Beckettmas

When I was a small child, history taught at school comprised a series of stories, each one recounting the great deeds of some famous man or, occasionally, famous woman.  I imagine that each country has its own selection of national heroes and heroines, exemplars for the young, whose exploits are re-told to each generation of children: Robin Hood in England, Joan d’Arc in France, William Tell in Switzerland, and Paul Revere in New England.  And, if you live in Argentina, I guess it will now be Diego Maradona.   

One tale that I heard was that of Thomas à Becket.  He was a good friend of King Henry the something, in the days when the kings of England were in fact Normans, which is to say, they were French.  Henri decided to make Thomas the Archbishop of Canterbury, which was then – as it is now – the top job in the church in England.  For sure, being the head of the English branch of the Church of Rome in those days – around eight hundred years ago – was much more important than being head of the Church of England today, but even as a child I judged that if you were best friends with the King you would be justifiably cross about being sent to live in Kent and told to become a priest.  But Thomas, so we were taught, took his new job seriously and started having arguments with the King about all sorts of things, the details of which I now understand to involve taxation and the political control of church appointments (exactly those issues that a later King Henry would find equally problematic, leading, in this later case, to his falling out with the Pope, the Habsburg Emperor, various Cardinals, Lord Chancellors, and a couple of Queens). 

Eventually, Henry II became so cross with his ex-friend Thomas that, so we were told, he said to some of his gang of new best friends, “will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?”  I now understand that we do not know exactly he said – the contemporary accounts vary on this point and, anyway, whatever he said it was probably in Frankys rather than English – but whatever he did say it was clear to all within earshot that he was mightily angry, and he gave the impression, at least to some of his hearers, that he would be happier if Thomas were dead.  Off rode four of his loyal knights in armour, who arrived in Canterbury on 29^th December 1270, where they sliced Thomas’s head from his shoulders while he was conducting a church service. 

King Henry later regretted his friend’s death, so we children were told. The lesson we learned was that you should never say in public that you wish your ex-best friend to be dead, just in case some of your listeners take you literally.  We were also taught that it was to the great credit of Thomas that he took his new job seriously and defended the church against the encroachment of the crown, although I doubt that at my primary school the phrase “speaking truth to power” was much in use.  I also discovered the meaning of the word ‘turbulent’ as it pertains to character, which was an educational bonus for someone only eight years old. 

Saint Thomas of Canterbury now plays an interesting and ambiguous role in the English cultural memory.  He might, like Robin Hood, have become a symbol of resistance among the lesser nobility and local dignitaries to the centralising ambitions of the English state, and in particular the insatiable appetite of English kings for higher taxes to fund their spending plans.  Instead, he has been transformed into a purely religious martyr, a man who found genuine faith through his adopted vocation and who willingly abandoned his life of political privilege for the humbler role of servant to the church.  In particular, he is revered by Catholics and the crypto-Catholic wing of the Anglican church, as a man who resisted secular intrusion into spiritual affairs, who remained loyal to the authority of Rome in matters of church organisation. 

The Cathedral in Canterbury continues working hard to perpetuate the memory of its most famous martyr.  Those who wish, can follow an on-line video tour this month, especially produced for the 850^th anniversary of the murder, which retraces Thomas’s last steps as he faced his killers, their long swords drawn, and accepted his early death at their hands.  Relics of his bones and hair are also available for sale in the Cathedral gift shop. 

(Sorry: that last sentence was made up, but the video tour is for real).

The American born poet T S Eliot, who took out British citizenship and converted to Anglicanism, wrote a play about Becket called Murder in the Cathedral, which I remember seeing once and not greatly enjoying.  I have grown to admire Eliot’s poetry, especially his early Modernist writing, but I have never found myself tempted to admire him as a person.  By contrast, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, although much harder to read than Eliot because they were written in Middle English, connects us to Thomas’s memory in a way that is far easier for us moderns to appreciate.  The rather mixed group of travellers, each of whom takes turn to tell a story, are making the journey from London to Canterbury, to visit Becket’s shrine and honour him.  (One part of the ‘Pilgrim’s Way’, as the route became known, passes close-by to where I grew up.)  Chaucer’s characters are far from sainthood: they are ordinary people, with the full set of associated vices, who are undertaking a religious rite and ceremony for reasons of social convention rather than faith.  These are worldly pilgrims.     

