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On Beckett

Essays and Criticism

Edited and with an Introduction by

S. E. Gontarski

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2012

by ANTHEM PRESS

75-76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 663 5 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 0 85728 663 3 (Pbk)

This title is also available as an eBook.

For Jane

Sitting prettily between

the Vivaldi A Minor and

the Bach Double

CONTENTS

The Essential Beckett: A Preface to the Second Edition xi

S. E. Gontarski

A Beckett Chronology xvii

Acknowledgments xxvii

Introduction

Crritics and Crriticism: “Getting Known” 1

S. E. Gontarski

Preliminaries

Beckett and Merlin 15

Richard W. Seaver

Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts: The Embarrassment of Allegory 23

Dougald McMillan

When is the End Not the End? The Idea of Fiction in Beckett 36

Wolfgang Iser

The Page

Murphy and the Uses of Repetition 53

Rubin Rabinovitz

Watt 72

Lawrence E. Harvey

Mercier and Camier: Narration, Dante, and the Couple 92

Eric P. Levy

Molloy’s Silence 103

Georges Bataille

Where Now? Who Now? 111

Maurice Blanchot

The Voice and Its Words: How It Is 118

J. E. Dearlove

viii ON BECKETT

The Unnamable’s First Voice? 133

Chris Ackerley

Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New Poetry 138

Marjorie Perloff

Worstward Ho 152

Dougald McMillan

The Stage

MacGowran on Beckett 157

Interview by Richard Toscan

Blin on Beckett 167

Interview by Tom Bishop

Working with Beckett 175

Alan Schneider

Notes from the Underground: Waiting for Godot and Endgame 189

Herbert Blau

Beckett Directs Godot 209

Walter D. Asmus

Beckett Directs: Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape 218

Ruby Cohn

Literary Allusions in Happy Days 232

S. E. Gontarski

Counterpoint, Absence, and the Medium in Beckett’s Not I 245

Paul Lawley

Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett’s

That Time and Footfalls 253

Walter D. Asmus

Footfalls 265

James Knowlson

Samuel Beckett and the Art of Radio 273

Martin Esslin

Light, Sound, Movement, and Action in Beckett’s Rockaby 292

Enoch Brater

CONTENTS ix

Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu: A View from the Isle of Swans 299

Pierre Astier

Quad and Catastrophe 307

S. E. Gontarski

Coda

Burroughs with Beckett in Berlin 313

Edited by Victor Bockris

Notes on Contributors 318

THE ESSENTIAL BECKETT: A PREFACE

TO THE SECOND EDITION

S. E. Gontarski

The first edition of this collection opened with an attempt to assess Samuel

Beckett’s legacy:

On 13 April 1986 Samuel Barclay Beckett will mark his eightieth year, an event that

will be commemorated by international festivals, performances and publications

unprecedented in an author’s lifetime. Such attention was neither sought nor

particularly welcomed by Beckett, but […] is fully the measure of his impact on the

literature and culture of the latter half of the twentieth century […]. Publication […],

however, usually lagged behind composition, and in 1951, at age forty-five, having

been publishing for over two decades, Beckett was little known outside a small circle

of avant-garde artists. It is a memory he doubtless tapped for one of Krapp’s birthday

memoirs: “Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating

libraries beyond the seas. Getting known.”

What may have seemed at the time like overstatement appears now like

understatement. Not infrequently an author’s reputation wanes with his physical

demise. Beckett’s, on the contrary, burgeoned after 1989. Witness the opening

assessment of Marjorie Perloff ’s presidential address to the Modern Language

Association in December of 2006, a year that has come to be called the Year of

Beckett:

This year marks the centennial of Samuel Beckett’s birth, and the celebrations around

the world have been a wonder to behold. From Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Rio de

Janeiro to Sofia, from South Africa (where Beckett did not permit his plays to be

performed until apartheid was ended) to New Zealand, from Florida State University

in Tallahassee to the University of Reading, from the Barbican Theatre in London

to the Pompidou Center in Paris, from Hamburg and Kassel and Zurich to Aix-en-

Provence and Lille, from St. Petersburg to Madrid to Tel Aviv, and of course most

notably in Dublin, 2006 has been Beckett’s Year. Most of the festivals have included

not only performances of the plays, but lectures, symposia, readings, art exhibitions,

and manuscript displays. PARIS BECKETT 2006, for example, co-sponsored by the

xii ON BECKETT

French government and New York University’s Center for French Civilization and

Culture, has featured productions of Beckett’s entire dramatic oeuvre, mounted in

theatres large and small all over Paris, lectures by such major figures as the novelists-

theorists Philippe Sollers and Hélène Cixous, the playwrights Fernando Arrabal and

Israel Horovitz, and the philosopher Alain Badiou. To round things out, in 2007 the

Pompidou Center will host a major exhibition of and on Beckett’s work. […] Who,

indeed, more global an artist than Beckett? (Perloff 652).

Beckett struggled for recognition early in his career, only to struggle as assiduously

to avoid it once achieved. A quotation his authorized biographer James Knowlson

found among Beckett’s notebooks was from Alexander Pope, “Damned to fame”;

it became an apposite title. What he would have thought of the celebrations

surrounding his centenary year is not difficult to adduce. He would certainly have

recognized that such an expansion of audience into the global market is not without

cost. Many of these symposia and performances garnered financial support not

only from universities, foundations, and cultural arms of governments but also from

banks, airlines, and other corporate entities. One might well ask what drives such

acceptance, such institutional enshrinement? How could an apparently hermetic

artist like Samuel Beckett be opened up to more than local comprehension? Does

such global acceptance entail a necessary blunting of the resistance inherent in the

Modernist enterprise and, for our purposes, in Beckett’s work in particular? Roland

Barthes already anticipated such absorption and rehabilitation of Modernism in

the 1960s: “the bourgeoisie will recuperate [the avant-garde] altogether, ultimately

putting on splendid evenings of Beckett and Audiberti (and tomorrow Ionesco,

already acclaimed by humanist criticism)” (69). The festivities commemorating the

Year of Beckett may have been just such recuperation, such a series of “splendid

evenings” in the culture park.

The surge in global popularity of Samuel Beckett’s work is thus something

of a mixed blessing. This global Beckett, sans frontiers, reflects the extension of a

particular western European moment, Modernism as the avant-garde’s interrogation

or critique of the cultural and moral bankruptcy of bourgeois Europe, onto a

trans-cultural stage where it is now embraced not only by those cultures that

were the object of its critique but also by cultures where the European moment

barely resonated. Whether such response represents a victory for or signals a crisis

in the arts is an issue that itself wants interrogation. Are we in the midst of a

global triumph of the avant-garde, or simply witnessing its reduction to nostalgia

or its assimilation into commerce and so into kitsch? In the case of Beckett, the

twenty-first century has been witness to the commercial and popular embrace of a

twentieth-century icon who happened to be not a rock star but an esoteric Hiberno-

Gallic poet. His emergence into the global economy has been, admittedly, through

popular culture, where he and his work are too often reduced to a few immediately

recognizable emblems, clichés, or catch phrases, like trash cans, bowler hats, or

the act of waiting itself. Such popularity, distorted as it is, tinged with sentiment

PREFACE xiii

and sporting the trappings of kitsch, remains nonetheless a measure of his cultural

impact, part of his legacy as he is absorbed into and celebrated if not revered by a

twenty-first century global economy, and so a commodity in the culture industry.

