swimmer, enjoyed diving from the high rocks at Sandycove when his son
Sam was small (Damned to Fame 32). In Beckett Writing Beckett, H. Porter
Abbott rightly points out that the scene in question is of “an action that does
not take place—no jump occurs”:
Nor, and this is equally important, is it the record of a refusal to
jump (nothing in the scene indicates such a construction either). It is
the not-taking-place of a following a father’s command. It is the not-
taking-on of an identity (“Be a brave boy”). It is the nonoccurrence of
a baptism of total immersion with a father before the witness of many
(“Many eyes upon you”).^17For Abbott it is thus an example of Beckett’s characteristic “Unwriting
[of ] The Father” (11), his intentional “sealing” of central autobiographical
moments—his own Wordsworthian “spots of time”—“from meaningful, se-
quential narrative connection with any of the other spots in Company” (17).
Abbott convincingly separates Beckett’s “autography” from full-®edged
autobiography on the one hand, ¤ction on the other. Company, one might
add, works more like a lyric poem than any kind of narrative, and the diving
incident cited above is best understood in relation to another scene just a few
pages earlier in the text, in which the author’s father sets off on a mountain
hike so as to avoid “the pains and general unpleasantness of [his wife’s] la-
bour and delivery,” the delivery being Beckett’s own. The father’s urge is to
get away: “Hence the sandwiches which he relished at noon looking out to
sea from the lee of a great rock on the ¤rst summit scaled” (Company 13).
The father who absents himself for the moment of his son’s birth is not un-
like the father of Embers, whose posture on a similar rock above the sea pro-
vides the death motif. And the son who cannot respond properly to the loved
father’s request to “Be a brave boy” and to “jump” is forever a “washout.”
Knowlson records how devastated the twenty-seven-year-old Beckett was
when his father died in 1933. It happened during the worst period of Beckett’s
life—the inability to leave home or to ¤nd a viable form of writing, the heavy
drinking, the terrible ¤ghts with his mother. But his father, who made few
demands on his son, was “a great source of strength to him” (Damned to
Fame 164). As Beckett wrote to his friend Tom MacGreevy:
Lovely walk this morning with Father, who grows old with a very
graceful philosophy. Comparing bees and butter®ies to elephants and
parrots and speaking of indentures with the Leveller! Barging through
hedges and over the walls with the help of my shoulder, blaspheming116 Chapter 6