Amy Grandvoinet
Royal Berkshire Hospital’s A&E department is directly opposite the Museum of English Rural Life, where the Samuel Beckett Special Collection at the University of Reading is held, and which I’m calling the Beckett Centre. In that A&E, as in most A&Es, there is a waiting-room. Some people are more comfortable in the waiting-room than others; some are not comfortable at all. In 2023, we went to a Wellcome-Trust-run ‘Waiting Times’ conference on Euston Road, co-hosted by Dr Laura Salisbury who scholars on Beckett and health occasionally. The conference took place near Tavistock Square and Tavistock Place and Tavistock Square Gardens, nomenclaturally reminiscent of the Tavistock Centre (NW3 5BA) where Beckett received psychotherapy in the early-to-mid 1930s.
We were invited to the conference by somebody I’d been to secondary school with in the post-war New Town of Bracknell (coincidentally close to the Beckett Centre). After attending the conference, which discussed Beckett a lot, I experienced medicality-related flashbacks from that secondary-school-in-Bracknell era at what should have been a delightful park-café we’d found. I tried to write them down and got confusingly – for myself and my company – upset. Not long ago, GIG Cymru or NHS Wales gave me a P.T.S.D. diagnosis, a condition affecting at least 1-in-10 humans in the UK & Ireland today.
It was so nice to be able to go to the Beckett Centre and continue to work out, while investigating the (non)presence of ‘psychogeography’ in Beckett’s gestalt, such persistent mind-hums. An unexpectedly busy episode prior to arriving, however, had turned them up Mezzo piano to Forte. I got to the Beckett Centre whacked and relapse-y. The Sure Hotel by Best Western Reading where I’d be staying assigned me a room that felt scary and I got all upset. Reading is full of personal memories, and I was anticipating pleasant-yet-intense reunions ahead, as well as the pressure of research success. Things felt awry. Enter heart palpitations, brain-fog / delirium, night-sweats and night-mares, large headache. I developed a mouth ulcer.
James Knowlson’s authorised biography tells you Beckett suffered depression and acute anxiety in his late twenties – an arrhythmic heart, night-sweats, night-mares, shudders, panic, breathlessness, paralysis. Symptoms augmented in 1933 after he translated André Breton’s and Louis Aragon’s ‘The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria’, concurrent also with the death of his Daidí. Beckett began psychotherapy in London where he’d joined Thomas MacGreevy from Dublin. Between walking or reading or sipping on lime-juice, says Knowlson, Beckett saw Dr Wilfred Bion almost one-hundred-and-fifty times over a period of two years (though this felt to him only six months). Beckett lay on couches, Beckett dream-diaried, Beckett educated himself via Robert S. Woodworth’s Contemporary Schools of Psychology (1932). He believed the ventures somewhat alleviated his debilitating disturbances.
Beckett is known for being tenacious. He survived a near-fatal stabbing in 1938, recovering from a coma in Hôpital Broussais. He fought in the French Resistance in the mid-1940s, before beginning his frenzy-of-writing epoch in Paris. In the late 60s, Beckett was treated at Hôpital Cochin for a bad lung-abscess involving a technique of hypnotic rêves éveillés dirigés (guided waking dreams in which he remembered walks with his father) and forwent the pleasures of alcohol and cigarettes, confined to his flat at 38 Boulevard Raspail until he was better. Beckett never ceased writing, but this too seems bound up in sickness-talk: he wrote to a friend in 1954 ‘I am absurdly and stupidly the creature of my books’. Which are often about affliction and dying.
To what extent did writing deleteriously effect Beckett’s psyche? Frenzy. When at the Beckett Centre, I admit to Steven Matthews (the centre’s director) just how many notes I’ve made, way too exhaustingly Joyce-ish and not enough pared-back Beckett but am reassured (?) that Beckett made loads loads and loads of notes also. I say I’m ofnadwy (poorly) and Steven says he’s wedi blino (tired). Someone else and I spoke at the Beckett Centre on the potential obsessiveness occurring with writing projects, ousting valorisations of harmful ‘creative’ habits. I remember the importance of NOT PROJECT, as well as of project. Projects can give life, but also derail it? All in good measure? Tá?
I went to A&E at the Royal Berkshire Hospital when the headache had reached its seventh-day and was now freaking me out. In A&E, everyone chatted about how long they’d been there. ‘I’ve been waiting here for ages,’ said a lady. ‘Gosh, how much longer?’ said a man, looking at his wrist-watch. Once, I watched Waiting for Godot (1954) on my Fairphone 2 in the bath at the sanctum ‘The House of Virtue’ (where I lived with two angels proto-healing ravenously) and missed the ending as water gurgled loudly down the plughole, which seemed very fitting it is a story I like to repeat at parties. A&E’s ceilings were static trompe-l’oeil sky-lights, which people rustled biscuit-packets under from the free tea cart. Eventually leaving with codeine, steroids, and conflicting dose instructions, I ripped off my QR-coded NHS wristband and gained a hot new bookmark.
At the Beckett Centre I read someone say only great writers are unafraid of shame and thus capable of creating literature carrying within it humanity’s imprint. Nervously, I consumed my new meds (plus a.t.m.-usual Sertraline) at breakfast in the Sure Hotel by Best Western Reading. I tried to visualise Beckett in spates of recuperation, seeking figmentary solidarity. Manuscripts in the Beckett Centre listed instances in Waiting for Godot when its four players ask each others’ assistance below a subtitle HELP. As well as his tenacity, Beckett is known for his kindness. To cross things out, he typed ‘x’s over glyphs on type-written documents, reminding me of a while ago crossing out hand-written errors with love-hearts as acts of self-care. My G.P. recently recommended reading Montaigne (+ EMDR) as opposed to more talking therapies; I lol when witnessing Francophilic t-shirts in Reading town-centre emblazoned PARIS AVENUE MONTAIGNE 75008 PARIS and MON AMIE PARISIENNE. I bought neither of them. We had drinks by the Seine wait no the Kennett that flows beneath the Oracle Shopping Galleria.
