Beckett might have sat out World War II in his native Ireland, but as he later quipped in an interview with Israel Shenker, “I preferred France in war to Ireland at peace.” By 1941 he had joined the Resistance in Paris, largely as a response to the arrest of such Jewish literary friends as his old Trinity College classmate Alfred Péron. As a neutral Irishman who spoke fluent French, Beckett was in great demand; he and his companion (later wife) Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil joined Gloria, areseau de renseignement or information network, whose main—and dangerous—job was to translate documents about Axis troop movements and relay them to Allied headquarters in London. The coding of messages and transfer of microfilm hidden in matchboxes, toothpaste tubes and so on has interesting implications for Beckettian dialogue that I discuss in Wittgenstein’s Ladder: the so-called “cut-out’ system, for example, whereby each cell member reported to the next in line, often unknown to him or herself, surely stands behind particular sequences in Watt, which Beckett was writing in the early forties.
When Gloria was betrayed by a double agent in August 1942, the Becketts had to flee Paris immediately, heading for the Unoccupied Zone in the south of France. It took them, sometimes alone, sometimes with other refugees, almost six weeks to cross into the free zone at Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy; they made their way by hiding in barns and sheds and sometimes behind trees, inside haystacks and down in ditches. As Beckett later told his biographer James Knowlson:
I can remember waiting in a barn (there were ten of us) until it got dark, then being led by a passeur over streams; we could see a German sentinel in the moonlight. Then I remember passing a French post on the other side of the line. The Germans were on the road so we went across fields. Some of the girls were taken over in the boot of a car.
In another six weeks or so the Becketts reached Roussillon, a village so named for its location on a plateau of red rock, some 40 km. from Avignon, which was to become their home for the next three years. Much as the 700km journey on foot had been hazardous and painful, Beckett’s biographers agree that the stay in Roussillon was in many ways even worse: a mixture of boredom and danger. As an alien identifiable by his Irish accent, Beckett had to avoid Nazi patrols coming through the area by hiding, sometimes for days at a time, in the fields and woods on the outskirts of Roussillon . Then too, as Stan Gontarski points out, “they never knew when they heard someone approach whether it would be a Nazi patrol or friendly villagers.” Indeed, the uniqueness of the French war experience, as compared to the English or German, was that there was no sure way of differentiating between friend and enemy. Collaborator and Resistance fighter, after all, looked alike.
Waiting (the original title of Waiting for Godot) became, in any case, the central activity. At first the Becketts lived at the village hotel where bedbugs and mice were everywhere, and where they had to go outdoors, not only for the privy but also for drinking water. The fields where they searched for potatoes were often seas of mud. For a time, Beckett worked for a farmer named Aude and picked grapes for another farmer named Bonnelly, who is mentioned by name in En Attendant Godot:
VLADIMIR: Pourtant nous avons été ensemble dans le Vaucluse, j’en mettrais ma main au feu. Nous avons fait les vendanges, tiens, chez un nommé Bonnelly, à Roussillon.[
In the English translation, the specific references to the Vaucluse and Bonnelly have been excised, the lines reading, “But we were there, together, I could swear to it! Picking grapes for a man called . . . (he snaps his fingers) . . . can’t think of the name of the man, at a place called . . . (snaps his fingers) . . . can’t think of the name of the place, do you not remember?”]
Beckett and Suzanne finally got their own house, but it was unheated and the winter of '43 was by all accounts especially cold and dreary. The village, enticing as it could be in the spring in its mountain setting of pine, oak, and olive (and after the war, a tourist attraction because of its prehistoric caves) was claustrophobic in winter, indeed a kind of prison.
Here Beckett spent the better part of three years. He spoke only French at this time, of course, there being almost no English speakers in residence. At war’s end, the Becketts made their way back to Paris, and the Irishman continued on, by way of a bombed-out London, to Dublin to see his mother for the first time in five years. Then, since his status in
France was that of resident alien, Beckett was not permitted to return to his home in Paris where conditions were terrible—large-scale starvation—and hence he volunteered to help the Irish Red Cross build a hospital for the Normandy town of Saint-Lô, which had been devastated by the Allies en route from Cherbourg to Paris
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
