in 1932, when he was reading Mallarmé’s poems, renowned achievements of formal perfection, he railed in a letter to his friend Thomas MacGreevy in most revealing terms: “I don’t know why the Jesuitical poem that is an end in itself and justifies all the means should disgust me so much. But it does – again – more & more. I was trying to like Mallarmé again the other day, & couldn’t, because it’s Jesuitical poetry . . . . I suppose I’m a dirty low-church P.[rotestant] even in poetry, concerned with integrity in a surplice. I’m in mourning for the integrity of a pendu’s emission of semen, what I find in Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud, the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind.
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That’s a telling Beckett quote, one I don’t recall seeing before. He’s one of my literary heroes and when you talk about “integrity”, his is one of the first names that should come to mind. Have you read the James Knowlson bio of Beckett, DAMNED TO FAME? It’s quite good…