Beckett Before Godot 052146496x

Citation preview

BECKETT BEFORE GODOT JOHN PILLING Professor of English and European Literature University of R£ading

UCAMBRIDGE

V

UNIVERSITY PRESS

In Beckett before Godot, John Pilling re-evaluates the formative years of Beckett between the publication of his first work in 1929 and the composition late in 1946 of The Calmative, his last work before the 'trilogy'. Using a wealth of unpublished manuscripts and correspondence from around the world, Pilling examines individual works across all genres for what they reveal of Beckett's creative process during this crucial period. He offers a detailed account of Beckett's early psychological and aesthetic development, and shows how his artistic growth was always paradoxically linked to the likelihood of failure, to which he was always temperamentally attracted. Pilling's treatment of the first two decades of Beckett's career as a writer offers for the first time a coherent critical narrative of his development during this long period of apprenticeship. Beckett before Godot links biographical fact with a series of powerful close readings to modify and enhance our understanding of one of this century's most influential authors.

BECKETT BEFORE GODOT

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 lRP, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, United Kingdom 40 West 20th Street;NewYork, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, OakJeigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia © Cambridge University Press 1997

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1997 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeset in I 1/1 2 ~pt New Baskerville A

catalo~

[s E]

reaml for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

Pilling,John. Beckett before Codot / John Pilling. p. cm. ISBN 0 521 46496 x 1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989 - Criticism and interpretation. 1. Title. PR6003·E282Z 7869 1997 8489·9 1409-, whilst doing everything it can to build bridges of relationship. These more than merely verbal gestures are intended as the ground and foundation for the last paragraph of 'The Capital of the Ruins'. Here Beckett speaks openly of a 'universe become provisional' now that '''Provisional'' is not the term it was' (ULP, 26). This is of a piece with his idea that there is 'no more sense' in the world, but that there is a world nonetheless. Saint-La having been 'bombed out of existence in one night' (ULP, 25), the reconstruction of the town will take a very long time to effect. Beckett 'questions the opinion generally received, that ten years will be sufficient' (ULP, 26). His face, as it were, 'remains grave', but this coda to 'The Capital of the Ruins' testifies to the triumph of the smiling mind: I think that to the end of its hospital days it will be called the Irish Hospital, and after that the huts. when they have been turned into

194 dwellings, the Irish huts. I mention this possibility, in the hope that it will give general satisfaction. And having done so I may perhaps venture to mention another, more remote but perhaps of greater import in certain quarters, I mean the possibility that some of those who were in Saint-Lo will come home realizing that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and sense of a timehonoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again. These will have been in France. (ULP, 27-8)

The important elements in this simple, but subtle, conclusion are the focus upon what will give 'general satisfaction' beyond nationhood (but not beyond the facts of place, 'in France'), and the flexibility of the conception that getting and giving can be at once related to, and dissociated from, one another. Retrospectively, of course, Beckett's last sentence reads like a statement of his own intent, having been in France, to stay there, as he would thereafter. From the same point of view, there is perhaps an 'inkling' of the suggestion that 'the terms in which our condition is to be thought again' will, for Beckett, be, and in due course have been, in French. 7 But what matters most of all, surely, is the 'vision and sense' that Beckett derives from a 'universe become provisional', the 'time-honoured conception' with which the times have supplied him. The poem 'Saint-Lo' (1946) functions as a kind of footnote to 'The Capital of the Ruins'. Its initial idea of continuance and continuity ('Vire will wind ... ') picks up a motif from the radio talk: 'the hospital of wooden huts in its gardens between the Vire and Bayeux roads will continue to discharge its functions, and its cures'. But the poem is of a darker cast than 'The Capital of the Ruins': Vire will wind in other shadows unborn through the bright ways tremble and the old mind ghost-abandoned sink into its havoc (original Irish Timesversion)8

The 'bright ways' are without names, and the weight of 'unborn', 'tremble', 'sink' and 'havoc' surrounds them. 9 It is as though the shock of seeing the devastated town had surprised in Beckett a momentary, but only a momentary, glimmer of its capacity to live on, even with 'the old mind' buried in a 'universe become provi-

Texts for something

195

sional'. The poem's very brevity affects its consolatory potential, and the tangled syntax suggests a confused reaction, whereas 'The Capital of the Ruins', designed for a mass audience which was never to receive it, is for the most part plain and straightforward. The last (at least for our purposes) of Beckett's poems in English, 'Saint-Lo' is uncomfortably detached from its predecessor 'Cascando' of ten years earlier, both in tone and subject-matter, and resists any significant affiliation with the poems in French of 193 8 -39. 'Saint-Lo' is, as 'The Capital of the Ruins' would have it, 'in France' (ULP, 28) but not in French, and the difference, however slight it may seem, leaves the poem (both as first published, and as collected) stranded,1O and - ironically - less of a statement than the radio talk which was only to be published in the aftermath of Beckett's death. Published in France, and in French (indeed, as Beckett's first publication in French), 'Les peintures des van Veldes, ou Le Monde et Ie Pan talon ' returns its author from the domain of 'general satisfaction' to the more restricted forum of art criticism, a medium which (as 'MacGreevy on Yeats' had attempted to show) 'can lift from the eyes, before rigor vitae sets in, some of the weight of congenital prejudice' (Dis, 95). In 'Le Monde et Ie Pantalon' signs of rigor vitae setting in are few and far between, since rigour of any kind is in very short supply. The whole essay is a kind of Molotov cocktail lobbed into the drawing-rooms of 'the sensible people' who are labouring under 'the weight of congenital prejudice'. At the same time 'Le Monde et Ie Pantalon' undercuts its radically subversive aims by offering itself from the outset (notably in its title and epigraph) as a sort of squib, as if it were not to be taken too seriously, and could not be condemned as intended to cause harm. The tensions thus created are at no point resolved into anything resembling unity of tone, but the two painters dealt with are presented in such a way as to seem incommensurable entities (even if they do happen to be brothers), which at least in part justifies Beckett's quixotic manner. The delay in dealing with the van Veldes - almost half the essay has elapsed before they are so much as mentioned - increases the vertigo, since no explicit links are established between the general issues raised in the first half and the specific assessments made in the second. In waging war on 'congenital prejudice' Beckett is also demonstrating that the two

196 brothers, and the two halves of his essay on them, are in disequilibrium one with another, and necessarily so. The idea is obliquely conveyed in the epigraph which dramatizes the curious subtitle of the essay, where 'the world' and 'the pair of trousers' do not lend themselves to any kind of equation, and are conceived of as very different from the point of view of creation and achievement (Dis, 118). Beckett's admission of 'the world' into the subtitle and epigraph of the essay is a reminder - though few of the readers of Cahiers d/\rt no. 21 could have known this - of the conclusion to 'MacGreevy on Yeats' (in which 'a world' is imagined), and is at least partially congruent with the 'facts' of real life marshalled in 'The Capital of the Ruins'. But the first half of 'Le Monde et Ie Pantalon', concerned as it is with what the world of art criticism does (or, rather, does not do) for art, is designed to atomize any such world into a flurry of particles. 'Relationship' and 'reference' (as per 'MacGreevy on Yeats') have no place here, although the welter of names and allusions offers a sketchy simulacrum of them. No doubt mindful of the 'literature of the unword' of which he had spoken to Axel Kaun, Beckett is once again at daggers drawn with the very medium on which his essay depends: Avec les mots on ne fait que se raconter. Eux-memes les lexicographes se deboutonnent. Etjusque dans Ie confessional on se trahit. (Dis, Ilg)

This dispiriting judgement looks as if it could legitimately be described in the words of Beckett's 1934 review of Rilke: 'There is no position here, no possibility of a position, no faculty for one' (Dis, 67). Yet the essay contrives to continue in spite of such deficiencies. ll Like the Saposcat family in Malone Dies (1948), 'Le Monde et Ie Pantalon' seems to draw the strength to live from the prospect of its author's impotence. His impotence thus acknowledged, Beckett follows it with a forced move outward (towards the art object as a relief from criticism's 'hysterectomies with a trowel' (Dis,1 18», and multiple in its effects (in an almost dramatic presentation of professional orthodoxy against amateur enthusiasm). In the terms of Beckett's title 'the pair of trousers' is now privileged over, though still under pressure from, 'the world'. The shift is governed by Beckett's frequent recourse to questions, more often than not presented in clusters (Dis, 120, 122), to capitalize upon their disruptive effect. The strat-

Texts for something

197

egy is an application of the dictum in the Denis Devlin review of 1938 which identifies art as 'pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric' (Dis, 91). It is a way, if not perhaps a very subtle one, of collapsing the space between art and the art criticism which hopes to be something more than 'hysterectomies with a trowel'. It keeps the pot boiling, without Beckett yet being under the obligation to introduce any potentially nutritious ingredients. But it is not a tactic which will take Beckett very far, as he seems to realize in the second half of the essay, where he makes much more sparing, and more pointed, use of it (Dis, 129, 130, 132). His spirit of subversion apparently appeased - albeit by devices far from 'pure' and by no means without rhetoric - Beckett belatedly addresses the work of the van Velde brothers, and immediately seeks to restore a balance which he has previously been more than content to do without. But the balance he wishes to promote is a dynamic one, which explains why very early in this exposition Beckett warns: Il importe tout d'abord de ne pas confondre les deux reuvres. Ce sont deux choses, deux series de choses, absolument distinctes. Elles s'ecartent, de plus en plus, l'une de l'autre. Elles s'ecarterent, de plus en plus, l'une de l'autre. Comme deux hommes qui, partis de la Porte de Chatillon, s'achemineraient, sans tmp bien connaitre Ie chemin, avec de frequents arrets pour se donner du courage, l'un vers la Rue Champ-del'Alouette, l'autre vers l'Ile des Cygnes. (Dis, 124)

Ironically, the reader of 'Le Monde et Ie Pantalon' has thus far been in no danger of confusing one brother with the other, since the few facts that Beckett has seen fit to mention have been very carefully rendered as specific to each of them. The ironies multiply when, having apparently decided to focus in upon 'the pair of trousers' at the expense of 'the world', the two brothers are imagined walking in a real Paris with real map references (and 'frequents arrets') to support them on their way. Indeed, the very next paragraph acknowledges that even things which seem at first sight 'absolument distinctes' need not always be so: II importe ensuite d'en bien saisir les rapports. Qu'ils se ressemblent, deux hommes qui marchent vers Ie meme horizon, au milieu de tant de couches, d'assis et de transportes en commun. (Dis, 124)

The idea of 'rapports', if not 'en commun' then at least as two men walking the same road, is a vision governed by the 'relation-

Ig8 ship' found in 'MacGreevy on Yeats' and The Capital of the Ruins', even if the focus is a more particularized one. But by the time Beckett returns to 'rapports' some four pages later (Dis, 128), the focus has been narrowed down to A. van Velde, making it difficult for the essayist to keep faith with G. van Velde, upon whom in the event only two brief paragraphs prove to be possible (Dis, 128). Between the visionary moment of conjunction in which two men walk towards the same horizon and the practical difficulties of the critic faced with 'un passage difficile' (Dis, 128) in seeking to move from one to the other, A. van Velde seems to provoke in Beckett a need to engage in further sabre-rattling of the kind already seen in the first half of the essay. It is as if the work of A. van Velde, precisely because it is 'La chose immobile dans Ie vide' (Dis, 126), does not lend itself to appropriation by description. The 'massive fidelity' ('fidelite massive') (Dis, 128» of A. van Velde ironically provokes in his commentator a no less massive infidelity, nicely epitomized by references to Braque (Dis, 127) and Cezanne (Dis, 128). The outcome cannot be adjudged much more successful - not that success is deemed possible by Beckett from the outset - than the 'hysterectomies with a trowel' of which others, much more eminent in this mode than Beckett, have been presumed guilty. The account of A. van Velde is what Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce would call a 'painful exposition' (Dis, 26), with a few flashes of insight, a few nods in the direction of 'Les deux besoins' (not to be published until Ig83), and an overwhelming sense that what is being undertaken is not only logically 'impossible' but actually so. G. van Velde, by contrast, seems to provide Beckett with the kind of stimulus which he needs to energize a flight of fancy like that which occurs at the end of 'MacGreevy on Yeats', Faced with the 'passage difficile' between the two brothers (and between his treatment of first the one, and then the other), Beckett once again derives power from an acknowledgement of impotence: Que dire de ces plans qui glissent, ces contours qui vibrent, ces corps comme tailles dans la brume, ces equilibres qu'un rien doit rompre, qui se rompent et se reforment amesure qu'on regarde? Comment parler de ces couleurs qui respirent, qui haletent? De ceUe stase grouillante? De ce monde sans poids, sans force, sans ombre? lei tout bouge, nage, [uit, revient, se defait, se refait. Tout cesse, sans

Texts for something

199

cesse. On dirait l'insurrection des molecules, I'interieur d'une pierre un millieme de seconde avant qu'elle ne se desagrege. (Dis, 128)

This sudden burst of what Beckett immediately dismisses ('C'esl c;a, la IiW~rature', perhaps with Verlaine's 'Ars poetica' in mind) is the saving grace of 'Le Monde el Ie Pan talon " enabling at least part of what follows to be a genuine study in the matter of 'rapports'. The device of asking questions is at last shown as capable of generating answers, and the relief seems to be at least in part a product of G. van Velde being orientated towards the world Cce monde') whereas his brother is occupied with 'la chose en sus pens ... la chose morte, idealement morte' (Dis, 126). The last pages of 'Le Monde et Ie Pantalon' - up to, but not including the rapid succession of short-arm jabs which constitute the coda to the essay - are, as Lawrence Harvey was the first to Show,12 a testament to the continuance of dualistic thinking on Beckett's part. Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that the products of dualism in this instance are merely a reprise upon those found in the literary criticism of the 1930s. As a literary critic, Beckett seems to have been unable to free himself of the need to see one pole of a duality as preferable to the other, except when confronted (as in The Amaranthers) by a 'single series of imaginative transactions' (Dis, 90), or when loath to 'presume to suggest a relation of worth' (as in the Denis Devlin review (Dis, 91». Now turned art critic, or as good as, it is not surprising that Beckett should have gravitated initially towards 'a relation of worth' in giving four pages to A. van Velde and only two paragraphs to G. van Velde. The old habits (what 'Saint-L()' calls 'the old mind') die hard. But as 'Le Monde et Ie Pantalon' unfolds towards its end, or rather begins to jump about to some purpose, the world and the pair of trousers start to look as though they might be able to make common cause, in spite of their differences. 'II n'y a pas de peinture. II n'y a que des tableaux', writes Beckett in 'Le Monde et Ie Pantalon' (Dis, 123); there is no art (no 'painting' as such), only paintings. This may seem a strange claim in an essay which almost forgets to mention a single painting by name, and none at all (by title) by the van Veldes. But Beckett intends 'paintings' in the plural to be truly pluralistic, so that no individual canvas needs to be named. In a fol1ow-up essay - 'Peintres de l'empechement', published in 1947 - the same reticence and the

200

same pluralism obtain, with the difference that, from the two essays taken together, it becomes evident that there are no paintings, only painters, and only two of them (the van Veldes). 'Peintres de l'empechement' is a much more finished article than the rough sketch 'Le Monde et Ie Pantalon', its clearer focus no doubt an important contribution to the mood in which, in the same year, Beckett composed Molloy. But like many of Beckett's other less successful, more obviously experimental works, 'Le Monde et Ie Pan talon ' contains clues to his current state of mind, and pointers as to how he will transcend the problematic situation in which he finds himself. Neither 'Le Monde et Ie Pantalon' nor 'Peintres de l'empechement' will explain how the quantum leap of Molloy eventuated out of the debris of Watt, and the scattered activities of Watt's aftermath. But with the war ended, and with reconstructions of various kinds undertaken ('the terms in which our condition is to be thought again' (ULP, 28», Beckett began to let 'the old mind' be 'ghost-abandoned' to some positive effect. The language of 'rupture' prevalent in the 1930S is mollified here in the direction of the language of 'obstacle' (empechement). Out of rupture he had created a predominantly interventionist art; out of obstacle he would create an essentially quietist art. The 'subject-object' relationship would remain a problem precisely because Beckett had seen at last that it was a relationship rather than a drama of dominance, a matter of horizontals and not of hierarchies.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Mercier et Camier and the nouvelles: 'the vicissitudes of the road'

