English Studies

ISSN: 0013-838X (Print) 1744-4217 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/nest20

The Mercyseat And ‘The Mansion Of

Forgetfulness’: Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, Austin
Clarke’s ‘Mnemosyne Lay In Dust’ And Irish Poetic
Modernism

David Wheatley

To cite this article: David Wheatley (2002) The Mercyseat And ‘The Mansion Of Forgetfulness’:
Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, Austin Clarke’s ‘Mnemosyne Lay In Dust’ And Irish Poetic
Modernism, English Studies, 83:6, 527-540, DOI: 10.1076/enst.83.6.527.13554

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1076/enst.83.6.527.13554

Published online: 09 Aug 2010.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 97

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=nest20
 THE MERCYSEAT AND ‘THE MANSION OF FORGETFULNESS’:
SAMUEL BECKETT’S MURPHY, AUSTIN CLARKE’S ‘MNEMOSYNE
LAY IN DUST’ AND IRISH POETIC MODERNISM

The Thirties were a patchy decade for Samuel Beckett. Resignation from his
lectureship in Trinity College, Dublin, in 1931 launched him on what his poem
‘Gnome’ calls the ‘years of wandering /Through a world politely turning /From
the loutishness of learning’1 before his decision in 1937 to settle permanently in
France. A number of key events during this period ensured that, wherever he
settled, it would not be in Ireland. In 1933 his father died, a bereavement he
marked with the poem ‘Malacoda’. Life with his dourly puritanical mother
proved an enormous strain, bringing on profound depressions accompanied by
a variety of skin complaints. In 1934 he published the short-story collection
More Pricks Than Kicks only for it to be banned in Ireland, provoking Beckett
to the furious riposte of ‘Censorship and the Saorstat’. In 1937 he gave evidence
in a Dublin libel case on behalf of a Jewish cousin, and was derided in court
and in print as a ‘bawd and blasphemer from Paris’.2 Not quite on a level with
these for personal trauma, but no less indicative of his profound dissatisfaction
with Ireland was his publication in 1934 of the article ‘Recent Irish Poetry’.
Beckett’s decision to publish the article under the pseudonym Andrew Belis
was a prudent one, as few of the dozens of poets mentioned escape his scoffing
derision. At the time he still thought of himself as primarily a poet, and was
keen to advance the cause of modernist experiment in a culture still bedevilled
(as he saw it) by conservative sub-Yeatsian Revivalism. It is important to bear
in mind, however, that nowhere in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ does Beckett use the
word ‘modernism’. He awards extravagant praise to three writers, Thomas
MacGreevy (1893-1967), Brian Coffey (1905-1995) and Denis Devlin (1908-
1959), but given how little this triumvirate had published in 1934 Beckett’s
avant-garde stance is forced to define itself as much in negative as in positive
terms. It is against the use of stock Celtic mythology, rural themes, religiosity,
provincialism and the avoidance of subjective content. Less vocally, it is for po-
etry that ‘admits – stupendous innovation – the existence of the author’ and
avoids ‘dying of mirage’.3 The terms of Beckett’s argument are rigidly binary,
pitting ‘antiquarians’ against modernist ‘others’ with Manichean zeal and treat-
ing Revivalism, from unremembered poetasters to established figures such as F.

1
Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems 1930-1978, London, 1984, 7.
2
The Irish Times, 24 November 1937, quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life
of Samuel Beckett, London, 1996, 280. For a recently discovered, ribald example of Beckett’s
low opinion of Free State Ireland cf. the poem ‘Antipepsis’ in Metre 3 (Dublin), 5.
3
‘Recent Irish Poetry’, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, London,
1983, 76.

English Studies, 2002, 6, pp. 527-540 527

0013-838X/02/06-0527/$16.00
© 2002, Swets & Zeitlinger
 DAVID WHEATLEY

R. Higgins and Austin Clarke, as a form of national pathology. J. C. C. Mays

accurately characterizes the violence of Beckett’s stance when he describes it as
‘bear[ing] the same relation to reality as an infra-red photograph which obliter-
ates contours’.4 Unluckily for Beckett, his article predates by a year the first col-
lections of Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice, both of whom were to lead
Irish poetry in quite different directions from those explored by either the Re-
vivalists or MacGreevy, Coffey and Devlin. These unexpected developments did
little to advance the cause of Beckett’s modernists, who conspicuously failed to
achieve the hegemony that ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ seemed to promise.5
Beckett’s comments on Clarke are succinct but deadly:

Mr Austin Clarke, having declared himself, in his ‘Cattle-drive in Connaught’ (1925), a follow-
er of ‘that most famous juggler, Mannanaun’, continues in ‘The Pilgrimage’ (1920) to display the
‘trick of tongue or two’ and to remove, by means of ingenious metrical operations, ‘the clapper
from the bell of rhyme’. The fully licensed stock-in-trade from Aisling to Red Branch Bundling,
is his to command. Here the need for formal justifications, more acute in Mr Clarke than in Mr
[F. R.] Higgins, serves to screen the deeper need that must not be avowed.6

