Normandy landing

The time Beckett spent working in an Irish Red Cross hospital in France had a huge influence on his work, writes Phyllis Gaffney

Samuel Beckett had just turned 39 when, in May 1945, he was recruited to the staff of an Irish hospital in the French town of Saint-Lô. Among the worst affected of Normandy's war-blighted towns, Saint-Lô was so devastated by Allied bombings during the D-Day landings in June and July 1944 that it had earned the unenviable title of "Capital of the Ruins".

The Irish Red Cross hospital in Normandy was a pioneering project in overseas aid. It was not without problems, partly because no clear timescale had been established for its operations, and the Irish medical volunteers were seen as unwelcome competition by local French doctors, who eventually launched a campaign to speed the Irish withdrawal from the town.

The last of the Irish medics left Saint-Lô in January 1947, to the dismay of many local people. There were street demonstrations and rows on the town council. These political tensions were clear to Beckett from the start of the project, as he stated in a letter to his friend Thomas MacGreevy: "The local medical crowd . . . would like the stuff, but don't want us (very reasonable attitude)."

Beckett sailed for Cherbourg with the hospital's supplies on the merchant vessel, the Menapia, on August 14th, 1945. He supervised the unpacking and storing, by German POWs, of the 3,500 crates that had been assembled in Dublin by volunteers. The requirements for an emergency hospital included not only medicines and professional equipment, beds and bed linen, but electrical generators, garden seeds and tools, books, ambulances, utility vehicles and furnishings for the chapel, not to mention six months' supply of tinned fish, Bovril, tea, bacon, whiskey and cigarettes.

The hospital, installed in wooden huts, was soon up and running and proved a welcome relief to a civilian population deprived of all material comforts. The town's municipal hospital had been destroyed the previous year. Cordial relations obtained between the Irish and the citizens. Beckett was by all accounts an exemplary colleague, thorough and conscientious in his work. Hired as the hospital's storekeeper, he also played the vital role of interpreter with the French architect and German POWs, he ferried patients by ambulance and drove departing or arriving staff to or from Cherbourg or Paris to meet authorities on hospital business. In his spare time he would help nurses with their French, play bridge, and was known to play the piano at the social gatherings of townspeople and volunteer visitors. In fact, he was so caught up with the demands of the hospital post that he was getting no chance to write. His sense of frustration is expressed in another letter to MacGreevy: 'If I don't feel myself quite free again soon, freedom will never again be any good to me.' So he resigned in January 1946 and settled down in Paris as a full-time writer.

BECKETT'S NORMANDY SOJOURN, though short-lived, was arguably influential for his subsequent writing. Apart from the direct echoes of his Saint-Lô experience found in three poems and a curiously styled radio script for Radio Éireann, entitled The Capital of the Ruins, there are less tangible reverberations in some hallmarks of his later work: life pared to its minimum and seen as contingent, suffering borne with fortitude - "'that smile at the human condition as little to be extinguished by bombs as to be broadened by the elixirs of Burroughes and Welcome, the smile deriding, among other things, the having and the not having, the giving and the taking, sickness and health" (as his radio script put it). The role of Clov, in Endgame, mirrors the author's at the hospital: storekeeper of pain-killers and go-between when Hamm needs to communicate with Nagg or Nell.

One earlier work may owe something to Beckett's Normandy days: Mercier et Camier, a novel written in the summer of 1946, after he left Saint-Lô. In many ways the prototype for En Attendant Godot, it is what that work might have been had it not been a play. Written in French, the novel depicts two vagrants wandering aimlessly about a boggy, rain-soaked island that, although not explicitly named, is Beckett's native Ireland. Mercier and Camier speak dialogues almost as zany as Vladimir and Estragon's, joke about the weather and chat in pubs, while the purpose of their odyssey is never made clear. The waiting in Godot is a wandering in the novel.

Beckett was not at ease with this first attempt at a full-length novel in French. He did not seek a publisher for it and, when translating it into English decades later, called it "hateful old hat from the late Forties". It finally appeared in 1970 after he was awarded the Nobel prize; his English translation was published four years later.

Mercier et Camier has a curiously bifocal perspective. The tramps are Irish, but they speak in French. That his months in Saint-Lô had sharpened Beckett's awareness of the interplay between the two cultures, Irish and French, is clear from his radio script, where he draws comparisons between the two that are not always to the benefit of the Irish side. It seems Beckett has already crossed the threshold and cast in his lot with his country of adoption.

AS EOIN O'BRIEN surmises, Saint-Lô was a crucial cultural watershed for Beckett, pivotal in prompting him to cross over into Frenchness and to write in French. This "spiritual exodus" (to use O'Brien's phrase) occurred in a liminal setting: an Irish hospital in the heart of Normandy. At Saint-Lô, Beckett was living in France yet consorting on a daily basis with a greater cross-section of Irish people than he had previously mingled with in Portora or Trinity. The close juxtaposition of the two cultures helped confirm that he had more intellectual affinities with his host country than with de Valera's Ireland.

"They got at least as good as they gave." Thus Beckett summed up the Saint-Lô experience for the Irish medical volunteers. This was doubtless true, and Beckett is not the only one to remark on the benefits to the donor of humanitarian aid. But the writer, too, derived much from his stay in Saint-Lô, not least the certainty that he preferred the French way of doing things - "the rare and famous ways of spirit that are the French ways" - despite the penury of post-war France. This last is extremely evident in his radio script, where he hopes that some of the Irish volunteers, at least, will have returned home with "a vision and sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again. These will have been in France."

Phyllis Gaffney, head of French at UCD, is the author of Healing Amid the Ruins: the Irish Hospital at Saint-Lô 1945-46 (A&A Farmar, 1999). Her late father, Jim Gaffney, served as pathologist at the Saint-Lô hospital