Nous sornrnes seuls dans rna cellule Apollinaire, 'A la Sante l

In Beckett's Trinity lectures of 1931, given after returning from his placement at the Ecole Normale Suphieure in Paris, he had addressed the differences (as he perceived them) between French and English as languages, emphasizing that English had 'more flower value' whereas .French was 'more ofa work language'. For the young Beckett, apparently, English was a matter of 'looking well', French not. These judgements, which survive in the notebooks of Rachel Burrows,2 anticipate one of Beckett's most beguiling explanations as to why he had felt moved to substitute French for English as his primary expressive medium: 'because in French it is easier to write without style'.3 Of the many reasons that Beckett was prompted to offer for this remarkable change of direction in mid-career - none of them wholly without an admixture of enigma - this is perhaps the most helpful, especially when buttressed by the remarks made some fifteen years earlier to a group of somewhat perplexed undergraduates. 4 Yet the idea of writing 'without style' - style having been reduced (with grammar) to the status of a 'mask' in the Axel Kaun letter of 1937 - seems to have occupied Beckett quite as much in relation to his mother-tongue as in relation to his adoptive one. The Watt notebooks offer abundant illustration of how difficult Beckett found it to write in English without style, although Watt as published is in a sense the most 'styleless' of all Beckett's fictional efforts in his native language. And even with allowance made for the fact that 'The Capital of the Ruins' was intended for radio broadcast, it is evident that Beckett had more than his prospective audience in mind - as was no doubt also true at Trinity in 1931 - in expressing himself so very plainly 201

202

on the subject of the Irish Red Cross Hospital at Saint-L6. He can hardly have been entirely unaware that it was by way of work, the work he had carried out there as storekeeper and interpreter, that he had at last found himself writing in an English with almost no 'flower value', and indeed.about as humdrum and workaday in its values as anything he was ever to write. One reason why 'The Capital of the Ruins' could be written 'without style' - quite apart from the emotions aroused in Beckett by Saint-L6, which made style beside the point - was because Beckett had already begun, only a few months subsequent to his 'vision' of summer 1945,5 to act upon it creatively. On February 17 1946 he began a short story,6 apparently his first attempt to do so since 'Draff' in the summer of 1933. It was begun in English, as the sudden burst of French poems in 1938 had been. But within a month Beckett had switched to French and by May the story was 'finished" and a publisher found (Knowlson, 773) although revision of the second part of the story was to occupy Beckett over the next month or so, before the first part appeared in the July edition of Les Temps Modemes. The story was 'Suite et fin' (of which only 'Suite' was published in the magazine), and it inaugurated what would in due course, before the end of 1946, become a group offour nouvelles or novellas of immense importance in their impact on Beckett's subsequent development. It was the nouvelles which, in a universe much more 'provisional' than the pre-war world had been, put Beckett in possession of 'a work language', a language in which he could work. Between 'Suite et fin' and the second (October), third (October-November) and fourth (December) nouvelles, perhaps in recoil from the difficulties Beckett had experienced in his dealings with Simone de Beauvoir at Les Temps Modemes (Knowlson, 359-60), he worked from early July to early October on the novel Mercieret Gamier. s Beckett was at the beginning of what his authorized biographer, James Knowlson, characterizes as a seven-year 'frenzy of writing';9 but he was obviously in two minds as to how best to proceed. Mercier et Gamier - portions of which would not have seemed out of place in the Watt notebooks - offered Beckett the opportunity to refine an old manner, just when he had discovered a distinctively new way forward. Beckett was later to tell his bibliographer that' Mercier et Gamier . .. cannot have been earlier than the nouvelles'. The manuscript evi-

'Mercier et Gamier' and the 'nouvelles'

dence seems to show that in fact Merripr et Camifr was earlier than all but one of the nouvelles, and was finished before any of the nouvelles had undergone amendment and revision. It was within a week of beginning the novel, and with only the first chapter written, that Beckett wrote The Capital of the Ruins'. The conjunction is important because both the novel and the radio broadcast are as plain and 'unliterary' as anything that Beckett had thus far written. In 1932, struggling with Dream, Beckett had made a fiction in despite ofthe 'facts, facts, plenty offacts' to which he was indebted (Dream, 32). In the summer of 1946 a more factual, or a more matter-offact, approach could be adopted without any admixture of irony. Viewing Mercier pt Gamifrfrom the perspective of The Capital of the Ruins' makes something of a change from viewing it, as has almost always been done up to now, from the perspective of En attendant Codol, begun in late 1948.10 It remains true, however, that Mercier el Camier is insufficiently compelling in itself to warrant treatment separate from Beckett's other concerns. The novel was very probably conceived from the outset as more of a means to an end than an end in itself, even if he had hopes of publishing it at the time (Knowlson, 362). It at least enabled Beckett to get a narrative fiction going again, after the becalmed stasis of much of Watt. Mercier et Gamier testifies to Beckett's abiding interest in his recent fictional past (and to his need to get beyond it) in the sudden appearance of Watt towards the end, albeit a very different Watt from the figure who effectively dominates the novel which bears his name. But this curious strategy, rather than promoting the continuance of Mercier et Gamier, ironically proves something of a disaster, as if even a transmogrified Watt must be acknowledged a regressive move. This is also no doubt the best way of accounting for an otherwise almost inexplicable aspect of Mercier et Gamier, its dependence on Dante, arguably one of the most bizarre features of a bizarre book.)) As the Whoroscope notebook (kept during the composition of Murphy) unambiguously reveals, turning instinctively to Dante had been tried by Beckett more than ten years earlier. How far Beckett was conscious of the compound ironies of the situation we cannot know. But it may well have given him some satisfaction, after registering from the outset that Mercier et Gamier 'pue d'artifice', that the Dantesque elements therein could, by the time of completion, fulfil the requirements of the Whoroscope notebook by virtue of being kept 'out of sight'. 12

In the event it was Beckett's need to keep Mercier et Gamier 'out of sight', once Codol had, as it were, arrived, that conspired to leave the competing tensions between going on and going back something of a mystery even when the novel became belatedly available in 1970. It seems likely, however, that - for some months at least Beckett thought Mercier et Gamier worth the time and the trouble for what it told him about character and dialogue, issues left unresolved (and indeed scarcely raised) in Human Wishes, but in due course crucial to the creation of En attendant Codol. The exchanges in Human Wishes suffer from the fact that there is no obvious endpoint towards which they can contribute; no less damagingly, anything that might serve to characterize the dramatis personae seems in Human Wishes to have surrendered to the structures of language. Mercier et Gamier offered Beckett relieffrom English and its 'flower value', and at least a partial solution to the problem of focus. For even if the two figures central to the narrative can only engage in spasms of movemen t and recoil, they are for the most part presented as inseparable, and are therefore forced to acknowledge, even though each of them may exist as an independent entity, that they are under some obligation to co-operate. A 'pseudocouple' they may be,13 from the more stringent perspective of Beckett's later trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. But the resourceful manner in which they keep conversation going, and at the same time keep the plot at least notionally going somewhere, is perhaps not so easily gainsaid, especially when it can be seen as part and parcel of the shift toward 'relationship' found shortly before Mercierel Gamier in 'MacGreevy on Yeats' and 'The Capital of the Ruins'. It has not perhaps been sufficiently realized that when Beckett spoke of 'that most necessary of plagiarisms, plagiarism of oneself' (Pr, 53), he was not merely referring to the odd way in which his 'people' live from book to book, nor even to the creative monotony attendant upon being 'never much ofa one for new ground' (No's Knife, 142), but to the way in which even works withheld from public scrutiny could be primed to interact. The opening of Mercier et Camier seems almost perfectly designed to figure against the beginnings of Beckett's career in fiction. For whereas Assumption labours against the disadvantages inherent in 'He could have shouted and could not', Mercieret Gamier indicates

'Mercier et Gamier' and the 'nouvelles'

20 5

- and the grammatical mood is indicative, not su~jllnctive - that there is no need to shout, and nothing but the will of the T-figure to threaten the enterprise: Le voyage de Mercier et Camier, j(' suis avec eux tout Ie temps. (7) 14

PCIIX

rat'on ter

si je V(,IlX, pan'c que je

The very brevity of this opening contributes to the impression that, with Beckett in recoil from labouring away at complexities (with Watt not long finished), a business-like briskness is to be brought to bear. This seems further guaranteed by the fact that 'ce fut un voyage materiellement assez facile' (7) ('Physically it was fairly easy going' (7) 1:,), and indeed by the unusually declarative manner, as if the 'facts' of the matter were not in question. This situates Mercier et Gamier at a considerable remove from Watt, or at least from most of Watt, since there are actually some signs of this new manner in the earlier novel, ironically enough in the first few pages. The factual dimension of Mercier et Gamier is further confirmed by a tabular presentation of how the two voyagers take three-quarters of an hour to meet, given in something like the format of a railway timetable. But this is roundly condemned for its 'stink of artifice' (9), as if the very irruption of departure and arrival times into a narrative that has begun to get going were an offence against the 'voyage' and the impulse to recount it. The irony inherent in 'artifice' entering a context which has been characterized as 'fairly easy going', and which has certainly thus far maintained a generally benign aspect, is compounded a paragraph later by contrasting the voyagers with a pair of rutting dogs: Ils ne s'etaient pas embrassesjusqll'au bout et pourtant cela les genait de recommencer. Quant aux chiens, ils faisaient deja I'amour, avec un natural parfait. (10-1 1 ) (They had not finished in each other's arms and yet feIt awkward about resuming. The dogs for their pan were already copulating with the utmost naturalness.) (9)

The ironies multiply, however, when it is revealed in due course that 'the utmost naturalness' commits the dogs to remaining conjoined unless or until the rain permits them to separate. The neutral style, which seems so much in love with reportage that no space is left for interpretation, leaves the reader to recognize that 'resuming', coming together and separating, will, in a sense, be the whole story of the voyage of Mercier et Gamier. The resumes which

206

occur every third chapter, and which themselves 'stink of artifice', serve to express the same idea in a manner perfectly designed to disavow either art or 'naturalness'. At the same time the narrative's dependence on the desultory conversations of Mercier and Camier seems to restore, flexibility to a situation in danger of simply dying on its feet. Chapter 4 of Mercier et Gamier (III in the English translation) reanimates these issues in a context which recalls Watt to mind; a train compartment on 'the slow and easy' with the two 'heroes' on the receiving end of Mr Madden's preposterous life-story. The lifestory moves so swiftly from point to point that the underlying purpose in reciting these 'facts' proves impossible to retrieve; the 'voyage' of Mercier and Camier is not only not advantaged by this excursus, but left in a kind of permanent stop-go limbo. This is no doubt why they are removed from the limelight shortly thereafter, with the focus shifting to a burgeoning group of 'those liable to vanish and never reappear' , who are therefore deemed to be 'best limned at first sight' (50) (,II est des personnages dont il comient de parler des Ie debut .. .' (77». But Mercier et Gamier as a whole is devoted to the convenience of what can be 'limned at first sight'. The strategy supplies Beckett with material which vanishes never to reappear, facts from which all perspective has been removed. By concentrating his efforts on figures who seem (as Watt would say) not to 'invite mention', Beckett is undermining what little authority at the level of narrative interest his 'heroes' can legitimately claim. Without in any way emphasizing the fact, Beckett is preparing the ground for the moment later on when both Mercier and Camier (not to mention Watt and 'his sometime alter ego Quin 16) can be safely dispensed with, and a first-person narrator can at last be established as the being to whom things happen, or as the being who makes things happen, and who finds it sufficiently worthwhile - beyond the 'stink of artifice' - to 'tell' ('raconter') of them. The very limited ground on which Mercier and Camier can operate is reduced still further in chapter 5 (N in the English version) of the novel. The defining feature of the field that 'lay spread before them' (56) ('s'etendait devant eux' (87); the English translation contains just a hint of Adam and Eve at the end of Paradise Lost) is that it contains 'rien d'utile' ('nothing of use') either for human beings or animals. In what amounts to the

'Mercier et Camier' and the 'nouvelles'

207

novel's first (but by no means last) glimpse of a 'straggling expanse' stretching beyond the tried and trusted (but trivial) consolations of the town, the seeing eye of the narrative belongs neither to Mercier, nor Camier, but to the T who, as the first sentence of the novel informs us, is 'with them all the time'. But Mercier and Camier see nothing; even the sun is only 'une tache pale et sans chaleur' (90) or 'pale raw blotch' (57). Their concerns are exclusively with their possessions, whether with 'certain objects we cannot dispense with' (59) or with certain other objects (Camier's notebook, the coat that Mercier is 'sitting on my half of' (57» that will either now or later prove eminently disposable and easy to discard. These gestures of our hapless and helpless heroes are an ironic acknowledgement that there is 'rien d'utile' to be done with them, an acknowledgement reinforced by Camier's farewell to Monsieur Conaire, and by both Monsieur Gast and his maid-of-all-work Teresa being 'nowhere to be seen' (64). The farewell to Conaire is a farewell to conation (Latin conatus, the difficult effort of continuing the undertaking), which is why Camier sees his 'work' as over (64) and why he subsequently says farewell to , [t] oute une vie' (108) in abandoning the flotsam and jetsam left in the pockets of the raincoat. At what is structurally the mid-point of Mercier et Camier the two heroes suffer, apparently all unawares, the kind of death and damnation which makes nonsense of their belief in 'something essential to our salvation' (59). Chapter 5 (IV in the English translation) ends: Courage, dit Camier, c'est bientot la station des damnes. Je vois Ie clocher. C'est bien, dit Mercier. Nous allons pouvoir nous reposer. (110) (Cheer up, said Camier, we are coming to the station of the damned. I can see the steeple. God be praised, said Mercier, now we can get some rest.) (67)

Mercier and Camier are from this point on as superfluous to any significant narrative purpose as the belongings they have felt moved to leave behind. The point is dramatically made by separating them one from another, and entertaining the idea of '[a] new beginning, but with no life in it, how could there be?' (7 6 ) The 'new beginning' is not to be vouchsafed to either Mercier or Camier, who remain mired in an obsessive return to the quarters

208

of the prostitute Helen, and only 'voyage' towards or away from them, preparatory to returning. The crucial 'new beginning' in chapter 7 of Mercier et Camier comes at precisely the point where the chief protagonists thus far effectively cease to exist in narrative terms, because they can only exist it, deux. Camier's farewell to Conaire (64) anticipates the narrative's farewell - a temporary one, but anticipating the final farewell - to Mercier and Camier. Into the space thus cleared the T of the first sentence - though the narrative refuses to suspend its objectivity and neutrality inserts itself with a disquisition on life 'a la campagne' (128), the same country that offered 'rien d'utile' at the pivotal point at the beginning of chapter 5. This sudden burst of extremely emotional writing - the first 'voyage' in Mercier et Camier that seems to possess focus and perspective - spells a kind of doom for the protagonists in the long run, unfitted as they are for 'the horrors of soliloquy' (78). Mercier immediately becomes '[a] dim shape' (78), and Camier suffers from the fact that 'tout etait flou et enfume' (134) without him, so much so that, when Mercier reappears, Camier 'vit en face de lui un etre qu'il mit quelque temps a reconnaitre' (136). From this point on the 'pseudocouple' (as The Unnamable sees them) are to find that, whatever chapter 1 of this novel may say to the contrary, it is far from 'easy going'. Throughout chapter 8 they are at cross purposes and each is plainly irked by the presence of the other, whereas previously they have maintained a degree of good spirits and bonhomie in the face of adversity. All is unremittingly adverse in the final paragraph, and especially at the end of the final sentence, of chapter 8: ils etaient fatigues, ils avaient besoin de dormir, Ie vent les faisait chanceler et pour comble de desagrement, il pleuvait dans leurs tt~tes des coups insatiables. (161) (they were weary, in need of sleep, buffeted by the wind, while in their skulls, to crown their discomfiture, a pelting of insatiable blows.) (94)

After Beckett's reflex recourse to the resume, chapter 10 (VII in the English version) reverts for the third significant time to a 'passage descriptif' (167) which is also a 'voyage' of sorts. The very mention of 'Un chemin encore carrossable' (165) ('A road still carriageable' (97» serves as a reminder that, in spite of Mercier and Camier's inadequacies, journeys are still possible. Not surprisingly (and not for the first time), Mercier receives within a page or

'Mercier et Camier' and the 'nouvelles'

two the 'strange impression ... that we are not alone', sensing 'the presence of a third party' (100). The third party is on the point of usurping their narrative function altogether, which is why the two 'heroes' have become almost incapable of deciding what course to follow, and have declined into a state of decrepitude. By the end of this chapter they have become 'Decroches' (187) (,Unstuck' ( 10 7) ), and have almost surrendered the narrative space to the 'third party' who is reluctant to relinquish the objective 'third person' gaze. The penultimate chapter (the last, if we do not count the resu ml) reinforces the effect by opening in such a summary and decisive manner: 'Et voila.' ( IS8) (That's it.' (108». But Beckett's principal purpose in this chapter is to bring back Watt from the dead, even if Mercier and Camier are soon to disappear with him into the shadows. Very appropriately - though the irony of a ghost conveying this is perhaps what first makes an impact - it falls to Watt to predict what Beckett will attempt in narrative terms when, as soon, Mercier et Camierwill be done with: II naitra, il est ne de nous, dit Watt, celui qui n'ayant rien ne voudra rien, sinon qu'on lui laisse Ie rien qu'i! a. (198) (One shall be born, said Watt, one is born of us, who having nothing will wish for nothing, except to be left the nothing he hath.) (1 14)

