In 1945, Samuel Beckett made his slow way back from a recently liberated France,
through England, and on to Ireland to visit his ailing mother. He was carrying
notebooks that contained, in his indecipherable, spidery handwriting, a novel. Hardly
surprisingly, when the British border authorities examined the Watt notebooks they
didn't know what to make of these oddly recalcitrant, perversely resistant, bits of
textual matter. Coming up against those long sections of seemingly motiveless
permutation and repetition for which Watt has become famous, they confiscated the
notebooks, inspecting them for code, only to return them none the wiser. Watt, it
turned out, wasn’t the kind of enigma that called for application of military
Intelligence. But for those who made it their business to see through both the
purposeful encryptions and unintended occlusions that shape themselves into the fog
of war, it seemed as if Samuel Beckett himself emerged as a far more readable
proposition.
Beckett appears as a person of interest in the archives of the British
Intelligence Services because he didn’t choose to return from Paris to his neutral Irish
homeland on the outbreak war; instead, in the latter half of 1941, he joined a
Resistance réseau de reseignement, or information network, known as Gloria SMH.
As James Knowlson records in his 1996 authorized biography, Beckett was recruited
by his friend Alfred Péron into a reasonably large cell run by Jacques Legrand
(codenamed SMH) and Gabrielle, known as Jeannine, Picabia (Gloria) – daughter of
the artist Francis Picabia, who first worked for Polish and then British Intelligence
Services. The group was active in both Occupied and Unoccupied France and was at
least partially directed by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), the
improvised group established in 1940 with the aim of waging subversive war behind
enemy lines. Picabia and Legrand ran an operation that gathered information about
Nazi operations and movements, smuggling it into the Unoccupied zone, and then
transmitting it back to the Allies via radio. At first Beckett simply provided a boîte
aux lettres – an information drop off point. But he soon got involved in collating and
translating what he had been handed. As Beckett himself described it to Knowlson: ‘I
would type it all out clean. Put it in order and type it out, on one sheet of paper, as far
as was possible’. He would then drop off his sheets to ‘the Greek’ in what is now Rue
René Coty to be photographed and reduced on to microfilm.
It was on the basis of this involvement in Gloria SMH that Beckett was
interviewed at the War Office in the April of 1945. The details of his ‘interrogation’
remained classified until 2003, and even then the interview with H W Astor from BlA
(a subsection of B Branch, in turn a division of MI5, responsible for vetting staff
involved in counter-espionage and counter-subversion) didn’t attract the attention of
scholars. The typed sheets, smudged and thinned through compression, with treasury
tags pulling carelessly across their punched holes, are not detailed in the catalogue of
the National Archives at Kew. Scholars knew that Beckett had gone to the War Office
to retrieve the impounded Watt notebooks and passport and to be ‘debriefed’, but it
was not clear exactly why Beckett would have been interviewed and therefore
whether such an interview would have been recorded as significant. In 1945 he had no
literary identity that would have attracted special attention, and Beckett persistently
brushed off his activities in Gloria SMH as little more than ‘boy scout stuff’, despite
having been awarded the Croix de Guerre just a week before his trip to London.
Whether or not Beckett’s account of his ‘boy scout’ activities is to be taken at
face value, the files reveal that Gloria SMH was active, sometimes delivering
valuable information, and often exposing its members to very real dangers. For in the
summer of 1942 the cell was penetrated: a number of key members were arrested and
Beckett and his partner Suzanne were forced to flee Paris and hide out in Roussillon
until October 1944. Beckett told Astor that he became involved with the Maquis there
in May 1944, ‘but did not see any real action’. Gloria SMH, however, had been a
different story. Involvement with this réseau had led to Suzanne being questioned by
the Gestapo, their flat searched for incriminating evidence, and a desperate flight from
home. They had been lucky to get away; and they knew it. Beckett’s friend, Alfred
Péron, had not been so fortunate. Captured by the Gestapo, he was deported to
Mauthausen where he was to die on the first of May 1945, just two days after being
liberated.
Astor clearly thought Beckett was sufficiently involved in the cell that he was
worth speaking to, though confirmed, in the end, the Irishman’s own sense of his less
than central role. ‘Although BECKETT appears fairly intelligent and well-educated
he knew very little about the organization of S.M.H/Gloria’, he notes. One wonders
what the student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the one-time lecturer at Trinity
College Dublin, and the highly bookish, sometimes waspish, author of a monograph
on Proust and a novel, Murphy, would have made of this lukewarm assessment of his
intellectual prowess. Still, despite the minor snub, Astor seemed to like what he saw
of this apparently not too worryingly intellectual Anglo-Irish alumnus of Portora
Royal School: ‘So far as BECKETT himself is concerned, he appeared helpful and
created a favourable impression. I can see no reason to regard him with suspicion
from a security point of view’. Elsewhere in the files, Beckett is described by Captain
John Mair, whose task it was to ‘sift’ the information about the network’s activities,
as possessed of some rather useful capacities in this hopelessly leaky cell, bursting at
the seams with too many people, too many of whom knew each other: ‘Age 36. 6 ft.
