Beckett's Eighteenth Century

Beckett’s Eighteenth Century Frederik N. Smith Beckett’s Eighteenth Century Also by Frederik N. Smith THE GENRES OF ...

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Beckett’s Eighteenth Century Frederik N. Smith

Beckett’s Eighteenth Century

Also by Frederik N. Smith THE GENRES OF “GULLIVER’S TRAVELS” LANGUAGE AND REALITY IN SWIFT’S “A TALE OF A TUB”

Beckett’s Eighteenth Century Frederik N. Smith University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA

© Frederik Northrop Smith, 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–92539–4 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Frederik N., 1940– Beckett’s eighteenth century / Frederik N. Smith. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0–333–92539–4 1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906—Knowledge—Literature. 2. English literature—18th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) I. Title. PR6003.E282 Z8335 2001 848′.91409—dc21 2001036890 10 11

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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To Jane, with love and heart-felt appreciation. She might have known that being a spouse meant being an encourager, but would she have thought that it entailed serving as critic, editor, and professional advisor? She listened when she didn’t feel like it and when she had heard it all before, and her input is apparent (to me) on virtually every page. That debt can never be repaid.

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Contents viii

List of Plates

ix

Acknowledgements Introduction

1

1

Beckett Reads the Eighteenth Century

10

2

“Hiatus in MS”: Swift and Beckett

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3

Beckett and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

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4

“Gentle Skimmer”: Reader Entrapment in Swift, Fielding, Sterne, and Beckett

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5

Beckett’s Literary Gerontophilia

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6

“My Johnson Fantasy”

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Pope, Beckett, and the Aesthetics of Decay

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Conclusion

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Appendices: A Eighteenth-Century Items in Beckett’s Library at His Death B Trinity Course of Study for English Honors C Beckett’s Reading of British Literature, 1932–38 D Allusions to English Literature in Beckett’s Early Fiction

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Notes

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Index

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List of Plates 1

Samuel Beckett’s untitled doodle from the Watt manuscript, Notebook 1, p. 56 (verso) (Courtesy of Edward Beckett and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin)

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James Barry, “Dr. Samuel Johnson” (c. 1777) (Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

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William Hogarth, “A Harlot’s Progress”, 4th engraving (1732) (Courtesy of the British Museum, London)

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Thomas Patch, “Caricature of Laurence Sterne and Death” (1766) (Courtesy of Jesus College, Cambridge)

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William Hogarth, “The Bathos” (1764) (Courtesy of the British Museum, London)

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Acknowledgements Conventionally, at this point an academic book includes an acknowledgement that it would not have been possible without the help of so many, etc. I have endeavored to give specific credit where there has been specific assistance, but my debts run deeper than these credits may suggest. This is surely true of all such books, but is, I honestly believe, particularly true of mine. First of all, the long period of its researching and writing necessarily involved my working with a large number of fellow-scholars. More importantly, however, has been the very nature of the project, which has involved work in libraries here, in England, and in Ireland, and which has included requests for help from both Beckett scholars and eighteenth-century scholars. For permission to reprint parts of essays previously published (although in much-revised form), I wish to express my appreciation to The Age of Johnson, Journal of Beckett Studies, Romance Studies, Studies in the Literary Imagination, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, AMS Press, and the Pennsylvania State University Press. I wish also to thank the Board of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for granting me a semesterlong research leave to work on this project. I have learned from many and particular debts are cited in the notes. More broadly, however, for their initial encouragement, their sharing of ideas, their reading of parts of the manuscript, as well as their belief that this project would, finally, come to fruition, I should thank Ruby Cohn, Jim Knowlson, and John Pilling. Others who have helped by answering my questions or by making useful suggestions have been H. Porter Abbott, Morris Beja, Linda Ben-Zvi, Enoch Brater, Mary Bryden, John Calder, S. E. Gontarski, my colleague Tony Jackson, Paul Korshin, James Mays, Angela Moorjani, Maximillian Novak, the late Rubin Rabinovitz, Robert Sandarg, Edward Tomarken, and Everett Zimmerman. Along the way I have also received help from the staffs at Trinity College Dublin, the British Museum, Jesus College at Cambridge University, the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum, the Beckett Archive at the University of Reading, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas (especially Linda Ashton), the National Portrait Gallery in London, and my own library at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I also want to thank my editors at Macmillan Press, now Palgrave, who have helped me through this long process: Charmian ix

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Acknowledgements

Hearne, Eleanor Birne, Lucy Qureshi, Lesley Atkin, and Philip Tye. Finally, I am grateful to Edward Beckett for his generous responses to my questions as well as for his permission to quote from unpublished material at Reading and Texas. But as important as have been the time, ideas, and research assistance contributed by the above, I must say finally that without the help and support of my wife Jane (a scholar in her own right), this book would not have been published. It could be dedicated to no other.

Introduction

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. T. S. Eliot1 The Anxiety of Influence appeared in 1973, A Map of Misreading in 1975. Harold Bloom’s thesis is Freudian, based on an assumption that every writer depends upon his forefathers yet must reject them. While condemning “those carrion-eaters of scholarship, the source-hunters,” however, Bloom opens the door to a new kind of study of influence. 2 Unlike so many critics who preceded him, he is careful not to oversimplify: “The profundities of poetic influence cannot be reduced to source-study, to the history of ideas, to the patterning of images.” Rather, Bloom moves such studies onto a personal plane: “Influence remains subject-centered, a person-to-person relationship, not to be reduced to the problematic of language.” 3 Not that Bloom’s book erased the bad name accumulated by generations of source-hunters. As Stephen J. Greenblatt said, ironically, in 1985: “Source study is, as we all know, the elephants’ graveyard of literary history.”4 Greenblatt’s observation points to a prevailing view of the older sort of historical criticism; he and other new historicists have shown what can be brought to light by considering a literary text not simply as reflective of other texts which predate it, but as an outgrowth of a peculiar “field of force” comprised of “texts” more broadly construed. The work of Greenblatt – who is sympathetic to the undecidability inherent in deconstruction – is likewise notable for its insistence on the contingency of a text’s relationship with other texts. 1

2


Having thrown away the skeleton key of cause-and-effect historicism, however, we are left with a much less clear notion of literary influence. Nowadays we can more accurately speak of the “dialogue” (arrows pointing both directions) which occurs between an author and his or her predecessors, between a particular text and other texts which predate it. Indeed as early as 1919 Eliot argued that it is not preposterous “that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (p. 2537). This principle underlies John M. Warner’s Joyce’s Grandfathers, which suggests not only that Defoe, Sterne, and Smollett had an influence on Joyce, but that simultaneously Joyce was the “creator” of these writers, engendering as it were his own grandfathers. 5 And more overtly, the title of Melvyn New’s article – “Proust’s Influence on Sterne: Remembrance of Things to Come” – is only slightly tongue-in-cheek; we can without distortion speak of ways in which our reading of Proust, or another modern, affects our reading of an earlier writer. As New argues, “twentieth-century readers, reading the best that has been produced in their own century, come to earlier literature through that experience and cannot free their reading from it.” 6 A. A. Luce, Samuel Beckett’s tutor at Trinity College Dublin, himself published a study of the influence of the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche on eighteenth-century George Berkeley. “Originality,” Luce wrote in 1934, “does not stand in thinking the thing all out for oneself de novo. The ‘original’ philosopher is no recluse out of touch with his times, but the philosopher who makes creative, or at least novel, use of the material furnished by the representative thought of his day.”7 What Luce says of the philosopher is equally true of the literary writer, and this is the sort of thing Beckett would have heard during his days at Trinity and after. Indeed we might say much the same thing about Beckett, substituting only some reference to earlier literature for “the representative thought of his day.” Interestingly, in 1931 young Beckett used the word “influence” in the third-person description he wrote of himself to accompany the publication of four poems published in The European Caravan: “[He] has adapted the Joyce method to his poetry with original results. His impulse is lyric, but has been deepened through this influence and the influence of Proust and the historic method.” 8 “The historic method” mentioned here may refer either to Proust’s “remembrance of things past” or to the cyclical view of history held by the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico, whom Beckett had written about in his 1929 essay “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce.” In any case, Beckett here seems anxious to do two (perhaps contradictory) things: to vouch for the influence of

Introduction

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both Joyce and Proust on his writing, and, at the same time, to suggest his own originality. With the exception of Dante, Joyce, and Proust, there has been less interest in literary influences on Beckett than there has been in the influence of Berkeley and other philosophers such as Descartes, Geulincx, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Sartre.9 However, the literary influences on Beckett are far more important than has been typically acknowledged, and more important, indeed, than the philosophical influences. The intensity of the struggles of his first-person narrators have perhaps misled us into believing that the personal, existential dramas which are the essence of his work are his alone, created (as Luce denied such things can ever be) de novo. Beckett’s “failure,” the drama he creates out of his own perceived impotence, is of course his; nonetheless, to say this should not discourage us from seeking various literary inspirations for his dilemmas, nor from recognizing the way he seems to have identified with the artistic as well as human struggles of Swift, Pope, Fielding, Johnson, and Sterne. Thus in our efforts to explain Beckett’s uniqueness, as well as the personal basis of his writings, we need to be careful not to cut Beckett off from his literary heritage. 10 This is especially important in his case, for as John Pilling says, Beckett was “afflicted, much more than a less well-educated writer would have been, by the compulsion to see life in terms of literature, through the spectacles of others.”11 Quite early on a few reviewers noted Beckett’s affinities to eighteenthcentury English writers. In 1934 Edwin Muir wrote of More Pricks Than Kicks: “The author has been influenced by Mr. James Joyce, but the spirit in which he writes is rather that of Sterne, and he reduces everything, or raises it, as the case may be, to intellectual fantasy.”12 In 1956 Kenneth Rexroth developed this analogy to the eighteenth century more fully: He has a mind of singular toughness and stability – a mind like an eighteenth-century Englishman, as sly as Gibbon, as compassionate as Johnson, as bold as Wilkes, as Olympian as Fielding. I don’t mean that he is “as good as” a mixture of all these people. I mean he is their moral contemporary. “Courage, sir,” said Johnson to Boswell. 13 I find Rexroth’s statement to be an important one – in particular his reference to Beckett’s eighteenth-century mental “toughness,” as well as to his being a “moral contemporary” of these earlier writers. But making such connections only in passing, reviewers and critics have for the

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most part persisted in characterizing the philosophical background as an influence, the literary background as an affinity. When Beckett was asked if he minded being placed in the company of Rabelais, Swift, Fielding, and Sterne, he responded with a terse “No.”14 And a number of critics have mentioned the eighteenth-century connection. Hugh Kenner in 1961 referred to the title character in Malone Dies as one who, “like a senescent Crusoe,” enumerates his possessions; William York Tindall in 1964 mentioned that Murphy is “in the manner of” Swift’s Tale of a Tub or Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; John Fletcher in 1964 saw Beckett as “Sternian” in his bawdry and “firmly with Fielding” in his handling of the ludicrous; Vivian Mercier in 1977 noted that “echoes of Johnsonian gravity” can be found in Beckett’s work; and Bloom in 1985 described Beckett as “much the legitimate descendant of Swift as he is of his friend, James Joyce.”15 However, although the similarities have been recognized, and although these allusions have shed momentary light on the author in question – legitimizing Beckett or modernizing an eighteenth-century writer – no one, perhaps because of source study’s bad name, has pursued these parallels with much deliberation. Yet the influence of these writers is both broader and deeper than has been acknowledged. Beckett’s fascination with the eighteenth century cannot be doubted: his study of English literature at Trinity College Dublin, including that from the eighteenth century, was far more extensive than has been previously realized; his correspondence (recently made available) with his closest friend, Thomas MacGreevy, clearly demonstrates that he read a great deal of Swift, Fielding, Pope, Johnson, and Sterne during the 1930s; this evidence is elaborated by citations in his Whoroscope notebook, a reading journal he kept between 1932 and 1938, which includes quotations from Pope, Fielding, Smollett, Boswell, Johnson, and others;16 explicit allusions to many of these writers can be found in his writings from this period, as well as (less explicitly) in his later works; and, finally, even at his death he retained in his library a number of primary and secondary texts from the period, including eighteenthcentury editions of works by Sterne and Johnson (see Appendix A). It can be demonstrated, I believe, not only that Beckett, in the old sense of the term, was heavily “influenced” by these writers, but that the “modernity” of Beckett’s oeuvre can be traced in part – paradoxically – to the influence of writers who predated him by more than 200 years. To return to Bloom’s Freudian notion of “influence”: it is not surprising that Beckett would feel anxiety over too warmly embracing Joyce, nor that he, like others of his generation, would find his most significant

Introduction

5

literary influences not in his immediate Victorian predecessors but in the writers of the previous century. “To us in 1930,” Virginia Woolf wrote of the eighteenth century, “it looks less strange, less remote than those early Victorian years.” 17 Joyce and Beckett would have agreed. Of course there is an irony in the fact that the eighteenth century these three iconoclastic writers turned to was itself oriented toward classical models, although it is perhaps not surprising that several of the writers who most attracted them (Swift and Sterne, for example) were those who most forcefully rebelled against what we are apt to see as the dominant features of its literature: aristocratic proprieties, shibbolethed moralities, and emphasis on literary convention. Yet there is another eighteenth century. As Lester G. Crocker pointed out some 30 years ago, “The age of Reason, paradoxically, might be called the age of unreason, or the age of the irrational.” 18 Although her favorite was the Elizabethan age, Woolf is a good example of a contemporary who, like Beckett, discovered roots in the writers of this earlier period. She wrote essays on Defoe, Addison, Swift, Goldsmith, Sterne, Gibbon, and Lord Chesterfield; moreover, her novels are dotted with allusions to canonical eighteenth-century figures.19 In Orlando, a comic fantasy-novel masquerading as biography, the presence of the century is immediately felt. The androgynous Orlando (now a woman) imagines herself pouring tea at a salon attended by Addison, Swift, and Pope, and later watches the silhouettes of Johnson and Boswell play across a window.20 It is true that Woolf stereotypes the eighteenth century as staid and rational, but the writers themselves are what holds her interest; and although the writers Orlando encounters are disappointing as people, authors in Woolf’s eyes are equivalent to their works, and these eighteenth-century figures are represented in the book not simply by their imagined selves but by rather lengthy quotations. Similarly, Beckett’s attraction to the century seems to have been a personal one, and thus he was drawn not just to the writings but the writers, to Swift’s Journal to Stella, to Fielding’s posthumously published Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, and to Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.21 And he worked hard but without success to pull Samuel Johnson’s life into a full-length play (see Chapter 6). Woolf too found something theatrical in Johnson’s life, as can be seen in her dramatic essay titled “Dr. Burney’s Evening Party” (1932).22 Or in Orlando, where she watches the silhouettes of Johnson, Boswell, and the blind Anna Williams in a window. “Never was any play so absorbing,” says Orlando.23 Woolf and Beckett shared a sense of the imminence of eighteenth-century writers.

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Joyce and Beckett shared an interest in Swift. This enables us to compare their respective references to him in Finnegans Wake, which was under construction during the time when Beckett was a frequenter of Joyce’s assemblies in Paris, and in More Pricks Than Kicks, published in 1934. “No lumpend papeer in the waste and mightmountain Penn still groaned for micies to let flee,” writes Joyce; this doubly dense allusion seems to refer simultaneously to Gulliver’s Travels, where Gulliver is called “Man Mountain” by the Lilliputians, and A Tale of a Tub, where Swift in his “Apology” to the fifth edition refers to “such Treatises as have been writ against this ensuing Discourse, which are already sunk into waste Paper and Oblivion.”24 In More Pricks Beckett similarly alludes to “a waste of poets and politicians,” echoing the Tale’s references to “waste Paper” and “the vast Number of Beaux, Fidlers, Poets, and Politicians.”25 In this instance one would be hard-pressed to distinguish between Swift’s immediate influence on Beckett and the influence of Swift through the mediation of Joyce. Nevertheless, the layered allusion in the Wake is typical, as is the somewhat humbler allusion in Beckett – even in More Pricks, one of his denser works. Unlike Beckett’s, Joyce’s allusions are for the most part name-games and title-games, based on literary history rather than a detailed memory of Swift’s texts.26 Thus Joyce puns on Gulliver’s Travels like this: “gullible’s travels” (p. 173); “lillypets on the lea” (p. 491); “Bigrob dignagging his lylyputtana” (p. 583); and “With her strulldeburgghers! Hnmn hnmn!” (p. 623). There are comparable allusions in More Pricks Than Kicks, such as “he did the King of Brobdingnag in a quick dumb crambo” (p. 80), and “a female cousin, so remote as to be scarcely credible, and a kind of moot Struldbrug” (p. 128). But most of Beckett’s allusions, even his early ones, tend to be less explicit: thus he refers to Belacqua’s decision “to linger on in the bed with his uneasy load, codding himself that it would be more decent not to act incontinent” (p. 166), verbally echoing Gulliver’s excremental dilemmas in the Voyage to Lilliput; and in the Alba’s observation to Belacqua that “We go through this world . . . like sunbeams through cracks in cucumbers,” he borrows a curious comparison from the Voyage to Laputa (p. 69).27 Rather telling are Joyce’s and Beckett’s allusions to Swift’s biography, in particular their respective references to Stella and Esther (Vanessa) Vanhomrigh. In Finnegans Wake such allusions as the following can be found: “Unity Moore or Estella Swifte or Varina Fay” (p. 101); “revolted stellas vespertine vesamong them” (p. 177); “at the sign of Mesthress Vanhungrig” (p. 406);28 “O, the vanity of Vanissy! All ends vanishing!” (p. 449); and “O, sey but swift and still a vain essaying!” (p. 486). In

Introduction

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More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), on the other hand, Beckett’s allusions are not so much based on word-play as on a close (and recent) reading of the Journal to Stella; although quotation of Swift’s precise words is uncommon in Joyce’s book, it is frequent in his younger countryman. For example, Beckett reveals his knowledge of an innuendo buried in the Journal: “those feet . . . that Swift, rebuking the women of this country for their disregard of Shank’s mare, described as being fit for nothing better than to be laid aside . . . ” (p. 145); in his letters to Stella, Swift says that “I always cry shame at the ladies of Ireland, who never walk at all, as if their legs were of no use, but to be laid aside.”29 Even more noteworthy is Beckett’s description of Belacqua: “Little fat Presto, he would set out early in the morning, fresh and fasting, and walk like camomile” (p. 34). This is a conflation of two moments (50 pages apart in the modern edition) in Swift’s Journal: “[the warm weather] makes your little fat Presto sweat in the forehead” (Vol. 1, p. 259), and “Our weather grows fine, and I will walk like camomile” (Vol. 1, p. 207). One might guess that Beckett’s interest in the Augustan writers was kindled by Joyce; however, in Finnegans Wake he asks, in a passage that has been thought by some to refer to his young countryman: “How used you learn me, brather soboostius, in my augustan days?” (p. 468). Is Joyce perhaps thanking Beckett for teaching him something about eighteenth-century writers? At least we know that in the late twenties and early thirties – their “augustan days” – they shared an interest in those writers. 30 Not surprisingly, the overt allusions found in Beckett’s first works – Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written 1932), More Pricks Than Kicks (written 1932–34), and Murphy (written 1934–36) – appear near to the time when Beckett was reading the author in question. As documented in the chapters which follow, we know that he was reading Tom Jones in late 1932, and there are two allusions to Fielding’s novel in More Pricks. We know that he was reading Gulliver’s Travels in early 1933, and the Travels are alluded to only once in the Dream but five times in More Pricks and twice in Murphy. And we know that he was reading Lord Chesterfield in early 1936 and Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson in 1936–37, and allusions to both appear in Murphy. Although there are references to eighteenth-century writers in Watt (written 1942–45) and in Beckett’s drama up to Happy Days (1961), the dense allusiveness of his writing generally drops off after the period of his intense reading during the 1930s. This, however, does not mean that the influence of these writers is no longer felt; on the contrary, it would seem, paradoxically, that as his memory waned of the writers he read at Trinity College and on his

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own during the 1930s, their influence on him increased. In particular, in the trilogy – Molloy (1955), Malone Dies (1956), and The Unnamable (1958) – the figures of Swift, Fielding, Johnson, and Sterne seem never to be far from Beckett’s consciousness. Describing Beckett’s use of Balzac, Mary Bryden has applied Michel Schneider’s words to Beckett: “oubli inconscient des sources, ou l’influence involontaire.” 31 I wish to distinguish between literary allusion and literary influence.32 In the first stage of his career, Beckett, fresh from his reading and working in the shadow of Joyce’s heavily allusive technique, himself drops authors’ names, puns on the names of characters, and even quotes something from a recently read text. In the later stages of his career, Beckett’s explicit allusions to his literary forebears decline dramatically in frequency, and instead one becomes aware of more subtle, less explicit evidence of the great eighteenth-century writers. To think in Bloom’s terms once again, perhaps we might speculate this way: Beckett’s embracing of the writers of the eighteenth century enabled him to escape the burden of Joyce and served in a sense to legitimize his own writing by connecting him to a long literary tradition; having established this connection, however, he could throw it away, or at least feel no pressure to make his heritage explicit, thus allowing these writers unconsciously to infuse themselves into his work. For all his iconoclasm, and despite his Honors BA in French and Italian from Trinity College, Beckett never abandoned his native English literature. And despite his interest in acquiring a broad knowledge of English literary history (in the 1930s he read in all major periods), the eighteenth century clearly held a special fascination. In the chapters which follow I hope to show how Beckett was influenced in important ways by eighteenth-century literary technique, but also how personal this literary heritage became for him. This relationship between Beckett and past authors is comparable to that between Dante and Virgil, caught in a doodle in the Watt manuscript (see Plate 1); illustrating Canto 1, line 82 of The Inferno, Beckett shows Virgil and Dante locked in a sort of yin–yang figure. He even quotes Dante’s telling words: “Tu se’ lo mio maestro e il mio autore.” Comparably, in reading the canonical writers of the eighteenth century he seems to have imagined their private lives, to have seen them in him or him in them; and thus it was quite natural for him to invoke their persons, situations, and themes, as well as their characteristic styles. He might have said with Woolf: “Great poets do not die; they are continuing presences.”33 Richard Ellmann once spoke of “the guilty acquisitiveness of talent,” adding that “the best writers expropriate best.”34 Beckett stands guilty

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in precisely this sense, engaged as he was thoughout his life in a sort of expropriation of characters, situations, and styles from writers of the British eighteenth century. However, stopping short of a conviction, perhaps we can substitute the notion of a writer in “dialogue” with his predecessors: Beckett read Swift, Fielding, Sterne, Johnson, and Pope with the eye of a post-Joycean modernist, or postmodernist, and as we read him we can see how he interpreted the eighteenth century in a twentieth-century way. What interested him, what he chose to use and what he chose to reject – these decisions reveal his peculiarly twentiethcentury reading of both the works and the authors. Thus if Shakespeare is our contemporary, then so is Swift, and a close reading of Beckett’s texts will not only demonstrate what he took from Swift but how he saw Swift through his own modern eyes, eyes made more acute as a result of his friendship with his countryman James Joyce, who was himself influenced by Swift. 35 Beckett, that is, in a sense reached back to the eighteenth century for his own inspiration, found there a surprisingly “modern” era, allowed this reading to impose itself on his own writing, and in the process supplied us with a lens through which we too can discover something quite modern in that century. Without meaning to make the situation more complex than it is, I believe I might argue (but not “prove”) that Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, for example, influenced Beckett, that his novel Watt, say, shows this influence, and that in turn our reading of Beckett’s novel influences our own reading of the Tale as a modern work. We, like Beckett, participate in this dialogue with the eighteenth century.

1 Beckett Reads the Eighteenth Century

Generally speaking, the romantic artist is very much concerned with Time and aware of the importance of memory in inspiration. . . . Samuel Beckett1 Three myths about Beckett’s university education and subsequent reading underlie and (I believe) distort a great deal of criticism of his work: 1. that at Trinity College Dublin, as an Honors student in Modern Literature, focusing on French and Italian, Beckett would have studied little or no English literature; 2. that in turning away in 1938 from his native Ireland and, after the war, in rejecting his native language, Beckett turned his back also on English literature; and 3. that in order to become a writer of poems, plays, and novels, Beckett had in a sense to reject the scholarly learning, methodology, and style he had learned at Trinity. The first of these myths can be dispelled by reference to available factual information regarding Beckett’s curriculum at Trinity. The second and third can be dispelled by discussing his reading at Trinity and later, during the 1930s, and observing how this reading was critical to his development as a writer. Of special significance here is Beckett’s Whoroscope notebook, the reading journal he kept during the 1930s, as well as his correspondence at this time with his closest friend, Thomas MacGreevy. Precisely what eighteenth-century British literature Beckett might have read as a schoolboy is a matter of speculation. 2 Beginning the story at the point that the evidence becomes available, I shall discuss Beckett’s reading of that literature at Trinity College Dublin between 10

Beckett Reads the Eighteenth Century 11

1923 and 1927, and, moreover, on his own during the 1930s. In particular, I want to suggest the following paradox: how the essayists, poets, and novelists whom he read during this period came increasingly to influence his work as he reduced his allusions to them. Important here is Beckett’s power of memory (helpfully discussed in Proust), which, like his Trinity learning, is ultimately put to imaginative use. “Beckett never read that much later in his life,” says John Calder, “but always remembered what he had read.”3

I In the fall of 1923 (at the age of 17), Beckett entered Trinity College, where A. A. Luce, the famous editor of George Berkeley, was assigned as his tutor. Beckett was an undergraduate at TCD from 1923 to 1927, graduating in December 1927 with high ranking, several prestigious awards, and Honors in Modern Literature. 4 After graduation he taught for nine months at Campbell College in Belfast, then in October 1928 began a two-year exchange fellowship at l’École Normale Supérieure in Paris. “He must have been a bright student,” comments Jean-Jacques Mayoux, “for Trinity sent no others as lecteurs.”5 In September 1930 he returned to Dublin and in December 1931 received an MA in Modern Literature. Although the general profile of Beckett’s studies at Trinity is known, there has been no attempt to investigate the nature of his work in any detail. Yet it is possible from the Dublin University Calendar to discover a great deal about the “course of study” prescribed in the mid-1920s, for such information is printed for each academic year (published in the summer preceding the start of the year); this system, very unlike that of American universities and unlike most English universities except Oxford, was the one in place when Beckett was a student at Trinity. In addition to the course of study for each of the three terms (Hilary, Trinity, Michaelmas), also available are students’ examination questions; these were (and still are) published sometime during the following academic year.6 The assumption is that Beckett’s reading of English literature was scant. John Pilling’s assertion is not unique: “At Trinity College Dublin Beckett, as an Honours student in French and Italian, would have read English literature only as a subsidiary and ancillary subject.”7 But it is misleading to imply that Beckett’s study of English was so minimal; Deirdre Bair quite rightly reports that he first enrolled in a general arts curriculum and only gradually found himself attracted to the study of

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foreign languages and literatures.8 Moreover, there is a tendency (at least on the part of American scholars) to think of a Trinity College student’s academic career as structured around required “classes” and a “major,” whereas the program of study was based on final examinations, with attendance at lectures encouraged but not required.9 Using notes he made in the 1920s, Luce outlined for Knowlson in 1970 the quite conservative course of study at Trinity during Beckett’s time there. 10 According to Luce, the young man was admitted to the university as a junior freshman on the basis of passing the four-day examination known as the “Junior Exhibition.” 11 The 1923 Examination Papers show that in addition to questions on mathematics, geography, botany, zoology, physics, chemistry, the history of England, and the history of the language, prospective students were held responsible for Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book I, and chapters of Alexander H. Thompson’s History of English Literature, including “The Age of Anne – Pope, Swift, and the Augustan Poets”; “The Great Novelists of the Eighteenth Century”; and “The Dawn of Romantic Poetry.” 12 Furthermore, students intending to matriculate in the fall of 1923 were advised to read designated sections of Sir William Smith’s Specimens of English Literature.13 Here Beckett would have been exposed to the following: Pope’s Rape of the Lock, An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and An Essay on Man; Swift’s Battle of the Books (“The Spider and the Bee”) and “Verses on the Death of of Dr. Swift”; Addison’s Spectator (No. 159, the so-called “Vision of Mirza”); Berkeley’s “Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain”; Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year; Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones; Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (“The Death of Le Fever”); Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village”; Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; and Johnson’s famous letter to Lord Chesterfield, The Life of Dryden, The Life of Pope, and “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” Admittedly, Smith’s Specimens only contains excerpts from these works, but coupled with commentary from Thompson’s History, would have given 17-yearold Beckett a fair overview of eighteenth-century British literature. It is worthy of note that of these writers, Swift, Fielding, Johnson, and Berkeley (although not Berkeley the moralist) will later become major influences on Beckett. More specifically, Addison’s allegorical “Vision of Mirza” is alluded to in Beckett’s 1931 Proust (p. 60). In the mid-1930s Beckett began (but later abandoned) a play based on Johnson’s life, titled Human Wishes, and to a visitor to his Paris flat in 1972 he quoted a few lines of Johnson’s letter to Chesterfield, commenting that when he was younger he had memorized it.14 And in Rough for Radio II, written


in French in the 1960s and published in English in 1976, the chief character remembers the passage on the death of Le Fever that Beckett first read in Smith’s Specimens (though he read Tristram Shandy in 1938) some 40 years earlier.15 Furthermore, the Examination Papers for 1923 show that students were in fact required to write an essay in response to each of the following questions on Restoration and eighteenth-century literature: 1. Describe Dryden as a dramatist. 2. Give an account of Swift’s life and writings from 1714 onwards. 3. Set forth Richardson’s method of storytelling. 4. Explain the importance of Gray’s poetry. 5. What do you know of the Ossianic poems of James Macpherson?16 Those familiar with Beckett’s work will perhaps not be surprised at Trinity’s emphasis (as we shall see elsewhere) on the language of literature. And while I would hesitate to make too much of these questions posed to young Beckett, it is interesting to note that one of them points toward his subsequent fascination with Swift’s life; another shows how early was his introduction to narrative experimentation in the eighteenth century; another his early reading of Thomas Gray’s poetry, which he echoes much later in Happy Days; and finally, his first awareness of James Macpherson’s unauthentic Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem (published in 1762), which may have a connection with the story “Fingal” in More Pricks Than Kicks.17 Luce’s letter to Knowlson shows that as a junior freshman young Beckett did very well in his study of language and literature: in the Hilary (winter) term 1924, he received First Honors in both English and French literature; in the Trinity (spring) term, First Honors in English and Second Honors (what Luce calls “most thoroughly undistinguished”) in French;18 and in the Michaelmas (fall) term, Second Honors in both English and French, First Honors in Italian. The 1925–26 Calendar indicates that in the first two terms of his senior freshman year Beckett continued to do fairly well: in Hilary 1925 he received a Second Honors in English and French, a First Honors in Italian;19 in Trinity 1925, although he seems not to have been awarded honors, he won a “Premium” for composition in French (one of two awarded). 20 Ending his first two years with great success, however, in Michaelmas 1925 he received a First Honors in English, French, and Italian for his performance on the so-called “Little-Go” Examination.21 After this, as a junior and senior sophister, Beckett became an Honors student in French and Italian, and as such was restricted to taking Honors Examinations in two literatures only.22

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Since Beckett during his first two years chose to sit for Honors Examinations in English literature, their content is of some significance. The 1923–24 Calendar, giving the requirements that would have pertained to Beckett, who entered in that academic year, suggests that in addition to being responsible for specific sections of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Verse, and certain literary periods from a history such as A. J. Wyatt and Walter H. Low’s Intermediate Textbook of English Literature,23 students should prepare assigned works from the canon: Chaucer, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Swift, and others (see Appendix B). Furthermore, requirements for students sitting for Honors Examinations in English were substantially more rigorous than those required of students sitting for Ordinary Examinations.24 What this course of study proves, among other things, is that although Beckett graduated with Honors in French and Italian, he was nonetheless introduced to a broad sweep of literature in his native language – through the early eighteenth century. Students continuing in Honors English, as Beckett did not, studied in the next two years writers of the later eighteenth century, the Romantic poets, and the major Victorians. More specifically for our purposes, students sitting for the Honors Hilary Examination in 1925 were expected to be familiar with the history of English literature from 1660 to 1798 (as in Wyatt and Low). For the Honors Trinity Examination in 1925 they were assigned Addison’s critical essays and the Roger de Coverley papers from The Spectator (1711–12). For the Honors Michaelmas Examination in 1925 – the final Freshman Examination – students were assigned the following works from this period: Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681); Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711) and The Rape of the Lock (1712, expanded version 1714); and Swift’s Drapier’s Letters (1724). The questions actually posed to students in these terms give some indication of the orientation of Beckett’s lecturers. 25 In Hilary 1925 there was only one question relating to the Restoration or eighteenth century, and since no specific works were appointed from this period, presumably students were being asked to write on the basis of their reading in a literary history: Write on (a) Waller, (b) Congreve. In Trinity 1925 there were two questions dealing with Addison; students were expected to write essays on each of the following topics:


Apply Addison’s canons of tragedy either to Richard III or to Romeo and Juliet. [Respond to this statement:] “Addison’s essays are a rare example of the merging of art in a didactic purpose without detriment to either.” In Michaelmas 1925 students were given the following prompts: [Write an essay on] Dryden as a past-master in the use of the heroic couplet. Write an essay on the historical interest and the abiding value (if any) of the Essay on Criticism. “The Drapier’s Letters are interesting examples of journalism; the writer’s rhetoric blinds us to the fact that the literary quality of the work is negligible.” Write an essay supporting or refuting this. These challenging questions – often spotlighting issues of style and genre – are typical of those posed to students in English Honors during the 1923–25 academic terms. 26 They are noteworthy in that they give students freedom to express their own views within stated parameters; and the best of them (I reveal my bias here), like the Pope and Swift questions, also require students to look at issues from more than one perspective. Beckett received a First Honors for his performance on this final group of questions. This was the term in which he won a Senior Exhibition. It seems to me that Luce’s own evidence casts some doubt on his comment to Bair (47 years after the fact) that Beckett had a “quite dismal” first two years, as well as her extrapolations that he “floundered” academically, “drifted from course to course,” and accumulated a “nondescript” record. 27 More to the point of this study is Beckett’s introduction to English literature. A student at Trinity who in his third and fourth years chose to embrace French and Italian (or anything else) was nonetheless given in his first two years a solid foundation in his native literature, and this grounding was especially formidable for one vying for Honors. Relevant here is a seemingly autobiographical passage jettisoned from the Watt manuscript (some ten years after the author left Trinity) where Beckett reflects on his college days. Referring to his persona James Quin’s “dogged thoroughness of study,” he observes: “This discovery . . . was made during the first period accorded to James for a consideration of the celebrated passages of the more celebrated works of the most celebrated authors; a period which, after deduction of its numerous intermissions, cannot have fallen much short of 18 calendar months.” 28 This is not entirely

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ironic. Although Beckett half-disparages Quin’s study of literature (in a cancelled version of this passage, he specifically refers to “British” authors), we know that the writer himself was at Trinity a serious student, and also that he has quite recently been engaged in his own independent reading. Admittedly, except in his preparation for the Junior Exhibition, Beckett’s formal study of English literature never proceeded beyond the early eighteenth century, for in his last two years he was, as we have seen, forced to deal exclusively with two Romance literatures. Yet the foreshortened nature of his academic study of English must in the 1930s have prompted his deliberate, almost programmatic return to that literature, much of it from the very periods unexplored at Trinity.

II After graduation from TCD in late 1927, Beckett, perhaps looking toward his two-year lectureship at l’École Normale Supérieure (1928–30), continued his engagement with French poetry, becoming, according to Bair, “an omnivorous reader.”29 However, in 1930, at the same time that he was studying French, he mentions in letters to MacGreevy that he has been reading (among others) Keats and T. S. Eliot, and in his Proust, published in 1931, there are references to Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Thomas Shadwell, Addison, Pope, and Keats. And in light of this reading, it is not surprising that Dream of Fair to Middling Women, written in 1932, is dotted with a wide range of literary allusions. Indeed the density of allusion in Dream bears a good deal of resemblance to Beckett’s letters to MacGreevy during the first half of the 1930s, when the younger Beckett seems to want not only to tell his older friend whom he has been reading, but to display the breadth of that reading, classical as well as modern, and in French, English, Italian, and German. The English writers mentioned in Dream are the following: Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Swift, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Austen, Dickens, and Ruskin. Of course Beckett had formally studied Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Swift at Trinity College; he must have read the others on his own during his last two years there, or privately between 1928 and 1932. Some of these are just passing allusions (e.g. “the immortal Byron”) and some could be based on the reading of a literary history (“On this emotion recollected in tranquillity of those celebrated bowers . . . ”), but others, such as this one, testify to a close reading: “She had lost her looks, the virtuous girl, supposititiously, in Dickens’s striking adverb. . . . ”30 In any case, it is clear that the young man is staking out his literary territory.


Sometime late in 1932 Beckett began in his private reading to focus on English literature, in particular the eighteenth century. In his 8 October 1932 letter he says that he has been “enchanted” by Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), which he observes is like Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste (1796) and Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766) rolled into one. On 18 October 1932 he writes that he has been reading Tom Jones (1749), which he judges to be “a great book pitted with faults,” and on 4 November 1932 says that he has finished Fielding’s novel. The following month, on 23 December 1932 he reports that he has been reading Berkeley’s Commonplace Book (first published in 1871, with a new edition in 1930), which his friend Joseph Hone had recommended to him. 31 Then on 6 January 1933 he writes that he has been reading Swift (without pleasure), and, in particular, on 1 February 1933 that he has been reading Gulliver’s Travels (1726) – a book he had read as a child.32 Given the large number of English writers Beckett turned to between the end of 1932 and the beginning of 1933, it appears as if he had deliberately set out to complete his literary education begun at Trinity. His reading of a work he had not read by Berkeley, his (re)reading of some Swift, including Gulliver’s Travels, his reading of Fielding’s two bestknown novels and Goldsmith’s Vicar – all of this helped to fill out the century he had begun to study at Trinity between 1923 and 1925. 33 “Perhaps only the French language can give you the thing you want,” Belacqua muses in Dream (p. 48); but we need to be cautious in concluding that Beckett, in turning away from his native language, turned away also from British literature. True enough, one would expect that his thoughts about writing in French, as well as his gradual estrangement from Ireland, which began with his extended stay in France after graduation in 1927, would be paralleled by a withdrawal from his native Anglo-Irish literary tradition. He once said, after all, that in French it was easier to “write without style,” and, as Marjorie Perloff has explained, the “style” Beckett wanted to be “without” was that of his inherited tradition.34 However, although Richard Ellmann goes so far as to say that his switch to French “freed him from [his] literary forefathers,” there is no evidence that his native literary history ever really left him. 35 His rejection of the English language was decidedly not accompanied by a rejection of that tradition. These were for Beckett two different matters. Paradoxically, shortly after his completion of a degree in French and Italian literature, his recent return from two years in Paris, and at a time when he was becoming increasingly unhappy living in Ireland, Beckett appears to have experienced a resurgence of interest in English literature.

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In More Pricks there are allusions to these eighteenth-century writers: Defoe (pp. 125 and 161), Fielding (pp. 90 and 103), and Swift (many, but see especially pp. 33, 56, 80, 128, and 150).36 A number of Beckett’s allusions are quite subtle and could be understood only by a reader who had read these same writers very recently or very carefully. Beckett is like Swift, who explains in the “Apology” to A Tale of a Tub that he wrote his book with “his Invention at the Height, and his Reading fresh in his Head.” 37 The quotations in his Whoroscope notebook demonstrate clearly that he was privately continuing what John Pilling has called his “apprenticeship as a writer.” 38 As far as his reading of eighteenthcentury English literature is concerned, what is most remarkable is Beckett’s seemingly self-conscious deepening and broadening of his knowledge of the period: having read Swift’s Drapier’s Letters at Trinity College, having reread Gulliver’s Travels in 1933, and probably having read A Tale of a Tub and the Journal to Stella at the same time, he mentions in his notebook something about The Bickerstaff Papers (1708); having read Pope’s Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock at Trinity, he now turns to the youthful Pastorals (1709) and Pope’s apocalyptic The Dunciad (1728, 1742);39 having read, as we have seen, Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones in the early 1930s, he apparently then turns to Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), Amelia (1751), and Fielding’s last work, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755); 40 and having read much of Fielding and probably Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719, mentioned in More Pricks) and Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766, mentioned to MacGreevy), having at least read about Richardson and Sterne (in one of the literary histories encountered at Trinity), he now – as if deliberately filling in a gap – picks up Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771). Since Beckett has not previously read the dramatists of this period (he would only have read about them in his literary histories at Trinity), he now chooses to read Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707), Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), and Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777);41 and, finally, having at Trinity read little Johnson except what was required for his Junior Exhibition, he now turns to Rasselas (1759) and The Lives of the English Poets (1779–81), and then to Boswell, reading the Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1785) and The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Furthermore, in a letter of 14 February 1935 Beckett informs his friend MacGreevy that he is reading Jane Austen, and on 20 February refers specifically to Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (written in the 1790s but not published until 1811). All of this suggests that Beckett is reading by design. He seems in the 1930s to have truly discovered an affinity for the eighteenth century.


Ironically, although the title character in Murphy (written 1934–36) is twice referred to as “a strict non-reader,” the novel is dotted with literary allusions.42 But it is perhaps not surprising to discover that since critics have commented on the “Englishness” of the novel, these allusions are more than in any other of Beckett’s works tipped toward English writers. My rough tabulation shows that of 18 writers explicitly alluded to in the novel, 15 are English. For our purposes, it is relevant that Beckett mentions or quotes from Berkeley (pp. 58, 108, and 246), Swift (pp. 139 and 170), Pope (p. 99 and passim), Boswell (p. 167), Edward Young (p. 73), and Lord Chesterfield (p. 269). Although we cannot be sure of the chronology, there is evidence that his allusions to Young, Boswell, and Chesterfield represent a recent reading of these writers – an attempt once again to fill in gaps in his knowledge. 43 It is worth noting that while some of these allusions are signposted, others lean heavily upon the knowledge and memory of the reader. When there is reference to “the Gilmigrim jokes, so called from the Lilliputian wine” (p. 139), or to “what the great and good Lord Chesterfield calls the necessary house” (p. 269), most readers can make the literary connection with ease. 44 Other allusions, however, are a good deal more demanding: “But now it was winter-time again, night’s young thoughts had been put back an hour” (pp. 73–4) is a reference to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742–45); moreover, Beckett’s character “Rosie Dew” (p. 99 and passim) is a name that evokes the pastoral landscape generally, but specifically echoes line 69 in Pope’s youthful pastoral to “Summer” (“Here Bees from Blossoms sip the rosie Dew. . . . ”). On occasion Beckett’s literary allusions during this period become quite rarified, private jokes understandable only to himself and a handful of readers; paradoxically, what one notices in his later fiction, especially that after Watt, is a lessening of allusion, and at the same time the deeper influence of the writers we have been discussing. To summarize: although at Trinity he had received a good introduction to English literature up through the early eighteenth century, Beckett during the mid-1930s continued these studies on his own. Taken together, the Whoroscope notebook and his letters to Thomas MacGreevy show the range of this reading, and, more to the point, demonstrate how Beckett almost programmatically set about reading the works he felt were required in order for him to be a writer, especially a novelist. It was during this period that he felt the need to round out his reading of eighteenth-century English authors in particular. Indeed there are only three canonical figures absent from the list of eighteenth-century writers Beckett read during his Trinity days and in the early to mid-1930s: Samuel

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Richardson, Thomas Gray, and Laurence Sterne. Richardson, however, whose sentimental, moralistic fiction seems so foreign to his own work, Beckett had at least encountered in his reading of literary history at Trinity, where (as we have seen) he had written an examination essay on “Richardson’s method of storytelling.” Furthermore, we know that at his death Beckett owned the Poems and Letters of Gray in a 1922 edition and The Works of Laurence Sterne in a 1910 edition (see Appendix A), and that on 5 August 1938 he wrote to MacGreevy that he had been reading Tristram Shandy. Nonetheless, if in 1936–37 Beckett’s plans for writing a novel were derailed by an urge to write a full-length play on Samuel Johnson (see Chapter 6), we should now be in a position to appreciate the fact that this seemingly spontaneous fascination with Johnson was rather a natural outgrowth of his quite determined reading of eighteenth-century literature over the previous four years. Later, however, when he returned to writing fiction, his years of preparation paid off in full.

III John Pilling argues that Beckett’s secession from academic life at Trinity College was a result of his beginning to realize that “his ideas were too heterogeneous and advanced to flourish in an academic atmosphere,” and that he “had to make the decisive step of becoming a writer rather than an academic.” 45 Enoch Brater says much the same, only more bluntly: “Not an acolyte by temperament, Beckett also had to free himself from the echoes and influences he had accumulated during his long years of academic preparation at Trinity.” 46 More bluntly still, A. Alvarez refers to Beckett’s “over-education.” 47 There is of course an element of truth to these statements. But what I find unfortunate about them (and ones like them) is that they tend to drive a wedge between the scholarly Beckett and the creative Beckett, suggesting that the first had to be denied before the second could emerge. I do not believe that this is true; or to put the point more positively, I believe that Beckett’s academic preparation, at Trinity and after, was essential to his maturation as a writer. In spite of his frustrations with “the Unadversity of Dublin” (as he puns in the Whoroscope notebook) and his pervasive antiacademic stance, Beckett would not be Beckett without his strong academic background. Early in his career, he obviously felt uneasy about his academic training and the career he seemed destined for: “Don’t be too hard on him,” says the narrator in Dream of the learned Belacqua, “he was studying to be a professor” (p. 48). Later


in his life, however, Beckett seems to have recognized the relevance of his education to his writing. The Unnamable, for example, speaking of suffering through enforced “lectures,” reluctantly admits that “some of this rubbish has come in handy on occasions.” 48 So too the narrator in How It Is, referring to the subjects of his education, says that “they have marked me that’s the main thing.” 49 Tellingly, at the beginning of Waiting for Godot, when Vladimir is attempting to convince Estragon that the story of the two thieves is apropos of their situation, Estragon seems uninterested and confused because he has not studied the Bible or cannot remember it; Vladimir, on the other hand, cut from the same cloth as Beckett, is anxious not only to explain the significance of the story to his friend but to discuss with him the differences among the Evangelists’ versions of that story. Others have studied Beckett’s art of allusion. But as Knowlson argues, we must go beyond the notion of allusion as mere reference. In a letter of 11 April 1972, Beckett humorously referred to himself as nothing more than a “plumber” who knows nothing of the “history of hydraulics”: “They are just bits of pipe I happen to have with me. I suppose all is reminiscence from womb to tomb.”50 Yes, all is reminiscence, but no, surely Beckett’s allusions are consistently apt and – especially in his maturity – resonate importantly through the texts in which they appear. Thus as Knowlson suggests, the rich literary tradition called up in the play Happy Days bears for the most part an ironic relationship to Winnie, buried alive, enamored more of poetic rhythm than she is of sense. The same sort of situation exists in all Beckett’s works, fiction as well as drama. The earliest examples are relatively crude. In Dream of Fair to Middling Women there are numerous references to sources, and Beckett certainly makes no attempt to conceal his borrowings: “Now he is once more a mere outside, facade, penetrated, if we may pilfer to reapply the creditable phrase of M. Gide. . . . ” (p. 46). In this instance (the example is not at all unusual) Beckett could be said to supply an in-text “footnote” in the style of Swift or Fielding. The same quality pervades More Pricks Than Kicks; here Belacqua, participant in a literary guessing-game, is invited to “say his lines”: Belacqua helped himself to a deep breath of the rank ambience and then, with the precipitation of one exhibiting a tongue-teaser, rattled off the borrowed quodlibet as follows: “When with indifference I remember my past sorrow, my mind has indifference, my memory has sorrow. The mind, upon the indifference

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which is in it, is indifferent; yet the memory, upon the sorrow which is in it, is not sad.” (p. 81) Once again the author openly admits that he is quoting from memory (a passage about memory), Belacqua leaving it to his fellow students to guess his source, Beckett to his readers. Although in this and other instances it is tempting to argue that through Belacqua he is in his early fiction satirizing the academy he so recently left, I believe that would be an oversimplification. Beckett is reaching for a new form. Twenty-six years old, only four years away from his Trinity Bachelor’s degree, and still under the influence of the learned Joyce – this textual “footnoting” is one way Beckett manages to integrate his academic training with his literary aims.51 But again I would stress that he seems not simply to be parodying this kind of academese, for his academic allusions characteristically hover somewhere between parody and fascination. Beckett had a prodigious memory. And significantly, in Proust he helpfully distinguishes between voluntary and involuntary memory, between memory as “an instrument of reference” which deliberately searches through our mental pages, and memory as “an instrument of discovery” which may become, to use Beckett’s word, “explosive” (pp. 17 and 20). In a similar vein, in the story “A Wet Night” he ridicules Belacqua’s acquaintance Chas, a kind of “clockwork Bartlett” who has “a mind like a tattered concordance.”52 Much later, in From an Abandoned Work, Beckett says that it was “fortunate” that his father died when he was a boy (actually he was 27), for otherwise he might have followed his father’s wishes and become a professor (a fate he narrowly escaped): “A very fair scholar I was too, no thought, but a great memory.”53 Once again Beckett juxtaposes the thinking mind, the creative mind, to the clockwork mind, and there is no doubt where his bias lies. True enough, he was a fair scholar and did have a great memory. But the mature Beckett is no mere name-dropper, for he utilizes his memory as a springboard to intellectual and imaginative discovery. Even as early as Dream of Fair to Middling Women, More Pricks Than Kicks, and Murphy, the allusive texture of Beckett’s prose alternates with something else. The Joycean density of these works on occasion gives way to an overriding presence of the voice of the narrator or character, and in these instances Beckett’s allusions are not there simply to decorate the text but are part of the ongoing depiction of the human memory in operation. As in this example from Murphy:


“What does the poet say, Angus, perhaps you remember?” “What poet?” said Dr. Killiecrankie. “‘Never the rose without the thorn,’” said the coroner. “I quote from memory, bitter memory.” (p. 263)54 The lines which the coroner quotes come from “The Lass of Richmond Hill,” variously attributed: “On Richmond Hill there lives a lass . . . / A rose without a thorn.” Of course the poetic lines of the original hardly match the present situation; the “lass” here is Murphy, now only a corpse. And notice that in this passage the perfect rose of the poem becomes a thorny rose, as the original sentiments are completely reversed. Is the coroner in fact misremembering the lines? Or is it possible that Beckett has himself misremembered? Or (perhaps most likely) does he know full well what the original is but elects to toy with the quotation? “When Beckett’s narrators do allude,” David Cohen writes, “it is not with the confident erudition of Stephen Dedalus or the Ulysses narrator, but rather with the improvisatory wit of Leopold Bloom.” 55 And as P. J. Murphy says of Beckett’s quoting of Keats in the unpublished text “The Voice”, he is “quoting by heart, in both the emotional and mnemonic senses of the word. . . . Beckett is remembering Keats at the same time as he is rewriting him.” 56 The dramatization of the mind in the process of remembering is a feature which can be found in Beckett’s plays as well as his fiction. With the passage from Murphy compare the following dialogue between the Animator and the Stenographer, written some 30 years later, from Rough for Radio II: A Are you familiar with the works of Sterne, miss? S Alas no, sir. A I may be quite wrong, but I seem to remember, there somewhere, a tear an angel comes to catch as it falls. Yes, I seem to remember. . . . 57 The Animator is alluding here to Tristram Shandy, Volume 6, Chapter 8; but again, is he perhaps misremembering? “The ACCUSING SPIRIT which flew up to heaven’s chancery with the oath, blush’d as he gave it in; – and the RECORDING ANGEL as he wrote it down, dropp’d a tear upon the word, and blotted it out for ever.” 58 It would seem that in both this and the above instance Beckett is truly working from memory rather than from the original text. He cares not for the absolute accuracy of his literary citation. What is important to him is not the quotation

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itself, but rather the effort required to remember, the fallibility of memory, and the applicability (or inapplicability) of what is remembered. Beckett creatively utilizes his literary reading from the 1920s and 1930s; he dramatizes the role of the scholarly mind rifling its memory for the right allusion, then faltering in its attempt to be as accurate as possible. A couple of allusions in More Pricks demonstrate this important connection between Beckett’s reading and writing. Here we come across: “He [Belacqua] had underlined, as quite a callow boy, a phrase in Hardy’s Tess, won by dint of cogging in the Synod: When grief ceases to be speculative, sleep sees her opportunity. He had manipulated that sentence for many years now, emending its terms . . . ” (p. 158).59 Similarly, Belacqua’s allusion to Swift’s last words aptly describes Beckett’s own practice: “He would grow tired and say to himself: I am what I am. That was the end of all his meditations and endeavours: I am what I am. He had read the phrase somewhere and liked it and made it his own.” 60 Not only does Beckett typically borrow from the works and lives of many writers whom he reads; in the process he “emends” them and “makes them his own.” Over time the allusions of the early fiction begin to wane. As I have suggested more than once, Beckett’s reading does not then disappear from his texts, but only becomes less explicit; to paraphrase a line in Watt, when Beckett ceases to allude to his literary heritage, he starts to find its importance. For example, in his Life of Samuel Johnson, Boswell says under the year 1775: “On Monday, May 8, we went together and visited the mansions of Bedlam.” 61 In the course of his 1936–37 research on Johnson, Beckett read the Life and recorded in the second of his three research notebooks kept during this period: “He [Boswell] calls the cells of Bedlam the ‘mansions’ (and the corridors the galleries).” 62 Interestingly, although Beckett’s projected play on Dr. Johnson never fully materialized, this quotation from his research was not lost. In Murphy we read: “There were no open wards in the ordinary sense, but single rooms, or as some would say, cells, or as Boswell said, mansions” (p. 167). This is the characteristic “footnoting” described above; Beckett’s scholarship is fusing with, or giving rise to, his fiction. And the subsequent evolution of this allusion to Boswell is informative. In Watt Beckett clearly echoes the same sentence: “It was about this time that Watt was transferred to another pavilion, leaving me behind in the old pavilion. We consequently met, and conversed, less than formally. . . . For we seldom left our mansions, Watt seldom left his mansion and I seldom left mine.” 63 Perhaps because he is writing as


“Sam,” Beckett this time silently borrows from Boswell and also introduces “pavilion,” used here to refer to a detached or semi-detached building of a hospital. 64 And even as late as Malone Dies, Beckett appears to draw upon his reading of Boswell some 20 years earlier: “One day, much later, to judge by his appearance, Macmann came to again, once again, in a kind of asylum. . . . The room, or cell, in which he lay, was thronged with men and women dressed in white. . . . ”65 This is the least explicit allusion of all. Indeed in this case we might guess that Beckett, so far removed from his reading of Boswell, did not even know that he was drawing on the Life of Samuel Johnson. Nonetheless, his debt to Boswell seems clear, as once again he hesitates over the correct terminology, deliberately opposing “asylum” – defined in the OED as “a benevolent institution affording shelter and support to some class of the afflicted” – to the harsh reality of “cell.”66 Later in the novel Malone underscores these implications by hesitating again over a word: “the keepers coming and going, perhaps mingled with I was going to say the prisoners!” (p. 277). Knowlson explains how in 1934 Beckett managed to get inside Bethlehem Royal Hospital in London, how he used material from his friend Geoffrey Thompson, how he interviewed a male nurse at the hospital, and how this visit was his inspiration for the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat in Murphy.67 Without denying this biographical light, however, the origin of this specific item from Beckett’s research for Human Wishes suggests that behind all of these passages is the horrifying reality of eighteenth-century Bedlam, a reality that must have led Beckett to be shocked by Boswell’s inappropriate “mansions” in the first place. Boswell’s Bedlam thus becomes Murphy’s fictional Mental Mercyseat, which becomes the unnamed sanitorium in Watt, which in turn becomes in Malone Dies the House of Saint John of God – itself a real Dublin hospital. And finally, behind all these references to mental institutions there exists a witty but bitter condemnation of eighteenth-century – and twentieth-century – treatment of the mentally ill. Having visited an actual mental hospital, Beckett cannot understand how the cells of the patients/prisoners can be called “mansions” or their buildings “pavilions.” The irony is one that Boswell, like others in the eighteenth century, failed to comprehend, although it was not missed by Swift, who in A Tale of a Tub has his narrator describe a tour of Bedlam, cavalierly scrambling the terms “cell,” “kennel,” and “apartment.” 68 If from Boswell Beckett learned something about long-standing attitudes toward the insane, from Swift he seems to have learned something about the force of verbal irony.

