Poetry of the novel: Beckett in Germany looking at paintings

One thing I dislike about biographies is that they often begin with the subject's birth. While I accept that this might be necessary, the background of grandparents, parents and siblings, no matter how brief, is often tiresome. By the time the subject is an adult, my interest tends only to be in finishing the book. For this reason, I began re-reading Damned to Fame, James Knowlson's long, pains-taking biography of Beckett, from Chapter 10: Germany – the Unknown Diaries 1936-37. The chapter also contains the deeper reason for my impatience.

Elsewhere I have mentioned that 2006 is Beckett's centenary. I'm looking out for the news of the promised first editions of his collected correspondence. Knowlson whets the appetite with quotations from a few letters. I have read them before. Indeed Spike's review of this and Anthony Cronin's The Last Modernist was the first thing I ever wrote for it, back in 1996, the year of its birth (which means Spike has a special anniversary itself). I don't recall much of either biography, hence the decision to do so again but without the stifling preamble.

Beckett is 30 and, as he leaves Ireland for a not-so-grand tour of Germany, has various people trying to get Murphy published in the UK and US. In my review of the biography, I mention that these diaries reveal that Beckett to be very conscious of what was happening in Germany at that time. He despised the Nazis and was disgusted by those who parroted received opinion. The Nazis also frustrated the main purpose of the trip, and this is what makes this chapter particularly intriguing; something I didn't mention in the review: Beckett's travels are almost solely given over to viewing art. And he mixed not with writers but collectors and artists. He visits Hamburg, Brunswick, Erfurt, Dresden, Berlin and Munich always to view paintings.

At that time the Nazis had banned 'decadent' art from exhibition, so it was rare he could see all that he wanted. But he found much to inspire in older works, such as 'the profound reticence' of Giorgione's self-portrait and the sacred in Altdorfer's landscapes. Incidentally, when I read this in 1996, I did not have access to the internet, so it was good to be able to access images of these as the biography does not contain illustrations.

I didn't need the internet to visualise one artist however. I was pleased to be reminded that Beckett loved the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. Knowlson says that Two Men Contemplating the Moon might well have stayed in the author's mind long enough to emerge as Vladimir and Estragon. But it is more than inspiration for characters that painting had on Beckett's work.

Knowlson's book is famous for including details of Beckett's excruciating psychosomatic illnesses. In Hamburg, he had a sore on his lip, ruining his chances with art-friendly German ladies, and then festering boils on his fingers. In Berlin he gets laid up by an unexplained abscess behind his scrotum. As he rests, he notes down his thoughts on poetic theatre, having just seen a production of Hebbel's Gyges and His Ring. According to Beckett, 'the poetical play can never come off as a play, nor when played as a play either, because the words obscure the action and are obscured by it'.

Knowlson argues that Waiting for Godot creates 'a poetry of the theatre rather than poetry in the theatre.' The play uses speech rhythms whose vitality comes 'not from poetic forms or metaphors but from music hall and circus and action and gesture [that] create their own kind of intricate, balletic choreography.' In later plays, Beckett 'took care to set up tensions within […] language and create powerful visual images, often modelled on paintings, that either sustain or undercut it'.

This might help us define the necessary distinction between the kind of literary novel at which Grumpy Old Bookman regularly sneers, because it places poetic language over doing a good professional job for the reader (whatever that means), and the real kind of literary novel whose poetry resides not in relentless perception, fancy metaphors or swooning sentimentality, but in the intricate choreography of language and the action it describes. This is why I feel no pressure to admire beautiful sentences and endless mots juste churned out by writers for whom the novel just happens to be the given form (i.e about 95% of modern novelists).

It's also why reading one chapter from the biography can be more affecting than wading through the 700 pages, just as looking at a painting can offer more than any amount of background information. The shape of the life can be sensed over thirty pages. One reads them with the tension of the present either sustained or undercut by the past and future.