Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man

The glasses are for reading, for close work, for eyes now more suited to the far distance. Folded and clenched, the best they can do is look at the floor, trying to bring into view a tiny slippered foot that could be miles away and certainly not big enough to support a literary giant [fig. 1]. As is the case with many images of writers, Minihan's Beckett is rarely seen with the instrument of his craft. The act of writing, hardly the most photogenic of practices, takes place off scene. Pen stays mainly in pocket. The erotics of modern author portraiture demand either the before or the after, a build up of concentration or a moment of relaxation after the work is done. On the edge of a bed yet to be slept in, the courtship between photographer and subject begins. Glasses are removed but not put down. The right hand hangs on, so intent on staying clothed by what it grips that the ring finger must flex for purchase on the knee. The finger looks spastic, delinquent, arthritic even, but it's the only thing stopping the further slide of the hand towards the dismal world of the slipper, a route its partner seems intent on taking, caterpillaring down a trouser leg.¹ For the time being, right hand keeps carpet at arm's length, observing it through spectacles wielded like a magnifying glass that miniaturizes the world until put near enough for gross detail.

Moving up and away [fig. 2], denuded of glasses whose imprint it still bears, the face is not sure where to look. The concentration of furrows across the brow point down with all the clarity of an arrow, as suggests the angle of the head also, but the eyes have a different idea. It is little wonder they usually need the assistance of spectacles to compete with the size of the other sensory organs in evidence. Beckett chose a profile shot as his first publicity photograph but was soon able to dispense with standing out quite so obviously.² If it wasn't that his head seems to rise forever upwards, the ear would look animal in elongation. And all of this propped up on the sparsest of armatures. When commissioned to produce a monument to Balzac, the sculptor Rodin imagined him sprung out of bed in the middle of the night, semi-conscious but fully erect with a great idea. The writer's body, wrapped entirely in a gown, arms, hands and all, became merely a mass of sculptural framework engineered to support a colossal, leonine head, limbs melded into a single column in service of an oversized capital.

Does Minihan's Beckett share Balzac's headiness? Not really. We would have to deploy great force to straighten him out into either a vertical eureka or a horizontal faint. As the veins in his hands show, he has been sitting like this for a while, not in a state of inspiration but one of intense thought: concentration rather than rapture. Although not columnar, he is nonetheless stiffened into a monument. With both arms extended identically, he has become something of a sphinx. The faint ribbing and weave in his jumper and trousers might hint at skin and bones beneath but, by and large, the high contrast of the photograph creates a single weightless, black shape of them, one which frames his hands below and face above. This silhouette carves Beckett out from the everyday stuff of the room all around him. We do not really need to know that this is a hotel room or to scrutinize the anonymous textiles and furniture which occupy it in order to sense that Beckett is not at home here. Nor is he, as so many writers find themselves when photographed, pinned against the bookshelves of his study. Apart from the bending sheets of books cast aside on the bed, the symbolic register of writing has been dispensed with. His head is neatly mounted by the window frame to the right and bedstead below, occupying the most privileged space of the photograph...