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“Beckett’s characters often appear to exist in isolation,” observes S. E. Gontarski, “but they play their roles against a backdrop made from the shattered traditions of western man.” 69 This holds for single texts as well as Beckett’s work as a whole. And there is a telling metaphor in a letter to MacGreevy dated 23 July 1937, when he was preoccupied with attempting to draw a massive amount of material on Samuel Johnson into a play (see Chapter 6). “It really is clear enough now, my particular special pleas anyway [Johnson in love with Hester Thrale], but I keep pushing it back, like material into a dye. With good effect, I think.” Although he is referring here to the slow, painstaking building up of a particular text, the principle holds more generally. Many have noticed the frequency with which Beckett revisits characters, situations, and themes, and even repeats language employed in an earlier text. But the metaphor of fabric pushed back into the dye is useful as well in explaining his relationship to his native literary tradition, for he seems continually to be pushing his own imaginative ideas back into the dye of that tradition. While we should not overlook the influence of French writers on Beckett, English literature – surprisingly, given his switch from French to English as his language of composition – seems to have had a primary influence on his work, and right up until the end of his life. As we have seen, at TCD and then on his own in the 1930s, Beckett quite self-consciously studied the major writers of his native tradition. In particular, he seems to have been drawn to the writers of the English eighteenth century, and by juxtaposing his own ideas to theirs, by borrowing their techniques, and by absorbing their themes and characteristic tones, Beckett deepened the hues of his own texts. As Belacqua did with a sentence of Swift’s, so Beckett did with the English eighteenth century: “he had read it somewhere and liked it and made it his own.”

2 “Hiatus in MS”: Swift and Beckett

He [Swift] was not spared the last bitterness of seeing that they thought him imbecilic at just the moment when intelligence drove him to reach them with words. Irvin Ehrenpreis1 In 1969, when relevancy was a litmus test, Denis Donoghue cautioned against “our tendency to read Swift as if he were Samuel Beckett.” 2 The date of Donoghue’s warning is not surprising. But the comparisons did not go away. Critics of both eighteenth- and twentieth-century literature have for 30 years alluded to the affinities between Swift and Beckett. To pick two examples among many: C. J. Rawson observes that Swift’s characters are similar to “Beckettian heroes, whose minds and lives are trapped in those very prisons of the self which Swift mocked”; and Harold Bloom describes Beckett as “much the legitimate descendant of Swift as he is of his friend, James Joyce.”3 Allusions in both directions, however, almost invariably resemble those of Rawson and Bloom – little more than quick, undeveloped noting of general affinities. Such allusions tend to stereotype the two writers, turning Swift into an existentialist and Beckett into a misanthrope. I do not find this very helpful. Nonetheless, while it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that we should avoid reading either Swift or Beckett as if he were born two centuries later or earlier, there is ample evidence that Beckett knew Swift well. As discussed in the previous chapter, in 1925, when Beckett was a senior freshman, The Drapier’s Letters were on the Honors course of studies at Trinity College. As also discussed, Beckett returned on his own to the study of Swift in 1933, seemingly fascinated by both the man and his writings. Thus in his correspondence with Thomas MacGreevy at this time one can find references to his reading of 27

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Gulliver’s Travels, and in the Whoroscope notebook to The Bickerstaff Papers; so too the allusions to Swift in More Pricks Than Kicks and Murphy suggest that he at this period must have read the Journal to Stella and A Tale of a Tub and reread (he had read it as a boy) Gulliver. And some 40 years later, in 1976, an acquaintance reported that Beckett had admitted a year earlier that he was rereading Swift’s major work. 4 Furthermore, in his personal library at his death were two Swifts (see Appendix A): a single volume, containing The Drapier’s Letters, of Temple Scott’s edition of the Prose Works (1922), and John Hayward’s edition of Gulliver’s Travels in the Oxford World’s Classics Series (1969). Swift was a major influence on – again I would prefer to say “inspiration to” – Beckett in his formative years, and this inspiration can be traced in his work long after he was actually engaged in reading Swift in any systematic way.

I That a sensitive young Protestant, good at languages and with a streak of independence, would have been attracted to Swift is not surprising. Although the main gate at Trinity is flanked by larger-than-life statues of her alumni George Berkeley and Oliver Goldsmith, Swift’s presence is everywhere felt at the College and in Dublin generally. At St. Patrick’s Cathedral, for example, the impressionable young Beckett would have been able to view Swift’s pulpit, chair, and writing desk, and would have walked above the vaults of Swift and Stella. At Trinity itself Beckett would in the library have studied near a bust of Swift taken from his death mask, and a cast of Swift’s skull made in 1835, when his body was exhumed.5 Although as an undergraduate he studied the Irish patriot of The Drapier’s Letters, he was also responsible for “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” and (I would guess) the Dean’s remains in such close proximity must have made him seem quite immediate. Joyce appears to have recognized an affinity between his young friend and their Irish forefather. In Finnegans Wake, comparing himself to Beckett, Joyce says that “Sam knows miles bettern me how to work the miracle,” and calls him one who can “prisckly soon hand tune your Erin’s ear for you.” 6 He goes on to speak of Sam’s having “earned the factitation of codding chaplan and being as homely gauche as swift B.A.A.” Complimenting Beckett, Joyce seems to suggest that his friend knows how to manipulate the language as well as Swift, combining academic proprieties with everyday Irish speech. “He can cantab as chipper as any oxon I ever mooed with,” says Joyce. Or, to translate: “He can be


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as learned as well as any man from Oxford (oxon) or Cambridge (cantab) I ever met.” But is he not teasing Beckett for being too much of a follower of Swift? In calling Sam “as homely gauche as swift B.A.A.,” Joyce is apparently referring to Swift’s and Beckett’s baccalaureate degrees from Trinity, but in adding an extra “A” he imitates the sound of a sheep, “baaaaa.” 7 Beckett was especially attracted to Swift’s life. In a 5 January [1933] letter to Thomas MacGreevy he mentions a rainy bicycle ride out to the Portrane Lunatic Asylum north of Dublin (one of two mental institutions in the metropolitan area) and his conversation with a local resident about the ruin of a nearby old tower: “That’s where Dane Swift came to his motte” he said. “What motte?” I said. “Stella.” What with that, and the legend about the negress that his valet picked up for him, and the Portrane lunatics and round tower built as relief work in the famine, poem scum is fermenting. 8 But in an undated letter clearly from this same period, Beckett complains that he has “Nothing in the mind but Pavlov spittle. I had hopes of a Swift poem mais . . . tant mieux.” However, although it can hardly be considered the “Swift poem” he originally had in mind, the autobiographical poem “Sanies I,” written at Easter 1933, deals with this same journey out to Donabate. Beckett peddles his bicycle – called a Swift! – around the countryside: “cinched to death in a filthy slicker / flinging the proud Swift forward / breasting the swell of Sturmers. . . . ”9 In a poem thick with wordplay, “proud Swift” seems to pun on Jonathan Swift and the persona of the Dean not uncommon in the thirties. Thus it may be significant that in January 1933 Beckett had dinner at the home of Joseph Hone, a writer and acquaintance of his who (Beckett mentions this in a letter to MacGreevy) was at this time co-authoring a book titled Swift, or the Egotist, published the following year.10 Then in “Fingal,” a story written sometime between May and September 1933 and published the next year in More Pricks, Beckett discovers a literary use for the Portrane hospital episode, now made more complicated by the presence of Winnie, Belacqua’s female friend: “The best I know” he said “is some Lady Something had it.” This was news indeed. “Then before that again” it all came back to him with a rush “you might have heard tell of Dane Swift, he kep a” – he checked the word and then let it come regardless – “he kep a motte in it.”

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“A moth?” exclaimed Winnie. “A motte” he said “of the name of Stella.” 11 Beckett cannot seem to leave the situation alone. This time, the third time (counting the letter to MacGreevy) he has worked over the event, he assumes something of an ironic stance toward his material, and the distance allows him to make fun of the Irishman, prudish about events of more than two centuries ago, the insensitive and easily fooled Winnie, and also, perhaps, Belacqua himself. And once again in a punning mood, Beckett seems to joke over the heads of his characters, toying with the word “motte,” which is slang for “girl” and at the same time a reference to Benjamin Motte, the original publisher of Gulliver’s Travels.12 Beckett’s allusions to Swift in the flamboyant Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written in May and June of 1932) reflect his recent reading. In this novel there are references to “owld Tale of a Tub,” “lile pute,” and, more obscurely, “like sunbeams through cracks” and “like a cloud . . . after the sands of poets and politicians.”13 In the ten stories of More Pricks, however, published two years later and in some respects a reworking of the earlier novel, the number of allusions to Swift has increased from four to fourteen. Here Beckett alludes to Swift’s major works in order to help depict a character or event in his own narrative, as in this quick reference to A Tale of a Tub: “Belacqua threw them a tub in the form of Hairy, locked the wicket on the outside and committed himself and his wife to the Morgan” (p. 150). And there are several allusions to Gulliver’s Travels: “Belacqua was green, he did the King of Brobdingnag in a quick dumb crambo” (p. 80); “It pleased his fancy to think of himself as a kind of easy-going Saint George at the Court of Mildendo” (p. 116); “Until finally, a female cousin, so remote as to be scarcely credible, and a kind of moot Struldbrug . . . ” (p. 128); and “But he stupidly elected to linger on in the bed with his uneasy load” (p. 166). 14 It is as if Beckett cannot get Swift out of his mind. Or as if he feels a kinship with his eighteenth-century countryman who provides apt analogies for his own twentieth-century characters. Especially remarkable is Beckett’s detailed knowledge of the Journal to Stella. Swift, teasing Stella, contrasts the ladies of England with the lazy ladies of Ireland: “I always cry shame at the ladies of Ireland, who never walk at all, as if their legs were of no use, but to be laid aside.” 15 Swift’s bawdy pun seems to have caught Beckett’s attention, for he repeats it in his story “What a Misfortune”: “Swift, rebuking the women of this country for their disregard of Shank’s mare, described [the legs of Irishwomen] as being fit for nothing better than to be laid aside . . . ” (p. 145).


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Further evidence of Beckett’s meticulous reading of the Journal is his combining of two sentences (some 50 pages apart in the modern edition) from Swift’s letters: “A fine day, but begins to grow a little warm; and that makes your little fat Presto [Italian for ‘swift’] sweat in the forehead” (Vol. 1, p. 259), and “Our weather grows fine, and I will walk like camomile” (Vol. 1, p. 207). Compare the following description of Belacqua from the story “Fingal”: “Little fat Presto, he would set out early in the morning, fresh and fasting, and walk like camomile” (p. 34). It is clear that Beckett knew his Swift intimately, not only the major works but also the private, posthumously published Journal. In Beckett’s first published novel Murphy (written in 1934–37 and published in 1938), there is one explicit allusion to Gulliver’s Travels and another rather buried reference to The Drapier’s Letters, which the author had first studied at Trinity College about ten years earlier: “Feeling just the same old Wood’s halfpenny in the regulation shirt and suit. . . . ”16 In addition, there are a few possible verbal echoes of the Tale: “knotty points” (p. 131), “pudenda of my psyche” (p. 47), and “the fool in league with the knave” (p. 170).17 And on one page there appears to be a subtle echo of Swift’s letter to Esther (Vanessa) Vanhomrigh in which he hints at their (imaginary?) sexual intercourse: “I wish I were to walk with you fifty times about your garden, and then – drink your coffee.” In Murphy it is tea: “She [Celia] stood there, smelling, ravished in contemplation of her tea being taken” (p. 68).18 Beckett in these instances seems almost to engage in a dialogue with Swift. He is toying with some peculiarly Swiftian phraseology that echoes not only public texts but private letters, not only the Dean’s literary works but his life. 19

II As with eighteenth-century writers generally, Swift’s influence on Beckett becomes more profound when Beckett stops alluding to him; when separated from his books during the war, and afterward, when his reading is quite some years in the past, then Beckett moves beyond mere allusion. It seems that over time certain images in Swift accumulated greater and greater significance in his imagination. I cannot, of course, go through all of the works of Beckett’s maturity, citing a possible echo here, a potential influence there. Let me simply point out two passages that appear to reflect Swift’s Journal to Stella: one in the novel Malone Dies and another in the one-act play titled Krapp’s Last Tape. I want then to discuss in some detail two scenes which I believe depend on “A Digression on Madness” in A Tale of a Tub, and

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which bear some resemblance to each other: that in Murphy describing the title character’s tour of the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat; and the scene at the conclusion of Malone, containing the character “Lemuel,” in which there is a comparable description of the inmates at the House of St. John of God. One image Beckett seems to have been drawn to (a frequent one in the Journal) is that of Swift alone in London, in bed, writing to Stella in Dublin.20 This image is similar to the controlling image of Malone Dies, where the title character is pictured alone in a room, in bed, making an inventory of his remaining possessions and pursuing his memoirs until the last breath. Beyond the image itself, however, both writers possess a keen ability to make something of the most unpromising material, dramatizing as they do the process of reading or writing itself. For example, see the following passage from the Journal to Stella, where Swift manages to convey a marvelous immediacy: I opened the bishop’s letter; but put up MD’s, and visited a lady just come to town, and am now got into bed, and going to open your little letter: and God send I may find MD well, and happy, and merry, and that they love Presto as they do fires. Oh, I won’t open it yet! yes I will! no I won’t; I am going; I can’t stay till I turn over: What shall I do? My fingers itch; and now I have it in my left hand; and now I’ll open it this very moment. – I have just got it, and am cracking the seal, and can’t imagine what’s in it; I fear only some letter from a bishop, and it comes too late: I shall employ nobody’s credit but my own. Well, I see through – Pshaw, ‘tis from sir Andrew Fountain.21 Within this egocentric, melodramatic monologue, Swift informs MD what he is doing each second that he is doing it; in fact some of the statements read almost like stage directions: “now I have it in my left hand,” etc. Moreover, the monologue is a sort of dialogue, as foolish Presto asserts something, then denies it, asserts something else, then denies that. Even though Stella and Mrs. Dingley are not present, Swift works hard to make them spectators at his reading of their letter. Paradoxically, the extreme attention given to the physicality of the letter does not impede immediacy but somehow manages to enhance it; touched by Stella and Mrs. Dingley in Dublin, the letter is now being touched by Swift in London. Textuality here collapses the barrier of time and distance inherent in their correspondence, and by personifying her letter, Swift brings Stella almost literally into his room, indeed into his


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bed. There is an important intimacy in this for both the writer of the letter and his correspondent across the Irish Sea. Although the following passage from Malone Dies deals with writing instead of reading, and although Beckett has opted for the past instead of present tense, he creates a comparable sense of immediacy: The exercise-book had fallen to the ground. I took a long time to find it. It was under the bed. How are such things possible? I took a long time to recover it. I had to harpoon it. It is not pierced through and through, but it is in a bad way. It is a thick exercise-book. I hope it will see me out. From now on I shall write on both sides of the page. Where does it come from? I don’t know. I found it, just like that, the day I needed it. Knowing perfectly well I had no exercise-book I rummaged in my possessions in the hope of finding one. I was not disappointed, not surprised. If tomorrow I needed an old love-letter I would adopt the same method.22 The feature which the two passages have most obviously in common is their emphasis on the material document: Presto admits that he cannot resist reading the letter from MD “till I turn over”; Malone says that in order to conserve paper, he shall “write on both sides of the page.” Moreover, as in the passage from the Journal to Stella, the egocentricity in Malone Dies is remarkable; for the record, there are in the passage from Swift some 18 first-person pronouns and some 15 in the passage from Beckett. Having so narrowed the scope of their narratives, however, both authors achieve, and through some of the same devices, a great deal of dramatic interest: the use of very short sentences, the handling of monologue as if it were dialogue, and the creation of a range of voices within the first-person pronoun. Mentally and emotionally, something is happening as we read. In an excellent essay on Malone Dies and what he calls “the diary novel,” H. Porter Abbott discusses the connection between works like Pamela or Clarissa and Beckett’s novel, in particular referring to the threatened manuscript and the merging of the times of narrative and narration.23 But both of these features can be found as well in the Journal to Stella, and given what we know about Beckett’s reading of these letters, I find Swift a more likely source than Richardson, whom he may never have read. Not that there are no differences between these two passages. In Beckett, for example, there is a clearer connection between the physical process of writing and the life of the teller. And Swift has a public life outside his room, beyond his writing, whereas

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Malone’s only other life is achieved through his memory and /or imagination. Text is being in Beckett. We can’t go that far in Swift.24 But I agree with J. C. C. Mays, who stresses the way in which both Beckett and Swift use language as an instrument, with “emotions seething underneath”: “The parallels with Swift are particularly striking,” observes Mays, “especially the element of self-laceration their divided natures share, expressed in forms which are precisely determined.” 25 Specifically, Beckett seems to have been influenced by A Tale of a Tub. Of course part of Murphy is, like part of the Tale, set in a mental hospital. Within a few pages of a reference to The Drapier’s Letters and “the fool in league with the knave” is a description of the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat: “a sanatorium,” the narrator protests too much, “not a madhouse nor a home for defectives” (p. 160). Murphy, presumably an attendant but at times appearing more like a patient, reports that he lives in a “genuine garret” (p. 162); Swift’s Modern Author, who at present resides outside Bedlam but once was an inmate, admits that “the shrewdest Pieces of this Treatise, were conceived in Bed, in a Garret” (p. 44). And brought to the sanatorium by the ex-poet and attendant Austin Ticklepenny, Murphy – in an echo of A Tale of a Tub – is given a tour of the wards by another attendant, one “Bom.” Alluding to Boswell, Beckett refers to the “cells” in the Mercyseat (p. 167), and as Murphy walks from cell to cell, viewing the inmates, the scene is reminiscent of Swift’s “Digression on Madness.” In the Journal to Stella, after all, he reports that he visited Bedlam, and 200 years later, Beckett, when he was preparing to write Murphy, managed through his psychiatrist and friend Geoffrey Thompson to arrange a tour of Bethlehem Royal Hospital in London. 26 “There were not many patients about as Murphy followed Bom through the wards,” the narrator tells us: But those that he did see were not at all the terrifying monsters that might have been imagined from Ticklepenny’s account. Melancholics, motionless and brooding, holding their heads or bellies according to type. Paranoids, feverishly covering sheets of paper with complaints against their treatment or verbatim reports of their inner voices. A hebephrenic playing the piano intently. A hypomanic teaching slosh to a Korsakow’s syndrome. An emaciated schizoid, petrified in a toppling attitude as though condemned to an eternal tableau vivant. . . . (pp. 167–8) Comparably, in the Tale the Modern Author tours Bedlam, led by a “keeper,” and “observe[s] with utmost Exactness their several Dispositions


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and Behaviour” (p. 176). We are introduced to the following: “Is any Student tearing his Straw in piece-meal, Swearing and Blaspheming, biting his Grate, foaming at the Mouth, and emptying his Pispot in the Spectator’s faces?” (p. 176); “Accost the Hole of another Kennel, first stopping your Nose, you will behold a surley, gloomy, nasty, slovenly Mortal . . . very sparing in his Words, but somewhat over-liberal of his Breath” (p. 178); and “Behold a Fourth, in much and deep Conversation with himself, biting his Thumbs at proper Junctures . . . Sir, says he, Give me a Penny, and I’ll sing you a Song: But give me the Penny first” (p. 178). Michel Foucault explained many years ago that the Age of Reason harbored a great fear of unreason. 27 Perversely, however, both Swift and Beckett suggest that the residents of Bedlam and the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat are no crazier than those outside those walls. “What wonderful Talents are here mislaid!” (p. 176), exclaims the Modern Author, and goes on to suggest that those inside might be let out: “I shall not descend so minutely, as to insist upon the vast Number of Beaux, Fidlers, Poets, and Politicians, that the World might recover by such a Reformation” (p. 179). Similarly, in Murphy it is established that only 15 percent of the inmates are “certified,” the Mercyseat preferring to keep only those chronics who are “quiet, clean, biddable, and solvent” (p. 160); the others are turned away. Beckett, borrowing the technique of the satirist, flouts the distinction between reason and unreason, deliberately blurring the border between his main character, technically removed from the inmates, and the supposed madmen on the wards. Swift’s Bedlam is ultimately a symbol of the madness that he sees throughout eighteenthcentury British society; Beckett’s Magdalen Mental Mercyseat shows the failure of twentieth-century psychiatry and the inhumanity of locking up those who deserve our sympathy. They are us. And finally, in a more complex passage at the end of Malone Dies, Beckett seems creatively to play off Gulliver’s Travels as well as A Tale of a Tub. Here he brings together a character named “Lemuel” – like Murphy, an attendant – and a visit to Saint John of God, an actual asylum outside Dublin: Flayed alive by memory, his mind crawling with cobras, not daring to dream or think and powerless not to, his cries were of two kinds, those having no other cause than moral anguish and those, similar in every respect, by means of which he hoped to forestall same. Physical pain, on the contrary, seemed to help him greatly. (p. 267)28

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As Lawrence Graver suggests, “Flayed alive” would seem to echo Swift’s famous passage in “The Digression on Madness” in which the Modern Author tonelessly recounts a modern horror: “Last Week I saw a Woman flay’d, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her Person for the worse” (p. 173).29 So too the reference to Lemuel’s “mind crawling with cobras” may echo Swift’s reference in The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit to “the Opinion of Choice Virtuosi, that the Brain is only a Crowd of little Animals.” 30 Beckett’s Lemuel resembles Swift’s. Upon first being introduced into Malone Dies, he “gave the impression of being slightly more stupid than malevolent, and yet his malevolence was considerable” (p. 266) – not a bad description of Lemuel Gulliver. When Macmann asks him a question, such as whether Saint John of God is an institution for the aged or a madhouse, he would ponder the question at length, then “usually ended by his saying he did not know” (pp. 266–7). 31 And if readers need any corroboration that this is Lemuel Gulliver, they may find it in this: “And taking out a note-book as fat as a ship’s log he made note . . . ” (p. 267). Finally, when Lemuel removes a hammer “from an inner pocket” (I am reminded of Gulliver’s secret pocket in “A Voyage to Lilliput”) and strikes himself on the skull, Beckett seems to intend a crude mockery of Swift’s thick-headed Gulliver. Furthermore, in Malone Dies Beckett’s depiction of the sane and the insane, the visitors and the inmates, seems to owe something to Swift’s depiction of madness in the Tale and Gulliver’s Travels. We are told that Lady Pedal, an aristocratic do-gooder, “was not the only one to take an interest in the inmates of Saint John of God”; “she was seconded by other ladies sharing her way of thinking and similarly blessed in means and leisure” (pp. 280–1). Seeking to “[bring] a little happiness into the lives of those less fortunate than herself” (p. 280), Lady Pedal is a twentieth-century version of an eighteenth-century visitor to Bedlam. True enough, she does more than spectate, but like her predecessor, she does not seek to understand those in the asylum and when she takes them out for an excursion to an island, keeps them at arm’s length. When the good Lady and her “waggonette” arrive, she rides up on the box, beside the coachman, although “behind her heavily spotted fall-veil her plump red face appeared to pullulate” (p. 284). “My creatures,” she says, “what of them? Nothing” (p. 286). Lady Pedal serves tea and tiny sandwiches and tells her “creatures” of Druid remains on the islands. When she steps away, however, Lemuel (in a moment that is reminiscent of Beckett’s unprovoked stabbing in Paris in 1938) coldly murders two of the other inmates with a hatchet. Returning in search of the inmates,


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Lady Pedal faints at the sight of the carnage. “Smash her!” screams someone. She must have broken a bone in her fall, we are told, “for no sooner had she recovered her senses than she began to moan and groan, as if she were the only being on the face of the earth deserving of pity” (p. 287). What Beckett suggests is that the inmates too deserve pity. Like the eighteenth-century aristocrats who toured Bedlam for entertainment’s sake, Lady Pedal is incapable of comprehending the Saint John of God inmates as anything more than charitable toys. Like the narrator of A Modest Proposal or the cruel sociologist of The Lost Ones (originally titled Le Dépeupleur), Lady Pedal does not see the poor, troubled inmates as people like herself. “My creatures,” she calls them. If he were to exist, Godot would speak in the same terms. 32 In any case, Beckett in Malone Dies brings a violent close to the artificial separation between the aristocracy and the working class, the powerful and the powerless, the sane and the insane. Rewriting the tour-of-Bedlam scene from A Tale of a Tub which he had earlier used for Murphy, he here stresses more than ever his impatience with inhumane estrangement. Then borrowing the name “Lemuel” from Gulliver’s Travels, he (unconsciously?) scrambles the two works so that slow-witted Lemuel becomes a keeper on the wards, then the perpetrator of violence against the inmates. Swift’s Lemuel is agonizingly placid, all too willing to be victimized, and in the end, in his quest for acceptance, he is happy to take up residence in the barn with his horses; in Beckett we get a more active Lemuel, fully deranged, who, in his appalling perpetration of violence on an unsuspecting charitymonger, is a sort of answer to Swift, a reinterpretation of Gulliver’s Travels for a Europe which has survived, barely, the carnage of two world wars. There is no hiding in ignorance or stupidity, Beckett seems to say. Although I would not want to suggest that he condones the violence done to Lady Pedal, we can see a sort of poetic justice in her demise: aloofness may spawn violence as easily as it spawns apathy. For Beckett, who served with the Irish Red Cross in 1946, human empathy must be sincere. Like Swift, who in A Modest Proposal pretends to recommend the cannibalization of children as a way of getting people to do something about Irish poverty, Beckett shocks us in order to resensitize us to the presence of the less fortunate. That Swift is behind this complex passage in Malone Dies – though in an indirect, almost untraceable way – seems undeniable. Although some would balk at calling Beckett a satirist, his brand of misanthropy reminds me of Swift’s admission to Pope, in a passage Beckett in the mid-thirties copied into a notebook: “I have

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ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals.” 33

III Beckett’s novel Watt (written between 1941 and 1944) demonstrates a far deeper Swiftian influence than any text we have discussed so far. I would venture to speculate that in his title character, servant to Mr. Knott, Beckett recalls Swift’s servant Watt, who is mentioned in his Holyhead Journal of the year 1727.34 Important here is the image of Swift at Holyhead, concerned about Stella’s rapidly deteriorating health and “imprisoned” (his word) for a week, waiting impatiently for a break in the weather in order that he might cross over the Irish Sea and return to Dublin. Swift’s frustration is intensified by the ineptitude of Watt, who, among other things, has botched his wardrobe: It was a mercy that there were 6 clean [shirts] when I left London; otherwise Watt (whose blunders would bear an history) would have put them all in the great Box of goods which goes by the Carrier to Chester. He brought but one cravat, and the reason he gave was because the rest were foul, and he thought he should not put foul linnen into the Portmanteau. For, he never dreamt it might be washed on the way. My shirts are all foul now, and by his reasoning, I fear he will leave them in Holyhead when we go.35 In a sense, Beckett has on Swift’s behalf written the history of Watt’s blunders. His novel Watt records the encounter of a modern-day, rather foolish servant who seems unable to figure out doorknobs, pots, and keys, much less comprehend the significance of the existential situation in which he finds himself. The slapstick quality of Beckett’s fiction has usually been traced to his interest in burlesque and silent film (in Watt there is an allusion to “hardy laurel”), but it should not be overlooked that there is a great deal of slapstick in Swift, as here in the Holyhead Journal. Imagine Buster Keaton in this scene. “Somehow or other,” says Francis Doherty, “Swift has laid his hand on Watt, and the madness of the Modern in A Tale of a Tub has paved the way for the failure of reason in the face of the incomprehensible.” 36 Beckett, separated during the war from his books but groping for a fictional form that might reflect his frustrating attempts to know and to write, seems at this time to have recalled most vividly Swift’s own youthful, troubled, seemingly formless satire. In the evolution of Beckett’s


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fiction Watt is a turning-point, an experiment in the radical fragmentation of narrative form, an ironic novel that emphasizes the significance of what is, from the standpoint of traditional fiction, its own failure. I suggest that in Swift’s fictional satire – written prior to the development of the novel as a genre – Beckett found a rough model for his own text.37 A Tale of a Tub showed him how to use a fractured literary structure and style in order to question the effects of literary form, the relationship between form and experience, and beyond – the very possibility of rational knowledge. Both Beckett’s novel and its eighteenth-century antecedent are hybrid combinations of novel and philosophical tract. Reminiscent of Berkeley (who influenced both writers), the Tale and Watt are satiric dramatizations of the type of mind that denies everything outside the mind. It is not the woman flayed per se that troubles the Modern; nor is it Mr. Knott’s mysterious door per se that troubles Watt. These phenomena scarcely exist until interpreted. If the Modern can only transmute the corpse into a neat generalization on outsides vs. insides, or if Watt can only transmute the door into a singular explanation of the behavior of doors, they can relax, sensation and conscience safely under control of intellect. The Tale and Watt are marked by strange denials of the facts of physical experience. Reading Swift’s book not as religious allegory but as a novel, we can take as an example Jack’s encounter with a post: He would shut his Eyes as he walked along the Streets, and if he happened to bounce his Head against a Post, or fall into the Kennel (as he seldom missed either to do one or both) he would tell the gibing Prentices, who looked on, that he submitted with entire Resignation, as to a Trip, or a Blow of Fate, with whom he found, by long Experience, how vain it was either to wrestle or to cuff; and whoever durst undertake to do either, would be sure to come off with a swinging Fall, or a bloody Nose. (p. 192) This scene from the Tale prefigures Watt’s pelting by Lady McCann. Following Watt down the road, she suddenly picks up a stone, and for no reason whatsoever throws it at him with all her might – “which, when she was roused, was not negligible.” Beyond stopping, and laying down his bags, and picking up his hat, and setting it on his head, and picking up his bags, and setting himself, after one or two false starts, again in motion, Watt, faithful to his rule, took no more notice of this aggression than if it had been

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an accident. This he found was the wisest attitude, to staunch, if necessary, inconspicuously, with the little red sudarium that he always carried in his pocket, the flow of blood, to pick up what had fallen, and to continue, as soon as possible, on his way, or in his station, like a victim of mere mischance.38 Jack and Watt are Chaplinesque figures. Both have a bad time in the world of objects. Interestingly, the post and the kennel that lie in wait for Jack are independent hazards, whereas the stone that knocks down Watt is propelled by a fellow human being. But this difference aside, Jack’s and Watt’s responses to their respective blows are alike: neither really notices what has occurred to him, nor learns anything from his experience. Jack and Watt pretty much ignore what happens to their bodies, so anxious are they to fit this particular physical event into some sort of rational schema. Both explain away (1) by identifying this blow as simply one in a series of blows, and (2) by interpreting the whole series as evidence for the workings of “fate” or “mischance.” But to attempt to rationalize the arbitrary is ridiculous; the boys who laugh at Jack have the right idea. Neither Jack nor Watt gets around to asking “Why?” or even “Why me?” What we have in each case is a sort of clownSisyphus who responds to physical stimulus as if it were rational meaning. “Pour Beckett comme pour Swift,” says John Fletcher, “la condition humaine implique l’angoisse épistémologique.” 39 Fiction and epistemology are intimately conjoined in the Tale and Watt. In both works the attempt to tell a story, to make order and sense out of the raw materials of fiction, is inseparable from the attempt to understand the world, to make order and sense out of physical and intellectual experience. Indeed both authors associate themselves with their narrators simply by turning those narrators into peculiarly self-conscious authors: Swift, very literally, is a “modern author,” and Beckett names his narrator “Sam.” Yet point of view in each work is intentionally inconsistent. Swift and Beckett have arranged things in such a way that they can satirize their speakers’ mismanaged narrations while at the same time recognizing the irony of their own struggles to create. The content of Watt, therefore, is an ironic reflection on its own form as well as a parody of all philosophical concepts that govern human endeavors. As Raymond Federman said many years ago: Watt is a narrative experiment which exploits the inadequacy of language, reason, and logic to reveal the failure of fiction as a means of apprehending the reality of the world. In this novel Beckett implies


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that the rational is no longer compatible with fiction. Watt’s content, therefore, is an ironic reflection on its own form as well as a parody of all philosophical concepts that govern men’s undertakings.40 This is not news. But what is interesting is that Beckett seems to have recognized that A Tale of a Tub brings together the art of novel-writing and the philosophy of knowledge. The Tale too was for its young author an experiment in ironic narrative. In parodying seventeenth-century Grub Street histories, analytical treatises, and critical essays, Swift implies that for the hack none of these can be effective vehicles of truth. In parodying the easy, complacent, optimistic novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Beckett implies that fiction in its traditional guise is not a good means for discovering truth. Yet an important distinction is that whereas Swift satirizes the egocentric dishonesty of the modern writer, Beckett goes so far as to question the very possibility of honest writing. Although we expect print to fix ideas in a black-and-white certainty, A Tale of a Tub and Watt deny the possibility of achieving any such thing. Thus the footnote – what Kenner once called a “ventriloqual gadget” (p. 40) – is used in both works to undercut the main point and even to mock itself: Swift says, “I cannot conjecture what the Author means here, or how this Chasm would be fill’d, though it is capable of more than one Interpretation” (p. 179); Beckett says, “Haemophilia is, like enlargement of the prostate, an exclusively male disorder. But not in this work” (p. 102). Furthermore, Beckett must have gotten his idea for “Hiatus in MS” (pp. 238 and 239), “MS illegible” (p. 241), and the many blank spaces in his text from comparable devices in the Tale.41 Swift and Beckett agree that thoughts are too complicated, variable, and subjective to be fixed by mere ink and paper; the disintegration of manuscripts is meant in each book to suggest the failure of the purely technographical aspects of writing to lend certainty to ideas. Indeed the story of Mr. Louit and the story of Peter, Jack, and Martin are about the fates of manuscripts: what fixity is there in writing if a document can be lost or interpreted any way at all? Both narrators suffer from what Sam calls “The labour of composition, the uncertainty as to how to proceed, or whether to proceed at all” (p. 156). The haphazard appearances of A Tale of a Tub and Watt likewise suggest a lack of authorial control. The beginnings are somewhat alike, as the Modern Author attempts numerous embarcations (“Apology,” “Dedication,” “Bookseller to the Reader,” etc.), and as the main character in Beckett’s novel is belatedly, almost casually introduced by three people

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who never appear again. So too the two texts wind down, ending unclimactically. In the Tale the Modern (like his reader) simply gets tired and concedes that “there seems to be no Part of Knowledge in fewer Hands, than That of Discerning when to have Done” (p. 208). Watt ends with an Appendix full of curious fragments accompanied by this Swiftian note: “The following precious and illuminating material should be carefully studied. Only fatigue and disgust prevented its incorporation” (p. 247). Similarly, at one point the Modern admits that he has found as proper a place for his digression as he could: “[But] if the judicious Reader can assign a fitter, I do here empower him to remove it into any other Corner he pleases” (p. 149). 42 Comparably, at the beginning of the fourth section of Watt we are informed: “As Watt told the beginning of his story, not first, but second, so not fourth, but third, now he told its end” (p. 215). Sam confides in us that the order of his narrative is not identical to the order of Watt’s story, and Swift’s Modern Author is so confused that he expresses a willingness to surrender authorship to his reader. However, the mock-serious tones of the Tale and Watt should not obscure a point that Beckett would have felt they shared: ultimately, it is impossible to squeeze contingent reality into neat beginnings, endings, and chapter divisions; by permitting contingency to enter between the covers of their books, Swift and Beckett underscore not only the arbitrariness of literary form, but also, by extension, the arbitrariness of judgments about the world. Michel Foucault, mentioning Swift, speaks of that unique type of literature which exposes that “central incertitude where the work of art is born.” 43 A Tale of a Tub in this respect prefigures Beckett’s novels, all of which remain disordered works of art and tentative explorations of knowledge. Language itself is a dubious means of discovering or conveying truth. Both the Tale and Watt are very wordy books about words, and their authors frequently focus our attention on the arbitrariness of their own means of expression. For example, the Modern argues that “If certain Ermins and Furs be placed in a certain Position, we stile them a Judge, and so, an apt Conjunction of Lawn and black Sattin, we intitle a Bishop” (p. 79). Swift puns here on the word “certain.” The same arbitrariness operates in Beckett’s novel, where we are told that “Watt’s need of semantic succour was at times so great that he would set to trying names on things, and on himself, almost as a woman hats” (p. 83). Words in both texts begin to come unglued from things, and words themselves begin to disintegrate. In one passage from the Tale which contains a remarkable hint of Watt, the three brothers argue over the word “Knot,” whether it is spelled with a “C” or a “K,” as Swift puns over their heads


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on “not” and “nothing”; although the brothers consult their father’s will, there was “not a Word of the Shoulder-knot” (p. 83), and “a K was not to be found” (p. 84). 44 Beckett throughout his novel toys with the same words, as in this humorously complex example: “Not that Watt was ever to have any direct dealings with Mr. Knott, for he was not” (p. 67). The Modern and Watt use mathematics the way they use language – as a tool for systematizing experience. And the abstractness of numbers promises that they will succeed in quieting reality where words have failed. Thus the Modern loves to quantify. He suggests that the Grub Streeters’ worth might be calculated by hiring an arithmetician (if he had “Capacity enough”) to count their books (p. 64). Elsewhere he advocates meditation on the mystical numbers seven, nine, and especially three: “Now among all the rest, the profound Number THREE is that which hath most employ’d my sublimest Speculations, nor ever without wonderful Delight” (p. 57).45 In Watt we likewise meet numbers everywhere: thus Mr. Nackybal’s talent for doing square roots in his head enthralls but confuses the Watt-like committee for an entire day (pp. 182–97). And after Watt’s three pages of vital statistics on the Lynch family, we get this footnote: “The figures given here are incorrect. The consequent calculations therefore are doubly erroneous” (p. 104).46 Swift and Beckett are both fascinated by mathematics and yet distrust it. Note the closeness of Mr. Louit’s speech against gardening by means of “the line, the measure, the plumb, the level, and who knows what other mechanical aids” (p. 182), to Gulliver’s report on the Laputans who describe beautiful women by reference to “Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other Geometrical Terms” (p. 163). The mock-scientific tones are the same. The trouble with mathematics is that it gives us the abstract outlines of things, or turns things into symbols, and thus makes sense only if we happen to be more interested in outlines or symbols than things themselves. The failure of language and mathematics in A Tale of a Tub and Watt points to what is perhaps their most important parallel – the theme of nothingness. By Swift’s day there was a minor tradition of writings on the subject of nothing. 47 Swift himself was fascinated by the intangible notions of infinity, vacuum, and annhilation, and as far as writing is concerned his position was this: “There is no inventing Terms of Art beyond our Idea’s; and when Idea’s are exhausted, Terms of Art must be so too” (p. 50). With no ideas to start with, the Modern Author should never have picked up a pen, and now he seems unable to stop. What he writes is so many words. Of course Sam has no ideas either, but whereas for Swift the blame falls on the Modern, that is on modernism, for

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Beckett there is simply no hope of turning ideas into art without destroying those ideas themselves. As if his book has not demonstrated it well enough, the Modern in his Conclusion admits the failure of his imagination, even passes it off as a sort of modern virtue: “I am now trying an Experiment very frequent among Modern Authors; which is, to write upon Nothing; When the Subject is utterly exhausted, to let the Pen still move on; by some called, the Ghost of Wit, delighting to walk after the Death of its Body” (p. 208). Twenty years after writing Watt, Beckett echoed – “parodied” would be too strong – this passage in his story Enough (English translation of the 1966 Assez): All that goes before forget. Too much at a time is too much. That gives the pen time to note. I don’t see it but I hear it behind me. Such is the silence. When the pen stops I go on. Sometimes it refuses. When it refuses I go on. Or it’s my voice too weak at times. The one that comes out of me. So much for the art and craft.48 The detachment of the manuality of writing from the writer himself, the writer’s loss of control, and the ultimate uselessness of writing – these things are common to both passages. And in stressing the manuality of their enterprises, both writers undercut the significance of their own texts, accusing themselves of parading only “the Ghost of Wit” or referring to the mere “art and craft” of writing. Of course Swift’s satire is here aimed at the empty-headed moderns who have nothing to say, though they continue to scribble. Beckett, however, appears to have discovered in Swift’s passage something more personal: he satirizes himself, etching words in the silence, mocked by the scratching of pen on paper. Writing for Beckett has become a sort of self-immolation. And there is one further difference: whereas the passage from Swift appears at the conclusion of the Tale, the passage from Beckett is the opening paragraph of his story; he in a sense begins to write where Swift left off.

For all their showy rationalism the Modern and Sam (who resembles Watt) are quite irrational; and if irrationality is the absence of meaning, then their books are in a sense nothing. Foucault points up the paradox of madness: The paradox of this nothing is to manifest itself, to explode in signs, in words, in gestures. Inextricable unity of order and disorder, or the


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reasonable being of things and this nothingness of madness! For madness, if it is nothing, can manifest itself only by departing from itself, by assuming an appearance in the order of reason and thus becoming the contrary of itself. (p. 93) I cannot imagine a better description of the paradox at the heart of the Tale and Watt. The Modern explains his title: “Sea-men have a Custom when they meet a Whale, to fling him out an empty Tub, by way of Amusement, to divert him from laying violent Hands upon the Ship” (p. 40). Swift here mocks the Modern’s distracting Tale of a Tub (but not his own), which is empty, and also the type of mind capable of producing such a book.49 And in his inverted style Watt says: “Deen did taw? Tonk. Tog da taw? Tonk. Luf puk saw? Hap! Deen did tub? Ton sparp. Tog da tub? Ton wonk” (p. 166). Moreover, I am tempted to see in the word “tub” an allusion to Swift and also an imbedded question: “Deen did tub?” Beckett is perhaps asking, “Dean Swift wrote A Tale of a Tub?” Swift’s authorship, after all, is technically open to question, since he never put his name to this work. At any rate, both the Modern’s tub and Knott’s cup (cf. Knott’s pot) turn out to be quite empty. 50 “Was kup ful?” Watt asks. “Pah!” What he needs, we are told, is “Ton wonk,” or to “know Knott,” to comprehend nothingness itself. But this is not possible. A Tale of a Tub and Watt are both chock-full of images, metaphors, numbers, allusions, jokes, quotations, and words and more words; but the copiousness of both works paradoxically betrays their emptiness. Of course Swift subtly, cleverly, communicates something in spite of his crazy narrator. Beckett communicates something in spite of himself. Beckett puts it plainly: “The only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something” (p. 77). That’s what Watt and the Modern do. They talk and talk and talk, sounding as if they are saying something but in fact saying nothing at all. Swift and Beckett push the art of tedium about as far as it will go; their respective texts are not merely about nothing, but are nothing. Minus the occasional hints in the Tale and Watt that the authors themselves know full well what we have only been suspecting, we would not read much more than a page of either book. But the difference between a dull book and a dull book which acknowledges its own dullness, I suggest, is the difference between an elephant and a gazelle pretending to be an elephant. The real subject of Beckett’s novel as well as A Tale of a Tub is the limits of the human mind. Both works test the assumption that reason can eventually locate verifiable, fixed, certain meanings; both depict minds repetitiously sifting experience through language and number;

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and finally, both show the futility of expecting to make rational sense of the facts of everyday experience, or, much less, life itself. “If Truth be not fled with Astraea,” Swift says in A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind, “she is certainly as hidden as the Source of the Nile, and can be found only in Utopia.” 51 Significantly, Dean Swift, who believed in God, argues in his sermon On the Trinity that religious mysteries – like some earthly mysteries – are beyond human reason and must remain essentially mysterious, acceptable only on grounds of faith.52 Swift’s unknowable God, we might say, becomes Beckett’s unknowable Knott. Or unknowable Godot.

3 Beckett and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

I can readily imagine Beckett’s next novel, for example, as Tom Jones. . . . John Barth1 In a 14 February 1935 letter to MacGreevy, Beckett mentioned that he was reading Jane Austen. “I think she has much to teach me,” he added. 2 Indeed Beckett might have said the same about several British novelists of the eighteenth century, for during the 1930s he deliberately schooled himself on the canonical novelists of this period. We know from his correspondence with MacGreevy and from the Whoroscope notebook that at this time he read the following: Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Jonathan Wild, Tom Jones, and Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon; Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker; and a book that is technically an eighteenth-century novel, Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.3 In addition, he undoubtedly read Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (alluded to in More Pricks Than Kicks); Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (mentioned in a letter to MacGreevy); Sterne’s Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (he owned an eighteenth-century edition at his death); and a novel which is in many ways a product of the century, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (alluded to in Murphy).4 Although as an entering student at Trinity College Beckett had been required to read a chapter in Alexander H. Thompson’s History of English Literature entitled “The Great Novelists of the Eighteenth Century,” at this time he probably read few if any of these novels; furthermore, in his first and second years at Trinity, when he was studying French and Italian as well as English literature, he never got beyond the early part of the century and was not required to read any fiction (see Chapter 1). Thus his focused reading during the 1930s may perhaps be viewed as an 47

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independent attempt to learn the craft of the novel from those responsible for its origins. “It was a novel that he wished to write,” says John Pilling, “and a novel that would resemble those that had established the form as a recognizable genre with an extraordinary explosion of genius in the middle of the eighteenth century.”5 Joyce was not Beckett’s only mentor; indeed the eighteenth-century novelists Beckett read during this period, when he was in Paris and often in the company of Joyce, may, paradoxically, have led him out from the shadow of his countryman.

I I begin with a specific example. Thirty years ago J. M. Coetzee noted that in the early drafts of the English novel Watt (written 1941–44) the name given to Knott is “James Quin,” a figure mentioned in two later works: “Vive Quin!” shouts the rather cantankerous Watt of Mercier et Camier (written 1945); and more than a decade later, Malone refers to “the flannel that Mr. Quin gave me” and to “that bloody man Quin.” 6 Coetzee guesses that Quin’s “literary descent is perhaps from the James Quin of [Smollett’s] Humphry Clinker.”7 We may now speak more confidently, for there is in the Whoroscope notebook a citing of Smollett’s epistolary novel: “sirreverence,” slang for human excrement, is identified by Beckett’s allusion to Smollett on the verso of the previous page; indeed the word appears in Humphry Clinker, where it is spoken by none other than James Quin, the eighteenth-century actor who is a character in the novel. 8 The word is then utilized by Beckett (this hints at the way he used the Whoroscope notebook) as he revised his story “A Wet Night” for inclusion in More Pricks Than Kicks.9 And beyond these particulars, it may be relevant that when Jeremy Melford writes to his friend Watkin Phillips, he on occasion addresses him as “Wat” or (once) “Watt,” and that there is also reference to one “Wat Wyvil,” an imaginary poet (p. 116). The influence of Humphry Clinker on Beckett, however, may perhaps be traced less in these specific, documentable details than in the characters and prevailing tone of Watt and its successors. Among the invalids at Bath, Matthew Bramble shares with the actor Quin a delightful melancholy. Calling them “two cynic philosophers,” Jeremy (in the same letter in which the word “sirreverence” appears) tells how they shared a world-view: “My uncle and he are perfectly agreed in their estimate of life; which Quin says, would stink in his nostrils, if he did not steep it in claret” (p. 48). We might speculate that the melancholy, slapstick characters of the actor Quin and his friend Bramble contributed something


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to the characters Watt and Sam, and perhaps Mercier and Camier, who in turn may have served as a dry run in fiction for the mordant wit of Vladimir and Estragon, Hamm and Clov. Bramble’s description of the assembled company at Bath introduces a group of invalids who seem familiar to a reader of Beckett. Smollett, we need remind ourselves, was a physician before he was a novelist. We consisted of thirteen individuals; seven lamed by the gout, rheumatism, or palsy; three maimed by accident; and the rest either deaf or blind. One hobbled, another hopped, a third dragged his legs after him like a wounded snake, a fourth straddled betwixt a pair of long crutches, like the mummy of a felon hanging in chains; a fifth was bent into a horizontal position, like a mounted telescope, shoved in by a couple of chairmen; and a sixth was the bust of a man, set upright in a wheel machine, which the waiter moved from place to place. (p. 51) In Beckett of course we come across those who are blind (Hamm, Dan Rooney), suffering from problems with their legs (Molloy, Malone, and the Unnamable), and pushed around in a wheelchair (Hamm). And note the similarity between Smollett’s reference to one who “dragged his legs after him like a wounded snake,” and Molloy’s to those who “haul” themselves along, while he himself moves by “crawling on his belly, like a reptile.” 10 The sheer physicality of such images in Smollett’s novel – suffering from rheumatism, tuberculosis, and asthma, he died within months of the book’s publication – surely contributed to the physically deteriorating characters we call “Beckettian.” More important than Smollett, however, is the influence of Defoe, Fielding, and Sterne. From Robinson Crusoe Beckett may have learned the style of meticulous realism (though such descriptions in Beckett are usually treated ironically), but from Defoe he may also have gotten some ideas for a focus on a narrator who is isolated, tenuously recording his life, appealing periodically to an unresponsive deity. From Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones he seems to have learned how to develop a complex, ironic, first-person narrator, how to control a fragmented, digressive narration, and how a novelist – in a way we might almost call “postmodern” – can repeatedly set up a reality while at the same time undermining it. From Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey Beckett may have been inspired to construct a novel out of the shards of his own semifictionalized “life and opinions,” and, more particularly, may have discovered the style of permutations and combinations, shifting

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tones and voices, and the way a novelist can communicate with his reader in spite of a radically fractured form.

II Molloy admits that “I had read with care, while I still could read, accounts of travellers more fortunate than myself . . . ” (p. 31). Among texts Beckett might have mentioned is Robinson Crusoe, twice alluded to, although in a sarcastic way, in More Pricks: we are told that Belacqua intends to take his bride Thelma by the hand and to invoke “the spirits of Crusoe and Columbus” (p. 125); and that Belacqua “coughed, as Crusoe laboured to bring his gear ashore, the snugger to be” (p. 161).11 Beckett in this latter citation ties Crusoe’s “gear,” his possessions, to his human comfort – a theme he develops more deeply in works like Malone Dies and Happy Days. Significantly, in his early poem, “Serena I,” begun in 1932 and published in Echoes Bones in 1935, Beckett makes the following revealing statement: I stump off in a fearful rage under Married Men’s Quarters Bloody Tower and afar off at all speed screw me up Wren’s giant bully and curse the day caged panting on the platform under the flaring urn I was not born Defoe12 Both John Fletcher and Lawrence E. Harvey discovered in this passage an envy of Defoe, who far from succumbing to prison-like London, turned it into material for his journalistic and novelistic writing.13 I cannot agree. Behind Beckett’s curse is a telling irony: in the history of the English novel, Defoe, often cited as the first novelist, is known for his meticulous representation of a Lockean, sensory reality; Beckett, however, a skeptic born of the twentieth century, can no more than Fielding or Sterne rest comfortably with Defoe-like descriptions of that empirical world. If he curses the day he was not born Defoe, it is only because he regrets the modern agitation he feels in the presence of supposed “reality.” Throughout his career, we find Beckett emulating Defoe’s brand of realism, although he promptly undercuts it, or at least shows it to be only one possible style. “I apologize for these details,” says Molloy, “in


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a moment we’ll go faster, much faster. And then perhaps relapse again into a wealth of filthy circumstance” (p. 40). 14 In both Crusoe and Malone Dies, of course, the title characters collect things and set great importance on their inventories of those things. With confidence, Crusoe describes his second journey out to the wrecked ship: I got on board the ship, as before, and prepared a second raft, and having had experience of the first, I neither made this so unweildy [sic], nor loaded it so hard, but yet I brought away several things very useful to me; as, first, in the Carpenter’s stores I found two or three bags full of nails and spikes, a great skrew-jack, a dozen or two of hatchets, and above all, that most useful thing call’d a grindstone. All these I secur’d together, with several things belonging to the Gunner, particularly two or three iron crows, and two barrels of musquet bullets, seven musquets, and another fowling piece. . . . 15 Compare the following. Although Malone’s goal is an inventory “free from all trace of approximativeness,” he is to be disappointed: I see then I had attributed to myself certain objects no longer in my possession, as far as I can see. But might they not have rolled behind a piece of furniture? That would surprise me. A boot, for example, can a boot roll behind a piece of furniture? . . . I am now without this boot, just as I am now without certain other objects of less value, which I thought I had preserved, among them a zinc ring that shone like silver. I note on the other hand, in the heap, the presence of two or three objects I had quite forgotten and one of which at least, the bowl of a pipe, strikes no chord in my memory. (pp. 196–7) There is an echo here of Defoe’s brand of realism. However, whereas the items in Crusoe’s list are keys to his future, those in Malone’s are his final accounting of a life now past. And whereas the first list is presumably a reliable one (though fictionalized by Defoe), the second is overtly punctuated by doubts: “certain objects no longer in my possession,” “I am now without this boot,” “two or three objects I had quite forgotten.”16 The question for Beckett is the relevance of fictional detail: perhaps speaking for his creator, Molloy observes that “Homo mensura can’t do without staffage” (p. 63), but Malone seems compelled to admit that “True lives do not tolerate this excess of circumstance” (p. 197). As J. Paul Hunter once said of Defoe, “long lists and particular details do not necessarily add up to some larger truth.” 17

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Leo Braudy observes that “Defoe’s novels reflect a (frequently inconclusive) search for identity within the confines of the self.” 18 Of course the same can be said of Beckett. “I was a prisoner,” says Crusoe, sounding like the Unnamable, “locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness, without redemption” (p. 125). The Unnamable on occasion even sounds like Crusoe: “The island, I’m on the island, God help me. I was under the impression I spent my life in spirals round the earth. Wrong, it’s on the island I wind my endless ways. The island, that’s all the earth I know.”19 Furthermore, isolated as they are from other people, Crusoe and the narrators of Beckett’s trilogy put great emphasis on writing, which functions as an attempt at documenting one’s own existence. In such desperate straits, language becomes critically important. Transforming life into writing is essential to the existence of these isolated men, as is Crusoe’s carving of notches into a post to represent the passing days and months and years. Of course there are differences between then and now: contrast Crusoe’s teaching of his parrot to say its name “Polly” (p. 131) with Malone’s story of one Jackson, who teaches his only companion, a parrot, to say Leibniz’s “Nihil in intellectu, etc.” (p. 218).20 The opposition between Crusoe’s clichéd education of his bird and Jackson’s nihilism aptly defines at least one difference between then and now. Also relevant here is the form of the fictional diary, a popular form in the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, H. Porter Abbott’s imaginative study of Malone Dies from this perspective focuses primarily upon Richardson and Beckett, although there is no evidence that Beckett ever read any Richardson.21 A more likely inspiration for this novel in particular is the dramatization of journal-keeping in Robinson Crusoe: “My ink, as I observed, had been gone some time, all but a very little, which I eeked out with water a little and a little, till it was so pale it scarce left any appearance of black upon the paper” (p. 143). This passage – even its style – seems especially close to the following in Malone Dies: “So little by little my little pencil dwindles, inevitably, and the day is fast approaching when nothing will remain but a fragment too tiny to hold. So I write as lightly as I can” (pp. 222–3). Diary-fiction joins writing and interpretation, suggests Abbott; “The self disclosed behind the text is the project of the text” (p. 49). Such is the case here. Crusoe’s watered-down ink, like Malone’s dwindled pencil, reveals the tenuousness of his existence. As these characters attempt to record their activities and thoughts, the faint marks their writing leaves on the paper suggest their weak holds on life. If they are unable to record their lives, then they will not be able to objectify their beings;


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there will be no evidence of their ever having been at all. The difference, of course, is that whereas such references to writing are relatively sparse in Robinson Crusoe, they form the basis of Malone Dies. And whereas Defoe was far more interested in the religious drama of his character’s threatened self, Beckett must have read Defoe’s adventure story with keen attention to its modern, existential implications.

