Volume 33, Number 7 · April 24, 1986
Nayman of Noland
By Richard Ellmann
Samuel Beckett, who is eighty this month, is sui generis, a writer with his own stamp, assured and stylized. This said, he can still usefully be ranged against his Irish predecessors. Because of what he has written, they take on a different aspect. Because of their work, he may seem not quite so rootless as he first appears. Although Beckett has not called attention to his Irish nationality as Yeats and Joyce did, his books are apt to mention with fondness unexpected Irish details. For example, in his first publication, the poem 'Whoroscope,' he draws in two brothers named Boot from seventeenth-century Dublin so as to compliment them for having refuted Aristotle. His character Molloy suddenly remarks, 'Da, in my part of the world, means father,' and the name Molloy reminds us of Beckett's conspicuous fondness for the commonest Irish names, especially if they begin with M—Murphy, Molloy, Moran. In his Fizzles the Irish word deasil, which means 'clockwise,' suddenly appears, and we recall that it is also used conspicuously as the first word in the Oxen of the Sun episode in Ulysses. Beckett's translations of his works into English tend to give them an Irish inflection. When someone asked him if he were an Englishman, he replied, 'Au contraire.'
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