It also falls to Watt to turn violent at Camier's memory of Madden, but Watt himself is buried in the 'vacarme' (204) ('hubbub' (liS» which ensues, out of which, in a 'hurlement etouffe' ('stifled roar'), comes an ironic health drunk on behalf of Watt's proto-existence as James Quin. The violence over, and the novel very nearly over, Camier decides that Quin 'must be someone who does not exist' (1Ig), but it is their own corporate failure to exist which most troubles our 'heroes' at this late juncture: Au fond, dit Camier, on s'est parle de tout sauf de nous. Nous avons mal travaille, dit Mercier,je ne dis pas Ie contraire. (206) (Looking back on it, said Camier, we heard ourselves speaking of everything but ourselves. We didn't bring it off, said Mercier, I grant you that.) (119)

What the narrative now, however, grants them both is a long elegiac reflection on their inability to attain selves that might speak of them. An unprecedented tenderness of tone - almost a natural

210

consequence of Beckett having maintained such a stringent neutrality for so long - is found in this prolonged coda. Beckett shows himself perfectly conscious that, unbeknownst to them, the cards have been stacked against Mercier and Camier from the outset, in suddenly softening towards nature, a strategy which in its way echoes the 'utmost naturalness' of the situation at the beginning of the novel: C'est donc la, dit Camier. La pluie tom bait sans bruit dans Ie canal. Mercier en etail chagrin. Mais bien au-dessus de I'horizon les nuages s'effrangeaient en longues effilochures lenues el noires, des cheveux de pleureuses. Elle a de ces attentions, la nature. (208) (So that's it, said Camier. The rain fell silently on the canal, to Mercier's no little chagrin. But high above the horizon the clouds were fraying out in long black strands, fine as weepers' tresses. Nature at her most thoughtful.) (120)

In the final tableau of Mercier et Camier the two 'heroes' are at their most thoughtful, too late for it to matter much, but just in time for it to matter a little, as they themselves have never previously done, or at least not enough for the narrative to have much profited thereby. Their last few exchanges lend them something of the life they could perhaps (and perhaps should) have laid claim to, but everything is pointing forward to their inevitable severance and demise. In its way the 'farewell' prepared for them is as 'memorable' as Murphy's and Neary's, and for that matter Belacqua's and the Smeraldina's in Dream. But with their farewell coming at the end - whereas in Dream and Murphy the farewells come at the beginning - there is an extra' poignancy, a poignancy registered in the quiet accents with which the whole enterprise is laid to rest: Bon,je m'en vais, dit-il [Camier]. Adieu, Mercier. Bonne nuit, dit Mercier. Seul it regarde son ciel s'eteindre, l'ombre se parfaire. L'horizon englouti, il ne Ie quitta pas des yeux, car il connaissait ses sursauts, par experience. Dans Ie noir il entendait mieux aussi, il entendait des bruits que Ie long jour lui avait caches, des murmures humains, par exemple, et la pluie sur l' eau. (2] 0) (Well, he [Camier] said, I must go. Farewell, Mercier. Sleep sound, said Mercier. Alone he watched the sky go out, dark deepen to its full. He kept his

'Mercier et Gamier' and the 'nouvelles'

211

eyes on the engulfed horizon, for he knew from experience what last throes it was capable of. And in the dark he ('ould hear belter too, he could hear the sounds the long day had kepI from him, human murmurs for example, and the rain on the water. (122)

These 'last throes' of Merrier et Camier resemble the end of Eliot's 'The Love Song of]. Alfred Prufrock', where 'human voices wake us, and we drown'. But even with the dark deepened to its full, Beckett gestures hopefully towards the 'human murmurs' which have been kept from Mercier by the 'third party', and the third person, for so long. Lurking among the sounds heard in this last sentence of the novel - though only hindsight permits us to know it - is the voice of the one who, having nothing, will wish for nothing, except to be left the 'nothing he hath'. P. J. Murphy has been one of the very few Beckett critics to see that Mercier et Camiersuffers from what the Denis Devlin review calls' the need that in its haste to be abolished cannot pause to be stated'P For a book so full of statement, indeed, Mercier et Camier seems oddly insubstantial, as if the 'haste to be abolished' had here been more important than 'the predicament of particular human identity' (Dis, 91). Mercier et Gamier was certainly written very quickly, with Beckett no doubt mindful ofjust how long Watt had ensnared him in its toils. But the nouvelles which followed it, like the novels which followed them, were also written at great speed, from which it is possible to deduce that Beckett needed to work in as extempore a fashion as he could - in a manner more resembling that of Dream, say, than that of Murphy - to feel at all comfortable with what he had done. What he had called in Proust 'the labours of poetical excavation' had - after Murphy, Human Wishes and Watt - perhaps understandably lost some of the gloss which Beckett had once been pleased to find in them. Mercier et Camier must have been a reminder to Beckett that he needed to labour less, but achieve more. It undoubtedly prompted Beckett to reflect ruefully on the futility of 'speaking of everything but ourselves' even if it had - if only by default - brought him closer to the kind of fiction that would admit 'the incomprehensibility of the real' and the 'liminal consciousness' of which he had spoken in his lectures at Trinity fifteen years earlier. The situation which confron ted Beckett as Mercier et Gamier gave way to the nouvelles had been anticipated in the pseudonymous

212

book review 'Recent Irish Poetry' published in The Bookman in August 1934: The poem of poems would embrace the sense of confinement, the getaway, the vicissitudes of the road, the wan bliss on the rim. But a large degree offreedom may enter-into the montage of these components, and it is very often in virtue of this, when the tics of mere form are in abeyance, that attributions are to be made. (Dis, 71)

Mercier et Camier, even with 'the tics of mere form ... in abeyance'

for much of the time, had not granted Beckett the 'large degree of freedom' which its 'montage' was designed to generate. The 'poem of poems', or fiction of fictions, would have to wait for this degree of freedom until the 'trilogy'; but the nouvelles very significantly enlarged upon what was no longer 'the statement of a compromise', but rather (as Dream had imagined it) 'a statement of itself. The nouvelles were the first Beckett works to offer him the 'Douceurs' consequent upon generating 'facts in the fact of my mind' (Dream, 182), without undue preference being shown either to 'facts' or 'mind'. To his Trinity students Beckett had spoken of the 'absurdity of getting to know yourself from an artistic point of view at the risk of finding yourself', yet he had insisted that art should be 'the progressive discovery of the real'. The nouvelles were above all a matter of 'progressive discovery', of the real, of the self, and of the self as real. The subject-matter of the nouvelles is almost perfectly summed up in 'Recent Irish Poetry', which Beckett may conceivably have recalled to mind on writing (in French, and beginning with Mercier et Camier) stories dependent on his memories of Ireland from his childhood, youth and young manhood: the sense of confinement, the getaway, the vicissitudes of the road, the wan bliss on the rim.

Each one of the four nouvelles concerns itself with at least one of these 'components', 'getaway' and 'confinement' being most prominent in The End and The Expelled (and figuratively present in First Love), 'vicissitudes' and 'wan bliss' being most prominent in the last of the four stories, The Calmative. As 'Recent Irish Poetry' seems almost to predict, 'the tics of mere form' are in abeyance throughout, so much so that material which appears in one nouvelle could very easily have figured almost as aptly in another, although The Calmative depends for its success on such fine grada-

'Mercier et Camier' and the 'nouvelles'

21 3

tions of form that it effectively insists upon it" separation from the others. In freeing himself of the fetters of 'mere form', however, Beckett here begins to realize, and actually realizes, the benefits which accrue from allowing form to emerge from the material, rather than imposing form from the outside in advance. The great liberation of the nOUl1elles is that they discover their itinerary, as it were, on the spot. The beginning of what is more a cluster than a sequence is, paradoxically, The End (La Fin). This is by some distance the longest of the nouvelles, and perhaps the one in which Beckett is most obviously putting one foot in front of another without any very clear sense of the ground to be covered. The End was begun, as it openly acknowledges in getting under way, 'to get me started'. The difficulty in getting started is, The End suggests, a direct consequence of inheriting old clothes - 'shoes, socks, trousers, shirt, coat, hat' - from 'the deceased' ,18 Yet the fact that there has been a death is what enables the T to find some kind of life for itself. Removed first from his bed, then from the house in which he has lived, and at last from the 'shelter in the cloister' in which a Mr Weir 19 has permitted him to wait, the 'I' is under duress from imperatives imposed from without. Yet at the point where another employee decides he must move on, the narrative makes a sudden leap forward, as if it were - miraculously - free to move at last. You must not loiter in the cloister now the rain is over. Now I was making my way through the garden. (46)

In both Murphy and Watt there are moments like this in which a kind of narrative ellipsis occurs; but the narrative stance in the novels makes them seem at best 'forced moves' (Dream, 43), at worst artificial interventions. In The End a more quietist spirit prevails, both here and again at the next paragraph break: I never turned back on such occasions. In the street I was lost ... I did not know where I was supposed to be going. (46)

It quickly becomes apparent that 'going' is a more important matter than knowing where one is going to, even though the protagonist manifests an understandable reluctance to relinquish the memory of past refuges. '1 longed to be under cover again, in an empty place, close and warm' (48), he tells us; but nostalgia is not what it used to be:

It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.

The temporary lodgings which the 'J' subsequently does acquire show in the very sequence in which they occur - a basement, a stable, a cave and a cabin 20 in the mountains - that it is only by disimproving his lot that the protagonist can hope to make progress. At the same time his narrative procedures are themselves disimproved by his reliance on structures which are not really structural (,One day' this, 'One day' that) and which cannot bear any great weight being placed upon them. Up to and including the point at which 'Suite' ends (as first published in Les Temps Modernes) there is in fact almost no way of knowing how this story will ever come to an end, even though the protagonist is granted a few blessings in disguise (a child singing (SO-I); a brush (52); 'the quiet, dustwhite inland roads' (S4); a knife (S6); and some free milk (S6-7». On a first reading, indeed, it seems as though the 'I's return to the suburbs, and from there 'to the old haunts' (S7-8), has repeated the familiar Beckettian structure - found in works as diverse as the story 'Ding-Dong' and the poem 'Sanies I' - of out and back, without any decisive change of direction having occurred. So, at least, it must have seemed to Simone de Beauvoir, with the reversion to 'the old haunts' offering the hint of a circular structure after so much that had seemed merely linear. For Beckett, however, separating 'Suite' from 'Fin' was tantamount to terminating a life before it had even begun to live. Emphasizing that 'Suite' was 'no more than a major premise' (making no sense without the rest of the syllogism), Beckett accused Simone de Beauvoir of having left his protagonist without the opportunity to resolve matters one way or the other. 'Vous immobilisez', he told her, 'une existence au seuil de sa solution'; 'you have fixed an existence on the threshold of its solution'. The words immobilisez and solution were carefully chosen, even though Simone de Beauvoir could not possibly have registered the play of meanings that mattered to Beckett. For him solution was unavoidably bound up with what Dream calls 'a solution of continuity', a resolution without prejudice to beginning again; and immobiliser meant not simply stopping or stalling but also 'converting property into real estate'. Separating 'Suite' from 'Fin' left the first half of The End uncomfortably situated still in the 'real estate' of fiction from

'Mercier et Camier' and the 'nouvelles'

21 5

which Beckett was hoping to liberate himself and his protagonist. Only with 'Fin' attached could it be clear that the most significant 'event' in the story was the last of all, in which the']' is 'scattered to the uttermost confines of space' and yet miraculously survives to regret the fact that he has failed to tell 'a story in the likeness of my life'. In the last two long paragraphs of The End the narrator occupies three new haunts designed as a counterweight to the three 'old haunts' he has occupied earlier. The first is a street corner from which he begs; 'generally speaking it was a quiet corner' (62). The second is a 'shed ... on a private estate ... on the riverside' (62), the description of which is intended to demonstrate how the 'real estate' of realistic writing dries up and dies on its feet. The third, and the most important of the three, is a boat, which becomes a liberating agent by virtue of removing the protagonist from land altogether: I heard the lapping of water against the slip and against the bank and the other sound, so different, of open wave, I heard it too. I too, when I moved,2J felt less boat than wave, or so it seemed to me, and my stillness was the stillness of eddies. That may seem impossible. (64)

It is the business of the coda of The End to make possible 'the stillness of eddies'. Not surprisingly, 'the next thing I was having visions, I who never did' (65); but no less importantly a series of new attachments to reality supervenes ('I noticed that my hat was tied, with a string I suppose, to my buttonhole' (66». In the last throes of The End it is the determinants of the real which enable the protagonist to find his 'solution': The sea, the sky, the mountains and the islands closed in and crushed me in a mighty systole, then scattered to the uttermost confines of space. The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on. (67)

The End leaves this outcome indeterminately dependent upon both the 'real estate' of nature and the 'calmative' which the protagonist has swallowed immediately previous to this moment. There are, in any event, few comforts to be found in a space reminiscent of Pascal's famous fear in the face of infinity. At the same time, it seems as if the story 'in the likeness of my life' which might have been told - a projection as much as a memory - can supply

the speaker with the courage to end this story, and the strength to go on to another, The Expelled.

The Expelled revisits the 'old haunts' of The End both literally and figuratively. Very few of the events and details that give The Expelled a substantial presence are not anticipated by, or actually present in, The End. Indeed, The Expelled pays a kind of backhanded compliment to The End by effectively supplying it with the 'beginning' which it lacks. In The Expelled the ambience is exclusively urban and/ or suburban, the protagonist believes himself to be 'in the prime of life' (he even at one point prides himself on possessing 'my own free will'), and the relationships between figures and plot motifs enjoy a degree of reciprocity ('That makes sense, cabman, hotel, it's plausible' (22». The Expelled is, indeed, at one level a kind of exercise in relatively comfortable, relatively plausible, exchanges and substitutions. This is no doubt why there are no distinctive 'last throes' at the end of The Expelled, The End having already provided them: I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are. (24)

One naturally infers from this that, far from being 'a story in the likeness of my life' as 'defined' in The End, The Expelled is rather a story in the likeness of another story (notably The End:), or even in the likeness of any other story pleased to concern itself only with 'living souls'.22 Not being The End, however, The Expelled situates itself in a Dream-like 'fair to middling' ~pace, which proves, as before, unusually sympathetic to the production of narrative matter. Though this is counterproductive to the expressed aim of writing 'a story in the likeness of my life', it actually proves unexpectedly beneficial from the point of view of narrative freedom. Whilst the motifs of 'setting off and 'advancing' are very prominent early in The Expelled, the story subsequently achieves a kind of equipoise by situating the protagonist in a cab ferrying him from place to place without him having to lift a finger on his own behalf. Locked into this delimited space (and later into a stable with only a window to leave by), as indeed The Expelled as a story is locked into its own delimited space, thoughts and impressions flow freely, with none of the sudden spasms and eddies that are such a

'Mercier et Camier' and the 'nouvelles'

21

7

hallmark of The End. A new kind of will-Iessness is at work in The Expelled, as is signalled by the protagonist admitting from the outset that 'the figure [of how many steps there were] has gone from my mind' (9), and as is confirmed by his cavalier attitude to describing objects ('How describe this hat? And why?' (11)). From the perspective of the last of the nouvelles, The Calmative, this may seem little enough to have achieved, or perhaps the little that can only be achieved with 'living souls'. But without this intennediate stage, in which almost every sentence comes to seem intermediate between the fixed and the free axes of narrative, The Calmative would surely have been deferred for much longer than the few weeks which elapsed between the two stories. The protagonist of The ~xpelled admits at the story's point of closure that he 'would have liked a sea horizon or a desert one' (24), rather than situations such as obtain between himself and the cabman ('We did our best, both of us, to understand, to explain' (20». But there is no boat or beast of burden (other than the horse which, unharnessed, seems lodged in an insomniac trance) for this protagonist to travel by; he must make do with his legs, and they explicitly involve him invariably in 'a loss of equilibrium, followed by a fall' (13). The Expelled, which begins with a fall (qualified as 'not serious' (10)), is an exploration of what happens fictionally when equilibrium has either been lost or proves unattainable. There is throughout the story a fascination with states of mind or of body that lend themselves to the restoration of a kind of balance; but the difficulty of establishing any kind of economy, at the level of fact or at the level of fiction, remains. As The Expelled puts it, in a typically casual but curiously judgemental observation, 'we may reason on to our heart's content, the fog won't lift' (14). The third of the nouvelles, First Love, is an attempt to get the fog to lift by way of reasoning on the one - said to be the first, but implicitly the last - alliance which might bring the heart contentment, even though the heart's discontent is ultimately dominant. First Love begins with a narrative alliance by association, a kind of imaginative liaison for fictional purposes: I associate, rightly or wrongly, my marriage with the death of my father, in time. That other links, on other levels, exist between these two affairs, is not impossible. (FL,7)

