ECHO’S BONES
WORKS BY SAMUEL BECKETT PUBLISHED BY GROVE PRESS
Collected Poems in English and French
The Collected Shorter Plays
(All That Fall, Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Krapp’s Last Tape, Rough for Theatre I, Rough for Theatre II, Embers, Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio, . . . but the clouds . . . , A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht and Träume, What Where)
The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989
(Assumption, Sedendo et Quiescendo, Text, A Case in a Thousand, First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative, The End, Texts for Nothing 1–13, From an Abandoned Work, The Image, All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, Enough, Ping, Lessness, The Lost Ones, Fizzles 1–8, Heard in the Dark 1, Heard in the Dark 2, One Evening, As the story was told, The Cliff, neither, Stirrings Still, Variations on a “Still” Point, Faux Départs, The Capital of the Ruins)
Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment
Echo’s Bones
Endgame and Act Without Words
Ends and Odds
First Love and Other Shorts
Happy Days
How It Is
I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader
Krapps Last Tape: (All that Fall, Embers, Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II)
Mercier and Camier
Molloy
More Pricks than Kicks
(Dante and the Lobster, Fingal, Ding-Dong, A Wet Night, Love and Lethe, Walking Out, What a Misfortune, The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux, Yellow, Draff)
Murphy
Nohow On
(Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho)
The Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism of Samuel Beckett
Rockaby and Other Short Plays
(Rockaby, Ohio impromptu, All Strange Away, and A Piece of Monologue)
The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett
(boxed paperback set)
Volume I: Novels
(Murphy, Watt, Mercier and Camier)
Volume II: Novels
(Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, How It Is)Volume III: Dramatic Works
Volume IV: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism
Stories and Texts for Nothing
(The Expelled, the Calmative, The End, Texts for Nothing 1–13)
Three Novels
(Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable)
Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot: A Bilingual Edition
Watt
SAMUEL BECKETT
ECHO’S BONES
Edited by Mark Nixon
Grove Press
New York
‘ECHO’S BONES’ © THE ESTATE OF SAMUEL BECKETT 2014
Commentary © 2014 by Mark Nixon
Jacket design by Charles Rue Woods
Jacket photograph ©BobAdelson
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First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Faber & Faber Ltd
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-8021-2045-8
eISBN 978-0-8021-9407-7
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/ Atlantic, Inc.
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Distributed by Publishers Group West
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Note on the Text
Scan from Typescript
ECHO’S BONES
Annotations
Letters from Charles Prentice at Chatto & Windus
to Samuel Beckett
Bibliography
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My first debt of gratitude is to Edward Beckett, who has supported this publication since its inception several years ago. I would also like to thank the Beckett International Foundation, as well as Special Collections at the University of Reading, the Rauner Library at Dartmouth College in Hanover, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin and Random House for giving relevant permissions. I have benefited from the help and expertise of a number of scholars in annotating ‘Echo’s Bones’. Unfortunately, I am unable to pay proper and specific credit to any individual scholar to whom I am indebted for information, as this would have made the entries unwieldy, but wish to acknowledge my debt here. My greatest debt (not for the first, and undoubtedly not for the last time) is to John Pilling, who has grappled with this story for more years than I have, and has generously given me advice, hints and material along the way. He has helped me to clarify various difficult issues, and his annotated edition of Beckett’s Dream Notebook – the main source for material found in ‘Echo’s Bones’ – has made my task of annotating the text considerably easier. Further sources have been suggested or identified by Chris Ackerley, Aura Beckhöfer-Fialho, Tatyana Hramova, Dirk Van Hulle, Seán Kennedy, Marty Korwin-Pawlowski, the late Seán Lawlor, Paola Nasti, Matthew Scott and David Tucker, and I am grateful to all of them for their help in unravelling several riddles in the text. Thanks are also due to Jim Knowlson for his friendship and support. I am particularly grateful to Dirk Van Hulle, John Pilling and David Tucker for making invaluable comments on reading parts of the manuscript. Needless to say, any omissions and errors that remain are my own, and, given the nature of ‘Echo’s Bones’, I am sure there are quite a few of them. I also want to express my gratitude to Aura for her continued support and to Tikka for the welcome distractions. Finally, I would like to thank the copy-editor, Eleanor Rees, for her careful reading of the manuscript, and Martha Sprackland, Paul Keegan and Matthew Hollis at Faber & Faber for their excellent editorial guidance, their work on the manuscript, and for patiently steering this book into publication.