The references to the Celtic God Mannanaun, the aisling (a genre of visionary
poetry) and the Red Branch Knights (legendary protectors of Ulster) identify
Clarke as one of the ‘antiquarians’ that Beckett begins his essay by deriding.
The phrase ‘deeper need that must not be avowed’ is pregnant with innuendo;
Clarke’s private life had long been a source of gossip in Dublin. Sexual guilt
had played a part in a central crisis of the young Clarke’s life: following short-
ly after a period of confinement in St Patrick’s psychiatric hospital and unsuc-
cessful shock treatment, his marriage to Geraldine Cummins in 1920 was
unconsummated and lasted a mere ten days. Such was the stigma of this last
episode that, more than forty years later, Clarke rapidly glossed over it in his
1962 memoir Twice Round the Black Church.7 It would take even longer for the
experience to be laid bare in his poetry: despite individual sections appearing as
early as 1938, ‘Mnemosyne Lay in Dust’, a fictionalized account of his mental
breakdown, was not published until 1966, when the poet was seventy.8
More than a decade after Clarke’s confinement Beckett too would experience
profound depression, though never bad enough to warrant his hospitalization,

4
J. C. C. Mays, introduction to Denis Devlin, Collected Poems, Dublin, 1989, 26.
5
MacGreevy’s Poems, also published in 1934 (and reviewed by Beckett) was his only book of
poetry; Coffey published Third Person in 1938 and fell silent until the 1960s. Only Devlin had
anything like a conventionally successful poetic career – outside Ireland, in the United States,
where he won the praise of Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren.
6
Disjecta, 72-3.
7
The relevant passage reads in full: ‘in my twenties [… I] was dangerously ill in body and
mind. For months I existed in a visional state which was heightened by the usual opiates’
(Twice Round the Black Church: Early Memories of Ireland and England, Dublin, 1962, 7).
8
Hugh Maxton points out the existence of an unpublished prose work entitled ‘The House of
Terror’, ‘clearly very early in date of composition’, as the poem’s ultimate source (note to Se-
lected Poems, ed. Hugh Maxton, Dublin, 1991, 245). This text can be found in Mary Thomp-
son’s ‘“Invisible Ink”: A Presentation of Some Manuscripts Pertaining to Austin Clarke’s
“Mnemosyne Lay in Dust”’ (unpublished M. Phil., Trinity College Dublin, 1989).

528
 BECKETT, AUSTIN CLARKE AND IRISH POETIC MODERNISM

which led him to enter analysis in London with Wilfred Bion. By this time the
writers’ paths were crossing in Dublin, or rather not crossing. In a letter of 9
October 1931, written shortly before he resigned his lectureship at Trinity Col-
lege, Dublin, Beckett numbers Clarke among the ‘stercoraceous bastards’ who
make pubcrawling in the city centre impossible for him.9 His animus against the
older writer was as sustained as it is inexplicable. Clarke appears again in Beck-
ett’s 1938 novel Murphy, where he is portrayed as the pitiful homosexual drunk-
ard and ‘pot poet’ Austin Ticklepenny.10 To cap the insult Ticklepenny works
as an orderly in the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, based on the Bethlem Royal
Hospital which Beckett had visited with his doctor friend Geoffrey Thompson.
Beckett derides Clarke/Ticklepenny as everything that he is not, and though his
biographers can only speculate, it would be ironic if his knowledge of what the
two men secretly had in common were exactly what turned him against the
older writer.
It is against the backdrop of Beckett’s polemic for Irish modernism that I
wish to look at ‘Mnemosyne Lay in Dust’. His portrayal of MacGreevy, Cof-
fey and Devlin as standard-bearers for modernism against the forces of Re-
vivalism proved an influential and for many years unquestioned reading: a
revival of these poets in the 1960s, conducted in the pages of the radical Dublin
journal The Lace Curtain (and featuring a reprint of ‘Recent Irish Poetry’), was
conducted on almost identical lines. More recently another wave of interest in
these writers has been launched by the publication of Alex Davis and Patricia
Coughlan’s Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s in 1995, followed
by monographs such as Davis’s A Broken Line: Denis Devlin and Irish Poetic
Modernism and Dónal Moriarty’s The Art of Brian Coffey. Among the achieve-
ments of this scholarship is to have shown how much more in common the Re-
vivalist and Modernist camps had in the 1930s than a casual reading of ‘Recent
Irish Poetry’ would have us believe.11 Europhile and modernist though it was,
the poetry of MacGreevy also testifies to its author’s ardent Republicanism.
For all their dissenting modernism, Devlin and Coffey were far closer to the
Catholic Church than the scathingly anti-clerical Clarke. Despite the genuinely
Revivalist elements in Clarke’s poetic, I would like to argue, Beckett’s rejection
of him was strategic and tendentious; and with the revisionist readings of Mac-
Greevy, Devlin and Coffey in mind, I propose to re-enter the complex and le-