218

Other links on other levels certainly obtain between First Love and the two previous nouvelles, since the very issue of what is 'in time' is turned topsy-turvy by the order of composition. The movement of these first three nouvelles is from an 'end' to a 'middle' to a 'first' and in due course to 'I don't know when I died' at the opening of The Calmative, the first nouvelle to progress beyond the domain of 'living souls' of a certain 'likeness'. First Love proceeds, initially at least, by associating like with like, or by moving within trajectories that are delimited: I set out [for 'my father's grave'] in the morning and was back by night, having lunched lightly in the graveyard. But some days later, wishing to know his age at death, I had to return to the grave, to note the date of his birth. These two limiting dates I then jotted down on a piece of paper ... (FL,7-8)

The jotting down of these limiting dates 'in time', but only in reported time, prepares the way for the protagonist to record ('while there is yet time') his own limited epitaph, of which '[t]he second and last or rather latter line limps a little perhaps' (FL, 1 0-1 I), in his own estimation. But this is only one of the' other links on other levels' which First Love either explicitly or implicitly endorses. 23 In the wake of this epitaph comes - after an excursus on a 'favourite' graveyard, Ohlsdorf24 (FL, 12) - a section of narrative which deliberately echoes, and rounds out, narrative moments already familiar from the two previous nouvelles. This excursus is offered, like the deferred introduction of the figure to whom the protagonist is to be united, as part of his professed intention 'to pass on [I] to less melancholy matters' (FL, 13), even if matters in fact persist in a predominantly melancholy mode. But in passing on in this way First Love begins to disclose its dissociative tendencies. The narrator has already indicated that 'when my father's remains join in [with the smells of others] , however modestly, I can almost shed a tear' (FL, 9); when Lulu - 'the name of the woman with whom I was soon to be united' (FL, 19) - suddenly appears in the narrative, the protagonist's attempts to Join in' are ominously frustrated: All she had done was sing, beneath her breath, as to herself, and without the words fortunately, some old folk songs, and so disjointedly, skipping from one to another and finishing none, that even I found it strange. (FL,21)

'Mercier et Camier' and the 'nouvelles'

'Even I' might here as well be 'especially 1', given this figure's concern for 'limiting dates', limp jottings and links that soften the harsh facts of otherness. But Lulu, not to mention her songs, reeks of otherness and disturbance (,You disturb me, I said, I can't stretch out [on the bench, on the bank of the canal] with you there' (FL, 22)). 'The mistake one makes', he ruefully reflect'!, 'is to speak to people'; but lurking within this is the darker imputation that the mistake one makes is to speak of people ('Ah people', as The End puts it), a mistake only to be put decisively right in The Calmative. First Love proceeds from this to expose the protagonist's associative propensities as themselves something of a mistake: her image remains bound, for me, to that of the bench, not the bench by day, nor yet the bench by night, but the bench at evening, in such sort that to speak of the bench at evening, is to speak of her, for me. (FL,

24-5) The emphasis on 'for me' reflects the narrator's need to disavow the differentials between the bench and Lulu, and may also be intended to mimic, and hence call in question, the 'talking cure' of psychoanalysis,25 since in this situation there is no cure to be had. Encountering otherness, in whatever form it may present itself, this figure 'go[es] all syncretist', all out for 'equilibrium', all in awe of 'my system' and the promise of 'distinguishing between the different kinds' of ailment or displeasure that flesh is heir to (FL, 26-8). Of all the 'strange pains' he suffers (FL, 28), however, none is stranger than the pain of love which he would like 'to put a label on' (FL, 31), though no label proves forthcoming (' ... what kind oflove was this, exactly?' (FL,32). The irony of the situation at this point in First Love is that the 'I' has the very remedy for his plight in his own hands, but chooses to look elsewhere for solace and solutions: I see no connexion between these remarks. But that one exists, and even more than one, I have little doubt, for my part. But what? Which? (FL,

31) The very 'connexions' which the narrative is generating, a series culminating in the 'connexion' which gives Lulu (by then Anna) a child by an almost immaculate conception, are inimical to the protagonist's likelihood of achieving equilibrium and peace of mind. The eruption of the otherness of the other creates a gulf

220

which cannot be wholly acknowledged, but which by the same token cannot be wholly denied: ... I have always spoken, no doubt always shall, of things that never existed, or that existed if you insist, no doubt always will, but not with the existence I ascribe to them. (FL, 33-4)

The ascription of existence to 'things' in First Love is hobbled by the protagonist's bedevilling concern for kinds and for some sort of system with which to interpret them. A similarly futile concern is to be found in the 'kinds of things still' which surface as a constant in From an Abandoned Work, but which seem to contribute to the abandonment of that work. Once again, in the developing drama of the nouvelles, The Calmative, drifting freely beyond these nets, is to be seen as curative because it does not seek, or even believe in, 'connexion'. First Love repeatedly reveals its protagonist's inability to achieve disconnection. Anna's Mignon-like song of 'lemon trees, or orange trees' (FL, 39) acts as a trigger to bring the narrator back again and again to the bench on the bank of the canal, even though it is profoundly ambiguous and' ... ambiguity I found difficult to bear, at that period' (FL, 42). And once they are ensconced a deux in 'two rooms, separated by a kitchen' (FL, 44-5)' the 'density of furniture' (it 'defeats imagination') proves intolerable (FL, 46). It is not density, but rather fluidity, that the 'I' requires: 'the slow descents', 'the long submersions' (FL, 51). What he experiences, however, are the descents and submersions of a 'night of love' (FL, 53) in which he has not even actively participated. The long final paragraph of First Love presents the protagonist barricaded into his room, still seeking to 'Clear ... up' the 'paltry perplexities' (FL, 55) into which his real 'first' love, himself, has led him, in a less cerebral (but still rational) version of Murphy's 'intellectual love' (Mu, 76) by which he loved himself: It took me a long time, my lifetime so to speak, to realize that the colour of an eye half seen, or the source of some distant sound, are closer to Giudecca in the hell of knowing than the existence of God, or the origins of protoplasm, or the existence of self ... (FL, 55)

The implication is that it takes a lifetime to free oneself of 'the existence of self and so fight free of self-love. This is confirmed by the last two sentences of First Love, but without the narrator drawing any consequences from what he says:

'Mercier et Camier' and the 'nouvelles'

221

I could have done with other loves perhaps. But there it is, either you love or you don't. (FL,62)

The same clear-cut 'distinguishing' as before is negatively operative here, even when the cries of the child, like the song sung by his mother, are received by the protagonist, who has been playing with them ('if that may be called playing'), as growing 'a little fainter each time' (FLo (2) .2l) Almost the only growth in knowledge and self-knowledge to which this figure can lay claim lies wedged between the cries and the 'other loves perhaps', themselves a reminder of the 'other links ... on other levels' (fL, 7); and there is no evidence that the narrator understands the degree to which the cries' continuance might be construed as at once necessary, and in some ways benign: For years I thought they would cease. :\low I don't think so any more. (l'L, 62)

The very title of The Calmative is a registration ofthe curative properties which the story brings to the troubled world of the first three nouvelles: 27 it is something of a definition rather than a mere description of the work's content. The story is obviously to some degree conceived of as occurring after the boat incident in The End, during which 'I swallowed my calmative' (67). It is also, in time terms (if time terms can actually be applied here), after The End in its opening acknowledgement that this voice comes from beyond the grave: 'I don't know when I died' (25). This simple declarative statement, in its way a 'natural' development of the final tableau of The End, may very possibly have been influenced by the famous opening of Camus's L'Etranger ('Mother died yesterday'), which from Beckett's correspondence we know to have been in his mind at the time of composition of The End. 28 But beyond the opening sentence of The Calmative the story is anything but simple and declarative, and in no way does the style resemble Camus's. Almost from the outset, indeed, Beckett writes in a manner which seems to belie the 'calmative' of the title, and understandably so when the narrator decides to 'try and tell myself another story, to try and calm myself .. .' (25). The story subsequently told consists of one short and one very long paragraph (the latter a strategy first adopted in The End), with the short paragraph something of a footnote to its equally short predecessor,

222

both paragraphs being a kind of 'warm-up' for the task to come. Even here, however, one feels the difference between 'I swallowed my calmative', an activity which makes the protagonist of The End seem something of a passive victim, and a situation in which the narrator is effectively saying 'I must find a calmative.' What follows is, from the point of view of a conventional rational narrative perspective, no less turbulent than what has preceded it in the two prefatory paragraphs. But the whole point of The Calmative is to occupy the narrative space available (or for as long as possible) without any of the customary mainstays of fictionmaking. The 'story' that the narrator tells himself, which for us is not a story at all, is from here on 'calmative' for him in inverse proportion to the amount of perplexity it generates in us. In disrupting narrative procedures with such obvious relish, the speaker of The Calmative - who seems so much more like a speaker than a writer (whereas in the earlier nouvelles the opposite obtains) - is seeking to diminish any residual nostalgia we may have for a wellcrafted, easily appropriated narrative. The kind of freedom upon which The Calmative depends is indicated early on by the speaker saying: The paths of other days were rank with tangled growth ... Of my last passage no trace remained. (26)

What The Calmative shows is that there are 'traces' which occur only to be replaced by other traces, that none of them can be said to 'remain', and that it is the 'passage' from one to the next which matters. The Calmative is the first Beckett text to realize the Beckettian ambition signalled (under co¥er of a discussion of Joyce's Work in Progress) in Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce: 'Here form is content, content is form.' The turbulence of The Calmative makes each item caught in its flux assume a kind of equivalence, as if in spite of competing and divergent forces there was an overarching equilibrium. From the perspective of conventional narrative, 'nothing happens', not just twice (as in Codol) but thousands of times. The total effect is paradoxically, in spite of the vortex created, one of stillness; indeed, the best description of The Calmative is to be found at the end of The End: I too, when I moved, felt less boat than wave, or so it seemed to me, and my stillness was the stillness of eddies. (64)

'Mercier et Camier' and the 'nouvelles'

223

Given Beckett's long-standing interest in the discoveries of modern science, it may not be wholly beside the point to suggest that quantum physics, subsuming wave-theory and particle-theory in 'wavicles', may have had something to do with why The Calmative is as it is. The Calmative is certainly Beckett at his least dualist in the period of apprenticeship leading up to the 'trilogy'. It is a way of actively demonstrating that the projection of Dream - 'At his simplest he was trine' - can be realized, and without having to explain the aesthetics involved. The Calmative, though extremely complex for the reader to process, moved Beckett - it was the only nouvelle he felt moved to translate without a collaborator for No's Knifeprincipally because it seemed to him to be a matter of simplicity. Movement is built into the very fabric of The Calmative as a natural corollary of its protagonist's gravitation towards myth, fable and metamorphosis: this evening I need another age, that age to become another age in which I became what I was. (26)

The narrator's expressed wish is for his body to 'vanish in the havoc of its images' (27),29 and every situation which seems to threaten stasis is viewed with the possibility of inducing change in it: the quays were deserted and there was no sign or stir of arrival or departure. But all might change from one moment to the next and be transformed like magic before my eyes. (29)

The overriding concern of the speaker is with moving on, and becoming a kind of Crusoe-like castaway. Twice - once in perceiving 'haven afar' in a flagstone (30), and then again after an encounter with a ragged barefoot 'guttersnipe' - the protagonist says to himself 'I'll never come back here' (30, 32). But the momentum generated in The Calmative is inevitably of a particularly active kind, given that there can be no sea journey (the vanishing point of The End) and no help forthcoming - in spite of the biblical reassurance to the contrary (30) - from the sky. The Calmative, with its flagstone and its guttersnipe, is orientated earthwards, with the myth of Antaeus (who derived his strength from contact with the earth) underpinning the whole proceedings, and the journey of Dante explicitly invoked in references to 'the mouth of hell' (31 ).30 So successful are the protagonist's earthbound transactions with the obstacles he encounters that he is

224 granted a glimpse of 'a great cylinder sweeping past as though on rollers on the asphalt' (32), and in due course also of a cyclist 'pedalling slowly in the middle of the street, reading a newspaper' (36 ). Even in the enclosure at the top of the spiral staircase in the cathedral- which the speaker climbs 'at top speed' (33) - the emphasis falls on the mechanics of motion: Flattening myself against the wall I started round, clockwise. But I had hardly gone a few steps when I met a man revolving in the other direction, with the utmost circumspection. (33)

The real-life inspiration for this scene was almost certainly Beckett's ascent ('in fear and trembling') of the tower of the Andreaskirche in Braunschweig in December 1936.31 But the situation envisaged is fictional and dynamic: a man in motion encountering an alter ego proceeding in the opposite direction. As the first reference to myth in The Calmative indicated, one goes backwards in order to go forwards and, as the subsequent narrative shows, one goes forward in order to go backwards. The speaker is wearing a long green greatcoat 'such as motorists wore about 1900, my father's' (29), and sees the guttersnipe as 'a little unfortunate at the mouth of life' (31). At the same time he recurrently surprises himself by his ability (in spite of the pains in his legs) to move 'at a very fair pace' and 'without slowing down, for 1 was afraid if I stopped of not being able to start again' (35). Whatever fears may haunt the narrator of The Calmative, there are signs throughout that significant benefits are accruing as the narrative develops. Looking at the horizon he sees' [a place] where sky, sea, plain and mountain meet' (~4)' but even when he is' [black in the street' he realizes that: I wasn't returning empty-handed, not quite, I was taking back with me the virtual certainty that I was still of this world, of that world too, in a way. (34)

It is by virtue of this unprecedented fluidity of being that the speaker can subsequently record that' [i] t is not my wish to labour these antinomies' (35). Beckett's use of the word 'antinomies' almost certainly derives from his reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason,32 but the refusal to 'labour' them is an indication of how far ('far' is a recurrent motifin The Calmative) he has travelled into the realms of the irrational, the very refusal to distinguish between one domain and another being here a sign of health ('I had no

'Mercier et Camier' and the 'nouvelles'

225

pain whatever, not even in my legs' (36». The unusually positive indications in The Calmative culminate in an observation placed after two curious encounters - in the first of which 'I might as well not have existed', in the second of which non-existence becomes an antidote to telling 'the story of your life' (37) -when once again events are shown to be more fluid than pure reason would allow: Between the caressing voice and the fingers rowelling my neck the contrast was striking. But gradually the two things merged in a devastating hope, if I dare say so, and I dare. (39)

The Calmativp is the product of Beckett daring to believe in this 'devastating hope', and acting upon it with at least some conviction that it will bear fruit: this evening I have nothing to lose that I can discern. And if I have reached this point (in my story) without anything having changed, for if anything had changed I think I'd know, the fact remains I have reached it, and that's something, and with nothing changed, and that's something too. (39)

'What was changed', we read in Watt, 'was existence off the ladder' ( W, 42). Here there is no existence off the ladder for the very good reason that there is no ladder, no linked and limited system ofhierarc hies, from which to exile oneself, no antinomies to labour. The Calmative is like the house of Mr Knott in Watt in which 'nothing changed ... because all was a coming and a going' (w, 130), but with the difference that the 'nothing changed' has now been seen from within, and shown to be a much more complex matter of 'nothing to lose'. The conclusion of The Calmative is a study in contrastive forces acquiring equilibrium. A story that has begun after death ends with indices of vigour regained. A rejection of dreaming ('dream is nothing' (40» is balanced by a renewed sense of reality ('reality, too tired to look for the right word, was restored' (42». Key figures from the stories that the narrator has been told - the 'Pauline' of the man with a 'kind of' life (41), the lighthousekeeper's son joe Breem, or Breen' (42) - surface for a second, but prove elusive, like the light on the French coast in Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach' which 'gleamed an instant and was gone' in Beckett's almost verbatim quotation from the poem (41). Such instances are correlative with the protagonist's 'mind panting after this and that and always flung back to where there was nothing'

(4 1 ), with the words 'flung back' a more oblique echo of the pebbles in 'Dover Beach'. But a calmative mood prevails, as reflected in the protagonist's ability to maintain consciousness in the face of convulsions of all kinds: bright flowers fading as squares and rectangles gradually blossom, a sudden throng materializing and falling away. 'It was well with me', observes the narrator, 'sated with dark and calm, lying at the feet of mortals' (42); the need registered at the beginning of the story ('to calm myself') has itself proved evanescent: I had no need to raise my head from the ground to know I was back in the same blinding void as before. (42)

The speaker has here succeeded in becoming the 'one ... who, having nothing, will wish for nothing, except to be left the nothing he hath' as envisaged in Mercier et Camier. I said, Stay where you are, down on the friendly stone, or at least indifferent, don't open your eyes, wait for morning. (42)

Like everything else in The Calmative, however, this pause and this lapse into inertia prove evanescent, to be replaced by an onward and upward movement, as if the torpor of death were simply the prelude to continuing life: But up with me again and back on the way that was not mine, on uphill along the boulevard. A blessing he was not waiting for me, poor old Breem, or Breen. I said, The sea is east, it's west I must go, to the left of north. But in vain I raised without hope my eyes to the sky to look for the Bears. For the light I steeped in put out the stars, assuming they were there, which I doubted, remembering the clouds. (42)

This conclusion differs absolutely from 'the 'faint and cold' memory at the end of The End, and from the blunt, clipped judgements that close The Expelled and First Love. Here a 'blessing' is received, or bestowed, it hardly seems to matter which, since there are no more antinomies to be laboured. A cluster of associationsgoing west from the end of Joyce's 'The Dead', looking upward from the end of Dante's Paradiso (XXXIII) - loom, only for Beckett to insist on his own journey and his own 'uphill' struggle, with no star to steer by.33 This is the first time Beckett has been able to accept, and to give expression to, an idea formulated very early, as early as the 'last word' in Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce: 'neither prize nor penalty; simply a series of stimulants to enable the kitten

'Mercier et Camier' and the 'nouvelles'

to catch its tail' (Dis, 33). One may legitimately feel that in the conclusion to The Calmative the kitten has at last caught its own tail, even if the voice insists on 'the way that was not mine' as the complement to 'up with me again'. The outcome is comparable with the 'saying again' which was such a benefit in the poem 'Cascando', and with the repetitions which occur at the end of section III of Eliot's East Coker (1940): In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not. 34

The Calmative left Beckett 'without hope' and loath to arrive anywhere, without possessions, without knowledge, and in what Malone Dies identifies as 'a kind of leaden light'. 35 But it had liberated impulses and strategies which previously coiled round themselves in ways that made it difficult to go on. With The Calmative begun shortly before Christmas 1946 and presumably completed quite quickly, Beckett could tell a correspondent that he would probably not be writing much in English again,36 and in the spring of 1947 begin Molloy. It seems clear that the nouvelles had a profound effect on what was to come even if - characteristically Beckett later thought them 'uninteresting'. 37

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Conclusion

Now I didn't know where I was.

