5
Chronology 1906-1929
25 December
26 December 31 December
SB in Dublin.
Chronology 1906-1929
25 December
26 December 31 December
SB in Dublin.
Samuel Beckett
94 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 13 [September 1932].
xciii
In the work of Cezanne, first, Beckett sights - or sites - an all-important representation ofthe other ness ofthe world, "incommensurable with all human expressions what soever. " The "deanthropomorphizations of the artist" are the more precious in Cezanne's portraits, where the individual subject becomes "incapable ofloving or hating anyone but himselfor ofbeing loved or hated by anyone but himself'; a claim which Beckett immediately and doubly undermines, as ifhe had seen too much or reached too far, by signing off his letter in a firm rejection ofsolipsism - "God love thee" -
believes writing should be heading.
Introduction to Volume I
terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between. "95 In Yeats's work, nature itself, Ireland's nature, becomes the setting of "the ultimate inorganism of everything. " And again the future looms, the theatrical work for which Beckett will be most cele brated, in the metaphor he uses to describe Ireland here: "a nature almost as inhumanly inorganic as a stage set. "96 When, in 1938, return ing to Ireland after a prolonged absence, he visits Yeats's studio and sees his "magnificent new picture," entitled Helen, he rediscovers the "same extraordinary tenderness & distinction of handling," and beyond that, "depth and a courage more than of conviction, of certainty, absolutely natural & unrhetorical. " He rediscovers the very sense of necessity that years previously he located in Homer and Dante, the sense of art as a physical extension of the self, an art which is as natural as breathing. Unable to produce his own art to match, Beckett the viewer none the less absorbs the impact: "I was really knocked all ofa heap. "97
If art hits, and must hit, the body, this is because it must emerge
from the body to begin with, if it is to be necessary. For the greats, this
may be as easy as breathing; for the remainder, which includes Beckett
himself, whose writing emerges "above an abscess and not out of a
cavity," the somatic impetus is less unambiguously life-sustaining or
98
95 SB to Cissie Sinclair, 14 ! August 1937].
96 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 August 1937.
97 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Thursday 14 August 1938].
98 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 October 1932.
99 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 28 November 1937 [for 1936].
100 SB to Thomas McGreevy. Saturday 112 September 1931].
101 SB to George Reavey, 8 October 1932. "Dies diarrhoeae" (Lat. , literally, days of
diarrhea, echoing the Dies Irae of the reguiem Mass).
xciv
satisfying.
masturbation," Beckett says, with a sideways glance at his own restricted productivity, that there are worse things, "mental asperma tism for example. "99 When finally two poems do arrive, they are blessed as "a double-yoked orgasm in months ofaspermatic nights & days. " 100 At its best, writing is evacuation of pus, or is ejaculation of sperm. Being very rarely at its best, it is more commonly - even obsessively - that less exalted convulsion, defecation. When, amidst the "dies diarrhoeae,"101 some poems are taken by a journal, Beckett celebrates this acceptance of "three turds from my central lavatory. " The toilet is not private, and the
Commenting on Aldous Huxley's use of the term "mental
Introduction to Volume I
"Proustian arse-hole"102 needs to be contemplated, as we saw above, while the critic himself is "at stool. "103 To McGreevy, Beckett conveys his intention to return to writing as a determination to "take down the petites merdes de mon ame. "104 Beckett envisages writing a work which might finally please a publisher, in the following terms: "When I imagine I have a real 'twice round the pan & pointed at both ends' I'll offend you with its spiral on my soilman's shovel. "105 Of his poems which he calls "the Bones," his hope is that they will become a "bolus," which, on publication, will cause readerly discomfiture - "May it stick in their anus. "106 Even when the work is not itself fecal, it can still do cloacal duty. When an article is requested of him, he finds himself "looking through my essuie-cul de reserve. "107 The scatology may contain an undergraduate's jocularity, but that it is no mere joke, still less any mere trope, is clear even without recourse to Beckett's oeuvre. Writing and shitting: without recourse to Freud, either, these may be seen to share for Beckett an all-important intimacy, an urgency, a necessity even, just as they share a difficulty and delight in emission and transmission. They share, that is to say, both the requirement and the limits of expres sion. And so the irony is much fainter than might at first be imagined, when, after a publisher suggests substantial cutting of Murphy, what are envisaged next are "The Beckett Bowel Books. " Such new work might at least have a rhythm, one which would tie it to the body and its necessacy functions: "My next work shall be on rice paper wound about a spool, with a perforated line evecy six inches and on sale in Boots. The length of each chapter will be carefully calculated to suit with the average free motion. " 108
What writing and the rectal spasm share is that they take the subject, quite literally, out of himself. They are not the only spasms to do this, however, and there are others which take Beckett so far out of himself that he fears he may never return. "I always see the physical crisis just round the corner," he writes to Cissie Sinclair in 1937, confirming
102 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 25 August 11930].
103 SB to Thomas McGreevy. Friday I? summer 1929].
104 SB to Thomas McGreevy, I? after 15 August 1931]. '"Petites merdes de mon ame'"
105 (droppings from my soul).
106 SB to Charles Prentice, 15 August 1931.
107 SB to George Reavey, 9 January 1935 [for 1936].
SB to George Reavey, 6 May 1936. "Essuie-cul de reserve" (spare bumf). 108 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 14 November 1936.
XCV
Introduction to Volume I
that this crisis is far from merely dreaded: "It would solve perhaps the worst ofwhat remains to be solved, clarify the proven anyway, which I suppose is the best solution we can hope for. "109 The "crisis" takes the form ofboils, cysts, and especially heart palpitations, all ofwhich, even while he tries to attribute to them purely organic origins, Beckett suspects are psychosomatically induced.
Beckett finally decides to move into a quite new word-setting, a highly alien one, yet one in which, as in writing, language must do the work of relation and creation: in 1934 he begins a psychoanalysis with W. R. Bion, then a junior analyst, whom he quickly re-christens "the covey. " He counts the sessions: "On Monday I go for the 133rd time. "111 He fears that "the analysis is going to turn out a failure. "112 Yet he sees "no prospect of the analysis coming to an end. " The somatic symptoms persist. but with a new force he realizes: "how lost I would be bereft ofmy incapacitation. "113 The shift in perception may appear slight, but what the letters make clear - clearer than Beckett ever intends - is how significant it is, to the point where he can write in 1935 to McGreevy: "The old heart pounces now & then, as though to console me for the intolerable symptoms ofan improvement";114 or write to him later, after the analysis has ended, that he has "overcome the need ofreturn ing to my vomit. "115
The letters manifest the shift not just in what they say, but also in the way they say it. They present a change, achieved in part through words used in the highly specialized context ofpsychoanalysis, through those words used in the not-entirely-different context that is letter-writing: not just their information, now, but their increasingly undefended style that becomes a disarming directness. Certainly, there is still room for highly self-conscious Beckett parades, ofthe sort that make him say of his early work, "ofcourse it stinks ofJoyce in spite ofmost earnest endeavours to endow it with my own odours. "116 The letters do provide
109 SB to Cissie Sinclair, 14 [August 1937].
110 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 10 March [1935].
111 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 February [1935].
112 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 1 January 1935.
113 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 February [1935].
114 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 20 February [1935].
115 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 May 1937.
116 SB to Charles Prentice, 15 August 1931.
xcvi
11
It is only when the crisis puts "the fear ofdeath" into him, 0 that
Introduction to Volume I
plentiful opportunities for the flexing of newly acquired linguistic muscles, as well as for old-fashioned showing-off. Those written to Nuala Costello, for example, are quite as narcissistically turned, as elliptical and excessive at once, as anything he ever wrote, an aware ness of which he seems to catch even as he protracts it, telling her: "My velleities of self-diffusion in this stew of LETTERS have been repulsed with the traditional contumely, so now I'm sulking and won't play. "117 Here, as on occasion with Cissie Sinclair, the seductions of verbal play seem to take the place- as it were, synechdochally- of seduction more palpable. He even goes so far as to say, at one point, with tongue only half in cheek, that "Perhaps the literary value of this letter [ . . . ] would be promoted by a few lines of verse. "118
Shortly after writing to McGreevy of "obstipation" and "tepid evira
tion,"119 Beckett declares: "I find that eschewal ofverbal sanies is one of
my New Year resolutions. " 120 Of course, this resolution is quite as hard
to keep as any other. Yet the verbal play and display in the letters, which
will yield a tone familiar from the published work of the 1930s, can
indeed cede at any point to something less ostentatious or guarded.
When Beckett's writing darts between languages or registers, at times
he may be less demonstrating his cleverness than exploring the short
comings in the words at his disposal. The distinction between this
exploration and his Joycean play may seem slim, but it is none the
less important, as he invites not so much his reader's admiration as
an apprehension of a shared incapacity - shared with language, too,
now. When Beckett writes that "the Irish Times accuses reception of his
new prose work," he may not be merely forgetting he is writing in
121
English.
