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March 27, 2006

BANVILLE ON BECKETT

As expected, John Banville lends his voice to the Beckett Centenary with this typically fascinating essay on the influence of painting on Beckett.  (Banville himself tried his hand at painting in his youth.)

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.

(Thanks to Adrian Marley for the link.)

If you're fortunate enough to be in New York, you can check out Banville this evening at the 92nd Street Y.  (Yes, we almost came out.) 

Posted at 12:19 AM in World Beat |

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Comments

Steven Augustine

I can't see a painting by Bacon without thinking of Beckett...Banville completes the triptych of silence-haunted B's!Lovely...

Posted by: Steven Augustine | March 27, 2006 at 01:26 AM

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