Beckett, The End1

By the end of 1946, already in his forty-first year, Beckett was almost as far from, '[g]etting known'2 as he had been at any time during the previous seventeen years. All his work in book form was either out of print - Murphy, More Pricks Than Kicks, Proustor had only ever been available in very small limited editions. Everything else Beckett had published, in magazines in London, Dublin, Paris and elsewhere, he had either already discounted and jettisoned, or had come to see as mere juvenilia. There was a growing amount of what Beckett would later call 'trunk material',3 but little likelihood of any of it ever seeing the light of day. He had written a radio talk, which had not been broadcast. He was marooned. with an Irish passport, in a foreign country; he had made the extraordinary decision to write exclusively in French. He was about to spend something like four years holed up 'in the room', doing the only thing that really mattered to him - writing - knowing that this was not so much what he wanted to do as what he could not help but do, whatever pain this commitment cost him, before, during and afterwards. It is not surprising that, in the second of the dialogues with Georges Duthuit, Beckett was moved to '[e]xit weeping', and at the end of the third to say - ironically, but wearily - 'Yes, yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken' (Dis, 142, 145). He was at or about the point of sinking sufficiently low in his own estimation to take on an 'alimentary chore'4 (for which, in the event, he was not to be paid): the translations for the Anthology of Mexican Poetry, which he was subsequently to describe as 'without doubt I think my worst literary experience' .5 Beckett must at this point, and no doubt for several years before 228

Conclusion

229

this point, have ruefully reflected that he possessed a temperament of thoroughgoing scepticism which was, to adopt the description of Murphy's first move in his chess game with Mr Endon, 'the primary cause of all [his] subsequent difficulties' (Mu, 167). Although 'the years oflearning' (CP, 7) at Trinity had left Beckett with an exceptional amount of learned lumber which he found it difficult to slough off, outside the groves of academe he acquired yet more of the same material to keep his scepticism alive. Even in the absence of anything new to consume, Beckett's sceptical and disruptive intelligence could always feed on itself, as had been very clearly shown as early as Dream of Fair to Middling Women. This meant that, after a youthful enthusiasm for Descartes, Beckett could maintain a kind of Cartesian discipline of doubt, without owing any long-term allegiance to Descartes, or to anyone else. The difficulty, however, was to find a strategy whereby scepticism did not merely collapse in upon itself, and could actually become the servant of some more constructive purpose. A solution of a sort offered itself in Murphy: 'architectonics' of a more conventional nature could be brought in to contain the volatile collision of one element with another. 'One can always organize a collision', Beckett had told himself in Dream (Dream, 1 17), and Murphy would demonstrate, as nothing else previous to it could, that this was indeed the case. In ways that must have both pleased and irked Beckett, Murphy solved the problem of scepticism only to reanimate it in another guise. As a novel of ideas it had failed to address the idea that (given its 'architectonics') it could not contain: how to be free, and how to write as a free spirit? For some time subsequently, in any of the enterprises that were more than merely ancillary to these issues ( Watt, Mercier et Camier), Beckett continued to impose formal markers from without, rather than letting form emerge from within, even though as early as the essay on Joyce's Work in Progress he had known, and shown that he knew, that 'the form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfil no higher function than that of stimulus for a tertiary or quarternary conditioned reflex of dribbling comprehension' (Dis, 26). The question remained, as it had been first posed: How can we qualify this general esthetic vigilance without which we cannot hope to snare the sense which is for ever rising to the surface of the fonn and becoming the fonn itself? (Dis, 27)

Conclusion

For so long as Beckett hoped to 'snare the sense' (or, like the Student at the party in Dream, to know 'in what sense ... did you use sense' (Dream, 217», the snare of arbitrary form claimed him as its victim. Whether willed (as in Murphy) or present by default (as in Watt), form could f~lfil 'no higher function'. To do so form would have to become an epiphenomenal by-product of accepting that there was no sense in sense, and no sense in using sense as a ratifYing agent. As 'The Capital of the Ruins' illustrates, in a world become 'provisional' even the word to describe it had to be held in suspension between speech marks. To discover the 'provisional' was Beckett's ambition, because it could give his scepticism a limitless domain in which to operate. At the same time, with form buried so deeply in the 'provisional', it became imperative to make creativity a matter of interactive forces between works already created, as had to some extent obtained before the nouvelles. The 'trilogy', three major works occupying Beckett for six months (Molloy), six months (Malone Dies) and ten months (The Unnamable) respectively,6 consists of separate works oddly dependent on one another, very much like the four nouvelles. 'The kind of work I do', Beckett told Israel Shenker in 1956, 'is one in which I'm not master of my material'.7 The cross-referencing in Beckett's work from 1946 onwards is best seen as part of a surrendering of authority, as if authorizing - the giving of life to fictions -led inevitably to fictional characters cropping up unbidden in alien or alternative contexts. It was from a deep trough that Beckett ultimately emerged as the author of Molloy, Malone meurt, L1nnommable and En attendant Godol. Only the last, and only by virtue of its translation into English, brought Beckett the celebrity which, from the outset, he had not sought, and which (when it came) he loathed. Writing from Ussy in July 1955 Beckett confessed himself 'Tired of Godot and all his works' ,8 with the first English production of Codot a mere three weeks away. It is natural to want to explain the recalcitrance and pessimism of Beckett as attributable largely to deficiencies and/ or imbalances in his upbringing, or his psyche, or his behavioural make-up. These of course cannot be disregarded in any estimate of the man or of the writings. But it is easier to identify causes than to estimate effects. When Beckett said that he had 'breathed deep of the vivifYing air' of failure 9 all his writing life, he

Conclusion

was in no way misrepresenting the case. The 'formative years' were the years in which his sense of what mattered and what did not were continually changing. Having stated in the first sentence of Proust that' [tlhe Proustian equation is never simple', Beckett was determined thereafter to make things difficult for himself. Beckett is arguably at his most difficult where he is least sure of his ground and apparently unwilling to temper his expressive impulses in the light of a clear creative purpose: in Dream, in Proust, and in the early poems in English. The difficulties diminish, both in scale and volume, in More Pricks Than Kicks, which nevertheless proved an important practice-pad for the much more compelling achievement of Murphy. Beckett's mercifully brief spell as a literary journalist, combined with his own developing sense of how best to proceed, served to situate what it would not be profitable to pursue; but, as we have seen, there remained something of what he openly despised (Rilke's 'fidgets', for example) in Beckett himself. By putting himself under psychoanalysis, Beckett must have come to know himself better, although it seems likely that, in doing so, he did not care much for what he found. Yet through Quigley briefly, and more gradually through Murphy, Beckett achieved the ability both to distance himself from himself (sufficient to make Murphy something less than a hero),10 and to imagine himself in the lineaments of another (rendering an absurd quest as something not merely to be mocked). Murphy, though not without some evidence of inspirational fatigue, showed Beckett that it was possible to use tried and trusted conventions even in the belief that there was no life left in them. He could allow such a conviction to surface from time to time without jeopardizing the whole enterprise. But the very successful management of Murphy's ends, with no answering echo on the part of publishers, left Beckett somewhat becalmed. There was 'no jubilation' on securing publication of Murphy in 1938, II and Beckett had already made it clear in the letter to Axel Kaun of 1937 that there would be nothing comparable, and could be nothing comparable, with so intransigent a commitment to 'dissonance'. Probably the most important decision made by Beckett during these formative years was to abandon, not without some significant retentions (notably Watt, The Capital of the Ruins' and Human Wishes). his mother-tongue of English. It seems unlikely. even with the first of the nouvelles having been begun in English, that there

Conclusion

would ever have been a Godot or a 'trilogy' without this fundamental shift in Beckett's attitude to his medium. Close in time to adopting a 'foreign' language, however, Beckett was also, by way of Human Wishes, estimating his capacity to work in a 'foreign' medium, the theatre. From every point of view the late 1930s, which saw Beckett ending 'years of wandering' (CP, 7) by returning 'home' to Paris, assume an importance in the formative process which nothing before (not even the death of his father) and nothing after (not even the succes de scandale of Godot) can match. The configuration was in fact only consolidated by the worsening political situation in Europe which made war inevitable, and which increasingly isolated Beckett in unenviable physical conditions not dissimilar to those which he would subsequently impose on his 'people'. 'Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me', Beckett could tell Alan Schneider without false modesty. 12 At work 'in private',IS however, success and failure mattered to Beckett much as they would to anyone with literature, even 'a literature of the un-word', in mind. The principal evidence for this is contained in the Watt notebooks, although in them the scales of success and failure are weighted overwhelmingly toward the latter. Nevertheless, Watt proper, which Beckett was more than ready to adjudge 'an unsatisfactory book', supplied him in Arsene with something like the voice that would, in prose fiction at least, convey what could be made of failure. In the event even Arsene's unbridled turbulence must have seemed too stiff and too rhetoricaJ14 to be more than a 'shadow' of what Beckett was seeking; but the decisive move towards monologue had been made. In the wake of a change oflanguage a change in mode and manner beckoned. Beckett would not have been Beckett if, with Arsene as a guide, he had moved directly into the impersonation of Molloy. With Watt done, or left undone, he still found it difficult to make headway. Signs of Beckett's reluctance to accept the more radical transvaluation of materials which would make for Molloy are unmistakable in Mercier et Camier, and are still present in the much more fluid and beguiling domain of the nouvelles. Perhaps no study of the formative years of a writer can hope wholly to avoid the suggestion that there must have been some endpoints in view - Molloy, Waiting for Godot? - all along the difficult

Conclusion

233

thoroughfare that led to them. A kind of post hoc ergo propter hoc continuum offers the illusion of an explanation in what, by the very nature of things (and, more particularly, given Beckett's unusual temperament), the author himself could never have explained, and would never afterwards be prevailed upon to explain, except in unguarded moments, and even then with a sense of the absurdity of the enterprise. Always conscious that Beckett before Godot would run aground on this awkward reef, I have attempted to interpret the works in question as in relationship one with another, but not wittingly cognizant of what lay ahead. As all the world now knows, it is what happens before Godot comes that matters, and something similar can be said, without prejudice to the mature work, of what occupied and preoccupied Beckett in the years when he had no reason to suppose a Godot ever would arrive.

Notes

1

INTRODUCTION

Watt, London: John Calder, 1963,83. Beckett, As the Story was Told: uncollected and later prose, London: John Calder, 1990, 86-7. 3. Beckett, Molloy Malone Dies The Unnamable, London: John Calder, 1.

2.

1959,161. 4. Letter of 27 January 1986, in the Ell mann papers at the University of Tulsa, quoted by James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury, 1996,772; see also Knowlson's discussion of the matter, 351 ff. 5. Krapp's Last Tape in: Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, London: Faber and Faber, 1984, 60. 6. Beckett interviewed by Gabriel d'Aubarede for Nouvelles Litteraires, 16 February 1961; translated in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds.), Samuel Beckett: the critical heritage, London, Henley and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 217. 7. Charles Juliet, 'Meeting Beckett', trans. Suzanne Chamier, TriQJlaterley, 77 (1989-90), 22. 8. D'Aubarede interview, The Critical Heritage, 217. 9. The first paragraph of Molloy as first published in French is found on

the opening endpaper of the manuscript' contained in the hardbacked notebook at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, Texas (HRHRC), and is dated 1/11/47. The notebook proper is dated 2/5/47. 10. 11.

Molloy Mawne Dies The Unnamable, 8. Beckett, 'Enough', in: No's Knife: collected shorter prose I947-66,

London: Calder and Boyars, 1967, 153. 12. I quote 'last end' from the end ofJoyce's The Dead; Beckett refers to Murphy's 'first end' in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 7 May 1936 (TCD). 13. Arikha, Paris: Hermann, 1985, g. 14. In the Whoroscope notebook (Reading), under the heading 'For Interpolation' Beckett jotted down: 'It is but giving over of a game that must be lost ([Beaumont and Fletcher's] Philaster).'

234

Notes to pages 6-z 3

235

15· Beckett, Murphy, from the concluding paragraphs of chapter 6. 16. Dis, 172; Beckett's Gennan original is on 53. 17· Ibid., 128: 'L'art adore les sauts' (,Le mondc clle Pantalon'); Mollay Malone Dies Thf Unnamable. 29:~: 'There must be other shift~.' 18. In chapter 5 of Murphy the protagonist applies at a chandlery for the position of smart boy, an approach treated by the chandlers with derision. 19· As in the first of the Texts for Nothing. for example (No's Knife, 73); cf. the fourth (89) and the twelfth (130) and Mollov Malone Dies The . Unnamable, 291. 20. Juliet, 'Meeting Beckett', 12. 21. Interview with Beckett, Paris, August 1969. 2

DANTE ... BRUNO. VICO .. JOYCE AND ASSUMPTION: 'THE PROSPECT OF SELF-EXTENSION'

1. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1992, 169. 2. Beckett's idea, as shown by his letter of 8 February 1932 to Charles Prentice (Reading) and by letters of late summer and early autumn 1932 to Thomas MacGreev), (TCD). Beckett knew Gide's works intimately, as is clear from Rachel Burrows's lecture notes (TCD MIC 60). 3. Knowlson, 713, says: 'There are contradictory views as to whether Beckett did or did not contribute to Portora magazine'; and he summarizes these views, as well as adding his own. 4. Disjecta reprints 'The Possessed', a title which reflects Beckett's interest in Dostoevsky, a point of reference in Beckett's lectures, in conversations with Charles Prentice, in the letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 29 May 1931 (TeD), and in Proust (Pr, 81-2, 87). One reason for Beckett wishing to add some pages to the end of Proust was 'to develop the parallel with Dostoievski' (letter to Charles Prentice, 14 October 1930; Reading). 'Che Sciagura' remains uncollected. 5. And to one 'play' in particular: Le Kid, which as Knowlson has shown (122ff.) was almost entirely conceived and executed by Georges Pelorson. 6. 'Theo Rutra' was a pseudonym for Eugene Jolas. 7. Knowlson, 1 I I, shows that Beckett worked on Descartes during his time as lecteur at the Ecole Normale Superieure (November 1928- September 1930). The poem 'Whoroscope', with Descartes the speaker, is in many respects anti-Cartesian, as Edouard MorotSir has shown in 'Samuel Beckett and Cartesian Emblems' in: Morot-Sir, Howard Harper and Dougald McMillan (eds.), Samuel Beckett: the art of rhetoric, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976.

