Just Visiting 2: Samuel Beckett
Next Monday (19 March 2012), the Archivist will give a Gresham lecture at the Museum of London on the subject of unrestricted public visiting to Bethlem, a phenomenon which effectively ceased in 1770. In contrast, this series of blog posts will concentrate on visitors to the Hospital from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Having profiled Queen Mary in January, this month we feature the Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett, who drew inspiration from visits he made to Bethlem in the composition of his first novel, Murphy (1938).
A friend of his, Dr Geoffrey Thompson, was Bethlemâs Junior House Physician from February 1935, and Acting Senior House Physician from May of the same year, until his resignation that October. âThis gave Beckett the chance to come to Bethlem, where he walked in the grounds, visited the wards and played chess with Dr Thompsonâ, according to the author of a published history of the Hospital. âBeckett himself acknowledged that he used Bethlem as a point of departure for his novel Murphy, which had as its setting a sanatorium for the mentally ill, called the Magdalen Mental Mercyseatâ.1
An acknowledged point of departure is one thing; a recoverable string of point-by-point correspondences between Bethlem and Beckettâs Mercyseat is quite another. It has been said that âthe novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novelâ and that âa novelistâs biographers thus undo what a novelist has done, and redo what he undidâ but âall their labour cannot illuminate either the value or the meaning of a novel, can scarcely even identify a few of the bricksâ.2
Attempts at tracing the sources of Beckettâs inspiration have been made nonetheless, most notably in Chris Ackerleyâs Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy (Edinburgh, 2004), in which identifications of varying degrees of plausibility are advanced: between âDr Killiecrankieâ and Murdo Mackenzie, Bethlemâs Senior Assistant Physician, between Beckettâs county coroner and John Porter-Phillips, the Physician Superintendent, and between âBim Clinchâ and Kenneth Cantle, deputy chief male attendant at the time of Beckettâs visits.
To these proposals we venture to add our own simple suggestion: that criticism should accord ample space to Samuel Becketâs storytelling powers, not to mention his caustic wit. Reading that no female nurse at the Mercyseat âhad taken a male nurse to husband within living memory, though one had once been almost obliged toâ,3 for example, is not meant to send us scurrying to Bethlemâs staff records looking for real-life scandal. It is meant to make us laugh, while simultaneously discomforting us.