Whatever subversive or political edge such work may have had in its narrow

context is transformed into commodity with increased exposure, like Che Guevara

T-shirts, Salvador Dali neckties, or Matisse prints used to decorate Las Vegas hotel

rooms, radical politics reduced to fashion statement, and such decorative tokens

are readily available for Beckett as well. The special anniversary issue of Gentleman’s

Quarterly, GQ 50, for example, listed Beckett as among the 50 most stylish men

of the past 50 years (388). For GQ Beckett was a hip trendsetter, a celebutant or

fashionista, “A timeless figure, both ancient and modern, traditional and (whether

he liked it or not) hip, he favored black (which ignited his blue eyes) and wool or

tweed coats that could have come from any number of centuries.” Little matter

that his clothes were bought by his wife more often than not at the marché de puces in

St. Ouen, for GQ Beckett wore Prada.

Witness as well graffiti artist Alexander Martinez’s stark community mural

of Beckett, for a time on Blenheim Crescent, just off the Portobello Road, the

antique Mecca and tourist destination in London’s W11. Beckett’s face, admittedly

deteriorating from the moment of its completion, something of a quick or instant

ruin, dominated the side of a building as if he were a local politician, a notable

neighbor, or a local hero, which he may well be for the artsy Notting Hill set.

The iconic mural, doubtless a heartfelt tribute, had nonetheless all the trappings

of celebrity, of a cult of personality. Furthermore, the mural was spotted by an

enterprising Irish group committed to commercializing graffiti art that calls itself

“Helterskelter.” The image is featured on a free postcard the group distributes

all over Ireland. The postcard fails to list the mural’s precise location, nor has

the group identified the painter (himself a noted graffiti artist), whom they list

as “Unknown.” While the group says of itself, “we have collected grafitti [sic],

stencil art and murals wherever we have found them. They continue to be printed

at regular intervals and are still free to pick up from city card racks throughout

Ireland”; one may cynically ask, is there not a T-shirt or poster in the offing?

Beckett had usually resisted at least the most overt commercial exploitation of

his work, or at least that is the image he himself worked assiduously to promote.

In 1969, for instance, he refused to allow his publishers to reissue (or re-cover) his

work in order to capitalize on the newly awarded Nobel Prize. Beckett’s cultural

capital altered with the award as production moved from small to large scale in

response to increases in promotion and consumption, much of that increase driven

by institutions like universities and fueled, unsurprisingly, by Beckett’s American

publisher who circulated various readers’ guides to Beckett’s work. The award of

the prize also spurred Grove Press to issue in 1970 the first Collected Edition of

Beckett’s work, in 16 volumes, and Beckett was delighted with the result. Under

different management, Grove Press went on to issue a second uniform edition

to mark the 2006 centenary, a handsome, four-volume boxed set, edited by Paul

xiv ON BECKETT

Auster and with introductions by contemporary literary luminaries Edward Albee,

Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, and Colm Toibín. Both sets were designed as and

have become collector’s items, materialist trophies. In fact, one dare not break the

shrink film and actually read the 2006 centenary edition for fear of devaluing the

object. But many of us recall that suggestions to Beckett that he might or ought

to be selected for inclusion in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade evoked a disdainful sneer

from himself. Such honorifics seemed to interest him little.

This overt commodification is admittedly no more crass than Beckett’s image

being used to flog Apple computers in its solecistic “Think Different” campaign.

Beckett joined an impressive pantheon of twentieth-century icons like Mahatma

Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon in the Apple promotion,

the campaign using the outsider status of these immediately recognizable icons in

commercially brilliant ways, eliding the gap between art (or independent thought,

or moral integrity) and commerce. Beckett’s name has yet to appear on a Las

Vegas marquee, but it is worth noting that his most “popular” play is not Waiting

for Godot or Endgame, but “Breath,” that is, in a sense, Beckett: The Musical. Its longest

run was as the opener, called “Prelude,” to the Jacques Levy directed and Kenneth

Tynan conceived sextravaganza Oh Calcutta, Calcutta, the image and title adapted

from the painting by Camille Clovis Trouille’s posterior odalisque, with its pun on

the French “O quel cul t’as,” said “cul” prominently displayed. Tynan marketed

the 30-second playlet by adding three words to the opening tableau. Beckett wrote,

“Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish,” to which Tynan added,

“including naked people.” Leading off with Beckett, Oh Calcutta premièred at the

Eden Theater in New York City on 16 June 1969 (the 65th Bloomsday). After a

PREFACE xv

cautious tryout with 39 previews, it opened, moving to the Belasco Theater on

Broadway on 26 February 1971 where it ran, and ran, and ran, with only slight

interruption, until 6 August 1989. Finally, 85 million people saw 1,314 performances

during its 18-year run, making it, incontestably, the most viewed Beckett play ever,

a record unlikely to be broken. Moreover, the musical was subsequently issued as

an LP, was made into a Hollywood film, and remains currently available in CD,

VHS, and DVD formats, and Oh, Calcutta received a full-spread “pictorial essay”

in Playboy magazine (October 1969: 166–171). Oh Calcutta did not play Vegas, but

it certainly might have today given that Las Vegas has become the culture, well,

theatrical, well, entertainment capital of the United States, if not the world.

The flamboyant centenary celebrations in Dublin were themselves crowned

by another pop icon, U2 lead singer Bono, who was prevailed upon to pen and

perform a tribute to Beckett and to (Gate Theatre impresario) Michael Colgan in

a piece recorded for RTÉ and called “Waiting for Colgan.” As Bono’s monologue

suggests, he was persuaded to acknowledge his admiration for Beckett publicly

over dinners at the Unicorn, with Colgan hosting and buying bottles of Puligny-

Montrachet at “200 quid a bottle,” according to Bono. For his participation Bono

was in turn rewarded with a trophy, a signed first edition of Murphy, by Minister for

Arts, Sport, and Tourism John O’Donoghue, the irony of the quid pro quo gesture

obviously lost on the principals. These Beckett celebrations were certainly big

business.

The Apple campaign, moreover, while it plays on, or off, popular culture, also

invokes the messianic possibilities of the featured icons. It established a religious

mood, and thereby reasserted authority, an incontestable, unimpeachable,

indisputable authority, even as the object of the campaign was undisguisedly

commerce. The cultural skepticism of these figures becomes recuperated by the

bourgeoisie, and the icons thereby validate rather than interrogate contemporary

culture and institutions. The mass-produced Apple posters, moreover, have

themselves become collectors’ items.

