In April 1954, a third passage was published under the title ‘Molloy’ in New World Writing, vol. 5. Like the ‘extract’ printed in Merlin, this text is a translation of the opening of the novel and, aside from the fact that it is shorter, is almost identical to that in Merlin. The most notable difference between the two texts is that, whereas the Merlin text renders the two persons seen by Molloy as ‘A’ and ‘C’ (translating the ‘A’ and ‘B’ of the French original), as in the Olympia Press edition, the New World Writing text is inconsistent, rendering them as both ‘A’ and ‘B’ and ‘A’ and ‘C’.
In August 1955, six months after its Olympia Press publication, the English Molloy was published in the United States by Grove Press. In January 1956, the novel was banned in Ireland on the grounds of obscenity, and later in the same year was also banned in Canada. The first British edition appeared in the 1959 volume Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (published by John Calder), and only in 1966 as a discrete volume. Since its first publication in 1951, the original French version of Molloy has been kept in print as an independent volume, Les Éditions de Minuit having thus far resisted calls for its integration with Malone meurt and L’Innommable. This is in striking contrast to the novel’s publication history in English, since both in the United States and in Britain Molloy has generally – since 1959 – been published together with Malone Dies and The Unnamable, often with the subtitle Three Novels. In the ‘Notes on Contributors’ section on Beckett in the Spring 1954 issue of the Paris Review, he is identified as the author of a ‘trilogy of novels’, and later Calder editions of the three works in one volume labelled them The Beckett Trilogy, as did the 1979 Picador edition. While Beckett did make clear to Aidan Higgins that he wished to see the novels published together, he was none the less resistant to their being identified as a ‘trilogy’.
It is unfortunate that the ‘disintegration’ both thematised and enacted stylistically in Molloy has also been reflected in its textual history. The 1955 Olympia Press edition is marred by typographical errors and orthographical inconsistencies. While the first Calder edition (1959) corrects some (but not all) of these errors, it also introduces new ones, including the omission of words. The first discrete Calder edition (1966) contains further typographical errors, for example rendering Youdi’s address as ‘Arcadia’ (rather than ‘Acacia’) Square. The American Grove Press edition contains far fewer errors than any of the Calder editions, but some of the obvious errors in the original Olympia Press edition remain uncorrected therein, including inconsistency in the rendering of the name of the Elsner sisters’ cook (in the original French text, her name is ‘Hanna’; in the English translation this is rendered first as ‘Hannah’ and then, at the very end of the novel, as ‘Hanna’).
Given this history of deterioration, the present edition returns for its copy-text to the first English-language edition (Olympia Press, 1955), correcting all obvious typographical errors. For the most part, these errors and inconsistencies take the form of orthographical mistakes (‘antechrist’ for ‘Antichrist’, no doubt owing to the fact that the French spelling is antéchrist; ‘herbacious’ for ‘herbaceous’; ‘langour’ for ‘languor’), a mixture of English and American spellings, and of ‘-ise’ and ‘-ize’ endings, some irregular hyphenation (‘good-bye’/‘goodbye’; ‘good-will’/‘goodwill’; ‘handle-bars’/‘handlebars’), transposed letters and words, omitted marks of punctuation, and, on a few occasions, omitted words. The text of the Olympia Press edition is also characterised by a number of peculiarities that cannot be described as errors, the most notable being the frequent use of hyphenation for compound nouns (for example, ‘police-sergeant’; ‘sucking-stones’; ‘supply-pocket’; ‘lemon-verbena’; and ‘garden-gate’). A number of other terms that one might have expected to find as single words are hyphenated in the Olympia Press edition; these include ‘arm-chair’, ‘ash-tray’, time-table’ and ‘cork-screw’. All such orthographical peculiarities have been retained in the present edition. A number of the corrections made in the 1959 Calder edition have not been adopted in the present edition, either because these corrections are misguided or because, while arguably justifiable, they interfere with phrasing that is distinctly Beckettian. An example of the former is the ‘correction’ of ‘object of virtu’ (translating ‘objet de vertu’) in the Olympia Press edition to ‘object of virtue’; an example of the latter is the changing of the phrase ‘And it says that here nothing stirs, has never stirred, will never stir’ (translating ‘Et il paraît qu’ici rien ne bouge, ni n’a jamais bougé, ni ne bougera jamais’) to ‘And it says that here nothing stirs, has ever stirred, will ever stir’. Lastly, there are two occasions where the phrasing is strange enough to have led to its being altered in later editions; these are ‘bet to the world’ (changed to ‘beat to the world’ in the Calder and Picador editions) and ‘let a roar’ (changed to ‘let out a roar’). In the present edition, the original phrasing has been retained on the grounds that it is characteristic of Beckett’s Irish English.