9
Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy, 9 October 1931, TCD MS 10402.
10
See below for some of the sexual themes in ‘Mnemosyne’, but for a strikingly homoerotic mo-
ment in Clarke occurring in the context of mental illness, cf. A Penny in the Clouds, where the
writer George Sigerson cures a young man suffering from “mountain gloom” by thrusting the
“red-hot tip” of a poker onto his coccyx (London, 1968, 43).
11
Alex Davis and Patricia Coughlan (eds), Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s,
Cork, 1995, Alex Davis, A Broken Line: Denis Devlin and Irish Poetic Modernism, Dublin,
2000, and Dónal Moriarty, The Art of Brian Coffey, Dublin, 2000. Davis quotes a letter of
Devlin’s to MacGreevy describing the Dublin reaction to ‘Recent Irish Poetry’: ‘it appears
that Clarke is vindictive by nature and will pursue Sam to his grave’ (A Broken Line, 17). Yet
when the opportunity for vengeance presented itself, in Beckett’s libellous caricature of him
as Austin Ticklepenny in Murphy four years later (see below), Clarke inexplicably declined to
sue.

529
 DAVID WHEATLEY

gitimately modernist dimensions of Clarke’s poetry into the equation of Beck-

ett’s argument.12 Appropriately or ironically, given how much there is to link it
to Beckett, no poem of Clarke’s better belies his fusty Revivalist image than
‘Mnemosyne Lay in Dust’, his longest poem and one of his most accomplished.
The time-gap across which we must read it, to compare the poem to Murphy, is
analogous to the gap of understanding between the two authors: a mixture of
the accidental and the inexplicable. Nevertheless, bringing the two into closer
proximity than their publication dates and Beckett’s antipathy for Clarke would
seem to warrant produces some unexpected results.
One of Beckett’s charges against Revivalism is its eclipse of subjectivity or
‘flight from self-awareness’,13 but Clarke’s poem was written in response to just
this condition; the central character Maurice Devane’s fears that ‘Void would
draw his spirit, /Unself him’.14 ‘Unselved’ is how Beckett already saw Clarke in
his reliance on the props of Gaelic folklore; but to be ‘unselved’ so colourfully
by mental illness is another matter entirely. Talk of the ‘unself’ echoes T. S.
Eliot’s contemporary calls for a poetry of impersonality, a position with which
Beckett’s more affirmative treatment of subjectivity would seem to be at odds.
Which is the more properly modernist, the extolling of personality or its ex-
tinction? However one argues it, what is not in doubt in both Beckett and
Clarke is that selfhood is deeply in crisis, and by extension the literary forms in
which the self has been accustomed to expressing itself. Coming on top of the
attack on Clarke in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, the presence of mental instability as
a major theme of Beckett’s Murphy offers a valuable opportunity to compare
the two writers’ responses to this crisis. As the comparison shows, the unsettling
modernist writing is by no means all on Beckett’s side.
Written in London in straitened circumstances, Murphy has none of the rev-
erence for Dublin topography of Clarke’s poem, extracting mischievous fun
from national icons such as Oliver Sheppard’s statue of Cuchulain in the Gen-
eral Post Office and describing a character as ‘Famous throughout Civilized
World and Irish Free State’.15 Murphy is a chronic sluggard, given to strapping
himself to his rocking chair naked and rocking himself into a quasi-catatonic
state. At the request of his lover, the prostitute Celia, he seeks employment and
becomes a ward nurse at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, sometime employer
of Ticklepenny. Beckett’s description of Ticklepenny, ‘Pot Poet /From the
County of Dublin’, drips acid:

12
I am indebted in this essay to W. J. Mc Cormack’s contribution to Modernism and Ireland,
‘Austin Clarke: The Poet as Scapegoat of Modernism’ (75-102), which alludes briefly to
‘Mnemosyne Lay in Dust’ and at more length to Murphy, but stops short of the parallel read-
ing I am concerned with here. For more on Clarke’s view of his 1930s contemporaries, and
their interest in Eliot and other Anglo-American modernists, cf. Alex Davis, ‘Irish Modernist
Poets of the 1930s’, in Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (eds), Locations of Literary Mod-
ernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernism, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 135-158.
13
Disjecta, 71.
14
Clarke, Selected Poems, 107.
15
Beckett, Murphy, London, 1963, 26.

530
 BECKETT, AUSTIN CLARKE AND IRISH POETIC MODERNISM

This creature does not merit any particular description. The merest pawn in the game between
Murphy and his stars, he makes his little move, engages an issue and is swept from the board.
Further use may conceivably be found for Austin Ticklepenny in a child’s halma or a book-re-
viewer’s snakes and ladders, but his chess days are over. […] the quality of his speech is most
wretched […] a distinguished indigent drunken Irish bard […]16

Ireland and Revivalism, Beckett makes clear, have much to do with Ticklepen-
ny’s mental condition. The improvement he has experienced at the Mercyseat,
one Dr. Fist diagnoses:

was to be sought neither in [Ticklepenny’s] dipsopathy nor in the bottlewashing, but in the free-
dom from poetic composition that these conferred on his client, whose breakdown had been due
less to the pints than to the pentameters.
This view of the matter will not seem strange to anyone familiar with this class of pentameter
that Ticklepenny felt it his duty to Erin to compose, as free as a canary in the fifth foot (a cruel
sacrifice, for Ticklepenny hiccuped in end rimes) and at the caesura as hard and fast as his own
divine flatus and otherwise bulging with as many minor beauties from the gaelic prosodoturfy as
could be sucked out of a mug of Beamish’s porter.17