When he writes to McGreevy, upon one more rejection of
a work, "Anyhow tant piss," he may be offering more than a trans
national pun; may be inviting his friend into a verbal space where no
ready-made language can do justice to what he feels, when this includes
a wish to shrug off the whole disappointment in the fewest words
122
possible.
When he skips across registers and languages searching
117 SB to Nuala Costello, 27 February 1934.
118 SB to Cissie Sinclair, 14 [August 1937].
119 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 November [for 3 November 1932].
120 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 January [1933].
121 SB to Arland Ussher, 25 March 1936.
122 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 [August 1932]. "Tant piss" (pun on "tant pis" [too bad]).
xcvii
Introduction to Volume I
for a word, he is not always just parading his learning. Sometimes, he is
being as straightforward as possible. When he jots on the back of a
picture postcard to McGreevy sent from Florence, "Che tu fossi meco,"
he is not only finding a fancy way ofsaying, "Wish you were here"; he is
above all trusting in his friend to catch the compacted message, which
includes their shared love of languages, of Italy and Italian, of Dante,
and of the escape which all these together imply. 123 When he flashes
between English and French - and Latin - in his letters to McGreevy,
when he complains that "this vitaccia is terne beyond all belief," he is
124
He is coax ing his reader on to a fragile ground between languages, a ground that he
not only repudiating the "terne" in his very formulation.
will make ever more daringly his own in the years to come.
Beckett's letters reveal, they present, explain, harangue, occasionally theorize, more rarely justify. But as, from the moment he started to write - and not only because of the influence of Joyce - their author turned his back on any instrumentalist understanding of language, the letters do these things as acts of a writer, as acts of writing. What might appear a contradiction - between a highly self-conscious Beckett for whom the act of writing mattered even when it came to letters and the Beckett we have tried to sketch above, who always had his destinataire in mind, who wrote letters to - may, in fact, offer a key to what is distinctive in the tone and style ofthe letters, as compared to his more purposefully literary work of the period. For Beckett's writing in his letters is never so unadornedly itself as when it is moving out of itself, never so fresh and indicative of his future as when he feels confident of his destinataire. The letters presented here deploy their range of languages and idioms not merely for show; they do so in order to tickle, engage, challenge their intended reader, and they do so on the reader's linguistic home ground. From the cod-bombast of his French to his cousin Morris Sinclair, to the super-formal English of his applications for jobs, to the slang of his back-slapping to Arland Ussher - and beyond: Beckett writes as he hopes, and increasingly trusts, he will be heard.
123 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 2 February 1937.
124 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 24 February 1931. "Vitaccia" (It. , miserable life, wretched
existence). "Teme" (colorless).
xcviii
Introduction to Volume I
Beckett's letters, like his literary works of the period, are perform
ances as much as they are communications; only, if they are perform
ances, they are so for a very particular audience. And when his faith in
this audience grows, as it does with McGreevy, his language leaps,
explores the in-between spaces, achieves sudden condensations. So
too may it relax. Then, a freedom, an unselfconscious simplicity,
emerges which may not be found in the oeuvre until Beckett turns to
writing fiction in French at the end of World War II. This is what one
senses in the extraordinary letter of 10 March 1935, in which Beckett
explains to McGreevy his reasons for entering into and persisting with
his psychoanalysis; explains his attempt, compelled by his acute phys
ical crises, to shed his "feeling of arrogant otherness," his "feeling that
I was too good for anything else," in favor of something for which he has
not yet found a name - unless its name is the extended one offered by
125
125 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 10 March 1935.
126 SB to Arland Ussher, 26 March 1937.
127 SB to Thomas McGreevy. 8 October 1935.
"It is more than I can do to go on," he writes to
this marvelous letter.
Arland Ussher in 1937 - having gone on at length in his letter.
hard it is to reach a tolerable arrangement between working & living," he writes to McGreevy, when the letter is the indispensable link in just such an "arrangement. "127
126
"How
xcix
LETTERS 1929-1940
1906
1911
1915
1916
1918
1919
1920
1921 1922
1923
1924 1925
13April
24April
11 November 21 January April
23 December 6 December 28June September May
23 May August
1 October March
March April June
SamuelBarclayBeckettbornatCooldrinaghon Good Friday.
A pupil at the Elsner kindergarten. A pupil at Earlsfort House School.
Sees flames and smoke rising from Dublin while walking in the Wicklow Mountains with his father: The Easter Rising.
End of World War I.
Start of the Anglo-Irish War.
SB joins brother Frank Beckett as a pupil at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh.
Partition of Ireland by Government of Ireland Act. Signing of Anglo-Irish Treaty.
Start of the Irish Civil War.
SB appointed Junior Prefect, Portora Royal School. Sits entrance exam for Trinity College Dublin. End oflrish Civil War.
SB leaves Portora Royal School as Senior 6th Form Prefect.
Enters Trinity College Dublin.
SeesSeanO'Casey'sJunoandthePaycockatthe Abbey Theatre, Dublin.
TakespartinDonnybrookmotorcycletrial. Picked for Trinity College Dublin Cricket First XI. Becomes Senior Exhibitioner.
3
CHRONOLOGY 1906-1929
Chronology 1906-1929
1926 January
8, 11 February
31 May
August-September
Michaelmas Term (autumn)
1927 22 March
20 April-August
6July
October
8 December 1928 January-July
July
StudiesItalianwithBiancaEspositoinDublin.
Attends premiere of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey Theatre with Geoffrey Thompson. Attends again on the night W. B. Yeats addresses the audience.
Places fourth in the Foundation Scholarship (Modem Languages), which entitles him to live free of charge in rooms in College.
Takes first trip to France; meets and travels with American student Charles Clarke.
Moves into rooms in Trinity College Dublin, 39 New Square. Meets Alfred Peron, French exchange Lecteur at TCD from the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris.
Recommended to be exchangeLecteur to the Ecole Normale Superieure by Trinity College Dublin Board.
Takes first trip to Italy. Lives in Florence, spends time with the Esposito family; reads Dante with Bianca Esposito. Is joined in Italy by Charles Clarke. Visits mountains nearLake Como with Mario Esposito.
Thomas McGreevy remains in the post ofLecteur at the Ecole Normale Superieure for 1927-1928. SB is offered an alternative position at the University of Besarn;on, with assurance of appointment at the ENS in autumn 1928; on the advice of his Trinity College Dublin mentor, T. B. Rudmose-Brown, he turns this down.
Awarded First Class Moderatorship in Modern Literature at Trinity College Dublin with Large Gold Medal. Wins travel grant.
BA degree from Trinity College Dublin formally conferred.
TeachesatCampbellCollege,Belfast,aninterim post arranged by Rudmose-Brown.
Is visited in Dublin by cousin Margaret (Peggy) Sinclair and Charles Clarke.
4
Chronology 1906-1929
September
By 1 November
December
1929 January 23 March 31 March
10May
June
27June
16 July
July or August October
24 October 14November
28November December
Stays with Sinclair family in Kassel; visits Peggy Sinclair in Vienna.
Arrives at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. ThomasMcGreevy still resident in Paris; he introduces SB to James Joyce, Jean Beaufret, Richard Aldington, and Eugene Jolas.
Joyce suggests a topic for SB's contribution to Our Exagmination. SB spends Christmas in Kassel.
SB proposes French Doctorate on Proust and Joyce.
Responds to Joyce's suggestions regarding his essay "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce. "
Visits the Sinclairs for Easter holiday.
Formally requests renewal of appointment at the Ecole Normale Superieure for 1929-1930.
SB story "Assumption" and essay "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce" published in transition.
Attends Dejeuner Ulysse at Hotel Leopold, Fontainebleau.
Censorship of Publications Act in Ireland. SB visits the Sinclairs in Kassel.
Remains at Trinity College Dublin at start of the Michaelmas Term pending arrival of exchange Lecteur from the Ecole Normale Superieure, delaying his return to the ENS.
New York Stock Market crash.
Essay "Che Sciagura," published in T. C. D. : A College Miscellany; written in response to the Censorship Act.
SB returns to Paris to take up position as exchange Lecteur at Ecole Normale Superieure.
Begins French translation ofJoyce's "Anna Livia Plurabelle" with Alfred Peron. Georges Pelorson arrives in early December to begin as the Ecole Normale Superieure exchange Lecteur at Trinity College Dublin in the Hilary Term Qanuary 1930).
5
Chronology 1906-1929
25 December
26 December 31 December
SB in Dublin. Pelorsonjoins the Beckett family on Christmas Day.
SB leaves for Kassel.
Relationship between Peggy Sinclair and SB broken off.
6
J AMES JOYCE P A RIS
23/3/29 Landgrafenstr. 5 Kassel
Dear M! Joyce
Here is the latest insertion. I think it might follow the
passage which treats of form as a concretion of content. I have succeeded in combining the three points in a more or less
1
2
Sincerely yours Sam Beckett
ALS; 1 leaf, 1 side; NjP,Sylvia Beach Papers, C0108/138/1.