INTRODUCTION
On 25 September 1933, the London publishing house Chatto & Windus accepted Beckett’s collection of short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, for publication. Writing to Beckett, Chatto’s editor Charles Prentice wondered whether Beckett could add another story, which would ‘help the book’ by bulking up the content. Beckett agreed, and proceeded to write what he called a ‘recessional story’ entitled ‘Echo’s Bones’, which was to conclude the collection. Within three days of receiving the story, however, Prentice on 13 November 1933 turned it down, arguing that the story was a ‘nightmare’ and ‘would depress the sales very considerably’. More Pricks Than Kicks was published on 24 May 1934 as Beckett had originally submitted it, with ten rather than eleven stories. Now, eighty years after it was first written, the enigmatic ‘Echo’s Bones’ makes its first public appearance.
The failure of ‘Echo’s Bones’ to see the light of day in 1934 needs to be considered in the context of the young writer’s desperate struggle to get published in the early 1930s. In many respects, the story of ‘Echo’s Bones’ begins with Beckett’s firs
t substantial piece of fiction, the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, written between May 1931 and July 1932. Encouraged by Chatto’s publication of his book on Marcel Proust (Proust, 1931), Beckett submitted the novel to the publishers. On receiving it in the summer of 1932, however, Prentice politely called it ‘a strange thing’, praised those sections in which the writing was ‘right away from Joyce’, and then unsurprisingly rejected it (5 July 1932). As Prentice told the writer Richard Aldington, turning down Beckett’s first novel was ‘Perhaps a mistake; but it would have been an almost impossible thing to handle; we didn’t understand half of it ourselves’ (5 September 1932).
Over the next nine months, the book continued to confuse and alienate publishers. With rejection notices piling up around him, and with no steady income after resigning his lectureship at Trinity College Dublin, Beckett by the middle of 1933 must have realised that Dream was never going to be published (it only appeared posthumously in 1992), and subsequently turned his attention to assembling a set of short stories, some of which he had written as early as 1931.
With Dream unpublished, and with not enough stories to make up a solid collection that would interest a publisher (or ‘invite a publisher to wipe his arse with’, in his words), Beckett began to recycle material from the novel, salvaging those sections that could easily be integrated into or adapted to the shorter literary form. Thus for example the story ‘A Wet Night’, as it appears in More Pricks Than Kicks, is taken nearly verbatim from the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Beckett also pilfered material from his Dream notebook, reading notes collated for the writing of the novel. This pragmatic approach also had, to Beckett’s mind, intellectual precedence. He had advocated in his essay on Proust ‘that most necessary, wholesome and monotonous plagiarism – the plagiarism of oneself’ (523).
