DREAM
OF FAIR
to middling
WOMEN
DREAM
OF FAIR
to middling
WOMEN a novel
SAMUEL
BECKETT
Edited by Eoin O'Brien and Edith Fournier
Foreword by Eoin O'Brien
Fifteen hundred copies of the Collector's Edition of
Dream of Fair to Middling Women
have been specialty printed on 100 gsm Chinese Yulong Cream paper. Each copy has a ribbon marker, decorative endpapers, and is bound in wibalin with gilt stamping on the cover and spine.
Copyright © 1992, 2011 by The Samuel Beckett Estate
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the work of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-313-3
Printed in China
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
The publication of Samuel Beckett's Dream of Fair to middling Women is an important event, both in itself and because, at long last, it brings to the public an essential text that has too long been available only to scholars.
Much will be made of the fact that Beckett did not allow the work to be published during his lifetime, and that when he referred to it, it was generally in derogatory terms. But those of us who knew Beckett for a long time—in my case roughly forty years—are well aware that he was prone to deprecate most, if not all, of his earlier work. Even Waiting for Godot did not go unscathed. In the 1970s when my wife and I were invited to see the revival of Godot, which was staged at the Odéon theater in Paris, we met the author after the play at a café in Montparnasse. Beckett was nursing a drink, and when we arrived he stood and greeted us warmly, as always, but then sat down and resumed communing for what seemed to us a very long time with the drink. Finally he asked us what we had thought of the play. We waxed enthusiastic, our reaction sincere, as he listened in silence. He knew that we had seen the original production some twenty years before at the tiny Théâtre de Babylone. “The stage is too big,” he said, “far too big,” referring to the generous proportions of the Odeon. We agreed that perhaps the play had lost a smidgen of its intimacy, but none of its power. He shook his head. “The text,” he said, “it doesn't stand up….” His voice trailed off. Would he have liked to go back and change it? No, he couldn't do that. It was what it was. But, on an evening that, from our viewpoint, should have been a celebration—for bringing Godot to the Odeon, a national theater, was a consecration—there was a definite undertone of wake on the part of the author. He, who was constantly honing, paring away the words that seemed either excessive or imprecise, moving ineluctably toward the silence that had always been so important to him, could see nothing but the flaws. Despite that, we eventually repaired, with the play's designer, Alberto Giacometti—whose stark set at the Odeon Beckett did fully appreciate—to a boîte a block or two away where, late in the evening, Beckett actually accepted an invitation to get up and dance.
All this is to say that if he was harsh about Waiting for Godot, a play that had revolutionized contemporary theater, was universally hailed as a masterpiece, and was constantly being performed around the world, one can readily imagine how unremitting his judgment could be of his earlier work. It took years and years of cajoling to get him to allow publication of Mercier and Camier, or the reissue of works long out of print such as More Pricks than Kicks or Whoroscope. The fact is that when he wrote Dream of Fair to middling Women, he ardently desired to see it published. He wrote it in the summer of 1932, after having abruptly resigned his teaching post at Trinity College, Dublin, finding teaching to be anathema to him, and he wrote it in what has been described as a “white heat,” finishing it before the end of summer. Having given up his two hundred pounds per annum stipend from Trinity, and with only symbolic monetary help from his parents, he felt the urgent need to earn some money from his writing. He knew that the book—which among other things contained incidents of sexual congress and masturbation, or what could very well be taken for such—could not be published in his native country, for reasons of censorship, which the editors of the present volume describe. He also knew it was impossible for any French publisher to take on and translate the novel, with its puns and wordplay, its word inventions and intentional misspellings. Most of his literary connections were in Paris, but the little magazines there were not in a position to publish more than an extract or two.
That left London. Beckett took the manuscript to England and sent it around to various British publishers. Chatto and Windus, who the previous year had published Beckett's perceptive essay on Proust to critical praise and considerable commercial success, seemed a likely prospect, as did the young, literary-oriented houses, Jonathan Cape and the Hogarth Press. But by early autumn 1932, he had found no takers and was down to his last five-pound note. One publisher's reader noted: “Beckett's probably a clever fellow… but I wouldn't touch this with a bargepole.” Another commented that it was “a slavish imitation of Joyce.” Its erotic content was also duly noted, needless to say negatively, and the word indecent was prominent in the evaluation. On October 8, 1932, Beckett wrote from Dublin, to which he was forced to retreat after his London debacle, to his close friend and fellow poet George Reavey:
The novel doesn't go. Shatton and Windup thought it was wonderful, but they couldn't, they simply could not. The Hogarth Private Lunatic Asylum rejected it the way Punch would. Cape was écoeueré [sic] in pipe and cardigan and his aberdeen terrier agreed with it. Grayson has lost it or cleaned himself with it. Kick his balls off. They are all over 66 Curzon St. W.l.
I'll be here till I die, creeping along genteel roads on a stranger's bike.
Subsequently, Beckett sent the novel to other British publishers, but to no avail. That he wanted it published and was sorely disappointed when it was not is uncontestable.