1 SB refers to "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce," an essay commissioned by James Joyce• (1882-1941) on his Work in Progress (published in 1939 as Finnegans Wake);SB's essay was prepared for Our Exagmination Round His Factificationfor Incamination of Work in Progress, a collection of essays intended to suggest the fundamental design of Work in Progress, which was then appearing only in extracts ([Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1929] 1-22; hereafter Our Exagmination).
AlthoughSB's essay first appeared in transition (16-17 Uune 1929] 242-253), it was set from proofs of the book. On 25 April 1929, Eugene Jolas• (1894-1952), founder and Editor of transition• (April 1927-1938), wrote toSylvia Beach• (nee Nancy Woodbridge Beach, 1887-1962), the publisher of Our Exagmination, to request the proof of SB's essay: "Mr. Joyce would like to have it published in the next number of Transition. It is a very brilliant exegesis" (NjP, Sylvia Beach Papers, C0108/138/1; discussion of the dating: Maria Jolas to James Knowlson, BIF, UoR, MS 1277/1/2/28, and Records of Expenses for Our Exagmination, NjP,Sylvia Beach Papers, C0108/138/3).
No manuscript showing the additional paragraph has been found; this paragraph may well have been inserted before a proof copy was given to transition. Comparison between the essay as published by transition and byShakespeare and Company shows
7
reasonable paragraph.
I tried a bookshop to-day for Grimm, but found nothing that
wouldpleaseyou. Howeverthereareplentymore.
Will you remember me to M� Joyce and Giorgio & Lucia? 3
23 March 1929, Joyce
additions and changes on pages 13-15 of the latter Uohn Pilling, A Samuel Beckett Chronology IHoundsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire: PalgraveMacmillan, 2006] 19).
2 Although Joyce alludes to Grimm's Fairy Tales and Grimm's Law in Finnegans Wake, it is not known which of the works of the German mythologists and philologists Jakob Ludwig Carl Grimm (1785-1863) and his brother Wilhelm Carl Grimm (1786-1859) Joyce had requested.
3 JamesJoyce'swifeNora(neeBarnacle,1884-1951),sonGiorgio•(1905-1976)and daughter Lucia• (1907-1982).
JAMES JOYCE PARIS
[26 April 1929]
Dear M! Joyce The text is:
EK7t0pEuOμEVOV (for EK7t0pEUOμEvov] mxpcx ncx,poc;1
The infinitive: £K7tOpEUEcr0m 2
The substantive -co + Infinitive3
Sincerely yours Sam Beckett
[Paris]
ALS (pneu); 1 leaf, 2 sides; to James Joyce, Rue de Grenelle 19 (Square Robiac), Paris VII; pm 12:55, 26-4-29, Paris; pm received 13:00, 26-4-29, Paris; NBuU; previous publication: Patricia Hutchins. James Joyce's World (London:Methuen and Co. , 1957) 169 (facsimile), and Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971; rpt. London: Pimlico, 1991) 102. Dating: from pm on pneumatique.
1 BeckettwrotetoPatriciaHutchinsGraecen(1911-1985)on25April1954:"Ifear I have no recollection of that note to Joyce and can shed no light on it" (TCD,MS
4098/11).
The source of the text that SB sends to Joyce is not certain. The Greek phrase
"t,moprnoμevov mxpa rraTpo�" (ekporeuomenon para patros ! proceeding from the Father]) alludes to John 15:26, and is central to the F11ioque debate that divided
8
10 May 1929, Vessiot
the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches. Ft1ioque (and from the Son). For suggestions of how this passage may relate to Finnegans Wake: Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, rev. edn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) 156, and a letter of 26 June 1975, from Danis Rose to Karl Gay, Curator, Lockwood Library Poetry Collection, State University ofNew York at Buffalo.
2 "i\K7topEurn8m" (ekporeuesthai [to proceed]).
3 "rn" (to: [the]).
ERNEST VESSIOT,ECOLE NORMALE SUPERIEURE PARIS
10/5/29 Ecole Normale [Paris]
Monsieur le Directeur1
Je vous ecris dans l'espoir que vous voudrez bien ratifier
mon desir de passer l'annee scolaire prochaine a l'Ecole comme
2
le Doctorat de l'Universite de Paris.
Veuillez agreer, Monsieur le Directeur, ! 'expression de mes
sentiments respectueux. Samuel B. Beckett
ALS; 1 leaf. 1 side; AN 61AJ/202. Displayed in an exhibition at the Archives Nationales (1994).
10/5/29 Ecole Normale [Paris]
Dear Sir1 Iamwritingtoyouinthehopethatyouwillratifymywishto
2
9
lecteur d'Anglais.
Mon travail personnel sera la preparation d'une these pour
3
spend the next academic year at the Ecole as Lecteur in English.
10 May 1929, Vessiot
My private work will be the preparation of a thesis for the DoctorateoftheUniversityofParis. 3
Yours respectfully Samuel B. Beckett
1 ErnestVessiot(1865-1952),Directeur,EcoleNormaleSuperieure,'from1927to 1935.
2 SB was nominated to be the Lecteur d'anglais (English language assistant) for 1927-1928 in the exchange program between Trinity College Dublin and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris by his mentor Thomas Brown Rudmose-Brown· (known as Ruddy, 1878-1942), Professor of Romance Languages at Trinity College Dublin. Without prejudice to SB's nomination, the administration of the ENS decided to renew the appointment of the current Lecteur, Thomas McGreevy• (1893-1967), who was also a graduate of TCD (Gustave Lanson, Directeur, Ecole Normale Superieure [1919-1927] toRudmose-Brown, 31 July 1927, AN: 61AJ/ 202). SB was offered the appointment for 1928-1929.
SB's request to be retained for a second year was subject to the approval of both institutions; Ernest Vessiot wrote to Alfred Blanche, Consul General de France en lrlande, 14 May 1929, that he was inclined to grant this request (AN: 61AJ/ 202).
3 As the subject for his thesis, SB proposed Joyce and Marcel Proust (1871-1922), but he was discouraged from this by Professor Celestin Bougie (1870-1940), Directeur-adjoint, Lettres (Assistant Director, Arts), Ecole Normale Superieure Uames Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett [New York: Grove Press, 2004] 107, and notes of an interview with SB by Lawrence Harvey in the early 1960s [NhD, Lawrence Harvey Collection, MS 661, Notes for Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic, 161).
THOMAS McGREEVY P ARIS
Friday [? summer 1929]
Landgrafenstr. 5 Kassel
My dear McGreevy1
The abominable old bap Russel[l] duly returned my MSS
with an economic note in the 3! Q person, the whole in a consid erably understamped envelope. I feel slightly paralysed by the courtesy of this gesture. I would like to get rid of the damn thing
10
Friday{? summer 1929), McGreevy
anyhow, anywhere (with the notable exception of 'transition'), but I have no acquaintance with the less squeamish literary garbage buckets. I can't imagine Eliott (for Eliot) touching it - certainly not the verse. Perhaps Seumas O'Sullivan's rag would take it? 2 Ifyou think ofan address I would be grateful to know it.
To my astonishment I arrived in Kassel at the hour numer
ous officials assured me I would arrive, must arrive. 3 I had the
carriage to myselfall night, but did not succeed in getting any
sleep. The aspirin was a snare and the coffee a delusion. So I was
reduced to finishing Le Desert de l'Amour, which I most decid
edly do not like. A patient tenuous snivel that one longs to see
4
ribbons by the sun, and am as uncomfortable in the bunk as Florence.
'Che non puo trovar posa in su le piume ma con dar volta suo dolore scherma. '6
I have read the first volume of'Du Cote de chez Swann', and find it strangely uneven. There are incomparable things - Bloch, Frarn;:oise, Tante Leonie, Legrandin, and then passages that are offensively fastidious, artificial and almost dishonest. 7 It is hard to know what to think about him. He is so absolutely the master ofhis form that he becomes its slave as often as not. Some ofhis metaphors light up a whole page like a bright explosion, and others seem ground out in the dullest desperation. He has every kind of subtle equilibrium, charming trembling equilibrium, and then suddenly a stasis, the arms ofthe balance wedged in a perfect horizontal line, more heavily symmetrical than Macaulay at his worst, with primos & secundos echoing to each complacently and reechoing. His loquacity is certainly more interesting and cleverly done than Moore's, but no less
11
projected noisily into a handkerchief. WecamebackfromKragenhofyesterday. Iamscorchedto
5
Friday{? summer 1929}, McGreevy
profuse, a maudlin false teeth gobble-gobble discharge from a
8
think that I have to contemplate him at stool for 16 volumes!