III Beckett was likewise drawn to Fielding. Writing to Thomas MacGreevy on 8 October 1932, he comments that he has been enchanted by Joseph Andrews. “Such a thing never to have read,” he exclaims to his friend. On 4 November he tells MacGreevy that he has been reading Tom Jones, and on 11 November that he has finished Fielding’s novel, which he considers “a great book pitted with faults.” In addition to a quotation from Tom Jones, the Whoroscope notebook contains citations from Fielding’s Jonathan Wild and The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon – which Beckett must have read sometime after Fielding’s better-known novels. That he learned something important from Fielding is perhaps implied by his snide comment in a review of Ezra Pound’s Make It New (1934): “The suggestion that Fielding was deficient in comprehension of the novel as a form, because we have no notes (no?) from his hand on the subject, is very nice.”22 Beckett disagrees with Pound on two counts: Fielding, he implies, indeed does have a theory of the novel; and we do have notes from Fielding on the subject, namely within the novels themselves. In the story “Walking Out,” from More Pricks, there is an ironic allusion to Tom Jones, which Beckett had read less than a year earlier: “He was not a bad-looking young fellow, a kind of cretinous Tom Jones” (p. 103).23 More interesting, however, is the modern writer’s borrowing of two of Fielding’s own allusions, the first to Milton’s famous “darkness visible.” Fielding writes in Joseph Andrews: “The sky was so clouded that not a star appeared. It was indeed, according to Milton, darkness visible. This was a circumstance, however, very favourable to Joseph. . . . ”24 Beckett writes in “A Wet Night,” also from More Pricks: “When Belacqua that uneasy creature came out of Casa Alba in the small hours of the morning it was a case of darkness visible and no mistake. The street-lamps were all extinguished, as were the moon and stars” (p. 83). Understandably, we might assume here an allusion to Paradise Lost (Book 1, line 63), or perhaps to the parodic echo of Milton in Pope’s The Dunciad (Book 4, line 3) – a work Beckett read in the 1930s.25 However, given that he had read Joseph Andrews so recently,

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I would guess that Beckett was following Fielding’s lead in borrowing from Milton’s epic. What we have here is a sort of double allusion, Beckett alluding to Fielding’s allusion to Milton. A similar situation occurs in the story “Love and Lethe.” Here Beckett, imitating Fielding’s habit of referring to the visual arts, himself refers to the fourth engraving of William Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress (see Plate 3): “From now on till the end there is something very secco and Punch and Judy about their proceedings, Ruby looking more bawdy Magdalene than ever, Belacqua like a super [ = superintendent] out of the Harlot’s Progress” (p. 95). Again, while this may seem at first like an allusion to Hogarth pure-and-simple, it is rather an echo of Fielding’s allusion in Tom Jones to Hogarth’s same plate: She was, indeed, rather inclined to favour the Parson’s Principles; but Square’s Person was more agreeable to her Eye, for he was a comely Man; whereas the Pedagogue did in Countenance very nearly resemble that Gentleman, who, in the Harlot’s Progress, is seen correcting the Ladies in Bridewel.26 Clearly, Beckett, who shared Fielding’s interest in the visual arts (in a letter to MacGreevy, he admires a “nice dim Hogarth” at the National Gallery in Dublin), again adopts the allusive technique of his eighteenth-century forebear.27 Moreover, in both writers there is the attitude that words are inadequate to some descriptions, and that allusions to the visual arts (not infrequent in either writer) can assist us in getting beyond words. In the letter to MacGreevy in which he mentions Joseph Andrews, Beckett says what he likes about Fielding’s technique: I’m enchanted with Joseph Andrews, [which is] Jacques and the Vicar of W. in one. The reminiscences of Diderot interest me very much, the ironical replis and giving away of the show pari passu with the show, as when he executes a purely professional apostrophe to Vanity and then observes that something had to be done to spin out a chapter that otherwise would have been too short. 28 Beckett is referring to the conventional apostrophe at the end of Fielding’s Chapter 15: O Vanity! how little is thy force acknowledged, or thy operations discerned! How wantonly dost thou deceive mankind under different


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disguises! Sometimes thou dost wear the face of pity, sometimes of generosity: nay, thou hast the assurance even to put on those glorious ornaments which belong only to heroic virtue. . . . Incongruously, Fielding’s apostrophe (three times this long) gives way in the next paragraph to the following: . . . but thou are deceived: I value thee not of a farthing; nor will it give me any pain if thou shouldst prevail on the reader to censure this digression as arrant nonsense; for know, to thy confusion, that I have introduced thee for no other purpose than to lengthen out a short chapter; and so I return to my history. (p. 57) What Beckett likes here is precisely what he develops so often in his own fiction: the building up of a “show,” and, pari passu, the tearing down of that very show. He seems to delight in the equal energy expended on establishing and at the same time denying some level of reality, some tone, some genre or style. What he may like as well is Fielding’s acknowledgement of Vanity’s “force,” coupled with an ironic assertion of his own power in choosing to introduce Vanity in the first place, and for the most unflattering reasons. Beckett’s fiction, after all, is based on a tension between the writer’s imaginative authority and his debilitating anemia. In retrospect, this moment in 1932, Joyce’s apprentice commenting admiringly on a radical shift in reality in Joseph Andrews, looks almost apocalyptic: indeed it is tempting to see in it a hint of the literary postmodern, and a suggestion that our century’s postmodern owes something to the eighteenth.29 Of course Beckett in his belatedly published Dream, written earlier in the same year, was not afraid to remind his reader that what he or she was reading was fiction, nor to interject comments on his own struggles to keep the narrative going. Bearing little resemblance to a novel, this early work is rather a sort of explosion of ideas on the novel as a genre, or a dramatization of impediments to writing fiction, and any “story” recedes far behind the text. He is a great, big, inward man, continent, sustenant, verus internus. Jawohl. We find we have written he is when of course we meant he was. For a postpicassian man with a pen in his fist, doomed to a literature of saving clauses, it is frankly out of the question, it would seem to be an impertinence – perhaps we should rather say an excess, an

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indiscretion – stolidly to conjugate to be without a shudder. What we meant of course was that he was a great, big, inward man, etc., then. (p. 46)30 As a writer after Picasso, Beckett realizes that existence is no longer to be assumed, and that no assertion, in particular involving the verb to be, can be made without a shuddering lack of confidence. And it is understandable how a man who could write the above paragraph could be attracted to Fielding. In his predecessor’s novels Beckett, who seems still be looking for a mentor, discovered how to have his fictional cake and eat it too. Whereas in Dream he in a sense destroys on every page what is not there, in More Pricks, and even more so in Murphy and Watt, Beckett demonstrates a Fieldingesque ability to devote his energies simultaneously to acts of construction and destruction. Compare the following examples from Tom Jones and More Pricks. Subtle ratiocination, used elsewhere in the eighteenth century in a serious manner, is employed by Fielding in an often ironic way; in his novels syntactic parallelism, antithesis, and cautious judgment lead not so much to clearer understanding as to hesitancy, ambivalence. Fielding writes: Tom behaved to Sophia with no Particularity, unless, perhaps, by shewing her a higher Respect than he paid to any other. This Distinction her Beauty, Fortune, Sense, and amiable Carriage, seemed to demand; but as to Design upon her Person he had none; for which we shall at present suffer the Reader to condemn him of Stupidity; but perhaps we shall be able indifferently well to account for it hereafter. (Book 4, Chap. 5, p. 126) Can anything survive such circumlocutory rhetoric? Fielding discovered a delightful use for this eighteenth-century style, depending upon it simultaneously to judge Tom and to refrain from doing so, and also as a way of toying with his own role as narrator – a narrator who is both pompous and unsure. “Perhaps,” which K. G. Simpson notes is probably the favorite word of the narrator of Tom Jones, aptly captures Fielding’s humorous ambivalence, and surely it is no coincidence that this same word was such a favorite of Beckett’s. 31 Similarly, Michael McKeon speaks of Fielding’s “self-effacing authenticity,” and his term seems equally apt for describing the fiction of Beckett. 32 In More Pricks and later, Beckett shows what he can do with this kind of unreliable, yes-and-no, self-conscious description. For example, in


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the story “What a Misfortune” he attempts to explain Belacqua’s knowledge of a young woman’s dowry: To deny that Belacqua was alive to this circumstance would be to present him as an even greater imbecile than he was when it came to seeing the obvious, whereas to suggest that it was implied, however slightly, in his brusque obsession with the beneficiary to be, would constitute such obloquy as we do not much care to deal in. Let us therefore put forth a minimum of charity and observe in a casual way, with eyes cast down and head averted until the phase has ceased to vibrate, that he happened to conceive one of his Olympian fancies for a fairly young person with expectations. We can’t straddle the fence nicer than that. (p. 116) This sounds like the Olympian Fielding on Tom’s somewhat clumsy infatuation with Sophia. The authorial “we,” coupled with the personification of the narrator (“with eyes cast down”), the several euphemisms (“circumstance,” “beneficiary,” “expectations”), and the dodge-and-weave rhetoric throughout: this is a style quite removed from the situation. The effect is one of rather affectionate irony. Like Fielding, Beckett is not so much being satirical as playful, teasing Belacqua, engaging in a bit of self-mockery, and making fun of an eighteenth-century style which cannot make up its mind. “We can’t straddle the fence nicer than that,” adds Beckett, drawing attention to his uncommitted posture. Although this style is manipulated variously throughout Beckett’s fiction, self-contradiction remains its constant feature. Ironically, at one point in The Unnamable the title character tells us that now may be the moment to “have done with this tedious equipoise, at last” (p. 362). But no, he immediately denies that the time has come. And finally, a few pages from the end of the novel, he seems to accept this fact of life: “You announce, then you renounce, so it is” (p. 406). Hesitation, qualification, saying and unsaying – these are the chief characteristics of Fielding’s and Beckett’s styles. To take them away would be to change their fictions into something else.

IV Wayne Booth asserts tongue-in-cheek that Tristram Shandy is the fountainhead of all modern literature. 33 In a more serious vein, JeanJacques Mayoux observes that “It is plain that Beckett remembers clearly the first modern novel, Tristram Shandy.” Having traced the

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lineage of antinovels, self-conscious novels, and ironical novels, John Fletcher says: “It would seem that Beckett’s most striking affinity is with Laurence Sterne.”34 And Christopher Ricks calls him “an important heir of Sterne.” 35 On the other hand, Deirdre Bair, presumably basing her statement on biographical evidence, suggests the opposite: “[Beckett] was irritated by Tristram Shandy despite its great facility and decided then and there that he had little liking for Sterne.”36 The facts are these. On 5 August 1938 (seemingly in a testy mood) Beckett comments to MacGreevy that he has “read nothing for months but [Alfred de] Vigny’s Journal in the bowdlerized Larousse edition, which bored me, and Tristram Shandy, which irritated me in spite of its felicities.” 37 Furthermore, he still owned at his death a one-volume 1910 edition of The Works of Lawrence Sterne (see Appendix A), probably purchased in 1938. Indeed the oldest eighteenth-century item in his library was a single volume (there were seven) of the 1780 Dublin edition of Sterne’s works, a volume which contains A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. And might not it be more than coincidental that one of the faculty committee members in Watt is a “Mr. MacStern”? True enough, in Beckett’s works there is only one explicit reference to Sterne, although this may be because he read him after the allusive period of More Pricks and Murphy. What is surprising is that the single allusion occurs not in a novel but in a play, and so late in Beckett’s career.38 See the following dialogue between the Animator and the Stenographer in Rough for Radio II (written in the early 1960s and first broadcast in 1976): A Are you familiar with the works of Sterne, miss? S Alas, no, sir. A I may be quite wrong, but I seem to remember, there somewhere, a tear an angel comes to catch as it falls. Yes, I seem to remember . . . admittedly he was grandchild to an archbishop. (Half rueful, half complacent.) Ah these old spectres from the days of book reviewing, they lie in wait for one at every turn.39 Beckett alludes here, not altogether accurately, to the death of Le Fever in Tristram Shandy, Volume 6, Chapter 8: —He shall not die, by G – , cried my uncle Toby. —The ACCUSING SPIRIT which flew up to heaven’s chancery with the oath, blush’d as he gave it in;—and the RECORDING ANGEL as he wrote it down, dropp’d a tear upon the word, and blotted it out for ever.40


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As we saw in Chapter 1, however, accuracy would appear to be less important to Beckett than the process of remembering. And although he read Tristram Shandy in 1938, this very passage was part of the two pages which he actually read first in 1923, when an excerpt was included on the reading list for matriculating students at Trinity College. Thus the reference to memory’s “old spectres” is true enough. We might attempt to trace the influence of several features of Sterne’s fiction on Beckett’s. For example, the twentieth-century writer’s sporadically mechanized prose – where he seems intent on exploring all situational as well as verbal permutations and combinations – may have its origin in a passage like the following from A Sentimental Journey, a work he owned and probably read in the late thirties: The beautiful Grisset looked sometimes at the gloves, then side-ways to the window, then at the gloves—and then at me. I was not disposed to break silence—I followed her example: so I looked at the gloves, then to the window, then at the gloves, and then at her—and so on alternately. 41 Anyone who knows Beckett’s fiction will recognize something familiar here, for he seems to have expanded Sterne’s occasional stylistic stutter into one of the more unique features of his own style. This is particularly true of Watt, a novel Beckett began to write, we should recall, just two years after he was reading Sterne: Then I placed his hands, on my shoulders, his left hand on my right shoulder, and his right hand on my left shoulder. Then I placed my hands, on his shoulders, on his left shoulder my right hand, and on his right shoulder my left hand. Then I took a single pace forward, with my left leg, and he a single pace back, with his right leg. . . . (p. 163) Of course whereas Sterne concludes his repetitive description with the phrase “and so on alternately,” Beckett does Sterne one better by attempting to recount all possibilities. The effects of these two passages, however, are much the same. Although Sterne and Beckett each describes a rather intimate encounter between the first-person narrator and someone else, they oddly describe this encounter in terms which tend to diminish human feeling. This is prose manufactured by Henry Ford. And yet somehow, in spite of the mechanization, human communication does not altogether fail, perhaps because the mirroring of gesture in each instance itself suggests a kind of intimacy.

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Speaking of Sterne’s notion of the “hobby-horse” as a sort of epistemological imprisonment, Clive Probyn observes that in Tristram Shandy “each character is as self-imprisoned as any of Samuel Beckett’s characters.”42 This seems right. Evidence of this similarity may be found in the affinities between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy’s two-and-a-half-page “debate” (Sterne’s word) as to whether or not to put their son in breeches, and a passage in Malone Dies where Mr. and Mrs. Saposcat debate their son’s future: — – When he gets these breeches made, cried my father in a higher tone, he’ll look like a beast in ‘em. He will be very aukward in them at first, replied my mother.— – — – And ‘twill be lucky, if that’s the worst on’t, added my father. It will be very lucky, answered my mother. I suppose, replied my father,— – making some pause first,— – he’ll be exactly like other people’s children.— – Exactly, said my mother.— – — – Though I should be sorry for that, added my father: and so the debate stopped again. (Vol. 6, Chap. 18, pp. 363) Beckett tells us that Mr. and Mrs. Saposcat, like Mr. and Mrs. Shandy, “had no conversation properly speaking”: At least his health is good, said Mr. Saposcat. Not all that, said his wife. But no definite disease, said Mr. Saposcat. A nice thing that would be, at his age, said his wife. They did not know why he was committed to a liberal profession. That was another thing that went without saying. It was therefore impossible he should be unfitted for it. They thought of him as a doctor for preference. He will look after us when we are old, said Mrs. Saposcat. And her husband replied, I see him rather as a surgeon, as though after a certain age people were inoperable. (p. 189) The similarities between the passages from Sterne and Beckett are striking: both read as parodies of a couple’s attempt at conversation, polite on the surface but shot through with sharp, long-standing disagreement. To be doubly anachronistic, we might say that they read like scenes out of one of Harold Pinter’s plays. In both we witness a failure of domestic communication: the spousal quibbles, the superficial acquiescences, the hovering silences within the verbal sparring. And the mechanical “he said”/“she said” format increases the tension. Nonetheless, if in fact


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Beckett’s scene was prompted by Sterne’s, then I would imagine that this influence was unconscious on his part. But the influence of Sterne on Beckett would seem to be broader and deeper than anything mentioned so far. Back in 1967, when establishing the “relevance” of earlier writers was all-important, A. Alvarez argued that Sterne was the first “modern” novelist, pointing to his indifference to rules and his focus on the immediate expression of the creator’s personality.43 Indeed in Tristram Shandy as well as Beckett’s novels the text typically calls attention to itself as text, at the same time that it is attempting, without much success, a story line of sorts. Thus the writing of the novel becomes for both writers part of the “plot,” although in turning the narrative process inside out Sterne was of course not doing something altogether new: Swift had, almost 60 years earlier, toyed with much the same thing in A Tale of a Tub, and 20 years before, in a series of chapters prefacing each book of Tom Jones, Fielding had taken up, half-seriously, a number of important issues relating to the novel he was in the midst of writing. But the structural parallels between Sterne’s novels and Beckett’s are far greater than those between Fielding’s and Beckett’s. In Tom Jones, Fielding’s providential narrator, like Joyce’s, is only occasionally undermined, and our supposition throughout is that the author is in control. Sterne turns his narration over to Tristram, a surrogate writer who is perplexed at every step in the process. “I begin with writing the first sentence,” says Tristram, “and trusting to Almighty God for the second” (Vol. 8, Chap. 2, p. 450). Chance is made to seem to reign in Tristram Shandy, as also in Watt and the trilogy. Unlike Sterne, however, or at least Sterne most of the time, Beckett exploits the depths of this narrative uncertainty. Unable to lay claim to any sort of Victorian narrative control, the narrators of Beckett’s novels, like Tristram, can do little more than give us refractions of their own identities. For all their desire to commit their lives to paper, they inevitably fall short. Beckett could undoubtedly sympathize with Tristram’s – and perhaps Sterne’s – entrapment in his own narration: [F]or in good truth, when a man is telling a story in the strange way I do mine, he is obliged continually to be going backwards and forwards to keep all tight together in the reader’s fancy—which, for my own part, if I did not take heed to do more than at first, there is so much unfixed and equivocal matter starting up, with so many breaks and gaps in it,—and so little service do the stars afford, which, nevertheless, I hang up in some of the darkest passages, knowing

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that the world is apt to lose its way, with all the lights the sun itself at noon day can give it—and now, you see, I am lost myself! (Vol. 6, Chap. 33, p. 383) Compare this paragraph from near the beginning of Malone Dies where Malone discusses the problematics of narration, and at the same time, like Tristram, gets lost: What half-truths, my God. No matter. It is playtime now. I find it hard to get used to that idea. The old fog calls. Now the case is reversed, the way well charted and little hope of coming to its end. But I have high hopes. What am I doing now, I wonder, losing time or gaining it? I have also decided to remind myself briefly of my present state before embarking on my stories. I think this is a mistake. It is a weakness. But I shall indulge in it. I shall play with all the more ardour afterwards. And it will be a pendant to the inventory. Aesthetics are on my side, at least a certain kind of aesthetics. (p. 182) Malone’s question – “What am I doing now, I wonder, losing time or gaining it?” – itself seems to tease Sterne for his humorous concern throughout his semifictional autobiography. “[T]he more I write, the more I shall have to write,” laments Tristram; “I shall never overtake myself” (Vol. 4, Chap.13, pp. 234–5).44 These two passages deserve a closer look. There is of course a radical difference in style: Sterne uses a single, run-on sentence and his signature dashes to suggest his narrator’s stream of consciousness; Beckett employs a series of short sentences to suggest the same. Nonetheless, in both cases the narrators explain that their seeming narrative nonchalance is a conscious thing: “Aesthetics are on my side,” says Malone. While attempting to convince us that there is a method to their madness, they both end up demonstrating that their own narrative intentions cannot be maintained. Thus in spite of the “obligation” of telling his story by “going backwards and forwards to keep all tight together in the reader’s fancy,” Tristram is overcome by “unfixed and equivocal matter” which has “so many breaks and gaps in it” that he himself gets lost. Comparably, in spite of the fact that his way is “well charted,” with his plan being to tell his stories and then to make his inventory, Malone cannot resist the temptation to speak first of himself in the present – “I think this is a mistake,” he adds. Thus the aesthetic foresight in each case is undermined by the egocentricity of the narrator, who, like the rest of us, finds it difficult to ignore the allure of the first-person present


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tense. Malone is a twentieth-century Tristram, likewise searching for his identity, seriously and comically, although perhaps more solipsistically and with less interest in the comfort of the reader; but these are differences largely traceable to the cultural differences of their authors’ respective times. In Sterne’s day, when one was able to speak of the art of conversation, a novel could be founded on a narrator’s conversation with the reader; in Beckett’s day, when conversation was no longer prized but when, in the wake of Freud, Sartre, and two great wars, introspection was, a novel could assume the form of an ontological drama. What should not go unnoticed is the fact that the similarities between these two passages far outweigh their differences. Language fails. The dialogue of the Shandys and the Saposcats is not an effective vehicle for communication. Tristram Shandy and Beckett’s novels exhibit on every page the difficulty words have in conveying the thoughts and feelings of characters to one another, and in conveying the thoughts and feelings of an author to a reader. Tristram’s comment on Uncle Toby – “his life was put in jeopardy by words” (Vol. 2, Chap. 2, p. 72) – could just as easily be said of Tristram, any of Beckett’s narrators, and perhaps of Sterne and Beckett themselves. Both writers, however, in spite of their desire to explain in words ever so fully, seem parodoxically to want to get beyond words: in Tristram language often surrenders, as sentences simply stop or give way to asterisks, or discourse is replaced by a reference to painting, or we are given a black page, a marbled page, a diagram, or (in editions after Sterne’s death) bars of music; similarly, in Watt, for example, language on occasion surrenders, as sentences halt or are interrupted by a question mark or hiatus in the manuscript, or we likewise come across a page of music, and where at the center of the book there is a verbal description of a painting. “This I’m now writing,” admits Tristram, “is but a sketch” (Vol. 6, Chap. 21, p. 368). Elizabeth W. Harries argues that the aesthetics of the fragmentary and the unfinished were part of the context of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey: “Sterne,” she says, “constantly plays with the discrepancy between the artist’s vision and his ability to realize that vision.”45 While Beckett shares with Sterne a deep skepticism regarding the efficacy of verbal communication, he also, perhaps surprisingly, shares with his forebear a belief in nonverbal, even sentimental communication. In particular, he seems to have remembered fondly the scene from Tristram Shandy where Tristram encounters an ass, with two large panniers on his back, who has halted in a gate to munch turnip-tops and cabbage leaves – “not knowing very well whether he was to go in, or no.”

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Now, ‘tis an animal (be what hurry I may) I cannot bear to strike— there is a patient endurance of sufferings, wrote so unaffectedly in his looks and carriage, which pleads so mightily for him, that it always disarms me; and to that degree, that I do not like to speak unkindly to him: on the contrary, meet him where I will—whether in town or country—in cart or under panniers—whether in liberty or bondage—I have ever something to say to him on my part; and as one word begets another (if he has as little to do as I)—I generally fall into conversation with him; and surely never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance—and where those carry me not deep enough—in flying from my own heart into his, and seeing what is natural for an ass to think—as well as a man, upon the occasion. (Vol. 7, Chap. 32, pp. 431–2)46 “With an ass,” says Tristram, “I can commune forever,” and he goes on to intimate the beast’s dilemma: “I understand thee perfectly; answered I—if thou takest a wrong step in this affair, he will cudgel thee to death.” Tristram kindly feeds the ass a macaroon, but a moment later the owner appears and levels “a thundering bastinado upon the poor devil’s crupper.” Although we can imagine Beckett’s being “irritated” (to use the word from his letter to MacGreevy) at the sentimentality of this scene, we can at the same time imagine his appreciating the image of the ass, straddling a threshold, unsure of whether to go forward or backward, and yet demonstrating “a patient endurance of sufferings.” This “fellow creature,” as Tristram calls him, would have been no more the object of Beckett’s derision, I believe, than Vladimir and Estragon, or Molloy, Malone, or the Unnamable. For all Beckett’s difficulties with his mother, he seems to have inherited her delight in animals; she loved donkeys, was a dedicated antivivisectionist, and belonged to a number of societies for animal lovers. 47 The following scene from the opening of Beckett’s radio play All That Fall (first produced in 1957) bears a remarkable similarity to that from Tristram Shandy. Christy the carter’s “hinny,” a product of a she-ass and a stallion, is hauling a load of dung:48 Christy (to the hinny) Yep! (Pause. Louder.) Yep wiyya to hell owwa that! Mrs. Rooney She does not move a muscle. (Pause.) I too should be getting along, if I do not wish to arrive late at the station. (Pause.) But a moment ago she neighed and pawed the ground. And now


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she refuses to advance. Give her a good welt on the rump. (Sound of welt. Pause.) Harder! (Sound of welt. Pause.) Well! If someone were to do that for me I should not dally. (Pause.) How she gazes at me to be sure, with her great moist cleg-tormented eyes! Perhaps if I were to move on, down the road, out of her field of vision . . . (Sound of welt.) No, no, enough! Take her by the snaffle and pull her eyes away from me. (p. 13)49 In both scenes there is a stubborn beast of burden who refuses to budge and is beaten by its owner, but who is empathetically observed. What becomes clear in both cases is the sentimental communication between human and animal, although in the eighteenth century this communication is sought out, whereas in the twentieth it is something to be avoided. Nonetheless, even in Beckett the unspoken identification is complete, for a moment later Mrs. Rooney says (or thinks) that she herself cannot go on, that she will just flop down in the middle of the road, where she will soon – like the hinny – be covered “with grit and dust and flies” (p. 14). Of course Beckett lets some of the air out of the sentiment in Sterne’s scene, but he finds the unspoken identification between human being and beast of burden equally significant. In her introduction to a 1928 edition of A Sentimental Journey, Virginia Woolf referred to its author as “singularly of our own age.” And the scenes from Tristram Shandy and All That Fall illustrate Woolf’s point that “in this interest in silence rather than in speech Sterne is the fore-runner of the moderns.”50 For all their unsuccessful wrestling with verbal communication, both writers realize that some things can simply not be captured by words. We might guess that Beckett, follower of Joyce not Woolf, must have recoiled at some of his eighteenth-century predecessor’s sentimentality; but it is important to recall that the romantic in Sterne is typically countered by the unromantic, and to acknowledge that Beckett could have been inspired by his drama of silence and gesture – and shared his admiration of human endurance – without embracing that sentimentality. What Martin Battestin said many years ago of Sterne might be said, though much less emphatically, of Beckett: “He saw men as both absurd and lovable, enclosed within themselves by the body and the mind, yet capable of being released from that bondage through feeling and the imagination.” 51 Both authors discover a dignity not only in animals but in downtrodden human beings – a dignity that stems from the endurance of life itself.

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Whether or not Fielding was aware of it, there is in Tom Jones a parallel between the growth of Tom, who is, after all, introduced as an infant with no traceable parentage, and the writing of the novel itself. Sterne seems fully aware of this parallel and does Fielding one better, beginning his novel not with his hero’s infancy but with his conception. Moreover, Tristram refers to his living and his writing, then adds – “which in my case means the same thing” (Vol. 3, Chap. 4, p. 133). This is true as well of Beckett’s fiction. “This exercise book,” says Malone, “is my life” (p. 274). Like Sterne, Beckett is fascinated with that blurry borderline between life and writing about life, and as in Tristram Shandy his main character’s existence is equivalent to his writing. When Malone speaks of “the world that parts at last its labia and lets me go” (p. 189), therefore, he refers to his own physical birth, and also the birth of his textual self. Yet as many writers have observed, giving birth to a book is a kind of death. In All That Fall Maddy mentions having attended a lecture by “one of these new mind doctors” who referred to one of his patients who had died as one who had “never been really born” (pp. 35–6). 52 As Bair points out, Beckett had attended a 1935 lecture by Carl Jung in which the psychologist explained that a young girl whom he had unsuccessfully treated had “never been born entirely” – and the comment helped Beckett understand his own psychoanalysis.53 Maddy, tellingly, says that the doctor’s explanation has “haunted [her] ever since.” It may be that Beckett’s interest in Jung’s statement enabled him to recognize the literary exploration of this idea in Tristram Shandy, which we know he read at the end of 1938. Referring to his writing, Tristram says: “[F]or my own part, I declare I have been at it these six weeks, making all the speed I possibly could,—and am not yet born” (pp. 28–9). Sterne’s worsening medical condition may have led him to be attracted to the paradox of a writer living his life faster than he can write about it. Beckett’s twentieth-century context, perhaps the ailing Joyce, and his own stabbing in 1938, would have drawn him to the psychological and philosophical implications of the idea. In The Unnamable (the English translation was published within a year of the first production of All That Fall) the ambiguous relationship between life and death becomes a principle of composition: “Then I’d know for certain and giving up the ghost be born at last” (p. 342); “[One alone] come into the world unborn, abiding there unliving” (p. 346); “I’m a drying sperm,” says the Unnamable, “born of a wet dream and dead before morning” (pp. 379–80). Since so much of Beckett’s fiction – from his 1929 short story “Assumption” onward – is about the


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difficulty of composing, there is no doubt that these references to the difficulty of the speaker’s birth refer also to the difficulty of writing one’s story. “I shall never get born, having failed to be conceived” (p. 353), makes this clear through an old pun.54 Hugh Kenner once remarked that How It Is “looks like a draft of itself, as Endgame feels like a rehearsal of itself,” and others have observed that How It Is resembles a “rough draft” or “manuscript.”55 Yet the fragmentary nature of the novel’s form simultaneously causes it to resemble a literary work which has frayed, is in the process of coming apart. The many references to dark and light and the characters’ halting, laborious journeying through mud suggest an identity and a literary work which have collapsed into words which are no longer able to signify; and also a Genesis situation in which both identity and meaning are being shaped out of the primeval mud. 56 Beckett’s phrase in the novel (seemingly playing off Blake’s “The Sick Rose”) captures this oxymoronic situation well: “dear bud dear worm.”57 Comment c’est: the pun in the original French title is revealing, for this is how it is, what writing and identity have come to at last, but also how it is to begin to write or to live. Robert Alter, citing John Barth’s well-known essay on “The Literature of Exhaustion,” once spoke of narrative literature “at the end of an ultimate cultural cul-de-sac yet somehow reaching toward exciting new possibilities.” 58 Beckett’s fiction embraces just such a paradox. It everywhere reveals a kind of decadence, appearing to be a genre wrung out at the same time that it feels like a new beginning, a fresh start, an attempt like that of Defoe’s, Fielding’s, and Sterne’s to create something new. If Finnegans Wake may be said to bring the novel to an end-point, Beckett may be said to have discovered the spirit of a beginning in the eighteenth-century novel, and these two tendencies make his fiction a kind of palimpsest, recording the death of a genre at the same time that it celebrates its rebirth. Thus in The Dunciad Pope refers (twice) to that place “Where things destroy’d are swept to things unborn.”59 Or as the Unnamable says: “The time of the ancient dead and the dead yet unborn” (p. 389). Or as Beckett wrote of Murphy’s mind: “nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming” (p. 112).

4 “Gentle Skimmer”: Reader Entrapment in Swift, Fielding, Sterne, and Beckett

[T]he chief end I propose to myself in all my labours is to vex the world rather than divert it. . . . Jonathan Swift1 No writer growing up in Europe in the era of Picasso, Stravinsky, Joyce, and Gertrude Stein could not be aware of the uncertainties inherent in modern reconsiderations of the nature of the work of art. From his first writings onward, Beckett seems to have been attempting to define the status of his text, his “voice” as expressed in that text, and, in large measure, the role of his reader. But tutored not so much by the present as the past, Beckett learned from his eighteenth-century forebears the power inherent in an author’s deliberate destabilizing of his text and – especially – his relationship with his lector. “No symbols where none intended,” reads the final addendum to Watt.2 But were any intended? And if so, how do we know which ones? Beckett has placed us on uneven ground. Pointing to the significance of Ulysses in breaking with the harmonies of the nineteenth-century novel, Wolfgang Iser says that “the reader [of Joyce’s book] is never given the chance to establish any overall perspective.”3 We might even guess that Joyce’s writing suggested to Beckett the desirability of keeping his own reader off guard. But after he encountered Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Jonathan Wild, and Gulliver’s Travels in 1932–33, and later, in 1938, after he read Tristram Shandy, Beckett’s handling of his reader deepened and became even more complex. Swift, Fielding, and Sterne supplied models for ways of challenging the reader not so much by addressing him or her directly as by 68

Reader Entrapment: Swift, Fielding, Sterne, and Beckett 69

rhetorically entangling, entrapping his audience in the text being read. Swift’s well-known comment (in a letter to Pope) could be applied to each of these writers: “the chief end I propose to myself in all my labours is to vex the world rather than divert it.” 4 No critic of Beckett can avoid the issue of audience reception, and indeed a number of studies, mainly of his drama, have focused on this matter; most relevant to our purposes is an important but hard-to-find essay by John Fletcher, provocatively titled “From ‘Gentle Reader’ to ‘Gentle Skimmer’; Or, Does it Help to Read Swift as if He Were Samuel Beckett?”5 Yet this line of thinking has not been explored. I would argue that Beckett’s contact not only with Swift but also with Fielding and Sterne spawned his experimentation in the early fiction with overt references to the reader, and that this set the stage for his mature fiction, where the reader is cast in a far more subtle, more participatory role. Reading Beckett’s trilogy, like reading these eighteenth-century writers, becomes a sort of rhetorical game, a struggle in which an ironic text threatens at any moment to turn on its readers, making us its victims. 6

I Beckett met Joyce in 1928, and in Finnegans Wake there is a passage that Deirdre Bair considers a sort of parody of Beckett’s boyish understanding, his inability to distinguish the “farest” from the trees, the meaning from the “woods”: “You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest notions what the farest he all means.”7 Such an interpretation of these words is tempting, especially if we care to see “Bethicket” as Joyce’s pun on his young countryman’s name; but James Knowlson points out that this reading is unlikely because most of the passage from the Wake was written before Beckett met Joyce.8 In any case, however, we can see here an example of Joyce’s mocking his reader’s inability to comprehend what he or she is reading. “As with all artists,” Beckett himself wrote in his first published story, which appeared a year after he met Joyce, “this casting of an effect in the teeth of his audience was the least difficult part of his business.”9 There are throughout Beckett’s work ironic addresses to the reader reminiscent of those found in novels of the eighteenth century. Thus in his essay on Joyce’s Work in Progress, he mocks, as Joyce may have mocked him, the laziness of the modern reader, and even goes so far as to ridicule readers of his own essay: “Here is direct expression–pages

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and pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it.” 10 Over 50 years later, Beckett in Company insults his reader with a daring immediacy, though this time a touch more obliquely: “Might not the hearer be improved? Made more companionable if not downright human. Mentally perhaps there is room for enlivenment.” 11 In both cases we are ridiculed for our inabilities as readers as well as our shortcomings as human beings. This tension between the text and the reader is part of what we expect when we open one of Beckett’s books, just as we expect to be put on the spot when we enter the theater to see one of his plays. In Beckett’s essay on Joyce the above example is the sole direct address to the reader. Also unique to its text is the following from Proust: “The reader is cordially invited to omit this summary analysis of what is perhaps the greatest passage that Proust ever wrote – Les Intermittences du Coeur.”12 In both cases Beckett is reminiscent of Fielding, who in Tom Jones makes (and then retracts) a suggestion to some of his readers that they should skip over the inflammatory description of Sophia: “Indeed we would, for certain Causes, advise those of our Male Readers who have any Hearts, to read no farther, were we not assured. . . . ”13 Or reminiscent of Tristram Shandy, as for example the famous passage where the inattentive “Madam” is required to reread the ill-read chapter preceding: “I do insist upon it, that you immediately turn back, that is, as soon as you get to the next full stop, and read the whole chapter over again.”14 Yet we know that Beckett did not read Tom Jones until two years after his completion of Proust, and Tristram Shandy until eight years after.15 In any case, it is worthy of note that in the critical essays on Joyce and Proust we are talking about a kind of address to the reader ordinarily reserved for novels. And it may also be worth mentioning a difference here: whereas Fielding and Sterne condescend, advising or insisting on a certain response, Beckett invites a particular response, and his comment reflects not only on the reader but on himself. We may wonder why we are being invited to bypass reference to what is “perhaps the greatest passage Proust ever wrote.” Because, recognizing the brilliance of the passage, we should not be subjected to Beckett’s “summary analysis”? Or because, like Sterne’s reader, we wouldn’t understand it anyway? We are flattered and mocked at the same time. 16 Beckett as critic had been led to consider the kind of reader it takes to read Finnegans Wake and A la recherche du temps perdu. Then as novelist he struggled to work through the role of the reader in his own Dream of Fair to Middling Women. In this book there are references to “the reader,” “any dear reader,” the author’s desire to satisfy “all customers,” and


many direct addresses to “you,” clearly meaning the reader.17 More to the point of my argument here, there are two references to the “gentle reader” addressed so frequently in eighteenth-century fiction: “As though the gentle reader could be nothing but an insurance broker or a professional punter” (p. 13); “Gentle reader don’t overlook will you the fact that he celebrated the signing of the Armistice with a public lanugo” (p. 66). It is of course impossible to know where Beckett may have come across “gentle reader,” although the allusions in Dream to “lil pute” (p. 84) and “owld Tale of a Tub” (p. 178) may hint at possible sources. 18 Several of Beckett’s addresses to the reader in Dream, like Swift’s in the Tale and Gulliver’s Travels, have about them an ironic flippancy. Says Beckett: “We would not wish our young hero to be misjudged, or hastily judged, by the reader, for the want of a few facts” (p. 74). Similarly, in the Tale Swift repeatedly uses the term “judicious Reader” and at one point says: “Here it is good to stop the hasty Reader, ever impatient to see the End of an Adventure, before We Writers can duly prepare him for it” (p. 134). Elsewhere in Dream, Beckett says of Belacqua: The blame of this sally we lay therefore . . . on a phrase that he let fall on the way back to the city after a disastrous day on the course, a phrase that we propose now to the reader as a red-letter term in the statement of Belacqua and a notable arc of his botched circumscription. “Behold, Mr. Beckett,” he said, whitely, “a dud mystic.” (p. 186) The irony here is complicated. The narrator (whoever that is) seeks to lay blame for Belacqua’s ineptitude on “Mr. Beckett” himself, and he does this by allowing the character to criticize his creator; moreover, in the midst of this complexity, the narrator appeals to the reader to join him and Belacqua in thinking of the author as a “dud mystic.” Perhaps we do. Although never so overt as this, Swift similarly makes it clear that his narrator, the unnamed “Modern Author,” shares his profession but not always his point of view. And readers of the Tale (addressed some 50 times) and of Gulliver’s Travels (some 65 times) are often asked to share the narrator’s concerns: “Now, to assist the diligent Reader in so delicate an Affair . . . ” (Tale, p. 44); “I shall impart a few Hints to the candid Reader . . . ” (Tale, p. 68); “I hope, the gentle Reader will excuse me for dwelling on these and the like Particulars . . . ” (Gulliver, p. 94). In both Beckett and Swift we are brought into the narrative, made privy to useful information, and yet confounded at every turn; violation of our assumptions regarding polite human interaction, not to mention the

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flouting of the proprieties of time, place, logic, tone, and style, suggest anything but intimacy. 19 Swift in A Tale of a Tub rhapsodizes over those “wonderful Civilities that have passed of late Years, between the Nation of Authors, and that of Readers” (p. 181). But Dream, like the Tale and Gulliver’s Travels, shows that such civilities do not in fact exist. 20 However, Beckett’s attention to the reader in his unfinished novel goes well beyond these games with pronouns and comic addresses to the reader. At one point he opposes two ways of reading, employing a farcically mixed metaphor based on plumbing and electric power: His [Belacqua’s] Father assembled his arsenal of cold pipes, turned on the book, connected up, and it did the rest. That was the way to read – find out the literary voltage that suits you and switch on the current of the book. That was the mode that everyone had known. . . . The wretched reader [on the other hand] takes off his coat and squares up to the book, squares up to his poetry like a cocky little hop-methumb, hisses up his mind and pecks and picks wherever he smells a chink. (p. 53)21 In spite of the aviary comparison, Beckett unquestionably prefers the active reader, “wretched” though he may be, to the passive sort of reader like Belacqua’s (and his own?) father. Similarly, in an undated letter from the end of 1930 or the beginning of 1931, he sarcastically tells MacGreevy about his own reading of Victor Berard’s popular translation of the Odyssey: “He certainly makes it easy to read, and I really recovered something of the old childish absorption with which I read Treasure Island and Oliver Twist and many others – free of all literary velleities.” There is a touch of nostalgia here, though Beckett believes that such nonliterary reading is ultimately to little purpose, except for warming the cockles. If you asked Belacqua’s father the next day what the book was like, “he could not tell you” (p. 54). Beckett’s reader is cast in a more difficult role. In Dream, Belacqua hints at the intimacy of his relationship with his reader, although this relationship is far more complex than may at first appear: The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement, between the flowers that cannot coexist, the antithetical (nothing so simple as antithetical) seasons of words, his experience shall be the menace, the miracle, the memory, of an unspeakable trajectory. (p. 138)


Beckett was well ahead of his contemporaries in the development of an aesthetic of reader-based fiction; his references to the importance of the “chinks” in a text, moments when a reader is most active, suggests a notion of communication which is remarkably akin to the phenomenological approach to reading described by Wolfgang Iser some 40 years later. Beckett speaks of communication “between the phrases,” Iser of the reader having to fill in the “gaps” or “blanks” in the text. 22 What Beckett wants his reader to experience is beyond words and beyond explanation: a “menace” (suggesting an uneasy feeling), a “miracle” (suggesting the magic of words creating indescribable meaning), and a “memory” (of something from either earlier in the text or from the reader’s own past). Yet we should note that the author has established a trajectory; it simply cannot be talked about rationally. In Dream Beckett manages to create a rhetorical game in which we match wits with him. In one section later published in More Pricks Than Kicks as “A Wet Night,” the characters themselves engage in a game of literary guess-who-wrote-this. 23 Elsewhere Beckett unabashedly extends the game so as to include the reader: It was strange how this expression of themselves at odds, the surface ruffled, if they had known (she may have), of the profound antagonism latent in the neutral space that between victims of real needs is as irreducible as the zone of evaporation between damp and incandescence (We stole that one. Guess where.), a wedge of Ophir if they only knew. . . . (pp. 191–2)24 “If they only knew,” indeed! Though realizing that I was playing the role of Beckett’s victim, I have wracked my memory, thumbed a number of books, and queried my colleagues on the source of this passage. To no avail. Beckett has me where he wants me. Yet addresses to the reader, like every other aspect of Dream, are intentionally reduced to absurdity; it seems as if Beckett, seriously concerned about these rhetorical issues, cannot stand being serious.25 Here some terminology would be helpful. Common to the above examples from all of these writers are the differences among what Daniel W. Nelson conveniently designates the “actual reader,” the “characterized reader,” and the “implied reader.”26 The actual reader is you or me, a flesh-and-blood human being holding a book in our hands. The characterized reader is a fictionalized reader who is explicitly mentioned or directly addressed in the text, almost the way a character would be. And the implied reader is that reader whom we can only infer

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but whose peculiar behavior, attitudes, and background are necessary for a proper understanding of the text. Beckett’s indolent “Ladies and Gentlemen” in the Joyce essay, the reader in Dream who is compared to an insurance broker, and the “hearer” in Company who needs to be enlivened – these are all examples of characterized readers. So too are Swift’s hasty reader in A Tale of a Tub, Fielding’s heartless male readers, and Sterne’s slow-witted “Madam” who is sent back to reread a chapter. These texts imply, however, that these characterized readers, although inviting identification, are presumably not our textual surrogates, but inverted models. We should be better readers than they are. But perhaps it needs also to be said that while on the one hand we may resist being played the fool, we may on the other not be able to measure up to the standards of the implied reader. We know that when Beckett wrote More Pricks he had recently read Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones (late 1932), Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (early 1933), as well as other works by Fielding and Swift. Here there are far fewer allusions to the reader than in Dream, and, relatively speaking, the text is less self-conscious; the author has clearly overcome many of the worries which plagued him in his novel, or at least moved those aesthetic struggles farther behind the scenes. Yet on occasion the characterized reader is addressed condescendingly, as when we are informed in “Love and Lethe”: “Reader, a gloria is coffee laced with brandy” (p. 87). And in the same story there is this reference to Ruby Tough’s “incurable disorder”: “ . . . and we feel confident that even the most captious reader must acknowledge, not merely the extreme wretchedness of Ruby’s situation, but also the verisimilitude of what we hope to relate in the not too distant future” (p. 89). Finally, an even more complex example is this clever little joke (as old as The Canterbury Tales) in “Ding-Dong”: “The features [of a figure in a painting] were null, only luminous, impassive and secure, petrified in radiance, or words to that effect, for the reader is requested to take notice that this sweet style is Belacqua’s” (p. 45). Here and elsewhere Beckett’s relationship with a characterized reader is dramatized, as he snidely ridicules our persona in the text while at the same time depending upon our actual, moment-by-moment engagement with the text. In the first of these two examples, I resist being labeled a “captious reader,” although by this point in the story I have hardly been led to expect the promised verisimilitude. In the second, the reader addressed is presumably not me, for I always hear Beckett’s voice and sense his style, not Belacqua’s. Beckett, having learned something from his reading of Swift and Fielding, toys with the reader


addressed, creating an ambivalent relationship between me and that reader; I end up caught in a sort of double bind.27 In light of this, we should not be surprised at Charles Prentice’s harsh response in turning down an additional story written for inclusion in More Pricks: “It gives me the jim-jams. . . . ‘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 analyzing the shudder.” 28 If the influence of Swift and Fielding is behind Beckett’s games with the reader in Dream and More Pricks, their influence in Murphy is clearly demonstrable. See how Beckett parodies the sort of reader addressed in eighteenth-century fiction. “The number of seconds in one dark night is a simple calculation that the curious reader will work out for himself.”29 Compare the following from Gulliver’s Travels: To satisfy my curious Reader, it may be sufficient to describe Lorbrulgrud. This City stands upon almost two equal Parts on each Side the River that passes through. It contains above eighty thousand Houses. It is in Length three Glonglungs (which make about fifty four English Miles) and two and a half in Breadth. . . . 30 Both Beckett and Swift employ the term “curious reader” and both mock that curiosity by reference to difficult mathematical calculation; Beckett’s “curious reader” is used in its late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century sense to suggest man’s Royal Society hunger for facts and more facts. Of course one difference between the two passages in that whereas Swift satirizes his reader’s curiosity by overwhelming him with numbers, Beckett avoids doing the calculations and tells his reader that he can figure it out for himself. Yet the likenesses here are unmistakable, and while I cannot prove that this particular passage from Gulliver’s Travels served in this instance as Beckett’s model, I believe it is clear that this passage or others like it did indeed influence him. If in the above instance Beckett urges us to work out a mathematical problem, he elsewhere suggests that we may, like Murphy, want to try our hands at defrauding an eating establishment. Explaining how Murphy every day managed to pay for one cup of tea while consuming 1.83 cups, Beckett toys with the “gentle reader” so common to the work of his eighteenth-century predecessors: “Try it sometime, gentle skimmer” (p. 84). Here, as in the above reference to the “curious reader,” we are invited, jokingly, to work out the mathematics for ourselves, but also, presumably, to engage in Murphy’s sort of cheat. Swift typically

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invites his “gentle reader” – referred to in both the Tale and Gulliver’s Travels – disarmingly into his company, but simultaneously refers in the first of these works to “yawning” (p. 131) and “grunting” readers (p. 203), in the second to “ignorant” (p. 147) and “unwary” readers (p. 291). Beckett’s oxymoronic reference to the “gentle skimmer” is similar.31 Swift and Beckett mock us in the very process of complimenting us. However, just as the actual reader must separate him or herself from the not-so-gentle reader characterized in A Tale of a Tub, Gulliver’s Travels, and Fielding’s novels, so too the actual reader of Murphy must pull back from the reader mentioned here; in any case, Beckett surely hopes that we can also appreciate this humorous twist on an eighteenth-century narrative device. At another point Beckett echoes the spirit of some of Swift’s and Fielding’s mock flatteries of their readers, if not a particular passage in Joseph Andrews: “Are you Joseph Andrews?” “Art thou my Fanny?” he answered eagerly; and pulling her to his heart, he imprinted numberless kisses on her lips, without considering who were present. If prudes are offended at the luciousness of this picture, they may take their eyes off from it, and survey Parson Adams. . . . 32 Beckett’s scene appears to be dependent on this kind of rhetorical and moral gaming in Fielding, though he updates it and adds another level of irony: Miss Counihan sat on Wylie’s knees, not in Wynn’s Hotel lest an action for libel should lie, and oyster kisses passed between them. . . . Miss Counihan had never enjoyed anything quite so much as this slow-motion osmosis of love’s spittle. The above passage is carefully calculated to deprave the cultivated reader. (p. 118) Joseph and Fanny may be unaware “who were present,” but Fielding and Beckett are both exceptionally sensitive to the presence of their audiences. Beckett takes the romance of Fielding’s scene, which is, typically, both sincere and intentionally melodramatic, and undermines it, referring to libel actions, oysters, spittle, and slow-motion cinema. Whereas Fielding teases his adolescent couple for their Richardsonian sentiment, Beckett drains all sentiment from the love scene, which now becomes a matter of cinematic trickery, biology, and crude talk. And


although both writers poke fun at their readers, again there are differences: Fielding has fun at the expense of the prudes among us, mocking them for their moral squeamishness regarding the description of what is, after all, quite innocent behavior; Beckett, on the other hand, having given us an earthy description of the encounter between Wylie and Miss Counihan, then does not tell us we might look away if we are offended, but brazenly admits that he has designed the scene specifically to corrupt his cultivated readers – or rather, readers who pretend to be cultivated. Fielding teases his reader into a self-realization. Following Fielding’s lead and at the same time parodying him, Beckett disarmingly admits that he has manipulated his reader. Although Beckett may have been prompted by Joyce’s immediate example, I believe that his passive–aggressive relationship with his reader is something he learned from Swift, Fielding, and Sterne. To overstate the difference, I would say that Joyce’s reader remains essentially an observer of the author’s verbal fireworks, or at least a purely intellectual player, whereas Beckett’s reader, like the reader of eighteenth-century ironic fiction, is a key contributor, a full player in the rhetorical game which occurs inside the text. Joyce remains aloof and no matter how much he relies on his own and his reader’s copious library, would seem to enjoy displaying his own learning while frustrating his reader. Beckett, on the other hand, depicts himself as everywhere frustrated in his efforts to create meaning, and is unafraid to put himself on the same level with his equally puzzled reader. And in creating such uncertain profiles for himself as well as for us he is surely closer to Swift, Fielding, and Sterne than he is to Joyce.