The essays gathered in this volume, however, retain the evocative power of

Beckett’s work as it was interpreted by his early collaborators and critics, work

efficacious precisely to the degree that it has resisted the cultural hype that has come

to characterize so much commodified art. If the idea of Beckett sells computers,

or black sweaters for that matter, much of the art remains largely inaccessible to

bourgeois tastes. Here some of his earliest French critics like Georges Batailles

and Maurice Blanchot discuss their initial engagements with an unknown Samuel

Beckett. Richard Seaver, who would go on to become Beckett’s translator and

publisher at both Merlin magazine and Grove Press, recounts his first encounters

in Paris with the Beckett’s work. Lawrence Harvey worked closely with Beckett, as

closely as any critic, and Beckett was unusually forthcoming to the likeable professor

in Paris on sabbatical. The result was Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic, which Beckett

thought, finally, a bit too revealing. Marjorie Perloff and Dougald McMillan turn

to the difficult late prose: Perloff details its formal poetic qualities while McMillan

xvi ON BECKETT

explores the intricacies of Beckett’s final novel, Worstward Ho. Many of Beckett’s

closest theatrical interpreters are also represented here. His favorite actor Jackie

MacGowran and Beckett directors Roger Blin, Alan Schneider, Herbert Blau,

Walter Asmus, and Martin Esslin all discuss working with him. Pierre Astier details

the composition of the late masterpiece Ohio Impromptu, written at the behest of

the editor, and James Knowlson, who would go on to become Samuel Beckett’s

authorized biographer, discusses another of those late gems, Footfalls. The volume

ends with one of the great literary gatherings of the late twentieth century, Susan

Sontag’s account over dinner with French publisher Maurice Girodias, continued

with Grove Press publisher Fred Jordan, of a meeting in Berlin with her, Alan

Ginsburg, William Burroughs, and a perplexed Samuel Beckett. These then are

essays, memoirs, interpretations with staying power, quotable first-hand accounts

that remind us once again, amid contemporary hype, what is authentic and

startling about Beckett’s work beyond the popular images of trash cans and bowler

haps. What emerges in these essays is a Beckett for two centuries.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “Whose Theater? Whose Avant-Garde?” Critical Essays, translated by Richard

Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 67–70.

Perloff, Marjorie. “Presidential Address 2006: It Must Change.” PMLA 122:3 (2007): 652–62.

A BECKETT CHRONOLOGY

“And I am perhaps confusing several different occasions,

and different times, deep down, and deep down is my dwelling,

oh not deepest down, somewhere between the mud and the scum.”

—Molloy (11)

1902: Mary Roe “May” Beckett (1871–1950) gives birth to her first son, Frank

Edward Beckett, in Cooldrinagh on 26 July, some two months after the parents

moved into their new Foxrock home.

1906: May gives birth to her second son, Samuel Barclay Beckett (SB), also at

home in Cooldrinagh on 13 April, Good Friday. The official birth certificate,

however, lists 13 May as the date of birth, an error that has confused more than

one of SB’s early biographers.

1911–1915: SB attends a small, private kindergarten school run by two German

sisters, Misses Ida and Pauline Elsner, in Leopardstown. Shortly thereafter the

Beckett brothers leave the Misses Elsners’ Academy to attend a larger school called

Earlsfort House in Dublin, not far from the Harcourt Street station.

1916: Between 24 and 29 April, the Easter Rising occurs in Dublin, an abortive

(though profoundly momentous) attempt by the Irish Volunteers and the Irish

Citizen Army to establish the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic.

The Becketts are safely sequestered from any violence in the affluent Protestant

village of Foxrock, but the “Troubles” continue as the Anglo-Irish War (1919–21)

is followed by the Irish Civil War (1921–2). SB’s father takes his sons, Frank and

Samuel, to a hilltop where they can see the fires in neighboring Dublin. The image

will stay with SB his entire life.

1920: Begins attending Portora Royal School, as did Oscar Wilde, in Enniskillen

in the northern county of Fermanagh. For the 1921 school year SB discovered that

he now attended school in a foreign country, Northern Ireland, UK.

1923: Enters Trinity College, Dublin (TCD) as an undergraduate to study for

an Arts degree. Soon meets Thomas Rudmose-Brown, Professor of Modern

Languages, who is to have a lasting impact on SB, perhaps most notably developing

SB’s interest in contemporary French literature and by encouraging him to write

xviii ON BECKETT

creatively. SB would satirize his mentor as the Polar Bear in his first extended

piece of fiction, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, a novel he struggled with through

1931–2, offered to a series of publishers unsuccessfully, and then suppressed until

after his death. It was finally published in 1995. A second important lecturer

was Bianca Esposito, who (along with Walter Starkie) teaches him Italian and

inaugurates his lifelong passion for Dante. He would take private lessons from

Signorina Esposito as well. Those lessons at 21 Ely Place were then caricatured in

the short story “Dante and the Lobster.” SB retained lifelong affection for Dante,

however, evident by the fact that his student copy of The Divine Comedy would be at

his bedside as he died in December of 1989. Soon after he arrives at TCD, SB falls

in love, for the first time, with Ethna MacCarthy, a charming, experienced, mature

young woman who inspires two of his poems, “Alba” and “Yoke of Liberty,”

appears as a fleeting reference in “Sanies I,” and more fully as the Alba in Dream of

Fair to Middling Women. The affection seemed to have been one-sided, however, and

she would eventually marry SB’s best friend, A. J. “Con” Leventhal. Her death in

1959 increased the already close bond between SB and Leventhal.

1925–1926: Sees W. B. Yeats’s versions of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Oedipus

at Colonus at the Abbey Theatre. Toward the end of 1926 insomnia, night sweats,

and feelings of panic begin to afflict him. In August of 1926 he visits France for the

first time, taking a bicycle tour of the châteaux of the Loire Valley, to improve his

spoken French. On his return to Ireland he moves into rooms at 39 New Square

in TCD. At the end of 1926, Alfred Péron arrives form Paris as the new exchange

lecteur. Péron and SB’s friendship lasts throughout the ‘30s and is to have major

significance during World War II.

1927: With an American friend, Charles Clark, he tours Florence and Venice to

improve his spoken Italian. While there he tours museums and galleries, studying

artistic masterpieces that will resurface in much of his subsequent writing. At

Trinity he completes his examinations, places first in his class, and receives his BA

in Modern Languages (French and Italian).