Well built but stoops. Dark hair. Fresh complexion. Very silent’. Despite producing
writing characterized by the exploration of figures and themes imagined in the halflight of uncertainty, Beckett didn’t seem to be a figure to whom doubts, or at least
doubts about the leaking of information, easily stuck.
So Beckett himself never came under any real suspicion; he is merely a
footnote to the file, his interview part of an attempt to ‘discover whether he could add
anything to the story about the German penetration of this organisation’. Beckett’s
biographers have all blamed the compromise of Gloria on the betrayal of the man
Andrew Gibson calls ‘the great villain of the Beckett biography, the monster and
churchman Robert Alesch’. The received account of betrayal, driven by greed for
money, sex and power is almost certainly true, but the declassified files also reveal
the possibility of a more complex and uncertain story. Alesch is named as an agent
provocateur, but two other figures, one Guy Walters and a man called Pierrat (both
confusingly codenamed Leon), emerge, at least at this point, as the most likely and
significant traitors. By 1945, Astor seemed certain that Leon (it is unclear which) was
centrally involved in the break up of the cell, noting that he was ‘at present on trial in
France’. But Beckett’s interview was in fact one of the last gasps in a surprisingly
detailed investigation attempting to discover whether Jeannine Picabia herself could
have been a traitor. With hindsight this seems unlikely, and even at the time the
authorities concluded that the inconsistencies in her story were probably just the result
of personal vagueness about dates, and the suspicious fact that so many with whom
she came into contact were arrested simply bad luck. C H Harmer, who investigated
the case in 1943, noted that she could have been turned by the Germans, but added
that ‘she is such an exceptionally bad witness on any question of fact that I find it
hard to believe that she could sustain a false story under interrogation’. Still, because
there was ‘some lingering doubt about her intelligence record’, he recommended that
she should not be allowed to broadcast on the BBC, as she had hoped to do, on the
grounds that ‘we cannot exclude altogether the possibility of her using this as a
method of communicating with the enemy’. Harmer’s colleague, John Mair, was
assigned the job of listening attentively for the manifest inconsistencies that would
reveal the doubled consciousness of the double agent; but one can see Mair beginning
to shift his position and attention as he pieces together Picabia’s narrative. The very
inconsistency he was first tracking begins to shudder into something less tangibly
troubling:
It is inevitable that in cases of this kind that the final judgment must rest, to a
large extent, on the examiner’s estimate of the subject’s character … [S]he did
not appear, from the knowledge of her that was gained during her interviews, to
be the kind of woman who would be either inclined or fitted to play the part of
the double agent. Although there is little doubt that she is a woman of courage
and initiative, she does not appear to have the subtlety or general make-up
which would be required to fulfill a role of this kind.
What Mair decides he is hearing is something more like a psychopathology of
everyday life – something susceptible to being mistaken for another kind of doubled
agency only within the madness of war.
Harmer agreed with Mair in the end, though noted ‘it still reads as a peculiar
story’. He was to conclude on 11 July 1943: ‘I think that whatever faults she [Gloria]
may have committed, and may still commit through inexperience and lack of balance,
her sentiments are probably sincerely anti-German’. The American SOE operative,
Virginia Hall, also went on the record, stating in words that echo the gendered,
perhaps somewhat racially-inflected, terms that constellate around Picabia in the
documents, that she seemed ‘good hearted but muddle headed’. Of course, the wellreceived Beckett was manifestly unlike Picabia; he was able to turn up his levels of
personal legibility when it suited him. Beckett clearly wanted to help the British (as,
in all likelihood, did Picabia), but Astor notes that he was also after something
concrete. He had asked to be repatriated to Ireland to expedite his journey to see his
mother but realised this would then make it difficult for him then to be repatriated
back to France. Beckett therefore wanted Astor’s help with securing a visa so he
could ‘return to France, which he considers as his real home’. At this moment,
making a ‘favourable impression’ mattered.
Over the years, a number of critics have suggested that Beckett’s wartime
experiences, particularly his involvement in Gloria SMH, may have contributed to the
cryptic textual surfaces for which his work became famous. The postwar texts never
swerve from a sense of playing a dangerous game with language that can be oddly
blank – sometimes flatly gnomic, sometimes deceptively explicit – and at the same
time crackling with meaning. One can imagine that being involved in an information
network might have decisively orientated the direction of the writing of someone
whose weather vane was already twitching to the peculiar plasticity of language and
the impossibility of ever being able to mean quite what one found oneself saying. As
is well-known, after the war Beckett began to write in French precisely as a way of
producing resistances – disruptions to the facile, slippery poetry he associated with an
English that came all too naturally. For what the B1A interview indeed makes
compellingly clear is that Samuel Beckett, unlike Jeannine Picabia, could speak the
language of power when he needed to. The work, though, required something else.
And so it was that Beckett found himself returning to the gritty resistance of postwar
France and a French that allowed him to worry out hollows of insecurity, indigence
and doubt in his textual surfaces. It was in these spaces of an always doubled agency
that the work was to find its ‘real’ yet unspeakable home.