236

Notes to pages I 3-2 5

8. Raymond Fedennan andJohn Fletcher, Samuel Beckett: his works and his critics, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970 ,4. 9. Arikha, Paris: Hennann, 198 5,9. 10. In his Ph.D dissertation 'Beckett as a Critic of Proust and Joyce' (University of NOrlh Carolina, 1977), Terence McQueeny shows, by way of Padraic Col urn's .our Friend james joyce, that this is effectively Beckett quotingJoyce who, as Colum reveals, liked to describe Vico as 'a roundheaded Neapolitan' (,Beckett as a Critic', 10, footnote 16). 11. All subsequent unassigned numbers in this chapter refer to the printing of Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. joyce in Disjecta: miscellaneous writings and a dramatic fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn, London: John Calder, 1983. 12. McQueeny ('Beckett as a Critic', 10-60) offers a splendidly precise study of what, and of how much, Beckett took over unacknowledged from his reading. 13. McQueeny (,Beckett as a Critic', 16) points out that This linking of Vico and Bruno is not to be found in McIntyre or in Croce [two crucial sources for Beckett's essay], although the latter does remark thal Vico never mentions his predecessor perhaps because the heretic was a Neapolitan like himself.' 14. Beckett remembered 'reading a biography' (Knowlson, 89) of either Vico or Bruno. McQueeny shows that he read several books, but none of them simply biographical. 15. For an excellent treatment of the Vico portion of Beckett's essay see Massimo Verdicchio's 'Exagmination round the Fictification of Vi co andJoyce',jamesjoyce Quarterly, 26:4 (Summer 1989), 531-g. 16. McQueeny (,Beckett as a Critic', 18/19) shows that Bossuet is only mentioned because Beckett is 'translating' Croce. For other borrowings from Croce, see also Andrea Battestini, 'Beckett e Vico', Bolletino del Centro di Studi Vichian~ 5 (1975), 78-86. 17· McQueeny (,Beckett as a Critic', 153) shrewdly interprets Beckett's attribution toJoyce ofa 'rare subjectivism' ,(Dis, 23) as a tacit critique of his mentor's benign view of destruction and reconstruction as two sides of the same coin. 18. Verdicchio, 'Exagmination', 535. 19. 'Before going to Paris from Dublin for the first time, Beckett had read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners, and had heard about the work on Ulysses' (Mel Gussow, Conversations with (and about) Beckett, London: Nick Hern Books, 1996,47). Knowlson, 87, includes Ulysses in Beckett's 'intense admiration' for Joyce. 20. Verdicchio, 'Exagmination', 538. 21. Beckett's anti-allegorical stance, which is found again at the end of Pmust, derives largely, as McQueeny has shown ('Beckett as a Critic', 122ff.), from following De Sanctis's view of Dante. 22. McQueeny, 'Beckett as a Critic', 60.

Notes to pages 27-36

237

23· Interview with Beckett, Paris, August 1969. 24- Jules Romains, The Death ofa Nobod.v, trans. Desmond MacCarthy and Sydney Waterlow, London: Howard Latimer, 1914; 'Dedication', iii, v. 25. In the Rachel Burrows \enure notes (TeD MIC (0) Beckett distinguishes between Bt'rgsoll's conception of time and Proust's. and between Bergson's attitude to language and Gide's, The pages which Beckett wanted to add to the end of Proust were intended in part to separate Proust's intllitivism from Bergson's (letter to Charles Prentice of 14 October 1932 (Reading». 26. Romains, The Death of a Nobody, iii-iv. 27. Given the brevity of Assumption, I omit page numbers. The story is now most accessible in S. E. Gontarski's edition (New York: Grove Atlantic, 1996) of The Complete Short Prose. 28. Jeffrey Saunders ('The Mortal Microcosm', Ph.D diss., Reading, 1993, Ii) points out that 'the title (Assumption) suggests that [the protagonist] has survived as spirit'. 29. Romains, The Death of a Nobody, vi.

3 0 . Ibid., 154. 31. Phyllis Carey ('Stephen Dedallls, Belacqua Shllah, and Dante's Pieta ') shows how Beckett 'shapes the complex structure and the imagery of "Dante and the Lobster" to provide the contours for his own artistic piera' (He: joyff' 'n Beckett, New York: Fordham University Press, 1992, 108), but Assumption was obviously his first attempt to do so. Beckett's interest in the Pieta of Perugino, purchased by the National Gallery of Ireland in 1931, is expressed in a letter of 20 December 1931 to Thomas MacGreevy (TCD). 32. Dante, Inferno, xx, 28. The translation is Thomas MacGreevy's, from his poem 'Fragments'. In the fifth German notebook (Reading), in the entry for 1 March 1937, Beckett comments adversely on Hans Carossa's German translation of the phrase.

3

FROM A VIEW TO A KILL: PROUST AND LE CONCENTRISME

1. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, book 2, ch. 2, paragraph 405, trans. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968, 130 (amended). 2. transition, 16/17 (summer 1929)' 3. See Francis Doherty, 'Mahany's Whoroscope' , journal of Beckett Studies, n.s. 2:1 (Autumn 1992), 27-46. 4. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, undated [1930] (TCD). 5. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, undated [1930) (TCD). There are Proustian references in the poem 'Casket ofPralinen ... ', which may have been written at about this time. 6 Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 25 August 1930 (TCD).

Notes to pages 36-53 7. Letters to Charles Prentice of 14 October and 3 December 193 0 (Reading). 8. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 3 February 1931 (TCD). 9. Letter to Charles Prentice of 16 February 1931 (Reading). 10. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 11 March 1931 (TCD). Compare the marginal annotatiorrs to the copy of Proust once owned by Dr. Thomas Wall, cited by Deirdre Bair ( I 09), a book I have beef! unable to trace in spite of much help in this connection from Mr Eamonn de Burca, Ms Norma Jessop of special collections in the Library of University College Dublin, and Father Kevin O'Neill of St. Patrick's College, Carlow. Some ofthese annotations can be found in Nicholas Zurbrugg, Beckett and Proust (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), 103. As late as 21 January, 1954, in a letter to AJ. Leventhal, Beckett can be found describing Proust as 'a very poor work' (HRHRC). 11. All unassigned page numbers in this chapter refer to Proust and Three Dialogues: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, London: John Calder, 1965. 12. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, London: Macmillan, 1911, 1. 13. Zurbrugg, Beckett and Proust, 1 15, emphasizes that Beckett '''turns aside" from all mention of creativity predicated upon "Enchantment"' later in this section (Pr, 28). 14. How it is, London: John Calder, 1964,58. 15. Zurbrugg (Beckett and Proust, 104) says that Beckett's 'argument assumes relatively dualistic dimensions only in the last two ... sections' of Proust, although his own argument (105) recognizes how pervasive the dualistic elements in Proust actually are. 16. The awkwardness of this formulation may be the consequence of Beckett registering that he has 'borrowed' it from Arnaud Dandieu; see McQueeny (,Beckett as a Critic', 95 ff.) for a shrewd estimate of the degree of Beckett's dependence on Dandieu, and Arnaud Dandieu, Marcel Proust: sa revelation psychologj.que (Paris: FirminDidot, 1930),41-2. 17. McQueeny, (,Beckett as a Critic', 89), quite justifiably calls this 'extraneous' . 18. Beckett is tacitly adopting here the point of view of Gide in his book on Dostoevsky, first published in 1922. In using the word 'vulgarity' a few pages earlier (Pr, 81), Beckett is borrowing directly from Gide; in the Rachel Burrows lecture notes Gide's phrase 'simplification de vulgarite' is to be found. 19· In Arikha, Paris: Hermann, 1985,9. 20. Letter to Charles Prentice of 27 October 1930 (Reading). 21. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 14 November 1930 (TCD). One such poem, with the mention of' concierges' in its first line, must have been 'TristesseJanale' (HRHRC); 'Ce n'est au Pelican' (Dream, 21) may have been another.

Notes to pages 54-6I

239

22. McQueeny (,Beckett as a Critic', 103-4) points out that the phrase derives from a passage in Schopenhauer's Thl' World as Will and Idea; but Beckett improves upon his source by making the phrase more symmetrically balanced. The reference to Labiche very probably originates in Beckett's reading of Bergson's Ll' Rire; see Laughter: an essay on the meaning of the comic, trans. Brereton and Rothwell, London: Macmillan, 1911,51,84,114,120, 128. 23· James Knowlson quotes Beckett as saying 'Everyone was well aware that it was a spoof (K.nowlson, 122); but Le Concentrisme is not the most lucid of spoofs. 24· Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 11 March 1931 (TCD). 'Je est un autre', writes Rimbaud in the letter to Paul Demeny of 15 May 1871.

4 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

DREAM OF FAIR TO MIDDLING WOMEN: 'A SOLUTION OF CONTINUITY'

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (letter of I 2 June 1938), trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevre, New York: Schocken Books, 1989,226. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 3 February 1931 (TCD). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 29 May 1931 (TCD). Letter to Charles Prentice from Thomas MacGreevy of [12 July] 1931 (Reading). Letter to Charles Prentice of 15 August 1931 (Reading). Letter from Charles Prentice to Beckett of 51uly 1932 (Reading). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of [27] August 1932 (TCD). Letter from Charles Prentice to Beckett of 5 July 1932 (Reading). Letter to Charles Prentice of 15 August 1931 (Reading). All unassigned page numbers in this chapter refer to Dream ofFair to Middling Women, ed. Eoin O'Brien and Edith Fournier, Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1992, and are incorporated into the text. Undated [Summer 1932J letter to Thomas MacGreevy (TCD). Letter to Charles Prentice of 15 August 1931 (Reading). The indications in Dream can be supplemented by Beckett's letter to Prentice of 15 August 1931, in which he hypothesizes writing 'seven spectral petals' to accompany 'Walking Out'. Quoted from the G text of The Legend of Good Women in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, Oxford University Press, 1988, 588; but the line (with 'ys' for 'be') is also in the F text. Skeat's famous 1894 edition of Chaucer, and its many reprints, also includes this line (with 'hit' for 'it'), Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, vol. III, 66. Dis, 33; Harvey, 271. Mary Bryden, 'Beckett and the Three Dantean Smiles', Journal of Beckett Studies, n.s. 4:2 (1995),29. Beckett conceals behind this description the fact that he has 'created' Nemo from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (I, 117 and II,

Notes to pages 6 r -7 r

18.

19. 20. 2 I. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27· 28.

29.

30 . 31.

84), where 'Nemo' is not, strictly speaking, a person at all; cf. Dream, 182. Beckett's 1931/2 notebook reveals how much of Dream is taken verbatim from Burton. In Rachel Burrows's notes (TCD MIC 60) from Beckett's lectures on Gide in 1931 she has jotted down 'Action instead of being treated melodically is treated symphonically', in connection with Gide's Paiulks. Cf. 'paludal' (Dream, Ill). 'Chi non ha la forza di uccidere la realta non ha la forza di crearla' (Pr, 79); as Terence McQueeny points out (,Beckett as a Critic', 124-5 and footnote 5 I ), the phrase is taken from the chapter on Dante in De Sanctis's history of Italian literature. Cf. 'Novel not statementbut purposive uncovering ofthe real' in Rachel Burrows's notes from Beckett's Gide lectures. Beckett's letterto MacGreevy of I I March 1931 (TCD) speaks ofthis as 'a beautiful phrase'; it was Beckett's philosopher friend, Jean Beaufret, who had coined it (Knowlson, 148). Dante, Paradiso, xxx, 22. Letter to Charles Prentice of 15 August 1931 (Reading). Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Charles G. Anderson, New York: The Viking Press, 1968,214-15. In the most searching account of Dream known to me, Jeffrey Saunders points out that '[t]he "veil" of dislike through which he envisages her [the Smeraldina] at the end [of'1WO'] is the screen through which he has seen her all along' (The Mortal Microcosm', Ph.D diss., Reading, 1993,49). Saunders sees the New Year's scene as 'more coherently presented' (ibid., 48), but 'ultimately just as focussed on Belacqua's introspection and self-division' (ibid., 49). In Samuel Beckett: the last modernist (London: HarperCollins, 1996, 132 ff.) Anthony Cronin dates the scene to New Year's Eve 1930. Letter from Charles Prentice of 5 JuLy 1932 (Reading). Dante, Purgatorio, IV, 127, where the text actually reads 'andar in su'. See John Bishop,]oyce sBook of the Dark: Finnegans Wake, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986, passim: See, for example, Dream, I l l , 132, 134, 146,147,151 (three times), 156, 157,161,178, 179, 186, 195 etc. The dictionary definition is in the 1931-2 notebook referred to by Knowlson (Damned to Fame, 13 I ). Saunders (,Microcosm', 2 Iff.) discusses some interesting parallels between 'dehiscence' in Dream and 'dehiscence' in the 1934 review ofO'Casey's Windfalls (Dis, 82-3). Utterances begun and then broken off - with 'he said' or 'she said' operating as a kind of 'caesura' (Dream, 144) - can be found on 144, 147-8,150-1,155-6,170-5,180-1,189-90,196-7, and throughout what would become 'A Wet Night'. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1954, section VI C, 33 2 . This 'prayer' recurs in a variant form in the letter to MacGreevy

Notes to pages 72-81 quoted in Knowlson, 134, and dated hy him (729) 'probably late August 1931 '. 3 2 • A transcription of several lines from Dan Ie, [I/Ierno, XVIII, and headed 'Malebolge', is to be found on a posI('ard Ii'om Beckett in the MacGreevy materials at TCD. 33· Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 18 August 1932 (TCD). 34· Letter from Charles Prentice 10 Beckett of IgJuly 1932 (Reading).

5 1.

2

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

g.

10.

MORE POEMS THAN PRECIPITATES: TOWARDS ECHO'S BONES AND BEYOND

Entry (in the original Provenc;al: 'fetz de lieis mains bons vers ab bons sons ab paubres motz') in Beckett's 1931-2 notebook (Reading), The French poems from before 1932 are 'Ce n'est au Pelican' (Dream, 21) and the unpublished 'TristesseJanale', originally titled 'Lamentation Janale'. Both appear (the former as 'Text 2') in the projected contents list for POEMS by Samuel Beckett' in the Leventhal papers at HRHRC, and Beckett also quotes the Pelican poem in a letter of gJanuary 1935 to George Reavey (HRHRC). '[T) hese are helps' says the speaker of From an Abandoned Work (No's Knife, 144)· Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of [271 August 1932 (TCD). A late dedication copy to A. J. Leventhal describes Whoroscope as 'a bad poem', but Beckett takes some comfort from the fact that 'bad poems are not exactly the last ones' (Knowlson, 725). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 13 [September) 1932 (TCD). The title 'I put pen to this' survives (crossed out) into the Leventhal Contents list (HRHRC), with a new title 'Cri de Coeur l' substituted. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 18 October 1932 (TCD). In a letter to MacGreevy of 1 1 March 1931 Beckett writes 'I've been reading nothing but Rimbaud' and describes teaching Rimbaud's 'Poetes de sept ans' to the Senior Sophister students; 'I told them about the eyesuicide-pour des visions' (a quotation from line 20 of the poem). Whoroscope MS (HRHRC). Cf. Richard Admussen, The Samuel Beckett Manuscripts: a study, Boston: G. K Hall, 1979,94. Assumption contains the phrase 'one with the birdless colourless skies' two paragraphs from the end. In her essay on Beckett's poetry in Modernism and Ireland (ed. Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis, Cork University Press, 1995, 192-3), Patricia Coughlan also situates the sonnet and the story alongside one another. The 'one'-ness of the sonnet is reflected in the fact that the poem is all one sentence; my thanks to Chris Ackerley for help with this. The 'Night of May' reference is to Alfred de Musset's 'La nuit de mai', from which Beckett was to take the image of 'the piteous

242

Notes to pages 8I-83

pelican' in the poem 'Text' and the 'Pelican / pas si pitoyable' (Dream, 21). Knowlson, 732, notes that Henri Evrard (a model for Liebert in Dream) knew all the Nuits of Musset by heart. Harvey, 283, states that Beckett wrote three sonnets to the Smeraldina, but only 'At last I find .. .' seems to have survived. 11. The 'clues' to this, such as they are, involve the Poet remembering the 'languid floating flower' in Bloom's bath at the end of chapter 5 of Ulysses. The Poet writes: rocket of bloom flare flower of night wilt for me

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17·

and obviously also has in mind the litany of the Daughters of Erin from a third of the way through chapter 15 ('Circe') of Ulysses. Contents list and Leventhal papers (HRHRC). The subtitle of 'From the Only Poet to a Shining Whore' is: 'for Henry Crowder to sing'. 'To be sung loud', title and poem, appear in Contents list and Leventhal papers (HRHRC). Harvey, 280. In the Leventhal papers this becomes: 'I want you to cinch up your song' (my italics; an interesting indication that Beckett was seeking to subject his poetic method to greater pressure, and to gain a better grip upon his materials). Harvey, 288, 295. Beckett is here effectively the 'cold and passionate' (my italics) poet of Yeats's 'The Fisherman' (The Wild Swans at Coole). A comment prompted by seeing the work of Kathe Kollwitz in Berlin - 'There is no passion of compassion' (fourth German notebook, entry for 18January 1937; Reading) - shows how little Beckett's attitude had changed in the interim, and retrospectively helps to explain line 9 of 'Alba': ' ... you stoop with fingers of compassion'. The MacGreevy correspondence and papers at TCD show that the two 'Alba's to which Beckett refers in an undated letter (' [c. 9 September 1931]', Knowlson, 729) were 'world world world world' - later 'Enueg II' -and 'Alba' as published in magazine and book form - 'the "sheet" Alba' as Beckett describes it in the' MacGreevy letters. In a letter of 27 June 1932 (Reading) Charles Prentice singled out 'Alba 2', presumably 'Alba' as published, as 'superb'. The HRHRC Contents list itemizes not only 'Enueg I' and 'Enueg II' but also 'Alba I ' and 'Alba 2'. This may reflect Beckett's intention to adopt material from Dream (the prose piece 'Text' published in The New Review appears in the Contents list as 'Text 1'), perhaps the 'Plane of white light' passage in Dream, 181-2. Or Beckett may simply have fallen victim to the generic confusion analysed by Harvey, 91, who also points out that 'Dortmunder' is 'an alba in disguise' (ibid., 79). Coughlan, Modernism and Ireland, 193, writes of 'the idealization of eros' in the sonnet and of 'the antithetical impulses towards detachment and attachment' in 'Yoke of Liberty' /'Moly', which she finds echoed in ';1 elle I'acte calme'.

