“There is man in his entirety,
blaming his shoe when his foot is guilty.”
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot.
And thinking
of walking in other people’s shoes, Steve Martin was famously in a production
of Waiting for Godot, a play with
much boot imagery from Estragon who struggles every day
with boots that are too tight and hurt his feet. The beauty of this thought is slightly
spoiled by the fact that Martin actually played Vladimir, and it was Robin
Williams who played Estragon. Still …
At this point in literary history
anyone who cares about these things probably knows the story of Beckett’s shoes.
It pops up again in the latest New York
Review of Books in Fintan O’Toole’s review
of Beckett's Echo's Bones.
O’Toole writes, “Georges Pelorson, who was a close friend of Samuel
Beckett’s, recalled a walk they took together in Phoenix Park in Dublin in 1929
or 1930, when Beckett was twenty-three or twenty-four:
“‘After
a few hundred yards I noticed Sam was walking almost like a duck. I said to him
“What’s the matter with you, are your feet hurting?” and he said “Yes.” “Why,
are you tired?” and he answered “No it’s my shoes. They’re too tight.” “Well,
why don’t you change them?” I got no answer or rather I got it years later.’
“The
answer came when Pelorson met Beckett in Paris with James Joyce. Joyce was
wearing ‘extraordinary shoes of a blistering canary yellow.’ Pelorson had his
answer to the mystery of Beckett’s sore feet:
“’Sam
was sitting nearby and as I was looking at him all of a sudden I realized that
his shoes were exactly the same size as Joyce’s, though evidently his feet were
not…’
“In
the early 1930s, the young Beckett was trying, with sometimes painful results,
to walk in Joyce’s shoes.”
Well
this is very odd. Beckett was a youngish
man in the early 1930s, but not that
young. Be that as it may, I have been
searching for pictures of both Joyce and Beckett which show them wearing, and
preferably walking in, a pair of “blistering canary yellow shoes.”
This
isn’t easy, not least because the photographs from that period are likely to be
in black and white, and frankly none of them is exactly focused on the
footwear. Still …
Here’s
Joyce walking with Nora Barnacle in London on their wedding day in 1931:
Joyce’s shoes are very dark and very shiny, as I suppose befits a wedding.
His
shoes are similarly dark and shiny in this photographed taken in Zurich in 1938
by James Stephens.
And
here he is in Paris in a wonderful but undated photograph walking with that very James Stephens
(who’s looking a lot like Buster Keaton, if you ask me) and John Sullivan. Again the shoes are clearly not yellow.
The best
bet, I think, are the photographs of Joyce and Sylvia Beach taken at
Shakespeare and Company – its date seems uncertain, sources give as somewhere
between 1921 and 1925. Beckett moved to
Paris in 1926, which is promising, though obviously not the “early 1930s” spoken of above. Joyce’s shoes are certainly pale, but who
could swear they were yellow, much less blistering canary? Joycean scholarship being what it is, I’m sure
somebody knows and may even tell me.
As
for Beckett, well, here the photographic evidence seems to be a complete a
non-starter. I haven’t found any picture
of him wearing any shoes that could possibly be yellow, but then pictures of
him as a young man are pretty thin on the ground and certainly don’t show his
shoes, although the facial expressions are in keeping with a man experiencing
some kind of pain, whether from the feet or elsewhere.
There
is this photograph taken by Liam Costello (I confess I don’t know who that is).
Beckett looks youngish, but the
photograph is undated, and in any case the shoes are dark and shiny.
And here’s a picture right from 1934 with Thomas McGreevy, which would again be the right
period according to Pelorson, but those aren’t yellow shoes though he does appear to
be wearing “skinny jeans.” And could that coat really be black leather?
In
any case, eventually, sanely, Beckett gave up on the whole “tiny shoe”
thing. In this picture he’s wearing what
I’ve been told by people who know about these things, are Clarks Wallabees.
They, or at least one version of them, do in fact come in yellow, though not the blistering canary kind.
