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gave, so as not to disappoint the artists if I were unsuccessful in selling anything. In those days, as I had no idea how to sell and had never bought pictures, this seemed to be the best solution and the least I could do to please the artists.
    In spite of the fact that I had opened this gallery, I still much preferred old masters to modern art. Beckett told me that one had to accept the art of one’s day, as it was a living thing. He adored the paintings of Jack Yeats and of Geer van Velde, and he wanted me to give them both exhibitions. I could not refuse him anything, so it was agreed. Jack Yeats luckily realized that his painting was not at all in line with my gallery and let me off. But I agreed and gave the Van Velde show. In fact, I bought some of the pictures which were rather like Picasso’s, secretly under various names in order to please Beckett, but even after this Van Velde, not knowing I had done so, asked me for five hundred dollars, which I could not refuse him.
    Beckett lived in Paris, and because of the gallery I was supposed to live in London. But because of Beckett I was always leaving the gallery to Wyn Henderson and rushing off to Paris to be with him. He could not make up his mind either to have me or to let me go. Ever since hisbirth, he had retained a terrible memory of life in his mother’s womb. He was constantly suffering from this and had awful crises, when he felt he was suffocating. He always said our life would be all right one day, but if I ever pressed him to make any decision it was fatal and he took back everything he had previously said. At this time his book Murphy came out, and he gave it to me, as well as his previous study on Proust, which was excellent.
    Though I adored talking to him and being with him, conversing with him was very difficult. He was never very animated and it took hours and lots of drink to warm him up before he finally unravelled himself. He was a very fascinating lanky Irishman with green eyes and a thin face and a nose like an eagle and his clothes were very French and tight-fitting. He was extremely intellectual and abstract as a person and had an enormous passion for James Joyce, and had once been engaged to his daughter.
    Beckett was not Joyce’s secretary, as everyone has since claimed, though he was perpetually doing errands for him. Joyce had a Russian Jewish intellectual for secretary, called Paul Leon, who was later killed by the Germans.
    In 1938, Joyce had his fifty-second birthday, for which occasion Maria Jolas, a great friend of the Joyces, gave him a dinner party. Beckett was in a state of great excitement about suitable gifts. He went with me and made me buy a blackthorn stick. As for his own present, he wished to give Joyce some Swiss wine, Joyce’sfavourite beverage. I remembered years before that John Holms and I had dined with Joyce in a Swiss restaurant on the Rue Ste Anne, so I went back there and asked the proprietor if he would sell us some. Of course, he was delighted to do so.
    The party was a great success, and Joyce wore a beautiful Irish waistcoat which had belonged to his grandfather. This was the Finnegans Wake period and Joyce offered a hundred francs to anyone who could guess under what name it would be published. I think Beckett was the winner. The table was decorated with a plaster model of Dublin, through which ran a green ribbon representing the River Liffey. Joyce was very happy, surrounded by all his adorers, and after quite a lot to drink, got up and did a little jig by himself in the middle of the floor.
    In Paris Marcel presented me to Jean Arp, the sculptor who was an excellent poet and most amusing man. He took me to Meudon to see the modern house he had built for himself and Sophie, his wife. They had separate studios, each consisting of a whole floor, and there was a garden full of Arp’s sculpture. Sophie, a Swiss ex-school mistress, was an abstract painter and sculptress. Arp’s work was