II Walter J. Ong once referred to what he called the “new fashionable intimacy” between author and reader that developed in the early eighteenth century; he alludes in particular to Addison and Steele, who in The Spectator cast themselves as well as their readers in the role of coffee-house habitués. 33 But in the early eighteenth century, this intimacy is frequently treated ironically. “The satirical energy in Swift’s work,” says Clive T. Probyn, “drives a paradox. It not only invites and involves the reader, it disorganizes him once he is involved.” 34 Or as Leopold Damrosch, Jr., says of Fielding: “The narrator of Tom Jones is a guide who keeps encouraging the reader to pursue his own way, often supplying misleading hints that get him lost in order to find him again.” 35

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Iser suggests that such mock intimacy was characteristic of eighteenthcentury novels, whose authors “were deeply conscious of this interplay with the reader.” The novel of this period thus becomes a sort of “imaginary dialogue.”36 In Tom Jones Fielding asks us to “bestir” ourselves: “Thou art highly mistaken if thou dost imagine that we intended, when we began this great Work, to leave thy Sagacity nothing to do; or that, without sometimes exercising this Talent, thou wilt be able to travel through our Pages with any Pleasure or Profit to thyself” (Vol. 11, Book 9, p. 469). Fielding’s tone (underscored by the formal “thou”) is polemical, although ironically the point of his lecture is to encourage us not to rely on the lecturer. And in Tristram Shandy Sterne goes even further, describing writing as “but a different name for conversation”; we are expected to keep ourselves active, filling in a string of asterisks with our own words, imagining the significance of a black or marbled page, and creating our own text when things go unsaid. We almost become co-creators with Sterne. In Tom Jones there are innumerable addresses to a singular reader and also to male and female readers, critics and ordinary readers, discerning and ignorant readers, and other categories. And frequently the narrator presumes to imagine what we are thinking: “The Reader, if he considers that this Fellow was already obnoxious to Mr. Western . . . will perhaps condemn this as a foolish and desperate Undertaking” (Vol. 3, Book 10, p. 113); “Lest our Readers, of a different Complexion, should take this Occasion of too hastily condemning all Compassion as a Folly . . . ” (Vol. 7, Book 15, p. 299); “Perhaps the Reader may wonder why Lady Bellaston, who in her Heart hated Sophia, should be so desirous of promoting a Match . . . ” (Vol. 16, Book 8, p. 667). In these examples (a very few among many) the narrator presumes to read our minds or imagine what we might want to say. In one sense these moments increase the intimacy of our reading, drawing us into the text, although in another, because we may not wish to own the thoughts put in our heads, they separate us from our supposed proxy. There is an ironic push–pull built into all such addresses in Tom Jones, and Beckett seems to have learned something from Fielding about the value of creating a tension in the reader’s relation to the text.37 By the time he wrote the trilogy Beckett had read Tristram Shandy, which would have supplied him with many dramatic examples of the characterized reader’s involvement in the text. Things begin to go wrong for Tristram at the moment of his conception: Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?—Good G–! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking


care to moderate his voice at the same time,—Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying?—Nothing. (Vol. 1, Chap. 1, p. 5) This is wonderfully complex. There are four speakers here: Tristram (the narrator), his mother, his father, and the characterized reader, who asks the question, “Pray, what was your father saying?” The nature of this question, however, shows that the reader has failed to comprehend what is going on, for he or she mistakes the word “interrupts,” which of course refers not to what Tristram’s father was saying but rather to what he was doing. “Nothing,” Tristram’s response to this naiveté, suggests his disbelief or frustration at his reader’s literal-mindedness. The implied reader, on the other hand, while tied to the reader in the text (we too are reading, after all), is nonetheless anxious to separate him or herself from this kind of thing. Sterne hopes that we comprehend what is going on and are capable of laughing at our textual counterpart. Our diminishment of the characterized reader is essential to the meaning of this passage. “For a sentence to be properly ironic,” says Jonathan Culler, “it must be possible to imagine some group of readers taking it quite literally.”38 There are other passages in the novel that likewise develop a dialogue between the narrator and the reader. See this one, for instance, where Tristram, speaking of his female friend “Jenny,” is himself interrupted: Nor is there any thing unnatural or extravagant in the supposition, that my dear Jenny may be my friend.—Friend!—My friend. Surely, Madam, a friendship between the two sexes may subsist, and be supported without—Fy! Mr. Shandy:—Without any thing, Madam, but that tender and delicious sentiment, which ever mixes in friendship, where there is a difference of sex. (Vol. 1, Chap. 18, p. 42) Like so much of Tristram Shandy, the passage is written in a very conversational style, and, moreover, the female reader twice interjects a comment: “Friend!” and “Fy! Mr. Shandy.” But the characterized reader is not an altogether attractive proxy for us; “Madam” is depicted as prudish and incapable of imagining friendship (without sex) between a man and a woman. The characterized reader’s limitations compromise my own position. Here is one more example (a single paragraph), which I have reproduced verbatim but laid out in the form of a dramatic dialogue, identifying the speakers. The subject under discussion, interestingly, is theatrical speech-making.

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Reader And how did Garrick speak the soliloquy last night? Tristram Oh, against all rule, my Lord,—most ungrammatically! betwixt the substantive and the adjective, which should agree together in number, case and gender, he made a breach thus,—stopping, as if the point wanted settling;—and betwixt the nominative case, which your lordship knows should govern the verb, he suspended his voice in the epilogue a dozen times, three seconds and three fifths by a stop-watch, my Lord, each time.— Reader Admirable grammarian!—But in suspending his voice—was the sense suspended likewise? Did no expression of attitude or countenance fill up the chasm? Was the eye silent? Did you narrowly look? Tristram I look’d only at the stop-watch, my Lord. Reader Excellent observer! (Vol. 3, Chap. 12, p. 148) In Sterne’s day quotation marks were not used consistently to indicate dialogue, nor is he himself consistent in his innovative use of long dashes to show a change of speaker; thus in Tristram Shandy as published the dialogue is jammed together, the separation of speakers implied but not unambiguously indicated. Much the same effect is achieved in Joyce’s Dubliners and his other works, where the author returns to the eighteenth-century way of doing things. Beckett likewise eschews quotation marks, but he manages to heighten the drama (and ambiguity) of his first-person narration by shifting rapidly from voice to voice. The nineteenth-century novel, with its conventional quotation marks and indented speeches, would have served as a less useful model for Beckett. In this passage, as in the others, the reader is characterized as myopic (note the pun on “narrowly look”) in his or her insistence on a scientific description of Garrick’s acting. We are cast in the role of one who cares less for the subtle art of acting than for parts of speech and the ticks of a stopwatch. In fact in asking for mere information, we are put in the position of goading Tristram into being the kind of author who reports external, measurable details at the expense of human emotion. Perhaps it helps to know that Sterne and David Garrick were good friends, but that information is not essential to appreciating the point here. I have been cast in a rather uncomfortable role, although in a sense any reader, simply as a result of being a reader, goads a writer, implicitly demanding more and more detail. One of Sterne’s points is surely that readers are as guilty as authors in maintaining this convention. I get caught in the irony if I fail to recognize this.


Admittedly, in Dream of Fair to Middling Women there are a few examples of speech granted to Beckett’s reader. But these instances are different from Beckett’s mature fiction, lacking the subtle changes of speaker and tone to be found in texts written after his intensive encounter with eighteenth-century writers.39 In Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, on the other hand, although there are no overt allusions to the “gentle reader,” we typically feel addressed and are active participants. In Molloy it is not unusual to find simple but ironic addresses to “you,” as in the following teasing of the sort of reader (presumably not now reading Beckett’s novel) who prefers realism: “For the particulars, if you are interested in the particulars, there is no need to despair . . . ”; and “It is not often that I take cognizance so clearly of the clothes that people wear and I am happy to give you the benefit of it.”40 Elsewhere, Beckett suggests the kind of eighteenth-century intimacy with the reader that Ong refers to: “Between you and me there never was anything wrong with my respiratory tracts” (p. 79); and “ . . . like the old woman, I’ve lost her name again, Rose, no, anyway you see who I mean” (p. 83). This intimacy is made most explicit in the following: “I understand less and less, I don’t deny it, for why deny it, and to whom, to you, to whom nothing is denied?” (p. 45). Beckett, very unlike himself in Dream, here undermines his own control of the narrative and at the same time confesses to an absolute openness with his reader. Surely both are only partly true; this is the mock intimacy which characterizes the ironic fiction of Swift, Fielding, and Sterne. In Molloy there are several examples of the author in actual dialogue with the reader, a literal rendering of the eighteenth-century concept of the fictional text: “But I couldn’t! What? Lean on it” (p. 77). For an especially clever example of such dialogue, see the following, which (as with the passage from Sterne) I have laid out in the form of dramatic speech: Molloy You may object that this is covered by the business of my legs, that it has no importance, since in any case I could put to the ground the foot in question. Reader Quite, quite. Molloy But do you as much as know what foot we’re talking about? Reader No. Molloy Nor I. Wait till I think. (p. 80) As elsewhere in the novel, we are drawn in by the references to “you,” strengthened in this case by Molloy’s initial attempt to speak on the

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reader’s behalf, and also by his asking a question. There is interaction between us. But this interaction is underscored by Beckett’s moving from indirect to direct quotation, supplying actual words for the reader to say. And there is a further irony, for while Molloy depicts the reader as rather stupid, Beckett allows us to respond with a certain disdain, and at last Molloy must admit that he does not know which of his own two feet we are talking about either! With an eighteenth-century ironic twist, Beckett first ridicules us and then confesses to his reader (“to whom nothing is denied”) that he is just as ignorant as we. It is a passage Swift would be proud of. There are likewise lines for the reader to speak in Malone Dies. Many of these are comments on the text proper, the reader functioning as a sort of chorus: “This is awful” (p. 191); “Great calm is an exaggeration” (p. 212); “Drivel, drivel” (p. 272); “I don’t understand” (p. 274); “Try and go on” (p. 277); “fucking awful business this, no, yes?” (p. 282). Admittedly, as in some of the instances from Molloy, Beckett’s ambiguity at times leaves it unclear whether the reader is responding to the author or the author is simply responding to himself in a more critical tone of voice, almost as an editor. But as Beckett would say, no matter. The ambivalence itself helps draw us into the text. A few lines to remind me that I too subsist. He has not come back. How long is it now? I don’t know. Long. And I? Indubitably going, that’s all that matters. Whence this assurance. Try and think. I can’t. Grandiose suffering. I am swelling. What if I should burst? The ceiling rises and falls, rises and falls, rhythmically, as when I was a foetus. Also to be mentioned a noise of rushing water, phenomenon mutatis mutandis perhaps analogous to that of the mirage, in the desert. The window. I shall not see it again. Why? Because, to my grief, I cannot turn my head. (p. 283) Yes, this passage may be understood to reproduce the reflexive thinking of a single narrator. However, in spite of “the insistent I,” as J. Paul Hunter once called the frequency of the first person in late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century England, the excerpt contains a number of purely third-person declarative statements, such as “He has not come back,” and “Also to be mentioned a noise of rushing water. . . . ” 41 At the same time, there are several scraps that could just as easily be imagined as coming from a listener, the reader perhaps: “How long is it now?”, “Try and think,” and “Why?” Not only are we confused here by the role of the narrator, however, but we are once again depicted, as in the


passage from Tristram Shandy discussed above, as one who is goading the narrator on, demanding that the story be told. The unique style of The Unnamable is in part a result of Beckett’s pursuit of the full ramifications of the techniques he explored in the trilogy’s first two novels. The dramatization of the reader becomes more frequent and his very existence becomes an issue. As in Molloy and Malone Dies, there are interjections traceable to the reader: “No more obscenities either” (p. 305); “Here is a clue” (p. 356); “I’m listening” (p. 386); “that’s enough” (p. 387); “I’m doing my best, I can’t understand” (p. 391). In this novel, however, Beckett brings the listener’s presence even more to the fore, the Unnamable emphasizing on every page the conflicting voices he hears. “It’s entirely a matter of voices, no other metaphor is appropriate,” he admits to us (p. 325). Elsewhere he asks: “How many of us are there altogether, finally? And who is holding forth at the moment? And to whom? And about what? These are futile teasers” (p. 368). And later he asks, “Who is talking, not I” (p. 385). 42 Although it seems impossible for the Unnamable to know who he is, it likewise seems impossible for him to know who is his audience, for our identity is thrown into question. Finally, however, in spite of his endless protests against the talking demanded of him by some vague “they” (reminiscent of the “they” who beat Estragon in Waiting for Godot), the Unnamable arrives at the astounding conclusion that “there was never anyone but you, talking to you about you” (p. 394). Note the second person. We might view this in one of three ways: this is the narrator’s second self speaking, reminding himself that for all the talk of “voices,” he is the only presence; or (as we have seen elsewhere in the trilogy) the reader may be speaking to the narrator, reminding him of the same thing; or perhaps the Unnamable himself is speaking to us, finally owning up to the fact that the reader has him- or herself been the subject all along. To accept the third possibility, of course, is to recognize that the trilogy has not only been a quest for the identity of “I” but for the identity of “you.”43 If the reader has been paying attention, maybe this comes as no surprise. Beckett seems to have learned from ironic texts of the eighteenth century how to entrap his reader in such ambiguities. This infamous scene from Gulliver’s Travels – placing us inescapably in a double bind – is the sort of thing which might have served as his model: The handsomest among these Maids of Honour, a pleasing and frolicksome Girl of sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her Nipples; with many other Tricks, wherein the Reader will excuse

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me for not being over particular. But, I was so much displeased, that I entreated Glumdalclitch to contrive some excuse for not seeing that young Lady any more. (p. 119) The sixteen-year-old maid of honor is “pleasant” and “frolicksome” (two essentially positive words), and the stimulating posture in which she places Gulliver on her breast is obviously of interest to the (curious) reader. In fact when I read this passage I crave more of the text’s usual reportorial particulars. However, I am to be disappointed, for while my male pruriency is inflamed further by Gulliver’s vague allusion to “many other Tricks” (did she put Gulliver between her legs?), I am told that of course I will understand, that of course I would not want to have any further particulars. The truth is that I do want to hear more, but Gulliver’s assumption that I would be shocked by further details, and more importantly his final revelation that he himself was so displeased that he asked his protector Glumdalclitch to keep the naughty lady from his presence, makes my male fascination seem like leering. I have been trapped between Swift’s two contractory injunctions: sex is stimulating and Brobdingnagian sex is more so; but sex is obscene and offensive to our higher natures. My choice is between lasciviousness and prudery. Although both of these injunctions to the reader are clearly present in the text, both cannot be true at the same time. I am punished for my indecency by being forced to recognize that my high moral proprieties do not jibe with my degenerate physical self. Swift has a good laugh – on me.44 Although I do not mean to suggest that Beckett imitated this particular passage, a similar rhetorical situation is created in the following from Molloy: If ever I’m reduced to looking for a meaning to my life, you never can tell, it’s in that old mess I’ll stick my nose to begin with, the mess of that poor old uniparous whore and myself the last of my foul brood, neither man nor beast. I should add, before I get down to the facts, you’d swear they were facts, of that distant summer afternoon, that with this deaf blind impotent mad old woman, who called me Dan and whom I called Mag, and with her alone, I – no, I can’t say it. That is to say I could say it but I won’t say it, yes, I could say it easily, because it wouldn’t be true. (p. 24) In this passage there is no direct address to the reader (only the clichés “you never can tell” and “you’d swear that . . . ”), but the prose nonetheless


establishes a kind of intimacy. As in the passage from Swift, this one is based on a sense of narrativus interruptus, although the grotesque nature of Beckett’s scene makes me feel not altogether cheated out of the ungiven, probably unerotic details. But again I am pulled simultaneously in two different directions. “If ever I’m reduced to looking for a meaning to my life,” says Molloy, who is of course looking for a meaning to his life. He promises that he will tell us about some “distant summer afternoon” with an old whore named Mag but then breaks off, mid-sentence, refusing to tell more. I assume that he was about to describe an encounter with Mag when they were both younger, more attractive sexual partners. Yet by suddenly halting his story he has frustrated my desire for those unsupplied details, grotesque or otherwise, and then Molloy has the gall to admit that he, like Gulliver, has chosen not to report more. In Swift and Beckett the gaps in their respective texts (to use Iser’s phraseology again) encourages me to supply my own details, and then my involvement is put on display, thrown into question. Moreover, in both cases my own reaction to the text is all-important, as much a part of the meaning of the passage as the text proper. What we might view as a sort of manifesto in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (quoted above) is as true of Swift as of Beckett: “The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases. . . . ” But there is of course a difference in purpose between the two passages: whereas Swift urges me to fantasize over ungiven sexual details in order to underscore my lasciviousness, Beckett urges me to fill in the blank in order to make a point about my all-too-human tendency, in the absence of information, to create what we would swear were “facts.” Molloy admits that he could easily give us a description of his affair with Mag – because it is untrue. As a reader I am encouraged to do something similar, imagining text where there is none. In any case, whereas in the eighteenth century Swift’s point is a matter of morality and propriety, in the twentieth century Beckett’s point is psychological and philosophical. Beckett’s later works contain few addresses to the reader, although our involvement is as great as ever. Imagination Dead Imagine (1966), a short piece for the most part written in a rather cold, mechanical prose, begins with this ambiguous but important sentence: “No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine.” 45 Here “you” seems to refer to the reader, who is complaining that there is no life in this text, asserting that “pah, [there is] no difficulty there,” but is then answered by the author-narrator, who claims that his “imagination [is] not dead yet” and then goes on to mock the reader for thinking that imagination

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could ever be truly dead. Or we might reverse this. Maybe what we are overhearing is the insistent reader countering the narrator’s desire to be done. In any case, Beckett in this passage exploits the ambiguities of the relationships among author, text, and reader, and what emerges is more ambiguous than his previous ambiguity, his late texts shifting these relationships to the fore even more obviously than before. Writing and the reader’s relationship with the author have become the text. This same insistence on imagining becomes in the last works almost the subject itself, as in the opening lines of Company: “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.”46 I think it would be a mistake to read this last word as a polite “well, imagine that!” – rather, we are being given an order by a Godot-like author, who, while reminiscing about his own youth, is no Hans Christian Andersen. We are now locked in something of a power struggle with the author. Then in Worstward Ho the tables are turned and the monologue is once again broken into a sort of dialogue, the reader cast at least potentially in the role of one who, Pozzo-like, attempts to whip the writer’s prose into submission: It stands. What? Yes. Say it stands. Had to up in the end and stand. Say bones. No bones but say bones. Say ground. No ground but say ground. So as to say pain. No mind and pain? Say yes that the bones may pain till no choice but stand. 47 In these recent examples the rhetorical game Beckett learned from Swift, Fielding, and Sterne, and which he practiced for more than a half-century, seems to have been transformed but never abandoned. As we have seen, the game is played this way: within the text the author casts the characterized reader in an unattractive role, underscoring his or her limitations, yet depends on the actual reader to employ his or her memory, intelligence, and imagination in order to make meaning. This ambivalence puts the reader in an uncomfortable position. Although in the later fiction the game becomes powerfully ambiguous and its roots in eighteenth-century fiction no longer traceable, those roots are (I believe) nonetheless there and can be credited with contributing mightily to the force of these works.

Beckett’s dependence on the reader of his fiction may be underscored by comparing his connection between the world and the stage in the


Unnamable with comparable connections in Shakespeare and Fielding. As everyone knows, Shakespeare wrote: All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. . . . A century and a half later, Fielding asserted, in a chapter in Tom Jones titled “A Comparison between the World and the Stage”: None, as I remember, have at all considered the Audience at this great Drama. But as Nature often exhibits her best Performances to a very full House; so will the Behaviour of her Spectators no less admit the above mentioned Comparison than that of her Actors. (Vol. 7, Chap. 1, p. 248) And in The Unnamable Beckett says in a passage which serves, among other things, as a gloss on Waiting for Godot: Well, I prefer that, I must say I prefer that, that what, oh you know, who you, oh I suppose the audience, well well, so there’s an audience, it’s a public show, you buy your seat and you wait, perhaps it’s free, a free show, you take your seat and you wait for it to begin, or perhaps it’s compulsory, a compulsory show, you wait for the compulsory show to begin. . . . (p. 381) Whereas Shakespeare calls attention to the similarity between us and the players, Fielding shifts our attention to the audience, explaining how various members of the audience react differently to the same scene being acted out before them. Beckett’s metaphor is far closer to Fielding’s than Shakespeare’s, for he also turns up the house lights. On the other hand, Beckett does away with the play altogether, for his audience is not in fact watching a play but waiting for a compulsory play to begin; for him the spectators are the only players. And of course The Unnamable, like Tom Jones, is not a play at all.48 I believe this marvelous passage says a great deal about Beckett’s view of his readers, and once again underscores his proximity to the eighteenth century. As in several examples looked at above, here there are a number of words which would appear to be traceable to the person who is listening to the Unnamable: “that what,” “who you,”

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and “well well, so there’s an audience.” Mousetrap fashion, the passage turns back on itself, for at this point in the novel the very subject under discussion is the connection between the world and the stage, or in this case between the world and the inhabitants of the orchestra, the mezzanine, and the boxes. Since life is not a show but only a compulsory waiting for a show to begin, then The Unnamable is not a novel but only a compulsory waiting for a novel to happen. On the one hand, the rhetorical situation is condescending to Beckett’s readers, who are not only forced to suffer through pages and pages of difficult, unbroken text, attempting to attend to a story without a plot and to characters fragmenting into other characters, but who are at the same time told, quite frankly, that they are required to play the fool. On the other hand, however, like Fielding, Swift, and Sterne, Beckett implicitly compliments his readers by assuming that we shall be able to endure the generic and rhetorical ambiguities and will understand that we, as well as the Unnamable, are having our identities put on display. The author queries his own existence but he also queries yours and mine. And he expects us to learn from the experience. The early eighteenth-century prose writers – the ones Beckett was so attracted to – deliberately create a reading situation within their texts. As John Preston argued in his ground-breaking study, by so doing these writers set out to develop a new rhetoric of reading for their publics: They invoke the reader, they make him appear, they do not disguise the dialogue. The eighteenth-century novelists were pushing forward the possibilities of the novel and were therefore in effect asking for a different kind of reader. Their professed contempt of the “critic” was not just a conventional joke. It was part of the process of remaking a reader, who would have to be capable of sustaining a much more challenging situation than the mere critics. 49 “Crritic!” shouts Estragon in Waiting for Godot, culminating a string of negative epithets. 50 This is the conventional joke. But like the eighteenthcentury novelists, Beckett went well beyond the cliché and posited a different kind of audience for his drama, a different kind of reader for his fiction. In the pages of his novels I am asked to laugh at my readerly self, still far too dependent on realism, closure, and meanings delivered in a coherent fashion. At the same time, however, I am asked to imagine


a new role for myself, one that demands greater attentiveness and a willingness to recognize and accept incongruities as part life as well as texts. Meaning for this new reader is, as Stanley Fish has argued in another context, an event.51 The surprise is that Beckett learned not only from Joyce, but from his eighteenth-century predecessors, how to stretch the definition of “reader” for his own day.

5 Beckett’s Literary Gerontophilia

Joyce claimed to have given a voice to the third of human life that is spent in sleep. Beckett could claim to have given a voice to the third of every existence likely to be spent in decay. Richard Ellmann1 In an 8 September 1935 letter to Thomas MacGreevy, Beckett confesses to a love of old men. “I begin to think I have gerontophilia on top of all the rest,” he says, joking in a woe-is-me tone of voice. “The little shabby respectable old men you see on Saturday afternoon and Sunday, pottering about doing odd jobs in the garden, or flying kites immense distances . . . they fly them almost out of sight.” “My next old man, or old young man,” he continues, “not of the big world but of the little world [the world of his fiction], must be a kite-flyer.”2 Indeed Beckett created such a character in Murphy, the novel he was then beginning to write. Old Mr. Kelly, seated in his chair, asks Celia to hand him the tail of his kite: “‘As you say,’ said Mr. Kelly, ‘hark to the wind. I shall fly her out of sight to-morrow.’” A moment later he is imaginatively digging in his heels “against the immense pull skyward.” 3 But Mr. Kelly is just one of many. Beckett throughout his life reveals a curiosity about old men and women. After Murphy, he began a play based on the life of Samuel Johnson in his last years (see Chapter 6); near the beginning of Watt, the incidental character Mr. Hackett is clearly an old man (in the typescript of the novel, he is said to be almost 87), while the title character is engaged in writing a novel titled A Clean Old Man.4 “I never really had much love to spare,” admits Molloy, “but all the same I had my little quota, when I was small, and it went to the old men, when it could.” “I was always aged, always aging,” acknowledges the Unnamable, seemingly speaking for his creator. 5 90


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Although the death of Beckett’s father in 1933 as well as his relationship with the ailing and near-blind Joyce undoubtedly contributed to his preoccupation with aging, the British writers of the eighteenth century offered him a number of memorable models for his typically debilitated characters. At one point in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, which Beckett read in the early 1930s, Jeremy Melford refers to Thomas Guy (1645?–1724), a printer and bookseller who is best known as the founder of a hospital: “I think Guy,” Smollett writes, “ought to have appropriated one wing or ward of his hospital to the use of decayed authors.”6 Beckett in his fiction in particular made ample room for such residents, repeatedly connecting agedness and rhetoric: “Scratch an old man, and find a Quintilian,” says the narrator in Murphy (p. 17).

I Swift once reported: “I asked a poor Man how he did? He said, he was like a Washball, always in Decay.” Christopher Ricks aptly observes that this metaphor could stand as an epigraph for the whole of Beckett. 7 Vladimir’s soliloquy – “down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps” – shows Beckett compressing human life, almost fusing birth and death; indeed as early as his 1929 essay on the as-yetunfinished Finnegans Wake he had admired Vico’s concept that “there is a great deal of the unborn infant in the lifeless octogenerian.” 8 More to the point, in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written when Beckett was 26), Belacqua, in one of the rare first-person passages in the novel, imagines himself a newborn infant and simultaneously an old man dying in a hospital: I am irritable in manner. I resent being disturbed. I am intolerant of light. I am observed to pick at the bedclothes. It is the end. I die in a convulsion. Swathe me oh swathe me in oakum or charpie. Knot my cord twice. Place me in my flannel receiver, gently does it. 9 And this foreshadows a passage in Malone Dies (1956), although in the later work Beckett deepens his description, developing it as a sort of metaphor for literary creativity: Yes, an old foetus, that’s what I am now, hoar and impotent, mother is done for, I’ve rotted her, she’ll drop me with the help of gangrene, perhaps papa is at the party too, I’ll land head-foremost mewling in the charnel-house, not that I’ll mewl, not worth it. All the stories I’ve

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told myself, clinging to the putrid mucus, and swelling, swelling, saying, Got it at last, my legend. 10 Beckett associates birth with death, dying with being born; Malone imagines himself set free of his gangrenous mother, tumbling out of the “putrid mucus” into the “charnel-house” of the world. But there is something positive here: what emerges from this dying birth is a new thing, not a life but at least the story of a life. Physical impotency leads to literary potency. In Beckett’s unique version of this fundamentally romantic parable, the demise of the artist gives birth to the work of art, the artist’s “legend.” It is this concept which Beckett discovered in a very personal way not only through his relationship with Joyce, but through his encounter with the biographies and dying words of several eighteenth-century writers. In particular, the deaths of Swift, Fielding, and Sterne seem to have drawn him: Swift because of his Irishness and his proximity during Beckett’s days at Trinity College, as well as the Dean’s own fascination with aging; Fielding and Sterne because of the availability of their own last writings, which likewise focus on a physical winding down coupled with an acuity of mind and imagination. Beckett’s interest in the most intimate, semifictional work of all three writers is telling: as we saw in Chapter 1, he read Swift’s Journal to Stella (probably in 1933), Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (probably in late 1932), and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (in 1938), plus A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (which he had on his shelf and probably read around this same time).11 These texts fit the narrator’s description of his own How It Is: “little private book these secret things little book all my own the heart’s outpourings day be day” (p. 84). Of them we might say what Virginia Woolf said of A Sentimental Journey: “The book becomes semi-transparent. The usual conventions which keep reader and writer at arm’s length disappear. We are as close to life as we can be.”12 It is precisely this immediacy, the improvisitory quality of these journals, I believe, which attracted Beckett to them and made them perhaps more significant influences on his “diary fiction” (to use H. Porter Abbott’s term) than the novelistic tradition itself.13 In order to comprehend the relevance of the dying Swift for Beckett, we need to imagine what it would have been like to read Swift in the twenties or thirties. Yeats, for example, refers to him in his poem “The Seven Sages” (1933) – where the Dean is presented, along with Goldsmith, Burke, and Berkeley, as a politically important figure. But Yeats uses the conjured spirit of Swift most extensively in his play Words upon the Window Pane (1930), where he writes in the preface: “Swift haunts


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me; he is always just around the next corner.”14 He goes on to say that Swift is brought to mind repeatedly, in his thoughts of his great-greatgrandmother, who was the Dean’s contemporary, or on a visit to St. Patrick’s, where he has gone to wander or meditate. Attempting to describe his feelings, Yeats, referring to the patriot Swift, confesses that he “touches my pride,” and adds that such feelings are “in reality a return to the sources of our power, and therefore a claim made upon the future.” Without doing full justice to the complex matter of Yeats’s relationship with Swift, we may let these words serve from his introduction to the London edition of Bishop Berkeley – by Mario M. Rossi and Joseph Hone – mentioned by Beckett in a 5 January [1933] letter to MacGreevy. When we search our own experience whether of life or letters how many stand solidly? At this moment I but recall four or five intimate friends, an old woman that I never spoke to, seen at a public assembly in America, an image met ten years ago in a sudden blaze of light under my closed eyelids, William Morris, and the half symbolic image of Jonathan Swift. . . . I think of [these] men born of our Irish solitude, of their curiosity, their rich discourse, their explosive passion, their sense of mystery as they grew old. . . . 15 “In our eighteenth century,” adds Yeats, “four or five such men had genius, two or three have genius to-day.” For Yeats, Swift was an immediate presence but important especially as Irish symbol – part prophet, part priest, a religious figure who championed the political and human causes of the Irish. For Beckett, however, Swift is an immediate presence, yes, but not so much a symbol as a kindred spirit, significant not because of his politics but because of his fellow-suffering. Beckett’s Swift is altogether more personal than Yeats’s or even Joyce’s – a gifted writer, a tortured soul, a man alone confronting the meaning of existence. It is important to remind ourselves, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that Swift is now viewed far differently from the way he was 70 years ago. Thanks to the careful biographical work of Irvin Ehrenpreis and others, the myths and legends surrounding the Dean have been for the most part dispelled. 16 When Beckett was at Trinity College in the twenties, however, and later in the thirties when he was reading Swift on his own, the prevailing view of the Dean was not far removed from that which held sway in the previous century; he was still commonly depicted as proud, lonely, melancholy, and misanthropic, and as one who went mad at the end of his life. The prevalence of this image of

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Swift, even among the major writers during Beckett’s formative years, is suggested in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: a Biography (1928): “[Swift] scorns the whole world, yet talks baby language to a girl, and will die, can we doubt it, in a madhouse.” 17 A comparable image is to be found in two references in Finnegans Wake: “Early clever, surely doomed to Swift’s, alas, the galehus!”; and “the decan’s, fast aslooped in the entrance to his polthronechair.”18 And this same image is captured in Joyce’s short piece written and published in 1928 (the year Beckett met him) entitled “Twilight of Blindness Madness Descends on Swift”: “Unslow, malswift, pro mean, proh noblesse, Atrahora, Melancolores, nears; whose glauque eyes glitt bedimmed to imm! whose fingrings creep o’er skull: till, qwench! asterr mist calls estarr and grauw! honath John raves homes glowcoma.”19 Without insisting on a single source, it is safe to say that this view of Swift in his old age was the one Beckett was exposed to during his days at Trinity College and after. But apart from the writers themselves, there is the Swift defined in the popular biographies, literary criticism, and literary histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here the standard view is tempered by attention to recent speculation regarding Swift’s medical condition in his last years, and this in turn leads to the image of a sometimes tragic figure. Such is the portrait of Swift perpetuated in Leslie Stephen’s Swift (1882), Henry Craik’s The Life of Jonathan Swift (1882), John Churton Collins’ Jonathan Swift: a Biographical and Critical Study (1893), Shane Leslie’s The Skull of Swift (1928), and Mario M. Rossi and Joseph M. Hone’s Swift, or the Egotist (1934). The old Dean who emerges from these studies appears to us today as more of a novelistic figure than the subject of a reliable biography, but for Beckett, growing up in Ireland in the early part of the twentieth century, the image of the dying Swift – lonely, melancholy, and finally insane – seems to have struck a sympathetic chord. The nineteenth-century Swift may be suggested by the words of Stephen and Collins. Stephen, as Donald M. Berwick says, looks at the Dean as the most tragic figure in English literature, makes much of his infirmities and weariness of life, and sees in the Struldbruggs a sort of prophecy of “the melancholy decay into which he himself was to sink.”20 Collins describes the last years of Swift’s life as “a tragedy sadder and more awful than any of those pathetic fictions which appall and melt us on the stage of Sophocles and Shakespeare.” He proceeds to describe a figure reminiscent of the character we call “Beckettian,” referring to the “extraordinary activity of his mind” and “his habit of occupying himself in writing that he might escape himself”:


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He was below his own Struldbruggs. . . . At last, after suffering unspeakable tortures from one of the most agonising maladies known to surgery, he sank into the torpor of imbecility. By the mercy of Providence it generally happens that man so degraded is unconscious of his degradation. But this mercy was withheld from Swift. (p. 235)21 And this melancholy Swift was still extant in the early twentieth century, especially in books of a more popular tint; for example, Leslie’s melodramatic The Skull of Swift, subtitled “An Extempore Exhumation,” contains a photograph of Swift’s childhood cradle, and on the title page a sketch of his exhumed skull. 22 Rossi and Hone’s Swift, or the Egotist is likewise written in a melodramatic way, its chapters carrying such titles as the following: “Born – Nowhere” (on Swift’s ambiguous feelings toward Ireland); “The Doom” (on his increasingly debilitating physical ailments); and “The Rat in the Hole” (on his last years and death). Rossi and Hone focus everywhere on Swift’s long struggle with deafness, dizziness, loss of memory, and aphasia, and make much of the solitary existence which might have led to his presumed insanity. Referring, like Collins, to the “tragedy” of his closing days, the authors conclude: “As a poor man, as a beggar, he lies down – this which he perhaps thought to be the extreme challenge to fate, was only the expression of a bitter truth: he had awaited death terribly alone and terribly naked.” 23 Perhaps we should not find it surprising that in a 5 January [1933] letter to MacGreevy, Beckett calls Hone a “moribund creature.” Nonetheless, although he would have been put off by the style of Rossi and Hone’s book, if we strip away the melodrama, the highlighting of Swift’s illness and physical decline is something which again would have moved him. J. C. Bucknill’s 1882 essay on “Dean Swift’s Disease” underscores the source of Swift’s instability in Ménière’s syndrome, and it is significant that this explanation is embraced by Henry Craik in his Life of Jonathan Swift, published in 1882 and the authoritative biography up through the middle of the twentieth century.24 But science did not immediately displace nineteenth-century melodrama. Describing Swift’s last years in a final chapter titled “The Closing Scene,” Craik imagines a world-weary character not unlike the morbid, lonely old men who appear in Beckett’s trilogy: “the loneliness became more marked, the gloom more abiding and more deep” (Vol. 2, p. 240); “the tenacity of his clear logic had dwindled into the loose and broken peevishness of insanity” (p. 241); and “through a thick curtain of pain, disease, and baffled memory, Swift’s voice drops into silence” (p. 254).

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The last struggle of the long combat was over: and the strong man, so long invincible even in decay, sank into apathy and silence for ever. In this state he spent three years of living death. There was no longer any frenzied resistance to the mental decay. The fierce exercise by which he had striven to defy his torture was now over: he could scarcely be persuaded to move from his chair; and his body, which had shrunk to skin and bone, now recovered its plumpness: the wrinkles left his face, which now, in spite of the thick snow-white hair that overhung it, had an aspect of almost childlike gentleness. (Vol. 2, p. 256) The image here is Beckettian in its account of physical decay, a longing for death coupled with a courageous resistance to it, the perpetuation of life in a kind of “living death,” and the linkage of the child and the old man.25 If Beckett read this description of Swift in his last days (and I have no doubt that he did), then Craik’s image might have still been in his mind when he read Swift’s works in the 1930s, or even when he was later creating his own (as he called them in Molloy, p. 137) “gallery of moribunds.” Moreover, note that little would have to be changed in Craik’s rather novelistic portrait of the melodramatic yet at the same time heroic Swift in order to give rise to a Malone, for example. Beckett would likewise have been drawn to Swift’s own sentiments on life and death as they were reported by Craik: “For years he had marked the anniversary of his birth by reading the third chapter of the book of Job, praying that the day whereon he was born might be darkness: that he might have lain still and been quiet: ‘then had I been at rest’” (Vol. 2, p. 243). Job asks, “Why died I not from the womb?” Ellmann says of Beckett’s view of Yeats: “He liked especially the [play] about Swift entitled The Words Upon the Window-Pane, in which the voice of Swift utters the devastating final line, ‘Perish the day on which I was born.’”26 Beckett identifies with the tormented Swift. “No, I regret nothing,” says the narrator in the autobiographical From an Abandoned Work, “all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.”27 The touch of humor here is Beckett’s, but the sentiments are his and Swift’s, and ultimately Job’s. What I would suggest is that Beckett draws on the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century portrait of Swift, making it less melodramatic and more realistic, treating it with more than a touch of comic irony, and simultaneously underscoring the metaphysical anxiety of the figure. I believe that this nineteenth-century image of Swift dying is the first inspiration behind many of the characters in Beckett’s work,


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and that what he gives us is a modernization of this portrait. The paradox in all this is the antiquarian tendency of modern Beckett, reaching back to Swift through a nineteenth-century picture of him, and yet adding something new, something only seemingly disrespectful, to that somber portrait.

II While at Trinity College, Beckett met Walter Fitzwilliam Starkie, 12 years his senior, who was Professor of Romance Languages between 1926 and 1943. He was Beckett’s lecturer in Italian. In Starkie’s first year on the Trinity faculty, when Beckett was an Honors student in Modern Languages, he published a book on Luigi Pirandello which, among other things, touched on the roots of Pirandello’s fiction in the work of Laurence Sterne. 28 Although we cannot be sure of their relationship, it may be that Starkie’s interest in the personal lives of writers as reflected in their works had its effect on young Beckett. The hard evidence is scant and postdates Beckett’s Trinity days, but Starkie’s introduction to his translation of Don Quixote (1964), plus his undated notes for a lecture titled “Cervantes and the English Novel of the Eighteenth Century,” demonstrate his keen interest in such matters. “Don Quixote,” says Starkie in these notes, “is one of those rare novels in which both hero and author are so closely related that it is impossible to study them apart.”29 Elsewhere he refers to Cervantes’ book as a “spiritual autobiography.” Moreover, he goes on to quote Persiles y Sigismunda, which Cervantes completed only four days before his death: “Yesterday they gave me extreme unction, and today I am writing. The time is short; my agonies increase; my hopes diminish.” Starkie draws a parallel between Cervantes and other writers, in particular Fielding. Citing Austin Dobson’s essay on “Fielding’s Voyage to Lisbon,” published in his Vignettes of the Eighteenth Century (1892), he notes that “Fielding was dying of dropsy, the same disease as his master Cervantes.” We may speculate that Beckett’s interest in the biographical basis of Fielding’s fiction, as well as his concern for the image of the dying writer, may have been encouraged by an acquaintanceship with Starkie which continued into the 1930s. In the present context, what should most concern us is Beckett’s familiarity with The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Fielding’s posthumously published account of the voyage he made in the last few months of his life. Suffering from gout, jaundice, dropsy, asthma, and other complications, he undertook this trip on 26 June 1754 as a means of

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avoiding another long English winter, and he never returned home, dying in Lisbon on 8 October. A Voyage to Lisbon was published the following year. This short book recounts the daily events of Fielding’s voyage, including his harassment by the sailors, the eccentricities of the captain, the dangerous storms and uncooperative winds on the way, and the various physical ailments he (and his wife) suffered while on the difficult, six-week voyage. Dobson calls The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon a “sick man’s diary,” Wilbur L. Cross describes it as “a most intimate log-book with reflections,” and Harold E. Pagliaro, the Journal’s most recent editor, refers to “this courageous and lively book, in which [Fielding] bids the world farewell.” 30 Deprived of the company of his family (his wife and her companions were often seasick and she suffered from a debilitating toothache), and with The Queen of Portugal repeatedly blown off course or forced to seek shelter from the rough seas, Fielding turned to the writing of this little volume – in part as an escape from himself, in part to gain a little sum for his soon-to-be-fatherless children in England. 31 And indeed the image of the writer which emerges in these pages must have spurred Beckett’s interest. With the undoubted purpose of selling more books, the “Dedication to the Public” (not written by Fielding) creates a pathetic portrait of genius in decline: “Let your own imaginations place before your eyes a true picture in that of a hand trembling in almost its latest hour, of a body emaciated with pains, yet struggling for your entertainment . . . in a work begun in pain, and finished almost at the same period with life” (p. 181). Within the text proper, Fielding himself admits that The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, “if I live to finish it, [which is] a matter of no great certainty . . . will be probably the last I shall ever undertake” (p. 261). Melodrama aside, this is a picture which would have appealed to a man who was later to write Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Fielding is writing on the edge. In the “Author’s Introduction” (one of the last sections to be written), Fielding refers to his body as “so entirely emaciated that it had lost all its muscular flesh,” and says that he is “now, in the opinion of all men, dying of a complication of disorders” (pp. 193, 195). After the prescription of various diaphoretics (including arsenic) and the tapping of dropsical water from his belly, his body is further depleted and “within two days I was thought to be falling into the agonies of death” (p. 196). Fielding then began to experiment with the tar-water recommended in George Berkeley’s Siris: a Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water (1744), a prescription


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Beckett copied into his Whoroscope notebook.32 Finally, weakened by overwork and unable to achieve any sustained relief from the dropsy, asthma, and gout which threatened his life, Fielding prepared to transport himself to a warmer climate. But so grave was his condition that, as Cross indicates, one of the London evening papers reported that he was dead, although this was denied two days later.33 In Fielding’s book as in so much of Beckett, the matter-of-fact description of one’s own horrendous physical condition creates a split character, divided between mind and body, narrator and narrated. See this description of his embarcation aboard The Queen of Portugal, a scene which provides a moving image of the dying author: “I think, upon my entrance into the boat, I presented a spectacle of the highest horror. The total loss of limbs was apparent to all who saw me, and my face contained marks of a most diseased state, if not of death itself” (p. 202). Insulted by the sailors as he is hoisted on board, the dying Fielding, suspended in a chair from ropes and pulleys, endured a “total loss of limbs” (referring here only to a loss of strength) which is reminiscent of the Unnamable’s piteous condition. Similarly, when Captain Veal testily argues that he has been paid a mere 30 pounds for the passage, Fielding responds: [He spoke] with a contempt which I own the sum did not seem to deserve in my eye, either in itself or on the present occasion; being, indeed, paid for the freight of —– weight of human flesh, which is above fifty per cent dearer than the freight of any other luggage, whilst in reality it takes up less room; in fact, no room at all. (p. 267) This is the typically self-deprecating tone of Fielding’s book. He makes a macabre joke at his own expense, wittily refusing to give his own weight because it is so little, and then adds that a human body like his own (mere “luggage”) indeed takes up “no room at all.” He has wasted away to nothing. Although Fielding sees the close connection between his book and his life, both of which are on the wane, Beckett does him one better. At the end of his long journey, Fielding’s entrance into Lisbon is delayed, and yet the author, in order “to avoid prolixity,” ignores this frustration, admitting only (half-humorously and bravely) that this is “a part of my narrative which may be more agreeable to my reader than it was to me.” The author of Waiting for Godot, on the other hand, wanting to link form and content (as he praises Joyce’s Work in Progress for doing), makes tedium a part of the reader’s or spectator’s own experience. 34

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In the eighteenth century, A Voyage to Lisbon concludes somewhat paradoxically on an upbeat note, with Fielding finally carried to shore and transported in a chaise to a comfortable coffee-house, where, he says, “[we] hath a very fine prospect of the River Tajo from Lisbon to the sea” (p. 285). He even takes time to quote Horace in a positive vein. In the twentieth century, Malone Dies concludes with the text simply ebbing away, the end of Malone’s story made equivalent to his last breaths: never there he will never never anything there any more (p. 288) We might be tempted to call Beckett’s ending more realistic. But we should remind ourselves that it is Fielding who is literally dying, not Beckett. In his novel Beckett may have taken a cue from Fielding’s actual journal, but he then fuses form and content, making the demise of his character more immediate for the reader. There is one more feature of the Journal which may have had its effect on Beckett. Similar to what we observed in Craik’s portrait of Swift, the image of Fielding prevalent in the early part of this century contained an element of the heroic. Granting that the book is not a masterpiece, Dobson in 1892 spoke of the light which the Journal throws upon its writer’s character, particularly upon his manliness and patience, and he goes on to observe (memorably): “Of Fielding’s life, it may be said truly, that nothing in it became him like the leaving it.” In his 1907 biography of Fielding, Dobson similarly refers to the “gallant and indomitable spirit” of this “patient and magnanimous hero of The Voyage to Lisbon.” In much the same vein, Cross in his 1918 biography of Fielding plainly asserts that “neither bandaged legs, nor crutches, nor the invalid’s chair, could break his spirit.” 35 Fielding’s courageous end makes us think of Beckett’s valetudinary men, who, like Molloy on his crutches, or, more so, like the Unnamable confined to a jar, can’t go on, but go on. In the dying Fielding, Beckett found a historical model – not a fictional one – for his characters who seem always on the verge of collapse but who manage nonetheless to endure. Yet there is an important difference here: for Fielding the human comedy is being played out for a divine purpose and death is a sort of test; for Beckett death is the ultimate irony, an end-point that plays the lie to our human dreams.


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III It cannot be denied that Sterne’s story of “The Death of Le Fever” affected Beckett when he read it as a student at Trinity College, for some 40 years later, in Rough for Radio II, his character called the “Animator” alludes to this very scene, saying that he faintly remembers having read it a long time ago.36 Furthermore, in describing Le Fever’s demise, Sterne, unlike Fielding at the end of A Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, employs imitative form: “Nature instantly ebb’d again,—the film returned to its place,—the pulse fluttered—stopp’d—went on—throb’d— stopp’d again—moved—stopp’d—shall I go on?—No.”37 The uneven, broken syntax is particularly reminiscent of the conclusion of Malone Dies; in both cases, the fragmentary form is meant to capture the ebbing of life, the last breaths of Le Fever and Malone. Somewhat surprisingly, however, on this occasion Beckett elects to remain quite serious, whereas Sterne turns cynically on his own melodrama. “Shall I go on?” asks Sterne. “No,” answers the reader, having had enough. In the disguised autobiography of Tristram Shandy – Sterne in a letter to a friend called it “a picture of myself” – the theme of approaching death emerges early.38 Volume 1 gives us this description of Parson Yorick, a gaunt figure who resembles Don Quixote mounted upon the bony Rosinante, or, to reverse the chronology, Molloy on his delapidated bicycle: “He never carried one single ounce of flesh upon his own bones, being altogether as spare a figure as his beast,—he would sometimes insist upon it, that the horse was as good as the rider deserved,— that they were, centaur-like,—both of a piece.” Such simpatico Tristram explains this way: He would give fifty humorous and opposite reasons for riding a meek-spirited jade of a broken-winded horse, preferably to one of mettle;—for on such a one he could sit mechanically, and mediate as delightfully de vanitate mundi et fuga saeculi, as with the advantage of a death’s head before him. (Vol. 1, Chap. 10, pp. 19–20) 39 This passage has both literary and autobiographical significance for Sterne. In addition to the allusion to Cervantes, the “death’s head” of Yorick’s horse harks back to the skull of Hamlet’s Yorick. More important for Beckett, however, must have been his awareness that death in Tristram Shandy is no mere theme but a reflection of Sterne’s own struggles with consumption, which first exhibited itself when he was still a student at Cambridge. Volume 4, for example, concludes with Sterne’s

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promise to continue his story in 12 months, “unless this vile cough kills me in the mean time” (Chap. 32, p. 338). His medical problems are amply documented in the first modern biography of Sterne, that published by Cross in 1909. 40 Continually reminded of his own mortality, it is not surprising that in A Sentimental Journey, The Journal to Eliza, and his published sermons the author adopted “Yorick” as his pseudonym. In the first third of Tristram Shandy, Sterne seems to keep the threat at bay. But beginning with Volume 4 the image of death asserts itself, often mingled, as everything else in Sterne’s book, with levity. Reminiscent of Parson Yorick on his bony horse, even the long-nosed stranger in Slawkenbergius’ tale is “mounted upon a dark mule” (Vol. 4, p. 245), and later Tristram complains that as he himself rode or wrote along, “the arch-jockey of jockeys had got behind me” (Chap. 20, p. 298). In the next volume, yet another figure of death appears, this one curiously reminiscent of the mysterious man in the macintosh in Ulysses: “There’s a man there—no—not him with the bundle under his arm—the grave man in black—’Sdeath!” (Vol. 5, Chap. 15, p. 371). Volume 5, however, is dominated by the unexpected death of Bobby, Tristram’s brother, and the family’s attempts to come to terms with it. “Philosophy,” we are told, “has a fine saying for every thing.—For Death it has an entire set” (Chap. 3, p. 353). But there are poignant moments, as when Tristram’s father says: “Consider, brother Toby,— when we are—death is not;—and when death is—we are not” (p. 356). Moreover, Corporal Trim’s oration upon death may not accomplish much, but his gesture speaks volumes: “Are we not here now;”—continued the corporal, “and are we not”— (dropping his hat plumb upon the ground—and pausing, before he pronounced the word)—“gone! in a moment?” The descent of the hat was as if a heavy lump of clay had been kneaded into the crown of it.—Nothing could have expressed the sentiment of mortality, of which it was the type and fore-runner, like it,—his hand seemed to vanish from under it,—it fell dead,—the corporal’s eye fix’d upon it, as upon a corps,—and Susannah burst into a flood of tears. (Chap. 7, p. 362) Like Lucky’s hat or the hat mentioned by the narrator of “The Expelled” in Stories and Texts for Nothing, this one stands for “a heavy lump of clay,” or the man himself.41 Even the style of this and other passages may have taught Beckett a thing or two: the run-on syntax, the euphemistic but ambiguous “it”


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used to refer to Trim’s hat and death itself, the toying with the negatives “not” and “nothing,” and, in the midst of such a serious subject, the puns on “corporal”/“corps” and the personification of the hat that “fell dead.” In a similar vein, Molloy’s reference to “blacken[ing] a few more pages” (p. 68) may be a playful allusion to Sterne’s famous black page, or at least both refer to death in an immediate, material way. Porter Abbott has likewise argued that the blank spaces in Malone Dies (especially near the end), imply “at once nothing and something that exceeds the importance of the text it sets off”; yet we need to remind ourselves that 200 years before Beckett, Tristram Shandy, and indeed 50 years before that, A Tale of a Tub, similarly made much of the plain white paper in their printed texts. 42 Surely the twentiethcentury writer must have seen in these eighteenth-century examples a nothingness which reflects the horrifying emptiness of the author himself. Both Sterne and Beckett strive to get beyond words, and this is no more true than when they are speaking of death, where words do no good. As Sterne admits in the dedication to Tristram Shandy: “I live in a constant endeavour to fence against the infirmities of ill health, and other evils of life, by mirth” (p. 3). But the truth of that statement is not felt until Volume 7 – what Max Byrd calls its “tragic center” – when the novel veers toward the threats to the author’s own health.43 This volume in particular anticipates Beckett’s fiction, especially the trilogy, where Molloy, Malone, and the Unnamable embrace the idea that death will bring a long-sought calm, and at the same time postpone death as long as possible. The somber tone of Volume 7 is set in its opening pages, although Sterne’s joie de vivre never entirely abandons him: [W]hen DEATH himself knocked at my door—ye bad him come again; and in so gay a tone of careless indifference, did ye do it, that he doubted of his commission— “—There must certainly be some mistake in this matter,” quoth he. (Chap. 1, p. 395)44 As Arthur H. Cash says, Sterne at this point makes it clear that “the only villain of Tristram’s piece is Death.” 45 And the unwelcome visitor now knows where Tristram resides. Nonetheless, although tormented by a “vile cough” (p. 395) and feeling “Sick! sick! sick! sick!” (p. 397), the traveller resolves to attempt to outrun him, crossing the Channel to Calais and riding from there to Boulogne, Montreuil, Abbeville, Paris,

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Auxerre, Lyons, and Avignon – all the while attempting to defeat “that death-looking, long-striding scoundrel of a scare-sinner, who is posting after me” (Chap. 7, p. 402). But there is a doubleness to Sterne’s journey across the Continent, for while he is attempting to escape Death he is likewise attempting to find his health, to discover, we might say, himself. The view of life in Volume 7 is decidedly Beckettian; or, to put this another way, Beckett, if not before, would here have arrived at an awareness of his kinship with Sterne. Tristram refers to “the chances of a transitory life” (Chap. 9, p. 405), and everywhere he discovers signs of this, even in Lyons finding that Lippius’ famous clock is “in it’s decay” (Chap. 39, p. 440).46 Others are shocked by Tristram’s appearance: When the director of Madam Le Blanc’s conscience coming in at that instant, and seeing a person in black, with a face as pale as ashes, at his devotions—looking still paler by the contrast and distress of his drapery—ask’d, if I stood in want of the aids of the church— I go by WATER—said I—and here’s another will be for making me pay for going by OYL. (Chap. 34, p. 435) Ironically, Tristram here bears some resemblance to the very figure of death he is attempting to escape; however, frail and sickly as he is, he continues to turn from death, and “I fled him chearfully” (Chap. 42, p. 442). Indeed there is in Sterne’s, as in Swift’s and Fielding’s last days, an unmistakable courage: “This is the humour, infantile, impervious and heroic,” says Byrd, “that exposes a self and yet preserves it.”47 Beckett’s characters exhibit the same traits, hanging on till the last, making their macabre jokes, compulsively telling their stories. “So much of motion,” says Tristram, “is so much of life, and so much of joy—and that to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil—” (Chap. 13, p. 407). It seems that for Tristram as for Vladimir and Estragon, Hamm, and Malone, stasis becomes a living death. The mortality looming over Tristram and Beckett’s journal-writers is reflected in their respective texts. Punning, the modern author refers in The Unnamable to “the stench of decomposition” (p. 318), implying a connection between his aging personae and the disintegration of his writing.48 If Sterne’s and Beckett’s characters bear the stink of death, so also their texts everywhere threaten to come undone. “This is vile work,” exclaims Sterne’s narrator near the beginning of his story (Vol. 1, Chap. 22, p. 59), just as two centuries later Malone will grumble, “What tedium” (pp. 187 and 189) and “This is awful” (p. 191). Elsewhere,


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Tristram refers openly to his authorial difficulties: “I forget his name” (Vol. 7, Chap. 4, p. 399); “I do not recollect . . . where my understanding was more at a loss” (Vol. 8, Chap. 6, p. 454); and “I am got, I know not how, into a cold unmetaphorical vein of infamous writing” (Vol. 9, Chap. 13, p. 516). At one point we are shown how Yorick on the cover of a sermon scribbled the word “ BRAVO” in capital letters, then crossed it out in a different tint of ink – “as if he had retracted, or was ashamed of the opinion he had once entertained of it” (Vol. 6, Chap. 11, p. 356). Beckett more cynically dramatizes his own uncertainty and lack of authorial control, as in The Unnamable: “what rubbish all this stuff” (p. 306); “But there is something wrong here” (p. 338); and “Bah, any old pronoun will do, provided one sees through it” (p. 343). We might observe of Tristram as well as Beckett’s narrators what Tristram asks himself: “But this is neither here nor there—why do I mention it?—Ask my pen,—it governs me,—I govern not it” (Vol. 6, Chap. 6, p. 345). Beckett’s notion of the impotence of the writer, which seems so modern, or even postmodern, may in fact be the most significant trait he borrowed from Sterne. Sterne and Beckett both present themselves as suffering physically, but suffering also as artists. “Every line I write,” laments Tristram, “I feel an abatement of the quickness of my pulse . . . ” (Vol. 3, Chap. 28, p. 175). And in the next volume he notes that in a sense his autobiography has become his antagonist: “The more I write,” laments Tristram, “the more I shall have to write,” adding that “I shall never overtake myself”; and bluntly alluding to his title, he admits that “My OPINIONS will be the death of me” (Vol. 4, Chap. 13, pp. 234–5). This problem is Malone’s as well, for he too has much to say and is concerned that his little Venus pencil will run out of lead before he is done. Sounding like Tristram, he admits to a “fear of not finishing in time,” although he scarcely sounds like Tristram when he adds that this is coupled with a “fear of revelling, for the last time, in a last outpouring of misery, impotence and hate” (p. 197). The bitter tone is not Tristram’s, but what is comparable is the disarming revelation of one’s motivations, plus the fear that the time required for the telling of one’s life exceeds one’s life expectancy. Scribo ergo sum: because their lives have narrowed to the point that their existences are located at the point of their pencils, both narrators are gripped by a compulsion to write. Yet Tristram confides in Volume 9, Sterne’s last, that he feels his “want of powers” (Chapter 24, p. 527). And Beckett heightens Sterne’s “eros of mind,” as Peter Steele has termed it. 49 For example, see the breathless end to the trilogy:

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. . . I say what I hear, I hear what I say, I don’t know, one or the other, or both, that makes three possibilities, pick your fancy, all these stories about travellers, these stories about paralytics, all are mine, I must be extremely old, or it’s memory playing tricks, if only I knew if I’ve lived, if I live, if I’ll live, that would simplify everything, impossible to find out, that’s where you’re buggered, I haven’t stirred, that’s all I know, no, I know something else, it’s not I, I always forget that. . . . (p. 412) Through his “syntax of weakness,” as he once called it, Beckett exaggerates the Unnamable’s want of powers at every opportunity:50 his persona demonstrates his inability to make rhetorical choices; he says that he must be extremely old and his memory playing tricks on him, but then humorously admits (a variation on an old joke) that he cannot be sure; he confides in us that all his stories of travellers and paralytics are really his own, and that he himself has not stirred; and yet simultaneously he confesses that he does in fact know one thing, that “it” (presumably the Unnamable himself) is “not I,” though he tends to forget this. Both writers convert their physical and literary impotence into the stuff of fiction, then dramatize the weakness of their writing as way of demonstrating the frailty of their own existences. Beyond Tristram Shandy there was for Beckett the model of Sterne’s Journal to Eliza, a series of letters composed simultaneously with A Sentimental Journey. Undoubtedly inspired by the belated publication of Swift’s Journal to Stella in 1766, Sterne’s effusive series of letters to the young Elizabeth Draper, with whom he was in love, or thought he was in love (he had known her only a few months), were not discovered until 1851 and not published until 1904 in Cross’s edition of Sterne’s Works.51 Although the Journal to Eliza – Sterne called it “a Diary of the miserable feelings of a person” (p. 137) – has little or no literary interest, it is an important autobiographical document and may have contributed, like the other works discussed in this chapter, to the style of Beckett’s journal-like fiction. The Journal purports to be a series of thinly veiled love-letters from Yorick to Elizabeth Draper, young wife of an official of the East India Company, but for Beckett its main interest would have been the first half, where Sterne devotes so much attention to the state of his declining health. In the initial entry of 12 April 1767, he mentions being “worn out in both body and mind,” in the next that he “got up tottering and feeble,” and the day following protests that he is “worn out with fevers of all kinds” (p. 138). So it goes for the next six weeks, Sterne


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sometimes sounding like a Renaissance sonneteer, complaining that Eliza is not only his confidante but the source of his ills: “The want of thee is half my distemper, but not the whole of it” (p. 156). Periodically ordered by his physicians to stay in bed, Sterne takes tea, is bled, is dosed with James’s Powder, and undergoes a course of mercury. But nothing works. “You’re half dead, I fear,” comments a friend he encounters in the street (p. 152). “I am worn down, my dear Girl, to a shadow” (p. 142), Yorick complains to Eliza, and elsewhere reports, employing a marvelous metaphor: “I have been dismilly ill all day, owing to my course of Medicines which are too strong and forcing for this gawsy Constitution of mine” (p. 170). As in Tristram Shandy, attention in Sterne’s Journal is repeatedly given not only to the writer’s failing health but also to the actual struggle to compose the work, to communicate through writing. We might imagine ourselves reading a novel titled Yorick Dies. Theatricalizing himself, Sterne writes that “this moment when upon taking up my pen, my poor pulse quicken’d” (p. 147), and more melodramatically: “So ill, I could not write a word all this morning—not so much, as Eliza! farewell to thee; I’m going—” (p. 144). With an immediacy reminiscent of Cervantes and Fielding before him, Sterne presents an image of himself as a writer who is dying: “It was with difficulty I could reach the street door. I have got home, and shall lay all day upon my Sopha, and tomorrow morning, my dear Girl, write again to thee; for I have not strength to drag my pen” (p. 151). The prone, egocentric narrator who is recounting his unsuccessful struggles to write, coupled with the epistolary impediments – these are things which may have influenced Beckett in his writing of Malone Dies and other works. Unlike Sterne, Malone is not addressing his comments to a specific audience, and yet Beckett has managed to catch Sterne’s intimate, improvisitory style in instances such as the following: “I fear I must have fallen asleep again. In vain I grope, I cannot find my exercise-book. But I still have the pencil in my hand. I shall have to wait for day to break. God knows what I am going to do till then” (p. 208). But there are differences. While both Sterne and Malone are confined to bed, the eighteenth-century writer literally felt he was dying, and we know and Beckett knew that his predecessor was dead within less than a year of his writing the above sentences. 52 Beckett may, to use Malone’s words, “grovel and wallow in mortality until the end of time” (p. 241), but for him death was at least not so imminent, and he can thus afford to be a bit more playful. Sterne’s Journal to Eliza is a somber work, whereas Beckett’s Malone Dies – like Tristram Shandy – does

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not hesitate to laugh death in the face. In the above passage, for example, Malone appears almost clownish in his fretting over the lost exercise book, gripping tightly his stub of a Venus pencil, waiting for the dawn. Critics frequently quote Beckett’s observation on the impotence of the modern artist, but in this context his words seem worth citing once again: “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”53 This aesthetic principle, which captures so well the paradox of Beckett’s own art from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Worstward Ho, was, we can now see, nourished by his study of eighteenth-century writers. He appears to have identified with Swift, who in his thirty-second year recorded a list of thoughts entitled “When I come to be old,” who in Gulliver’s Travels created the grotesque image of the perpetually dying Struldbruggs, and who late in life wrote humorously about his own demise in “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.” 54 With Fielding and Sterne, Beckett seems to have been drawn to their last compositions. All three offered him oxymoronically vivid models of the slow-dying writer who refuses to surrender, continuing to attempt to define himself up until the bitter end. Swift, Fielding, and Sterne gave him historical equivalents to the image of the dying Joyce. And what Beckett seems to have discovered in these writers is not only a courage in the face of physical decline, but a persistence also in the face of multiple impediments to writing: fading memory, waning imagination, doubt as to the best way to express something, and uncertainty as to the truth of one’s own utterances. To “go on” in spite of these things requires a kind of heroism.