Cissie is devouringillysses, and likes talking about it and Joyce, a
delicate activity in the presence of Peggy, who has no interest in
9
Are you doing any work or are you infested by the aimable Thomas? How did Agreg. go? How is the position with regard to
11
to hear from you. Cissie remembers you well and sends her kindest. The Boss is in Ireland and the children conveniently dispersed, so there is a strange hot peace in the flat. I could'nt [for couldn't] sleep last night and read 'Sir Arthur Savile's Crime', 'The Something Ghost' & 'Poems in Prose', this last enormous Ithought. 12
S. B.
ALI; 1 leaf, 4 sides; TCD, MS 10402/1. Dating: although James Knowlson assigns a probable date of June 1930 to this letter, summer 1929 is more likely (Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 639-641, n. 90, n. 118). The agregation examinations took place in the early summer, and SB describes serious sunburn. The relatively formal greeting suggests this may be among the first of SB's letters to McGreevy with the issue of 12 April 1930, publication of The Irish Statesman ceased, and, given AE's definitive dis missal of SB's submission in early 1930 (see 1 March 1930), it is more likely that the understamped rejection described here is earlier than 1930.
1 McGreevyremainedinParisafterSBtookuphisappointmentasLecteurd'anglais at the Ecole Normale Superieure; he introduced SB to Joyce and to English novelist and poet Richard Aldington' (1892-1962).
12
colic-afflicted belly. I think he drank too much tilleul. And to
books and who cannot be persuaded that literacy is not a crime. I have made up my mind to write to 'transition' for the money they owe me, but have lost their address. 10 If you are writing I would be grateful to have it.
'Les Enfants'
Write when you feel strong. You know how glad I would be
. . .
Leb wohl. Yrs ever
13
Friday{? summer 1929}, McGreevy
2 Irish poet, painter, and editor George William Russell (pseud. AE, 1867-1935) edited The Irish Statesman (15 September 1923 to 12 April 1930), a journal that advocated national ideals and liberal policy on divorce and censorship. On the suggestion of Thomas McGreevy, who had published poems in the journal under the pseudonym L. St. Senen, SB may have submitted a prose piece to The Irish Statesman; John Pilling suggests "Assumption" (Pilling, A Samuel Beckett Chronology, 19). SB's story "Assumption" was published in transition, 16-17 Oune 1929), 268-271. Reference to an understamped envelope suggests that the submission was longer than one or two pages.
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), poet and Editor of The Criterion (1923-1939). Poet and essayist Seumas O'Sullivan• (ne James Sullivan Starkey, 1879-1958) edited Dublin Magazine (1923-1958).
3 SB writes from Kassel, Germany, from the home of his paternal aunt Frances Sinclair• (nee Beckett, known as Fanny, and by family and friends as Cissie, 1880-1951) and her husband William Abraham Sinclair• (known as Boss, 1882-1937), an art dealer.
4 Fram;oisMauriac,LeDesertde! 'amour(1925;TheDesertofLove).
5 Between1923and1925theSinclairshadlivedinthePensioninKragenhofon the Fulda River, near Kassel; they continued to go to Kragenhofto swim and take walks along the river or through the forests (Morris Sinclair, 20 October 1993).
6 The city of Florence is compared to a sick woman by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321): "Che non puo trovar posa in su le piume, / ma con dar volta suo dolore scherma" ("that can find no rest on her bed of down but with turning seeks to ease her pain") (La Divina Commedia, with comment by Enrico Bianchi [Florence: Adriano Salani, 1927], Purgatorio Canto VI, lines 150-151; Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Vol. II, Purgatorio, tr. and comment John D. Sinclair [London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1939, rev. 1948] 89). All citations are from these editions.
SB used the 1926 Salani edition, although he did not think highly of it; the editors could only obtain a 1927 edition. For further discussion of the Salani edition, see Daniela Caselli, "The 'Florentia Edition in the Ignoble Salani Collection': A Textual Comparison,"Journal ofBeckett Studies 9. 2 (2001) 1-20; Daniela Caselli, "The Promise of Dante in the Beckett Manuscripts," Notes Diverse Halo, Special issue SBT/A 16 (2006) 237-257.
SB read Dante in Italian, not in translation. The editors chose the prose translation of Sinclair with the Italian text. "the critical text of the Societa Dantesca Italiana revised by Giuseppi Vandelli," on the facing page, so readers can consult both texts (The Divine Comedy ofDante Alighieri, I, Inferno, 9).
7 SBreferstocharactersinDucotedechezSwann,thefirstpartofProust'snovel A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; In Search ofLost Time).
8 English writer and statesman Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859); Irish novelist George Augustus Moore (1852-1933).
The narrator of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu recovers memories of his childhood when drinking a cup of "tilleul" (lime-flower infusion) with a madeleine.
13
Friday{? summer 1929}, McGreevy
9 RuthMargaret Sinclair• (known asPeggy, 1911-1933 ), daughter ofCissie and Boss Sinclair, had spent time with SB in Dublin in the summer of 1928, and in September 1928 in Kassel and Vienna, where she studied dance and movement at the Schule Hellerau-Laxenburg (Pilling,A Samuel Beckett Chronology, 17).
JamesJoyce,Ulysses1( 922).
10 SB's essay"Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce," and his story"Assumption," hadjust
appeared in transition.
11 McGreevy continued to have a room at theEcole Normale Superieure. Jean Thomas• (1900-1983),Agrege-repetiteur at theENS (1926 to 1932), coached students preparing for the agregation. the highest-level university examination. SB taught students taking the agregation d'anglais.
McGreevy had been asked to consider translating Les Enfants tenibles 1( 929) by Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) (McGreevy to George Yeats, 21 August 1929, NL! ,MS 20,849; Susan Schreibman,15 January 2007).
12 lord Arthur Savile's Crime, The Canterville Ghost, Poems in Prose byOscar Wilde (1854-1900) (London: James R. Osgood,Mcilvaine,1891).
13 "Leb wohl. " (Ger. , Be well. )
RO GER DIO N, ECOLE NORMA LE SUPERIEURE PARIS
25/11/29 Trinity College Dublin
Cher Monsieur Dion1
Je peux maintenant vous annoncer definitivement la date
de mon retour a l'Ecole. 11 m'est impossible de partir avantjeudi, le 28 de ce mois. 2 Je me presenterai a l'Ecole dans l'apres[-]midi du vendredi suivant.
Veuillez agreer, Monsieur Dion, ! 'expression de mes senti ments les plus distingues,
s/ S. B. Beckett
TLS;1 leaf, 1 side;AN, 61AJ/119. Dating: although written in Roman numerals,the date refers to November.
14
25/11/29 Trinity College Dublin
Dear Monsieur Dion1
I can now tell you definitively the date of my return to the
Ecole. It is impossible for me to leave before Thursday the 28th of this month. I shall come to the Ecole in the afternoon of the following Friday.
Yours sincerely S. B. Beckett
1 RogerDion(1896-1981),amemberoftheSocialSciencesfaculty,wasSurveillant,a senior administrator with responsibility for discipline, at the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1929.
2 SB'sreturntotheEcoleNormaleSuperieureintheautumnof1929wasdelayed by Rudmose-Brown, who asked that SB remain at Trinity College Dublin in the absence ofAndre Parreaux (1906-1979). Parreaux had been the ENS exchange Lecteur at TCD in 1928-1929 and had been expected to return for 1929-1930; however, he was detained in Paris to retake examinations in English and Philology (Rudmose-Brown to the Directeur, Ecole Normale Superieure, 9 October 1929, AN, 61AJ/202). When it was determined that Parreaux would not be returning to TCD for 1929-1930, the ENS named Georges Pelorson• (after 1945 known as Georges Belmont, b. 1909) to take up the appointment at TCD beginning in the Hilary term (27 January 1930). Only when this decision was reached could SB return to his position at the ENS.
25 November 1929, Dion
15
1930 March 14May
1June
15June 16June
After 1 July SAugust 25August
16 September 17 September
1 October
10 October 14 October
Chatto and Windus accept Proust.
SB proposes adding a conclusion to Proust.
CHRONOLOGY 1930
SBpoem"ForFutureReference"publishedin
transition.
SB submits English translations from Italian for a special issue of This Quarter.
Richard Aldington proposes to Chatto and Windus that they publish what will become The Dolphin Books series.
SB submits MS ofWhoroscope to the Hours Press. Awarded Hours Press Prize for Whoroscope.
Applies for Trinity College Dublin lectureship in Modern Languages.
Sends two pages of French translation of Joyce's "Anna Livia Plurabelle" to Philippe Soupault.
Has begun to write Proust. Jacob Bronowski selects three of the four poems by SB published in The European Caravan: "Hell Crane to Starling," "Casket of Pralinen for the Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin," "Text," and "Yoke of Liberty. "
SB leaves Paris for London.
Personally delivers the MS of Proust to Charles Prentice at Chatto and Windus in London.
In Dublin for the beginning of theMichaelmasTerm at Trinity College Dublin.
17
Chronology 1930
15 October
17 October
By 14 November
25 November By 12 December
December
Bifurissues printer's proofs oftranslation of"Anna Livia Plurabelle" by SB and Alfred Peron, but Joyce withdraws the translation.
Chatto and Windus sends contract for Proust.
SB presents "Le Concentrisme," a spoof study of an invented poet, Jean du Chas, to the Modern Languages Society, Trinity College Dublin.