Notes to pages 83-87 18. Harvey, Paradiso,

100, II.

243

2H4, :314, 2~6. The 'branded moon' is from Dante,

19. Knowlson, 117-18, and letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 20 Decembe1' 1931 (TeO). In an earlier letter to MacGrecvy of 2[", January 1931 (TeO), desnibing a walk through Ringsend and out to the .>igeon House, Beckett speaks of the 'livid Dublin evening light on the shallows'; line 17 of 'Enueg I' speaks of the 'livid canal'. 20. Coughlan, Modl'rnislII and Ireland, 19!i, comments on other points of contact and difference between 'Alba' and 'Dortmunder'. 21. Letter to Thomas MacGreev), of 21 November 1932 (TCD). 22. Quoted here from the typewritten text of the poem in the Leventhal papers (HRHRC). Knowlson, 747, dates the revision of 'Spring Song' as 'after August 1935' and points up the difference between the Leventhal version and Georges Belmont's copy. 23. The third line from the end of 'Spring Song' (Leventhal version) reads: now the music is over the loud music

24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

The last two words link this experience with To be sung loud' (i.e. 'From the only poet to a shining whore'), the whore here having apparently ceased to 'shine'. The last two lines of 'Sanies r ('and let the tiger go on smiling / in our hearts that funds ways home') derive from this limerick. There is, however, no 'smiling' in 'Spring Song'. Letter from Charles Prentice to Beckett of 27 July 1932 (Reading). Ibid. Prentice calls it There is a Happy Land'. In the Leventhal Contents list it appears as 'Happy Land'. Harvey, 106, identifies Gracieuse, Belle-Belle and Percinet as from Charles Perrault's fairy-tales; but all three are from the fairy-tales of the Comtesse d'Aulnoy, 'Gracieuse and Percinet' and 'Belle-Belle: or, the Chevalier Fortune'. 'The Blue Bird' by the Comtesse d'Aulnoy is referred to, and adapted, in Dream, 154-5 and in 'What a Misfortune' in More Pricks Than Kicks. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 4 November 1932 (TCD). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 1H October 1932 (TCD); this letter contains Beckett's longest continuous meditation on poetry and poets. These datings are only provisional. 'Sanies I' (under the title 'Weg du Einzige!') was sent to MacGreevy on 13 May 1933; a version of 'Serena lII' with the first line 'gape at this pothook of beauty on this palate' was sent to MacGreevy on 9 October 1933. 'Malacoda' can only have been begun after Beckett's father's death on 26 June 1933, like the story 'DrafT' in More Pricks Than Kicks, which uses similar material. Coughlan, Modernism and Ireland, 1go, observes that 'the lyric

Notes to pages 87-91

244

speakers in the poems are anxious to an exactly equal extent about the failure of attachment ... and the failure of detachment' (italics hers).

3 2 . Knowlson, 167; and compare Beckett's remarks quoted by Knowlson, 185. Beckett's feelings are ruefully reflected in the HRHRC copy of Echo's Bones in which he has written 'Exitus redditus', a tag adapted from Thomas a Kempis's 'glad going out and sad coming home', which is a frequent point of reference in Beckett's prose fiction (see, for example, Dream, 129 and Watt, 38). In the Leventhal Contents list (HRHRC) , which contains numbered sequences but no 'sanies' or 'serenas', the title remains 'Weg du Einzige'. 33. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of H September 1935 (TCD); on 8 October 1935 Beckett wrote again to say that the poem had been changed for the belter. The title 'thrice he came' appears on the Contents list (HRHRC), crossed out, with The Undertaker's Man' substituted. 31. Harvey, 1 1 I, and footnote 56. 35. Harvey (160) reads 'nay' as 'a kind of refusal', but 'Malacoda' and its connections with Dante are best explored by C. J. Ackerley, 'Beckett's "Malacoda": or, Dante's devil plays Beethoven', Journal of Beckett Studies, n.s. 3: I (1993),59-64. 36. Undated letter of early 1933 (TCD). 37. 'Echo's Bones' (the poem) is quoted in the letter to MacGreevy of6 December 1933 (TCD). 38. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 9 October 1933 (TCD). 39. Stanza three of Joyce's 'Ecce Puer' begins 'Young life is breathed / Upon the glass'. Knowlson, 158, shows that Beckett remembered this poem almost verbatim until the end of his life. 'Da Tagte Es' is quoted in a letter to A. J. Leventhal of 7 August [1935] (HRHRC) , which associates the poem with a 'death bed' close in time to the second anniversary of Beckett's father's deat~. 'Da Tagte Es' may possibly figure in the Leventhal Contents list (HRHRC) as 'Abundance of the Heart', otherwise unknown. lfso, 'Seats of Honour', also not known, may be 'The Vulture'. 40. Beckett's title must presumably have been in part influenced by T. S. Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations (1917 ), with 'observations' no longer appropriate to a situation in which 'poetic sight' could not be guaranteed. 'Precipitates' may possibly derive from Beckett remembering a passage in Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth (London: Kegan Paul, 1929, 61 ): 'In analyses of deep states of depression, one is able to crystallize the libido consumed therein, so to speak, as a precipitate.' 41. Postcard to George Reaveyof 15 March 1935 (HRHRC). 42. Letter to A.J. Leventhal of28July 1934 (HRHRC). 43. The poem 'they come' - later to be translated as 'elles viennent' -

Notes to pages 91-92

245

'dictated itself' to Be(-kett early ill 193H; letter to Thomas MacCrt'evy of 27 January 193H (TeD). This pocm cOlllimlt's Ihe clost' assuciation between pOell''' and orgasm well-t'siahlished in Beckett's leiters to MacGreevy. 44, Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 18January 1937 (TCD). 45. Cf. Thomas MacGreevy, 'Dcchtire': I do not love you as I have loved The loves I have loved As I may love others POI'IIlS. ed. Susan Schreibman, Dublin: Anna Livia Press. 1991, :)0). '[ I] n a spasm' ill the first line of 'Enueg I' is horrowed from, rather Ihan an ("'('ho of. MacGreevy's 'Cab poem' (Dis. 69); Beckett registers his admiration for the phrase in a letter to him of early September 19~~ 1. In 'How is MacGreevy a Modernistr' UHodl'mism and h"l'land, 1 2S-G),.J. c. C. Mays observes generally: 'Beckett's earlv poems pursue a complicatcd dialogue with MacGree\"\"s which terminates with the pOrlrait of MacGreevy as Mr Endon in .\.1 urph)',' But Murphy seems to have bccn in large part finished before 'Cascando' was written. This is the reading in the MacGreevy papers. In POl'mS in English and subsequent printings 'an' is omitted, and the original first line ('why were you not merely what I despaired for') is reduced in size. Line four of the original ('is it better to abort than he barren ') is also altered. In a letter of 26 July [ 1936] Beckett lold MacGreevy: 'I think you are right about the opening.' Presumably the revisions made by Beckett took account of MacGreevy's criticisms. Cronin (The Last Modernist, 235) quotes the MacGreevy/TCD version in full. 47· Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 16 February 1937 (TCD). Compare: 'I thought a poem would be there' in the entry for 25 October 1936 in the first German notebook.(Knowlson, 240). There are, nevertheless, variants. TCD MSS 4644/3333/ I and 4644/3333/2 contain 'Two Poems by Samuel Beckett', comprising sections 1 and 2, but not section 3, of 'Cascando'. In a letter of 26 July [ 1936] Beckett told MacGreevy: '} have added a line to the end: "Unless [sic] they love you"' (TeD). See Harvey, 174 ff., and the entry for 3 I March 1937 in the sixth 49· German notebook (Reading). Knowlson, 227, shows how committed Beckett was to reading German literature from 1934 onwards, and to writing in German in the summer of 1936. 50. The pestling (and plunging) and the da capo aspect of 'Cascando' is anticipated, more diffusely, in the second paragraph of section 'lWO' of Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Dream, 4). Cf.Johannes Hedberg, 'Some Thoughts on Three Poems by Samuel Beckett', Moderna Sprilk, 68 (1974), 16: '[ the word "love" I can des-

(Colll'(tl'd

Notes to pages 92-96 ignate so much and so little, and ... can be both a noun and a verb. with many nuances of meaning'. 52 Cf. Hedberg. 'Some Thoughts', 16: 'it is this barely perceptible glimmer of a perfect love, rather than love itself, that is the force behind the poetic impulse that brought "Cascando" into being and made it into a memorable poem'. And, for a comparable 'minimal positive finding' in the 'Tailpiece' from Watt, see Thomas Kinsella, 'Poems of Samuel Beckert' ,journal ofBeckett Studies, n.s. 2:2 (1993). 18. 6 I.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

IN THE INTERVAL: MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS

Typescript of the unpublished 1933 story 'Echo's Bones' (Dartmouth College), 18. LettertoThomasMacGreevyof23 [April] 1933 (TCD). Rachel Burrows lecture notes on microfilm (TCD MIC 60) under the heading' Naturalists'. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy from Kassel of 1928 (TCD). Beckett's letter to Charles Prentice of 15 August 1931 (Reading) speaks of 'seven spectral petals', suggesting that at the time Beckett had only a very hazy idea of what might follow 'Walking Out'. 'Heiliger Brahmaputra! A hedgecreeper! A peeping Tom in bicycleclips, the ones that go round! Well then up he rose and apprehended without passion round and about the Sabbath brushwood foothill couples' (Dream, 72). The transition pri n ti ng of this passage (as part of the text 'Sedendo et Quiesciendo' [sic)) adds the phrase 'I once said that otherwise'. presumably referring to 'Walking Out'. Aversion of 'Dante and the Lobster', presumably the version which appeared in This Quarter in December 1932, existed by August 1932; Knowlson, 165. Knowlson, 51 ff. and 71 ff.. supplies the biographical background. Whilst the story undoubtedly depends upon a traumatic discovery personally made by Beckett, it seems probable that he also remembered a striking image from Jean-Paul Richter ('The sky changed from black to red, like a lobster being boiled') quoted by Bergson in Laughter: an i'ssay on thi' meaning of the comic, trans. Brereton and Rothwell. London: Macmillan, 191 1, 124. There are similaIities between 'Fingal' and the poem 'Sanies I' (written in late April/early May 1933), as Daniel Katz has pointed out ("'Alone in the Accusative": Beckett's narcissistic echoes', in: Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd 'hui, 5 (1996), 62). 'What a Misfortune' , in part inspired by a trip to Galway and Mayo in October 193 2 (Knowlson, 139), may also have been influenced by the marriage of the Bethells in April 1933, although Knowlson (758) makes no such connection. Dating the More Pricks stories has not been helped by Deirdre Bair (Samuel Beckett: a biography, London: Jonathan Cape, 1978, 160-2), who is unaware that 'Walking Out' existed as early as

Notes to pages 96-I08

9· 10. 11.

12. 13· 14. 15·

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

247

193 1, and who also states that the story 'Echo's Bones' was completed by Septemher 193:~. Charles Prentin' wrote to Beckett on 29 September 1933 to suggest that he write one more story, and acknowledged receipt of it on 10 November. Letters to Thomas MacGree\'\' of ... and I 1 Novemher 1932 (TCD). Letters to Thomas MacGreevy of 13 May and 22June 1933 (TCD). See Kay Gilliland Stevenson. 'Belacqua in the Moon: Beckett's Revisions of "Dante and the Lobster''', in: PatrickA. McCarthy (ed.), Critical Essa)'s on Samuf'/ Bf'rkf'tt, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986,36-46. Letter from Charles Prentice of 25 Septemher 1933 (Reading). Cf. 'delighting, .. in swine's drafT' (Dream, 46). Letter from Charles Prentice of 29 Septemher 1933 (Reading). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of6 December 1933 (TCD). Jeri Kroll shrewdly observes that' [d] uring the course of the stories [up to 'Yellow'] there has heen a lessening of Belacqua's aversion to sex' (,Fair to Middling Heroes: a study of Samuel Beckett's early fiction', Ph.D diss., Columbia University, 1974,326; hereafter 'Fair to Middling Heroes'). Beckett seems to have singled out 'Love and Lethe' more than any of his commentators have done. In a letter of 23 June 1934 to George Reavey, written in French, Beckett speaks of translating it as 'Mort Plus Precieuse', a title borrowed from Dream, 72. In a later (November 1938?) letter to Reavey, however, Beckett writes: 'I am halfway through a modified version in French of Love and Lethe. 1 don't know if it is better than the English version or merely as bad' (HRHRC). All unassigned page numbers in this chapter refer to More Pricks Than Kicks, London: John Calder, 1970. Anthony Farrow, Early Beckett: art and allusion in 'More Pricks Than Kicks' and 'Murphy', Troy, NY: The Whitston Publishing Company, 199 1, 135· Jeri Kroll (,Fair to Middling Heroes', 202), writes: 'One might say that the theory in the novel is put into practice in the stories', although hy 'theory' she means something less specific than the reader's experience as imagined in Dream. Kroll ('Fair to Middling Heroes', 267ff. and 338) conducts a most helpful discussion of other differential elements in six of the ten stories. Yoshiki Tajiri's discovery; see bars 128-9 of the score, in the cellos. This reflects the 'Ungehund' and 'Beethofen' of Drf'am, 138; and it anticipates the 'German Letter' of 1937 (Dis, 53,172). The phrase 'the slow climb of flat themes' occurs in the story 'Echo's Bones' (typescript, 21). By this point in 'Draff' the word 'up' has already occurred no fewer than six times in four pages. On its next occurrence Beckett asks

248

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30 . 3 1. 32.

Notes to pages

I09-I I3

'[W] hy up?' but offers no answer to the question, even though there are something like twenty more 'up's in the remainder of the story. The point, presumably, is that 'up' would be Paradiso and 'down' (later Belacqua's house is burned down) Inferno, which once again sequentially reverses - as in 'Dante and the Lobster' - the structure of The Divine Comedy. Beckett again plays on 'up' in the conversation between Belacqua and Zaborovna Privet in the story 'Echo's Bones' (typescript, 4-5) and must before 1933 have been aware of the uses to which Joyce had put 'up' as a leitmotiv in Ulysses. Compare the previous sentence, with four nouns and three adjectives: 'The hands pious on the sternum were unseemly, defunct crusader, absolved from polite campaign' (195). Beckett counts nouns and adjectives in Dream (19, 157). Kroll ('Fair to Middling Heroes', 349) suggests that 'the groundsman can be viewed as another persona for the author, similar to the narrator-friend of "Ding-Dong"'. It seems apt that, in almost the last words of the story, Beckett should have had in mind his own description of the stories as 'bottled climates' (letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 13 May [1933] (TCD». Kroll ('Fair to Middling Heroes', 346) writes of 'the ruined groundsman drinking a product which engenders draff, next to his one-time friend's decaying form, now also draff'. 'Echo's Bones' typescript 19a, 28. The phrase recurs (translated into German) in a letter to George Reavey of 26 May 1938 (HRHRC) , and in its original form in a letter of 20 August 1970 telling Kay Boyle 'I have capitulated' to requests for a reprint of MOTe Pricks Than Kicks. He had earlier written to her (letter of 4 March 1957 (HRHRC» to say that he found the stories 'very unsatisfactory'. Much of this material appears at the point in the jettisoned story 'Echo's Bones' where Belacqua is about to meet the groundsman from 'DraW (now given a name, Mick Doyle). In 'Echo's Bones' the material is Belacqua's, and he is seated; in "DraW it is the groundsman's, and he is standing. Letter toA.J. Leventhal of7 May 1934 (HRHRC). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 2 July) 933 (TCD). 'A Case in a Thousand', Thf' Bookman, 86 (1934), 241-2. John P. Harrington aligns the story with the 'scrupulous meanness' of Joyce's Dublinf'Ts (and specifically with 'A Painful Case') and considers that Joyce's example was ... less a limitation than a liberation', although he also emphasizes the 'critique' and the 'ironic manipulation' involved. References in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 4 August 1932 (TCD) anticipate 'A Case in a Thousand', the date of composition of which is not known. In his unpublished Ph.D dissertation ('Samuel Beckett's Family Values', University of London, 1996,425) Philip Robins sees 'A Case in a Thousand' as anticipat-

Notes to pages 114-122

249

ing All That Fall and as an important link hetween thaI play and the poem Whoroscope.