“I am what I am,” says Belacqua, quoting a few of Swift’s last words, and then adding that “he had read the phrase somewhere and liked it and made it his own.”55 Beckett was 28 when he identified with Swift’s last words, spoken when the Irish patriot was 78. But surely it underscores the depth of Beckett’s identification with the writers of the eighteenth century to speculate that close to 50 years later, when he himself was 83 and in a nursing home, he may still have had in mind the dying Jonathan Swift. Malone muses: “I wonder what my last words will be, written, the others do not endure, but vanish, into thin air” (p. 249). Beckett’s final literary utterance – a poem written as “comment dire” (in October


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1988) and translated as “what is the word” (in April 1989) – gives a belated answer to Malone’s wondering: folly seeing all this – this – what is the word – this this – this this here –56 There is in this poem a haunting parallel to the shattered last words of Beckett’s fictional Malone. More to the point, however, in using the word “folly,” which to a late twentieth-century (at least American) ear sounds a touch quaint, Beckett seems to echo a few more of Swift’s dying words. On his birthday in 1743, having been told that people were planning to celebrate the occasion, Swift mumbled, “It is all folly,” and at the end of the next March, struggling to speak to his servant, he showed some uneasiness and said, “I am a fool.”57 Although he lingered until October 1745, these were his last recorded words. Ironically, sadly, the dying Beckett, who since the time he was young had imagined himself an old man, empathizing with the aging Swift, here seems unconsciously to echo Swift’s own dying words. The final “folly” recognized by the two men is the folly of the world as well as the folly of themselves, struggling stupidly till the end to think and to communicate.58 By 1989 Beckett had become the Swift with whom he had literarily identified for half a century.

6 “My Johnson Fantasy”

Enlarge my life with multitude of days, In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays; Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know, That life protracted is protracted woe. Samuel Johnson1 Beckett had a special interest in Samuel Johnson. He studied him for over a year in 1936–37, when he was engaged in primary and secondary research for a full-length play to be focused on Johnson’s last years and called (adapting the title of the famous poem) Human Wishes. In some respects, this research was a continuation of his reading of eighteenthcentury writers over the previous five years; yet his single-minded concern with Johnson seems to have been a good deal more personal and was aimed toward the production of a particular work. In a 22 July 1937 letter to his friend George Reavey, he referred to his peculiar fascination as “my Johnson fantasy.” 2 However, the play, which began quite well, was unfortunately abandoned after the completion of only part of its first scene – and like Godot, Johnson never appears. Scholars have offered several explanations for Beckett’s giving up on this project: for example, Deirdre Bair says that he ran into insurmountable problems of language, attempting to have Johnson speak in the English of his century (“after the manner of Boswell,” he reportedly said), whereas the other characters were to speak in an Irish brogue; alternately, Ruby Cohn suggests that Beckett “could not resolve the conflict between the realistic biographical drama he had painstakingly prepared himself to write and the verbal ballet he actually found himself writing.”3 Knowing what happened to Beckett’s work after the mid-1930s, either of these explanations (which are not mutually exclusive) makes 110


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sense, as does Cohn’s subsequent discussion, and Linda Ben-Zvi’s, of some of the prophetic features of the fragment relative to Beckett’s later drama.4 I want to offer, however, an alternate explanation for the collapse of Human Wishes. It seems to me that in the course of researching Johnson for his play, Beckett began to perceive the comic as well as tragic possibilities – especially the latter – of the life of his eighteenth-century forebear.5 He empathized with Johnson; moreover, the figure of the declining Johnson became for him a sort of metaphor of Western man, academic and witty, alone, afraid of dying and yet intrigued by his own physical deterioration. Without denying the relevance of Human Wishes to the mature drama, I want to suggest the relevance of Beckett’s study of Johnson to his subsequent fiction. There are elements of Johnson the man in Dan Rooney, Hamm, and Krapp, but also in Molloy, Malone, and the Unnamable; each of them might be accused, like Macmann in Malone Dies, of “wallow[ing] in his mortality.”6

I It is difficult to say when Beckett’s interest in Johnson began. In a letter to MacGreevy of 8 September 1934, there is an allusion to “the Lexicographer kicking the stone.”7 Coupled with the fact that Beckett owned at his death Johnson’s Dictionary and his statement that he believed he purchased this eighteenth-century edition during his Dublin years (see Appendix A), it is tempting to speculate that his first real introduction to Johnson came neither through Boswell nor Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, but rather through this work. On the other hand, Johnson’s violent reaction to the immaterialism of Berkeley (originating in Boswell) is toyed with in Joyce’s Ulysses and is in fact widely known by people who have not read Johnson or Boswell.8 Moreover, the presence in the Whoroscope notebook (1932–38) of quotations from Johnson’s Life of Ascham and Life of Dryden, Rasselas, and Boswell’s Life of Johnson and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides suggests that Beckett began reading Johnson prior to starting his three reading notebooks dedicated to Human Wishes.9 In any case, it is interesting that the citations in the Whoroscope notebook are for the most part to primary sources, whereas those in the subsequent notebooks are mainly to secondary sources; presumably, then, Beckett moved from reading Johnson himself to an interest in Johnson the man, and at this time began to read about his eighteenth-century predecessor. According to Knowlson, in July 1935, on a visit to England with his mother, Beckett paid a visit to Johnson’s Lichfield birthplace; having

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seen his mother safely on her way home, he apparently went alone. Nonetheless, Bair’s and Knowlson’s suggestion that this visit had the purposiveness of a “pilgrimage” (both biographers use the word) is rather misleading, suggesting as it does a purposiveness that Beckett did not at this time possess.10 The guest book at Johnson’s Birthplace Museum in Lichfield bears no signature by Samuel Beckett anytime in 1935, and indeed the only verification of this trip is his letter to MacGreevy of 29 July 1935: “I hope to fit in a look at Lichfield before turning for home. . . . ”11 In spite of the paucity of evidence, however, I would not hesitate to guess that Beckett, who was perhaps beginning to be drawn to the person of Johnson, did visit his birthplace; and if in fact he went to Lichfield, he would have been able to see there, among other things, several of Johnson’s books, his walking stick, his writing desk, and his large chair. This last item, which was presumably the chair in which the asthmatic Johnson sat before finally taking to his bed, is now in the Museum’s attic but was in 1935 prominently displayed in a glass case. The final typescript of Murphy is dated “26 June 1936,” and thus Beckett’s new project was overlapping his old.12 In the first of the Johnson notebooks there are early, rather haphazard notes (mainly quotations) from Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and in this and the other two notebooks there are also quotations from the following: Hester Lynch Thrale’s Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, first published in 1786; John Hawkins’ The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., first published in 1787; Leslie Stephen’s 1878 biography of Johnson for Macmillan’s English Men of Letters Series; Thomas Seccombe’s lengthy “Essay Introductory” to A. M. Broadley’s Doctor Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, published in 1910; The Dictionary of National Biography; and C. E. Vulliamy’s Mrs. Thrale of Streatham, published in 1936 and thus for Beckett the latest discussion of his subject.13 Boswell’s Life, Mrs. Thrale’s Anecdotes, and Vulliamy’s new book were extremely important to him, and indeed at his death he owned all three books, although his copy of the Anecdotes was published in 1984, and his six-volume 1887 edition of Boswell was not purchased until 1961 (see Appendix A). Beckett’s research on Johnson seems to have been done at the National Library, which he explicitly mentions in a 22 May 1936 letter to Mary Manning, and which he presumably means when a year later, on 5 June 1937, he tells his friend MacGreevy that “the only thing resembling work has been in the library on Johnson.” In any case, all of the major sources cited by Beckett in his notebooks could have been found in the National Library. Of particular importance to Beckett would seem to have been Vulliamy’s Mrs. Thrale of Streatham. Throughout, this semipopular but


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stylishly written book, published with a commercial press, deals with “Mr. Johnson in Love” (Chapter 14) in a rather sensational way; nonetheless, it is clear that Vulliamy has been influenced by the contemporary concern for scholarly objectivity. He weighs the available “evidence” (the word appears repeatedly) and attempts to locate the “truth” regarding Samuel Johnson. At the distance of more than half a century, of course, it would be easy (as others have) to mock Vulliamy’s scholarly romance, but for Beckett in 1937 Mrs. Thrale of Streatham supplied an argument in favor of the unlikely love affair between Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, and, in addition, would have given him a detailed, three-dimensional, sympathetic portrait of Johnson himself. As far as Beckett was concerned, the publication of Vulliamy’s book at this time appears to have been both fortuitous and a distraction, for he now gets caught up in elaborating on this new discussion of the relationship between Johnson and Mrs. Thrale. In a 22 May 1936 letter to Manning he reports – oxymoronically – that he has been in the library “trying to document a fantasy of the late Samuel Johnson LL.D.” 14 Although in this letter he is not specific about the nature of this “fantasy” (the same word he used in the letter to Reavey cited above), it soon becomes clear that he has developed his own pet theory regarding Johnson’s relationship with Hester Thrale: reading between the lines of Vulliamy’s discussion, he sees Johnson as hampered by an “impotence” which becomes evident after the death of Mr. Thrale in early 1781. Although Beckett departed for Germany at the end of September 1936, not returning until the middle of the following April, his separation from the National Library seems not to have derailed his engagement with Johnson. A 13 December 1936 letter to Manning indicates that he is continuing to think in detail about his project: he tells her that he is considering a play, that it will be “perhaps only one long act,” and that he is interested in the “psychology” of Johnson, particularly what he sees as the old man’s love for the much younger Hester.15 In April 1937 this theme is further developed in two letters to MacGreevy: on 20 April he says that he intends for his play to explain Johnson’s esteem for “the imbecile Mr. Thrale,” while focusing on his obsessive, unspoken love for Mrs. Thrale; and on 26 April he says he believes that Johnson was “absurdly in love” with Mrs. Thrale but impotent in the face of her availability. Admitting in this second letter that “there is no text for the impotence,” Beckett nonetheless intends to develop this theme. Biographical fact is shoved aside in favor of imaginative speculation.

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The three Johnson notebooks, along with several letters to MacGreevy, Manning, and others, show that Beckett was drawn in two quite different directions: (1) toward the figure of Johnson in love with the much younger Hester Thrale, including his personal theory regarding Johnson’s impotence; and (2) simultaneously toward the image of the physically deteriorating Johnson, that massive intellect in decline. Throughout the notebooks, these two concerns remain quite separate, and Beckett seems to be having difficulty choosing between them. The closest he comes to linking the two themes is the December 1936 letter to Manning in which he comments on the situation after the death of Henry Thrale: “What interested me especially was the breakdown of Johnson as soon as Thrale disappeared.” Beckett’s elaborate doodle in the manuscript of the unfinished play, now at Reading University, may also suggest the two themes: between the looming and bizarre crucifixions of Christ and one of the thieves is a cartoon of what appears to be Johnson in a bowler and toting a suitcase – labeled with a “J” – and with his arm around a diminutive lady in a wedding gown. 16 Coincidentally, in mid-March of 1937 a cache of Boswelliana was discovered at Malahide Castle outside of Dublin; in this find, widely reported in the press, was located the original manuscript (presumed lost or destroyed) of the medical journal, titled Aegri Ephemeris, that Johnson kept during his final illness. 17 Indeed the journal had previously caught the attention of Beckett, who had jotted down references to it as he came across them in Boswell’s Life (MS 3461/3 [p. 38]), Hawkins’ Life (MS 3461/2 [p. 54]), and Sir Humphry Rolleston’s “Medical Aspects of Samuel Johnson,” Chapter 13 of Aspects of Age, Life and Disease, published in 1928 (MS 3461/2 [p. 23]).18 Although the journal was not published until 1958, the stir surrounding its discovery in Ireland would have made Beckett, who returned from Germany in April 1937, dramatically aware of the ongoing nature of Boswell–Johnson scholarship and the difficulty in locating the “truth.” Did these factors contribute to his inability to complete Human Wishes? Or could the discovery of this “Sick Man’s Journal” – as Johnson called it – have moved Beckett, once and for all, away from a play on Johnson in love and toward a novel based on the gradual demise of its first-person narrator? Malone Dies in particular is Beckett’s fictionalization of just such a journal. An outline inside the back cover of the first of Beckett’s notebooks shows that his plan for a one-act play at some point expanded into a four-act structure, and he on 3 July 1937 tells Joseph Hone that he sees more research to be done. Then in an 11 [July?] 1937 letter to Manning,


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Beckett alludes ominously to “the Johnson play if it is ever written,” and at the same time explains quite clearly what his focus will and will not be: It isn’t Boswell’s wit and wisdom machine that means anything to me, but the miseries that he [Johnson] never talked of, because unwilling or unable to do so. The horror of annihilation, the horror of madness, the horrified love of Mrs. Thrale. . . . The opium eating [erasure] dreading-to-go to bed, praying-for-the-dead, past living, terrified of dying, terrified of deadness, panting on to 75 bag of water, with a hydracele on his right testis. How jolly. Although Johnson’s relationship with Mrs. Thrale is mentioned here, this letter seems to indicate a swerving in Beckett’s thinking about his play. Having for over a year attempted to develop his theory of Johnson’s love for Mrs. Thrale, complicated by his impotence after her husband’s death, he now appears to be attracted more strongly to the image of the physically deteriorating Johnson, that massive intellect in decline. A few weeks later, in a 4 August 1937 letter to MacGreevy, Beckett, importantly, seems almost to identify with Johnson. “There can hardly have been many so completely at sea in their solitude as he was or so horribly aware of it,” he writes. Taking Johnson’s side in his disapproval of Gabriel Piozzi, the Italian musician who became Hester Thrale’s second husband, Beckett contrasts her isolation with that of the subject of his play-in-progress: She had none of that need to suffer or necessity of suffering that he had . . . [I see that] he, in a sense was spiritually self-conscious, was a tragic figure, i.e., worth putting down as part of the whole of which oneself is part, and that she, being never physically self-conscious is less interesting to me personally. The groom didn’t have what she wanted either, Piozzi being a poor performer. “Human Wishes.” This is an important document. Not only does it (I believe) mark Beckett’s first reference to the title of his play, but it also lays out clearly what attracted him to Johnson: the “necessity” of his suffering, his spiritual as well as physical self-consciousness, and the tragic cast to his life. The phrase “the whole of which oneself is part” is particularly significant, suggesting as it does Beckett’s personal identification with Johnson, or at least his sense of their shared humanity.

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However, in spite of his deep involvement with Johnson at this point, Beckett continued to struggle with the writing of his play. “The Johnson thing has gone away to be died,” he admits to Reavey only two days after saying the above, adding that he means the idea of it, for he has not yet begun to write. The play had been developing slowly and unevenly, and four months after he told MacGreevy that he was ready to begin, he seems still to have remained rather unsure what his position is relative to the complex, oftentimes ambiguous, nonliterary material. “I had the Johnson thing fairly clear in my mind,” he confesses to his friend on 14 October 1937, “but with not thinking about it it has gone obscure again. Perhaps it gets clearer elsewhere.” Beckett had become very nearly lost in his efforts to document Johnson in love with Mrs. Thrale as well as the tragic decline of his last years; not only did he have difficulty fixing on one of these themes, but the notebooks demonstrate that he unearthed conflicting evidence everywhere and was both intrigued and confounded by this. At the end of the third notebook Beckett scribbles a note to himself on seven different sources for Mrs. Thrale’s Anecdotes and another on the three (in addition to Boswell’s) quite different “Accounts of Dr. Johnson’s last days”: those by William Windham, Sir John Hawkins, and John Hoole (MS 3461/3 [p. 43]). It would seem that although Beckett had accumulated a tremendous amount of material for his play Human Wishes, his research had not clearly resolved either of the two matters that interested him. Perhaps he felt he knew too much at this point to write. Or while as a writer he may have felt liberated by the scholarly ambiguity, he must, as something of a scholar himself, have felt puzzled and perhaps frustrated by his own inability to pin these matters down. In his essay on “Johnson’s Last Days: Some Facts and Problems,” Paul Korshin looks closely at the impersonal but inaccurate Hawkins, Hoole’s focus on Johnson’s conversion, and the epic flavor of Boswell, then concludes: these three interpreters, “whatever their strengths, also embody inconsistencies that should make us realize how uncertain an attainment is complete literary objectivity.”19 Beckett’s frustrating attempts to write a play on Samuel Johnson had an odd impact on his writing immediately thereafter. The Johnsonian influence is ultimately revealed in the debilitated central characters who emerge in his drama and fiction of the late 1940s and after; but the book which immediately follows Beckett’s study does not contain a character who clearly recalls Johnson. Watt, written in France between 1941 and 1945, is a sort of transition from the aborted Human Wishes and his novels and plays to come, and the character Watt (what?) could


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be said to reflect the intellectually curious Johnson. On the other hand, in a sense we can see that this most “academic” of Beckett’s works indirectly reflects the struggle its author himself had been through; in spite of his scholarly efforts, he has been unable to grasp the character of the enigmatic Samuel Johnson. Although it would be a gross oversimplification, of course, to say that Watt’s ultimately unsuccessful quest for the mysterious Mr. Knott is a mere novelization of Beckett’s aborted quest for an understanding of his literary predecessor, I believe there is an element of truth here. That Beckett had not forgotten Johnson is shown by the buried reference to “the vanity of human wishes” near the beginning of the novel. 20 In any case, Beckett’s lengthy research on Johnson seems to have brought home once and for all the realization that scholarly thoroughness is no guarantee of truth. “It is difficult for a man like Watt,” says “Sam,” Beckett’s narrator, to tell a long story like Watt’s without leaving out some things, and foisting in others. And this does not mean either that I may not have left out some of the things that Watt told me, or foisted in others that Watt never told me, though I was most careful to note down all at the time, in my little notebook. (p. 126) The narrator reflects Sam Beckett’s own uncertainties. He sounds here rather compulsive, like one who has meticulously taken notes on his subject but fears he has been unable to capture the “true” Johnson. Years later Malone admits: “My notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record” (p. 259). An attempt at accuracy and completeness like Boswell’s, or Sam’s, or indeed like Beckett’s own, leads not to a singular truth but rather to multiple perceptions. Not that Erskine, Arsene, Walter, Vincent and the others could have told anything of Watt, except perhaps Arsene a little, and Erskine a little more, for they could not, but they might have told something of Mr. Knott. Then we would have had Erskine’s Mr. Knott, and Arsene’s Mr. Knott, and Walter’s Mr. Knott, and Vincent’s Mr. Knott, to compare with Watt’s Mr. Knott. That would have been a very interesting exercise. (p. 126) One thing Beckett must have learned through his research was that in the process he has only discovered Boswell’s Johnson, Hawkins’ Johnson,

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Hester Thrale’s Johnson, Vulliamy’s Johnson. . . . “That,” we can almost hear him say, “was a very interesting exercise.” 21 Nonetheless, although his scholarship failed to give Beckett a play on Johnson, it did permit him to write a novel that among other things mocks his own frustrations; Watt parodies the scholarly enterprise Beckett had recently abandoned, and one might argue that its structural open-endedness in fact reflects his abandonment of Human Wishes. In France during the war, that is, Beckett found a way to put his scholarly frustrations to novelistic use; then after the war he again drew on his Johnson research, this time utilizing not the empty quest but the figure of Johnson himself – sick and dying – as something of a model for his own characters.

II It would appear that the collapse of Human Wishes was caused by Beckett’s fascination with the rather novelistic figure (at least as he appears in several of his sources) of Johnson himself – the image of that deteriorating body, slowly declining intellect, and threatening depression of spirit. This enigmatic figure eventually overshadowed his interest in the unlikely relationship between Johnson and Mrs. Thrale. Beckett’s notes on his extensive research reveal his attention to Johnson’s physical ailments, and also to certain matters of temperament: his fear of isolation and delight in “company,” his need for conversation, his moodiness and periodic depression, his fear of going insane, and his morbid obsession with death. Thus, as I suggested above, although Watt is a sort of Johnsonian figure in his endless ratiocination, Johnson may ultimately be connected with Mr. Knott, who, seen here only remotely, emerges later as the dominant character in Beckett’s most significant fiction. In his fiction Beckett ends up imaginatively exploring the inner life of this Johnsonian figure, the one he had so much difficulty pinning down by means of his research. Beckett’s Johnson notebooks show that he is concerned from the start with this learned mind fastened to a body plagued by physical ailments. “I was born almost dead,” writes Johnson at the beginning of his autobiographical Annals, and in his notebooks Beckett quotes the line twice (MSS 3461/2 [p. 105] and 3461/3 [p. 13 verso]).22 “I was born grave as others syphilitic,” says Malone, punning on “grave” (p. 195). “Birth was the death of him,” begins A Piece of Monologue.23 Boswell laments that chronicling Johnson’s life during 1782 (two years before his death) is “little more than a mournful recital of his illness” (Vol. 4, p. 136), and


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in a sense the same could be said of Johnson’s life as a whole: he was born nearly blind in one eye; he contracted early a case of scrofula, or “the king’s evil,” which affected his facial appearance and his hearing; he endured a chronic asthma; he for many years suffered from the gout, and more seriously, from dropsy or oedema of the legs, a condition that caused him much pain, restricted his movements, and eventually contributed to his death. In any case, Molloy’s reference to his “ignorance of medical matters” (p. 56) belies his creator’s fascination with Johnson’s, and his own, physical ailments. Beckett goes so far as to copy into his second notebook several pages from the detailed autopsy report on Johnson’s death, including even the most technical terminology (MS 3461/2 [pp. 17–20]). It would seem to be no coincidence that Johnson’s medical problems, or ones like them, are shared by several of Beckett’s characters. And although as early as Dream of Fair to Middling Women one can locate references to “a blind paralytic” and to Belacqua’s own “ruined feet,” “weak eyes,” and how he “stumped along now, gasping,” Beckett’s encounter with Johnson appears to have drawn together these images.24 The eighteenth-century figure served as a catalyst, that is, with Beckett’s research easing him from fact into fiction, from a kind of documentary on his predecessor to a novel expressing his own disparate ideas in a more cohesive way. Furthermore, if Johnson’s public works suggest an austerity, his vulnerability is conveyed in his private writings and letters, and Boswell in particular showed Beckett how to reveal that inner man while avoiding sentimentality. 25 And he read not only a great deal of biographical material but also many of Johnson’s letters, his Annals, and the Prayers and Meditations. These last items seem to have been particularly important to him: he specifically mentions the Annals in a letter to Joseph Hone (3 July 1937) and the Prayers and Meditations in letters to MacGreevy (4 August 1937) and Manning (26 August 1937). Of course Joyce’s near-blindness may have prompted in some way Beckett’s blind characters. But here it is impossible to separate the contemporary from the eighteenth-century influence, for Johnson writes in his Annals that ten days after his birth he was taken home, “a poor, diseased infant, almost blind” (p. 105) – and Beckett quotes this in the notebooks (MS 3461/2 [p. 105]). Dan Rooney and Hamm are blind, and Nagg’s and Nell’s sight and hearing are both failing. So too blindness and deafness are mentioned frequently in the trilogy. Like Johnson, the Unnamable has been “blind from birth” (p. 387) and he describes his condition this way: “waiting alone, blind, deaf, you don’t know where, you don’t know for what, for a hand to come and draw you away,

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somewhere else, where perhaps it’s worse” (p. 382). Not atypically, Beckett hints at a metaphorical significance to the Unnamable’s blindness and deafness; his major characters’ sensory handicaps are ultimately less important than their epistemological difficulties in comprehending the world and their place in it. Here as elsewhere, he has found a way to link physical disabilities to an overriding concern for intellectual understanding. Johnson’s gout and dropsy suggest the many leg problems suffered by Beckett’s characters. In Watt, Sam Lynch is confined to a wheelchair, as is Hamm in Endgame; so too Molloy walks on crutches and refers to his “chronic arthritis,” Malone is in bed and has no use of his legs, and the Unnamable perhaps possesses no legs or arms at all, or at least has no sensation in them. Speaking of one-legged Mahood, the Unnamable promises that his next persona will be a “billy in the bowl” – a popular Dublin paraplegic in Beckett’s day. 26 “Faith that’s an idea, yet another, mutilate, mutilate, and perhaps some day, fifteen generations hence, you’ll succeed in beginning to look like yourself, among the passers-by” (p. 315). In spite of their impressive intellects, both Johnson and the Unnamable equate their identities with their physical selves. Boswell quotes Johnson: “Sir, (said he,) Dr. Dodd would have given both his hands and both his legs to have lived” (Vol. 3, p. 154). Elsewhere Boswell reports that a few days before he died Johnson said he would give one of his legs for a year more of life (Vol. 4, p. 409). In Molloy the narrator jokes about another of Johnson’s ailments which Beckett cited in his notebooks: “Ah yes, my asthma, how often I was tempted to put an end to it by cutting my throat” (p. 79). Johnson first comments on his difficulty breathing in 1777 and during the next seven years there are increasing references in Boswell and elsewhere to this affliction. In a letter written within his last year he complains to a friend about his asthma, which he fears is “constitutional and incurable.” But Johnson takes courage from the fact that Sir John Floyer, a Lichfield physician and author of a book on asthma that he read only a few months before he died, “panted on to ninety” (Boswell, Vol. 4, p. 267), and Beckett makes note of this (MS 3461/2 [p. 22]). He himself employs the same language some 18 years later, in All That Fall. Says Dan Rooney: “No, I cannot be said to be well. But I am no worse. Indeed I am better than I was. The loss of my sight was a great fillip. If I could go deaf and dumb I think I might pant on to be a hundred.”27 At about the same time, he used similar phraseology on the first page of Malone Dies: “Indeed I would not put it past me to pant on to the Transfiguration, not to speak of the Assumption. But I do not think so, I do


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not think I am wrong in saying that these rejoicings will take place in my absence, this year” (p. 179). And later, in How It Is, the word “pant” or “panting” appears repeatedly (some 75 times), almost imitating the panting of the speaker; on one occasion we get what would seem to be a description of an asthmatic attack: a fancy I am given a fancy the panting stops and a breathclock breath of life head in the bag oxygen for half an hour wake when you choke repeat five times six times that’s enough now I know I’m rested my strength restored the day can begin these scraps barely audible of a fantasy. 28 Although a less explicit, less traceable use of Beckett’s Johnsonian material, one senses that this echo is perhaps more important than those in the earlier works. Physical ailments have here assumed larger significance; the speaker is “given a fancy,” and (rather humorously) this seems to be so powerful that it takes his breath away, requiring oxygen to restore both life and fancy. There appears to be an empathy here between Beckett and Johnson not only as human beings, but as writers; it is horribly ironic that one of the chief causes of Beckett’s own death was a chronic emphysema. The combination of physical ailments and a chronic depression was for Johnson a heavy burden, as it is for Beckett’s characters. In a superficially comic letter addressed to Mrs. Thrale under the pseudonym of “Mme. Très Honorée” – given in Vulliamy and copied out by Beckett in the first notebook – Johnson speaks of passing several hours every day in profound solitude. 29 Indeed during his last spring, Johnson spent most of his time in bed, shut up in his room for a total of 129 days. “I want every comfort,” he moans to a friend. “My life is very solitary and very cheerless. Though it has pleased GOD wonderfully to deliver me from the dropsy, I am yet very weak, and have not passed the door since the 13th of December” (Boswell, Vol. 4, p. 270). Moreover, in another passage that Beckett copied out, Vulliamy says: “He refers ominously and mysteriously to the possible advantages of his being locked up in actual confinement” (p. 101). One cannot help but be reminded here of Beckett’s Malone, confined to his bed, writing, and focusing always on his physical decline; at one point he believes he is trapped in a cell in an asylum (pp. 255–6). The Unnamable likewise imagines himself locked up in a Piranesi-like “cathedral,” and says: “I need walls, good and thick, I need a prison, I was right, for me alone, I’ll go there now, I’ll put me in it. . . . ” (p. 410).

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Beckett’s physically debilitated, self-conscious characters also fear their waning mental powers. And Mrs. Thrale, interestingly, writes in her Anecdotes: Mr. Johnson’s health had been always extremely bad since I first knew him, and his over-anxious care to retain without blemish the perfect sanity of his mind, contributed much to disturb it. He had studied medicine diligently in all its branches; but had given particular attention to the diseases of the imagination, which he watched in himself with a solicitude destructive of his own peace, and intolerable to those he trusted. 30 Beckett copied the latter half of this passage into his first notebook, along with Mrs. Thrale’s question to Johnson: “Will any body’s mind bear this eternal microscope that you place upon your own so?” (p. 59). This extreme self-consciousness, Johnson’s tendency to look at his own body and mind as the subjects of his conversation, suggests an important trait of the character we call “Beckettian.” Furthermore, from sometime around the age of 30 Johnson suffered from what he called his “vile melancholy” (Boswell, Vol. 1, p. 35), and Beckett in his notebooks makes ample notation of his frequent bouts with depression. This depression seems to have been worsened by Johnson’s isolation from other people. “The great business of his life,” reports Boswell, “was to escape from himself.” “Whenever he was not engaged in conversation, such [negative] thoughts were sure to rush into his mind; and, for this reason, any company, any employment whatever, he preferred to being alone” (Vol. 1, pp. 144–5). “His melancholy,” says Hawkins, “was hardly supportable. Company and conversation were the only reliefs to it.” Hester Thrale comments that Johnson’s life “consisted in little else than talking.” 31 Surely the morbid self-consciousness of Beckett’s characters from blind Hamm to the quadraplegic Unnamable suggests that they too suffer from something akin to Johnson’s “vile melancholy,” and like him, they attempt to shield themselves from bleak thoughts by the sound of their own voices. I might add that the word “company,” used repeatedly by Boswell, Hawkins, and Mrs. Thrale, has alerted me to an especially eighteenth-century resonance to the concept as it is employed by Beckett. More particularly, Beckett in his notebooks twice refers to Johnson’s use of arithmetic to escape his chronic melancholy. The first of these comes from the Anecdotes, where Mrs. Thrale writes: “When Mr. Johnson felt his fancy, or fancied he felt it, disordered, his constant recurrence


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was to the study of arithmetic” (pp. 52–3).32 For Johnson and for Beckett’s characters, mathematics conveys the illusion of mental control. Malone, combining the key motifs of isolation, company, and arithmetic, could be describing Johnson: “He made a practice, alone and in company, of mental arithmetic. And the figures then marshalling in his mind thronged it with colours and with forms” (p. 187). In All That Fall, Dan Rooney is shocked by his wife’s refusal to count: “Not count! One of the few satisfactions in life?”33 And in How It Is the narrator refers to “the ratio four to one I always loved arithmetic it has paid me back in full” (p. 37). Furthermore, anyone familiar with Beckett’s manuscripts – with their marginal calculations and geometric doodlings – will have sensed his own dislike of blank space and his own love–hate attitude toward numbers. A little over halfway through his first notebook, Beckett, seemingly experiencing a sort of epiphany, writes in capital letters: “NOTE J’S FEAR OF DEATH” (MS 3461/1 [p. 64]). Boswell records Johnson’s comment that “he never had a moment in which death was not terrible to him” (Vol. 3, p. 153), and yet elsewhere he says: “By no means happy, he still clung to life with an eagerness at which many have wondered” (Vol. 4, p. 394). Cannot we say the same of Beckett’s characters? Johnson wrote to his friend Charles Burney: “I struggle hard for life, and I take air; my friend’s chariot is always ready. We have run this morning twenty-four miles, and could run forty-eight more. But who can run the race with death?” (Boswell [his emphasis], Vol. 4, p. 360). Although Johnson feared that his soul would be caught unprepared for death, Boswell refers several times to another of his serious concerns: “Mere existence,” Johnson said on one occasion, “is so much better than nothing, that one would rather exist in pain, than not exist” (Vol. 3, pp. 295–6). Beckett’s characters likewise combat their own annihilation. In spite of their incessant protests at their own existences, they, with only a few exceptions (such as the narrator of “The End”), wilfully prolong their lives. In 1783 Johnson suffered a mild but terrifying stroke which caused a temporary palsy and aphasia. Describing his condition in a letter to the Reverend John Taylor, he says that “it has pleased God, by a paralytick stroke in the night, to deprive me of speech” (Boswell, Vol. 4, p. 228). Similarly, the Unnamable awakens one snowy morning, half-deaf and unable to see, and wonders if he has suffered the same thing: “Has my head lost all feeling? Or did I have a stroke, while I was meditating?” (p. 345). And this bears a similarity to a scene in Endgame where Hamm is interrupted and loses his train of thought; “There’ll be no more speech,” he says, then adds that he hears a “dripping” in his head:

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Perhaps it’s a little vein. (Pause.) A little artery. (Pause. More animated.) Enough of that, it’s story time, where was I?34 Here blind Hamm at least momentarily loses his power of speech and speculates that he may have suffered a stroke; but like Johnson, who reassured himself that he had his wits about him by reciting the Lord’s Prayer, Hamm pulls rapidly back from this horrific thought by turning to storytelling. 35 In Beckett as well as Johnson, speech, like mathematics, is employed to distract oneself from reality. This is the underside to Johnson’s celebrated conversation. In Beckett’s work there is an element of the grotesque also found in Johnson’s life. He developed in the last few years of his life a sarcocele or fleshy tumor in one of his testicles, a condition that came close to requiring amputation. At this time he wrote to Mrs. Thrale: “If excision should be delayed there is danger of a gangrene. You would not have me for fear of pain perish in putrescence” (Boswell, Vol. 4, p. 240 n. 1). And to one of his doctors he wrote: “The operation is doubtless painful; but is it dangerous? The pain I hope to endure with decency” (p. 240). Johnson’s condition bears a remarkable resemblance to Molloy’s testicular difficulties, described here in Beckett’s characteristic comic-macabre: “I had so to speak only one leg at my disposal, I was virtually onelegged, and would have been happier, livelier, amputated at the groin. And if they had removed a few testicles into the bargain I wouldn’t have objected” (p. 35). And there is yet a further parallel. A few days before he died, Johnson’s dropsical legs became so painful that he begged his doctors to somehow relieve his discomfort. Beckett copies out the following from Hawkins: He looked upon himself as a bloated carcase; and, to attain the power of easy respiration, would have undergone any degree of temporary pain. He dreaded neither punctures nor incisions, and, indeed, the trochar and the lancet: he had often reproached his physicians and surgeon with cowardice; and, when Mr. Cruikshank scarified his leg, he cried out – “Deeper, deeper; – I will abide the consequence.” (Hawkins, p. 275) At last Johnson took responsibility for his own treatment; hiding a knife under the bedclothes, in his doctors’ absence he cut deep into one


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of his own legs. Beckett, combining Johnson’s problem with his testicles with this death-bed self-mutilation, writes in the first part of Molloy: And, worse still, they [his testicles] got in my way when I tried to walk, when I tried to sit down. . . . So the best thing for me would have been for them to go, and I would have seen to it myself, with a knife or secateurs, but for my terror of physical pain and festered wounds, so that I shook. (p. 36)36 This is a good example of Beckett’s transformation of material out of Johnson’s biography: one medical event has been combined with another, thus intensifying the horror, but the events and emotions (though Johnson shows greater forbearance of pain than Molloy) remain strikingly true to the original. And this example likewise demonstrates how Beckett’s 1936–37 research, accomplished with the play Human Wishes in mind, some 12 or 13 years later finds a less specific, imaginative home in his fiction. One can only guess, of course, but given his prodigious memory and the horrific nature of these incidents, is it not possible that Beckett is working not from his notebooks but from recollection? Is he in fact remembering these discrete incidents as if they were one? Although Boswell does not mention it until much later, Hawkins claims that Johnson first used opium to relieve depression when still in his fifties, and that his “strong propensity” for the drug increased as he advanced in years (p. 133). Writing two months before his death to his physician Dr. Richard Brocklesby, Johnson says: “I have here little company and little amusement, and thus abandoned to the contemplation of my own miseries, I am sometimes gloomy and depressed; this too I resist as I can, and find opium, I think, useful, but I seldom take more than one grain” (Boswell, Vol. 4, p. 356). Near the end, in response to a letter from Boswell, Dr. William Cullen, an Edinburgh physician, wrote back to say that “At the age of 74 Asthma and Dropsy are very insurmountable distempers,” and went on to advise the use of laudanum – “as I believe it is the only means of rendering his life tolerably easy” (Boswell, Vol. 4, p. 528). Laudanum is explicitly mentioned at least twice in Watt (pp. 87 and 180) and Moran refers to morphine four times in Molloy, as in this instance: “morphine tablets, my favourite sedative” (p. 126). Similarly, the extreme physical circumstances in which Beckett’s Hamm finds himself leads him to cry out: “Is it not time for my pain-killer?” (p. 48; cf. pp. 24 and 35). And the Unnamable admits:

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Well supplied with pain-killers I drew upon them freely, without however permitting myself the lethal dose that would have cut short my functions, whatever they may have been. . . . Their purpose was to enable me to go on. I did not use them to brood on my lot, but to rub myself as best I might with Elliman’s Embrocation, for example, or to give myself an injection of laudanum, no easy matter for a man with only one leg. (pp. 320–1) Like Johnson, the Unnamable employs pain-killers in order to enable himself to “go on,” though he avoids the overdose that might kill him; Johnson in his last days stopped taking opium altogether, anxious to meet his Maker with a clear head (Hawkins, p. 271). As we have seen before, Beckett here half-toys with an idea inherited from Johnson: the alignment of “Elliman’s Embrocation” with opium tends to diminish the latter, as does the joke about one leg. But beneath the humor is the seriousness of Johnson’s painful last years, and his and Beckett’s shared human suffering. “Where there is nothing to be done,” said Johnson, “something must be endured” (Thrale, p. 62).

III Significantly, in an undated letter from the end of 1937 or the beginning of 1938, Beckett wrote to Mary Manning: I have not written a word of the Johnson blasphemy. I trust that acts of intellection are going on about it somewhere. Which will enable me eventually to see how it coincides with the Pricks, Bones and Murphy fundamentally, and fundamentally with all I shall ever write or ever want to write. I find it remarkable that Beckett, at the very moment of giving up on his Johnson play, is able to see past his immediate frustration to the larger significance of the work he is quitting. Although he fails to articulate exactly how his research “coincides” with his past writing and looks forward to his future writing, he senses its importance. And then, as if to underscore his point, on 5 August 1938 he notes to MacGreevy: “Dr. Johnson is back in my consciousness and I hope to settle down to it when I get back to Paris.” Close to two years after he began this project, having carried it with him from Ireland to Germany and back to Ireland, and now projecting work on it in France, Beckett is still pondering Samuel Johnson.


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Johnson – even more than Swift, Fielding, and Sterne – served as an inspiration to Beckett. Only fragments of the character we most associate with his work appear in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, More Pricks Than Kicks, and Murphy (as we have seen, Watt is a special case); I do not believe that it is coincidental that the complete “Beckettian” character emerges only after the author’s profound encounter with Johnson. Nor is it coincidental that in the postwar period Beckett began to write in the first person, exploring the debilitated, frightened, melancholy figure from the inside. His yearlong work on Human Wishes, while a theatrical dead end, was clearly not a period of unfruitful, useless research, but on the contrary an invaluable experience, a process of embodying numerous inchoate ideas. From his study of Johnson Beckett emerged with a renewed impetus to write not a play but a novel, and in his mind was an imaginative construct of an egocentric, self-conscious, rather hard-edged figure – but one nonetheless vulnerable, even tragic. Johnson, I believe, contributed in critically important ways, ways we can perhaps never fully document, to the development of this character. Beckett absorbed the image of Johnson in his decline and made it his own. Over a ten-year period, during the fertile late 1940s and early 1950s, we might almost say that Beckett interprets and reinterprets Johnson: in Molloy, he shows him writing Rasselas to defray his mother’s funeral expenses, a myth that was not even debated until 1927;37 in Malone Dies, he focuses on the dying Johnson, Johnson the writer attempting to get everything down on paper, staving off his demise by writing his life; and in The Unnamable, Beckett depicts Johnson as highly vulnerable, uncertain of his own existence, depleted in body and mind, and yet determined to live. On 7 July 1936, Beckett asked MacGreevy if he knew the whereabouts of the eighteenth-century Irishman James Barry’s portrait of Johnson (see Plate 2); “Looked at in reproduction,” says Beckett, “it is very impressive, the mad terrified face that I feel was the truth a very little below the adipose.”38 We might describe some of Beckett’s major characters in much the same way. But when the trilogy ends, something, not nothing, is left behind. What we can admire in Johnson is what we can admire in Beckett’s people: “I will be conquered,” says Johnson, “I will not capitulate” (Boswell, Vol. 4, p. 374); “I can’t go on,” says the Unnamable, “I’ll go on” (p. 414). Boswell praised Johnson’s “philosophick heroism” (Vol. 4, p. 190) and I believe we might apply the same label to many of Beckett’s characters, as well as to Beckett himself. He, after all, was forcibly struck by Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations, which Leopold Damrosch has called the most tragic Johnson of all. Damrosch stresses Johnson’s

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“tragic sense of life”: his awareness of human misery, his struggle against insanity, his horror of death or annihilation, his emphasis on activity and achievement in the face of despair, and, above all, his straightforward facing of life.39 This is Beckett’s way. Although his characters approach harsh reality with uncertainty, in crab-like fashion, they do not avoid their own all-too-human limitations, and they proceed unflinchingly. And Beckett discovered the tragic in Johnson a few years before the critics. Modern-day scholarship emphasizing this theme may be said to have begun in 1939 with the publication of W. B. C. Watkins’ Perilous Balance: the Tragic Genius of Swift, Johnson, and Sterne; this is the study, says Damrosch, which “first laid emphasis on the darker side of Johnson, and represented as tragic a life spent in heroic struggle against the threat of insanity” (p. 59). That is not far away from a description of the Beckettian character. What makes Johnson a tragic or heroic figure is his excruciating self-awareness and his stern resistence to the physically inevitable – qualities we can discover in Beckett’s characters as well. Here we may compare Boswell’s portrait of 75-year-old Johnson with Beckett’s portrait of Macmann in Malone Dies, although I do not mean to suggest by this, as I have sometimes above, that Boswell is Beckett’s immediate source. I intend only to hint in each case at the curious presence of the heroic in the midst of physical oddity: His figure was large and well formed, and his countenance of the cast of an ancient statue; yet his appearance was rendered strange and somewhat uncouth, by convulsive cramps, by the scars of that distemper which it was once imagined the royal touch could cure, and by a slovenly mode of dress. He had the use only of one eye. . . . So morbid was his temperament, that he never knew the natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his limbs: when he walked, it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters; when he rode, he had no command or direction of his horse, but was carried as if in a balloon. (Boswell, Vol. 4, p. 425)40 In spite of Boswell’s description of the slovenly, awkward, dilapidated Johnson, we are told that his person was “well formed” and that “his countenance [was] of the cast of an ancient statue”; that his blindness in one eye seemed not to impede his sight, which was “uncommonly quick and accurate”; and above all (as Boswell says in the next sentence) that he was a representative figure, proof that Lucretius’ vivida vis sustains the physical self.


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Beckett’s comparable description of Macmann, which extends over more than two pages, begins this way: And there he is as good as gold on the bench, his back to the river, and dressed as follows, though clothes don’t matter, I know, I know, but he’ll never have any others, if I know anything about it. He has had them a long time already, to judge by their decay, but no matter, they are the last. But most remarkable of all is his greatcoat, in the sense that it covers him completely and screens him from view. . . . And even the two feet, flat on the ground demurely side by side, even they are partly hidden by this coat, in spite of the double flexion of the body. . . . (p. 227) The effects here are more subtle, but in the midst of Beckett’s overt focus on his character’s decomposition, he simultaneously enhances the positive aspects of Macmann’s image: “good as gold” is childlike and ironic, but his greatcoat is “remarkable” and his feet are placed “demurely” on the ground. And in what follows, Beckett paradoxically compares Macmann to “the Colossus of Memnon” (recall Boswell’s “ancient statue”), says that the tails of his coat sweep the ground and rustle “like a train,” and adds that the coat’s collar remains intact, “being of velvet or perhaps shag.” And finally we are told that the coat is a sort of overcoat, or cover-me-down, concealing the body, “with the exception obviously of the head which emerges, lofty and impassive, clear of its embrace.” Like Boswell describing the awkward, shabby Johnson, Beckett demotes his character while subtly enhancing him, and this peculiar combination of the ironic and the heroic, I would argue, was something he picked up from his long research on Johnson. This and other passages like it fleetingly lift Beckett’s figures out of the realm of the burlesque or the satirical, transforming them into partially noble, almost tragic figures.

Many years ago, in an essay titled “The Double Tradition of Dr. Johnson,” Bertrand Bronson pointed out the long-standing split between Johnson the author (the learned tradition) and Johnson the personality (the popular tradition). 41 Studying Johnson in the 1930s, Beckett would have inherited this double tradition: the learned tradition, depicting a well-read, powerful intellect and moral force, and a brilliant stylist; and the folk-image of Johnson, physically large, sloppy in dress, of loud

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voice and bad manners, and a witty but weighty conversationalist. Both traditions seem to have attracted Beckett. What he did, interestingly, was to take the popular image and combine it with the learned image, thus giving us the typical Beckettian character: a slovenly, rebellious, uneven conversationalist, who nonetheless is a powerful – though confused – intellect and moral force. Beckett casts his figure as one tormented by hopes and fears, by a mind which will not shut down (the learned Johnson) and a body that is unkempt, very much in decline (the popular Johnson). We might say that, in effect, the eighteenthcentury Johnson is compelled by Beckett to confront those very horrors which stalked him – loneliness, powerlessness, mortality – without the solace of religious belief. It is relevant that in shortening the title of Johnson’s poem from “The Vanity of Human Wishes” to Human Wishes, Beckett has removed the eighteenth-century emphasis on “vanity,” thereby underscoring the “wishes” themselves. And as Ronald Schleifer points out, Johnson himself, in his subtitle alluding to a classical predecessor (“The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated”), suggests a kinship with an earlier writer.42 Human wishes, for Johnson, do not change the world over, nor do they change substantially over time: Let observation with extensive view, Survey mankind, from China to Peru; Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, And watch the busy scenes of crowded life; Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate, O’erspread with snares the clouded maze of fate, Where wavering man, betrayed by ventrous pride, To tread the dreary paths without a guide. . . . (lines 1–9) Beckett echoes Johnson who echoes Juvenal; “nature and passion,” says Imlac in Rasselas, “ . . . are always the same.” 43 But if human nature does not change, of course our perspective on it changes; the fact is that Johnson does rewrite Juvenal and Beckett does rewrite Johnson, each updating the other. As Beckett says in Texts for Nothing: “What agitation and at the same time what calm, what vicissitudes within what changelessness.”44 In spite of their origin – at least in part – in the historical personage of Johnson, Beckett’s characters are human beings like us. As Louis Cazamian wrote in A History of English Literature, the popular history recommended at Trinity College in the late 1920s and 1930s, Johnson


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has “the value of a symbol,” fixing as he does “the type of the modern man of letters” (Vol. 2, pp. 138 and 145). Indeed the contemporaneity of Johnson appears on several occasions in the material Beckett consulted. For example, Macaulay wrote in an essay in The Encylopedia Britannica, twice mentioned by Beckett in his research notebooks: The old philosopher is still among us in the brown coat with the metal buttons and the shirt which ought to be at wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in oceans. No human being who has been more than seventy years in the grave is so well known to us.45 Beckett likewise read Thomas Seccombe’s “Essay Introductory” to A. M. Broadley’s Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, where Seccombe argues: “Of all Englishmen born two hundred years ago, or even one hundred years ago, there is not a single one who is living with us and amongst us today in such a full sense as he is.” 46 Although the sentimentality of these statements would have been off-putting to Beckett (he refers in the notebooks to Macaulay’s “romantic bilge”), the immediacy of Johnson in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must have had an impact on him. Johnson’s presence had been sensed by others. But few perhaps sensed Johnson’s presence quite so deeply and personally as Beckett.

