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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Thomas MacGreevy and Samuel Beckett. Affinity and Controversy

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Acquainted with Beckett in (1928) Parisian Ecole Normale, Thomas MacGreevy soon became his confidant and a literary mentor introducing him to James Joyce and Richard Aldington. Their artistic interests took form, among others, of the common declaration “Manifesto. Poetry is Vertical” (1932), signed by them and several other poets associated with Jolas’s transition. However, the intellectual attraction between the two was, at the same time, disturbed, or, so to say, spiced, by the tension between Beckett’s agnosticism and MacGreevy’s Catholicism. Sean Kennedy’s illuminating article (“Beckett Reviewing MacGreevy: A Reconsideration,” in; The Irish University Review, September 2005, pp. 273–288) notices a number of ambiguities in Beckett’s praise of MacGreevy in his “Humanistic Quietism” (1934), devoted solely to his friend’s first and only volume of poems, as well as in “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934). In “Humanistic Quietism” Beckett describes MacGreevy’s poetry as “the adult mode of prayer syntonic” to his emotions (“Humanistic Quietism” p. 11), which suggests, according to Kennedy, that MacGreevy’s faith, expressed in his contemplative metaphors, is always subjective and blind. “He sees what he wants to see. … As such, it is always likely to be consonant with one’s own needs. MacGreevy’s own preference is decisive.” (Kennedy 278) The description of MacGreevy as “the Titchener of the modern lyric” in “Recent Irish Poetry” is to confirm such evaluation, since the nineteenth century psychology of Titchener represents the immanent biological concept of human psyche. However, the correspondence between Beckett and MacGreevy, quoted by Kennedy, opens the space for more complex interpretation of this controversy. Without excluding the tension between the two, my article offers another explanation of these critical allusions. By combing the analysis of their letters with essential fragments of their poems it shows the difference of their approach to human consciousness.