Visits Jack B. Yeats for the first time.
xciii
In the work of Cezanne, first, Beckett sights - or sites - an all-important representation ofthe other ness ofthe world, "incommensurable with all human expressions what soever. " The "deanthropomorphizations of the artist" are the more precious in Cezanne's portraits, where the individual subject becomes "incapable ofloving or hating anyone but himselfor ofbeing loved or hated by anyone but himself'; a claim which Beckett immediately and doubly undermines, as ifhe had seen too much or reached too far, by signing off his letter in a firm rejection ofsolipsism - "God love thee" -
believes writing should be heading.
Introduction to Volume I
terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between. "95 In Yeats's work, nature itself, Ireland's nature, becomes the setting of "the ultimate inorganism of everything. " And again the future looms, the theatrical work for which Beckett will be most cele brated, in the metaphor he uses to describe Ireland here: "a nature almost as inhumanly inorganic as a stage set. "96 When, in 1938, return ing to Ireland after a prolonged absence, he visits Yeats's studio and sees his "magnificent new picture," entitled Helen, he rediscovers the "same extraordinary tenderness & distinction of handling," and beyond that, "depth and a courage more than of conviction, of certainty, absolutely natural & unrhetorical. " He rediscovers the very sense of necessity that years previously he located in Homer and Dante, the sense of art as a physical extension of the self, an art which is as natural as breathing. Unable to produce his own art to match, Beckett the viewer none the less absorbs the impact: "I was really knocked all ofa heap. "97
If art hits, and must hit, the body, this is because it must emerge
from the body to begin with, if it is to be necessary. For the greats, this
may be as easy as breathing; for the remainder, which includes Beckett
himself, whose writing emerges "above an abscess and not out of a
cavity," the somatic impetus is less unambiguously life-sustaining or
98
95 SB to Cissie Sinclair, 14 ! August 1937].
96 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 August 1937.
97 SB to Thomas McGreevy, Thursday 14 August 1938].
98 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 October 1932.
99 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 28 November 1937 [for 1936].
100 SB to Thomas McGreevy. Saturday 112 September 1931].
101 SB to George Reavey, 8 October 1932. "Dies diarrhoeae" (Lat. , literally, days of
diarrhea, echoing the Dies Irae of the reguiem Mass).
xciv
satisfying.
masturbation," Beckett says, with a sideways glance at his own restricted productivity, that there are worse things, "mental asperma tism for example. "99 When finally two poems do arrive, they are blessed as "a double-yoked orgasm in months ofaspermatic nights & days. " 100 At its best, writing is evacuation of pus, or is ejaculation of sperm. Being very rarely at its best, it is more commonly - even obsessively - that less exalted convulsion, defecation. When, amidst the "dies diarrhoeae,"101 some poems are taken by a journal, Beckett celebrates this acceptance of "three turds from my central lavatory. " The toilet is not private, and the
Commenting on Aldous Huxley's use of the term "mental
Introduction to Volume I
"Proustian arse-hole"102 needs to be contemplated, as we saw above, while the critic himself is "at stool. "103 To McGreevy, Beckett conveys his intention to return to writing as a determination to "take down the petites merdes de mon ame. "104 Beckett envisages writing a work which might finally please a publisher, in the following terms: "When I imagine I have a real 'twice round the pan & pointed at both ends' I'll offend you with its spiral on my soilman's shovel. "105 Of his poems which he calls "the Bones," his hope is that they will become a "bolus," which, on publication, will cause readerly discomfiture - "May it stick in their anus. "106 Even when the work is not itself fecal, it can still do cloacal duty. When an article is requested of him, he finds himself "looking through my essuie-cul de reserve. "107 The scatology may contain an undergraduate's jocularity, but that it is no mere joke, still less any mere trope, is clear even without recourse to Beckett's oeuvre. Writing and shitting: without recourse to Freud, either, these may be seen to share for Beckett an all-important intimacy, an urgency, a necessity even, just as they share a difficulty and delight in emission and transmission. They share, that is to say, both the requirement and the limits of expres sion. And so the irony is much fainter than might at first be imagined, when, after a publisher suggests substantial cutting of Murphy, what are envisaged next are "The Beckett Bowel Books. " Such new work might at least have a rhythm, one which would tie it to the body and its necessacy functions: "My next work shall be on rice paper wound about a spool, with a perforated line evecy six inches and on sale in Boots. The length of each chapter will be carefully calculated to suit with the average free motion. " 108
What writing and the rectal spasm share is that they take the subject, quite literally, out of himself. They are not the only spasms to do this, however, and there are others which take Beckett so far out of himself that he fears he may never return. "I always see the physical crisis just round the corner," he writes to Cissie Sinclair in 1937, confirming
102 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 25 August 11930].
103 SB to Thomas McGreevy. Friday I? summer 1929].
104 SB to Thomas McGreevy, I? after 15 August 1931]. '"Petites merdes de mon ame'"
105 (droppings from my soul).
106 SB to Charles Prentice, 15 August 1931.
107 SB to George Reavey, 9 January 1935 [for 1936].
SB to George Reavey, 6 May 1936. "Essuie-cul de reserve" (spare bumf). 108 SB to Mary Manning Howe, 14 November 1936.
XCV
Introduction to Volume I
that this crisis is far from merely dreaded: "It would solve perhaps the worst ofwhat remains to be solved, clarify the proven anyway, which I suppose is the best solution we can hope for. "109 The "crisis" takes the form ofboils, cysts, and especially heart palpitations, all ofwhich, even while he tries to attribute to them purely organic origins, Beckett suspects are psychosomatically induced.
Beckett finally decides to move into a quite new word-setting, a highly alien one, yet one in which, as in writing, language must do the work of relation and creation: in 1934 he begins a psychoanalysis with W. R. Bion, then a junior analyst, whom he quickly re-christens "the covey. " He counts the sessions: "On Monday I go for the 133rd time. "111 He fears that "the analysis is going to turn out a failure. "112 Yet he sees "no prospect of the analysis coming to an end. " The somatic symptoms persist. but with a new force he realizes: "how lost I would be bereft ofmy incapacitation. "113 The shift in perception may appear slight, but what the letters make clear - clearer than Beckett ever intends - is how significant it is, to the point where he can write in 1935 to McGreevy: "The old heart pounces now & then, as though to console me for the intolerable symptoms ofan improvement";114 or write to him later, after the analysis has ended, that he has "overcome the need ofreturn ing to my vomit. "115
The letters manifest the shift not just in what they say, but also in the way they say it. They present a change, achieved in part through words used in the highly specialized context ofpsychoanalysis, through those words used in the not-entirely-different context that is letter-writing: not just their information, now, but their increasingly undefended style that becomes a disarming directness. Certainly, there is still room for highly self-conscious Beckett parades, ofthe sort that make him say of his early work, "ofcourse it stinks ofJoyce in spite ofmost earnest endeavours to endow it with my own odours. "116 The letters do provide
109 SB to Cissie Sinclair, 14 [August 1937].
110 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 10 March [1935].
111 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 8 February [1935].
112 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 1 January 1935.
113 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 February [1935].
114 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 20 February [1935].
115 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 14 May 1937.
116 SB to Charles Prentice, 15 August 1931.
xcvi
11
It is only when the crisis puts "the fear ofdeath" into him, 0 that
Introduction to Volume I
plentiful opportunities for the flexing of newly acquired linguistic muscles, as well as for old-fashioned showing-off. Those written to Nuala Costello, for example, are quite as narcissistically turned, as elliptical and excessive at once, as anything he ever wrote, an aware ness of which he seems to catch even as he protracts it, telling her: "My velleities of self-diffusion in this stew of LETTERS have been repulsed with the traditional contumely, so now I'm sulking and won't play. "117 Here, as on occasion with Cissie Sinclair, the seductions of verbal play seem to take the place- as it were, synechdochally- of seduction more palpable. He even goes so far as to say, at one point, with tongue only half in cheek, that "Perhaps the literary value of this letter [ . . . ] would be promoted by a few lines of verse. "118
Shortly after writing to McGreevy of "obstipation" and "tepid evira
tion,"119 Beckett declares: "I find that eschewal ofverbal sanies is one of
my New Year resolutions. " 120 Of course, this resolution is quite as hard
to keep as any other. Yet the verbal play and display in the letters, which
will yield a tone familiar from the published work of the 1930s, can
indeed cede at any point to something less ostentatious or guarded.
When Beckett's writing darts between languages or registers, at times
he may be less demonstrating his cleverness than exploring the short
comings in the words at his disposal. The distinction between this
exploration and his Joycean play may seem slim, but it is none the
less important, as he invites not so much his reader's admiration as
an apprehension of a shared incapacity - shared with language, too,
now. When Beckett writes that "the Irish Times accuses reception of his
new prose work," he may not be merely forgetting he is writing in
121
English.
When he writes to McGreevy, upon one more rejection of
a work, "Anyhow tant piss," he may be offering more than a trans
national pun; may be inviting his friend into a verbal space where no
ready-made language can do justice to what he feels, when this includes
a wish to shrug off the whole disappointment in the fewest words
122
possible.