Twenty years after this first effort at publication, another opportunity arose for the book, at long last, to see the light of day. In 1951, a young group of us living in Paris began publishing a literary magazine reminiscent in many ways of those that flowered when Beckett first came to Paris. In the second issue of that magazine I wrote an essay on Beckett in which, with fairly little to go on—Murphy, Molloy, and Malone Dies—I proclaimed Beckett a writer of major importance “to anyone interested in contemporary literature.” Subsequently, Merlin featured something by Beckett in virtually every issue of the magazine. When, the following year, the Merlin group began to publish an occasional book and, having heard that Beckett—who by then was writing and publishing in French—had one, possibly two, unpublished manuscripts in English, I wrote the author through the intermediary of his French publisher, Jérôme Lindon, asking if Merlin could see it/them, with a view toward publicatio
n. The two were, Dream of Fair to middling Women and Watt, the second of which Beckett had written in the Vaucluse during the war. Eventually Beckett brought by the manuscript of Watt, which “Collection Merlin” duly published in 1953 in an edition of 1,125 copies, of which 25 were a limited edition signed by the author and 1,100 intended for “general circulation.” Beckett again wrote his old friend George Reavey, who after World War II had made a valiant effort to place Watt with a British publisher, without success:
Also, (tiens-toi bien) our old misery, Watt [is due out] with the Merlin juveniles, who are beginning a publishing house.
Two months later, after the book appeared, Beckett wrote Reavey again:
Watt is just out in an awful magenta cover from the Merlin Press.
Subsequently, we approached him with the idea of publishing the “other novel in English,” but Beckett politely declined. Whether his attitude was the result of the “awful magenta” cover of Watt or his reluctance to see Dream in print at that time will forever remain a mystery.
There was a final possibility the novel might be published in Beckett's lifetime. In 1986, when Beckett's longtime friend, American publisher Barney Rosset, was unceremoniously deposed from Grove Press, the publishing house he had founded, Beckett, quite characteristically, looked for ways to help. The best way would be to give him an unpublished work, and Dream came immediately to mind. Beckett discussed the idea with the future editor of the work, Eoin O'Brien, who had recently published the monumental The Beckett Country, which the author greatly admired, but eventually Beckett decided he could not face the pain—O'Brien's words—of going back to the manuscript. But, as O'Brien relates in his Foreword, Beckett did recognize that the book should indeed be published, but not until “some little time after my death.”
There is doubtless a kind of ironic, if belated, justice in the fact that, after all, Dream of Fair to middling Women was first published in Ireland, the only one of his works to be so honored, under the aegis of the Black Cat Press, of which Eoin O'Brien is a principal. I suspect, too, that Beckett would have been pleased to know that this first, simultaneous American and U.K. edition of “the chest into which [he] threw [his] wild thoughts” has been a collaborative effort between two of his oldest friends and publishing colleagues, his British publisher John Calder and me, and that Barney Rosset's advice and counsel on many key aspects of the publishing process of the work were cogent and perceptive.
—Richard Seaver
FOREWORD
“The chest into which I threw my wild thoughts.
Dream of Fair to middling Women, Samuel Beckett's first novel which has remained unpublished for sixty years, was written at the Trianon Hotel, on the Rue de Vaugirard in Paris, during the summer of 1932 when the author was twenty-six years old.
At the time Samuel Beckett's published writings consisted of a prize-winning poem Whoroscope published in 1930, two essays of criticism: “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” published in 1929 in the collective work Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, and his Proust, published in 1931. Some eight poems and several of his short prose texts had also been published in reviews among which were, a piece of satire “Che Sciagura” (1929), four short prose pieces, “Assumption”, “The Possessed”, “Text” and “Sedendo et Quies-cendo”; the latter two were to be included in Dream along with some of the poems in prose form. In essence, therefore, this work of fiction reaches back to the author's deeper roots in earlier days and forward to future writings in that it foretells much of what was to follow in poetry, prose and drama. Indeed many aspects of Samuel Beckett's philosophy are enunciated in Dream: “Doubt, Despair and Scrounging, shall I hitch my bath chair to the greatest of these?” Some semi-autobiographical elements are prevalent in the portrait of Belacqua, the main character of the book, yet they are not to be overrated. The timeless span, later to become so characteristic of Beckett's work, gives to Dream a universal value for the reader to assess, fathom and enjoy.
Dream was submitted by Samuel Beckett to a number of publishers without success. He knew that Ireland offered no hope given the anti-intellectualism of Irish Catholicism at the time and the lack of any rational objectivity in the unrelenting attitude of the Irish Censorship Board, which certainly would not have brooked such a novel as Dream of Fair to middling Women. He later castigated the Board in a witty essay, “Censorship in the Saorstat” (1935), by which time he himself was a victim with the banning of More Pricks than Kicks. London publishers were to prove no more audacious when he went there in 1933, hoping to find one sympathetic to Dream.