‘Gaelic prosodoturfy’ is a reference to the same ‘ingenious metrical opera-

tions’ unfavourably noticed in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, Clarke’s experiments with
assonantal and other techniques from Irish language poetry, as influenced by
the minor Victorian writer William Larminie (1849-1900). While this antiquar-
ian dabbling constitutes further evidence of Clarke’s cowardly ‘flight from self-
awareness’, Murphy is anything but a defence of rationalist consciousness. On
the contrary, its anti-hero idealizes behaviour that, from a clinical point of view,
can only be described as grossly dysfunctional. Earlier in the book Beckett de-
votes a chapter to Murphy’s mind and its desire for a condition of radical solip-
sism modelled on the Occasionalist philosophy of Arnold Geulincx. His work
at the Mercyseat convinces Murphy that its inmates have achieved the with-
drawal from the world that he has only fantasized about. Murphy’s official
function as a ward nurse is to:

translate the sufferer from his own pernicious little private dungheap to the glorious world of
discrete particles, where it would be his inestimable prerogative once again to wonder, love, hate,
desire, rejoice and howl in a reasonable balanced matter, and comfort himself with the society
of others in the same predicament.18

16
Ibid., 61, 63.
17
Ibid., 63. Any suspicion that Clarke is not the intended butt of Beckett’s satire is removed
when Ticklepenny comments on Murphy’s expression: ‘you had a great look of Clarke there
a minute ago,’ the narrator adding, ‘Clarke had been for three weeks in a catatonic stupor’
(Murphy, 133).
18
Ibid., 123.

531
 DAVID WHEATLEY

Murphy has other thoughts, however:

All this was duly revolting to Murphy, whose experience as a physical and rational being oblig-
ed him to call sanctuary what the psychiatrists called exile and to think of the patients not as
banished from a system of benefits but as escaped from a colossal fiasco.19

Collapse of the self represents an ideal opportunity for studying it in isolation

from the distorting props of society. The opening of ‘Mnemosyne Lay in Dust’
lacks such a philosophical standpoint on the fate of Maurice Devane, but shows
in similar fashion how illness strips away the social self, as ‘terror repeals the
mind’:

Past the house where he was got

In darkness, terrace, provision shop,
Wing-hidden convent opposite,
Past public-houses at lighting-up
Time, crowds outside them – Maurice Devane
Watched from the taxi window in vain
National stir and gaiety
Beyond himself: St Patrick’s Day,
The spike-ends of the Blue Coat school,
Georgian houses, ribald gloom
Rag-shadowed by gaslight, quiet pavements
Moon-waiting in Blackhall Place.

For six weeks Maurice had not slept,

Hours pillowed him from right to left side,
Unconsciousness became the pit
Of terror. Void would draw his spirit,
Unself him. Sometimes he fancied that music,
Soft lights in Surrey, Kent, could cure him,
Hypnotic touch, until, one evening,
The death-chill seemed to mount from feet
To shin, to thigh. Life burning in groin
And prostate ached for a distant joy.
But nerves needed solitary confinement.
Terror repeals the mind.20

No less than Devane, the language is on edge. Among the features of Clarke’s
style are suppression of the definite article, as in the opening rejection of an
anaphora with ‘past’, use of personification for abstract or threatening forces
(‘Void’, ‘Life’, ‘Terror’), spikily uncomfortable line-breaks, often for dramatic
effect (‘the pit /Of terror’), and paratactic delaying of the main verb in the first
stanza versus the proliferation of short, verb clauses in the second (two in stan-
za one as against thirteen in stanza two). The paralysis of Devane’s mind is sug-
gested by his watching passively from a taxi window while the landscapes of his
childhood, symbolically led by ‘the house where he was got’, pass by in review
outside. A reference to the ‘National stir and gaiety’ of St Patrick’s Day is un-

