Local explorer

Eoin O'Brien recalls the journey he undertook to uncover the settings for Beckett's plays, and the friendship he formed with the writer

It is now 20 years since I wrote The Beckett Country to celebrate Samuel Beckett's 80th birthday. The book started life well with a tribute from Samuel Beckett: "My gratitude for this kindly light on other days." This tribute was extended to the loyal team that had made The Beckett Country a reality against many odds. Samuel Beckett was to later endorse the photographic exhibition based on the book (which will be on display in the County Hall of Dún Laoghaire and Rathdown County Council from April 10th to April 28th), and he gave his lasting imprimatur to the work by signing the special edition (of which a few copies are available from De Búrca Rare Books). But the story of The Beckett Country is more than the sum of its parts; it is, in fact, the story of a deep and lasting friendship that began in the 1970s, when I first had thoughts for the book.

The seeds were sown, I suspect, when I read Murphy, my first taste of the Beckett oeuvre. After this, I was compelled to read everything Beckett had written. I soon realised that much of the apparently surrealistic in his writing is linked, sometimes forcefully, often only tenuously, with the reality of existence, and much of this actuality emanates from his memories of Dublin - a world he renders almost unrecognisable as he removes reality from his landscape and its people (while also annihilating time) in his creation of the "unreality of the real".

I approached Con Leventhal with my preliminary researches, not suspecting then how kindred a spirit I had found. Unknown to me at that time, he had earlier marvelled at academe's inability to appreciate the Irish influence in Beckett's writing. The question as to whether France had the right to claim Samuel Beckett as its 11th Nobel prize-winner in 1969 or whether the country of his birth could claim him as its third (after Yeats and Shaw) drew an interesting critical comment: "There is no one here [in France] to make the full Irish case. Few to talk of the kinship with Swift though more to tie the Dubliner in a Joycean knot. No one, however, is sufficiently aware of the background to notice the Irishness of the Godot tramps."

CON INTRODUCED ME to Sam in Paris in the early 1970s and so began a friendship that was to endure. Beckett was intrigued by my observation that the growing critical literature on his work (mostly written by non-Irish academics, the Irish academic beacon being directed elsewhere) was failing to recognise his Irishness and, as a consequence, his humour. It was, I think, a Japanese treatise on the deep surrealism of a passage from Company that evoked a warm chuckle in the Café de Paris: "Nowhere in particular on the way from A to Z. Or say for verisimilitude the Ballyogan Road. That dear old back road. Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road in lieu of nowhere in particular. Where no truck any more. Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road on the way from A to Z. Head sunk totting up the tally on the verge of the ditch. Foothills to the left. Croker's acres ahead. Father's shade to right and a little to the rear. So many times already round the earth. Topcoat once green stiff with age and grime from chin to insteps. Battered once buff block hat and quarter boots to match. No other garments if any to be seen. Out since break of day and night now falling. Reckoning ended on together from nought anew. As if bound for Stepaside. When suddenly you cut through the hedge and vanish hobbling east across the gallops."

SAM ENCOURAGED ME to persist with my researches and offered to help. As I took to the Dublin mountains, the canals and the coast of Dublin on my bicycle, the topographical references in his works began to grow beyond even what I had first suspected.

My trips to Paris became more frequent, but now with many photographs to be mulled over and enjoyed or, on occasion, to evoke profound sadness. On one poignant visit I produced a photograph of Bill Shannon, the "consumptive postman" in one of Beckett's most beautiful pieces of prose: "The crocuses and the larch turning green every year a week before the others . . . and the consumptive postman whistling The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy and the standard oil-lamp and of course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your heart the slush and every fourth year the February debacle and the endless April showers and the crocuses and then the whole bloody business starting all over again." This photograph brought tears to his eyes and I realised it was time to bid farewell, pack my bag of photographs and slip away without words, just a hand on his shoulder to show I understood and would return anon.

And so The Beckett Country grew from a dream to the reality of a book, which met with Sam's enthusiastic agreement. The topographic references now began to take on new meanings. It is widely accepted that All That Fall is set in Foxrock, but what is not so well known is that Happy Days may have had its origins in a seaside cove bearing the delightful name of Jack's Hole, that one of the climatic episodes in Krapp's Last Tape occurred on Dún Laoghaire pier, and that a case can be made for placing Vladimir and Estragon's vigil for Godot on the Dublin mountains.

I did not trouble Sam for explanations of the obvious and there were times when I had to leave the obscure anchored in obscurity. But there were many nudges from Paris that sent me cycling again the winding roads of the Dublin mountains. For example, I had spent days in the mountains in search of Foley's Folly, and eventually arrived in Paris with the location securely in my bag of photographs - a place called Taylor's Folly, high in the mountains.

Sam pored over the photographs, fascinated by the beauty of the place, but then, to my disappointment, informed me that he had never been there. Instead he directed me to Barrington's Tower, which, of course made much more sense in that it was close to Cooldrinagh, where he had been sent "supperless to bed" in punishment for his childhood peregrinations. When I asked him why he had changed the name, he said: "Eoin, there's no music in Barrington's Tower."

ON ANOTHER OCCASION, I laid out David Davison's wonderful photographs of the storm-lashed Dún Laoghaire pier with the anemometer "flying in the wind", and Sam confided to me, not quite apologetically but rather in the tone of one who had pulled a fast one and is proud of having done so, that the revelatory moment - that moment when he "saw the whole thing at last" - had taken place on the much more humble Greystones pier on a black stormy night when he had been staying in the house his mother had rented in the then seaside resort.

Despite constant encouragement and occasional help from Sam, I approached my task aware that artistic issues relative to place and person must be interpreted with great care and never more so than with Samuel Beckett. He had a justified abhorrence of anyone attributing to minutiae a personal significance that did not exist, and this has greatly influenced the structure of the book, which concerned itself more with topography than with personality, more with the ambience of a lifestyle than with those who participated in that life. The Beckett Country is not biographical; if it veers towards the genre of biography it is then closer to autobiography, in that it allows the story of Sam's life to unfold, in the only way with which he would have been in agreement, that is through his art. Yet, to treat his writing as a whole as autobiographical would be to reduce its artistic value, and to detract from its beauty.

Any discussion as to whether or not the French or the Irish can lay claim to Samuel Beckett is of consequence only insofar as it may assist in the interpretation of his work. A squabble over national identity would have been most offensive to a man to whom national boundaries, geographical and cultural, had always been tiresome, and at times threatening, encumbrances. So while allowing that Sam was Irish in origin, in manners, and at times in thought, we must accept that he belongs to no nation, neither to France nor to Ireland; if any claim has validity, it is that he represents in outlook the true European, but even this tidy categorisation is excessively constraining: Samuel Beckett is of the world.

A photographic exhibition based Eoin O'Brien's The Beckett Country runs at Dún Laoghaire and Rathdown County Council County Hall from Apr 10 to Apr 28