1928: Wins a research prize (either £50 or £100) from TCD for his essay on

“Unanimisme.” Through the good offices of his mentor Rudmose-Brown he

obtains a teaching post in French and English at Campbell College, Belfast, a

residential public school, while he waits to take up his exchange lectureship as

Lectueur d’Anglais at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Teaches for two terms in Belfast

and dislikes the experience, finding it difficult to teach elementary material and to

get up in time for his first lesson. Returns to Dublin in the summer and meets his

cousin Peggy Sinclair, who will appear as the Smeraldina-Rima in Dream of Fair

to Middling Women. Her fictional treatment is, to say the least, unsympathetic. In

October, despite heated parental opposition, he visits Peggy in Kassel, Germany.

Leaves Kassel at the end of October and arrives in Paris on the last day of the

CHRONOLOGY xix

month to take up his teaching post as Lectueur d’Anglais at École Normale Supérieure.

Meets his predecessor Thomas MacGreevy, who becomes a lifelong confidant

and who introduces him to influential writers and publishers living in Paris, James

Joyce, Eugene Jolas, and Sylvia Beach among them. Although he is not enthusiastic

about a scholarly career, his immersion in the Parisian literary circle has profound

artistic import. He returns to Kassel for the Christmas holiday, and much of that

stay is parodied in Dream of Fair to Middling Women.

1929: Meets Suzanne Deschevaux-Demesnil at a private tennis club; he will

eventually marry her in 1961. SB publishes his first critical essay “Dante…

Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” in transition magazine, together with his first piece of fiction,

“Assumption.” Makes many trips to Kassel throughout 1929 to visit Peggy (and

her family).

1930: Publishes his first separate work, the long poem Whoroscope, which he writes

in several hours on 15 June for a contest, on the subject of Time, sponsored by

Richard Aldington and Nancy Cunard, which prize he wins. Begins to translate the

“Anna Livia Plurabelle” section of Joyce’s Work in Progress (later to become Finnegans

Wake) with Alfred Péron. Under a commission arranged by Thomas McGreevy, he

begins to write the monograph Proust, which is heavily reliant on his deep reading of

Schopenhauer; delivers completed monograph to Chatto and Windus toward the end

of September on his way home to Dublin (via London) to take up his appointment

as Lecturer in French at TCD. First meets Jack B. Yeats (in November), an artist who

exercises considerable influence on SB. SB eventually purchases a painting called

“Morning,” which hangs over his Paris desk for most of his life.

1931: Reluctantly plays a part in three performances of Le Kid at the Peacock

Theatre between 19–21 February, SB’s only known acting part. Has a falling-out

with his mother and grows increasingly dissatisfied with his teaching post at TCD.

Visits France with his brother, Frank. Translates numerous pieces for the Surrealist

number of This Quarter. In late autumn writes “Enueg.” In September becomes

engrossed in Victor Bérard’s French translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Regularly

visits the National Gallery of Ireland. Decides to resign his post at TCD, though

the execution of this decision comes the following year in a letter from Kassel,

Germany.

1932: Moves to Paris, resumes friendship with Joyce in the first few weeks, and

completes his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Writes “Serena I” after

returning to Dublin at the end of August.

1933: Learns that Peggy Sinclair has died of tuberculosis on 3 May. Father

dies on 26 June of a heart attack, which death devastates (and haunts) SB.

Finds out on 25 September that Charles Prentice accepted his collection of

xx ON BECKETT

stories (several of which are recast versions of episodes from Dream of Fair to

Middling Women) called More Pricks Than Kicks (MPTK). Writes the story “Echo’s

Bones” as an end piece for the short-story collection, but Chatto and Windus

rejects it, and it remains unpublished. Commences intensive psychotherapy

in London at the Tavistock Clinic after Christmas to manage his deepening

depression. Translates numerous pieces for Nancy Cunard’s Negro Anthology,

which is published in 1934.

1934: Publishes “A Case in a Thousand” in the Bookman in August, which reflects

his immersion in psychotherapy. MPTK is published in London on 24 May. Writes

the four-line poem “Gnome” and an enthusiastic review of MacGreevy’s Poems for

Dublin Magazine.

1935: Attends Carl G. Jung’s third lecture at the Tavistock Clinic with his analyst

Wilfred Bion in October, an experience that resurfaces most overtly in All That Fall

(written twenty-one years later) and Footfalls (written over forty years later). Begins

writing Murphy on 20 August, which makes extensive use of his detailed knowledge

of London’s geographical terrain. A collection of thirteen poems is published in

December, Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates. He terminates psychotherapy.

1936: He returns to Dublin to complete Murphy. Briefly considers going to

Moscow to the State Institute of Cinematography, writing to Eisenstein about

the possibility of becoming his pupil, but this comes to nothing. Writes the poem

“Cascando” in July. Leaves the family home, Cooldrinagh, on 28 September and

travels around Germany, keeping a detailed diary of his excursions. Returns to

Cooldrinagh. “Boss” Sinclair dies on 4 May. SB’s brother marries on 24 August.

SB leaves Dublin in the middle of October for Paris, which is to be his permanent

home for the next 53 years.

1937: First significant attempt to write a play, which is based on the last years in

the life of Dr. Samuel Johnson and is called Human Wishes. Returns to Dublin to

give evidence at a trial against Oliver St. John Gogarty’s book As I Was Going Down

Sackville Street, the action brought by Harry “Boss” Sinclair before his death, for

accusations of slander. Following his testimony, during which he is thoroughly

humiliated, SB returns to Paris.

1938: After dining with friends on 7 January, SB is stabbed by a beggar and

pimp named Prudent. Recovers in Hôpital Broussais, where he corrects proofs

to Murphy, and is visited by Suzanne, who not long thereafter begins to live with

him. Murphy is finally published, after 42 rejections, in March. SB starts to write

poetry in French, which allows him to begin purging his writing of unnecessary

superfluities.

CHRONOLOGY xxi

1939: Hitler invades Poland on 1 September; two days later Chamberlain

announces that Britain is at war with Germany (as is France by this time). SB is

caught in Dublin visiting his mother but immediately returns to Paris, famously

declaring his preference for France at war to Ireland at peace. Joyce’s Finnegans

Wake is published.

1940: France crumbles under the Nazi assault in June.

1941: In February SB begins to write Watt in Paris. On 1 September joins the

Resistance cell called “Gloria SMH,” primarily an information network, a

decidedly dangerous enterprise—despite SB’s subsequently dismissive attitude

regarding the experience. Joyce dies in Zurich in January.

1942: Alfred Péron is arrested. SB and Suzanne escape a close encounter with the

Gestapo and find refuge on October 6 in a small village in the south of France

called Roussillon.

1943: Continues on 1 March to write Watt, primarily to ward off ennui.

1944: Finishes manuscript of Watt on 28 December.

1945: SB and Suzanne leave Roussillon for Paris early in the year, and SB

immediately returns to Dublin to visit his mother only to learn that she suffers from

Parkinson’s disease. SB joins the Irish Red Cross as a translator and quartermaster

in order to return to France and is posted at St-Lô, Normandy. Péron dies on 1 May.