Rather than pursue the fruitless fight for publication, Samuel Beckett decided to assemble some of the stories from Dream with others, including “Dante and the Lobster” which had been published in the Paris review This Quarter in December 1932. This collection of stories was published in London in 1934 as More Pricks than Kicks. That he had not at this time resigned himself to the rejection of Dream and that he intended, moreover, to have Dream published, albeit at some future unspecified date, is announced in More Pricks than Kicks:
The powers of evocation of this Italianate Irishman were simply immense, and if his Dream of Fair to Middling Women, held up in the limæ labor stage for the past ten or fifteen years, ever reaches the public, and Walter says it is bound to, we ought all be sure to get it and have a look at it anyway.
In much later years, Samuel Beckett would express his strong doubts and misgivings about the creation of more youthful days, as indeed about much of his published work (“my other writings are no sooner dry than they revolt me”), including More Pricks than Kicks which he forbade to have reprinted for many years. Alert to these misgivings, while aware also that his deep feelings about Dream were not so clear-cut and hostile as he may have let appear, the decision to publish Dream has not been taken lightly. Indeed, if today Dream reaches the public as it was “bound to”, it is at Samuel Beckett's own behest, expressed to me in talks on the subject between 1975 and 1989.
When I began writing The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett's Ireland in 1975, I realised how deficient a book purporting to illustrate the origins of much of Samuel Beckett's writing would be if Dream, a novel which ranks as one of his most Irish writings, was not referred to. He agreed to my quoting whatever I wished to take from Dream for The Beckett Country. My reading of the transcribed copy of the manuscript of Dream at the Beckett Archive in Reading University was, of necessity, perfunctory at the time, but it led to many discussions with Samuel Beckett about the work. In particular, I recall, he was interested in the reaction of a man more than thirty years his junior to Dream or, as he called it, ”the chest into which I threw my wild thoughts'. His interest was all the more acute, I think, because he had forgotten much of the detail of Dream and it allowed us to wallow gently in the nostalgia of his Dublin. We discussed, during those meetings in Paris, his having “pilfered” the “chest” and whether or not anything worthwhile remained. Such discussions were a means of fond recollection, yet he could not tolerate memories of times past if the pain became too acute. When, for example, I showed him the photograph I had found of Bill Shannon, the postman of Dream—and later of Watt—who whistled “The roses are blooming in Picardy”, his face, first alight with joy, disassembled into anguish and he knew I appreciated the need for us to part so that he could be alone.
In 1986, Samuel Beckett asked me to visit him in Paris to discuss Dream. He was considering, he told me, how best to help a friend to whom he wished to give a text for publication, and he asked me if it should be Dream. We did not reach, nor attempt to reach, a decision that evening, but merely bandied about the pros and cons. When I returned to see him shortly afterwards, he had made up his mind. He could not face the pain of going back to the “chest” where, whether they had been happy or fraught with sorrow, the wild thoughts of his youth-days were so vividly stored.
Shortly afterwards, he told me Dream should be published, but he did not want this to h
appen until he was gone “for some little time”. He asked me to hold the “key” to the “chest” until I thought fit.
The original typed manuscript of Dream had remained in Samuel Beckett's possession until 1961 when he gave it, with other texts, to Lawrence E. Harvey to assist him in writing his critical monograph Samuel Beckett: Poet & Critic which remains the finest biographical study published on Beckett. Harvey gave the manuscript to Dartmouth College, New Hampshire in 1971, stating in so doing that he regarded Dream as “valuable for the insights it provides into the temperament, intellect, talent, and interests of the young Beckett and constitutes the necessary point of departure in assessing his development as a writer”.
Dream is indeed such and very much more besides. It is a major literary achievement and this consideration, together with Samuel Beckett's wishes in regard to publication, led his literary executor and long-time friend, Jérôme Lindon, to grant permission for me to edit Dream for publication.
Up to now Dream has been available only to scholars and researchers who could peruse the original manuscript in the Dartmouth archives, or, later on, a typed transcription of it in the Beckett Archive at Reading University. This has led inevitably to an unsatisfactory state of affairs whereby much of Dream has been quoted and published, with more or less appropriate comments, in substantial extracts which deny the reader an objective, unbiased and personal appreciation of the whole novel. Moreover, such extracts can but dangerously misrepresent the entire work.
Samuel Beckett himself, as I have pointed out, “pilfered the chest” which served as a point of commencement for many later works—Happy Days and Krapp's Last Tape spring to mind. It was also a depository for some earlier writings—the poems “Enueg I”, “Dortmunder”, “Alba” and “Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin” being examples. Substantial parts of Dream appear almost verbatim in More Pricks than Kicks, notable examples being “The Smeraldina's Billet Doux”, “Ding-Dong” and “A Wet Night”. Here again such extracts can but give a restricted and pale idea of the whole novel. More Pricks than Kicks is a collection of vignettes of Dublin life; Dream of Fair to middling Women has the wealth of the complete form and full structure of a novel about a young man, his loves and travels in Europe.