7 Pope, Beckett, and the Aesthetics of Decay

Not write? But then I think, And for my Soul I cannot sleep a wink. I nod in Company, I wake at Night, Fools rush into my Head, and so I write. Alexander Pope 1 Although Beckett studied no eighteenth-century prose writer more fully or deliberately than Johnson, there is (perhaps surprisingly) a poet whose style and world-view seem to have had a major impact on him: Alexander Pope. As we saw in Chapter 1, Beckett was quite familiar with Pope’s poetry. Having been held responsible for a bit of it at Trinity College, he read him during the 1930s, purchased a copy of the collected poems in 1936 (which he still owned at his death), quoted Pope in a 1981 letter, and in the same year alluded to him in Ill Seen Ill Said. Beckett must have been attracted to the bold, ironic edge to the poet’s language, his compressed, oxymoronic style, and his ability (like Swift’s) to squeeze competing meanings out of every word or phrase. And as with the writers discussed above, the life of Pope appears to have had an attraction for him, although in this case he seems to have been drawn less to the image of the poet in his last days than to the physical and mental suffering of the frail, diminutive, hunchbacked poet throughout his whole career – to what Pope so unforgettably called in The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, “this long Disease, my Life” (line 132). 2 We may speculate that Beckett felt a kinship with Pope’s evolving aesthetics – an aesthetics born of his own personal experience as much as any inherited dicta. Looked at chronologically, or course, the eighteenth-century poet’s career traces an uneven path from innocence and self-confidence to greater uncertainty: from his youthful Pastorals 132


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(where he at least partially embraces the artificiality of the form), An Essay on Criticism (a collection of epigrams on reading and writing), and The Rape of the Lock (a self-confident attack on aristocratic values); to An Essay on Man (a philosophical poem which seems to have had personal relevance for Pope), the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (in which he wrestles with his difficulties as a verse satirist), and, finally, The Dunciad (the fourth book of which reveals a deep negativism on the poet’s part). I wish to deny neither the influence of Joyce’s aesthetics on the young Beckett nor that implicit in the works of Swift, Fielding, and Sterne. Nonetheless, it would appear that he discovered in the increasing pessimism of Pope a style of writing which focuses on the self, where form is equated with content, where the positive past is jammed against the harsh realities of the present, and where the artist’s own abilities seemingly come under threat. What we might term Pope’s aesthetics of decay seems to have had an important and long-lasting influence on Beckett the fiction writer. The age of gold and the age of lead, so often counterbalanced in Pope, are juxtaposed in Beckett as well. “You and your landscapes!” Estragon complains to Vladimir; “Tell me about the worms!”3

I In the 1930s, presumably reading from his newly purchased edition of Pope (see Appendix A), Beckett copied into his Whoroscope notebook a number of couplets from the Pastorals, including the following romantic lines from “Summer”: Where-e’er you tread, the blushing Flow’rs shall rise, And all things flourish where you turn your eyes. (lines 75–6) Followed by these quite contradictory lines from “Winter”: In some still Ev’ning, when the whisp’ring Breeze Pants on the Leaves, and dies upon the Trees. (lines 79–80) The juxtaposition of these opposed sentiments suggests something important not only about Pope but about Beckett. Pope had written in his “Discourse on Pastoral Poetry” (contained in the Works Beckett owned) that the pastoral poet “must use some illusion to render a Pastoral delightful,” and that “this consists in exposing the best side only of a shepherd’s life, and in concealing its miseries”; but Pope

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himself at least hints (see “pants” and “dies” above) at the existence of those miseries.4 All is not golden, even in the pastoral. As early as his Trinity College days, Beckett had been asked to consider the viability of the world depicted in the pastoral elegy. In the 1924 Michaelmas term, junior freshmen Honors students in English were required to be prepared to discuss Milton’s “Lycidas,” and on their exam were given this question: “How far do you consider that doubt is thrown on the poet’s sincerity in ‘Lycidas’ owing to the form in which the poem is cast? If possible, illustrate your remarks by comparison with some other elegies, whether English or foreign.”5 Is Milton being honest? Does he really care about the death of Edward King or is he simply echoing the conventions of his chosen genre? When Beckett later seems to question the credibility of the pastoral mode, or highlight its contradictions, we should keep in mind that this is something he had been asked to consider when only 18. Twelve years after receiving his baccalaureate, Beckett, reading Johnson’s Rasselas, encountered a dubious response to the problem of sincerity in the pastoral; Prince Rasselas and Princess Nekayah visit with shepherds tending their flocks, inquiring about their happiness: “It was evident that their hearts were cankered with discontent,” reports Johnson. Elsewhere he complains of the tired imagery of “Lycidas,” whose “inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind.” 6 And it seems worth mentioning that in 1972 Beckett was able to quote to a visitor the following from Johnson’s letter of rebuke to his would-be patron Lord Chesterfield: “The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.”7 It is this improbability of an idyllic world which Beckett exploits in his own allusions to the pastoral, but he is led from there to emphasize the duality of Pope rather than the outright skepticism of Johnson. In Beckett the pastoral is typically shown to exist not as a pervasive way of life but as a mere inset within a nonpastoral frame of reference. Thus in the story “Walking Out” from More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), Beckett uses the pastoral landscape – the technique is absolutely conventional – as a reflection of his character’s mood. Himself a sort of modern-day shepherd, Belacqua one spring evening walks with his dog out to the “bright green grass” of Boss Crocker’s Gallops; there he pauses, we are told, “not so much in order to rest as to have the scene soak through him.” 8 The description which follows alludes unmistakably and rather humorously to the pastoral tradition: Belacqua regretted the horses of the good old days, for they would have given to the landscape something that the legions of sheep and


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lambs could not give. These latter were springing into the world every minute, the grass was spangled with scarlet afterbirths, the larks were singing, the hedges were breaking, the sun was shining, the sky was Mary’s cloak, the daisies were there, everything was in order. Only the cuckoo was wanting. It was one of those Spring evenings when it is a matter of some difficulty to keep God out of one’s meditations. (p. 101) Again, the real landscape is less important to Belacqua than his imaginative “pastoralization” of that landscape. The sheep, lambs, larks, hedges, evening sun, blue sky, and flowers are all easily recognizable motifs of the pastoral – “everything was in order.” Beckett, in creating this pastoral scene, goes so far as to borrow self-consciously from the poetic diction of eighteenth-century poetry, in particular the words “legions” and “spangled,” and (at the beginning of the next paragraph) the reference to the grass as an “emerald floor.” 9 Indeed the landscape prompts Belacqua, as it has so many pastoral poets, to think of God. On the other hand, amidst the near-perfection of the pastoral is the knowledge, as Frank Kermode said many years ago, “that Nature is rough, and the natural life in fact rather an animal affair.”10 Beckett perversely combines this sort of imagery from Pope’s “Autumn”: When falling Dews with Spangles deck’d the Glade, And the low Sun had lengthen’d ev’ry Shade. (lines 99–100) and this from “Winter”: To thee, bright Goddess, oft a Lamb shall bleed, If teeming Ewes increase my fleecy Breed. (lines 81–2) Instead of being spangled with Pope’s expected pastoral dew, Beckett’s grass is spangled with bloody afterbirths. But in both writers there is an overt connection between birth and death. Pope’s rhyming of “breed” and “bleed” is in its powerful compression very like Beckett. And in both there is an irony in the failure of the poetic language to contain the violence of animal life. Beckett’s “the grass was . . . spangled with scarlet afterbirths” no more conceals that animality than Pope’s “oft a [fleecy] lamb shall bleed.” Of course the lamb in Pope is associated with the sacrificial Lamb of Christian tradition; in Beckett’s world there is no such redemption. Thus if Pope turns the classical into the Christian, Beckett shows how the literary remnants of that tradition have survived sans religious belief. That is his point.

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In Murphy (1938) there is a wry gesture in the direction of “the green old days.”11 This novel develops the concept of withdrawal into pastoral tranquillity, although that tranquillity is typically qualified by Beckett’s irrepressible humor. Riding a bus to Hyde Park, Murphy shuts his eyes and asks the conductor to tell him when they reach the Marble Arch: “By closing his eyes he could be in an archaic world much less corrupt than anything on view in the B.M.” (p. 95). When he gets to Hyde Park, Murphy, overcome by the problem of which biscuit to eat first, falls forward on his face on the grass and is roused only by the approach of one Miss Rosie Dew and a flock of sheep. 12 Although morning or evening dew is a staple of the pastoral tradition, “rosy dew” actually appears in line 69 of Pope’s pastoral to “Summer.” Is Murphy dreaming all this? Are Rosie Dew and the sheep mere residents of Murphy’s highland imagination? No matter. Confined to the role of observer, Murphy notes the imperfection of this flock: “Murphy had never seen stranger sheep, they seemed one and all on the point of collapse” (pp. 99–100). As Vladimir Nabokov once said, comparing the eighteenth-century pastoral to its predecessor: “The sheep aren’t quite as white and fluffy.” 13 The pastoral likewise appears in both halves of Molloy, serving – much the way it does in Pope – as poetic respite but also as reminder of death. Whereas Murphy vaults into the pastoral by way of a Hyde Park trance, Molloy awakens at dawn from a tortuous sleep to discover himself watched by a shepherd and his dog. Again, is this a dream? Registering the “anxious bleating” of sheep, Molloy asks the shepherd, “Where are you taking them, to the fields or to the shambles?”14 The sheep are innocent of their fates. But Molloy is left with what he calls “persisting doubts, as to the destination of those sheep, among which there were lambs”: often wondering if they had safely reached some commonage or fallen, their skulls shattered, their thin legs crumpling, first to their knees, then over on their fleecy sides, under the pole-axe, though that is not the way they slaughter sheep, but with a knife, so that they bleed to death. (p. 29) Although reminiscent of the imagery from Pope’s “Winter” (“lamb[s],” “fleecy,” and “bleed” appear in both cases), the percentage of poetic words has much diminished by comparison with the earlier passage from “Walking Out.” In this example we hear only a faint, ironic echo of the peaceful pastoral world, and it has no chance against the violence suggested by “shattered,” “crumpling,” and “slaughter.” A frail literary image has been confronted by the reality of a violent, cruel death.


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Moran’s similar interlude in the second half of Molloy (it occurs not in the morning but at dusk) seems on Beckett’s part almost a doubling back in order to pick up the fuller significance of the earlier scene. Moran and his son one day come across a shepherd, his flock, and his dog, and Moran exclaims: “What a pastoral land, My God” (p. 158). Significantly, the sheep make a circle around him, eyeing him suspiciously: “Perhaps I was the butcher come to make his choice” (p. 159). And this scene closes the way Molloy’s does, Moran soon realizing that the flock is departing, “huddled together, their heads sunk, jostling one another, breaking now and then into a little trot, snatching blindly without stopping a last mouthful from the earth” (pp. 159–60). 15 The image is close to one from Pope’s Essay on Man: The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, Had he thy Reason, would he skip and play? Pleas’d to the last, he crops the flow’ry food, And licks the hand just rais’d to shed his blood. (Book 1, lines 81–4) Like Pope, Beckett juxtaposes innocence and awareness, the poetic and the all-too-real. Here the lamb “skips and plays,” and ignorant of the “doom” awaiting him and happy “to the last,” he licks the shepherd’s hand raised to slaughter him. The pastoral imagery of An Essay on Man and Molloy – separated by more than 200 years – is remarkably akin in its focus on the sheep, the shepherd, the slaughter, and the different levels of consciousness of man and beast. But the subtle difference in the presentation of the two images says a great deal about the two authors and their eras. Nature’s cruelty is in Pope necessary to God’s whole design, whereas in Beckett it represents a horrible wastage. In Pope the happily unreasoning sheep are spared understanding by the omniscience of the poet’s voice (God-like, he lectures us); in Beckett we still hear the voice of reason, but the first-person point of view incorporates a subtle empathy. We too are somebody’s sheep. The pastoral allusions in early Beckett shed light on his subsequent work. In Dream of Fair to Middling Women – in that section of the novel which later became “A Wet Night” in More Pricks – one of the party guests is sarcastically labeled the “young pastoralist.”16 Yet this is Belacqua’s first act upon returning home: to plunge his prodigal head into the bush of verbena that clustered about the old porch (wonderful bush it was to be sure, even making

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every due allowance for the kind southern aspect it enjoyed, it never had been known to miss a summer since first it was reared from a tiny seedling) and longly to swim and swoon on the rich bosom of its fragrance, a fragrance in which the least of his childish joys and sorrows were and would forever be embalmed. (p. 145) Twenty-six-year-old Beckett would seem to be recalling an actual shrub outside his family’s home at Cooldrinagh, imbuing nature with almost archetypal powers. As he suggests, the verbena could be counted on to bloom no matter what, and no matter how far the prodigal son might roam, he expects that all his childish joys and sorrows will “forever be embalmed” in its fragrance. In spite of his itch to escape the political and cultural parochialism of Ireland, Beckett ascribes to the Irish landscape (here represented by the verbena) a fixedness that overrides all else. That same verbena is enshrined in How It Is, written 30 years later, when he remembers himself as a child, kneeling on a pillow at his mother’s knee: “we are on a veranda smothered in verbena the scented sun dapples the red tiles yes I assure you.” 17 In the second conclusion to Dream Belacqua comments on the frequent rain in Ireland, which he calls “part of her charm,” and then goes on to say more generally: “The impression one enjoys before landscape in Ireland, even on the clearest of days, of seeing it through a veil of tears, the mitigation of contour. . . . Don’t cod yourselves. Those are clouds that you see, or your own nostalgia” (p. 240). This was written when Beckett was still in Ireland. After his departure from his homeland, however, her landscape necessarily becomes a product of his own nostalgia. See, for instance, The Calmative: “A lush pasture lay before me, nonsuch perhaps, who cares, drenched in evening dew or recent rain. Beyond this meadow to my certain knowledge a path, then a field and finally the ramparts, closing the prospect.”18 Or From an Abandoned Work: “Never loved anyone I think, I’d remember. Except in my dreams, and there it was animals, dream animals, nothing like what you see walking about the country, I couldn’t describe them, lovely creatures they were, white mostly.” 19 In 1985 the 79-year-old Beckett told Eoin O’Brien that “the old haunts were never more present”; “I walk those backroads,” he went on to say, “with closed eyes.” 20 And in Stirrings Still, written some 56 years after Dream, Beckett’s description of a landscape is still comparable: Nor on his looking more closely to make matters worse was this the short green grass he seemed to remember eaten down by flocks and herds but long and light grey in colour verging here and there on


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white. Then he sought help in the thought that his memory of outdoors was perhaps at fault and he found it of none. 21 Beckett in each of these latter passages refers to a landscape which appears to be Irish, but seen through a veil of tears. Like the verbena of Cooldrinagh, his memories of Ireland are encapsulated in memories of its landscape. Or, alternately, the poetic landscape he encountered in Pope’s youthful pastorals and elsewhere never left him, remaining in his memory, challenged by his skeptical, intellectual style but never overcome by it. Beckett really abandoned neither Ireland nor the pastoral tradition and was seemingly capable of withdrawing at will, like Andrew Marvell, into “a green Thought in a green Shade” (“The Garden,” line 48). It is this imaginative escape from harsh reality, coupled with a ferocious confrontation with that same reality, which is Beckett’s special contribution to the pastoral form. As my allusions to the poets may suggest, Beckett’s reassuring memories of the Irish countryside become for him deeply entangled with the pastoral landscape of the literary tradition. In All That Fall – which is set in Ireland – the following moment is telling: Urgent baa. Mr. Rooney (startled). Good God! Mrs. Rooney Oh, the pretty little woolly lamb, crying to suck its mother! Theirs has not changed, since Arcady.22 Although this may be Ireland Beckett is remembering, Maddy’s reference to Arcady effectively links this particular lamb with the sheep of Theocritus, Virgil, Spenser, and Pope; furthermore, Mr. Rooney’s expletive, like Moran’s, cleverly but traditionally brings God into the picture. And the life of the lamb, like the image of nature in the imagination of the pastoral poets, has not changed over the centuries. In a sense the lamb of All That Fall has been embalmed in literary tradition, isolated from the vicissitudes of the real world, and made available as part of an idyllic landscape which used to be. The lamb is crying for sustenance, yearning for its mother. Like the lovers on Keats’s urn, its longing is frozen in time.

II “At the heart of the pastoral,” says Henry Weinfield, “is nostalgia – nostalgia not so much for the past as for a mode of life that never

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existed but that the poet locates in the dim confines of the past.”23 In the nostalgic fiction of Beckett’s late period, Company and, most particularly, the prose poem Ill Seen Ill Said (published when he was 75), his beloved Irish landscape is now “ill seen” and “ill said.” By this point in his career, that landscape seems to have been fused with the decaying landscape of the pastoral elegy.24 Ill Seen is written in the same key as Milton’s “Lycidas,” Pope’s pastoral to “Winter” and Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, and Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country ChurchYard” – all of which Beckett had at one time or another read. 25 He borrows in this work from these pastoral elegies and also (I believe) from the second of Nicolas Poussin’s famous seventeenth-century paintings called The Arcadian Shepherds.26 The old woman of this story repeatedly traverses the “zone of stone” surrounding her cabin in order to reach the pastures which lie beyond that stone, always carrying flowers to place on a worn grave bearing an enigmatic inscription. The stones, encroaching ever farther into the pastures, suggest the old woman’s decline into the inanimate, as well as, more generally, the decay of pastoral perfection. The situation and mood are reminiscent of that in Pope’s earliest extant poem, “On Solitude”: Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; Thus unlamented let me dye; Steal from the world, and not a stone Tell where I lye. (lines 17–20) Pope is said to have composed these lines when he was only 12. Although we have no literary productions from Beckett written at such a tender age, he and the young Pope seem to have shared what one critic has called the poet’s “prematurely old cast of mind.” 27 In the elegiac world of Ill Seen Ill Said the idealized pastoral landscape has diminished markedly. Here we have only “rags of sky and earth.” 28 Beckett’s text has a rural setting, includes references to saddened or otherwise debilitated sheep, uses seasonal and daily change as backdrops to its limited action, and refers to the ceremonial placing of flowers on a grave. He knowingly borrows from the tradition: “In the way of animals ovines only. After long hesitation. They are white and make do with little. Whence suddenly come no knowing nor whither as suddenly gone. Unshepherded they stray as they list. Flowers? Careful. Alone the odd crocus still at lambing time” (p. 10.)29 The hungry sheep in Ill Seen are “unshepherded”: in “Lycidas,” similarly, “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,” and in Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage” (which in


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many ways resembles a pastoral elegy) there is a reference to “truant sheep.” 30 Furthermore, the pathetic fallacy so common to the pastoral elegy is in Beckett’s prose poem in full force. “Withered flowers” (p. 15), “withered crocuses” (p. 29), and “limp grass strangely rigid” (p. 42) belong to an old tradition.31 But more important than the allusions themselves is Beckett’s transformation of the convention; paradoxically, his references to the pastoral tradition make its imagery appear static by comparison. See, for example, these lines from Pope’s “Winter”: ‘Tis done, and Nature’s various Charms decay; See gloomy Clouds obscure the chearful Day! Now hung with Pearls the dropping Trees appear, Their faded Honours scatter’d on her Bier. See, where on Earth the flow’ry Glories lye, With her they flourish’d, and with her they dye. (lines 29–34) Beckett similarly ties nature to the human, but with a significant difference: “Suffice to watch the grass. How motionless it droops. Till under the relentless eye it shivers. With faintest shiver from its innermost. Equally the hair. Rigidly horrent it shivers at last for the eye about to abandon. And the old body itself” (pp. 29–30). By substituting ambiguity for the safer analogies common to the pastoral tradition, Beckett transforms his allusion into an active thing. Both the old woman and the grass are motionless and droop. Furthermore, however, due not only to the damp of approaching night but under the force of the “relentless eye,” the grass and the old woman’s hair, and then her entire body, shiver (“horrent” means shuddering in horror) from their deepest beings. We watch as the static image of the tradition is dismantled. Indeed the poet’s or the reader’s gaze in a sense may be the source of the woman’s cold and fright: note that the shivering occurs “for the eye about to abandon.” In any case, Beckett’s pun at the end of this paragraph on the “weeds’ mock calm” (p. 30) – the widow’s weeds as well as lamenting nature – underscores his view that there is something too artificial in the pastoral imagery. Characteristically, he writes a pastoral elegy while questioning one of the genre’s principal features. Technically, the elegiac status of Ill Seen Ill Said is based on the old woman’s loss of her beloved mate; there are references to her “widowed eye” (p. 22) and to the ring on the third finger of her left hand, “the kind called keeper” (p. 32). But again Beckett maintains a powerful ambiguity. His prose poem is also an anticipatory elegy for the woman herself, who

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on several occasions is compared to the distant grave and the white stones piling up around her house. 32 On the first page we are told that “she sits as though turned to stone” (p. 7); and this connection continues throughout, as, for example, when next to the tomb she is described as standing by “the other stone” (p. 30). The old woman’s journeys out to the grave parallel the stones piling up outside her house, which is becoming in a sense a tomb for her. “At crocus time it would be making for the distant tomb. . . . Bearing by the stem or around her arm the cross or wreath. But she can be gone at any time. From one moment of the year to the next suddenly no longer there” (pp. 16–17). Note the ambiguity: “gone at any time” suggests that she can make for the distant tomb at times other than “crocus time,” but also suggests that the woman herself can be gone, taken away anytime. After all, like the subject of Pope’s Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, written to an obscure, anonymous, otherwise unlamented woman, Beckett’s subject has a quite tenuous existence. There is, moreover, yet another dimension, for the woman’s precarious hold on life is echoed in Beckett’s own precarious perception of the old woman (“ill seen”), as well as in his difficulty in satisfactorily conveying through words what he does see (“ill said”). The narrator would appear to be a sort of meticulous but enfeebled landscape painter, daubing a bit of color here, questioning what belongs there, everywhere encountering difficulty in summoning the old woman’s image onto the canvas. Surely it is no coincidence that pastoral poets (Spenser, Milton, Pope, and Thomson come to mind) have frequently relied on painterly imagery in depicting their landscapes.33 But here we come across the pathetic fallacy in reverse; the landscape is not so much reflecting the woman’s sadness as causing it. One way Beckett enhances the problematical nature of his text is through developing this analogy between writing and painting – what Pope once called “the Sister-arts.” 34 In his short play That Time, first produced only five years before the publication of Ill Seen Ill Said, he mentions the National Portrait Gallery in London, “with the portraits of the dead black with dirt and antiquity and the dates on the frames in case you might get the century wrong” (p. 32).35 Interestingly, whereas in that work Beckett presents himself as a viewer of paintings in a gallery, in Ill Seen he becomes a painter himself, and here manages to dissolve language by writing in a style more painterly than anything he had previously attempted.36 The effect is not unlike what occurs in Pope’s “Epistle to Mr. Jervas,” a testimony to Charles Jervas, his friend and painting teacher, which effuses (according to Maynard Mack) an


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“elegiac emotion lamenting the frailty and mutability of all things human, including the painter’s and the poet’s arts.” 37 Furthermore, the dilemma faced by Beckett in Ill Seen Ill Said – how to capture the old woman’s tenuous existence in words – is curiously similar to Pope’s in his “Epistle to a Lady”; assuming the role of a visual artist, Pope humorously speaks of the difficulty of catching the chameleon-like characters of women: “Some wand’ring touch, or some reflected light,/Some flying stroke alone can hit ’em right” (lines 154–5).38 Beckett’s painterly technique is comparable: the chalkstones are “of striking effect in the light of the moon” (p. 10); the woman’s white hands are said to have “their faintly leaden tinge killed by the black ground” (p. 31); and furthermore, There had to be lambs. Rightly or wrongly. A moor would have allowed of them. Lambs for their whiteness. And for reasons as yet obscure. Another reason. And so that there may be none. At lambing time. That from one moment to the next she may raise her eyes to find them gone. A moor would have allowed of them. In any case too late. And what lambs. No trace of frolic. White splotches in the grass. (p. 11)39 With neither the linguistic nor epistemological self-confidence of his eighteenth-century forebear, Beckett gives us not the final painting but the process of painting itself. We watch as his poet-painter, his artistic powers waning, hesitatingly applies words to the page, paint to the canvas. Of interest here is the recollection of Billie Whitelaw, one of Beckett’s favorite actresses, regarding his method of directing her in the late play Footfalls: “I almost felt as if he did have the paintbrush out and was painting, and, of course, what he always has in the other pocket is the rubber, because as fast as he draws a line in, he gets out that enormous India-rubber and rubs it out until it is only faintly there.” 40 Similarly, in Ill Seen Ill Said Beckett takes us into the painter’s mind, shows us his doubts, his second thoughts, his awareness of options for proceeding. “White splotches in the grass,” thinks this pastoralist as he daubs white on his canvas. But lambs are there not simply because the genre demands them. Beckett’s method is not unlike Oliver Goldsmith’s in “The Deserted Village” (1770), where the poet idealizes the past by describing what is no longer present: “And many a gambol frolicked o’er the ground,” writes Goldsmith, “But all these charms are fled” (lines 21 and 34). 41 In Company, published in English a year before Ill Seen, Beckett writes: “Out no more to walk the little winding back roads and interjacent pastures now alive with flocks and now deserted” (pp. 60–1). But

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in this text, there is an element of cruelty: the painter deliberately avoids allowing his lambs any trace of “frolic,” and indeed he paints them in only so that they may be removed, painted out, replaced with stones perhaps, when the old woman raises her eyes.42 Repeatedly, the late twentiethcentury artist of Beckett’s story asks, “What is the wrong word?” And Beckett once again echoes Pope. In their respective fusions of the verbal and the visual arts, both writers employ comparable imagery and wording, although the concept of the artist in each case is strikingly different. Pope writes in An Essay on Criticism of the artist’s “faithful Pencil” (line 484) and describes how “a new World leaps out at his command” (line 486). But his power is only temporary: When mellowing Years their full Perfection give, And each Bold Figure just begins to Live; The treach’rous Colours the fair Art betray, And all the bright Creation fades away! (lines 490–3) For all his God-like ability to manage nature and create perfection, Pope’s aging painter (recall that the poet himself was only 21) is ultimately betrayed by his lessening ability to control his medium. Is it even possible to find paints that will preserve the colors the artist has in mind? This is the problem faced by Beckett: She is vanishing. With the rest. The already ill seen bedimmed ill seen again annulled. The mind betrays the treacherous eyes and the treacherous word their treacheries. Haze sole certitude. The same that reigns beyond the pastures. It gains them already. It will gain the zone of stones. Then the dwelling through all its chinks. (p. 48) Although I would not want to call this an allusion, the wording as well as the imagery seems to have been inspired by the passage in the Essay. In Pope “the treach’rous Colours” betray the painter. In Beckett “the treacherous word” betrays the poet-painter, but so do his mind, his eyes, and even the tentative existence of his subject herself (“She is vanishing”). Contrary to the aging artist in Pope, who at least used to be able to control nature, in Beckett the artistic enterprise itself seems to be compromised.

III It was not only Pope’s life which interested Beckett, but his aesthetics. Having read a portion of An Essay on Man as an entering student at


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Trinity, he may well have read it in its entirety in the mid-1930s, when he purchased his copy of Pope’s Works. In any case, it is significant that in 1981, in a letter to Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann, he quoted from the poem. “In later life,” reports Ellmann, “Beckett thought this ability to contemplate with telescopic eye Joyce’s most impressive characteristic”: Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d, And now a bubble burst, and now a world. (Epistle 1, lines 87–90) 43 Whether quoting from memory or having looked up these lines in his century-old edition of Pope, Beckett’s familiarity with the poet this late in life suggests his importance to him. Moreover, the context would seem to be Joyce’s historical breadth of vision, and his citation of Pope assists him in reflecting on Joyce’s aesthetics. Note that Beckett aligns Joyce not with Pope himself but with Pope’s “God of all.” And implicitly he juxtaposes his own aesthetics to Joyce’s. Although Joyce possesses a “telescopic eye” (apparently Beckett’s phraseology), he himself has far more limited artistic vision. A hundred lines later in his Essay, Pope jokes: “Why has not Man a microscopic eye?/For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly” (Epistle 1, lines 193–4). The contrast between Joyce’s Godlike vision and Beckett’s fly-like vision is tellingly parallel to Beckett’s 1956 statement to Israel Shenker that whereas as an artist Joyce tended toward “omniscience and omnipotence,” he himself deals with “impotence.” “The kind of work I do is one in which I’m not master of my material.” 44 Furthermore, written immediately after the first three books of The Dunciad (1728), Pope’s Essay hovers between philosophical statement and satire, between a naive optimism that believes that “Whatever IS, is RIGHT” (Epistle 1, line 294) and “Order is Heav’n’s first law” (Epistle 4, line 49), and a far bleaker presentation of the ignorance, ineptitude, and stupidity of man: “Know thy own point: This kind, this due degree/Of blindness, weakness, Heav’n bestows on thee” (Epistle 1, lines 283–4). We might guess that read as a positivistic declaration of the ordered scheme of things, that is as a belated reassertion of the chain of being, Pope’s poem would have had little interest for twentieth-century Beckett; however, read as a poem which focuses on human limitations, on our inability to comprehend the ways of God, and as a poem which repeatedly

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opposes His knowledge and power to the blindness (a form of this word is used some ten times) of mere man, the poem would have appealed strongly to him. Indeed Beckett literalizes this blindness metaphor in the characters of Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, Hamm in Endgame, and Dan Rooney in All That Fall. Yet even in Pope the cosmic order is a fragile structure, as can be seen in the following lines, which Beckett first read as an entering student at Trinity: Vast chain of being, which from God began, Natures aethereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect! what no eye can see, No glass can reach! from Infinite to thee, From thee to Nothing! – On superior pow’rs Were we to press, inferior might on ours Or in the full creation leave a void, Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroy’d. (Epistle 1, lines 237–44) In late-Renaissance Milton, of course, the chain was already weakening, and in eighteenth-century Pope it is under much greater strain. In Beckett such harmony is no more than a faint memory, a parodic echo of the music of the spheres. We might view Beckett’s world as an inversion of Pope’s. Substitute Vladimir and Estragon’s absent Godot for Pope’s distant but powerful God and we are not far from Beckett. Waiting for Godot and most of his other works show man longing for answers and stability and willing to consent upon the flimsiest of evidence to the existence of a Godot, or to engage, as in Watt, in “eternally turning about Mr. Knott in tireless love.”45 As Pope says in his famous lines: “Hope springs eternal in the human breast;/Man never Is, but always To be blest” (Epistle 1, lines 95–6). Similarly, with an inner need for order so strong that they are only too willing to put themselves under the thumb of some off-stage power, Beckett’s characters, like Pope’s mankind, serve as minor players in an an epic drama with no visible author. Inverting Pope’s chain, Beckett replaces an omniscient God with the “Nothing” the poet-philosopher had identified at its lower terminus. Pope’s own funereal drawing, printed as the frontispiece for An Essay on Man and dated just four months before he died, illustrates the poem’s ironic juxtaposition of vanity and death; as his post-Dunciad reevaluation of the earlier poem, it might even be seen as undermining the philosophic optimism of that poem.46 Comparing the Essay and


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the drawing to Hogarth’s “The Bathos” (see Plate 5), David B. Morris observes: Such a setting, both visually and verbally, calls out for a central figure – a philosopher or sage – whose thought will discover the coherence so visibly absent. It invites us to contemplate, against a background of fragmentation and decay, what ideal, enduring, invisible orders may lie concealed both within and – like Pope’s absent sun – beyond the margins of sight.47 The absence of a central figure in Beckett likewise calls out for one, and his characters frequently seem to concoct their own, or slide easily into inferior–superior relationships with one another. The moral would seem to be that human beings are by nature dependent creatures, and, far from the vanity of Pope’s aristocracy, unable to assert their own power. But the inevitability of death hangs over them as well. The diminished man satirized in the Essay is oddly similar to Beckett’s existential man. Mocking our proud inability to accept our role as mere cog in God’s universal machine, Pope asks rhetorically: “Why form’d so weak, so little, and so blind!” (Epistle 1, lines 35–6). In the next line his cynical answer is another question: “Why form’d no weaker, blinder, and no less”? Things could be worse. We deserve no higher status. Comparing man to a “dull Ox” (Epistle 1, line 63), Pope says that his “time is a moment, and a point his space” (Epistle 1, line 72), observes that “Reason is here no guide” (Epistle 2, line 162), and admonishes us (in the last line of the poem) to realize that “all our Knowledge is, ourselves to know.” We are directly addressed as “Presumptuous Man!” (Epistle 1, line 35), “Weak, foolish man!” (Epistle 4, line 173), and even as “Vile worm!” (Epistle 2, line 258). As many before and after him, Pope, in his efforts to sing the praises of God’s well-oiled universe, has created a man ignorant of the explanation for anything. For Pope, God exists and he has a plan, and it is only our human limitations which prevent us from understanding. For unbelieving Beckett, there is no God and thus no plan, and yet our quest for such a plan proceeds unabated. A philosophical poem suspected of being based at least in part on the ideas of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, An Essay on Man can be read as well on a more personal level. As Bonamy Dobrée observed many years ago: In the last analysis it is Pope’s own emotion in face of the problem of existence that is moving, that gives the work its imaginative

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quality. It is not Pope the thinker we respond to, but Pope the ordinary puzzled human being whom we meet, like, and unavoidably echo. 48 This dimension of the poem must have drawn Beckett in. Although he perhaps borrows from his predecessor’s view of the world, he seems even more importantly to have taken from him a lesson in the appropriate style for depicting a situation in which man travels unaided, his own worst enemy, through a world he does not understand. As Harry M. Solomon has argued, convincingly, Pope in the Essay repeatedly undoes his rationalistic dogma through paradox. 49 Perhaps Beckett found in Pope’s couplets a hint as to how to create an oxymoronic compression, jamming positive and negative words together, juxtaposing two words and two opposed values in adjacent phrases. “That’s the idea, let’s contradict each other!” says Estragon to Vladimir with childish glee (Waiting for Godot, p. 41A). While the effects of Beckett’s oxymorons may be quite unlike Pope’s, the habit of mind which permeates the satirist’s work permeates his own. Thus Pope states in the Preface to his Works: “I believe no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer as the power of rejecting his own thoughts.”50 The narrator of From an Abandoned Work says much the same: “No, there’s no accounting for it, there’s no accounting for anything, with a mind like the one I always had, always on the alert against itself” (p. 141). Although it is true that Pope is speaking here about the necessity of an author’s revising his words, whereas Beckett is speaking more generally about a compulsion he cannot escape, the self-reflexivity is in each case the main point. For Pope, however, this is a “power.” For Beckett it is a frustration, a sign of human frailty. Belacqua, Beckett jokes in More Pricks Than Kicks, “had a strong weakness for oxymoron” (p. 33). Indeed both Pope and Beckett seem uneasy in the face of absolute statement, neatness of expression, or any suggestion that truth is easy. For different reasons, both are drawn to what Solomon – speaking of Pope – calls a “polyvalent rhetoric” (p. 95). In the second epistle of An Essay on Man, for example, man is described as “A being darkly wise, and rudely great,” a bundle of contraries: In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast; In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer, Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much . . .


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Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! (lines 8–18) Of course behind Pope’s description of man is a set of dichotomous assumptions regarding truth and error, right reasoning and wrong, God’s way and man’s – assumptions about which our century would be less sure. But Beckett would agree with practically every one of Pope’s points. In his view also man is the “jest” and “riddle” of the world, and, as in Pope, the self has become (to use Solomon’s term) “the matrix of doubt” (p. 65). The difference would seem to be this: the paradox in Beckett stems not from the clash between the “glory” of man (because he possesses none) and his “doubt,” “ignorance,” and “error,” but rather between man’s belief that he can understand and the reality that he cannot, or between his almost heroic attempts at understanding and his frustrating failure to understand, or, simply, between what he thinks now as opposed to what he thought a split second ago. Pope’s riddle becomes Beckett’s riddle, only with a difference in emphasis. The art of both writers is rife with deflating oxymorons – a figure which seems to have survived the move from a theistic to an atheistic world quite intact. In the essay one set of these – referring to death – might have been particularly important to Beckett. After all, here Beckett would have come across the following couplets: “Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;/Wait the great teacher Death, and God adore!” (Epistle 1, lines 91–2); “As Man, perhaps, the moment of his breath,/ Receives the lurking principle of death” (Epistle 2, lines 133–4); and “Taught half by Reason, half by mere decay,/To welcome death, and calmly pass away” (Epistle 2, lines 259–60). Again, aside from the adoration of God advocated by Pope, Beckett would have discovered an affinity here with a view of death as existing from the moment of our birth, as all-powerful and ever-present. And he would as well have discovered in Pope an aesthetics which could both assert and deny extremes, placing statements under immediate erasure, leaving them to hover between this and that. In this one respect like Sporus in The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Pope and Beckett create “one vile Antithesis” (line 325).

IV Through Pope’s career one can trace an increasing anxiety regarding the survival of both his person and his art, although the early poems show little concern of this sort. In Windsor Forest he says confidently that “The Muse shall sing; and what she sings shall last” (line 174). And in

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The Temple of Fame we are told that the names of the best poets shall survive: “These ever new, nor subject to Decays, / Spread, and grow brighter with the Length of Days” (lines 51–2). And not only the durability of poetry but its power – albeit humorously – is suggested at the end of The Rape of the Lock, where Belinda’s hair, like the Virgin herself, is assumed into heaven: “But trust the Muse – she saw it upward rise, / Tho’ mark’d by none but quick Poetic Eyes” (Canto 5, lines 123–4). Yet even in his earlier poems, Pope refers on occasion to his own ineptitude, as in the conventional allusion at the end of Windsor Forest to “My humble Muse” who recites in “unambitious strains” (line 427). More significantly, several of his poems go so far as to make the poet’s own loss of power part of the problem, as in the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady; indeed on 23 March 1936 Beckett tells MacGreevy that he has been reading Pope, presumably from his just purchased edition of the Works, and he specifically mentions this poem. Beginning with two stanzas on the brevity of life for us all, the poet in the lines which follow imaginatively memorializes an unidentified woman. Beckett is attracted to the rhetorical question posed by the elegy and quotes the first line of this couplet, calling it “lovely”: Is there no bright reversion in the sky, For those who greatly think, or bravely die? (lines 9–10) Pope’s question is relevant not only to the unfortunate lady but to the poet himself, and indeed to all artists. Yet the two writers’ respective answers to the question would be different: in the eighteenth century, Pope would have responded that yes, for those who “greatly think, or bravely die,” there is some reward; Beckett would answer in the negative. Something comparable is suggested in Pope’s powerful question in The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated, written within a few years of his death: “This subtle Thief of Life, this paltry Time, / What will it leave me, if it snatch my Rhime?” (lines 76–7). Identifying himself with his writing, Pope asks what Malone – or Beckett – might have asked: If my identity is my writing, then if my imagination collapses or if I can write no more, do I even exist? In An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, his most personal poem, Pope praises his friend who died only 25 days after the poem was published. Dramatizing himself, he says: A dire Dilemma! either way I’m sped, If Foes, they write, if Friends, they read me dead.


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Seiz’d and ty’d down to judge, how wretched I! Who can’t be silent, and who will not lye. (lines 31–4) And he goes on to ask, “Why did I write? what sin to me unknown/Dipt me in Ink, my Parents’, or my own?” (lines 125–6). Pope sees himself almost punished for some original sin, plagued now by the difficulties of writing (like Beckett’s, his manuscripts bear witness to this) and by hack writers who come to him for help. Although there is a degree of self-parody here, Pope is more than a little serious. “Heav’ns!” he protests, “was I born for nothing but to write? /Has Life no Joys for me?” (lines 272–3). In ill health, trapped inside a contorted frame, Pope presents himself as one painfully alone, abandoned by Swift (who had returned to Ireland), John Gay (who died in 1732), by his parents (his mother died in 1733 at the age of 90), and now fearing the death of Arbuthnot. He has only his writing. He has been, as suggested in the line Beckett copied out of The Dunciad into his Whoroscope notebook, “Damn’d to Fame” (Book 3, line 158).51 The image here is similar to Beckett’s in the trilogy. Since Pope is in The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot ostensibly writing to his friend the physician, it is appropriate that he alludes, poignantly, to “this long Disease, my Life” – referring simultaneously to his physical ailments and his writerly difficulties. Malone’s tone is comparable: That has been my disease. I was born grave as others syphilitic. And gravely I struggled to be grave no more, to live, to invent, I know what I mean. But at each fresh attempt I lost my head, fled to my shadows as to sanctuary, to his lap who can neither live nor suffer the sight of others living. I say living without knowing what it is. 52 I hesitate to insist that this passage echoes Pope’s poem, but want only to observe that the isolation of the individual, the reference to being “born grave” (pun intended), and the equation of disease and life – that all are suggestive of the Pope of Dr. Arbuthnot and the other late poems. He did much of his writing, we should remember in this context, in his grotto, buried underground, fleeing “to [his] shadows as to sanctuary.” I shall leave aside the old speculation that Pope suffered from syphilis. 53 But if, as discussed above, Beckett inverts the chain of being, so too he inverts the image of the writer as it appears in Pope. Thus Pope’s avowed enemy, the dull writer, pops up repeatedly in his satire as an example of what not to be. For example, we come across this in An Essay on Criticism:

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Still run on Poets in a raging vein, Ev’n to the Dregs and Squeezings of the Brain; Strain out the last, dull droppings of their Sense, And Rhyme with all the Rage of Impotence! (lines 606–9) The connection in this passage between difficulty in writing and old men’s difficulty in urinating is impossible to miss, and Beckett uses the same metaphor in Ill Seen Ill Said: “See now how words too. A few drops mishaphazard. Then strangury” (p. 52). In any case, in The Dunciad Pope created an image of an equally impotent Colley Cibber, the poet laureate: Swearing and supperless the Hero sate, Blasphem’d his Gods, the Dice, and damn’d his Fate, Then gnaw’d his pen, then dash’d it to the ground, Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound! Plung’d for his sense, but found no bottom there, Yet wrote and flounder’d on, in mere despair. (Book 1, lines 115–20) We might say that Pope’s image of the dull writer becomes for Beckett, in particular in the trilogy, an image of himself: frustrated, running on with sound but no sense, winding down, having nothing really to say, and deep in despair. Pope mocks the dull poet from a position of security. But Beckett has no such secure position from which to speak, realizing as he does his own inadequacies; in the eighteenth century, the satirist ridicules the impotent hack writer, whereas such criticism now seems too easy. Beckett in Molloy perhaps echoes The Dunciad: the Queen of Dulness, creating Cibber, “With pert flat eyes she window’d well its head;/A brain of feathers, and a heart of lead” (Book 2, lines 43–4); Molloy, in the first person (the change is significant) admits that “In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe” (p. 68). Beckett, exploiting ambiguity, recognizes a bit of Cibber in himself. In The Dunciad as well as Ill Seen Ill Said, the autobiographical drama is heightened even more. Pope writes in Book 4: “Suspend a while your Force inertly strong,/Then take at once the Poet and the Song” (lines 7–8). But he is unable to withstand the approaching aesthetic twilight: In vain, in vain, – the all-composing Hour Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the Pow’r.


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She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold Of Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old! Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay, And all its varying Rain-bows die away. (lines 627–32) “Gilded clouds” and “varying Rain-bows,” like Beckett’s references to sheep, flowers, and the renewable days and seasons, hark back not just to the Golden Age but to the poet’s own previous allusions to that past. Yet those days are gone, or rapidly departing. “The Muse obeys the Pow’r”: Pope and Beckett both dramatize themselves as victims of the relentless darkness. As we have seen, the lamentation in Ill Seen Ill Said for the old woman’s husband, or for her own departed youth, is also a requiem for the poet-painter’s ebbing imagination. Indeed the end of Beckett’s poetic novel echoes the last words of Pope’s poem: Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And Universal Darkness buries All. (lines 653–6) Similarly, Beckett laments: “Dim the light of day from them were day again to dawn. Without on the other hand some progress. Toward unbroken night. Universal stone” (p. 51). And in the final paragraph he refers to his own waning artistic existence: “No but slowly dispelled a little very little like the last wisps of day when the curtain closes. Of itself by slow millimetres or drawn by a phantom hand. Farewell to farewell” (p. 59). 54 The apocalyptic tones are comparable. And the specific echoes are unmistakable: references to dusk, hand, curtain, and universal darkness (Pope) or stone (Beckett). But whereas Pope begins Book 4 by pleading “Yet, yet a moment, one dim Ray of Light/Indulge” (lines 1–2), he seems by the close of the poem to have accepted the inevitable loss of his imaginative powers with a kind of Catholic stoicism. Beckett, on the other hand, courageously resists right up to the end: “No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness” (p. 59). The pun here on “know”/“no” embraces the doubleness of Beckett’s world: our unceasing efforts to know and our inability to know much of anything. 55 In Pope the fragmentary echoes of the pastoral, along with his inability to sustain a Miltonic epic in the present age, reflect on his own limitations as a poet. Beckett likewise feels impotent in the face of a larger force, victimized as he is by the postmodern sense

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of a flickering out of any hope of human understanding, or originality as a writer, much less knowing happiness.

Rather surprisingly, behind Beckett’s borrowing from the poetic tradition lies an implicit conviction in the writer’s power to at least beckon through language to a departed Golden Age. As Pope says in Windsor Forest: The Groves of Eden, vanish’d now so long, Live in Description, and look green in Song. (lines 7–8) Or Yeats in “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” which he placed first in his Collected Poems: The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy . . . Words alone are certain good. 56 Through his art the poet is able to rise above the mundane realities of the present and to call up the remnants of a happier, more beautiful, more harmonious time – to glimpse, as the Unnamable says, “shreds of old visions” (p. 405). Partially and perhaps reluctantly, Beckett accepts the aesthetics we associate with the Neoclassical Age – an aesthetics which depends upon what Martin Battestin once termed “the redemptive function of artifice.”57 Beckett, like Pope and Yeats, felt the absence of a better world, and perhaps felt it more keenly because he sensed that its perfections were not just over but never existed except in song. In his writing he dismantles the image of a better time which claimed only a literary existence in the first place. Many years ago, Reuben Brower observed how late Pope, in what he called the “Augustan twilight,” was nonetheless able to create “a timeless image of decline and fall.”58 Much the same is true of Beckett, for if Pope senses his falling-off from Horace and Virgil, Beckett senses his own falling-off from the age of Pope. Pope dramatizes his war with the dunces and we do not doubt that they threaten him personally; his own couplets, however, aside from his perfectly controlled use of paradox and self-erasure, remain untouched. Beckett takes things a step farther: everywhere in his prose there are signs of the disintegration of the text we are reading. He of course is also in command. But his writing palpably falters, fragments, slips into ambiguity, and in places approaches


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incoherency. Thus late in his life Pope can point to Queen Dulness and her “uncreating word” (The Dunciad, Book 4, line 654), whereas late in his, Beckett can write a sentence – if that is what we choose to call it – like this one: “Ununsaid when worse said.”59 Pope accuses Dulness of being uncreative while being quite clearly creative himself. Beckett is not accusing someone else but self-irreverently demonstrating his own inability to create a text that does not instantly undo itself.

Conclusion

One loses one’s classics. (Pause.) Oh not all. (Pause.) That is what I find so wonderful, a part remains, of one’s classics, to help one through the day. (Pause.) Oh yes, many mercies, many mercies. Winnie in Happy Days1 Beckett was influenced by the eighteenth century and also interprets it for us. Although very like the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in his interest in the biographical significance of literature, he was quite ahead of the critics in attaching himself to the bold experimentation with form in texts by Swift, Fielding, Sterne, and Pope. His own texts (especially his fiction) bear the traces of these eighteenth-century writers: such things as his rejection of moralism and his fragmentation of form, deliberate creation of ambiguity, mockery of the reader, and engagement in self-parody. Moreover, Beckett’s combination of two quite different interests in the century – the biographical and the formal – seems to have contributed in important ways to his own uniqueness as a writer. His identification with the dying writers of the eighteenth century, coupled with its formal innovations, led to his peculiar mix of the personal and the impersonal, the tragic and the parodic, the modern and the postmodern. Could not, however, the influence of eighteenth-century British writers have come to Beckett not directly but through Joyce, who himself demonstrates a fascination with (in particular) Swift and Sterne? The answer is yes and no, probably no. Of course his interest may have been spurred by Joyce’s interest, but there is substantial evidence that Beckett was attracted to the writers of the eighteenth century on his own. Furthermore, while Joyce’s allusions (especially those to Swift) 156

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focus as much on the lives of these authors as on their texts, he typically remains playful, keeps the authors and their texts at a distance, and never reveals the kind of personal involvement with these writers that Beckett does. This is not to say that Joyce’s interest in the eighteenth century did not have an effect on Beckett. But the source may not be the one typically pointed to. Understandably, critics assume that Finnegans Wake was more of an influence on Beckett than Ulysses; in the late twenties and early thirties, after all, the young writer-to-be assisted his near-blind countryman by reading out loud the draft of his magnum opus, and in 1929 he contributed a laudatory essay to Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. However, that the influence of the canonical writers of English literature on Beckett may have been prompted in part by the model of Joyce’s earlier novel is perhaps suggested by Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” a book published in 1930 in which Joyce cooperated. The fact that Gilbert (like Thomas MacGreevy) was a member of the Joyce circle in Paris during this time and was also a contributor to Our Exagmination, makes it likely that Beckett read about and perhaps discussed this aspect of Ulysses with Gilbert and possibly Joyce himself. Although Beckett would have been put off by Gilbert’s pedantic schematization of Joyce’s masterpiece (“Criticism is not bookkeeping,” the younger writer observes in the essay on the Wake), he may well have been intrigued by Joyce’s imitations of the characteristic styles of English authors from various historical periods.2 In particular, Gilbert, tracing Joyce’s echoes in “The Oxen in the Sun” chapter of Ulysses, argues for a chronological progression from AngloSaxon times up through the nineteenth century, including passages inspired by the eighteenth-century writers Defoe, Swift, Addison and Steele, Edmund Burke, Horace Walpole, Sterne, and Edward Gibbon. 3 Joyce’s seeming approval of Gilbert’s analysis of “The Oxen in the Sun” may indeed have prompted Beckett to look for ways to incorporate English authors and their works into his own writing. After all, by doing so, Joyce had demonstrated how one could be innovative while at the same time proclaiming an indebtedness to a long literary tradition. Although Joyce’s experiments with style are nowhere near as programmatic as suggested by Gilbert, it is not unlikely that Gilbert’s Ulysses, approved by Joyce, gave his young protégé the idea for experimenting with some literary borrowing of his own. If this is true, however, the challenge for Beckett would have been (to speak in Bloomean terms) to echo Joyce’s imitative technique, while at the same time avoiding too close a connection with Joyce.