SB returns to Paris toward the end of the year when his contract comes to an end.

He is awarded the Croix de Guerre for his role in the Resistance.

1946: In Paris SB writes a short story entitled “Suite,” later called “La Fin,” which

is his first extended prose work in French. Begins writing his first novel in French,

Mercier et Camier, on 5 July, and completes it on 3 October. In the final months of

1946, writes three more stories in French: “L’Expulsé,” “Premier amour,” and “Le

Calmant.”

1947: Writes first full-length play in French, Eleutheria. Begins writing Molloy on

2 May at New Place in Foxrock. Between this date and January of 1950, completes

Molloy, Malone meurt (begun on 27 November), and L’Innommable (begun on 29 March

1949), in what amounts to SB’s most creatively fertile period.

1948–1949: En attendant Godot is written between October of 1948 and January of

1949, between Malone meurt and L’Innommable, in order to break through an artistic

impasse.

xxii ON BECKETT

1950: May Beckett dies on 25 August and is buried with her husband in the

Protestant cemetery at Redford. SB signs an exclusive contract with Les Editions

de Minuit, which will be the publisher for his French work for the remainder of his

life. Its publisher Jérôme Lindon will become a life-long friend.

1951: Molloy is published in March, Malone meurt in October. The manuscript of

Texts pour rien is completed in December.

1952: Builds a house with money his mother left him, near the village of Ussy-sur-

Marne, a place of refuge and solitude that soon facilitates SB’s creative energies.

Godot is published in October. Eleutheria is announced for publication and then

withdrawn at the last moment.

1953: Roger Blin directs the premier of Godot on 19 January at the Théâtre de

Babylon. The show receives mixed but generally sympathetic reviews. Watt is finally

published in English, but in Paris. Fledgling American publishing house Grove

Press becomes SB’s exclusive American publisher, and the publisher Barney Rosset

becomes a life-long friend. SB begins to translate Godot into English for his American

publisher. His international reputation is considerably advanced by his American

publisher’s willingness to promote so apparently un-commercial a writer.

1954: Learns that Frank is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. SB, devastated,

rushes to his aid in Killiney. Frank dies on 13 September. SB writes first draft of

what becomes Fin de partie (Endgame), this early version with only two characters.

1955: The English edition of Molloy is published in March by Grove Press. Waiting

for Godot opens in London and Dublin. Finishes first draft of Fin de partie in the

summer. Nouvelles et textes pour rien is published in November. “Getting known.”

1956: The American production of Godot opens on 3 January at the Coconut

Grove Playhouse in Miami under the direction of Alan Schneider. The production

is badly received. During the summer SB writes All That Fall at the BBC’s request;

this radio play is clearly saturated with memories of his Foxrock upbringing.

1957: All That Fall airs on BBC Third Programme on 13 January; the broadcast

delights SB, who is busy rehearsing in Paris for Fin de partie. Jack B. Yeats dies in

March. Fin de partie is produced in London on 3 April at the Royal Court Theatre

in French. SB translates Fin de partie into English between May and August.

1958: Begins writing Krapp’s Last Tape, a deeply personal play, in February. Also

begins in January the laborious task of translating L’Innommable into English,

published as The Unnamable by Grove Press. On 8 July SB and Suzanne set out for

a three-week vacation to Yugoslavia. Begins writing Comment c’est in December.

CHRONOLOGY xxiii

1959: Sends Embers to BBC in February. Ethna MacCarthy dies on 25 May.

Receives an honorary D. Litt. from TCD on 2 July, which he reluctantly accepts.

1960: Finishes Comment c’est in the summer. On 8 October begins to write what

is to become Happy Days, working on it throughout the next three months. In the

winter moves to a permanent apartment in Paris.

1961: Marries Suzanne on 25 March in a simple, private ceremony. Returns

home after the wedding to revise Happy Days. Begins translation of Happy Days

into French and Comment C’est into English, the latter published by Grove Press as

How It Is in 1964. Donald McWhinnie’s television production of Godot is broadcast

on 26 June, with which SB is not satisfied. In the autumn SB befriends American

academic Lawrence Harvey, who is visiting Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship to

write about SB’s poetry and criticism. The work will be published as Samuel Beckett:

Poet and Critic, the only important full-length study (even to date) of these facets

of SB’s oeuvre. Words and Music written between November and December and

Cascando (his first radio play in French) in December.

1962: Begins Play in July and finishes translating Happy Days as Oh, Les beaux jours

in November. Begins translating How It Is.

1963: Completes Film and Play and assists with the German production of the

latter, thus establishing his continuous engagement with the production of his own

plays. Meets Billie Whitelaw for the first time at the London production of Play;

becomes captivated by her and commences a long working relationship and a close

friendship with the actress.

1964. Travels to New York during the intensely hot summer to aid in the

production of Film, starring legendary film actor Buster Keaton (whose work SB

greatly admires); this is to be SB’s only visit to the United States.

1965: Writes Imagination morte imaginez and Eh Joe (his first television play) in the

spring. Writes Assez and begins Le dépeupleur in the autumn.

1966: Translates Textes pour rien into English and helps with the translation of Watt

into French.

1967: SB is diagnosed with glaucoma. Thomas MacGreevy, one of his oldest friends,

dies, which consequently devastates SB. Begins a directing career in Berlin at the

Schiller-Theater Werkstatt with Endspiel (Endgame), which opens 26 September 1967.

1969: Writes Sans and translates it as Lessness. Awarded the Nobel Prize for

Literature on 23 October. A dark horse, SB beat out the favorite that year, Norman

xxiv ON BECKETT

Mailer. Rather than rejecting it like Jean-Paul Sartre, he sends his French publisher

Jérôme Lindon to accept the prize in his absence, and quickly disperses the prize

money to needy friends.

1970: Finally consents to the long-delayed publications of Mercier et Camier and Premier

amour, both of which were written in 1946. Undergoes eye surgery for cataracts.

1972: Writes Not I in the spring and translates Premier amour into English in April–

May. During the summer, SB is inundated by friends, family, and visitors, among

them Deirdre Bair who is writing SB’s first biography. He famously tells her that

he will neither help nor hinder her efforts.

1973: Despite an emotionally wrenching series of rehearsals, Billie Whitelaw leads

a very successful production of Not I in London, thus deepening SB’s respect for

her talents. Writes As the Story Was Told in August.

1974: Experiences a creative explosion and is inspired to begin That Time, a

companion piece to Not I, on 8 June in Paris; both of these highly experimental

plays, as SB himself acknowledges, challenge the remotest limits of what is possible

in a theatre.

1975: Directs Godot in German at Berlin in March and begins Footfalls. Also directs

the French version of Not I (Pas moi) in Paris in April and writes Pour finir encore in

December.

