From An Abandoned Work - History

History

“Proper names are less important in such works as The End, The Expelled, The Calmative, First Love Texts for Nothing ... Here Beckett’s method is to introduce an unnamed first person narrator; to give most of the secondary characters names related to their roles (“my father”, “a policeman”, a “cabman”); and to reserve proper names for only a few peripheral characters” such as, in From An Abandoned Work, Balfe.

The grotesque Balfe was a real person, a road worker in Foxrock, from Beckett’s childhood. In an interview with James Knowlson in 1989 the eighty-three year old Beckett could still describe him with great clarity: “I remember the roadman, a man called Balfe, a little ragged, wizened, crippled man. He used to look at me. He terrified me. I can still remember how he frightened me.” Balfe also makes a brief appearance at the end of Afar a Bird, in For To End Yet Again.

Because much of Beckett’s writing focuses on mothers it is easy to forget the affection he held for his own father, Bill. From An Abandoned Work recalls an incident from 1933 where “Beckett and his father took a long walk in the Wicklow Hills. While Bill, swearing and sweating, stopped to rest under pretence of admiring the view” his son took the opportunity to try to explain Milton’s Cosmology to him. “Though not a scholarly man, Bill Beckett may have recognised his son’s intellectual worth … was willing to listen to a growing boy’s opinions and problems, earned his son’s lasting affection.” This emphasises the fact that although Beckett used his own life experiences as source material, as do most authors, it is not biography in the strictest sense.

Beckett has drawn heavily from his own life in the writing of this text. His difficult relationship with his mother is a major theme in his writing. “During breaks in Foxrock in January and April 1935, he himself linked the return of his night sweats and his ‘periods of speechless bad temper’ with his presence back in the family home.” Throughout this, Beckett had a “tendency to suffer from ailments which were psychosomatic in origin”.