By September 1933, Beckett had assembled ten stories amounting to roughly sixty thousand words. After his failure to place his writing with publishers, Beckett was hardly confident that his collection would find favour, despite telling his friend Thomas MacGreevy in a letter of 7 September 1933, and referring to the first story of More Pricks Than Kicks, that ‘if people can read Saki they can read anything, even Dante & Lobster’ (quoted in Pilling 1997, 99). Prentice must have agreed with this evaluation. In his letter of acceptance dated 25 September 1933, he asked whether Beckett could come up with a ‘livelier title’ to replace ‘Draff’ (the name of the final story of More Pricks Than Kicks), adding ‘Hurray too if you manage that extra story’, which suggests that Beckett may have raised the issue of writing a further story should the publisher feel that the collection was on the short side. Thanking Beckett for the revised title, More Pricks Than Kicks, Prentice reiterated his belief that ‘another 10,000 words, or even 5,000 for that matter, would, I am certain, help the book’ (29 September 1933). Beckett, for various reasons, struggled to accommodate the request. As he told MacGreevy, part of the problem was that he had killed off the protagonist of the collection in the penultimate story, ‘Yellow’: ‘I have to do another story for More Pricks, Belacqua redivivus, and I’m as stupid as a goat’ (9 October 1933; Letters of Samuel Beckett I 167). The fact that Belacqua would have to be resurrected for the new final story was acknowledged by Prentice: ‘I’m delighted that Belacqua Lazarus will be walking again shortly’ (4 October 1933). By early November, Beckett confessed to MacGreevy that he was ‘grinding out the last yelps for C. & W.’ but was ‘having awful trouble’ with it (1 November 1933). Yet he must have succeeded in writing the story rather quickly after this, as Prentice acknowledged receipt of it on 10 November, while also registering his surprise at its length of 13,500 words (‘What a big one!’). More importantly, the story as a whole completely confounded him, and in a long letter, phrased apologetically yet firmly, Prentice informed Beckett on 13 November that ‘Echo’s Bones’ was not suitable for publication; the letter is worth citing at length:
It is a nightmare. Just too terribly persuasive. It gives me the jim-jams. The same horrible and immediate switches of the focus, and the same wild unfathomable energy of the population. There are chunks I don’t connect with. I am so sorry to feel like this. Perhaps it is only over the details, and I may have a correct inkling of the main impression. I am sorry, for I hate to be dense, but I hope I am not altogether insensitive. ‘Echo’s Bones’ certainly did land on me with a wallop.
Do you mind if we leave it out of the book – that is, publish ‘More Pricks than Kicks’ in the original form in which you sent it in? Though it’s on the short side, we’ll still be able to price it at 7/6d. ‘Echo’s Bones’ would, I am sure, lose the book a great many readers. People will shudder and be puzzled and confused; and they won’t be keen on analysing the shudder. I am certain that ‘Echo’s Bones’ would depress the sales very considerably.
I hate having to say this, as well as falling behind scratch myself, and I hope you will forgive as far as you can. Please try to make allowances for us; the future of the book affects you as well.
This is a dreadful débâcle – on my part, not on yours, God save the mark. But I have to own up to it. A failure, a blind-spot, call it what I may. Yet the only plea for mercy I can make is that the icy touch of those revenant fingers was too much for me. I am sitting on the ground, and ashes are on my head.
Beckett’s response to this remarkable letter appears to have been tempered by acquiescence, although a possibly more honest reaction is found in a letter to MacGreevy written shortly afterward: ‘I haven’t been doing anything. Charles’s fouting à la porte [kicking out] of Echo’s Bones, the last story, into which I put all I knew and plenty that I was better still aware of,discouraged me profoundly [. . .]. But no doubt he was right. I tell him so, therefore all that entre nous’ (6 December 1933; Letters of Samuel Beckett I 171). Indeed, the failure of the story provoked Beckett into writing a poem of the same name, and he subsequently used the title again for his first collection of poems, Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935). And, although it would surely have been difficult for him to feel otherwise at the time, the writing of the story was not an entirely wasted effort, as he transferred material from ‘Echo’s Bones’ to a revised ending of ‘Draff’, and thus to More Pricks Than Kicks as a whole; Prentice (on 11 December 1933) praised ‘the new little bit at the end’, calling it ‘a decided improvement’.