Shane Weller
Canterbury, 2009
Notes
1 The play Eleutheria, written in January–February 1947, before Godot, remained unpublished until 1995.
2 Richard Seaver, ‘Samuel Beckett: An Introduction’, Merlin, vol. 1, no. 2 (Autumn 1952), p. 73. The two novels to which Seaver is referring here are Molloy and Malone meurt.
3 Beckett to Lawrence E. Harvey; quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 358.
4 Quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), p. 346.
5 Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 220.
6 See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 352. John Pilling observes that while 1945 is the ‘most likely date’ for this ‘vision’, it may have occurred in 1946 or ‘just possibly’ in 1947 (John Pilling, A Beckett Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 94).
7 Charles Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde, trans. Janey Tucker (Leiden: Academic Press, 1995), p. 140.
8 Beckett quoted in John Pilling, Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 11.
9 That, in one respect, Beckett was not being modest when he claimed to have ‘no idea’ where he was heading when he began Molloy is confirmed by an addition to the second paragraph of the English translation of the novel. In the published French text, this paragraph begins: ‘Cette fois-ci, puis encore une je pense, puis c’en sera fini je pense, de ce monde-là aussi. C’est le sens de l’avant-dernier.’ In the published English translation, these sentences are rendered as: ‘This time, then once more I think, then perhaps a last time, then I think it’ll be over, with that world too. Premonition of the last but one but one’ (emphasis added). This addition in translation takes account not only of the ‘once more’ of Malone meurt (written between November 1947 and May 1948) but also of the novel he wrote between March 1949 and January 1950, L’Ilnnommable – these three novels forming a sequence, though not necessarily (for Beckett) a ‘trilogy’.
10 Nadeau in Combat, 12 April 1951; reprinted in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds.), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 53 (trans. Francoise Longhurst).
11 Pingaud in Esprit, September 1951; reprinted in Graver and Federman (eds.), Samuel Beckett, pp. 67–8 (trans. Françoise Longhurst).
12 Reprinted in Graver and Federman (eds.), Samuel Beckett, pp. 74–5.
13 See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, pp. 393–7.
14 Patrick Bowles, ‘How to Fail: Notes on Talks with Samuel Beckett’, PN Review 96, vol. 20, no. 4 (March–April 1994), p. 24.
15 Bowles, ‘How to Fail’, p. 24.
16 Bowles, ‘How to Fail’, p. 27.
17 Bowles, ‘How to Fail’, p. 27.
18 Bowles, ‘How to Fail’, p. 33.
19 See Pilling, A Beckett Chronology, p. 128.
&
nbsp; 20 I wish to express my thanks to Mark Nixon for very kindly having supplied me with copies of the ‘Fragment’ of Molloy published in Transition Fifty, no. 6, and the passage published under the title ‘Molloy’ in New World Writing, vol. 5.
Table of Dates
Where unspecified, translations from French to English or vice versa are by Beckett.
1906
13 April Samuel Beckett [Samuel Barclay Beckett] born in ‘Cooldrinagh’, a house in Foxrock, a village south of Dublin, on Good Friday, the second child of William Beckett and May Beckett, née Roe; he is preceded by a brother, Frank Edward, born 26 July 1902.
1911
Enters kindergarten at Ida and Pauline Elsner’s private academy in Leopardstown.
1915
Attends larger Earlsfort House School in Dublin.
1920
Follows Frank to Portora Royal, a distinguished Protestant boarding school in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh (soon to become part of Northern Ireland).
1923
October Enrols at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) to study for an Arts degree.
1926
August First visit to France, a month-long cycling tour of the Loire Valley.
1927
April–August Travels through Florence and Venice, visiting museums, galleries, and churches.
December Receives B.A. in Modern Languages (French and Italian) and graduates first in the First Class.
1928
Jan.–June Teaches French and English at Campbell College, Belfast.
September First trip to Germany to visit seventeen-year-old Peggy Sinclair, a cousin on his father’s side, and her family in Kassel.
1 November Arrives in Paris as an exchange lecteur at the École Normale Supérieure. Quickly becomes friends with his predecessor, Thomas McGreevy [after 1943, MacGreevy], who introduces Beckett to James Joyce and other influential anglophone writers and publishers.
December Spends Christmas in Kassel (as also in 1929, 1930 and 1931).
1929
June Publishes first critical essay (‘Dante … Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’) and first story (‘Assumption’) in transition magazine.
1930
July Whoroscope (Paris: Hours Press).
October Returns to TCD to begin a two-year appointment as lecturer in French.
November Introduced by MacGreevy to the painter and writer Jack B. Yeats in Dublin.
1931
March Proust (London: Chatto andWindus).
September First Irish publication, the poem ‘Alba’ in Dublin Magazine.