19
Ibid.
20
Selected Poems, 107.

532
 BECKETT, AUSTIN CLARKE AND IRISH POETIC MODERNISM

dercut by the line-break: ‘Beyond himself’. One of the effects of syphilis is para-
lysis (Joyce’s ‘general paralysis of the insane’), and Devane’s ‘death-chill’
tellingly leads from his feet to his ‘thigh’, half-rhyming from its mid-line
position with ‘joy’ at the end of the next line (another technique borrowed from
Gaelic metre). As we shall see, however, Devane’s problems with sexuality stem
from neurotic caution rather than the recklessness needed to contract ‘general
paralysis of the insane’.
With its description of cab-ranks at Kingsbridge railway station and Guin-
ness tugs moored on the Liffey, the rest of the poem’s first section can be com-
pared to the peripatetic landscapes of Beckett’s 1935 poetry collection Echo’s
Bones and Other Precipitates, as well as his fellow modernist Thomas Mac-
Greevy’s long poem ‘Crón Tráth na nDéithe’.21 The phrase ‘Delirium tremens’,
used in connection with the barges’ inebriating cargo, could just as easily be ap-
plied to the metropolitan bustle from which Devane recoils: ‘Dublin swayed,
/Drenching, drowning the shamrock: unsaintly /Mirth’. His journey finally
brings him to ‘The Mansion of Forgetfulness’ or St Patrick’s Hospital, found-
ed with a bequest from the will of another Irish poet troubled by the spectre of
insanity, the Protestant Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Jonathan Swift. Its re-
ligious origins are not without importance. Clarke’s childhood, as described in
his poetry and prose, was haunted by the religious landscape of Dublin, with
Protestant churches and other institutions seen as mysterious and sinister. The
Penal Laws and the Great Famine of the 1840s engendered much Catholic sus-
picion of Protestant charity, which was associated with proselytism: the story of
Madame Steevens’s porcine child with which the first section ends is a typical
example.22
Section II compares the violence of Devane’s collapse to a railway accident
at Westland Row and what Clarke’s editor suggests is a memory of a baton
charge on a group of picketers during the 1913 Dublin Lockout.23 The crowd’s
cries of ‘Murder! Murder!’ will find a resonance later in the poem in the psy-
chotic ravings of one of Devane’s fellow patients. The violence done to Devane
once he enters St Patrick’s is extreme, and without any parallel in the benignly
inept regime of Beckett’s Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. The free citizen who
stepped out of the taxi is brutally reduced to an institutional cypher. Once again
Clarke’s syntax is far from straightforward:

21
In Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy, ed. Susan Schreibman, Washington, 1991, 14-24.
22
‘The eighteenth century hospital /Established by the tears of Madam /Steevens, who gave
birth, people said, to /A monster with a pig’s snout, pot-head’ (Selected Poems, 108). The for-
mer Steven’s Hospital (the usual modern spelling) adjoins St Patrick’s. The story of Madam
Steevens can also be found in Twice Round the Black Church, 152. The title of the volume is
another example of the same superstition: the young Clarke believed that running twice
round the neighbourhood ‘Black’ Protestant church would conjure the devil.
23
Selected Poems, 247. Clarke was also to describe the Lockout in his 1968 poem ‘The Subjec-
tion of Women’.

533
 DAVID WHEATLEY

Straight-jacketing [sic] sprang to every lock

And bolt, shadowy figures shocked,
Wall, ceiling; hat, coat, trousers flung
From him: vest, woollens, Maurice was plunged
Into a steaming bath; half suffocated,
He sank, his assailants gesticulating,
A Keystone reel gone crazier;
The terror-peeling celluloid,
Whirling the figures into vapour,
Dissolved them. All was void.24

Devane’s passivity before what is happening is conveyed in the transforma-

tion of his ordeal into a Keystone Cops film, ‘whirling the figures into vapour’
much as the characters in Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’ are ‘whirled /Beyond the circuit of
the shuddering Bear /In fractured atoms’.25 As Devane drifts to sleep, he sees
‘still watchful’ the shining peep-hole through which he will be observed. Sur-
veillance is a major theme throughout Clarke’s oeuvre, appearing in attacks on
Irish clericalism such as ‘Penal Law’ and ‘Her Voice Could Not Be Softer’ with
their powerful evocations of sexual claustrophobia. It also features memorably
in the opening pages of Twice Round the Black Church, where the young Clarke
imagines himself being watched by a portrait of Shakespeare.26 In ‘Mnemosyne
Lay in Dust’ a visit from the night nurse is cause for panic and wild specula-
tion: ‘Evil was peering through the peep-hole’.27
Devane’s descent into paranoia begins with his imagining ‘Four men […] car-
rying a coffin /Upon their shoulders’ outside his room.28 In section IV, he is
plunged into fear when he believes his soap-dish has been ‘moved an inch’
overnight. Where Beckett’s Murphy envies his sedated patients, Devane sees
only ‘Drug maniacs’ and the heavy-handed ‘band of seizers’ employed to keep
them in check.29 In Murphy the hero enjoys games of chess with the schizoid Mr
Endon, whose serenity is positively Zen-like. No such peace of mind is available
to Devane. One possible consolation, religion, is firmly rejected throughout
‘Mnemosyne Lay in Dust’: in section III the hospital patients are described aim-
lessly (and tautologically) ‘looking up /At the sky /As if they had lost something
/They could not find’.30
It is not just in the sky that Devane has ‘lost something’ he can no longer
find. His face in the mirror too progressively becomes that of a stranger, as
memory takes its titular fall into dust, just as in Murphy Mr Endon’s ruined
pupils ‘reduced, obscured and distorted’ Murphy’s image when he peers into
them hoping to find himself. Even as Devane enters a solipsistic world, how-
ever, the pressure of the revolutionary events outside the hospital walls contin-

24
Ibid., 108.
25
T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962, London, 1974, 41.
26
Twice Round the Black Church, 1-3.
27
Selected Poems, 115.
28
Ibid., 109.
29
Ibid., 111.
30
Ibid., 110.