1976: Begins the television play …but the clouds… in the autumn. Footfalls and That

Time are performed at the Royal Court Theatre on 20 May as part of a seventieth

birthday celebration. Beckett himself directs Whitelaw in Footfalls.

1977: Begins to write Company, a profoundly personal piece saturated with

memories form childhood. Filmed version of Not I is aired on BBC2 in April.

Directs Krapp’s Last Tape in Berlin.

1979: SB’s oldest friend of more than fifty years, A. J. (“Con”) Leventhal, dies on

3 October. Also begins writing Mal vu mal dit (Ill Seen Ill Said).

1980: On 7 May SB flies to London to direct Endgame with Rick Cluchey and the

San Quentin Drama Workshop. At those rehearsals S. E. Gontarski asks SB for a

new play for a Symposium planned for May of 1981 in Columbus, Ohio, to honor

his seventy-fifth birthday. He begins to write what will become Ohio Impromptu.

1981: Ohio Impromptu has its world premiere in Ohio, directed by Alan Schneider,

on 9 May 1981. Writes and translates Rockaby at the instigation of Danielle Labeille

for another festival honoring his 75th birthday.

CHRONOLOGY xxv

1982: Writes and translates Catastrophe; writes and directs “Nacht und Träume.”

SB’s production of Quad is broadcast in Germany by Süddeutscher Rundfunk, and

Catastrophe is performed at the Avignon Festival.

1984: Roger Blin dies on 20 January. Visits London to oversee San Quentin Drama

Workshop production of Waiting for Godot, prepared by Walter Asmuss.

1986: SB’s health starts to decline with the beginnings of emphysema.

1988: Writes “Fragment for Barney Rosset,” which becomes Stirrings Still; published

in a luxury edition with illustrations by Louis LeBrocquy.

1989: Suzanne dies on 17 July. On 11 December SB falls into a coma, and dies

at 1:00 p.m. on 22 December. He is buried beside Suzanne in Montparnasse

Cemetery.

1992: Dream of Fair to Middling Women is posthumously published.

1995: Eleutheria is posthumously published.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The contributors to this volume have been cheerfully cooperative in the face of

requests for editorial changes to be made under difficult deadlines and have earned

my gratitude. In particular I should like to thank James Knowlson, only coincidentally

my predecessor at the editorial helm of the Journal of Beckett Studies, for doing double

duty as critic and translator. For released time to complete this volume, I am grateful

to the Department of English at the Georgia Institute of Technology, its head, A. D.

Van Nostrand, and the dean of the College of Sciences and Liberal Studies, Lester

A. Karlovitz. At Grove Press this manuscript has been in the very capable hands

of my editor, John Oakes, whom I thank warmly for his enthusiasm and the care

he has lavished on this project.

Quotations from Beckett’s works throughout are to the most recent Grove Press

editions except where otherwise noted.

For permission to reprint the essays, I thank the following:

Chris Ackerley, “The Unnamable’s First Voice?” Journal of Beckett Studies n.s. 2.2

(Spring 1993): 53–58.

Walter D. Asmus, “Beckett Directs Godot,” Theatre Quarterly, 5 (19, 20, September,

November 1975): 19–26.

Walter D. Asmus, “Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beck ett’s That

Time and Footfalls at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt, Berlin,” Journal of Beckett Studies,

no. 2 (Summer 1977): 82–95.

Pierre Astier, “Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu: A view from the Isle of Swans,” Modern

Drama, 25 (September 1982): 331–41.

Georges Bataille, “Molloy’s Silence,” Critique, 7 (May 1951): 387–96.

Maurice Blanchot, “Where Now? Who Now?” Evergreen Review, 2 (7, Winter 1959):

222–29.

Herbert Blau, “Notes from the Underground: Waiting for Godot and Endgame,” The

Impossible Theater: A Manifesto (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1964).

“Dialogue: Roger Blin and Tom Bishop,” Cahiers de L’Herne: Samuel Beckett (Paris:

Editions de l’Herne, 1976), 141–46.

Victor Bockris, ed., “Burroughs with Beckett in Berlin,” With William Burroughs:

A Report from the Bunker (New York: Seaver Books, 1981), 209–14. Reprinted with

permission of Seaver Books.

xxviii ON BECKETT

Enoch Brater, “Light, Sound, Movement, and Action in Beckett’s Rockaby,” Modern

Drama, 25 (September 1982): 342–48.

Ruby Cohn, “Beckett Directs: Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape,” Just Play: Beckett’s

Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 249–70.

J. E. Dearlove, “The Voice and Its Words: How It Is,” Accommodating the Chaos: Samuel

Beckett’s Nonrelational Art (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1982), 85–106.

Martin Esslin, “Samuel Beckett and the Art of Radio,” Mediations: Essays on Brecht,

Beckett, and the Media (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1982), 125–54.

S. E. Gontarski, “Literary Allusions in Happy Days,” Beckett’s Happy Days:

A Manuscript Study (Columbus: The Ohio State University Li brary Publications,

1977), 59–73.

S. E. Gontarski, “Quad and Catastrophe,” The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s

Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 179–82.

Lawrence E. Harvey, “Watt,” Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Prince ton: Princeton

University Press, 1970), 348–84. Reprinted by permis sion of Princeton University

Press.

Wolfgang Iser, “When Is the End Not the End? The Idea of Fiction in Beckett,”

The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 257–73.

James Knowlson, “Footfalls,” Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel

Beckett (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1980), 220–28.

Paul Lawley, “Counterpoint, Absence, and the Medium in Beckett’s Not I,” Modern

Drama, 26 (4, December 1983): 407–13.

Eric P. Levy, “Mercier and Camier: Narration, Dante, and the Couple,” Beckett and

the Voice of Species: A Study of the Prose Fiction (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books,

1980), 39–53.

“MacGowran on Beckett,” Interview by Richard Toscan, Theatre Quar terly, 3 (11,

July–September 1973): 15–22.

Dougald McMillan, “Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts: The Em barrassment

of Allegory,” Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism, Ruby Cohn, ed. (New York:

McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1975), 121–35.

Dougald McMillan, “Worstward Ho,” Irish Literary Supplement, 3 (2, Fall 1984): 39.

Marjorie Perloff, “Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New Poetry,” Critical

Inquiry, 9 (2, December 1982): 415–34.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xxix

Rubin Rabinovitz, “Murphy and the Uses of Repetition,” The Devel opment of Samuel

Beckett’s Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 71–103.

Alan Schneider, “Working with Beckett,” Samuel Beckett: The Art of Rhetoric, Edouard

Morot-Sir, Howard Harper, and Dougald Mc Millan, eds. (Chapel Hill: North

Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1976), 271–89.

Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Richard W. Seaver, “Beckett and Merlin,” Samuel Beckett: I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On

(New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1976), x–xviii, xxiii–xxv.