Unsatisfied with the NHS (where you must pay for prescriptions unlike yr GIG), I went to MyDentist and found I need not worry about suspected temporal arthritis or other mystery ailments, but take anti-biotics to solve a trauma-ulcer caused by a wisdom tooth. MyDentist is one-hour away from the Beckett Centre, a liberating stroll on Bath Road and past Prospect Park to a neglected precinct in Tilehurst. Beckett, did you know, had lots of teeth out. She told you they(’d) consider(ed) you an enigma, and we talked of Point Royale.
The next day at a new arts venue named Reading Biscuit Factory I attempted drinking a small glass of vin rouge watching The Substance (2024), which features a disgusting crustacean scene (Beckett did not like to see lobsters in fish-tanks at restaurants fyi) and the slicing of human skin. Nauseously, I got up to leave and collapsed, crawling out of Screen 3 and into the foyer where duty-of-care staff phoned 999. Did Beckett undergo immersive ciné too? Phone-call paramedics asked if my head felt like it had been hit with a brick and whether I looked deathly pale, among other alarming questions surely designed to arouse lucidity. Meanwhile, four dolphins leapt in Paradise Aberystwyth.
I could not bring myself to go back to A&E as a courtesy 111 check-up call later advised, and I don’t think Beckett would have wanted to either. Instead, I read through my notes from the Beckett Centre so-far back at the Sure Hotel by Best Western Reading, and slept relatively soundly. Another guest, I’d overheard, believed ‘The rooms are not nice’ here, but personally I’d grown fond of the Sure Hotel by Best Western Reading, where Beckett’s books were all laid out all over my bed. Many ambulances sirened in the night outside. We are legitimately concerned about health, but health-scare can really take over! Sometimes I dreamt about Beckett doing normal things, like brushing his teeth or opening cupboards, which was bon.
Matin, a sister sent a sympathetic WhatsApp message: ‘It’s been a week of mouths and beckett!’. She attached a YouTube clip of Not I (1972), Beckett’s play featuring a lit-up character MOUTH speaking on a dark stage.
Isn’t it totally humane and reasonable to find it sad (difficult even, yes!) to not drink for a few days? My Dad found it worrisome. But Beckett was miserable in convalescence, and weaned himself a.s.a.p. back into his preferred lifestyle via tiny gifted Champagne bottles from painter Henri Hayden and his wife Josette. Mom and I went for a Sunday walk, and a Beckett scholar recommended me Whiteknights Lake around which to peregrinate Beckett-ishly.
The NHS is in tatters Sky News broadcasts about it perpetually at the Sure Hotel by Best Western Reading, with guidance on how to talk about health with your loved ones. Vox-pops probe health’s socio-economic determinance, as the public is asked to recall advantageous and disadvantageous experiential aspects of their postcode-locations.
As my gums were healing, archive fever gripped. I endeavoured calming myself with the Beckett Centre’s print-version archive catalogue, but only spied proliferate items to impossibly look at. I was relieved to learn Eimar McBride was overwhelmed by the archive’s quantities. Going through my Addendum-specific notes I’d started compiling I came upon following: ‘Repeat repeat repeat repeat trying and trying and trying and trying, confused confused confused confused, soothe soothe soothe soothe’. God. Beckett had five or six different pairs of glasses for different activities, a consoling discovery as I’d been having to wear my own semi-optional pair 24/7 while ill at the Beckett Centre, which I left still-poorly but happy, blessed with Steven’s sympathies and plenty of word-loot from an idiosyncratic episode.
I ate a banana from the shop near the Sure Hotel by Best Western Reading. Beckett used to eat bunches of bananas, according to the Beckett Centre, as we’d eaten them along the prom on mornings before the day’s onslaught began. Android bleeped it’s constantly sunny in Aberystwyth. Beckett considered going to the Canary Islands on holiday for restorative purposes, but went to Madeira and Porto Santo alternatively.
The train back to the Welsh Riviera split without notice at Shrewsbury I swear there was no announcement I am hyper-vigilant. Realising at the last moment, I jumped off it, dropping my empty Amoxicillin packet (a litter-bug) and waited un heure for the carriage prochain. Waiting, waiting. I got home on 25th September. I like a line from Beckett’s short story ‘Dante and the Lobster’ from More Pricks Than Kicks (1934): ‘It took time, but if a thing was worth doing at all it was worth doing well, that was a true saying’. It had been a scramble, but back at MyDentist Aberystwyth my Dentist removed some of my wisdom tooth and everything healed pretty nicely.
Amy Grandvoinet is a PhD researcher in fraught avant-garde literary legacies (mainly pertaining to the contested signifier ‘psychogeography’) between Aberystwyth and Cardiff Universities. Her work can be found in SPAMzine, Content Journal, The London Magazine, Worms, The Polyphony, and elsewhere (click linktr.ee/amy_k_grandvoinet for more). She is part of Literature Wales x Disability Arts Cymru’s Reinventing the Protagonist 2024-5 writing programme, and is a co-founder of think.material Press.