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That is exactly what he did. In the mature Beckett gone (for the most part) are the explicit allusions to Swift, Addison, Berkeley, Pope, Boswell, Chesterfield, and others which characterized his earlier writing. Beckett manages to move beyond the overt display of his literary heritage employed in Proust, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, More Pricks Than Kicks, and Murphy; so too he gets beyond the fairly obvious echo-parodies of representative periods and authors Joyce created in “Oxen in the Sun.” However, even as early as Proust Beckett seems to have suffered a certain anxiety regarding his originality. Here he refers to “rememoration,” but separates “deliberate rememoration” from that which is habitual: “In extreme cases memory is so closely related to habit that its word takes flesh, and is not merely available in cases of urgency, but habitually enforced.”4 In Dream he similarly makes numerous allusions to authors he has recently been reading, but on a couple of occasions suggests that such layering of memories is not altogether positive: “Without going so far as Stendhal, who said – or repeated after somebody – that the best music (what did he know about music anyway?) was the music that became inaudible after a few bars. . . . ”5 Beckett, aged 26, seems to have begun to struggle with his literary heritage. Here he alludes to Stendhal but says he cannot go as far as Stendhal, then suggests that Stendhal may have been repeating after someone else, and then returns to Stendhal, questioning whether or not he in fact knew anything about the subject at hand. The problem is authority. Does Stendhal himself have it? Or is Stendhal’s authority only borrowed from someone else? Or does Beckett, writing after Stendhal who wrote after another, have any writerly authority whatsoever, any authority even to judge Stendhal’s authority? Almost lost behind the complex rhetorical struggle is the subject itself – inaudibility, silence – which would have attracted Beckett in the first place. In this context not altogether surprisingly, Murphy opens: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”6 These are the kinds of issues that worried Beckett throughout the next 60 years, but most forcibly in mid-career. As we have seen, by the time of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable he had developed a technique of his own: a subtle interweaving not so much of styles but of characteristic voices; his narrators are plagued by the literary voices that they, and Beckett, hear in their heads. It would seem that in the trilogy he has discovered a dramatic new method based on his personal anxieties of influence. As he says in Molloy: “Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and

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long forgotten. . . . ”7 Reflecting on his own unoriginality, on the impossibility of truly inventing anything, Molloy suggests that all we know was learned, and that what we believe is new is nothing more than a redaction of someone else’s writing. The “lesson” Molloy “got by heart” is perhaps not a literal reference to school but rather a metaphor for all that he (and we can assume he is speaking for Beckett) has read and only thinks he has forgotten. In fact he has forgotten very little. What he read is part of him now and impedes his originality. “[N]o words but the words of others,” says the Unnamable (p. 314), and elsewhere he complains that there is nothing left for him but the “old slush to be churned everlastingly” (p. 403).8 His dilemma is not unlike Molloy’s: It’s of me now I must speak, even if I have to do it with their language, it will be a start, a step towards silence and the end of madness, the madness of having to speak and not being able to, except of things that don’t concern me, that don’t count, that I don’t believe, that they have crammed me full of to prevent me from saying who I am. . . . (p. 324) The same thing is suggested more overtly by the phraseology repeated incessantly throughout How It Is: “I quote,” says the narrator; “I say it as I hear it.” The literary and personal problem for Beckett in the late 1940s and after becomes one of finding, or hanging onto, his own personal voice amidst the barrage of voices from the authors he so assiduously read in the 1920s and 1930s. Joyce’s is one of those demanding voices, but not the only one. I do not mean to underestimate the existential drama behind the textual struggle of Beckett’s “I” – that slender pronoun – against the demanding fictional presences of Molloy, Moran, Malone, Macmann, and the other personas. That drama is surely there. But the struggle with the problem of voice in the trilogy has literary as well as personal significance for Beckett; in these novels he is competing not only with fictional voices he cannot avoid creating, but also (to name only writers of the eighteenth century) with the presences of Defoe, Swift, Pope, Fielding, Sterne, Johnson, Gray, and others. Joyce had tamed those voices. Beckett could not, and remembering those writers so well, could not halt their babbling. Of course it is ironic that having escaped the shadow of Joyce, Beckett should find himself in the longer shadow of the literary tradition. I am reminded of Swift’s parable of the spider and the bee in The Battle of the Books, a passage Beckett first read as an entering

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student at Trinity College: like the spider, he wants to spin his art out of himself; like the bee, however, he finds himself by necessity feeding here and here and here, his art dependent on the nectar of a multitude of flowers. It is his awareness of this tenuous situation that perhaps more than any other places Beckett at a key position in the development of twentiethcentury literature: “Samuel Beckett,” says David Lodge, “has a strong claim to be considered the first important postmodernist writer.”9 And one of the primary features of postmodernism, as Julia Kristeva has argued, is the degree of importance placed on intertextuality: “Every text takes shape as a mosaic of citations, every text is the absorption and transformation of other texts.” 10 A postmodern text is a sort of palimpsest. Unfortunately, in such a rhetorical situation, says Claudette Sartiliot, the writer can no longer create – or feel he or she is able to create – but “only repeat, copy, and/or plagiarize what has already been written in the previous centuries.” 11 Thus in Finnegans Wake Joyce refers to Shem the Penman’s “very many piously forged palimpsests slipped in the first place by this morbid process from his pelagiarist pen.” And Shaun disparages his brother Shem’s writing: “Every dimmed letter in it is a copy and not a few of the silbils and wholly words. . . . The last word in stolentelling!”12 Beckett himself, in his essay on Proust, refers to “that most necessary, wholesome and monotonous plagiarism – the plagiarism of oneself,” or rather the conscious calling up of one’s earlier reading and writing.13 Joyce and Beckett saw themselves as very much a part of the literary tradition they necessarily echoed, and each must have read with interest Swift’s comments in A Tale of a Tub on literary originality. His Modern Author claims: “I here think fit to lay hold on that great and honourable Privilege of being the Last Writer; I claim an absolute Authority in Right, as the freshest Modern, which gives me a Despotick Power over all Authors before me.”14 Mocking here the egotism of modernism, Swift hints as well that all writers should despair, as the Modern admits in the Preface, of saying “the smallest Tincture of anything New” (p. 49). Thus Joyce, while alluding to, borrowing from, and quite dismantling his inherited literary tradition, was able to maintain a “Despotick Power” over the authors he used. Beckett, on the other hand, similarly sensing his own place in that tradition, discovered no power whatsoever in being – as Swift calls himself – “the freshest Modern”; it almost seems as if the more strongly he felt his attachment to the writers who preceded him, the more completely he felt his own literary impotence. Beckett’s keen awareness of his literary roots in the eighteenth century

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was therefore a mixed blessing: while the likes of Swift, Fielding, Pope, and Sterne fed his literary creativity, there was a cost, for he seems as early as the mid-1930s to have sensed an inability to escape their work. After all, under the weight of what W. Jackson Bate memorably termed “the burden of the past,” what are the odds of being able to say anything really new? 15 But it is ironic that even this perception of the exhausted state of modern writing is one Beckett might have found in eighteenth-century texts. The writers of that century, at least some of them, were themselves as aware of this churning of culture as were Joyce and Beckett. In addition to Swift, Pope and Sterne explored the idea that their art might consist of little more than a reheating of the past. The younger Pope saw something positive in the tradition, as suggested in this couplet from Windsor Forest: “Happy the Man,” he says, who “Of ancient Writ unlocks the learned Store,/Consults the Dead, and lives past Ages o’er.”16 However, by the time he came to write The Dunciad in Four Books, which Beckett read when he was 30, Pope is able to mock the poet laureate Colley Cibber, who cannot create without plagiarizing: Next, o’er his Books his eyes began to roll, In pleasing memory of all he stole, How here he sipped, how there he plunder’d snug And suck’d all o’er, like an industrious Bug. (Book I, lines 127–30) It would of course be reassuring to imagine that Pope saw the hack writer alone as guilty of such pilfering, but there is reason to believe that he saw himself as compromised by the same reiterative situation. In the 1728 Dunciad Variorum and again in its 1744 version, Pope included among his prefatory “Testimonies of Authors Concerning our Poet and his Works” the following statement from his contemporary Joseph Addison, who in 1711 had written of the unoriginality of Pope’s youthful Essay on Criticism: [H]ere give me Leave to mention what Monsieur Boileau has so very well enlarged upon in the Preface to his Works, that Wit and fine Writing doth not consist so much in advancing Things that are new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable Turn. It is impossible, for us who live in the latter Ages of the World, to make Observations in Criticism, Morality, or in any Art or Science, which have not been touch’d upon by others.17

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Pope quotes Addison who quotes Boileau, and thus the layering of quotations serves to underscore his point about unoriginality. Moreover, Pope would not have read Addison’s reference to “the latter ages of the world” as ironic, for The Dunciad is a sadly, desperately grand gesture in the direction of an epic which can no longer be written. The notion is as old as Ecclesiastes, of course, but Pope’s magnum opus, two centuries before Finnegans Wake presumably brought literature (or at least the novel) to an end, stands as another monument to the position that all has been said. Beckett would have commiserated with Addison in his pulling back from the optimism of the modern. And much the same attitude had been expressed at length almost a century before The Spectator. In “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” which prefaces the Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton had made a comparable point, arguing metaphorically: “As apothecaries,” says Burton, “we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another”; and again, “we weave the same web still, twist the same rope again and again.” “I cite and quote mine authors,” he says, then defends himself by asking: “Whom have I injured?” 18 And Burton aptly demonstrates his point; the pages of his Anatomy are replete with echoes of Cardan, Tully, Lipsius, Aristophanes, Lucian, Scaliger, Gesner, Jovius, Democritus, and a host of others. He openly admits that his own book is nothing but “a rhapsody of rags tied together” (p. 162). Surely it is relevant that Beckett read Burton in the middle 1930s and copied four pages of excerpts from “Democritus Junior to the Reader” into the reading journal he kept during this period. Indeed Beckett wrote out the following Latin: “actum agere. Iliada post Homerum, cramben bis coctam apponere” (p. 160). Twice-cooked cabbage!19 Burton’s comments on literary recycling must have struck Beckett again when he read Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in the late thirties. At the beginning of Volume 5, Chapter 1, Tristram vows to protect himself from his library by locking the door and throwing away the key. Having thus figuratively separated himself from other writers, Sterne, ironically echoing Burton’s very words, inveighs against plagiarism: Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new Mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? Are we for ever to be twisting, and untwisting the same rope? for ever in the same track – for ever at the same pace? Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be shewing the relicks of learning, as monks do

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the relicks of their saints – without working one – one single miracle with them?20 Although Beckett did not read Tristram Shandy until 1938, he must (we can only guess) upon doing so have caught the modern relevance of this passage on literary reiteration. Here the irony would have struck him: Burton had borrowed from the ancients both to embrace and condemn literary borrowing, and Sterne, as cavalier about such matters as Burton, plagiarizes the seventeenth-century writer in order to mock plagiarism. Surely all of this must have made Beckett keenly aware of the redundancy of the literary tradition, but with this difference: whereas for Burton, Swift, Pope, Sterne, and Joyce that heritage was no handicap but an inspiration, for the mature Beckett it became cumbersome baggage, impeding his originality. Or so he believed. In the early 1930s Beckett may have been concerned that he could never compete with Joyce’s innovativeness, but his keen interest in his literary heritage runs far deeper than his relationship with his countryman. He would appear to have shared Burton’s view – “We can say nothing but what hath been said” – and to have sensed in this an impotence as well as a great urgency. Beckett’s position seems to be closest to Pope’s, who was aware in The Dunciad that he has simply been “uncreating” the epic (a word he uses in his closing lines), and is able to say little that is original in these “latter ages of the world.” In Beckett’s eyes as in Pope’s, things are winding down, and part of that devolution is the impossibility of the new. For the younger Pope or for an optimist like Henry Fielding, and we might say for Joyce as well, the roots of the present in the past were a source of inspiration or vibrant good fun, but for eighteenth-century writers like the gloomy Swift and Pope, this dependency signaled that the best days were long gone.21 Thus the slow decay of Molloy, Malone, and the Unnamable assumes a cultural significance that reaches beyond themselves. There is frequently in Beckett’s œuvre an unmistakably apocalyptic tone, as if the world were collapsing into itself, unable to promise anything new: “Imagination dead imagine.”22 Of course in this statement there is, as so often in Beckett, a tension between the assertion of a goal and its immediate erasure. This is the postmodern return to the past which is never merely nostalgic but always critical, ironic.23 As characteristically eighteenth century as it is Beckettian, this repeated unravelling of the modernist desire for discovery and closure is found as well in Book 4 of Gulliver’s Travels, where Swift shows his world traveller celebrating his new life in the company of horses in a British barn; in Pope’s mock epic that both

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reiterates the grandeur of the classical epic while denying the possibility of the form in the present day; in the final chapter of Johnson’s Rasselas, titled “The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded”; or even in the painfully physical demise of these eighteenth-century writers themselves, who had so carefully and, ultimately, fruitlessly, cultivated the life of the mind while recultivating the past. Unable to identify with Joyce’s selfconfident aesthetics and unwilling to identify with the relative optimism of Thackeray, Dickens, and Arnold, or even Fielding, Beckett discovered a compelling connection with the more philosophical, less sanguine writers like Swift, Pope, and Johnson, whose decidedly regressive time prefigured his own. “He deals in unheroics,” Richard Ellmann says.24 In most senses this is true. Beckett’s Chaplinesque antiheroes show us a world in which there is no hope of salvation and little chance of human love, human accomplishment, or human understanding. He even depicts his literary project – the writing of his own story – as plagued by blurred memory, technical difficulties, and the distortions inherent in language. On the other hand, Beckett’s world is not totally devoid of heroism, for the artist himself assumes (but not in Arnold’s sense) something of the role of hero, continuing on as he does in the face of all these obstacles. Of the painter Bram van Velde Beckett wrote in 1949: “[He is] the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail.”25 Of Joyce Beckett wrote only a few years before his own death: “I welcome this occasion to bow once again, before I go, deep down, before his heroic work, heroic being.” 26 And it is in light of these comments that we must view Beckett’s attraction to the writers of the eighteenth century. Their view of things was more like his than that of the moralistic Victorians, and as writers in the age of reason and irony, before penicillin and morphine, they too suffered (but not as the Romantics did) for their art. Their courage seems to have been an inspiration to Beckett, and to have cast across their real lives, as well as the lives of Beckett’s characters, an element of the tragic. Pope, we should remember, asks in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot: “Why did I write? what sin to me unknown/Dipt me in Ink, my Parents’, or my own?” (lines 125–6). Beckett might have asked the same question, but he, like the Unnamable, persevered heroically: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Appendix A Eighteenth-Century Items in Beckett’s Library at His Death Note: I am grateful to Samuel Beckett’s nephew, Edward Beckett, for his efforts in identifying these volumes. In his letter of 16 September 1992, Mr. Beckett reminded me: “You must understand that my uncle disposed of a lot of books throughout his life, especially towards the latter part of it. Nevertheless I imagine that he kept the ones that meant the most to him.” Only one of these volumes is signed and dated; although we cannot be sure when Beckett purchased the others, I have speculated below when there is evidence arguing for a particular date. Berkeley, George. A New Theory of Vision and Other Writings, ed. A. D. Lindsay. (1910; London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1926). In addition to A New Theory, contains A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. It is not surprising to find this volume in Beckett’s library, given his allusions to Berkeley’s philosophy, from Murphy (written 1934–36) to the headnote to his film called Film (written 1963). Berkeley’s Commonplace Book, ed. G. A. Johnston (London: Faber, 1930). Probably purchased in the early 1930s; in a 23 December 1932 letter to Thomas MacGreevy, Beckett says that his friend Joseph Hone recommended the book to him and that he has been reading it. Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson,” including Boswell’s “Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides” and Johnson’s “Diary of a Journey to North Wales,” ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 6 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1887). Although Beckett read Boswell’s Life in the mid-1930s, James Knowlson (20 May 1994 letter to author) has assured me that he has evidence that these particular volumes were purchased in March 1961 in a Brighton bookshop. Clifford, James L. Young Samuel Johnson (London: Heinemann, 1955). Gray, Thomas. Poems and Letters (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1922). Gray is echoed in Happy Days (1961), although Beckett may have purchased this book many years before, perhaps as early as the 1930s, when he was reading so much eighteenth-century literature. Hibbert, Christopher. The Personal History of Samuel Johnson (London: Longmans, 1971). This volume and the next show the persistence of Beckett’s interest in Johnson for more than 30 years after he abandoned a play on Johnson’s last years. See Thrale below. Johnson, Samuel. The Complete English Poems. ed. J. D. Fleeman (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1971). Beckett earlier had undoubtedly owned another edition of his poems; in 1936–37 he began a play about Johnson’s last years, titled (after the famous poem) Human Wishes. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. . . . To which is prefixed a history of the language, and an English grammar, 2 vols. 8th edn, corr. and 165

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Appendix A

rev. (London: J. Johnson, 1799). In a letter to me of 30 September 1986, Ruby Cohn said that Beckett told her that he must have purchased the Dictionary in Dublin, probably in the 1930s. In his letter to me of 16 September 1992, Edward Beckett said that he has reason to believe his uncle bought the volume at Greene’s, a bookshop opposite his father’s surveying office on Clare Street; interestingly, in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932) there is a reference to “Green’s bloody library.” It may be that Beckett purchased other older volumes as well at this bookshop. Cf. Sterne below. Johnson, Samuel. Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr. Vol. 1 of The Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). Since Beckett refers to the Annals, Prayers, and Meditations in his 1936–37 Johnson notebooks, as well as in letters of the same period to Thomas MacGreevy and Mary Manning, then he surely read them at this time in their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions. Presumably, this is the book Mary Manning Howe sent him in the late 1950s and for which he thanks her in a letter dated 2 January 1959: “I read the Johnson book with great relish. . . . ” Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill. 2 vols. (1897; reprinted London: Constable and Co., 1966). Among other things, this volume includes Mrs. Thrale’s Anecdotes (cf. Thrale below), which Beckett had read in 1936–37, in preparation for writing Human Wishes. As with the above item, he either owned the 1897 edition and later gave it away, or simply read Hill’s edition in the National Library in Dublin. But his interest in Johnson persisted, as is clear as well from several of the following items. Johnson on Shakespeare: Essays and Notes Set Forth with an Introduction, ed. Walter Raleigh (1908; London: Oxford University Press, 1957). Lynd, Robert. Dr. Johnson and Company, (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1946). The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, with life of the author . . . (Edinburgh: Gall and Inglis, 1881). 6 engravings. Volume signed and dated inside front cover: “Samuel Beckett 3/36.” In a letter dated 23 March 1936 Beckett informed Thomas MacGreevy that he was reading Pope, surely in this edition; Beckett also quotes from Pope’s Pastorals and The Dunciad in his Whoroscope notebook (1932–38). Pope, Alexander. Essay on Criticism, ed. John Sargeaunt (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1909). Since this work was on the course of study for Trinity College Honors students in the Hilary term 1925, it is likely that Beckett purchased this second-hand volume at this time. Cf. Swift, The Drapier’s Letters, below. The Works of Laurence Sterne. 5th edn, 7 vols. (1779; Dublin: D. Chamberlaine, 1780). Beckett owned Volume 4 of this “First, or Dublin, Collected Edition,” which he may well have purchased in a Dublin bookshop, perhaps Greene’s (see Johnson, Dictionary, above). Vol. 4 contains A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, Letters from Yorick to Eliza, and Sterne’s Letters to his Friends. This was the oldest eighteenth-century book owned by Beckett at his death, earlier even than his edition of Johnson’s Dictionary; together, Beckett’s purchase of the two books, and his retention of them, suggests that there was an element of the antiquarian in his eighteenth-century interests. Like the next item, was this purchased in 1938? The Works of Laurence Sterne (London: Oxford University Press, 1910). This was a single-volume edition in The World’s Classics series published first in 1903

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and reprinted in 1905 and again in 1910. Given the question regarding the potential influence of Tristram Shandy on Beckett, it is significant that he owned a copy at the time of his death. He probably purchased it shortly before 5 August 1938 (he was in Dublin from mid-July to the end of August), when he reported in a letter to MacGreevy that he had been reading Tristram Shandy. Cf. above comment on The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope. Swift, Jonathan. The Drapier’s Letters, Vol. 6 of The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., ed. Temple Scott. Bohn’s Standard Library (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1922). As is the case with Pope’s Essay on Criticism (cf. entry immediately above), this work appeared in the course of study for Trinity Honors students in Hilary 1925, and thus it would seem that in this year Beckett splurged on this recent edition. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. The World’s Classics Series. John Hayward (1955; London: Oxford University Press, 1963). Of course Beckett had read this book many years before, and at one time must have owned an earlier edition. In 1976 an acquaintance of Beckett’s reported that the author had admitted a year earlier that he was rereading Gulliver’s Travels, undoubtedly in this edition: see E. M. Cioran in Partisan Review 41(4) (1974); reprinted in Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage, ed. Laurence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 325. Thrale, Hester Lynch. Dr. Johnson: “The Anecdotes” of Mrs. Piozzi in their Original Form, ed. Richard Ingrams (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984). From his extensive notes in the Johnson notebooks, we know that Beckett read this book in 1936–37, probably in Hill’s edition of the Johnson Miscellanies (see above); nonetheless, his purchase of this book as late as the mid-1980s demonstrates his lifelong interest in Johnson. The volume was the most recent eighteenth-century item in Beckett’s library at his death. Vulliamy, C. E. Mrs. Thrale of Streatham: Her Place in the Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson and in the Society of Her Time . . . (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936). Since there are extensive notes from this book in Beckett’s Johnson notebooks from 1936–37, and since it contains a chapter on “Dr. Johnson in Love” (a primary focus of his projected play Human Wishes), we can probably assume that this volume was purchased near to its date of publication.

Appendix B Trinity Course of Study for English Honors The course of study for students competing for Honors in English during Beckett’s junior freshman and senior freshman years at Trinity College is given in the 1923–24 Calendar. These are the requirements under which he would have entered. As explained in Chapter 1, students were also expected to read assigned sections of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Verse, and were assigned particular literary periods from a history such as Wyatt and Low’s Textbook of English Literature. Specific works appointed were as follows. (For each term I have listed the results of Beckett’s English Honors Examination.) 1924 Hilary: More, Utopia; Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book I; and Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry V. *FIRST HONORS* 1924 Trinity: Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book II; Shakespeare, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus; and Bacon, Essays. *FIRST HONORS* 1924 Michaelmas: Spenser, Colin Clouts Come Home Again; Sidney, Apology for Poetry; Shakespeare, As You Like It and Twelfth Night; and Milton, “Lycidas” and Comus. *SECOND HONORS * 1925 Hilary: Chaucer, “Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales; Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice and The Tempest; and Milton, “Aereopagitica” and Paradise Lost, Books I and II. *SECOND HONORS * 1925 Trinity: Chaucer, Knight’s Tale, Squire’s Tale, and Nun’s Priest’s Tale; Shakespeare, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet; and Addison, Coverley papers and critical essays from The Spectator. *PASS, NO HONORS* 1925 Michaelmas: Chaucer, Clerk’s Tale, Prioress’ Tale, Tale of Sir Thopas, and “Prologue” to The Legend of Good Women; Shakespeare, Macbeth and Hamlet; Dryden, Absolom and Achitophel; Pope, Rape of the Lock and Essay on Criticism; and Swift, The Drapier’s Letters. *FIRST HONORS* The syllabus defines the conservative canon of British literature as viewed by the faculty of Trinity (and most other faculties) in the mid-1920s. What is missing is not so surprising: Beowulf and all other Anglo-Saxon poems; medieval writers other than Chaucer; Renaissance dramatists other than Shakespeare; and the Metaphysical poets. Note that students who continued in Honors English (as Beckett did not) would have studied the late eighteenth-century writers, the Romantic poets, and the major Victorians.

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Appendix C Beckett’s Reading of British Literature, 1932–38 Note: Although the following lists do not pretend to completeness, they do give us some sense of the breadth of Beckett’s reading in British literature, as well as his special interest in eighteenth-century writers. See Chapter 1 for a discussion of this material as well as an attempt to weigh the preponderance of British writers relative to non-British writers. Note also that what is not reflected here is the year and a half that Beckett spent researching Dr. Johnson; for a consideration of this matter, see Chapter 5. The following authors are cited (and in most cases quoted) in the Whoroscope notebook (1932–38): Chaucer Greene Peele Nashe Dekker Marston Shakespeare Bacon Burton Bunyan Walton Pepys Milton

Berkeley Farquhar Swift Pope Gay Fielding Smollett Sheridan Johnson Thrale-Piozzi Boswell Thackeray

The following authors are mentioned (sometimes pejoratively), as writers he is reading, in Beckett’s correspondence with Thomas MacGreevy (1930–38): Anon, Everyman Jonson Donne J. Taylor Berkeley Swift Pope Fielding Sterne Johnson

Boswell Chesterfield Goldsmith Austen Keats Darwin Thackeray Ruskin Kipling

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A. Huxley Macaulay H. C. Anderson Shaw T. S. Eliot D. Barnes W. Lewis Joyce Pound

Appendix D Allusions to English Literature in Beckett’s Early Fiction Note: Although these lists do not claim to to be exhaustive, they nonetheless include most of Beckett’s allusions, either directly to the author by name, to one of his or her works or characters, or in some other unambiguous way. I discuss these and other – sometimes more questionable – references in Chapter 1. Because I believe the information may be relevant, even in a gross tabulation such as this, I have noted which authors are mentioned more than once. The following authors are referred to in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written 1932, published 1992): Chaucer (3) Marlowe Shakespeare (2) Swift (3) Austen

Blake Wordsworth Byron Dickens (3)

The following authors are referred to in More Pricks Than Kicks (written 1932–34, published 1934): Chaucer (2) Julian of Norwich Shakespeare Donne Milton Swift (9) Defoe (2) Fielding (2)

T. Moore (2) Donne Wordsworth ( passim) Coleridge Byron (2) T. H. Lister Hardy Yeats

The following authors are referred to in Murphy (written 1934–36, published 1938): Shakespeare Berkeley (3) Swift (2) Pope (passim) E. Young Boswell Chesterfield Wordsworth (2)

Coleridge Keats P. B. Shelley M. Shelley T. Moore Darwin Russell (A.E.) Lawrence

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Notes Introduction 1. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: the Major Authors, 5th edn, ed. M. H. Abrams et al. (1962; New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1987), p. 2537. 2. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 17. 3. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 7; A Map of Misreading, p. 77. See also Bloom’s more recent Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (1982). 4. Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcist,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (1985); reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (New York: Longman, 1989), p. 429. The same tone is assumed by Melvin J. Friedman, “Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce and Deirdre Bair’s Samuel Beckett: a Biography: the Triumphs and Trials of Literary Biography,” in Re: Joyce ’n Beckett, ed. Phyllis Carey and Ed Jewinski (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), p. 15: “This should give the influence-hunters – and there are many among the Beckettians – another tempting lead in the tracking down of Beckett’s seemingly endless inspirations and sources.” 5. Joyce’s Grandfathers: Myth and History in Defoe, Smollett, Sterne, and Joyce (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), in the Preface and elsewhere. Warner’s title alludes to Stephen Dedalus’s theory, developed in the library scene of Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1946), p. 205, that Shakespeare “was and felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson.” 6. MLN 103 (December 1988): 1031–55; reprinted in Telling New Lies: Seven Essays in Fiction, Past and Present (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), along with several other essays juxtaposing eighteenth-century and modern fiction. 7. A. A. Luce, Berkeley and Malebranche: a Study of the Origins of Berkeley’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), p. 7. Malebranche is referred to in How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 30. I explore Berkeley’s influence on Beckett in “Beckett and Berkeley: a Reconsideration,” in Beckett Versus Beckett, Vol. 7 of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, ed. Marius Buning et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 331–47. 8. Quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 130; cf. Beckett’s reference in Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1931), p. 62. In the next sentence I refer to the opinion of S. E. Gontarski, who cites this as an allusion to Vico in his essay “Molloy and the Reiterated Novel,” in As No Other Dare Fail: For Samuel Beckett on His 80th Birthday (London: John Calder, 1986), p. 57. 171

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9. The best summary of the philosophical background to Beckett is P. J. Murphy, “Beckett and the Philosophers,” in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 222–40; the best survey of Beckett’s literary background remains Chapter 6 of Pilling’s own Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), pp. 132–58. 10. For example, see Vivian Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 75–6: “We have the peculiar case here of an Anglo-Irishman who, like Swift, seems to fit comfortably into the Gaelic tradition yet has almost no conscious awareness of what that tradition is.” For a study closer in spirit to my own (although it focuses on Waiting for Godot), see Per Nykrog, “In the Ruins of the Past: Reading Beckett Intertextually,” Comparative Literature 36(4) (Fall 1984): 289–311. 11. Samuel Beckett, p. 5. 12. Review in Listener (4 July 1934): 42; reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 42. 13. “The Point is Irrelevance,” Nation (14 April 1956): 325. 14. William York Tindall, Samuel Beckett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 37. 15. Kenner, Samuel Beckett: a Critical Study, revised edition (1961; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 62; Tindall, p. 16; Fletcher, Samuel Beckett’s Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), p. 84; Mercier, Beckett/Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 141; and Bloom, “Introduction” to Modern Critical Views: Samuel Beckett (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), p. 1. 16. On the contents of this notebook, see John Pilling, “From a (W)horoscope to Murphy,” in The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives, ed. Pilling and Mary Bryden (Bristol: Beckett International Foundation, 1992), pp. 1–20. On the parameters of its use, see my own “Dating the Whoroscope Notebook,” Journal of Beckett Studies 3(1) (Autumn 1993): 65–691; and, for a revision of my suggested terminal date, Geert Lernout, “James Joyce and Fritz Mauthner and Samuel Beckett,” In Principle, Beckett is Joyce, ed. Friedhelm Rathjen (Edinburgh: Split Pea Press, 1994), p. 26. 17. “Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son” (1932), reprinted in Collected Essays, Vol. 3 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), p. 80. Cf. Orlando: a Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1928), p. 298: “There was something definite and distinct about the [modern] age, which reminded her of the eighteenth century, except that there was a distraction, a desperation.” 18. “What is Modern about the Eighteenth Century?”, in Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture: The Modernity of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Louis T. Milic (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971), p. 92. 19. I rely here on Beverly Ann Schlack, who in Continuing Presences: Virginia Woolf’s Use of Literary Allusion (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979), pp. 289–311, lists literary allusions in The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves (pp. 134–53). My characterization of Orlando in the next sentence is likewise drawn from Schlack (p. xi). 20. See Orlando, pp. 208–14 and pp. 222–3, and note also the following from Woolf’s preface: “No one can read or write without being perpetually in the

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21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Bronte, DeQuincey, and Walter Pater – to name the first that come to mind” (p. vii). Cf. P. J. Murphy, who in “Beckett and the Philosophers,” p. 228, notes that the writer was “always fascinated by the lives of philosophers in relation to their theories.” Reprinted in Collected Essays, Vol. 3, pp. 132–46. Orlando, p. 222. Finnegans Wake (New York: The Viking Press, 1939), p. 19. See Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), pp. 34ff., plus Roland McHugh, Annotations to “Finnegans Wake,” revised edn (1980; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 19. And see A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd edn (1925; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 9. More Pricks Than Kicks (1934; New York: Grove Press, 1970), p. 48; Tale, p. 179. Cf. Dream, p. 201: “the sands of poets and politicians.” “Quotations of the precise words of Swift’s works,” says James S. Atherton, “are not common in Finnegans Wake.” The Books at the Wake: a Study of Literary Allusion in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” (1959; Mamaroneck, NY: Paul P. Appel, 1979), p. 121. See Gulliver’s Travels: “I . . . discharged my Body of that uneasy Load. But this was the only Time I was ever guilty of so uncleanly an action . . . ” (p. 29); “He had been Eight Years upon a Project for extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers, which were to be put in Vials hermetically sealed . . . ” (p. 179). The latter of these citations occurs in Dream in less complete form: “‘ We go through the world’ said the Alba ‘like sunbeams through cracks’” (p. 224). Joyce puns here on Vanessa’s unusual family name, here making it sound like Grildrig, the Brobdinagians’ name for Gulliver. Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1948), Vol. 2, p. 270. Swift’s emphasis. That Samuel Beckett is referred to in this passage has been denied by Carey and Jewinski in their “Introduction” to Re: Joyce ’n Beckett, pp. xvi–xvii, and also, more recently, by Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 106. When Joyce originally wrote this, they say, he had not yet met Beckett. Nonetheless, whatever his intention when composing this passage, he may later have sensed its relevance to his young Irish friend; he did not delete it. “Balzac to Beckett via God(eau/ot),” in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 3, ed. Marius Buning and Sjef Houppermans (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), p. 50. See Schneider, Voleurs de mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 38. Schlack makes just such a division in Continuing Presences, where she mentions the “fatal blurring of the distinction between influence upon and allusion to” (p. x). A Room of One’s Own (1929; San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 117. In this matter I take a somewhat different position from S. E. Gontarski, who in The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), argues that Beckett typically begins with something personal or historical, but in the process of revision manages to make his subject applicable to humanity at large.

174

Notes

34. Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 3 and 8. 35. John Traugott, “The Professor as Nibelung,” ECS 3(4) (1970): 532–43, was the first critic I know who referred to Swift as our “contemporary.” However, many years before, Beckett seems to have looked upon him as his contemporary.

1

Beckett Reads the Eighteenth Century

1. Proust (1931; New York: Grove Press, 1970), p. 62. 2. See Marjorie Perloff, “Une Voix pas la mienne: French/English Beckett and the French/English Reader,” in Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett, ed. Alan Warren Friedman et al. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), p. 36: “English, for Beckett, is, after all, the language of his childhood, more specifically, the language of English literature as taught to a schoolboy at the Portora Royal School in the Northern Ireland of the early 1920s. Such a schoolboy would of course have been subjected to a heavy dose of Shakespeare and Elizabethan poetry, of Milton, and, more immediately, of the great Romantic and Victorian poets.” Oddly, Perloff skips over the eighteenth century. 3. John Calder, Modern Language Association Convention, Chicago, 30 December 1990; used with permission. Cf. Proust, p. 17: “The man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything.” In a letter to me in May 1993, James Knowlson questions the first half of Calder’s observation; yet Calder is correct in a relative sense, for it is clear that at no later time in his life did Beckett read with either the intensity or range that he did during the late 1920s and 1930s. 4. The Dublin University Calendars for 1924–25 and 1925–26 list the names of students in Beckett’s class for 1923–24 and 1924–25; the exact numbers are 208 students in his class during his first year and 192 during his second. 5. Samuel Beckett, ed. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harlow, England: Longman Group: 1974), p. 3. On this period of Beckett’s life, see James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), Chapter 5: “The Paris Years, 1928–30.” 6. I am grateful to Professor James Mays of York University for his suggestions on how such information can be gleaned; coming in the early stages of my research, his advice was invaluable to me. 7. “From a (W)horoscope to Murphy,” in The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives, ed. John Pilling and Mary Bryden (Bristol: Beckett International Foundation, 1992), p. 10. 8. Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 38. 9. Regarding TCD’s long reliance on examinations, see R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, Trinity College Dublin, 1592–1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 115–17 and 122–3. Students in Beckett’s day were permitted to pass by lectures (attendance at 5/6 of the total was required) or by examination; since his examination results are available, we may assume

Notes 175

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

Beckett elected to follow the second of these routes, except perhaps in the 1925 Trinity term. Examples of the views of American scholars are those of Bair, who indicates that Beckett’s tutor was concerned that he was “cutting classes excessively” (p. 37); and Linda Ben-Zvi, Samuel Beckett (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), who speaks of Beckett’s concentration on modern languages as a “major” (p. 10). Beckett Archives, Reading University MS 1227/1/2/15. On the self-satisfied atmosphere at Trinity during the period between 1924 and 1939, see McDowell and Webb, pp. 444ff. Although Bair says that this exam was “required only of students whose ability to do college work was questionable” (p. 37), McDowell and Webb report that until 1952 the standard mode of entrance for all students was by passing an examination (p. 11). Held in mid-October, the examination was open to students who had entered within the past 12 months. The copy I perused at Trinity was The History of English Literature, 13th edn. (London: Murray’s Student’s Manuals, 1901). Specifically, students were directed to use “Short Specimens” or “Smaller Specimens,” both based on T. B. Shaw’s Student’s Specimens of English Literature. The copy I perused at Trinity was the Smaller Specimens of English Literature, “New ed.” (1875; London: John Murray, 1907). David Gullette, “Mon Jour Chez Sam: a Visit With Beckett,” in Ploughshares, 1(2) (1972): 69. In Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1984), pp. 119–20. See Chapter 3 below. Beckett tells MacGreevy on 5 October 1938 that he has been reading Tristram Shandy. From TCD’s Annual Records of Terms and Examinations (detailed series), MUN Vol. 23/No. 82. Beckett refers to Ossian in a 1934 review of recent Irish poetry. See Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 70. Luce’s comment, made to Bair (p. 38) in the early 1970s, is as follows: “It wasn’t until he was twenty and in his third year that he blossomed. He even took a second in his French examination and that is most thoroughly undistinguished. It’s amusing now to think of it.” Although he received a Second Honors in English, Beckett was second in his class; there was only one First Honors awarded. For a description of the “Premium,” see McDowell and Webb, p. 126. Luce’s 1970 letter to Knowlson (see note 10 above) oddly skips over this term, and Beckett’s name does not appear in the 1925–26 Calendar as one receiving Honors. It may be that he passed on the basis of attending lectures (see note 9 above), or perhaps sat for the Ordinary Examinations. This information comes from the 1925–26 and 1926–27 Calendars; the award in French can be found also in “Captain Shaw’s List of Students with Distinctions, 1924–31,” a privately maintained account by an alumnus of TCD (MUN/Vol/43/12). In his letter to Knowlson, Luce called this final freshman examination “a tough exam in those days, including Latin and general subjects,” and it is thus significant that on the basis of his examination, Beckett was awarded a Senior Exhibition of £20 for two years. For an explanation of the “Little-Go,” see McDowell and Webb, pp. 446–8.

176

Notes

22. See the following from the 1923–24 Calendar: students were told that of English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, “all candidates must present themselves in two, and two only, of the five Sections named above.” 23. The slightly more recent edition which I perused at Trinity (the only one now available at the library) is The Intermediate Textbook of English Literature, ed. A. J. Wyatt and A. S. Collins, 4th edn (London: University Tutorial Press, 1930). The Calendar says “as in Wyatt and Low’s. . . . ” It would seem that students were free to choose Wyatt and Low or another history, such as Henry S. Pancoast’s Introduction to English Literature (recommended to incoming students), or Alexander H. Thompson’s History of English Literature (required for the 1923 Junior Exhibition), or Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian’s A History of English Literature (required for those taking the 1924 Ordinary Examinations). Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 762, notes that Beckett at his death still owned the first volume of the two-volume Wyatt and Low (inscribed “Michaelmas Term, 1923”), as well as a copy of Thompson’s History (dated February 1923). 24. One example shall have to suffice: students sitting for Ordinary Examinations during Beckett’s first two years at Trinity were responsible for four Shakespearean plays; students sitting for Honors Examinations in English were responsible for twelve plays. 25. Since the questions themselves are labeled, it is possible to say with assurance that all questions for Honors English Examinations during Beckett’s first two years at Trinity were authored by Rudmose-Brown, Professor of Romance Languages, and Wilbraham F. Trench, Professor of English Literature. 26. For example, style questions include those on the evolution of the decasyllable from Chaucer to Shakespeare, differences in the blank verse of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, and Milton’s style in “Aeropagitica”; genre questions include those on humor and satire in Utopia, Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Again as “idealized autobiography,” and the epic quality of Shakespeare’s Henry V. 27. Bair, pp. 38–40. 28. From Notebook 1, p. 61, now at the Harry K. Ransom Center, The University of Texas; the cancelled reference to British writers occurs on p. 67. Used with permission. That Beckett is alluding to his TCD years rather than his subsequent reading is suggested by his reference to “the first period accorded to James” and also by his allusion on the latter page to his “course of study” – the very terminology employed at Trinity. 29. Bair, p. 52; see also pp. 91 and 102. 30. See Dream of Fair to Middling Women (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), referring to Byron (p. 220), Wordsworth (p. 185), and Dickens (p. 95). 31. Beckett owned a copy of this edition at his death. See Appendix A. 32. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 649 n.120. 33. This emphasis shows up immediately in Beckett’s writing, for whereas French writers dominate the literary allusions in Dream, English writers dominate More Pricks. And there is evidence that Beckett’s recent reading is being immediately put to use: see how “He [Belacqua] was green, he fluttered a hand helplessly” (Dream, p. 236), becomes “Belacqua was green, he did the King of Brobdingnag in a quick dumb crambo” (More Pricks Than Kicks (1934; New York: Grove Press, p. 80).

Notes 177 34. “Une Voix pas la mienne: French/English Beckett and the French/English Reader,” in Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett, ed. Alan Warren Friedman et al. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), pp. 36–7. For the comment on the greater ease of writing “without style” in French, see Niklaus Gessner, quoted in Richard N. Coe, Samuel Beckett (1964; New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 14. 35. Samuel Beckett: Naman of Noland (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1986), p. 16. 36. In the poem “Serena I” (begun in 1932 and published in 1935), there is an explicit allusion to Defoe. And note the following in Disjecta: there is an explicit reference to Fielding in a 1934 review of Ezra Pound’s Make It New (p. 78); and references to Swift in a 1934 review of Thomas MacGreevy’s Poems (p. 68), in the 1935 essay “Censorship in the Saorstat” (p. 87), and in a 1936 review of Jack Yeats’s The Amaranthers (p. 90). 37. A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (1920; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 4. Subsequent references shall be to this edition. 38. “From (W)horoscope to Murphy,” p. 10. 39. Since “the Goddess of Dulness” is referred to in Proust (p. 20), it is possible that Beckett read The Dunciad at Trinity, although the general nature of the allusion suggests that it may be based on his reading of literary history. In addition to the texts mentioned here, Beckett tells MacGreevy in a letter dated 23 March 1936 that he has been reading Pope, mentioning in particular the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (1717). 40. Although it is not mentioned in the Whoroscope notebook, Knowlson indicates in Damned to Fame, p. 660 n.108, that Beckett read Amelia in May 1935. 41. Pilling, “From (W)horoscope to Murphy,” p. 11, notes that Farquhar’s play is referred to (in mangled form) in the addenda to Watt; Rubin Rabinovitz, The Development of Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. 163 and 172 n.23, points out an echo of Sheridan’s play in the same novel. 42. Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1938), pp. 162 and 234. 43. We know from Beckett’s letters to MacGreevy and Mary Manning that he was studying Boswell’s biography of Johnson in 1936–37; and on 23 March 1936 Beckett told MacGreevy that he had been reading “wildly all over the place,” and went on to mention, among other writers, Pope and Chesterfield. According to Richard Admussen, The Samuel Beckett Manuscripts: a Study (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1979), p. 71, the final typescript of the novel is dated 26 June 1936. 44. See Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), p. 56; and, cited for convenience, Letters Written by Lord Chesterfield to His Son, selected by Charles Sayle (London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., n.d.), p. 53. 45. Frescoes of the Skull: the Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1979), p. 246. 46. Why Beckett (London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1989), p. 39. 47. Cited in E. M. Cioran, Partisan Review 41(4) (1979); reprinted in Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 325.

178

Notes

48. In Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1979), p. 298. 49. How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 41. 50. Letter to Knowlson referred to in “Beckett’s ‘Bits of Pipe,’” in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Morris Beja et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), p. 16. 51. What I call “footnoting” is what Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 112, refers to as a “grafting technique.” 52. More Pricks, pp. 49–50; there is also a reference to Bartlett in Dream, p. 148. Knowlson (pp. 742 n.8 and 755) reports that Beckett inherited his father’s 1885 edition of the Familiar Quotations and kept it on his shelves till his death. 53. From an Abandoned Work, in First Love and Other Shorts (New York: Grove Press, 1974), p. 42; cf. The Unnamable, in Three Novels, p. 382: “memory, real flypaper.” 54. The same phraseology occurs in one of the draft sections of Murphy in the Whoroscope notebook: “I am not of the big world, I am of the little world: vir nihil valeo, ibi nihil velo (I quote from memory) and inversely. . . . ” 55. “‘ For This Relief Much Thanks’: Leopold Bloom and Beckett’s Use of Allusion,” in Re: Joyce ’n Beckett, ed. Phyllis Carey and Ed Jewinski (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), p. 47. Two bungled allusions to Thomas Gray’s poetry would seem to underscore Cohen’s point. In Ulysses (1922; New York: Random House, 1946), Bloom stumbles over the identification of the famous “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard”: “Eulogy in a country churchyard it ought to be that poem of whose is it Wordsworth or Thomas Campbell” (p. 111). In Happy Days (New York: Grove Press, 1961), Winnie has trouble remembering a line from the same poet’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”: “Oh well, what does it matter, that is what I always say, so long as one . . . you know . . . what is that wonderful line . . . laughing wild . . . something something laughing wild amid severest woe” (p. 31). 56. “On First Looking into Beckett’s The Voice,” in The Ideal Core of the Onion, p. 75. 57. Rough for Radio II (1976), in Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1984), pp. 119–20. 58. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (London: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 352. 59. Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 8th edn (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1984), indicates that the verb “to cog” meant in the early twentieth century “to cheat,” and more specifically (at least to 1938), “to copy from another.” 60. Beckett might have found Swift’s last words recorded any number of places. Two possible sources: Leslie Stephen, Swift (London: Macmillan and Co., 1882), p. 208; or Henry Craik, The Life of Jonathan Swift, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894), Vol. 2, p. 257. 61. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1934), Vol. 2, p. 374. Beckett later purchased a secondhand copy of Howard Erskine Hill’s 1887 edition of Boswell’s Life (see Appendix A). 62. Oddly enough, there is no reference on the relevant page of Boswell’s Life to the corridors being called the “galleries”; is the parenthetical part of this

Notes 179

63.

64.

65.

66.

67. 68. 69.

2

note Beckett’s extrapolation and thus the earliest sign of his fictionalization of this item from his research? Watt (1953; New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 151; the word “mansions” reappears several times in the next few pages. That Beckett was thinking of cells is suggested by the references to their “windowlessness” (p. 152) and, quite inconsistently, the “big barred window” (p. 158). The OED (see definitions 7b and 14) suggests that this meaning of “pavilion” was current by the end of the nineteenth century; there are apt quotations from 1885 and 1903. Malone Dies, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (1956; New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 255–6. Subsequent citations shall be to this edition and shall be given in my text. Cf. Dream, p. 44: “the mind at last its own asylum . . . ”; and More Pricks, p. 30: “abstract the asylum and there was little left of Portrane but ruins.” Damned to Fame, pp. 197–9. Tale, pp. 177–8; similarly, Swift inconsistently calls the inmates both “students” and “professors.” Beckett’s “Happy Days”: a Manuscript Study (Columbus: The Ohio State University Libraries, 1977), p. 60.


1. Dean Swift (1983), Vol. 3 of Swift: the Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1962–83), p. 918. 2. Jonathan Swift: a Critical Introduction (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. vii. 3. Gulliver and the Gentle Reader: Studies in Swift and Our Time (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 71; and Bloom, “Introduction” to Modern Critical Views: Samuel Beckett, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985), p. 1. See John Fletcher, “Samuel Beckett et Jonathan Swift: vers une étude comparée,” Litteratures X: Annales de la Faculté des Lettres de Toulouse 11 (1962): 81–117. 4. E. M. Cioran in the Partisan Review (1976); reprinted in Samuel Beckett; the Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 337. 5. For an account of the skull and death masks, see T. G. Wilson, “A Hitherto Undescribed Death-Mask of Dean Swift,” Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 81 (1951): 107–14. 6. Finnegans Wake (1939; New York: Viking Press, 1962), p. 467; but cf. Phyllis Carey and Ed Jewinski, “Introduction” to Re: Joyce ’n Beckett (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), p. xvi, who assert that these words were composed before Joyce and Beckett met. This passage (what passage is not?) is replete with innuendo: “to work the miracle” may suggest masturbation, as does “hand tune your Erin’s ear.” Could “prisckly” allude to Beckett’s More Pricks? 7. Cf. “swift B.A.A.” and the slang term “sweet B.A.,” or “sweet bugger all,” which Partridge says probably dates back to the early twentieth century.

180

Notes

8. Francis Doherty, in “Watt in an Irish Frame,” Irish University Review 21(2) (Autumn/Winter 1991): 190, points out that Stella in fact stayed in the manor house in Portrane in October 1712, when she endorsed letters from Swift that are part of the Journal. Eoin O’Brien, The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Ireland (Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1986), explains that a manor house and then a tower were first built on this site in the early eighteenth century and that they were between 1896 and 1901 incorporated into the Portrane asylum (pp. 233 and 372–3). 9. In Poems in English (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 32. According to O’Brien, p. 264, the “Swift” in this poem was a well-known bicycle of the period. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 51, is in error when she asserts that Beckett’s father in 1927 bought an automobile called a “Swift”; in a letter to me dated 26 November 1992, James Knowlson says that Bill Beckett owned a Delage, not a Swift. 10. Knowlson, Damned to Fame. p. 160. See Hone and Mario M. Rossi, Swift: or the Egotist (New York: Dutton, 1934), p. 32: “It was not mere selfishness, for sometimes he thought of the interests of his friends, and sometimes he had nothing precise to gain for himself: it was egotism. He could not conceive the possibility of others thinking in a way different from himself. Was he not the only man, the only reality in the world?” 11. More Pricks Than Kicks (1934; New York: Grove Press, 1970), p. 33. 12. Cf. “Madame de la Motte” in the poem “Sanies II,” in Poems in English, p. 34. Mary Power, in “Samuel Beckett’s ‘Fingal’ and the Irish Tradition,” Journal of Modern Literature 9 (1981–82): 151–6, goes beyond the pale in her attempt to document the Irishness of this story, arguing that “Winnie Coates is a descendant, almost surely, of Swift’s rational horses, the Houyhnhnms” (pp. 154–5). 13. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), pp. 178, 84, 224, and 201. Immediately after the allusion to “lile pute” is the following, perhaps punning on Stella’s name: “she tailed off very da capella into a kind of stela you might nearly say.” Cf. Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 179 (“a Project for extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers”); and A Tale of a Tub, p. 179 (“the vast Number of Beaux, Fidlers, Poets, and Politicians, that the World might recover”). The allusion in More Pricks has become more explicit: “‘ We go through this world’ observed the Alba ‘like sunbeams through cracks in cucumbers’” (p. 69). 14. Cf. Gulliver’s Travels, p. 29: gripped by the “Necessities of Nature,” Gulliver in Lilliput tells us that he crawled to the end of his chain and “discharged my Body of that uneasy Load.” 15. Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1948): Vol. 1, p. 270; Swift’s emphasis. The most accessible edition for Beckett would have been the Everyman Library edition, by J. K. Moorhead, which includes an introduction by Sir Walter Scott (London: J. M. Dent, 1924). 16. Murphy (1938; New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 170. 17. Cf. “A Tale of a Tub,” to which is added “The Battle of the Books” and the “Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol

Notes 181

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

Smith, 2nd edn (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958): “knotty Point” (p. 170); “Pudenda of either Sex” (p. 147); and “The Serene Peaceful State of being a Fool among Knaves” (p. 174). There is other phraseology in Murphy with a Swiftian odor, such as “divine flatus” (p. 89), “sublunary excrement” (p. 138), and “prolonged paroxysms” (p. 152). Correspondence, ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963–65): Vol. 2, p. 361. Cf. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 18: “ . . . she violated him after tea.” Beckett could have found an explanation of Swift’s sexual innuendo in Shane Leslie, The Skull of Swift: an Extempore Exhumation (London: Chatto and Windus, 1928), pp. 196–7. Similarly, Beckett’s allusions to Gulliver in the reviews he wrote during the mid-thirties suggest not only his acquaintance with Swift, but also his compatriot’s relevance to him as a sort of literary touchstone. See Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), pp. 68, 87, and 90. See, for example, Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), Vol. I, pp. 123, 156, 187, 199, and especially 139: “Lady Mountjoy carried me home to dinner, where I staid not long after and came home early, and now am got into bed, for you must always write to your MDs in bed, that’s a maxim.” In the Journal “MD” stands for “my dears,” or Stella and her friend Rebecca Dingley. Cf. the humorous immediacy in “The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux,” in More Pricks: “Bel! Bel! Bel! your letter has just come!” (p. 155); “If I dont stop writing you wont be able to read this letter because it will be all ofer tears” (p. 155); “I must get a new nib, this old pen is gone to the dogs, I can’t write with it any more” (pp. 155–6). Malone Dies, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 209. Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 183–206. We may say, however, that it is his life inside his room that dominates Swift’s letters to Stella. Many years ago, Hopewell R. Selby observed in “The Cell and the Garret: Fictions of Confinement in Swift’s Satires and Personal Writings,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 6, ed. Ronald C. Rosbottom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), p. 146: “For Swift . . . the problem is more ominous: we cannot find repose within the room, but that is where we are trapped. Worse yet, the room is a prison within our very minds, its fetters the ways of reason itself.” “Young Beckett’s Irish Roots,” Irish University Review: a Journal of Irish Studies 14(1) (Spring 1984): 30. Journal to Stella, Vol. I, pp. 122 and n. 27. For discussions of Beckett’s visit to Bethlehem Royal Hospital, see Bair, pp. 219–20, and Knowlson, pp. 197–200. Note also the reference to a “Bedlamite” in Beckett’s essay on Joyce, in Disjecta, p. 31. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (1961; New York: New American Library, 1965). The same phraseology occurs in the 1946 Mercier and Camier (New York: Grove Press, 1974), p. 108: “No time left for putting a shine on the soul, but you can’t have everything, the body in bits, the mind flayed alive. . . . ”

182

29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

Notes Cf. Virginia Woolf’s appeal to Swift in Orlando: a Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928), p. 211: “But stop, stop your iron pelt of words, lest you flay us all alive, and yourself too!” Review of The Lost Ones in the Partisan Review (1974), reprinted in Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 323. In “A Tale of a Tub,” Etc., p. 27. Cf. the comparable ambiguity in the Tale, where Bedlam is described as an asylum, but also as a university and as Parliament. Nor is Murphy’s response to the lunatics he observes one of shock or distaste: “They caused Murphy no horror. The most easily identifiable of his immediate feelings were respect and unworthiness” (Murphy, p. 168). The quotation from Hester Thrale, whom I cite from the Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson, ed. S. C. Roberts (New York: Books for Libraries, 1980), p. 174, appears in Beckett’s first Johnson notebook, now at Reading University (MS 3461/1/80): “He [Johnson] did not however encourage general satire, and for the most part professed himself to feel directly contrary to Dr. Swift; ‘who (says he) hates the world, though he loves John and Robert, and certain individuals.’” The original statement appears in Swift’s letter to Pope of 29 September 1725 in which he gives his rationale for writing Gulliver’s Travels. Thus what we have here is Beckett quoting Mrs. Thrale who is quoting Johnson quoting Swift writing to Pope! John Forster discovered this journal in the late nineteenth century, and it was first printed by Craik in an appendix to his Life of Jonathan Swift (1894). I do not mean here to contradict my suggestion in Chapter 4 that Beckett may have drawn his name from the “Wat” or “Watt” of Smollett’s Humphry Clinker; either or both may have been his source, although the fact that the “Wat” or “Watt” of the Holyhead Journal was Swift’s servant may argue more strongly for this influence. Holyhead Journal, in Miscellaneous and Autobiographical Pieces, Fragments, and Marginalia, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), p. 203. “Watt in an Irish Frame,” p. 195. Doherty’s essay has been of assistance to me in my recasting of this section, which is based on an essay I originally published some 25 years ago: “The Epistemology of Fictional Failure: Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Beckett’s Watt,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15(4) (Winter 1974): 649–72. Cf. J. Paul Hunter, “Gulliver’s Travels and the Novel,” in The Genres of “Gulliver’s Travels,” ed. Frederik N. Smith (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), pp. 68–9: “Indulge me in a preposterous claim. A Tale of a Tub is also, among other things, a parody of the emerging novel. But how can there be a parody of something that does not yet exist?” Samuel Beckett, Watt (1953; New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 32. “Samuel Beckett et Jonathan Swift: vers une étude comparée,” Litteratures X: Annales de la Faculté des Lettres de Toulouse 11 (1962): 89. In Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: the Stoic Comedians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), Hugh Kenner describes Gulliver’s Travels as an “epistemological satire” (p. 91); in Samuel Beckett: the Language of Self (1962; New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1964), Frederick J. Hoffman calls Watt an “epistemological comedy” (p. 133). Subsequent references to Kenner will be given within my text.

Notes 183 40. Journey to Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), p. 119. 41. See the textual gaps in the Tale, pp. 62–3, 170, and 200, as well as smaller omissions on pp. 108, 176, 179, and 207; cf. Malone Dies, p. 183: “hiatus in my recollections.” More specifically, “Desunt nonnulla,” from The Battle of the Books, in “Tale of a Tub,” Etc., p. 244, appears on the loose p. 100 in Notebook 6 of the Watt MS. Cited with permission of the Beckett Estate and the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas. 42. Cf. the following: “Yet the unhappy shortness of my Memory led me into an Error, from which I must immediately extricate my self. . . . ” (Tale, p. 92); and “And if I failed to mention this detail in its proper place, it is because. . . . ” (Molloy, in Three Novels, p. 41). 43. Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 229. Cf. Beckett’s comment on what he called his “peephole art,” a medium so-named because, as he said, “it allows the viewer to see what was never meant to be seen.” Quoted by the narrator Chris O’Neill in the video Peephole Art: Beckett for Television, directed by John L. Reilly (New York: Global Village, 1992). 44. Beckett, like Swift, may be playing on “knot” as some problem difficult to resolve (OED); cf. Tale, p. 70 (“I now proceed to unravel this knotty Point”), and Murphy, p. 131 (“These were knotty points”). In the MS of Watt, Notebook 2, p. 43, Beckett toys outrageously with this passage in the Tale; adding a footnote after the word “doorknob,” he writes: “If the reader could bring himself to articulate, at least mentally the k of knob throughout the following development, the k of knob would feel obliged to him.” Quoted with permission. 45. Cf. Dan Rooney in All That Fall, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 84: “Not Count! One of the few satisfactions in life?” And cf. Johnson’s delight in counting, taken up in Chapter 6. 46. See J. Alane Howard, “The Roots of Beckett’s Aesthetic: Mathematical Allusions in Watt,” in Papers on Language and Literature 30(4) (1994): 346–51. 47. For a somewhat different discussion of this theme, see W. B. Carnochan, “Swift’s Tale: On Satire, Negation, and the Uses of Irony,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 5(1) (1971): 122–44. On the long tradition behind these texts, see the following: Rosalie L. Colie, Chapters 7 and 8 of Paradoxia Epidemica: the Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Henry K. Miller, “The Paradoxical Incomium with Special Reference to its Vogue in England, 1600–1800,” Modern Philology 53(3) (1956): 145–78; and Robert M. Adams, Nil: Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void during the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). 48. In No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose, 1945–66 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), p. 158. 49. In “The Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated,” lines 128–9, Pope characterized his friend this way: “And Swift cry wisely, ‘Viva la Bagatelle,’/ The Man that loves and laughs, must sure do well.” The Unnamable, in Three Novels, p. 350, dismisses his own excoriation: “It’s nothing. A mere bagatelle.” 50. Cf. Proust 21: “the shallow well of a cup’s inscrutable banality.”