When he skips across registers and languages searching
117 SB to Nuala Costello, 27 February 1934.
118 SB to Cissie Sinclair, 14 [August 1937].
119 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 4 November [for 3 November 1932].
120 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 5 January [1933].
121 SB to Arland Ussher, 25 March 1936.
122 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 18 [August 1932]. "Tant piss" (pun on "tant pis" [too bad]).
xcvii
Introduction to Volume I
for a word, he is not always just parading his learning. Sometimes, he is
being as straightforward as possible. When he jots on the back of a
picture postcard to McGreevy sent from Florence, "Che tu fossi meco,"
he is not only finding a fancy way ofsaying, "Wish you were here"; he is
above all trusting in his friend to catch the compacted message, which
includes their shared love of languages, of Italy and Italian, of Dante,
and of the escape which all these together imply. 123 When he flashes
between English and French - and Latin - in his letters to McGreevy,
when he complains that "this vitaccia is terne beyond all belief," he is
124
He is coax ing his reader on to a fragile ground between languages, a ground that he
not only repudiating the "terne" in his very formulation.
will make ever more daringly his own in the years to come.
Beckett's letters reveal, they present, explain, harangue, occasionally theorize, more rarely justify. But as, from the moment he started to write - and not only because of the influence of Joyce - their author turned his back on any instrumentalist understanding of language, the letters do these things as acts of a writer, as acts of writing. What might appear a contradiction - between a highly self-conscious Beckett for whom the act of writing mattered even when it came to letters and the Beckett we have tried to sketch above, who always had his destinataire in mind, who wrote letters to - may, in fact, offer a key to what is distinctive in the tone and style ofthe letters, as compared to his more purposefully literary work of the period. For Beckett's writing in his letters is never so unadornedly itself as when it is moving out of itself, never so fresh and indicative of his future as when he feels confident of his destinataire. The letters presented here deploy their range of languages and idioms not merely for show; they do so in order to tickle, engage, challenge their intended reader, and they do so on the reader's linguistic home ground. From the cod-bombast of his French to his cousin Morris Sinclair, to the super-formal English of his applications for jobs, to the slang of his back-slapping to Arland Ussher - and beyond: Beckett writes as he hopes, and increasingly trusts, he will be heard.
123 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 2 February 1937.
124 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 24 February 1931. "Vitaccia" (It. , miserable life, wretched
existence). "Teme" (colorless).
xcviii
Introduction to Volume I
Beckett's letters, like his literary works of the period, are perform
ances as much as they are communications; only, if they are perform
ances, they are so for a very particular audience. And when his faith in
this audience grows, as it does with McGreevy, his language leaps,
explores the in-between spaces, achieves sudden condensations. So
too may it relax. Then, a freedom, an unselfconscious simplicity,
emerges which may not be found in the oeuvre until Beckett turns to
writing fiction in French at the end of World War II. This is what one
senses in the extraordinary letter of 10 March 1935, in which Beckett
explains to McGreevy his reasons for entering into and persisting with
his psychoanalysis; explains his attempt, compelled by his acute phys
ical crises, to shed his "feeling of arrogant otherness," his "feeling that
I was too good for anything else," in favor of something for which he has
not yet found a name - unless its name is the extended one offered by
125
125 SB to Thomas McGreevy, 10 March 1935.
126 SB to Arland Ussher, 26 March 1937.
127 SB to Thomas McGreevy. 8 October 1935.
"It is more than I can do to go on," he writes to
this marvelous letter.
Arland Ussher in 1937 - having gone on at length in his letter.
hard it is to reach a tolerable arrangement between working & living," he writes to McGreevy, when the letter is the indispensable link in just such an "arrangement. "127
126
"How
xcix
LETTERS 1929-1940
1906
1911
1915
1916
1918
1919
1920
1921 1922
1923
1924 1925
13April
24April
11 November 21 January April
23 December 6 December 28June September May
23 May August
1 October March
March April June
SamuelBarclayBeckettbornatCooldrinaghon Good Friday.
A pupil at the Elsner kindergarten. A pupil at Earlsfort House School.
Sees flames and smoke rising from Dublin while walking in the Wicklow Mountains with his father: The Easter Rising.
End of World War I.
Start of the Anglo-Irish War.
SB joins brother Frank Beckett as a pupil at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh.
Partition of Ireland by Government of Ireland Act. Signing of Anglo-Irish Treaty.
Start of the Irish Civil War.
SB appointed Junior Prefect, Portora Royal School. Sits entrance exam for Trinity College Dublin. End oflrish Civil War.
SB leaves Portora Royal School as Senior 6th Form Prefect.
Enters Trinity College Dublin.
SeesSeanO'Casey'sJunoandthePaycockatthe Abbey Theatre, Dublin.
TakespartinDonnybrookmotorcycletrial. Picked for Trinity College Dublin Cricket First XI. Becomes Senior Exhibitioner.
3
CHRONOLOGY 1906-1929
Chronology 1906-1929
1926 January
8, 11 February
31 May
August-September
Michaelmas Term (autumn)
1927 22 March
20 April-August
6July
October
8 December 1928 January-July
July
StudiesItalianwithBiancaEspositoinDublin.
Attends premiere of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey Theatre with Geoffrey Thompson. Attends again on the night W. B. Yeats addresses the audience.
Places fourth in the Foundation Scholarship (Modem Languages), which entitles him to live free of charge in rooms in College.
Takes first trip to France; meets and travels with American student Charles Clarke.
Moves into rooms in Trinity College Dublin, 39 New Square. Meets Alfred Peron, French exchange Lecteur at TCD from the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris.
Recommended to be exchangeLecteur to the Ecole Normale Superieure by Trinity College Dublin Board.
Takes first trip to Italy. Lives in Florence, spends time with the Esposito family; reads Dante with Bianca Esposito. Is joined in Italy by Charles Clarke. Visits mountains nearLake Como with Mario Esposito.
Thomas McGreevy remains in the post ofLecteur at the Ecole Normale Superieure for 1927-1928. SB is offered an alternative position at the University of Besarn;on, with assurance of appointment at the ENS in autumn 1928; on the advice of his Trinity College Dublin mentor, T. B. Rudmose-Brown, he turns this down.
Awarded First Class Moderatorship in Modern Literature at Trinity College Dublin with Large Gold Medal. Wins travel grant.
BA degree from Trinity College Dublin formally conferred.
TeachesatCampbellCollege,Belfast,aninterim post arranged by Rudmose-Brown.
Is visited in Dublin by cousin Margaret (Peggy) Sinclair and Charles Clarke.
4
Chronology 1906-1929
September
By 1 November
December
1929 January 23 March 31 March
10May
June
27June
16 July
July or August October
24 October 14November
28November December
Stays with Sinclair family in Kassel; visits Peggy Sinclair in Vienna.
Arrives at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. ThomasMcGreevy still resident in Paris; he introduces SB to James Joyce, Jean Beaufret, Richard Aldington, and Eugene Jolas.
Joyce suggests a topic for SB's contribution to Our Exagmination. SB spends Christmas in Kassel.
SB proposes French Doctorate on Proust and Joyce.
Responds to Joyce's suggestions regarding his essay "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce. "
Visits the Sinclairs for Easter holiday.
Formally requests renewal of appointment at the Ecole Normale Superieure for 1929-1930.
SB story "Assumption" and essay "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce" published in transition.
Attends Dejeuner Ulysse at Hotel Leopold, Fontainebleau.
Censorship of Publications Act in Ireland. SB visits the Sinclairs in Kassel.
Remains at Trinity College Dublin at start of the Michaelmas Term pending arrival of exchange Lecteur from the Ecole Normale Superieure, delaying his return to the ENS.
New York Stock Market crash.
Essay "Che Sciagura," published in T. C. D. : A College Miscellany; written in response to the Censorship Act.
SB returns to Paris to take up position as exchange Lecteur at Ecole Normale Superieure.
Begins French translation ofJoyce's "Anna Livia Plurabelle" with Alfred Peron. Georges Pelorson arrives in early December to begin as the Ecole Normale Superieure exchange Lecteur at Trinity College Dublin in the Hilary Term Qanuary 1930).
5
Chronology 1906-1929
25 December
26 December 31 December
SB in Dublin. Pelorsonjoins the Beckett family on Christmas Day.
SB leaves for Kassel.
Relationship between Peggy Sinclair and SB broken off.
6
J AMES JOYCE P A RIS
23/3/29 Landgrafenstr. 5 Kassel
Dear M! Joyce
Here is the latest insertion. I think it might follow the
passage which treats of form as a concretion of content. I have succeeded in combining the three points in a more or less
1
2
Sincerely yours Sam Beckett
ALS; 1 leaf, 1 side; NjP,Sylvia Beach Papers, C0108/138/1.