1932
January Resigns his lectureship via telegram from Kassel and moves to Paris.
Feb.-June First serious attempt at a novel, the posthumously published Dream of Fair to Middling Women.
December Story Dante and the ‘Lobster’ appears in This Quarter (Paris).
1933
3 May Death of Peggy Sinclair from tuberculosis.
26 June Death of William Beckett from a heart attack.
1934
January Moves to London and begins psychoanalysis with Wilfred Bion at the Tavistock Clinic.
February Negro Anthology, edited by Nancy Cunard and with numerous translations by Beckett from the French (London: Wishart and Company).
May More Pricks Than Kicks (London: Chatto and Windus).
Aug.–Sept. Contributes several stories and reviews to literary magazines in London and Dublin.
1935
November
Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates, a cycle of thirteen poems (Paris: Europa Press).
1936
Returns to Dublin.
29 September Leaves Ireland for a seven-month stay in Germany.
1937
Apr.–Aug. First serious attempt at a play, Human Wishes, about Samuel Johnson and his household.
October Settles in Paris.
1938
6/7 January Stabbed by a street pimp in Montparnasse. Among his visitors at Hôpital Broussais is Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, an acquaintance who is to become Beckett’s companion for life.
March Murphy (London: Routledge).
April Begins writing poetry directly in French.
1939
3 September Great Britain and France declare war on Germany. Beckett abruptly ends a visit to Ireland and returns to Paris the next day.
1940
June Travels south with Suzanne following the Fall of France, as part of the exodus from the capital.
September Returns to Paris.
1941
13 January Death of James Joyce in Zurich.
1 September Joins the Resistance cell Gloria SMH.
1942
16 August Goes into hiding with Suzanne after the arrest of close friend Alfred Péron.
6 October Arrival at Roussillon, a small village in unoccupied southern France.
1944
24 August Liberation of Paris.
1945
30 March Awarded the Croix de Guerre.
Aug.–Dec. Volunteers as a storekeeper and interpreter with the Irish Red Cross in Saint-Lô, Normandy.
1946
July Publishes first fiction in French – a truncated version of the short story ‘Suite’ (later to become ‘La Fin’) in Les Temps modernes, owing to a misunderstanding by editors – as well as a critical essay on Dutch painters Geer and Bram van Velde in Cahiers d’art.
1947
Jan.–Feb. Writes first play, in French, Eleutheria (published posthumously).
April Murphy, French translation (Paris: Bordas).
1948
Undertakes a number of translations commissioned by UNESCO and by Georges Duthuit.
1950
25 August Death of May Beckett.
1951
March Molloy, in French (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit).
November Malone meurt (Paris: Minuit).
1952
Purchases land at Ussy-sur-Marne, subsequently Beckett’s preferred location for writing.
September En attendant Godot (Paris: Minuit).
1953
5 January Premiere of Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone in Montparnasse, directed by Roger Blin.
May L’Innommable (Paris: Minuit).
August Watt, in English (Paris: Olympia Press).
1954
8 September Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press).
13 September Death of Frank Beckett from lung cancer.
1955
March Molloy, translated into English with Patrick Bowles (NewYork: Grove; Paris: Olympia).
3 August First English production of Godot opens in London at the Arts Theatre.
November Nouvelles et Textes pour rien (Paris: Minuit).
1956
3 January American Godot premiere in Miami.
February First British publication of Waiting for Godot (London: Faber).
October Malone Dies (NewYork: Grove).
1957
January First radio broadcast, All That Fall on the BBC Third Programme.
Fin de partie, suivi de Acte sans paroles (Paris: Minuit).
28 March Death of Jack B. Yeats.
August All That Fall (London: Faber).
October Tous ceux qui tombent, translation of All That Fall with Robert Pinget (Paris: Minuit).
1958
April Endgame, translation of Fin de partie (London: Faber).
From an Abandoned Work (London: Faber).
July Krapp’s Last Tape in Grove Press’s literary magazine, Evergreen Review.
September The Unnamable (NewYork: Grove).
December Anthology of Mexican Poetry, translated by Beckett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press; later reprinted in London by Thames and Hudson).
1959
March La Dernière bande, translation of Krapp’s Last Tape with Pierre Leyris, in the Parisian literary magazine Les Lettres nouvelles.
2 July Receives honorary D. Litt. degree from Trinity College Dublin.
> November Embers in Evergreen Review.
December Cendres, translation of Embers with Pinget, in Les Lettres nouvelles.
Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (NewYork: Grove; Paris: Olympia Press).
1961
January Comment c’est (Paris: Minuit).
24 March Marries Suzanne at Folkestone, Kent.
May Shares Prix International des Editeurs with Jorge Luis Borges.