Bray’s Beckett?

Jo Baker is the celebrated author of Longbourn (2013), which retells the events of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of the servants as if a Regency Downton Abbey. She is also the author of four other well-respected novels.

Her latest, A Country Road, A Tree, retells in fictional form Samuel Beckett’s and Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil’s World War II experiences in Paris and Roussillon, in the south, and their harrowing odyssey there, as well as Beckett’s work for the French Resistance there and back in Paris. In her note at the novel’s end, Baker acknowledges the important role played in researching it by the Beckett biographies of Bair, Cronin, and especially Knowlson’s Damned to Fame (1996). She also explains the role played by Barbara Bray, Beckett’s longtime lover.

Beckett and I had a mutual friend. Barbara Bray was…a great supporter of my husband’s and mine when we were starting out as writers. I’m so grateful for her kindness, for the warm, supportive correspondence, the lunches and drinks she insisted on treating us to when we were young and broke…I didn’t know at the time, the extent of her involvement in Beckett’s life. She was not, after all, just a friend to him, but she was a good and valued friend to us.

This influence shapes the way Beckett comes off as an existentialist martyr. Despite Saint Sam’s conviction of a totally absurd universe, he nonetheless practices common decency and courtesy. He prefers the shapes, the patterns, such performances give to his world much like his painfully impossible process of selecting words for his long, intricate sentences does for his mostly half-finished, abandoned, or poorly finished works.

The novel’s negative slant on Suzanne shows up in her portrait throughout. Her role in Beckett’s life is presented as that of a rather poor mother-substitute. From her appearance in the Paris hospital where he is recovering from a nearly fatal knife wound (she read about her former mixed tennis double’s partner in the newspaper); to her knitting curtains for his Paris apartment and blankets for them both as she moves in once the Nazis invade; to her retreat from anything but a translator’s role in their Paris cell of the resistance. While Beckett pieces puzzling Dadaist encoded sentences from clandestine Allied radio broadcasts and takes his readings of them to others in the unit for action, darting here and there in anxious evasion of Gestapo spies and Nazi Army patrols checking for papers he does not have, Suzanne whines about all this dangerous work and its toll on her. Even their long bitter journey to relative safety in Roussillon is depicted as displaying his heroism for her sake and her whining or gnawing complaints about his impracticality and needless self-sacrifice for the others they meet on the way apparently worse off.

Suzanne’s portrait is sometimes balanced by brief scenes of his wastrel ways and drinking bouts, though the worst of the latter never surface. These scenes of drunkenness, until the end, fade out before we see any real sins of Saint Sam. Only at the end, after many scenes of rationalization, do we finally see him drunkenly frequenting prostitutes. Bray/ Baker establishes Suzanne’s incapacity to forgive him for his time away when he comes back from his year of helping set up a makeshift hospital at Saint Lo in Normandy on behalf of the Red Cross. He takes this job while caught in Dublin red tape right after the war visiting his mother for the first time in years to ask her to up his portion of his father’s legacy for him and Suzanne. He then goes to Normandy not only to help, but also to get back to France and Suzanne sooner than he otherwise might. This is how A Country, A Tree pitches their relationship anyway.

When he finally does return to...