7 1.

2.

3·

4.

?).

6.

7.

8. 9.

BECKETT AS BOOKMAN: THE REVIEWS

Jean-Paul Sartn:>, L'ldiot de fa /amillR, Paris: (~allimard, 1971, II, 1260 (my translation). All subsequent unassigned page Ilumbers in this chapter refer to Disjecta. The equation of poetry alld prayer recurs in a letter to MacGreevy of H September [1935]: 'all poems are prayers. of Dives and Lazarus one flesh', a prefiguring of Ihe Denis Devli n review wri tlen in late 193i (TCD). In Beckett's second German notebook (Reading), in the entry for l!'i November 1936. he writes: The art (picture) that is a prayer sets up praver, releases prayer, in onlooker' (Knowlson. 237). A version of the 'musique de }'indifference' poem under the title 'Priere' is filed v.ith the letter to MacGreevy of 31 January 1938 (TCD); but cf. footnote 21 of chapter 9. 'Es wandelt nif1lland ungestmft unler PalT1lPr/' is from Goethe's novel ElRrtive AffinitiRs, II, vii; 'No-one wanders unpunished under palm trees, because it is inevitable that one's views will change in a country where elephants and tigers are at home.' My thanks to Dr Ian Roe for identifYing this source. In a letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 14 December 1953 (TCD), Beckett wrote: 'Nifmand wandell ungestraft on the road that leads to L'Innommable'. Letter to Alan Schneider of 29 December 1957; Dis, 109. In 'How is MacGreevy a Modern ist?' (Modernism and Ireland, ed. Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis, Cork University Press, 1995, 115) J. C. C. Mays observes: 'Beckett's interests led him to understand MacGreevy as a more self-absorbed writer than he is.' Mays, however, concludes that 'Beckett is right to suggest that in lerms of literary history MacGreevy is, in the end, a transitional figure' (ibid., 123). In a letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 7 May 1936 (TCD) Beckett tells his friend that he has just received a copy of The Amaranthers from Jack B. Yeats. Beckett's review appeared in theJuly-Seplember issue of The Dublin Magazinf, and Beckett obviously read the novel very quickly. A letter of 9June 1936 to MacGreevy describes the finished review as 'bad' (TCD). John Purser in The LilfTar:v Works of Jark B. Yeats (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991, 138) criticizes Beckett's 'periphrastic approach' to The AmaranthfTs; but in adapting a phrase from Jack B. Yeats's Sligo (London: Wishart, 1930, RH) - 'chartered raconteur'Beckett was also paying a witty kind of verbal homage. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 28 August 1934 (TCD). Knowlson, 739, shows that Beckett still had hopes of publishing his

Notes to pages

I24-I3I

'Censorship' essay as late as May 1936, by which time he was in a position to add his own registered number on the Index: 435. 10. Letter to George Reavey of 9 November 1961 on the subject of the Anthology of Mexican Poetry, described by Beckett in a letter of 20 November 1961 to Kay Boyle as 'Without doubt I think my worst literary experience' (HRHRC). I I. In a letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 8 September 1934 Beckett laments his 'sadness at being chained to the car of my fidgets' (TCD); Beckett's Rilke review had appeared inJuly 1934. 12. In an undated (probably December 1937) letter to Mary Manning Howe Beckett spoke of 'giving my critical career the long awaited kick in the ars [sic] with an article onJoyce for the homage number of the Nouvelle Revue Franc;:aise in February or March' (HRHRC); and in a letter of 12 May 1938 to Arland Ussher, Beckett mentioned an article he was intending to write on the Marquis de Sade. But neither of these have survived, if indeed they were ever written. 8 1.

2. 3· 4· 5· 6. 7· 8. 9· 10. 11. 12. 13·

14· 15· 16. 17· 18. 19· 20.

FIGURE AND GROUND: MURPHY

Quoted from St Augustine's Confessions in Beckett's 1931-2 notebook (Reading). All unassigned page numbers in this chapter refer to Murphy, London:John Calder, 1963. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 8 September 1935 (TCD). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 22 September 1935 (TCD). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of8 October 1935 (TCD). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 29January 1936 (TCD). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of6 February 1936 (TeO). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 8 March 1936 (TeO). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 25 March 1936 (TeO). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 15 April 1936 (TeO). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 7 May 1936 (TeO). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 9June 1936 (TeO). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 27 June 1936 (TeO). In a letter to George Reavey of 27 January 1938, however, Beckett describes making 'insertions' in 'section' V of Murph.'Y. one of which is from Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy (74), the first entry under the heading 'For Interpolation' in the Whoroscope notebook (Reading). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 7 July 1936 (TeO). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 10 December 1937 (TeO). Ibid. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 20 December 1931 (TeO). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 8 October 1932 (TeO). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 11 November 1932 (TeO). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 4 November 1932 (TeO).

Notes to pages 13 1-146 21.

22. 23· 24·

30 .

33· 34·

35·

Letters to Thomas MacGreevy of 26 April 1~l:~:) and of 1H August 1932 (TCD). Letter to A.J. Leventhal of 7 May 1934 (HRHRC). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of'!l Decemher 19:{2 (TeD). Letter to Thomas MacGreevv of' I:{ Septemher 19~4 (TCD). Knowlson, 194ff. and 2:qff. gives a very full account of Beckett and painting, a discussion which adds point to Beckett ironically observing to Mary Manning in a letter of 1HJanuary 193 T 'If I am not careful I shall become clear as to what I have written' (HRHRC). RUL MS 2902, from which all quotations from 'Lightning Calculation' are taken. The text cannot be earlier than September 1934, when Beckett found new lodgings at 34 Gertrude Street; but six months on from the publication of Morf' Pricks, and after some reasonable re\;ews, Beckett may have been encouraged to think of the short story as a still \;able form. 'A Case in a Thousand' had been published in August 1934. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 1 February 1933 (TCD). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 8 September 1934 (TCD). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 7 July 1936 (TCD). The Whorosropf' notebook is MS 3000 in the Beckett International Foundation (Reading). See my 'From a (W)horoscope to Murphy', in:John Pilling and Mary Bryden (eds.), Thf' Ideal Core of thf' Onion: reading Beckett archives, Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1992, 1-20, Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 7 July 1936 (TCD). As Chris Ackerley pointed out to me, 'surgical' is generated by' [t]he gentle rain' of the previous sentence in a context where Beckett has The Merchant of Venice in mind. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 11 November 1932 (TCD). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 17 July 1936 (TCD). On Beckett and pastoral see Frederik N. Smith, '''A land of sanctuary": Allusions to the Pastoral in Beckett's Fiction', in: Alan Warren Friedman, Charles Rossmann and Dina Sherzer (eds.), Beckett Translating/Translating Berkf'tt, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987, 128-39. In Thf' Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996, 169) Jean-Michel Rabate speaks of 'the novel's melancholy close', but he also shows how the 'open-ended' death of Murphy 'frees the psyche' of Celia. Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 4 August 1932 (TCD). Letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 10 January 1936 (TCD). As Chris Ackerley reminded me, both quotations occur in the numbered sections at the beginning of the Whorosrope notebook (Reading) which contain plans for Murphy. Presumably the word 'suddenly' in the letter to MacGreevy reflects Beckett's

Notes to pages 147-151

39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

awareness that the two quotations, which are seven pages apart in the notebook, could, should or might be of particular value taken together. Andre Malraux, Man s Estate, trans. Alastair Macdonald, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961, 219. German notebook 4, 18January 1937 (Reading); Knowlson, 247· For the 'realism' of Murphy, see in particular Malcolm Stuart's essay 'Notes on place and place names in Murphy', Recherches Anglaises et Americaines 14 (1981 ), 227-35' Paraphrased by John Cottingham in his Descartes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986, 12): 'if you can live your life through without attracting untoward attention, you will have lived well'. My thanks to Professor Cottingham for his help with this. The sentence is rendered by Ronald Gregor Smith: Our reason is like that blind Theban soothsayer Tiresias to whom his daughter Manto described the flight of the birds, and he prophesied from her accounts. (J G. Hamann: a study in Christian existence, with selRctions from his writings, London: Collins, 1960, 160)

Beckett remembered this mid-way through 'Le monde et Ie pantalon ': 'Les oiseaux sont tombes, Manto se tait, Tiresias ignore' (Dis, 12 5)'

44. Cf. Knowlson, 744, and the entry in the notebook under the heading 'For interpolation' which quotes I i, 282-4 from Dekker's play. 45. Frederik N. Smith (,Dating the Whoroscope notebook', Journal of Beckett Studies n.s., 3: 1 (1993),67) supposes that the entries in it date from 1932 until April 1937. But Geert Lernout (James Joyce and Fritz Mauthner and Samuel Beckett', In Principle, Beckett is Joyce, ed. Friedheim Rathjen, Edinburgh: Split Pea Press, 1994, 26) very plausibly suggests that 'the entries from Mauthner in the commonplace book date from after the summer of 1938'. 46. In the typescript dated 26 June (HRHRC) there are light corrections which may, or may not, pre-date the announcement' Murphy is finished' (letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 27 June 1936 (TCD». Beckett continued to work on it in January 1938, as the correspondence with George Reavey indicates (HRHRC) , after Routledge had accepted it.

9

DISSONANCE:

1937-1940

1. Jack B. Yeats, Sligo, London: Wishart, 1930, 18. 2. All subsequent unassigned page numbers in this chapter refer to Disjecta. 3· Letter to George Reavey of 2 I April 1940 (HRHRC): 'I wrote half of a first act ofJohns Oil .• My thanks to Fred Lowe for discussions on the date of Human Wishes.

Notes to pages I52-I54

253

4· Significant purchases induded Ihe (~dirht(' of Walther von der Vogelweide (German nOlebook 2, 14 Novemher 1~)36) and perhaps also Grimmelshausen's SimplirissimllJ (German nOlehook 6, entry for 28 March 19:n), although Ihe laller does nol appear on Ihe list of 'Books sent home' in the ~VhomsropfllOlehook (Reading). 5· It seems indicative that Beckell should still have been reading Keller's famous aUlohiographical novel, a copy of which he had bought immediately after Christmas 1936, as late as 22 March 1937 (Gennan notebook 6; Reading). 6. Knowlson, 2:~6, quoling from the letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 18 January 1937 (TCD). 7· Letter to Thomas MacGreevv of 22 December 1936 (TCD). 8. German notebook 6, entry for 29 March 1937 (Reading). 9· Other writings by Ballmer pleased Beckett less (German notebook 6, entries for 23 and 26 March 1937; Reading), and Ballmer the painter continued to matter more to him. Yet he remembered this pamphlet in writing of the 'grand peintre inconnu qu'est Ballmer' at the beginning of 'Le Monde et Ie Pantalon' (118). 10. German notebook 2, entry for 14 November 1936. 11. German notebook 4, entry for 15January 1937. 12. Knowlson, 288, quoting German notebook 4, entry for 15 January 1937· 13· German notehook 5, entry for 24 Fehruary 1937 (Reading), about a month after Beckett had left Berlin. Cf. 'Write to Kaun', notebook 6, entry for 18 March 1937. Almost a year later, writing to George Reavey on H March 1938 (HRHRC), Beckett complained that he had been unable to write the 'foreword' forthe London Gallery Geer van Velde exhibition, although the Gallery Bulletin published his terse contribution in May 1938. 14. Dis, 170. Cf. letters to Arland Ussher of (?) June 1937, and to Mary Manning Howe of I I July 1937 (HRHRC) giving Beckett's very critical view of Ringelnatz. 15. The idea of' the trembling of the veil', no douht familiar to Beckett by way of Yeats 's prose, seems to derive directly from Mallanne, about whom Beckett had mixed feelings. A lale notehook contains a line from Mallarme's 'Brise marine' (MS.2901; Reading), and this is perhaps the poem which Beckett has in mind at the beginning of Dream, when Belacqua waves 'a Mallarmean farewell' (Dream, 12). A later reference (Dream, 31) is more critical, and a letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 18 Octoher 1932 shows that Beckett was 'trying to like Mallarme again . . . and couldn't' (TCD). As Patricia Coughlan implies (Modernism and Ireland, ed. Patricia Coughlan and AJex Davis, Cork University Press, 1995, 189), the prohlem, or the obstacle to liking Mallarme, was Rimbaud. 16. In the entry for 26 March 1937 (German notebook 6) Beckett describes Work in Progress as 'the only [possible) development from

Notes to pages I56-I58

254

Vl'lsses' (Knowlson, 258), in what is generally a more positive assessm~nt than emerges from theJuly 1937 letter to Kaun.

17· HRHRC.

18. Knowlson, 194. Patricia Coughlan (Modernism in Ireland, 196 ) emphasizes that the French poems are 'not uniform in method'. 19· Beckett included one poem ('they come') in his letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 27 January 1938 (TCD). Three more poems are filed with the letter to MacGreevy of 31 January 1938: 'Ascension' (with variant readings in the last two lines), 'La mouche' and 'musique de l'indifference' (with the variant title 'Priere'). But a letter of 15 July 1938 (TCD) refers to 'the last few poems in French' as enclosed, and none are. This is perhaps where 'Ascension' - which refers to the World Cup, the final of which was played in Paris on 19June 1938and the other two poems belong. Beckett's letter to MacGreevy of 2 2 April 1938 speaks of' [a] couple of poems in French in the last fortnight' as 'the extent of my work since coming to Paris', i.e. since October 1937. And as late as 18 April 1939 (TCD) Beckett could tell MacGreevy: 'I have no work to show beyond a few poems in French .. .'. Cf. also letters to George Reavey of 22 April 1938 (,another French poem'), of 20June 1938 ('only a few more French poems'), of 28 February 1939 and 14July 1939 (HRHRC). 20. Coughlan (Modernism in Ireland, 198ff.) discerns points of contact between the French poems and also (ibid., 199, 208) between the French and English poems. In this connection it seems important to note that the phrase 'Ie ciel / qui nous eclaire tfOP tard' from towards the end of 'Arenes de Lutece' re-writes lines in 'Enueg II' of seven years earlier, the T and 'thee' of which anticipate the 'nous' of the French poem. 21. Coughlan (Modernism in Ireland, 199) suggests that 'Arenes de Lutece' is 'a thematic development over "Ascension''', which she sees as 'at first sight ... narrative'. However, from a formal point of view 'Arenes de Lutece', by virtue of being narrative throughout, is something of a regression, attractive poem though it is. 22. The situation recalls 'her whom ... I have dismounted to love' in 'Sanies I' (Echo's Bones). The 'negatif irrecusable' of 'Rue de Vaugirard' is anticipated by 'I took a time exposure' in 'Return to the Vestry' (Harvey, 310), a line slightly modified in 'it is high time lover' (HRHRC). In the unpublished 'Epitre a Ronsard' of sJanuary 1938 (TCD) , written three weeks earlier than 'they come', Beckett emphasizes that Ronsard is a poet of 'esprit', whereas he himself is a poet of ·corps'. Coughlan writes interestingly on how 'the process of composition [relates] metaphorically to the body' in the early English poems (Modernism in Ireland, 184-7) and observes of Beckett's poems of the 1930S generally that they 'attend more to sexual love and malefemale relations than any other body of Beckett's work' (ibid., 190 ).

Notes to pages I58-I68

255

25· Coughlan (Modernism in Ireland, 19H, 201-2) usefu11y pursues the ambiguities in 'a eJle J'acte calme' ami 'bois seu!', and in describing Jusque dans la caverne ... ' as 'a negative pendant to "Ascension'" (ibid., 203) shows how Bt'Ckett's attitude to his material fluctuates. 26. Beckett apparently began to see 'the possibility of stylelessness in French' in Munich in March 1937 (Knowlson, 257), although the idea was first entertained in Dream,