A Country Road, a Tree

Author’s Note

I first read Beckett during my MA in Irish Writing, at the Queen’s University of Belfast. I was at once unsettled and fascinated — those battered, persecuted characters, scraping by in the margins of a hostile world. This was like nothing else I’d ever read. Beckett’s work seemed to float free — I had no reference points; I felt lost.

Until my tutor, Dr. Eamonn Hughes, pointed out that Beckett had been stuck in occupied France during World War Two; he’d had to go into hiding. It was a light-bulb moment: a modern eco-bulb; a slow-growing light. I began to get an inkling of where these characters came from, the nature of the world they inhabited. The context of Beckett’s wartime experiences was not, by any means, the way to understand Beckett’s complex and allusive work, but it was a light by which to peer at bits of it.

Because the war years did mark a major change in Beckett’s work: he was already a published writer when the conflict broke out, but the work sometimes feels like that of an (albeit brilliant) adolescent, overburdened by his influences. There are indicators of change beforehand, but those years in occupied France seem to have established many of the key themes, images and preoccupations of Beckett’s later work. They also marked the start of his paring away at language: a stripping-back of Joycean wordplay and polyphonic extravagance, towards bare bones, and silence. Beckett experienced, in the direct aftermath of war, an epiphany. He understood, fully and for the first time, the kind of writer he would be. This revelation occurred not when confronted by the wild darkness of a storm-torn sea — as Krapp’s Last Tape might seem to suggest — but with appropriate-for-Beckett bathos, at his mother’s suburban bungalow in Foxrock.

The war was not something that Beckett just drifted through; it presented him with a series of extraordinary moral choices. And in impossibly difficult situations, he consistently turned towards what was most decent and compassionate and courageous. He chose to face the war with his friends in France, rather than sit it out in neutral Eire. He chose to give his subsistence-level rations away to those in still greater need. He chose to resist. He chose to survive. And then, after the devastation, he chose to aid with the rebuilding.

In short, he grew, as a writer and as a man. Afterwards he would go on to write the work that would make him internationally famous, and for which he would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Work that still resonates powerfully with us today.

A Country Road, A Tree emerges from a profound sense of admiration for both the writing and the man; it is an attempt to offer up a fictional version of this story, because it casts a particular light on both. But there is also a personal connection here. Beckett and I had a mutual friend. Barbara Bray was a literary translator and a drama producer. She 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 sent her a copy of my first novel when it was published; she sent us a present — a pair of beautiful hand-made pewter coasters for our writing desks — when we got married. 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.

I am also grateful to James Knowlson for his magisterial biography Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (Grove Atlantic, 1996): spending time immersed in this extraordinary book has been one of the chief pleasures of working on A Country Road, A Tree. The other biographies, Deirdre Bair’s Samuel Beckett: A Biography (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978) and Anthony Cronin’s Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (Harper, 1997), each offered their own invaluable perspective on this phase in Beckett’s life. Whilst there is little in the way of wartime correspondence, the Cambridge University Press edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, provided key way-markers and essential detail throughout the writing process. I also found myself turning again and again to Phyllis Gaffney’s Healing Amid the Ruins: The Irish Hospital at Saint-Lô (1945–46) (Dublin: A. & A. Farmar, 1999) for its fascinating account of the Irish Red Cross in post-war Normandy.

In shaping this novel, I have drawn on accounts in the biographies and references in the collected letters; I’ve found clues in Beckett’s own novels, poems and plays; I’ve drawn from other memoirs, from fiction and histories of the period, from art and music, from the various languages spoken and the places inhabited and the places just passed through. I’m immensely grateful for the advice and information and nudges I’ve been given along the way. The resulting novel, I know, is a partial, incomplete and limited thing. I always knew it would be. But nonetheless, I had to try.