On first reading ‘Echo’s Bones’, one cannot help but sympathise with Prentice’s decision to reject the story. As an early critic, Rubin Rabinovitz, summarised it: ‘the setting is unrealistic, the plot improbable, the characters bizarre’ (55). ‘Echo’s Bones’ is a difficult, at times obscure story, uneven in tone and mood, and evasive in stating its business. It bristles withtensions that arise from its fragmented nature, its incessant intertextual borrowings, the way it shifts between different literary styles and its allusive, wayward language, none of which allow the story to coalesce into a unity, even of the ‘involuntary’ kind that characterised Dream of Fair to Middling Women. But if the story is rather wild and undisciplined, it is also quite brilliantly so, especially in the flaunting yet withholding of its ‘shabby mysteries’ (‘Draff’, 183). The imaginative playfulness mixes styles and sources, all of whichgesture towards Joyce but ultimately establish something rather more distinctly Beckettian.
Beckett obviously struggled to write the story. His correspondence with MacGreevy testifies to the fact that his heart was not really in the book as a whole (‘But it is all jigsaw and I am not interested’), viewing More Pricks Than Kicks as a concession to the marketplace, and in terms of literary merit inferior to what he had tried to do with the novel Dream. Moreover, Beckett’s feelings about his creative activities must have been complicated by the death of his father only a few months earlier (on 26 June 1933), which may have contributed to his decision to abandon the kind of allusive, fragmentary and ultimately Joycean writing that might fulfil his own artistic criteria but would not sustain a living. As a result, Beckett’s struggle to write the story i
s evident across the surface of the text. The characters themselves are ostensibly trying to keep a story going even as it tries at every turn to sabotage them from doing so. More than once, for example, the text obstructs itself, as when Lord Gall ‘could not go on with what he was saying’.
Naturally enough, the largest challenge facing Beckett in writing this ‘fagpiece’, as the story calls itself, was how to ensure its consistency within the collection as a whole. He must have decided that it was easier to resurrect Belacqua from the dead and to add a story at the end of the book than to upset the unity, if there is one, of More Pricks Than Kicks by inserting one at an earlier point. Throughout the volume, Belacqua negotiates a world of love and death, and in ‘Echo’s Bones’ is faced with an afterlife. Even before his untimely demise during a surgical operation in the story ‘Yellow’, Belacqua was described (in Dream) as a ‘horrible border-creature’ (123), a state of being reinforced in ‘Echo’s Bones’ by his opening position, seated on a fence. Although a ghost, and casting no shadow, Belacqua is very much a corporeal entity, brought back to life in order to atone for his narcissism, his solipsism and for being an ‘indolent bourgeois poltroon’ (174) in the previous stories, indolent like his namesake in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
The story self-referentially calls itself a ‘triptych’, and it is indeed a piece in three movements, but whose panels barely make up a whole. The first part tells the story of Belacqua’s resurrection and his encounter with the prostitute Miss Zaborovna Privet. The second deals with the giant Lord Gall of Wormwood, who is unable to father a son and will lose his estate to the fertile Baron Extravas should he die intestate. Lord Gall thus requests that Belacqua help make him a father; Belacqua complies, and Lady Moll Gall does indeed give birth – to a girl, since this is a shaggy dog story. The story then switches in its final part abruptly to Belacqua sitting on his own headstone, watching the groundsman Doyle rob his grave. Although Doyle had already appeared as an unnamed minor figure in ‘Draff’, the other main characters are new to the collection. But in an attempt to establish a sense of continuity between ‘Echo’s Bones’ and the other stories of More Pricks, Beckett reintroduces various characters despite having killed off several of them (including Belacqua) in the course of the book, as summarised during the opening of ‘Draff’: ‘Then shortly after that they suddenly seemed to be all dead, Lucy of course long since, Ruby duly, Winnie to decency, Alba Perdue in the natural course of being seen home’ (175). Nevertheless, at two points in ‘Echo’s Bones’ a parade of characters passes by in the background. Thus for example the Parabimbis and Caleken Frica make an appearance, as does the (deceased) Alba, one of Belacqua’s love interests, who surfaces surreally in a submarine transporting the souls of the dead. The reintroduction of these characters, who add nothing to the plot, or plots, presumably prompted Prentice’s reference to the ‘wild unfathomable energy of the population’.