534
 BECKETT, AUSTIN CLARKE AND IRISH POETIC MODERNISM

ues to make itself felt. In section V Devane dreams of taking part in the War of
Independence, imagining himself leading raids in County Limerick and blowing
up lorries. These fantasies take on a darkly sexual aspect: seeing a ‘gigantic row
of columns’,
Templed, conical, unbedecked
[Devane] knew they were the holy ictyphalli
Curled hair for bushwood, bark or skin
Heavily veined. He worshipped, a tiny satyr,
Mere prick beneath those vast erections.31

The columns conjure up a realm of potency and sexual self-expression from

which hospital life has completely excluded him. Still in his dream, a group of
‘little Jewish boys’ is seen running through a gateway on their way ‘from
Lebanon /To Eden’. Their childish unselfconsciousness too is beyond him.
Where the body makes an appearance in the poem, it is as something to be dis-
ciplined and controlled; loss of control over bodily functions is treated with
horror by the narrator and punished harshly.
One such loss of self-control occurs at the end of section VI, in which Devane
experiences an anxiety attack that coincides with a brief but terrifying period of
lucidity. After imagining his mother and sisters dead, Devane realizes his soli-
tude and calls himself ‘the victim in a story’.32 What he crucially fails to realize
is that the story has no basis outside his diseased fantasies. The panicked beha-
viour of Devane’s body is mirrored in Clarke’s staccato writing, especially its
short sentences and wholesale elision of the article.33 ‘Shocked back /To Sanity’
by his condition, Devane sees its origins in his incapacity to consummate his re-
lationship with a woman he calls Margaret (the name he gives his wife in A
Penny in the Clouds). As though in revenge for his failure to enfranchise it sex-
ually, his body completes its collapse in an act of involuntary defecation; in sec-
tion VII we see Devane being forcibly restrained and fed through a tube after
going on hunger strike.34 Moments like this make the ‘colossal fiasco’ of the
outside world, in Murphy’s dismissive phrase, seem like a powerfully attractive
option.
Religion is not available to Devane as a consolation, but in section VIII its
absence is couched in self-consciously blasphemous terms that provide yet an-
other point of convergence between Beckett and Clarke:

31
Ibid., 113. ‘Ictyphalli’ rather than ‘ithyphalli’ is a Clarkeism.
32
Ibid., 115.
33
Devane’s heart ‘began to beat /Too quickly, too loudly’, just as in Murphy the hero is unable
to learn Neary’s Eastern heart-stopping technique (‘the Apmonia’) because of his uncontrol-
lably if uncharacteristically vigorous heart, ‘like Petrushka in his box’ (Murphy, 6).
34
Hunger strike has long been a form of political protest in Ireland. The Lord Mayor of Cork,
Terence MacSwiney, died in 1920 after a hunger strike of 74 days in London, a fact noted by
Beckett in Malone Dies: ‘That reminds me, how long can one fast with impunity? The Lord
Mayor of Cork lasted for ages, but he was young, and then he had political convictions,
human ones too probably, just plain human convictions. And he allowed himself a sip of
water from time to time, sweetened probably’ (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Lon-
don, 1959, 275).

535
 DAVID WHEATLEY

The heavens opened. With a scream

The blackman at his night-prayers
Had disappeared in blasphemy,
And iron beds were bared;
Day was unshuttered again,
The elements had lied,
Ashing the faces of madmen
Until God’s likeness died.35

The section ends with the patients wallowing in their status as outcasts, like the
rebel angels in Paradise Lost: ‘sinning without end: /O pity in their pride /And
agony of wrong, the men /In whom God’s image died’.36 Loss of bodily control
is given a macabre twist in section X, in the person of the ‘respectable’ Mr
Prunty who shrieks at passers-by ‘Stop, Captain, don’t pass /The dead body!’
Unlike Devane, he is incontinent nightly and shrieks ‘Murder! Murder!’ when
dragged down the corridor by the warder. Ward life has become a form of cloa-
cal living death.
Still in section X Devane dreams of freedom, planning his escape through the
back streets of the Constitution Hill area of Dublin. The echo he imagines hear-
ing of his voice is personified as the figure from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which
would make him Narcissus, confirming his dangerous state of self-absorption:
‘Discreetly /Concealed in every cornerstone /Under the arches, Echo resided,
/Ready to answer him’.37 Self-absorption reaches its sterile climax at the end of
the section with a description of masturbation, which leaves Devane with eu-
phemistic ‘balsam’ in his hands:

A solitary figure, self-wasted,

Stole from the encampments—Onan,
Consoler of the young, the timid,
The captive. Administering, he passed down,
The ward. Balsam was in his hand.
The self-sufficer, the anonym.

