^{Louis Le Brocquy Image of Samuel Beckett, 1987. Watercolour on paper. 71 x 51 cm. Collection of the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon} 

It is 1962 and my father is doing what I am doing now – he is at a table, writing; his head is down in concentration, his right hand is moving slowly across the page. There is chaos all around him, books piled on the floor and on the table, and notebooks open, as there is untidiness here as I write this. Sometimes when my father reads over something and doesn’t like it he crumples up the whole page and throws it towards the fireplace, often missing. I try not to do that, but I often find that my effort to be more tidy has failed. I also write in longhand. My handwriting is clearer than his was. Or else: his handwriting might have looked clear to an adult, but not to a child.  

I wonder if I watched him writing and thought that I could do that too. But we all have our own reasons for writing. Some days a phrase comes, or a sentence, or even an image. Or a problem in the construction of a novel arises, worries me, and I set about resolving it, at least for the moment, as though it were a problem in mathematics or structural engineering. This is not something I inherited or took from another person, even a parent. It comes from something more hidden, deeper, more personal and essential.

But that image of my father is powerful, haunting. I must have learned something from it, soaked in some of its energy.

In 1967 the American novelist James Baldwin wrote: ‘The father-son relationship is one of the most crucial and dangerous on earth, and to pretend that it can be otherwise really amounts to an exceedingly dangerous heresy.’

It seemed important, however, for both James Baldwin himself and Barack Obama too, as they both wrote their autobiographies, to establish before anything else that their story began when their father died, to emphasise that they set out alone without a father’s shadow or a father’s permission. Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son’ begins with his father’s death when he was almost nineteen. Barack Obama’s ‘Dreams from my Father’ begins also with the death of his father: ‘A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news.’

Both men quickly then established their own actual distance from their father, which made their grief sharper and more lonely, but also made clear to the reader that they had a right to speak with authority, to offer this version of themselves partly because they themselves, through force of will and a steely sense of character, had invented the voice they were now using, had not been trained to be the figure they had become by any other man.  ‘I had not known my father very well,’ Baldwin wrote. Barack Obama wrote: ‘At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man...as a child I knew him only through the stories that my mother and grandparents told.’

For other sons, the father was fully present and became an important and an abiding inspiration. Sometimes, nonetheless, the son learned to fulfil the father’s dreams without following his example. Both Henry James and his brother William, for example, finished everything they began. This was in sharp contrast to their father who was a great talker, but did not complete much. So, too, the father of the poet W.B. Yeats and his brother the painter Jack B. Yeats, who were also great workers, was good at making plans, but bad at carrying them out. It was as though the sons took what they needed from their father, his talent, and then set about offering it a completion. Their work, in all its steadfast relationship to reality, was a sort of homage to their father, but also came as a dispute with him and his indolence.

Images in literature about what the loss of a father means to a son make clear how close the bind is, or how much the father represents an anchor for a son, someone who holds the world in place. It is easy to see Hamlet as the play begins, for example, as a son made wayward by his father’s death. He can be in love, and the next minute out of love, and then angry and ready for revenge and then ready to procrastinate, the next minute melancholy and the next putting an antic disposition on. Hamlet’s tone can be wise and then bitter and sharply sarcastic and rude. How can he be so many things? Because his father has died not long before. That is all. He has been unmoored.

Are there any examples, on the other hand, in literature or in the lives of writers, where the relationship between father and son is simple and filled with love and ease, where one generation hands on to the next with no tension, just loyalty, where memories and the experiences that gave rise to them are sweet and easy? Yes, indeed, there are such examples, and in the most unexpected places. Samuel Beckett, to take one, and his father felt mutual affection and ease and love. In Beckett’s letters, and even in his late work ‘Company’, he lets us know how much he admired his father who was a quiet-living, non-literary, quantity surveyor in Dublin. Beckett relished the long walks they took together in the mountains south of Dublin. In April 1933, for example, he wrote to a friend: ‘Lovely walk this morning with Father, who grows old with a very graceful philosophy. Comparing bees and butterflies to elephants & parrots & speaking of indentures with the leveller. Barging through hedges and over the walls with the help of my shoulder, blaspheming and stopping to rest under colour of admiring the view. I’ll never have anyone like him.’ Four months later when his father died, he wrote again: ‘He was in his sixty-first year, but how much younger he seemed and was. Joking and swearing at the doctors as long as he had breath. He lay in bed...making great oaths that when he got better he would never do a stroke of work. He would drive to the top of Howth and lie in the bracken and fart…I can’t write about him. I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches after him.’

On New Year’s Day 1935, in another letter, Beckett remembered a Christmas morning ‘not long ago standing at the back of the Scalp with Father, hearing singing coming from Glencullen Chapel. Then the white air you can see so far through, giving the outlines without the stippling. Then the pink & green sunset that I never find anywhere else and when it was quite dark a little pub to rest & drink gin in.’

These are the memories that sustained Beckett, the sort of memories that belong to us all, or those of us who have been lucky enough to have known and loved a father. They belong to me too as I put down my pen now and turn and look and see my father, oblivious to everything, having filled a new page with words, and then stopping to check over what he has written, and putting the pen towards his lips as he reads his own words, making a change here and there, the floor around the fireplace dotted with the pages he has abandoned. We turn towards each other. There is so much to say.

Colm Tóibín (April 2022)