* * *

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot. From Collected

Introduction

CRRITICS AND CRRITICISM:

“GETTING KNOWN”

Vladimir: Sewer-rat!

Estragon: Curate!

Vladimir: Cretin!

Estragon (with finality): Crritic!

On 13 April 1986 Samuel Barclay Beckett marked his eightieth birthday, an

event commemorated by international festivals, performances, and publications

unprecedented in an author’s lifetime. Such attention was neither sought nor

particularly welcomed by Beckett, but it is fully the measure of his impact on

the literature and culture of the latter half of the twentieth century—on that

period now regularly called postmodern. With his eye on an academic career,

Beckett began publishing in the twilight of the twenties with a pair of essays finally

more polemical than critical—a defense of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake with its

quirky, temporal punctuation, “Dante …Bruno . Vico .. Joyce” (1929), and the

commissioned monograph Proust (1931)—and a long, arcane poem, Whoroscope

(1930), written within and simultaneously beyond the modernist tradition of The

Waste Land and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

However, Beckett’s work garnered little critical attention until the trilogy began

to appear just after mid-century.1 By then Beckett had completed an additional six

prose works (three in English and the French trilogy), a volume of poems, Echo’s

Bones and Other Precipitates (1935), two full-length plays (one of which, Eleuthéria, he

offered to Roger Blin along with Godot for production but subsequently withdrew),

and an assortment of reviews as acidic and polemical as the early essays.2

Publication in these years, however, usually lagged behind compo sition, and in

1951, at age forty-five, having been publishing for more than two decades, Beckett

was little known outside a small circle of avant-garde artists. It is a memory he

doubtless tapped for one of Krapp’s birthday memoirs: “Seventeen copies sold,

of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas. Getting

known.”3

As the century turned its midpoint, however, Beckett’s critical reputation turned as

well. By the early 1950s his French work began to appear from Les Editions de Minuit:

Molloy and Malone Meurt in 1951, En attendant Godot in 1952, and L’Innommable in 1953.

This work began to generate notice from the likes of Jean Anouilh, Alain Robbe-

Grillet, and Maurice Blanchot, among others. The earliest serious assessment was

2 ON BECKETT

a longish review from the novelist and disaffected surrealist Georges Bataille, which

appeared in the literary journal Critique in 1951 (here reprinted in a fresh translation

by John Pilling). That early enthusiasm for Beckett’s French work is further reflected

in Maurice Blanchot’s analysis of The Unnamable, “Where Now? Who Now?” and in

Richard Seaver’s memoir “Beckett and Merlin.” (Merlin not only published excerpts

from Watt and Molloy, but also printed Seaver’s own critical analysis, “Samuel

Beckett: An Introduction,” in the autumn of 1952.)

Interest in the United States followed as translations of the French work began

to appear from Grove Press: Waiting for Godot in 1954, Molloy ( jointly with Olympia

Press, Paris) in 1955, Malone Dies in 1956, and The Unnamable and Endgame in 1958.

The work quickly caught the attention of the American academic community. Edith

Kern, for instance, published her “Drama Stripped for Inaction: Beckett’s Godot ”

in the winter of 1954–55. The Irish-American critic Vivian Mercier produced a

series of essays and reviews of Beckett’s work in 1955 for New Republic, Hudson

Review, New Statesman, and The Nation. Ruby Cohn edited the first special issue of

a journal devoted to Beckett’s work, Perspective, in the autumn of 1959, completed

the first doctoral dissertation on Beckett’s work at Washington University, St. Louis,

the following year, and published it two years later with Rutgers University Press as

Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut.

The first book to appear in English on Beckett’s work, however, was Hugh

Kenner’s perceptive Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study, pub lished by Grove Press in

1961 and by John Calder in 1962. Kenner, who had caused a critical stir in 1956

with his revised dissertation, Dublin’s Joyce, first came across Beckett’s name in an essay

by Mercier (the polymath to whom Kenner’s book is dedicated), “Dublin under the

Joyces.” The essay sent him to the Yale library to ferret out Murphy. Regrettably,

not every member of that first generation of critics—that group which Ruby Cohn

calls Becketteers—can be represented in this volume and still retain a substantial

emphasis on the post-1961 work, but assuredly all subsequent analysts of Beckett’s

art stand on their critical shoulders.

In the “Personal Foreword” to Back to Beckett (1973), Ruby Cohn recalls an editorial

rebuke to her early efforts to publish criticism about Samuel Beckett’s work: “We

like your criticism, but we don’t feel your author merits publishing space.” The

rejection seemed confirmation of Beckett’s self-deprecating comment to Richard

Seaver: “No one’s interested in this… this rubbish.” By 1967, however, writing the

introduction to his festschrift, Beckett at 60, John Calder (publisher of Beckett’s poetry

and prose in England) could claim, “More books have been written on Christ,

Napoleon and Wagner, in that order, than anyone else. I predict that by 2000 a.d.

Beckett may well rank fourth if the present flood of literature keeps up.”

Calder’s comments may seem wildly extravagant, a publisher’s fan tasy; yet

the hyperbole does capture the growing interest in Beckett’s art. Since Beckett

was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969, the critical waters have risen substantially.

When Raymond Federman’s and John Fletcher’s monumental Samuel Beckett, His

Works and His Critics: An Essay in Bibliography appeared in 1970, it covered critical

INTRODUCTION 3

material up to 1966 (1968 for books) and cited some 580 articles and 31 books;

yet it already needed a supplement.4 By 1976, when Tom Bishop and Raymond

Federman edited the Beckett number of Cahiers de L’Herne, they estimated that sixty-

odd books and five thousand articles on Beckett were in print. The progression

continues geometrically.

Yet despite the staggering amount of analysis of Beckett’s work already in

print, it has yet to receive thorough critical scrutiny. Part of the function of this

introduction is not only to survey what has been done but also to suggest some of

what needs doing. Beckett’s translations, for example, particularly those of other

writers, remain neg lected. In the 1930s Beckett thought to earn something like a

living from translation and, in spurts, did an astonishing amount of it, even tackling

the untranslatable “Anna Livia Plurabelle” episode of Finnegans Wake, for which,

as Richard Seaver notes, he received almost no credit. His contribution to the

surrealist number of This Quarter (September 1932) was so substantial, for example,

that general editor Edward Titus could say, “We cannot refrain from singling out

Mr. Samuel Beckett’s work for special acknowledgment. His rendering of the

[Paul] Éluard and [André] Breton poems in particular is characterizable only in

superlatives.”

