies of the 1970s, he returned, in Company, to the vernal world of his childhood at the foot of the Dublin mountains and, in the heartbreakingly beautiful Ill Seen Ill Said, to the wintry snowscape around his cottage in the country at Ussy sur Marne. In these works the animal and vegetal world is conjured with a masterly economy of means: "And what lambs. No trace of frolic. White splotches on the grass. Aloof from the unheeding ewes. Still. Then a moment straying. Then still again. To think there is still life in this age. Gently gently." Cézanne himself could not have painted it better.

John Banville's novel, The Sea, won last year's Man Booker Prize. He will participate in Beckett and the Visual Arts, a panel discussion, in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin on Apr 9 .