Which reminds me: here in London the daily news is full of tales of unhappiness.  The normal English seasonal festivities – over-eating, drunkenness, excess consumerism, and heated family arguments – are all threatened by politically imposed restrictions on travel and socialising, due to the pandemic.  This year, Christmas in England will be quiet and sober, more Eliot-like than Chaucer-like, austere rather than ribald.   I am not much bothered by this.  I like to stay at home – neither a tree nor a decoration in sight – and spend my time reading.  As a concession to the pagan festivals which my pre-Christian forebears enjoyed at this time of year, I will organise some fine food and wine, to share with a select few companions.

I plan to read Homer’s Odyssey.  I enjoy some epic poetry during the long December evenings, but this Winter’s choice was dictated by my plans for Spring of next year, although I am not here alluding to the theological point, that the birth of Jesus, celebrated at Christmas, portends his death, celebrated at Easter.  Rather, during 2021 I plan to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the obscenity trial, in the US courts, of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses, which had been partially published in serial form in the journal The Little Review, during 1919 and 1920, and was only fully published, in one complete volume, in Paris in 1922.  Next year seems the ideal date to celebrate the centenary of a novel by a lapsed Catholic, which caused such ire among those whom Eliot left behind in puritanical America.  Joyce’s book is long and complex, taking its basic structure from Homer’s poem, but all the action– famously – takes place over one day, the 16^th June 1904, now known by aficionados as ‘Bloomsday’, after one of the two main characters in the novel. 

My plan for next Spring is to re-read Joyce’s Ulysses ahead of Bloomsday.  As preparation for this task, I wanted to remind myself of Homer’s original homer, who took ten years to travel from Troy to Ithaca, causing a considerable amount of mayhem en route, and precipitating mass slaughter upon his arrival.  As a character I find Leopold Bloom more sympathetic, but Odysseus was certainly more heroic and, if we follow Tennyson, a model of discontentment with easy, domestic life.  That said, I worried that this might be a slightly conventional way to organise my reading, therefore I have in addition been working my way through three Samuel Beckett novels – Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable – written in French and then translated by the author into English in the 1950s.  For, it seemed to me that properly to understand what Joyce was doing, I would not only need to think about the classical model he drew upon for his experimental writing, but also to immerse myself in the work of that second great Irish experimentalist, who followed closely in his wake.

To appreciate the true meaning of Christmas, Beckett’s work is a good place to start.  His reflections on the surprise of our birth, the certainty of our death, and the potential meaninglessness of everything in between, are challenging to read, both in terms of form and content.  The author’s voice is dark and often dyspeptic, but he writes with great wit and brilliance, alternating between the republican roguishness of early ‘20s Dublin and the war-weary existentialism of late ‘40s Paris.  His range of vocabulary and idiom is, like Joyce’s, extraordinary.  And he is concerned with the deep things of life, which I look forward to discussing, over a festive glass or two of good whiskey in the coming days.

Next week, therefore, I will not be travelling past the place of my birth, along the Pilgrim’s Way to Canterbury, as part of a Chaucerian entourage, to remember the martyrdom of Becket.  Nor will I spend my time pondering the troubled relationship between church and state, nor the urgent need for tax rises.  I will remain in East London, with Homer’s poetry and Samuel’s prose, looking forward to the prospect of a fine Dublin day in June 1904.  And I will reflect on my life as a journey, which might or might not have a destination, but which must, for now, in words and in silence go on, for as someone says, “… I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”.  

Merry Beckettmas to all my readers.