Samuel Beckett's secret wedding in Folkestone – posing as 'Mr Barclay'
‘Thank God it’s done at last,” Samuel Beckett wrote in March 1961 in a letter to a close friend, the Irish critic Con Leventhal. It’s a line that recalls Krapp’s Last Tape – his monologue of 1958 – and the aged Krapp’s memory of his mother’s death (“All over and done with, at last”).
Yet Beckett, then 54, was referring to his own wedding two days earlier, on March 25, to his lover Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil. It was conducted in the coastal town of Folkestone, Kent with the secrecy of a wartime operation – Beckett had once been part of the French Resistance – and the meticulousness of one of his rigorous texts.
As part of this year’s Folkestone Book Festival, Sean Doran and Liam Browne (who run the Enniskillen International Beckett Festival) have conceived an eerie ambulatory experience that allows participants, ideally one at a time, to make a pilgrimage through this way-station in the Nobel Prize-winning author’s life. Along the way, you are plugged into audio material, mainly biographical. There are no Beckett excerpts, but instead three specially penned and recorded video monologues, performed by leading actors, at salient sites about the town: a portrait of the artist at one remove.
Beckett’s unromantic sigh of relief after his wedding reflected the pragmatism of the exercise. The idea was that Dechevaux-Dumesnil, as his widow, should be able to inherit the rights to his work after his death. Being of Irish nationality, he had to marry her in England, not France. The clandestine set-up was because both abhorred publicity. An additional complication was that Beckett’s affair with the BBC script-editor Barbara Bray was still on-going.
So it was that he pootled his Citroën 2CV to Le Touquet, crossed the Channel via ferry and headed for the seafront Hotel Bristol, from where – on a clear day – he could see the French coast. He checked in as “Mr Barclay” (his middle name) and made sure to anonymise his correspondence. To make the marriage legal, he had to be in residence for a fortnight.
The Bristol, which once faced the promenade-to-seafront funicular known as the Leas Lift, was demolished in the 1960s, so instead the organisers have commandeered the nearby Clifton Hotel, a white-washed slab of faded grandeur. At the start of this illuminating one-hour trail, you sit in an armchair in the garden room, and imbibe the first tranche of a literary “fact file” via an MP3 player.
Its spiel draws on James Knowlson’s definitive biography and flags up relevant Beckett work, notably the paranoiac Film (1966), in which Buster Keaton plays a man comically desperate to avoid being watched. Upstairs, in Room 111, lie tell-tale allusions to that celluloid curio: black coverings on a mirror and a goldfish bowl. The focal point, though, is an old black and white telly showing the first new monologue, “Mr Barclay”, written by Helen Oyeyemi, in which a chirpy receptionist, played by Jade Anouka, tries to fathom the reclusive guest with the “faraway smile”.
Each of the monologues is impressive, offering a fictional eye-witness slant on the affair. The second plays at the British Lion pub down in town, where Russell Tovey poses as the Daily Express hack who almost rumbled Beckett’s plan, but was fobbed off by his publisher.
Last but not least, in the grand old Folkestone library (now also registry office), on a vertiginously perched TV screen, Harriet Walter plays E Pugsley (in a script by Eimear McBride), one of the two unknown witnesses procured from who-knows-where. She re-lives the oddly drab scenario, seized by the sheer banal effrontery of it: “Love’s young dream it was not… Would a little lipstick on the bride have hurt?”
What would Beckett have made of this belated multi-media hoo-ha, 60 years on? We’ll never know. A wince perhaps. It has been done with discreet love, though. Which feels right.
Folkestone Book Festival runs until June 13. A film of Beckett in Folkestone streams 13-19 June; creativefolkestone.org.uk