The single most neglected work in the Beckett canon is doubtless the volume

of Mexican verse he translated in 1950 under a UNESCO commission. Beckett

translated more than one hundred poems by some thirty-five Mexican poets

selected by Octavio Paz, and the volume was published as Anthology of Mexican

Poetry by Indiana University Press in 1958, after annoying delays. Although Beckett

“loathed” the work and inscribed the presentation copy to friend Con Leventhal,

“Cette vieille foutaise alimentaire,” his achievement received some early praise. James

Schuyler called the translations a “Horowitz performance of linguistic gift and

skill.”5 Yet the volume languishes, along with the translations for This Quarter and

transition and his translation of Robert Pinget’s La manivelle, published as The Old

Tune (Evergreen Review 5 [March–April 1961]: 47–60), in critical obscurity.

Admittedly, Beckett’s translations are not praised without qualification

when they do receive notice. Reviewing several texts including Collected Poems

in English and French (1977) and Beckett’s translation of Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre

(1932), once thought lost in the files of This Quarter, Richard Coe finds Beckett’s

translations at best uneven, principally because “Beckett as a ‘poet’ is playing

about on the surface of language. It is a hit-and-miss business. Sometimes it

works, sometimes it does not.”6 In an essay entitled “Beckett’s English,” Coe

makes his point even more strongly: “Now, it is generally assumed that Beckett

is a superlative translator from the French, whether his own or anyone else’s.

It is true that he can be….On the other hand, there are some efforts that had best

been left unpublished. Rimbaud’s Bateau ivre is one of these.”7

While Coe’s 1964 monograph Beckett, from Oliver and Boyd in England and

Grove Press in the United States, remains a useful introduction to some of the

philosophical underpinnings of Beckett’s early and middle fiction, Coe seems

4 ON BECKETT

preoccupied with the “ideas” in Beck ett’s work at the expense of its lyric and formal

features. (It is precisely such a traditional critical quest for meaning that Wolfgang

Iser addresses when he analyzes “The Idea of Fiction in Beckett.”) But despite

the limitations of Coe’s criticism, he does skewer a salient point about Beckett’s

art: Even as a translator Beckett thinks as a poet. Marjorie Perloff concurs as she

analyzes Beckett’s late prose, particularly Ill Seen Ill Said, as does Enoch Brater

as he examines the late drama and calls Rockaby a “performance poem.” It is a

point, furthermore, evident to any reader of Beckett’s letters. The ten-line poem

embedded in the radio play Words and Music provides an example. Except for its

lineation, it is almost indistinguishable from the play’s prose:

Then down the little way

Through the trash

Towards where

All dark no begging

No giving no words

No sense no need

Through the scum

Down a little way

To whence one glimpse

Of that wellhead.8

Despite the skepticism about communication apparent in almost any of Beckett’s

works—indeed, because of that skepticism—Beckett remains a wordsmith, the

most profound Joycean legacy in his art. In a 1937 letter to friend Axel Kaun,

the 31-year-old Beckett outlined his antimodernist aesthetics in characteristically

paradoxical terms: “To bore one hole after another in [language], until what

lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through. I cannot

imagine a higher goal for a writer today.”9 Beckett’s “literature of the un-word,”

however, is always attained through words, through immaculately used language.

Within the generic and experimental diversity of his art, the connecting thread is

its poetic, almost always lyric quality, even when language is turned against itself.

Whatever Beckett is writing, fiction, drama, teleplays, criticism, translations, or

even letters, he is foremost a poet.

The essays in this volume have been selected with an eye toward representing the

range of Beckett’s work and the historical and ideological breadth of the criticism

that engages it. The selections have further been designed to invite continuous

reading, to comment on and develop each other so that the volume as a whole

reads more like a unified book—as much as such is possible given the diversity of

hands at work—than a random collection of essays.

The Preliminaries section acts as an overture and is designed to introduce

several fundamental, interrelated issues, as well as three distinct critical approaches.

Richard Seaver’s memoir not only evokes the shock of his own discovery of Beckett

INTRODUCTION 5

and his work but also offers an insightful vignette about working with Beckett on

the translation of “La Fin.” Dougald McMillan details the extent to which the

visual arts and Dante (especially editions with the Botticelli illustrations) inform

Beckett’s art. Dante was a passion Beckett shared with Joyce, and their mutual

admiration for the Florentine was at least one of the reasons Beckett was selected

by Joyce to write the essay “Dante …Bruno . Vico .. Joyce.”

That rich texture of literary and visual allusions in Beckett’s work is developed

in many of the volume’s essays, particularly in Rubin Rabinovitz’s analysis of

Murphy, Eric P. Levy’s study of Mercier and Camier, and my own look at Happy Days.

Although most of the critics herein analyze or at least mention Beckett’s use of

Dante, a thorough study that does for Beckett’s art as a whole what Levy has done

for Mercier and Camier has yet to be undertaken.10

Wolfgang Iser brings a more theoretical perspective to Beckett’s work, yet still

manages to focus on particular texts. The whole of his book The Implied Reader, for

instance, engages Wayne Booth’s argument in The Rhetoric of Fiction for an “implied

author,” and the analysis of ends and ending anthologized here takes issue with

Frank Kermode’s very influential study The Sense of an Ending. Iser discusses how

Beckett anticipates and subverts our sense of ends and counters his audience’s

attempts, its need, to project meaning. Iser’s phenomenological approach draws

attention to the role of the reader and spectator in Beckett’s art, and he examines

how Beckett “draws the spectator into the play.”

The early criticism of Bataille and Blanchot is significant because it anticipates

much of the upheaval of post-structuralist literary theory, particularly Bataille’s

polysemous and oxymoronic view of “language as possibility, as ruleless game,”

and Blanchot’s devaluation or dissolution of the author. Bataille is also keen to

sense in 1951 that contradiction is the very signature of Beckett’s work. Yet that

early momentum, that theoretical and narratological interest in Beckett’s art, has

not been sustained (partly no doubt because Beckett deconstructs his own texts so

thoroughly that deconstructive analyses, at any rate, often seem merely redundant),

and so Iser’s work is particularly welcome. With Blanchot, Iser shares an interest

in the question of how we deal with the human tendency to impose order on

texts. The role of the reader or spectator in the phenomenological process of

reading (interpreted broadly to include painting, sculpture, and theater as well as

books among its objects), in the process of constructing meaning generally, is a

perspective surprisingly little analyzed in a body of work itself so concerned with

the phenomenon of perception.

The section called The Page takes up many of the issues sounded in

Preliminaries but focuses on particular works of fiction. Rubin Rabinovitz’s

remarkably detailed analysis of the patterns of repetition in Murphy highlights

Beckett’s strongly formalist aesthetics even in so early a work. Already at work in

Murphy is the recurrent, cyclic structure so evident in the two acts of Godot, the two

parts of Molloy and Play, a structure that culminates in Beckett’s most geometric

work, Quad. The corresponding tendency toward poetic repetition so obvious in a

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On Beckett Essays and Criticism PDF Free Download

On Beckett Essays and Criticism PDF free Download. Think more deeply and widely.

Uploaded by _michelle_crawford_ on 5/2/2026

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