1 SB refers to "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce," an essay commissioned by James Joyce• (1882-1941) on his Work in Progress (published in 1939 as Finnegans Wake);SB's essay was prepared for Our Exagmination Round His Factificationfor Incamination of Work in Progress, a collection of essays intended to suggest the fundamental design of Work in Progress, which was then appearing only in extracts ([Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1929] 1-22; hereafter Our Exagmination).
AlthoughSB's essay first appeared in transition (16-17 Uune 1929] 242-253), it was set from proofs of the book. On 25 April 1929, Eugene Jolas• (1894-1952), founder and Editor of transition• (April 1927-1938), wrote toSylvia Beach• (nee Nancy Woodbridge Beach, 1887-1962), the publisher of Our Exagmination, to request the proof of SB's essay: "Mr. Joyce would like to have it published in the next number of Transition. It is a very brilliant exegesis" (NjP, Sylvia Beach Papers, C0108/138/1; discussion of the dating: Maria Jolas to James Knowlson, BIF, UoR, MS 1277/1/2/28, and Records of Expenses for Our Exagmination, NjP,Sylvia Beach Papers, C0108/138/3).
No manuscript showing the additional paragraph has been found; this paragraph may well have been inserted before a proof copy was given to transition. Comparison between the essay as published by transition and byShakespeare and Company shows
7
reasonable paragraph.
I tried a bookshop to-day for Grimm, but found nothing that
wouldpleaseyou. Howeverthereareplentymore.
Will you remember me to M� Joyce and Giorgio & Lucia? 3
23 March 1929, Joyce
additions and changes on pages 13-15 of the latter Uohn Pilling, A Samuel Beckett Chronology IHoundsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire: PalgraveMacmillan, 2006] 19).
2 Although Joyce alludes to Grimm's Fairy Tales and Grimm's Law in Finnegans Wake, it is not known which of the works of the German mythologists and philologists Jakob Ludwig Carl Grimm (1785-1863) and his brother Wilhelm Carl Grimm (1786-1859) Joyce had requested.
3 JamesJoyce'swifeNora(neeBarnacle,1884-1951),sonGiorgio•(1905-1976)and daughter Lucia• (1907-1982).
JAMES JOYCE PARIS
[26 April 1929]
Dear M! Joyce The text is:
EK7t0pEuOμEVOV (for EK7t0pEUOμEvov] mxpcx ncx,poc;1
The infinitive: £K7tOpEUEcr0m 2
The substantive -co + Infinitive3
Sincerely yours Sam Beckett
[Paris]
ALS (pneu); 1 leaf, 2 sides; to James Joyce, Rue de Grenelle 19 (Square Robiac), Paris VII; pm 12:55, 26-4-29, Paris; pm received 13:00, 26-4-29, Paris; NBuU; previous publication: Patricia Hutchins. James Joyce's World (London:Methuen and Co. , 1957) 169 (facsimile), and Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971; rpt. London: Pimlico, 1991) 102. Dating: from pm on pneumatique.
1 BeckettwrotetoPatriciaHutchinsGraecen(1911-1985)on25April1954:"Ifear I have no recollection of that note to Joyce and can shed no light on it" (TCD,MS
4098/11).
The source of the text that SB sends to Joyce is not certain. The Greek phrase
"t,moprnoμevov mxpa rraTpo�" (ekporeuomenon para patros ! proceeding from the Father]) alludes to John 15:26, and is central to the F11ioque debate that divided
8
10 May 1929, Vessiot
the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches. Ft1ioque (and from the Son). For suggestions of how this passage may relate to Finnegans Wake: Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, rev. edn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) 156, and a letter of 26 June 1975, from Danis Rose to Karl Gay, Curator, Lockwood Library Poetry Collection, State University ofNew York at Buffalo.
2 "i\K7topEurn8m" (ekporeuesthai [to proceed]).
3 "rn" (to: [the]).
ERNEST VESSIOT,ECOLE NORMALE SUPERIEURE PARIS
10/5/29 Ecole Normale [Paris]
Monsieur le Directeur1
Je vous ecris dans l'espoir que vous voudrez bien ratifier
mon desir de passer l'annee scolaire prochaine a l'Ecole comme
2
le Doctorat de l'Universite de Paris.
Veuillez agreer, Monsieur le Directeur, ! 'expression de mes
sentiments respectueux. Samuel B. Beckett
ALS; 1 leaf. 1 side; AN 61AJ/202. Displayed in an exhibition at the Archives Nationales (1994).
10/5/29 Ecole Normale [Paris]
Dear Sir1 Iamwritingtoyouinthehopethatyouwillratifymywishto
2
9
lecteur d'Anglais.
Mon travail personnel sera la preparation d'une these pour
3
spend the next academic year at the Ecole as Lecteur in English.
10 May 1929, Vessiot
My private work will be the preparation of a thesis for the DoctorateoftheUniversityofParis. 3
Yours respectfully Samuel B. Beckett
1 ErnestVessiot(1865-1952),Directeur,EcoleNormaleSuperieure,'from1927to 1935.
2 SB was nominated to be the Lecteur d'anglais (English language assistant) for 1927-1928 in the exchange program between Trinity College Dublin and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris by his mentor Thomas Brown Rudmose-Brown· (known as Ruddy, 1878-1942), Professor of Romance Languages at Trinity College Dublin. Without prejudice to SB's nomination, the administration of the ENS decided to renew the appointment of the current Lecteur, Thomas McGreevy• (1893-1967), who was also a graduate of TCD (Gustave Lanson, Directeur, Ecole Normale Superieure [1919-1927] toRudmose-Brown, 31 July 1927, AN: 61AJ/ 202). SB was offered the appointment for 1928-1929.
SB's request to be retained for a second year was subject to the approval of both institutions; Ernest Vessiot wrote to Alfred Blanche, Consul General de France en lrlande, 14 May 1929, that he was inclined to grant this request (AN: 61AJ/ 202).
3 As the subject for his thesis, SB proposed Joyce and Marcel Proust (1871-1922), but he was discouraged from this by Professor Celestin Bougie (1870-1940), Directeur-adjoint, Lettres (Assistant Director, Arts), Ecole Normale Superieure Uames Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett [New York: Grove Press, 2004] 107, and notes of an interview with SB by Lawrence Harvey in the early 1960s [NhD, Lawrence Harvey Collection, MS 661, Notes for Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic, 161).
THOMAS McGREEVY P ARIS
Friday [? summer 1929]
Landgrafenstr. 5 Kassel
My dear McGreevy1
The abominable old bap Russel[l] duly returned my MSS
with an economic note in the 3! Q person, the whole in a consid erably understamped envelope. I feel slightly paralysed by the courtesy of this gesture. I would like to get rid of the damn thing
10
Friday{? summer 1929), McGreevy
anyhow, anywhere (with the notable exception of 'transition'), but I have no acquaintance with the less squeamish literary garbage buckets. I can't imagine Eliott (for Eliot) touching it - certainly not the verse. Perhaps Seumas O'Sullivan's rag would take it? 2 Ifyou think ofan address I would be grateful to know it.
To my astonishment I arrived in Kassel at the hour numer
ous officials assured me I would arrive, must arrive. 3 I had the
carriage to myselfall night, but did not succeed in getting any
sleep. The aspirin was a snare and the coffee a delusion. So I was
reduced to finishing Le Desert de l'Amour, which I most decid
edly do not like. A patient tenuous snivel that one longs to see
4
ribbons by the sun, and am as uncomfortable in the bunk as Florence.
'Che non puo trovar posa in su le piume ma con dar volta suo dolore scherma. '6
I have read the first volume of'Du Cote de chez Swann', and find it strangely uneven. There are incomparable things - Bloch, Frarn;:oise, Tante Leonie, Legrandin, and then passages that are offensively fastidious, artificial and almost dishonest. 7 It is hard to know what to think about him. He is so absolutely the master ofhis form that he becomes its slave as often as not. Some ofhis metaphors light up a whole page like a bright explosion, and others seem ground out in the dullest desperation. He has every kind of subtle equilibrium, charming trembling equilibrium, and then suddenly a stasis, the arms ofthe balance wedged in a perfect horizontal line, more heavily symmetrical than Macaulay at his worst, with primos & secundos echoing to each complacently and reechoing. His loquacity is certainly more interesting and cleverly done than Moore's, but no less
11
projected noisily into a handkerchief. WecamebackfromKragenhofyesterday. Iamscorchedto
5
Friday{? summer 1929}, McGreevy
profuse, a maudlin false teeth gobble-gobble discharge from a
8
think that I have to contemplate him at stool for 16 volumes!