As a form of non-procreative sexuality masturbation is heavily charged with

religious guilt for Clarke: Onan is presented as a virtual parody of a doctor or
priest ‘administering’ to the patients’ needs.38 By making Devane into a ‘self-

35
Selected Poems, 118. Like MacGreevy’s, Coffey and Devlin’s work was profoundly devout in
character; for an example of Beckett’s blasphemous invective from this period cf. ‘Ooftish’,
Collected Poems 1930-1978, 31.
36
Selected Poems, 119.
37
The myth of Echo and Narcissus also gives its title to Beckett’s Echo’s Bones and Other Pre-
cipitates.
38
Other poems by Clarke in which masturbatory or deflected sexuality are themes, sometimes
in highly coded form, include ‘Marriage’, ‘The Envy of Poor Lovers’, ‘Irish Mother’ and ‘The
Subjection of Women’. In ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ Beckett interprets a remark of Yeats’s as a
defence of the masturbatory nature of Revivalist poetry: ‘when he speaks, in his preface to
Senator Gogarty’s “Wild Apples”, of the sense of hardship borne and chosen out of pride as
the ultimate theme of the Irish writer, it is as though he were to derive in direct descent the →
536
 BECKETT, AUSTIN CLARKE AND IRISH POETIC MODERNISM

sufficer’ or ‘anonym’ like Onan, masturbation further confirms his apartness

from the other inmates and the rest of society; for Neil Corcoran, ‘the impossi-
bility of a true sexual relation’ which Devane’s masturbation represents is one
of the ‘conditioning circumstances’ of ‘the absence at the poem’s centre’.39 The
phrase neatly recalls Beckett’s charge in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ that ‘At the cen-
tre there is no theme’,40 but instead of the anti-subjective emptiness of which
Beckett complains, Devane’s mental vacancy has become a powerfully drama-
tized theme in its own right. Other examples of sexual shamelessness abound in
St Patrick’s: later the ‘half-caste’ Jackson will shamelessly expose his genitals in
the wash-room, much to the discomfiture of a new warden.41 As might be gath-
ered from the comic terminology of ‘virgins’ and ‘Irish virgins’ in Murphy (to
describe ‘clean’ ward rounds), the Mercyseat inmates by contrast appear free of
all sexual promptings.
In sections XI and XII Devane takes a minimal step towards recovery when he
comes off hunger strike, succumbing to a dish of strawberries invested by Clarke
with the same irresistibility as William Carlos Williams’s celebrated plums:

In June, upon the little table

Between the beds, he saw a dish
Of strawberries. As they lay
There, so ripe, ruddy, delicious,
For an hour he played with his delay
Then in delight
Put out two fingers towards the wished-for,
Ate for the first time.42

His recovery continues in section XIII: if previously Eden has been an inac-
cessible dreamworld, now it takes the form of a ‘Garden /Beyond the Gate’, for-
bidden but at least real. He looks forward to shedding the carapace of what
Clarke persists in calling his ‘straight-jacket’: ‘Unwieldy, /He wondered why he
had been straight-laced, /Straight-jacketed. /But soon his suture would unseam,
/His soul be rapt’.43 The restoration of his sanity will take the form of a burst-
ing rather than the stitching up of a suture, shedding the imago of his institu-
tionalized self.

→ very latest prize canary from that fabulous bird, the mesozoic pelican, addicted, though child-
less, to self-eviscerations’ (Disjecta, 72). The Biblical Onan’s mother Shuah (Genesis 38: 2-4)
provides the surname for Belacqua, hero of Beckett’s first two prose books, Dream of Fair to
Middling Women (1932; first published 1992) and More Pricks than Kicks (1934).
39
Neil Corcoran, ‘The Blessings of Onan: Austin Clarke’s “Mnemosyne Lay in Dust”’, in Poets
of Modern Ireland, Cardiff, 1999, 27. For John Goodby, Devane’s acceptance of Onan’s
‘balm’ is ‘liberatory’, leading to the breaking of his fast (Irish Poetry since 1950: From Still-
ness into History, Manchester, 2000, 96).
40
Disjecta, 71.
41
Selected Poems, 126. A character of the same name features in Beckett’s Malones Dies, whose
hero ‘t[akes] counsel of an Israelite’ called Jackson ‘on the subject of the conation’ (Malone
Dies, London, 1975, 46).
42
Selected Poems, 123.
43
Ibid., 124.

537
 DAVID WHEATLEY

The narrator’s mood in the final portion of the poem is lightened by his con-
fidence in this recovery. In section XIV Devane, ‘thickly clad like an imbecile’,
exercises with a trio whose habitual masturbation earns them the unflattering
label of ‘churn-dashers’.44 In section XV we meet more of Devane’s fellow pa-
tients, few of whom can share his hopes of leaving the ‘Mansion of Forgetful-
ness’. There is the homicidal McLoughlin who ‘One day […] blew his noddle
off’,45 and the building contractor Mr Cooper who chalks the words ‘Oul shitin’
Jases’ on a billiards table and is dubbed ‘the last of the stercorians’ (echoing
Beckett’s abusive term for Clarke).46 Such violent and transgressive behaviour
aligns the patients more with the dangerous psychotics of Beckett’s Malone Dies
than the harmless cases of the Mercyseat, though even so their behaviour is not
without its comic dimension (a Mr Kinehan decks his collar with wire and pro-
nounces that ‘Crude paraffin is excellent for hair, /But much too strong for the
drawing-room.’).47
A further sign of his recovery comes in section XVI when Devane is visited
by his uncle. Asked by one of his doctors whether the uncle is ‘well-to-do’ he
‘quickly’ lies, presumably conferring on the uncle a status he does not possess.
Ironically, this act of snobbish deception strikes the reader as another sign of
Devane’s increasing socialization, even if Clarke follows it with a stanza on De-
vane attempting and failing dismally to read Chekhov’s The Black Monk and
Other Stories (‘Nothing could hold his /Attention. The words had changed to
pothooks, /Hangers. Words hid their meaning from him’);48 but since the title
story of that volume is about a man in the grip of manic delusions, Devane’s
failure to read it may not be entirely negative. Freedom, when it comes, comes
unexpectedly: in section XVII Devane is taken for a walk in Phoenix Park, and
without further explanation is released in section XVIII. The cityscape he ob-
serves in the park harks back to the poem’s opening, with its carefully enumer-
ated spires and lamp-posts and awareness of the social conventions he has not
experienced since his confinement (‘The passers-by /Kept off forbidden grass’).49
Earlier, Devane saw himself as a ‘victim in a story’; in section XVIII Clarke ex-
ternalizes this condition when he writes ‘Illusions had become a story’, impli-
citly denying them any further power over Devane. His return to sanity is
portrayed in terms of a regained control over his memory, rescuing
‘Mnemosyne’ from the dust: the first word of the final section is ‘Rememorised’.