Cissie is devouringillysses, and likes talking about it and Joyce, a
delicate activity in the presence of Peggy, who has no interest in
9
Are you doing any work or are you infested by the aimable Thomas? How did Agreg. go? How is the position with regard to
11
to hear from you. Cissie remembers you well and sends her kindest. The Boss is in Ireland and the children conveniently dispersed, so there is a strange hot peace in the flat. I could'nt [for couldn't] sleep last night and read 'Sir Arthur Savile's Crime', 'The Something Ghost' & 'Poems in Prose', this last enormous Ithought. 12
S. B.
ALI; 1 leaf, 4 sides; TCD, MS 10402/1. Dating: although James Knowlson assigns a probable date of June 1930 to this letter, summer 1929 is more likely (Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 639-641, n. 90, n. 118). The agregation examinations took place in the early summer, and SB describes serious sunburn. The relatively formal greeting suggests this may be among the first of SB's letters to McGreevy with the issue of 12 April 1930, publication of The Irish Statesman ceased, and, given AE's definitive dis missal of SB's submission in early 1930 (see 1 March 1930), it is more likely that the understamped rejection described here is earlier than 1930.
1 McGreevyremainedinParisafterSBtookuphisappointmentasLecteurd'anglais at the Ecole Normale Superieure; he introduced SB to Joyce and to English novelist and poet Richard Aldington' (1892-1962).
12
colic-afflicted belly. I think he drank too much tilleul. And to
books and who cannot be persuaded that literacy is not a crime. I have made up my mind to write to 'transition' for the money they owe me, but have lost their address. 10 If you are writing I would be grateful to have it.
'Les Enfants'
Write when you feel strong. You know how glad I would be
. . .
Leb wohl. Yrs ever
13
Friday{? summer 1929}, McGreevy
2 Irish poet, painter, and editor George William Russell (pseud. AE, 1867-1935) edited The Irish Statesman (15 September 1923 to 12 April 1930), a journal that advocated national ideals and liberal policy on divorce and censorship. On the suggestion of Thomas McGreevy, who had published poems in the journal under the pseudonym L. St. Senen, SB may have submitted a prose piece to The Irish Statesman; John Pilling suggests "Assumption" (Pilling, A Samuel Beckett Chronology, 19). SB's story "Assumption" was published in transition, 16-17 Oune 1929), 268-271. Reference to an understamped envelope suggests that the submission was longer than one or two pages.
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), poet and Editor of The Criterion (1923-1939). Poet and essayist Seumas O'Sullivan• (ne James Sullivan Starkey, 1879-1958) edited Dublin Magazine (1923-1958).
3 SB writes from Kassel, Germany, from the home of his paternal aunt Frances Sinclair• (nee Beckett, known as Fanny, and by family and friends as Cissie, 1880-1951) and her husband William Abraham Sinclair• (known as Boss, 1882-1937), an art dealer.
4 Fram;oisMauriac,LeDesertde! 'amour(1925;TheDesertofLove).
5 Between1923and1925theSinclairshadlivedinthePensioninKragenhofon the Fulda River, near Kassel; they continued to go to Kragenhofto swim and take walks along the river or through the forests (Morris Sinclair, 20 October 1993).
6 The city of Florence is compared to a sick woman by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321): "Che non puo trovar posa in su le piume, / ma con dar volta suo dolore scherma" ("that can find no rest on her bed of down but with turning seeks to ease her pain") (La Divina Commedia, with comment by Enrico Bianchi [Florence: Adriano Salani, 1927], Purgatorio Canto VI, lines 150-151; Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Vol. II, Purgatorio, tr. and comment John D. Sinclair [London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1939, rev. 1948] 89). All citations are from these editions.
SB used the 1926 Salani edition, although he did not think highly of it; the editors could only obtain a 1927 edition. For further discussion of the Salani edition, see Daniela Caselli, "The 'Florentia Edition in the Ignoble Salani Collection': A Textual Comparison,"Journal ofBeckett Studies 9. 2 (2001) 1-20; Daniela Caselli, "The Promise of Dante in the Beckett Manuscripts," Notes Diverse Halo, Special issue SBT/A 16 (2006) 237-257.
SB read Dante in Italian, not in translation. The editors chose the prose translation of Sinclair with the Italian text. "the critical text of the Societa Dantesca Italiana revised by Giuseppi Vandelli," on the facing page, so readers can consult both texts (The Divine Comedy ofDante Alighieri, I, Inferno, 9).
7 SBreferstocharactersinDucotedechezSwann,thefirstpartofProust'snovel A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; In Search ofLost Time).
8 English writer and statesman Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859); Irish novelist George Augustus Moore (1852-1933).
The narrator of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu recovers memories of his childhood when drinking a cup of "tilleul" (lime-flower infusion) with a madeleine.
13
Friday{? summer 1929}, McGreevy
9 RuthMargaret Sinclair• (known asPeggy, 1911-1933 ), daughter ofCissie and Boss Sinclair, had spent time with SB in Dublin in the summer of 1928, and in September 1928 in Kassel and Vienna, where she studied dance and movement at the Schule Hellerau-Laxenburg (Pilling,A Samuel Beckett Chronology, 17).
JamesJoyce,Ulysses1( 922).
10 SB's essay"Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce," and his story"Assumption," hadjust
appeared in transition.
11 McGreevy continued to have a room at theEcole Normale Superieure. Jean Thomas• (1900-1983),Agrege-repetiteur at theENS (1926 to 1932), coached students preparing for the agregation. the highest-level university examination. SB taught students taking the agregation d'anglais.
McGreevy had been asked to consider translating Les Enfants tenibles 1( 929) by Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) (McGreevy to George Yeats, 21 August 1929, NL! ,MS 20,849; Susan Schreibman,15 January 2007).
12 lord Arthur Savile's Crime, The Canterville Ghost, Poems in Prose byOscar Wilde (1854-1900) (London: James R. Osgood,Mcilvaine,1891).
13 "Leb wohl. " (Ger. , Be well. )
RO GER DIO N, ECOLE NORMA LE SUPERIEURE PARIS
25/11/29 Trinity College Dublin
Cher Monsieur Dion1
Je peux maintenant vous annoncer definitivement la date
de mon retour a l'Ecole. 11 m'est impossible de partir avantjeudi, le 28 de ce mois. 2 Je me presenterai a l'Ecole dans l'apres[-]midi du vendredi suivant.
Veuillez agreer, Monsieur Dion, ! 'expression de mes senti ments les plus distingues,
s/ S. B. Beckett
TLS;1 leaf, 1 side;AN, 61AJ/119. Dating: although written in Roman numerals,the date refers to November.
14
25/11/29 Trinity College Dublin
Dear Monsieur Dion1
I can now tell you definitively the date of my return to the
Ecole. It is impossible for me to leave before Thursday the 28th of this month. I shall come to the Ecole in the afternoon of the following Friday.
Yours sincerely S. B. Beckett
1 RogerDion(1896-1981),amemberoftheSocialSciencesfaculty,wasSurveillant,a senior administrator with responsibility for discipline, at the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1929.
2 SB'sreturntotheEcoleNormaleSuperieureintheautumnof1929wasdelayed by Rudmose-Brown, who asked that SB remain at Trinity College Dublin in the absence ofAndre Parreaux (1906-1979). Parreaux had been the ENS exchange Lecteur at TCD in 1928-1929 and had been expected to return for 1929-1930; however, he was detained in Paris to retake examinations in English and Philology (Rudmose-Brown to the Directeur, Ecole Normale Superieure, 9 October 1929, AN, 61AJ/202). When it was determined that Parreaux would not be returning to TCD for 1929-1930, the ENS named Georges Pelorson• (after 1945 known as Georges Belmont, b. 1909) to take up the appointment at TCD beginning in the Hilary term (27 January 1930). Only when this decision was reached could SB return to his position at the ENS.
25 November 1929, Dion
15
1930 March 14May
1June
15June 16June
After 1 July SAugust 25August
16 September 17 September
1 October
10 October 14 October
Chatto and Windus accept Proust.
SB proposes adding a conclusion to Proust.
CHRONOLOGY 1930
SBpoem"ForFutureReference"publishedin
transition.
SB submits English translations from Italian for a special issue of This Quarter.
Richard Aldington proposes to Chatto and Windus that they publish what will become The Dolphin Books series.
SB submits MS ofWhoroscope to the Hours Press. Awarded Hours Press Prize for Whoroscope.
Applies for Trinity College Dublin lectureship in Modern Languages.
Sends two pages of French translation of Joyce's "Anna Livia Plurabelle" to Philippe Soupault.
Has begun to write Proust. Jacob Bronowski selects three of the four poems by SB published in The European Caravan: "Hell Crane to Starling," "Casket of Pralinen for the Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin," "Text," and "Yoke of Liberty. "
SB leaves Paris for London.
Personally delivers the MS of Proust to Charles Prentice at Chatto and Windus in London.
In Dublin for the beginning of theMichaelmasTerm at Trinity College Dublin.
17
Chronology 1930
15 October
17 October
By 14 November
25 November By 12 December
December
Bifurissues printer's proofs oftranslation of"Anna Livia Plurabelle" by SB and Alfred Peron, but Joyce withdraws the translation.
Chatto and Windus sends contract for Proust.
SB presents "Le Concentrisme," a spoof study of an invented poet, Jean du Chas, to the Modern Languages Society, Trinity College Dublin.
Visits Jack B. Yeats for the first time.