44
Ibid., 124-5.
45
Ibid., 127.
46
Ibid., 128. Murphy too has a Cooper, a bowler hat-wearing acathisiac employed by Neary to
track down Murphy in London.
47
Ibid., 127.
48
Ibid., 129.
49
Ibid., 130.

538
 BECKETT, AUSTIN CLARKE AND IRISH POETIC MODERNISM

The poem ends:

Upon that site

Of shares and dividends in sight
Of Watling Street and the Cornmarket,
Shone in the days of the ballad-sheet,
The house in which his mother was born.50

Significantly, it is a landscape of the past rather than the present that Devane
re-enters. The poem began with ‘the house where he was got’ but ends with a
return to an even more primal point of origin, his mother’s house, from which
control can now be reasserted over his life.
Applying Beckett’s ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ to ‘Mnemosyne Lay in Dust’ then,
we find the charge of ‘flight from self-awareness’ singularly fails to stick. Beck-
ett’s judgement of Clarke was right to the extent that subjectivity is threatened
in ‘Mnemosyne Lay in Dust’, but by other forces entirely than the anti-intellec-
tual complacency Beckett diagnosed. The absolutism of the phrase ‘flight from
self-awareness’ in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ carries the risk of making the self appear
a fixed entity either entirely present or absent from a work of literature, but as
‘Mnemosyne Lay in Dust’ and Murphy show, selfhood cannot be posited in ab-
straction from the ‘unself’ drawn so powerfully by Clarke and Beckett. This is
not to claim a tidy dialectic in which self confronts unself and emerges naïvely
triumphant and unaltered; the conclusions of both works, the one sombre, the
other farcical (Murphy dies in an explosion triggered by a gas leak in a WC)
work against such easy resolutions. As Beckett wrote of the artistic process in
a tribute for the painter Avigdor Arikha, ‘Eye and hand’ may ‘fever […] after
the unself’, but ‘By the hand it unceasingly changes the eye unceasingly
changed’.51 The effects of the unself are no less disruptive in Clarke’s poem.
Memory is the dominant theme of ‘Mnemosyne Lay in Dust’, not least on ac-
count of the poem’s remarkably protracted gestation. Had it been published in
the 1930s, only the most bloody-minded hostility on Beckett’s part could have
allowed him to maintain Clarke in the role of scapegoat for Irish modernism in
‘Recent Irish Poetry’. Even allowing for its non-appearance until 1966 however,
the poem alerts us to the tensions at work behind the Revivalist façade all along
in early Clarke. The purveyor of the ‘fully licensed’ mythical ‘stock-in-trade’
was even in the 1930s a fierce social critic, as much at home with hard-edged
urban subject matter as with more pastoral modes, a free-thinking defender of
the individual against the suffocating clericalism of the Irish Free State, and an
innovator rather than a reactionary in his metrical experiments. The tragedy of
Clarke’s early career was that it was not until Night and Morning (1938), when
he was forty-two, that he allowed this side of his work to come to the fore; and
with Night and Morning followed by a seventeen-year detour into verse drama,
the chances of ‘Mnemosyne Lay in Dust’ completing its gestation before it did
receded even further. Despite the many injustices of his attack then, a repentant

50
Ibid., 131.
51
‘For Avigdor Arikha’, Disjecta, 152.

539
 DAVID WHEATLEY

Beckett could justifiably have claimed Clarke’s diffident publishing history and
late development as extenuating factors; but what these missed opportunities
mean for ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ is that it must now be seen as a partial and par-
tisan map of the modernist possibilities open to Irish poetry in 1934 and be-
yond. As we reassess the post-Yeatsian generation of Irish poets and the extent
of their engagement with modernism, Clarke becomes more and more a crucial
link between Yeats on the one hand and MacGreevy, Coffey, Devlin and Beck-
ett on the other, and nowhere more so than in the deeply complex and reward-
ing achievement that is ‘Mnemosyne Lay in Dust’.

Department of English DAVID WHEATLEY

University of Hull
Hull HU6 7RX
U.K.

540