184

Notes

51. In “A Tale of a Tub” with Other Early Works, ed. Herbert Davis (1939; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), p. 248. In Dr. Swift (1967), Vol. 2 of Swift: the Man, His Works and the Age, Ehrenpreis makes the point that we should see A Tritical Essay as a parody of simplistic methods of argument, but that the ideas are Swift’s own. 52. In Irish Tracts 1720–1723 and Sermons, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), pp. 159–68.

3


1. “The Literature of Exhaustion,” The Atlantic 220 (August 1967): 31. 2. Beckett refers – echoing common Victorian sentiments – to “the divine Jane”; note also that he may have read some Austen earlier, as is suggested by Belacqua’s snide reference to “the divine Jane” in the 1932 Dream of Fair to Middling Women (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), p. 119. Subsequent citations of Dream will be to this edition. Cf. Virginia Woolf’s reference in The Voyage Out (1915; New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1948), p. 62, to “our beloved Jane.” 3. See the following: Beckett mentions that he has read Joseph Andrews in a letter to MacGreevy dated 8 October 1932; he tells MacGreevy that he has completed Tom Jones in a letter dated 11 November 1932; Tom Jones, Jonathan Wild, and the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon are quoted in the Whoroscope notebook; Humphry Clinker is likewise quoted in this notebook; and in addition to the 1935 letter mentioned above, Beckett in a letter to MacGreevy of 20 February 1935 alludes to Elinor Dashwood, heroine of Sense and Sensibility. 4. These allusions are discussed below. Frankenstein is mentioned in Murphy (1938; New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 124: “Cooper could not have looked more gratified if he had been Frankenstein’s daemon and Wylie DeLacey.” 5. “From (W)horoscope to Murphy,” in The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives, ed. John Pilling and Mary Bryden (Bristol: The Beckett International Foundation, 1992), p. 12. 6. Mercier et Camier (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1970), p. 204; in Mercier and Camier (New York: Grove Press, 1975), p. 118, the phrase is “Up Quin!” See also Malone Dies (1956), in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 282. 7. Coetzee, “The Manuscript Revisions of Beckett’s Watt,” Journal of Modern Literature 2(4) (November 1972): 476. Although Coetzee and John Fletcher, The Novels of Samuel Beckett (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), pp. 156–7, both discredit Beckett’s statement in the early 1960s that he has no idea who Quin is, maybe he did not; after all, it had been some 30 years since he had read Smollett’s novel. 8. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Andre Parreaux (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1968), p. 48; for the sake of convenience, subsequent references to Smollett’s novel shall be to this edition and shall be included within my text. Note that “Quin the player” is also mentioned in Fielding’s The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, which Beckett read about this

Notes 185

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

same time and perhaps in this edition; see “Jonathan Wild” [and] “The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon,” ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: J. M. Dent, 1932), p. 235. More Pricks (1934; New York: Grove Press, 1970), p. 56. The paragraph in which the word shows up has its origin in the draft of Dream, although the word itself does not appear; thus we might guess that Beckett, having read Humphry Clinker in early 1933, inserted the word as he revised this story in the fall of 1933 for inclusion in More Pricks. Molloy, in Three Novels, p. 90. James Knowlson, “Beckett’s ‘Bits of Pipe,’” in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Morris Beja et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), p. 19, suggests a connection between the significance of possessions in Robinson Crusoe and Beckett’s Happy Days. Indeed the image of Winnie half-buried in her little mound, parasol held above her head, is reminiscent of the image of Crusoe (who lived in a cave), trapped on his island, homemade umbrella protecting him from the sun; of course in Beckett’s absurdist world, the parasol spontaneously ignites. In Poems in English (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 37. See Fletcher, p. 32, and Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 88. Cf. The Unnamable, in Three Novels, p. 392: “I must describe him in greater detail, see what he’s capable of, whence he comes and whither he returns, in his head of course, we don’t intend to relapse into picaresque. . . . ” And cf. both citations with Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (1941; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965): in “The Publisher to the Reader,” Richard Sympson comments that the only fault he finds in Gulliver’s book is that “the Author, after the Manner of Travellers, is a little too circumstantial” (p. 9). Daniel Defoe, “Robinson Crusoe” and Other Writings, ed. James Sutherland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1968), p. 46. Subsequent references to Robinson Crusoe shall be to this edition, which is used for the sake of convenience. In addition to toying with the word “see,” Beckett here twice puns on “certain,” which is coupled in each case with an evident lack of certainty. As S. E. Gontarski says in “Molloy and the Reiterated Novel,” in As No Other Dare Fail (London: John Calder, 1986), p. 61: “Such subversion of the veracity of the text is an assault not only on the tradition of verisimilitude established by Defoe and Richardson but on the aesthetics of Joyce as well.” Hunter makes this point in the process of pointing out Swift’s awareness of the holes in Defoe’s assumptions in Robinson Crusoe. See “Gulliver’s Travels and the Novel,” in The Genres of “Gulliver’s Travels,” ed. Frederik N. Smith (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), p. 68. “Daniel Defoe and the Anxieties of Autobiography” (1973), reprinted in Modern Critical Views: Daniel Defoe, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), p. 111. The Unnamable, in Three Novels, pp. 326–7. Subsequent references to The Unnamable shall be to this edition. In Frescoes of the Skull: the Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1980), p. 95, James Knowlson suggests that in Happy Days Winnie’s frequent phrases like “great mercies” or “tender mercies” are reminiscent of Crusoe’s equally frequent expressions of pious gratitude for the goodness of Providence.

186

Notes

20. “These first three words the bird managed well enough,” Malone adds, “but the celebrated restriction was too much for it, all you heard was a series of squawks.” Leibniz’s “Nihil est in intellectu” is quoted in the Whoroscope notebook, but ironically, Beckett, like the bird, drops the restriction: “Nihil est intellectu nisi intellectus ipse.” 21. “The Writer’s Laboratory: Samuel Beckett and the Death of the Book,” Chapter 10 of Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 183–206. At Trinity, however, Beckett would have read about Richardson in Thompson’s History of English Literature, and as an incoming student at Trinity had to answer a question on Richardson’s narrative technique. See Chapter 1. 22. Reprinted in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 78. Beckett is of course punning here on “nice” – meaning finely discriminating but also not obvious, even full of uncertainty (OED). 23. See also the reference to “Molly Seagram’s arras” in More Pricks (p. 90). Once again allusions to Beckett’s recent reading occur in his writing; according to Bair (p. 162), this story was written between May and September 1933, when Beckett sent off the manuscript of More Pricks to Chatto and Windus. 24. Henry Fielding, “Joseph Andrews” and “Shamela,” ed. Martin Battestin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961), p. 161; subsequent references to Fielding’s novel shall be to this edition (used for convenience) and shall be included within my text. Belacqua, we are told in More Pricks, “had a strong weakness for oxymoron” (p. 38). 25. Beckett’s knowledge of Milton is not in question: he read Paradise Lost, Book 1, while at Trinity (see Chapter 1); as late as From an Abandoned Work (1957), in First Love and Other Stories (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1974), p. 42, he speaks of telling his father about Milton’s cosmology. On Beckett’s knowledge of Pope, see Chapter 7 below. 26. Tom Jones, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Sheridan Baker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), Book 3, Chap. 6, p. 104; subsequent references to Tom Jones will be to this edition. Fielding elsewhere mentions Hogarth: see Joseph Andrews, Preface, p. 9 and Book 1, Chap. 8, pp. 32 and 50; and see Tom Jones, Book 1, Chap. 11, p. 51, and Book 6, Chap. 3, p. 214. In these last two instances he likewise refers the reader to a particular Hogarth print in order to clarify a verbal description. 27. Letter dated 18 August 1934. This painting, which Beckett describes as “the family group one” (realizing McGreevy would know it), is the c. 1729 “Denunciation (for a respectable citizen falsely accused of fathering a child).” 28. Beckett goes on to say that “the hero is suggested admirably, almost a physical weight on the page,” and tells MacGreevy that “the short chapters are an idea.” 29. See the provocative article by Ralph Cohen, “Do Postmodern Genres Exist?”, in Postmodern Genres, ed. Marjorie Perloff (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), pp. 11–27. Referring to Fielding and Sterne, Cohen argues for a historical linkage between eighteenth-century and postmodern genres. 30. As the manuscript of the typescript of Dream reveals, Beckett first wrote “He was a great, big, inward man . . . ,” only later crossing out “was” and substituting “is”; thus we know that he in fact concocted the whole stylistic dilemma in this passage!

Notes 187 31. K. G. Simpson, “Technique as Judgment in Tom Jones,” in Henry Fielding: Justice Observed (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1985), pp. 167–8. Cf. Tom Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” Columbia University Forum (Summer 1961): 23: “The key word in my plays is ‘perhaps.’” He might have said the same of his novels. 32. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 405. McKeon points out how in spite of calling itself (on the title page and elsewhere) a true and authentic “history,” Joseph Andrews everywhere reveals a skepticism toward this truth and authenticity, as Fielding parodies himself and posits a form based on “a series of contradictory negations” (pp. 403–4). 33. “Thomas Mann and Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction,” in Now Don’t Try to Reason with Me: Essays and Ironies for a Credulous Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 285. 34. Mayoux, “Samuel Beckett and Universal Parody,” in Samuel Beckett: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 84; and Fletcher, p. 95. Although Fletcher points to a curious parallel between the masturbation scene at the beginning of Dream of Fair to Middling Women and a scene in Tristram Shandy, Beckett did not read Sterne’s novel until 1938. 35. “Introductory Essay” (1967), reprinted in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn and Joan New (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. xv. 36. Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 292; but cf. Knowlson, p. 677 n.168, who says that Beckett in a letter of 14 January 1963 mentioned to William York Tindall that he had a great admiration for Sterne, especially Tristram Shandy. 37. This is the letter alluded to by Bair. Note, however, that in addition to the change of Beckett’s “felicities” to her own “facility” (perhaps not a change worth quibbling over), there is no reference in the letter to Beckett’s having decided at this point “that he had little liking for Sterne.” 38. It is perhaps relevant that Henri Fluchère’s Laurence Sterne, de l’homme à l’œuvre: Biographie critique et essai d’ interprétation de “Tristram Shandy” (1961) had been translated by Beckett’s long-time friend and romantic attachment Barbara Bray: Laurence Sterne from Tristram to Yorick (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1965). 39. In The Collected Shorter Plays, pp. 119–20. Although the Stenographer’s statement that she has never read Sterne might be viewed as Beckett’s disclaimer of Sterne’s importance to him, it is relevant that on the previous page she likewise admits to having never read Dante’s Purgatorio – unquestionably, one of Beckett’s favorite works. 40. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (1978; New York: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 352; subsequent references to Tristram Shandy shall be to this edition and shall be given by volume, chapter, and page number within my text. 41. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, ed. Graham Petrie (London: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 77. 42. English Fiction of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789 (London: Longman, 1987), p. 138.

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Notes

43. “Introduction” to Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, ed. Graham Petrie (London: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 7. 44. In Malone Dies, p. 305, there is another probable echo of Tristram Shandy: “Why should I have a sex, who no longer have a nose?” As readers of Sterne’s novel know very well, Tristram’s loss of his “nose” to the falling window-sash is a source of great humor. 45. “Sterne’s Novels: Gathering up the Fragments,” ELH 49 (1982): 41. 46. Note the following curious similarity. As part of his Entrance Examination at Trinity College in November 1923, Beckett was asked to translate the following into French: “The ass was in the meadow, thinking of life and death, while he ate the grass. He saw a man who was approaching. He knew that men never think of life and death. They only eat. He did not wish to wait for the man. The man would only beat him and make him drag a cart. The man would rather earn money than think. The ass preferred to think. ‘There is nothing worth doing. Why do anything?’ Meanwhile the man had arrived. The ass had forgotten to run away.” Annual Records of Terms and Examinations (detailed series), MUN Vol. 23/No. 82. 47. Bair, p. 11; see photograph between pp. 114 and 115 of May Beckett riding in a little cart pulled by a donkey. 48. Although there is a touch of the sentimental in this scene (about as sentimental as one is apt to get in Beckett), neither he nor Sterne lets us forget that we are dealing with animals. Compare the following from Tristram Shandy: “The old mule let a f— ” (Vol. 7, Chap. 12, p. 508); with this from All That Fall: Mrs. Rooney Mercy! What was that? Christy Never mind her, Ma’am, she’s very fresh in herself today. (p. 13) 49. Cf. Bair, p. 11, who recounts a story about how on one occasion May Beckett saw a tinker beating a donkey, upbraided him for his behavior, and ended up purchasing the animal on the spot. In his Whoroscope notebook, Beckett copies out a lengthy passage on the hinny from Darwin’s Origin of Species; however, I do not agree with John Pilling, “From (W)horoscope to Murphy,” p. 6, that the hinny in All That Fall was “prompted by” Beckett’s reading of this passage. Rather, I think Beckett’s scene was prompted by the parallel incident in Sterne, although it is possible that Darwin was at this time still in his mind, or made him pay special attention to this scene. 50. Reprinted in The Common Reader: Second Series in 1932, and in Collected Essays, Vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), p. 98. On the function of silence in each author, compare the following brief examples: “So that when I stretched out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre’s— ” (A Sentimental Journey, p. 148); “The empty too. Away. No hands in the— ” (Worstward Ho [New York: Grove Press, 1983], p. 33). 51. The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (1974; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 258. 52. Cf. addendum to Watt, p. 248: “never been properly born.” 53. Bair, p. 208; cf. pp. 401–2. 54. Beckett frequently toys with this paradox. Cf. Malone Dies: “I shall never get born and therefore never get dead” (p. 225). According to Lawrence Harvey,

Notes 189

55.

56.

57. 58. 59.

4

Samuel Beckett, Poet & Critic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 414–15, Beckett spoke of “a presence, embryonic, undeveloped, a self that might have been but never got born, an être manqué.” Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: a Critical Study, new edn (1961; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 190. See also Michael Robinson, The Long Sonata of the Dead: a Study of Samuel Beckett (London: Rupert HartDavis, 1969), p. 213; and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, p. 78. The second of these points I develop more fully in “Fiction as Composing Process: How It Is,” in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Morris Beja et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), pp. 107–21. How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 79. Partial Magic: the Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (1975; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 226. Book 1, lines 61 and 242, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). Cf. An Essay on Criticism: “half-learn’d Witlings” (line 40), and “half-form’d Insects” and “Unfinish’d Things” (line 42).

“Gentle Skimmer”: Reader Entrapment in Swift, Fielding, Sterne, and Beckett

1. Letter to Alexander Pope, 29 September 1725. Swift wrote this as he was completing Gulliver’s Travels. 2. Watt (1953; New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 254. 3. “Ulysses and the Reader” (1982), reprinted in Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 133. 4. 29 September 1725. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963–65), Vol. 3, p. 103. 5. In Hungarian Studies in English 12 (1979): 49–59. Among more recent studies, see the following: James Acheson, “Chess with the Audience: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame” (1980), reprinted in Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett, ed. Patrick A. McCarthy (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), pp. 181–92; Karen L. Laughlin, “Seeing is Perceiving: Beckett’s Later Plays and the Theory of Audience Response,” in ‘Make Sense Who May’: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works (Irish Literary Studies 30), ed. Robin J. Davis and Lance St. J. Butler (Gerrards Cross, England: Colin Smythe, 1988), pp. 20–9; Michael Patrick Gillespie, “Textually Uninhibited: the Playfulness of Joyce and Beckett,” in Re: Joyce ’n Beckett, ed. Phyllis Carey and Ed Jewinski (New York: Fordham UP, 1992), pp. 83–103; and Wolfgang Iser, “Counter-sensical Comedy and Audience Response in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot” (1987), reprinted in New Casebooks: “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame,” ed. Steven Connor (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 55–70. 6. For a discussion of the notion of text as game, see Iser, “The Play of the Text,” in Prospecting, pp. 249–61. It is perhaps relevant that Beckett said to Jessica Tandy, who played Mouth in the 1973 Lincoln Center production of Not I: “I am not unduly concerned with intelligibility. I hope the piece may work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect”; quoted by

190

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

Notes S. E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 19. Finnegans Wake (New York: The Viking Press, 1939), p. 112. Roland McHugh, Annotations to “Finnegans Wake,” rev. edn (1980; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 112, notes that “Swift called Wood (of Wood’s halfpence) a son of a beech.” Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 106. “Assumption,” transition 16–17 (June 1929): 268. “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce,” originally published in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, reprinted in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 26. And see Suzette A. Henke, “Exagmining Beckett & Company,” in Re-Viewing Classics of Joyce Criticism, ed. Janet Egleson Dunleavy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), who refers to Beckett as a “critic-magician” who in this essay “winks slyly at his reader” (pp. 64 and 68). Company (New York: Grove Press, 1980), pp. 27–8. Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1931), p. 25. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Sheridan Baker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 116. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be given by volume, chapter, and page number. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (1978; New York: Penguin Books, 1997), Vol. 1, Chap. 20, p. 48. Subsequent references will be to this edition and shall be given within my text. Cf. Beckett, “From an Abandoned Work” (1958), in No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose, 1945–66 (London: Calder and Boyers, 1967), p. 145: “Now is there nothing to add to this day with the white horse and white mother in the window, please read again my descriptions of these, before I get on to some other day at a later time. . . . ” Knowlson (p. 122) reports that Beckett delivered Proust to the publisher in September 1930. On 4 November 1932 the author wrote to MacGreevy that he had finished Tom Jones; on 5 August 1938 he told him that he had been reading Tristram Shandy, a book he owned at his death (see Appendix A). It should be noted, however, that in preparation for his Junior Exhibition in the fall of 1923, Beckett would have read fragments of both novels in Smith’s Specimens of English Literature (see Chapter 1). Although his point is somewhat different, John Pilling, in “Beckett’s Proust,” Journal of Beckett Studies 1 (Winter 1976): 10, describes in similar terms the ambiguity of Beckett’s cordial invitation to his reader. Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992): pp. 186, 168, and 184; subsequent citations shall be given within my text. Since Beckett elsewhere uses the pronoun “we” and then explains that he intends by this a “consensus, here and hereafter, of me” (p. 5), it would seem that this “you” refers not to you or me specifically but to his readers collectively. For example, the “gentle reader” is referred to in A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd edn (1920; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. 54, 105, 176, and 203; subsequent references to the Tale

Notes 191

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

shall be to this edition. Cf. the numerous other epithets used in reference to the reader of the Tale, such as “courteous reader,” “candid reader,” and “learned reader.” For a general discussion of this phenomenon, see Mary Louise Pratt, “Literary Cooperation and Implicature,” in Essays in Modern Stylistics, ed. Donald C. Freeman (London: Metheun and Co., 1981), pp. 377–412. See G. Douglas Atkins, Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), p. 108: “The Tale thus participates in that important but little-studied Augustan interest in reading and interpretation that Dryden makes the center of attention in Religio Laici, which can be read as a layman’s approach to reading. The Tale may even be ‘about’ the effort to read and a satire on the perhaps inevitable desire to reduce and make comprehensible.” “Hop-me-thumb” is a nineteenth-century contraction of “hop-o’-my-thumb,” or a person so small that he may be said to hop on one’s thumb, like Tom Thumb (OED). The diction here is demanding: “hisses” suggests the response of a fault-finding reader, but also relates the reader to the pipes themselves. Cf. Beckett’s letter to James Knowlson of 11 April 1972 in which he speaks about himself as a sort of plumber, knowing nothing of the “history of hydraulics” but simply using “bits of pipe I happen to have with me.” James Knowlson, “Beckett’s ‘Bits of Pipe,’” in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Morris Beja et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), pp. 16–25. See The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); and The Act of Reading: a Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Beckett uses one of Iser’s words in a comparable sense in The Unnamable, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1965): “Gaps, there have always been gaps, it’s the voice stopping . . . ” (p. 369). Cf. Fielding’s apology for “blanks” in the action which necessarily lead to “chasms” in his novel (Tom Jones, Vol. 2, Chap. 1, p. 59), and Sterne’s reference to the unfortunate “breaks and gaps” in Tristram’s story (Tristram Shandy, Vol. 6, Chap. 33, p. 351). More Pricks (1934; New York: Grove Press, 1970), pp. 76–81; subsequent references will be to this edition. It is interesting that in revising this passage from Dream for inclusion here, Beckett added not only an allusion to Swift but also a reference to Belacqua’s “quick dumb crambo,” which the OED defines as follows: “A game in which one set of players have to guess a word agreed upon by the other set, after being told what word it rhymes with, by acting in dumb show one word after another till they find it.” Cf. Dream, p. 72: “As an herpetic taratantaratarantula (have you spotted the style?) hath he consumed away.” And cf. Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: The Viking Press, 1939), p. 170: “All were wrong, so Shem himself, the doctator, took the cake, the correct solution being – all give it up?” I paraphrase Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 149: “Typically, throughout the entire [novel], whenever Beckett makes a serious statement, he denigrates it.” “Readers in Texts,” PMLA 96 (1981): 848–63.

192

Notes

27. For a fuller discussion of this terminology, see my essay titled “The Danger of Reading Swift: the Double Binds of Gulliver’s Travels,” in Reader Entrapment in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Carl R. Kropf (New York: AMS Press, 1992), pp. 109–30. 28. 25 September 1933. Used with permission of Reading University and the Samuel Beckett Estate. 29. Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1938), p. 224; subsequent references will be to this edition and included in my text. 30. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), p. 112. Subsequent references will be to this edition. 31. Elsewhere in Murphy, an allusion to the “gentle compositor” (p. 236) humorously shifts attention from the reader – and the author himself – to the mechanical laying down of type. It is perhaps relevant that there is a reference in the Watt manuscript (Notebook 1, p. 91) and typescript (n.p., pencil 73) to “gentle readers,” although the reference seems not to have survived in the published novel. Cited with permission of the Beckett Estate and the University of Texas. 32. Henry Fielding, “Joseph Andrews” and “Shamela,” ed. Martin C. Battestin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961), p. 131. Cf. Jonathan Wild, in “Jonathan Wild” [and] “The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon,” ed. A. R. Humphreys (1932; London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1964): “Heartfree returned this goodness (as it is called) of his wife with the warmest gratitude, and they passed an hour in a scene of tenderness too low and contemptible to be recounted to our great readers. We shall, therefore, omit all such relations, as they tend only to make human nature low and ridiculous” (p. 67). 33. Walter J. Ong, “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction,” PMLA 90 (1975): 14. 34. “Preface: Swift and the Reader’s Role,” in The Art of Jonathan Swift, ed. Clive T. Probyn (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1978), p. 9. 35. “Tom Jones and the Farewell to Providential Fiction” (1985), reprinted in Modern Critical Views: Henry Fielding, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), p. 233. 36. The Implied Reader, pp. 31 and 47. Linda Hutcheon, in A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), refers to the “typically postmodern” dialogue between a narrative voice and a projected reader (p. 10). 37. Surprisingly, in the late play Footfalls (1976), in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1984), there is a direct reference to “the reader”: “Mrs. W. did not at once reply. But finally, raising her head and fixing Amy – the daughter’s given name, as the reader will remember – raising her head and fixing Amy full in the eye she said . . . ” (pp. 242–3). “The Reader will be pleased to remember” (p. 87), “The Reader may remember” (p. 107), and like phraseology appears on a number of occasions in Tom Jones – a book Beckett read more than 40 years earlier. Curiously enough, here we have a trait of eighteenth-century novels affecting one of Beckett’s plays! 38. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 154. 39. At one point in the early novel Beckett uses an ellipsis, then pauses to ask the reader: “The dots are nice don’t you think? Trine. Yessir” (p. 107). The affirmative response obviously is ours, indicating a kind of acknowledg-

Notes 193

40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

5

ment of our inferiority. And here also I have words put in my mouth: “Are they [the characters] then to be let slide? Are they, squeezed dry, to be cast aside into the gutter, the tragic gutter of not being referred to in this book? You fondly ask” (p. 158). The questions suggest that we expect of literary characters a properly explained departure, as one would get in a conventional novel. The adverb “fondly” suggests Beckett’s view of our naive questions. Molloy, in Three Novels, pp. 27 and 43. Subsequent references to this novel will be to this edition and will be given in my text. J. Paul Hunter, “The Insistent I,” Novel 13 (1979): 19–37. In the Journal to Stella, which Beckett knew well (see Chapter 2), Swift asks in the midst of an especially ambiguous passage: “Who talks?” See the Journal, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1948), Vol. 2, p. 380. Cf. Robert Burton’s blatant observation in “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” The Anatomy of Melancholy, in (used for convenience) SeventeenthCentury Prose and Poetry, ed. Robert P. Tristram Coffin and Alexander M. Witherspoon (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929), p. 156: “Thou thyself art the subject of my discourse.” There are numerous similar examples of reader entrapment in Tristram Shandy, as in the passage in Volume 7, Chapter 9, p. 404, where Tristram promises to describe the female figure of one Janatone “with as determin’d a pencil, as if I had her in the wettest drapery.— ” He then declines to do so: “But your worships chuse rather that I give you the length, breadth, and perpendicular height of the great parish church. . . . ” Imagination Dead Imagine, in First Love and Other Shorts (New York: Grove Press, 1974), p. 63. Company (New York: Grove Press, 1980), p. 7. Worstward Ho (New York: Grove Press, 1983), p. 8. Beckett early on employed metatheatrical metaphors in his fiction. See this humorous example in Dream, pp. 149–50: “About the final curtain: if there be one to be taken . . . we rather fancy Belacqua is the boy that will take it, all on his own, bowing left and right, bowing slightly to the plaudits. Now the figure solicits to be carried forward. It proffers fire-curtains, emergency exits, the green room and the stage door.” The Created Self: the Reader’s Role in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1970), pp. 209–10. Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), p. 48B. “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” in Self-Consuming Artifacts: the Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 389.


1. Samuel Beckett: Nayman of Noland (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1986), p. 30. Subsequent references to Ellmann will be to this edition. 2. Cf. Joyce’s far less empathetic tone in Finnegans Wake (1939; New York: Viking Press, 1962), p. 115: “And, speaking anent Tiberias and other incestuish salacities among gerontophils. . . . ”

194

Notes

3. Murphy (1938; New York: Grove Press, 1938), p. 25. The verbal echoes here, as well as Celia’s visit in Chapter 8 to see the old men kite-flyers, show how Beckett used his letter to MacGreevy as a place to draft this scene. Subsequent references to Murphy will be to this edition. 4. Both the original manuscript and the typescript are preserved at the Harry K. Ransom Research Center, The University of Texas: Mr. Hackett’s age is mentioned in MS 1, p. 41, and TS, p. 15 (pencilled p. 29); the reference to Watt’s novel appears in MS 3, p. 32, and TS, p. 105 (pencilled p. 211). Cf. the fourth addendum to Watt (1953; New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 247: “who may tell the tale/of the old man?” 5. Molloy, in Three Novels: “Molloy,”“Malone Dies,” and “The Unnamable” (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 112–13; and The Unnamable, in Three Novels, p. 398. Subsequent references to these novels shall be to this edition. 6. For the sake of convenience, I refer to Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Andre Parreaux (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1968), p. 122. On Beckett’s reading of Smollett, see Chapter 3. 7. “Thoughts on Various Subjects,” in “A Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue,”“Polite Conversation,” Etc., ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964), p. 252. See Ricks, “Beckett and the Lobster,” New Statesman (1964), reprinted in Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett, ed. Lance St John Butler (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1993), p. 132. 8. Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), p. 58A, and “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 22. Cf. Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1931), p. 8: “grave-sheets serve as swaddlingclothes”; and How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1962), p. 70: “having been born octogenerian. . . . ” Subsequent citations of How It Is refer to this edition. 9. Dream of Fair to Middling Women (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), p. 80. For further discussion of Beckett’s habit of fusing birth and death, see Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993). 10. Cf. p. 189, where, in the context of a discussion of how he intends to tell his “story,” Malone refers to “the world that parts at last its labia and lets me go.” 11. To these we may add Berkeley’s Commonplace Book (which he read in 1932 and owned at his death), Boswell’s Life of Johnson (read in 1936–37), and the diaries of Johnson himself (read in 1936–37). 12. “The Sentimental Journey,” originally published in The Common Reader: Second Series (1932), reprinted in Collected Essays, Vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), p. 96. Of course I do not mean to suggest that Beckett had an interest in such works written in English only, or only in the eighteenth century: on 24 February 1931, he informed MacGreevy that he was reading Jules Renard’s Journal (kept between 1887 and 1910); and on 5 August 1938 he told him that he had recently been reading Alfred Victor de Vigny’s nineteenth-century Journal. 13. See “The Writer’s Laboratory: Samuel Beckett and the Death of the Book,” Chapter 10 of Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). The line between diary or journal and diary fiction, as Abbott demonstrates, is not altogether clear.

Notes 195 14. For convenience, quoted from Discussions of Jonathan Swift, ed. John Traugott (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1962), p. 72. 15. Introduction to Mario M. Rossi and Joseph M. Hone, Bishop Berkeley (1931), reprinted in W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1961), pp. 397, 399–400. 16. Swift: the Man, His Work, and the Age, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962–83). 17. Orlando (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1928), p. 211. 18. Finnegans Wake, pp. 294 and 423. 19. Reproduced in James S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake: a Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” expanded edn (1959; Mamaroneck, NY: Paul P. Appel, 1979), p. 119. The connection between madness and his own death is one about which Swift spoke at the end of “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” which Beckett had read. 20. Leslie Stephen, Swift (London: Macmillan and Co., 1882), p. 183. See Donald M. Berwick, The Reputation of Jonathan Swift: 1781–1882 (New York: Haskell House, 1965), p. 128. This earlier emphasis on the tragic Swift can be traced by means of Milton Voigt’s Swift and the Twentieth Century (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964), especially Chapters 1 (“Nineteenth-Century Views”) and 5 (“Swift the Man”). 21. John Churton Collins, Jonathan Swift: a Biographical and Critical Study (1893; reprinted Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1970), pp. 227, 230, and 235. On Beckett and the Struldbruggs, see Ricks, pp. 25–6. 22. The Skull of Swift (London: Chatto and Windus, 1928). The fascination at this time with the death of Swift is suggested also in Stephen Gwynn’s The Life and Friendships of Dean Swift (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1933), which, while not as melodramatic as Leslie’s account, contains in its final chapter (titled “The End”) a drawing of Swift’s death mask. 23. Swift; or the Egotist (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1934), p. 373. The reference to the “tragedy” of Swift appears on p. 371. 24. The Life of Jonathan Swift, 2 vols., 2nd edn (1882; London: Macmillan and Co., 1894), which in Appendix XIII (“Swift’s Disease”) outlines the work of both Wilde and Bucknill. Subsequent references to Craik will be given within my text. 25. See esp. Watt (1953; New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 146: “Watt, looking up, saw that Mr. Knott’s eyes were closed, and heard his breathing, soft and shallow, like the breathing of a child asleep.” 26. Ellmann, p. 27. 27. In No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose, 1945–1966 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), pp. 142–3. 28. Walter Starkie, Luigi Pirandello (1926; London: John Murray, 1937), pp. 111–12. 29. I am grateful to the Trinity College Library for permission to quote from MS 1975/29 and, below, from MSS 1975/43 and 1975/51. The sentence cited here appears also in Starkie’s introduction to his translation of Don Quixote of la Mancha (1957; New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 15. Although these notes apparently date from the period 1962–70, when Starkie was a Professor in Residence at the University of California, Los Angeles, it is significant that in the citations and bibliography he cites only

196

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

Notes biographical and critical works published between 1892 and 1926, suggesting that this is the period during which he was formulating his ideas. Dobson, “Fielding’s Voyage to Lisbon,” in Eighteenth Century Vignettes, First Series (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 68; Cross, The History of Henry Fielding, 3 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1945), Vol. 3, p. 25; and Pagliaro, Introduction to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (New York: Nardon Press, 1963), p. 9. See The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, in “Jonathan Wild” [and] “The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon” (1932; London: J. M. Dent, 1968), pp. 194–5. Subsequent references to the Voyage will be to this edition (which, noting its date of publication, was probably the one Beckett read) and will be given within my text. Fielding’s pragmatic motivation for writing, which belies the need for a dying man to keep busy, is reminiscent of the comparable explanation offered at the beginning of Molloy, p. 7: “There’s this man who comes every week. . . . He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money.” Cf. the similar pragmatic motivation behind Johnson’s writing of Rasselas, a book dealing with the meaning of life which nevertheless is reported to have been written to defray a mother’s funeral expenses. The quotation is as follows: “dropsical: neither residence in dung (Heraclitus) nor Berkeley’s tar water (Fielding) . . . [illegible] . . . watery accumulation.” Cf. Beckett’s reference in Murphy, p. 108, to Berkeley’s “idealist tar.” A reference to the tar-water treatment in Yeats’s introduction to Hone and Rossi’s Bishop Berkeley, reprinted in Essays and Introductions, perhaps sheds light on Beckett’s interest here: “Did tar-water, a cure-all learnt from American Indians, suggest that though [Berkeley] could not quiet men’s minds he might give their bodies quiet”? (p. 399). One anecdote (see Cross, p. 17) may have been picked up many years later by Beckett: so ill was Fielding that he could not bear to look at himself, insisting that the mirrors in his presence be covered with cloths; this scene has a striking resemblance to one in Beckett’s Film (New York: Grove Press, 1969), pp. 26–7 and 30–1, where Buster Keaton twice covers the mirror in his room so as not to be forced to witness his own face. See “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce,” p. 27: “Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His [Joyce’s] writing is not about something; it is that something itself.” Dobson, “Fielding’s Voyage to Lisbon,” pp. 66 and 63, and Fielding (English Men of Letters Series), ed. John Morley (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902), pp. 160 and 176; and Cross, The History of Henry Fielding, 3 vols. (1918; New York: Russell and Russell, Inc., 1963), Vol. 3, p. 5. Rough for Radio II, in The Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1984), pp. 119–20; the play was written in French in the early 1960s and then broadcast and published in English in 1976. Enoch Brater, The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 185 n. 109, also identifies the reference to Tristram Shandy. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (1978; London: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1997), Vol. 6, Chap. 10, pp. 353–4; subsequent citations of Sterne’s novel will be to this edition and

Notes 197

38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

will be noted within my text. It is tempting to make something of the phraseology “shall I go on?” The Unnamable concludes: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (Three Novels, p. 414). Letter to David Garrick, in Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. Lewis Perry Curtis (1935; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 87. Cf. the buried mule in Malone Dies, referred to as a “striking death’s-head” (p. 211). See Cross, p. 35: “From the first he had been a delicate boy. . . . A dread disease lurking in his blood became manifest near the close of his residence at Cambridge. One night he was startled out of sleep by a hemorrhage of the lungs, ‘bleeding,’ he says, ‘the bed full.’” See Peter Steele, “Sterne’s Script: the Performing of Tristram Shandy,” in Augustan Studies: Essays in Honor of Irvin Ehrenpreis, ed. Douglas Lane Patey and Timothy Keegan (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), p. 199: “Sterne, much excercised by mortality, is aware too of the constant likelihood that the life of human indeavor itself will gutter out. For all his customary briskness, he has many essays in the momento mori, as he calls to mind the embolism of futility that seems to be within us all the time.” Cf. Stories and Texts (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 11: “When my father died I could have got rid of this hat, there was nothing more to prevent me, but not I.” Abbott, p. 193. Byrd, Tristram Shandy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 17–18. The epigraph to this volume, from Pliny the Younger, may be translated: “For this is not an excursion from it, but is the work itself.” Cf. Malone Dies, p. 274: “Death must take me for someone else.” This wellknown scene from Tristram Shandy is the one captured in Thomas Patch’s 1766 caricature in oil of a gaunt Sterne meeting at his door the skeletal image of Death, holding a scythe and an hourglass; Patch later did both a line engraving based on this painting and then an etching, which he published in his book Twenty-Five Caricatures (1769). See Plate 4. Laurence Sterne: the Later Years (London: Metheun and Co., 1986), p. 259. Cf. Tristram Shandy, Vol. 5, Chap. 16, p. 375: “I verily believe, I had put by my father, and left him drawing a sun-dial, for no better purpose than to be buried under ground”; and Molloy, p. 47: “Watch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, to the worms.” Beckett is apparently alluding to the view of God held by eighteenth-century Deists. Byrd, p. 17. Cf. Malone Dies, p. 254: “I might have extracted myself from my bed and perhaps even got myself back into it, when tired of rolling and dragging myself about the floor or on the stair. That would have introduced a little variety into my decomposition.” Steele, p. 201. Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 249, says that Beckett used this phrase in conversation. In Letter IX Sterne actually compares his love to Swift’s. Beckett could have found Sterne’s letters to Eliza which are not contained in the Journal to Eliza

198

52.

53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

58.

6

Notes proper in the single volume of Sterne’s 1780 Works which he owned (see Appendix A), while the Journal itself he could have found in any of several places: for example, in Vol. 8 of The Works and Life of Laurence Sterne, ed. Wilbur L. Cross, 12 vols. (New York: J. F. Taylor and Co., 1904); or, perhaps more readily, in “A Sentimental Journey” [and] “The Journal to Eliza” (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1927). I quote from the latter. “I am ill—very ill—Yet I feel my Existence Strongly,” wrote Sterne to a friend only a few days before his death, and he went on to say that he was beginning a comic romance. In Letters of Laurence Sterne, p. 416. “Three Dialogues” (1949), reprinted in Disjecta, p. 139. See “When I come to be old” in A Tale of a Tub, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965), p. xxxvii. “Yellow,” in More Pricks Than Kicks (1934; New York: Grove Press, 1970), pp. 159–60; cf. Molloy, p. 54: “What do you expect, one is what one is, partly at least.” Beckett could have come across Swift’s last words in the biographies of Stephen (1882), Craik (1882), or Collins (1893). In As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (London: John Calder, 1990), pp. 131–4, esp. 132. See Porter Abbott’s moving account of Joseph Chaikin’s reading of this poem at the 1993 meeting of the Modern Language Association: The Beckett Circle: Newsletter of the Samuel Beckett Society 16(1) (Spring 1994): 16; Chaikin, actor and director, suffers from aphasia, the result of a stroke. The first of these statements appears in Stephen, p. 208, and the second in Craik, p. 257. It is ironic that although Swift’s last spoken words have endured, Beckett’s (as Malone foresaw) have vanished. In his Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson defines “folly” as a “want of understanding; weakness of intellect.” The word is used four times in Beckett’s trilogy and in The Unnamable he refers to writing itself as “that bitter folly” (p. 301).


1. “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” lines 255–8. 2. The full statement (its significance will become clear) is as follows: “My efforts to document my Johnson fantasy have not ceased. The evidence for it is overwhelming.” 3. Bair, Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 255–6; Cohn, Just Play: Beckett’s Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 162. Indeed my own review of the evidence underscores Cohn’s comment on the tension between biographical evidence and Beckett’s imagination. 4. Cohn, pp. 161–2; Linda Ben-Zvi, Samuel Beckett (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), p. 55. 5. See Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1927–28): “The personality of Johnson counts for more than his literary work” (Vol. 2, p. 138). As mentioned in Chapter 1, the History was recommended to Trinity College students when Beckett was there.

Notes 199 6. Malone Dies, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 241. 7. The scene of Johnson kicking the stone is reported in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1934–50), Vol. 1, p. 471. Subsequent references to Boswell’s Life shall be to this edition and shall be included within my text. 8. Robert M. Adams, Surface and Symbol: the Consistency of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 134, suggests that on p. 38 of Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1946), Joyce parodies Johnson: “Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure.” 9. There is evidence that Beckett owned Johnson’s Dictionary during at least part of the time he maintained the Whoroscope notebook: a number of rare words listed individually in that notebook, including “increpation,” “carminative,” “inosculation,” and “to snite” are to be found in the Dictionary; moreover, the term “articulated air (Locke)” is identified precisely this way by Johnson. See Appendix A. 10. Bair, p. 206, and Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 193. 11. I am grateful to Dr. Graham Nicholls, Curator of The Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum, for sending me copies of pages from Dr. Johnson and His Birthplace, the 1933 official guidebook, and for checking the guest book for 1935 for Beckett’s name (letter to author dated 12 November 1992). It perhaps goes without saying that an unsigned guest book in no way precludes the possiblility that Beckett visited Johnson’s birthplace; it only fails to offer substantiation of the visit projected in his letter to MacGreevy. 12. See Richard L. Admussen, The Samuel Beckett Manuscripts: a Study (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1979), p. 71. 13. Stephen’s Johnson was on the Trinity College reading list for the Ordinary Examinations in the Hilary 1925 term. Although Beckett sat that term for the Honors Examination, he was a good student and may have read the biography then; if so, then we would have to view his encounter with Johnson the man as beginning some ten years earlier than is discussed here. 14. Beckett’s reference to “Samuel Johnson LL.D.” may suggest that by this date he had read Hawkins’ The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787). 15. In Just Play, p. 148, Cohn reports that in his later life Beckett could no longer remember why he fixed on a play; it is interesting, however, that numerous scenes in Boswell’s Life are themselves presented in dramatic form, with speakers identified. Furthermore, I have elsewhere noted parallels between Beckett and Virginia Woolf, and here should mention that Beckett might have discovered something of use in her essay “Dr. Burney’s Evening Party,” published in The Common Reader: Second Series (1932), in particular a highly evocative scene where Johnson was the featured, though silent, guest. So too in Orlando: a Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928), p. 222, Woolf says that Orlando once stood mesmerized for half an hour outside Johnson’s lodgings in Bolt Court, watching the shadows of Johnson, Boswell, and the blind Mrs. Williams, adding: “Never was any play so absorbing.”

200

Notes

16. For a different interpretation, see Mary Bryden, “Figures of Golgotha: Beckett’s Pinioned People,” in The Ideal Core of the Onion (Bristol: Beckett International Foundation, 1992), pp. 55–9. The doodle is reproduced on p. 57 of Bryden’s essay. 17. For an account of the discovery of this manuscript, see David Buchanan, The Treasure of Auchinleck: the Story of the Boswell Papers (New York: McGrawHill Publishers, 1974), pp. 162–4. 18. Boswell, Life, Vol. 4, p. 381; Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (abridged), ed. Bertram H. Davis (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 261; and Rolleston, in Aspects (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1928), p. 296. Subsequent references to Hawkins shall be to the above edition and shall be included within my text. 19. In Johnson after Two Hundred Years, ed. Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), p. 73. 20. Samuel Beckett, Watt (1953; New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 60; subsequent citations shall be included in my text. See also Francis Doherty, “Watt in an Irish Frame,” Irish University Review 21(2) (Autumn/Winter 1991): 188: “In the opening scene, ‘Tetty’ . . . reminds us of Beckett’s hero, Samuel Johnson, married to his ‘Tetty,’ drug-addict and alcoholic.” The late Rubin Rabinovitz pointed out to me that Mr. Hackett’s statement about Watt, that “He is not a native of the rocks” (Watt, p. 21), echoes the phraseology Johnson used in his famous letter to Lord Chesterfield, reprinted in Boswell’s Life, Vol. 1, p. 262: “The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.” 21. Cf. Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), pp. 9A–B, in which Vladimir and Estragon discuss the differences among the four Evangelists’ rendering of the Crucifixion. 22. In Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1958), p. 3. Subsequent citations shall be to this edition. 23. In The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 265. 24. Dream, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), p. 200, and pp. 8 and 237, 241, and 147. 25. Cf. Legouis and Cazamian, p. 139: “The search for balance, with Johnson, is an effort of will, a struggle against himself. Without being the least romantic, he is a troubled if not divided soul; a narrow but deep sensibility lies beneath its rough exterior.” See note 5 above. 26. Cf. The Unnamable, in Three Novels, p. 350: “a billybowl of thorns.” There may be an allusion here to a similar figure in Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness; for a discussion, see Eoin O’Brien, The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Ireland (Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1986), pp. 291–3, and p. 382 n. 173. 27. In The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1984), p. 75. Cohn, p. 158, was the first to note the origin of this phrase in Johnson. 28. How It Is (New York: Grove, 1964), p. 19. Subsequent references to Beckett’s novel shall be included within my text. 29. Vulliamy, Mrs. Thrale of Streatham (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), p. 101. 30. Hester Lynch (Thrale) Piozzi, Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson, ed. S. C. Roberts (1925; New York: Arno Press, 1980), p. 52. Cf. Lionel Kelly, who in

Notes 201

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

“Beckett’s Human Wishes,” in The Ideal Core of the Onion (Bristol: Beckett International Foundation, 1992), p. 31, underscores Beckett’s interest in “the implied relationship between physical illness and intellectual despair”; his point about the imaginative link between Johnson’s view of his birthday (as expressed in the Annals) and Krapp’s Last Tape is especially convincing. Hawkins, p. 134; Piozzi, p. 18, and cf. pp. 99–100: “The vacuity of life had at some early period of his life struck so forcibly on the mind of Mr. Johnson, that it became by repeated impression his favourite hypothesis . . . all was done to fill up the time, upon his principle.” Beckett cites this in the first of his three Johnson notebooks (MS 3461/1 [p. 73]). Note that Boswell likewise refers to Johnson’s fondness for arithmetic (Vol. 1, p. 72, and Vol. 3, p. 207). It is interesting, in light of Joyce’s reference in Finnegans Wake to “Hodder’s and Cocker’s erithmatic” (p. 537), to see that Beckett in his second notebook (MS 3461/2 [p. 60]) quotes Johnson’s advice to Queeney Thrale that she buy “Cocker’s, Hodder’s, and Wingate’s Arithmetic, and any other that every shop or stall will put in your way.” Is there influence here, and if so, who is influencing whom? Had Beckett been discussing his research with Joyce? See The Queeney Letters, ed. William Edmund Lansdowne (London: Cassell, 1934), p. 32. All That Fall, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 30; for other allusions to mathematics, see Malone Dies, pp. 202, 237, and 251, and also The Unnamable, pp. 299 and 388. Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 50. Cf. The Unnamable, p. 368: “I think I must have blackouts, whole sentences lost, no, not whole.” Cf. also the “divine aphasia” suffered by Lucky’s God and the following from Malone Dies, p. 270: “My voice has gone dead, the rest will follow.” Cf. Boswell’s quotation from Johnson: “I have so far recovered my vocal powers, as to repeat the Lord’s Prayer with no very imperfect articulation” (Vol. 4, p. 231). In Endgame, p. 55, Nagg recites a fragment of the Lord’s Prayer before being silenced by Hamm. Hawkins says that Johnson first used a lancet on one leg, then got hold of a pair of scissors and plunged them deep into the calf of each leg (p. 275). Hawkins’ lancet and scissors is echoed in Molloy’s “knife” and “secateurs.” Edward Tomarken, Johnson, “Rasselas,” and the Choice of Criticism (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989), p. 14. Beckett in this letter opposes Barry’s portrait of Johnson to “the various Reynoldses,” which he apparently thought did not capture the vulnerability he had discovered in Johnson. Note that he did not at this time see the original portrait, as he says in an autobiographical passage jettisoned from the manuscript and typescript of Watt, now at the Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas: “Sneaking out of the Nat. Port. Gall., where we had sought in vain the portrait by Barry of Johnson, is the great loss” (MS 3, p. 32 [verso]); and “Sneaking out of the National Portrait Gallery, where all the portraits and busts of Dr. Johnson were as usual on view except the one we sought –” (TS, p. 215). Cited with permission. Originally composed in the fall of 1942, while Beckett was serving in the French underground, this passage underscores the great impact Samuel Johnson had on him.

202

Notes

39. Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 54–5, and esp. p. 105. The quotation from Damrosch which follows is found on p. 59. 40. Cf. Boswell’s “when he walked, it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters,” and The Unnamable, p. 298: “He emerges as from heavy hangings. . . . He is stooping and seems to be dragging invisible burdens.” 41. ELH 18 (1951): 90–106; reprinted in Johnson Agonistes and Other Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965. 42. Rhetoric and Death: the Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 88. 43. Rasselas, in Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Gwin J. Kolb (New Haven: Yale, 1990), pp. 39–40. Boswell connects Rasselas and The Vanity of Human Wishes: “Rasselas, as was observed to me by a very accomplished lady, may be considered as a more enlarged and more deeply philosophical discourse in prose, upon the interesting truth, which in his ‘Vanity of Human Wishes’ he had so successfully enforced in verse” (Life, Vol. 1, p. 342). 44. Texts for Nothing 9 (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 118. 45. Britannica, 9th edn (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1878–89), Vol. 13, p. 730. 46. Doctor Johnson and Mrs. Thrale (London: John Lane, 1910), p. 41.

7


1. “An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot,” lines 125–6, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). Subsequent references to Pope’s poems shall be to this edition and shall be given within my text, by line number. 2. The best account of Pope’s various physical ailments is still Marjorie Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau, “A Medical Case History of Alexander Pope,” in “This Long Disease, My Life”: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 7–82. 3. Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press), p. 39B. 4. “Discourse on Pastoral Poetry,” in Poems, p. 120. See Andrew Ettin, Literature and the Pastoral (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 43, who points out that Pope, like Horace before him and Voltaire after, “knows that existence on a real farm is no idyll except for the gentleman-farmer, and that the pastoral life (as distinct from simply farm life) is reserved for poets’ fantasies and for those wealthy enough to make dreams come true.” 5. University of Dublin, Trinity College, Honor Examination Papers, 1924. Beckett apparently reread “Lycidas” in the 1930s: in his Whoroscope notebook he quotes Milton’s “eyelids of the morn” (line 26), which he records as “eyelids of morning.” 6. Rasselas, p. xix, in The Oxford Authors: Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 368; and The Life of Milton, p. 699. Later in his life, Pope showed his own disdain for the pastoral form; see the allusion to his early poetry in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, lines 147–8: “Soft were my Numbers, who could take offence/While pure Description held the place of Sense?”

Notes 203 7. The letter is given in full in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1934), Vol. 1, p. 262. Much later in his life, Beckett quoted the line to David Gullette, as reported in “Mon Jour Chez Sam: a Visit with Beckett,” Ploughshares 1(2) (1972): 67. 8. More Pricks Than Kicks (New York: Grove Press, 1970), p. 101. Subsequent references to this collection shall be to this edition and shall be given within my text. 9. Numerous examples of “legions” are cited by John Arthos, in The Language of Natural Description in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (1949; New York: Octagon Books, 1966), pp. 235–7. In addition to Pope’s use of “spangles” cited below, see Robert Herrick, “Corrina’s Going A-Maying,” line 6: “The Dew bespangling Herbe and Tree.” See also the uses of “emerald” cited in the OED, plus “green emerald” in Thomson, “Autumn,” line 155, and the poetical uses of “expanse” and “bright” earlier in this same paragraph. Cf. also Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1946), p. 37: “On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.” 10. English Pastoral Poetry (London: G. C. Harrap, 1952), p. 17. Cf. Beckett’s observation in his review titled “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934), reprinted in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 73: “[Frederick Robert Higgins’] verses have what . . . all modern nature poetry excepting Wordsworth’s has, a good smell of dung, most refreshing after all the attar of far off, most secret and inviolate rose.” 11. Murphy (1938; New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 106. Subsequent references to this novel shall be to this edition and shall be given within my text. 12. Incidentally, I find no reference to sheep in Hyde Park per se. But cf. Henry C. V. Morton, In Search of London (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1951), p. 263: “I remember once falling into a conversation with a foreigner in the Green Park [roughly adjacent to Hyde Park]. . . . ‘Look,’ he said, ‘Sheep are grazing all around us, right in the middle of Piccadilly. It is something, that no one could have imagined or believed. Don’t you call that extraordinary?’ I had to agree that it was.” 13. Pnin (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), pp. 156–7. 14. Molloy, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 28. Subsequent references to this novel shall be to this edition and shall be given within my text. 15. Not that Beckett treats pastoral innocence with too much respect. See The Unnamable, in Three Novels, p. 316: “Come, my lambkin, join in our gambols, it’s soon over, you’ll see, just time to frolic with a lambkinette. . . . ” The poetical word “lambkin” is used by Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Gay, and Shelley (OED). 16. Dream, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), p. 217. Subsequent references shall be to this edition and shall be given within my text. 17. How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 15. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: a Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 17, has pointed

204

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

Notes out that the moment captures in words an image caught originally in an actual photograph; thus there is an irony here, for the moment is not so much embalmed in verbena as it is in this photograph. In Stories and Texts for Nothing (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 29. Composed originally in English, From and Abandoned Work is reprinted in No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), p. 142. The Beckett Country, pp. xxvi and 346 n. 23. On numerous occasions Beckett makes a distinction between actual sight and the eyes of the imagination, as for example in How It Is, p. 28: “I close my eyes not the blue the others at the back. . . . ” Composed originally in English, Stirrings Still is reprinted in As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (London: John Calder, 1990), pp. 123–4. All That Fall, in The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 34. Beckett once more jokingly links God to the pastoral; see above. The Poet without a Name: Gray’s “Elegy” and the Problem of History (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), p. 152. More than 40 years after he departed his native country, the “Irishness” of Beckett’s landscape is still evident. The photographs of the Dublin mountains in O’Brien suggest the Irish inspiration behind Beckett’s setting for Ill Seen. Marjorie Perloff, “Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New Poetry” (1982), reprinted in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1986), pp. 191–206, convincingly illustrates the poetic attributes of Beckett’s prose in Ill Seen Ill Said. And in “Une Voix pas la mienne: French/English Beckett and the French/English Reader,” in Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett, pp. 36–48, ed. Alan Warren Friedman et al. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), Perloff goes on to argue that having abandoned his native language and its literary tradition beginning with Molloy, Beckett in his later works returns to that tradition as he translates his original French into English. Although Perloff’s point in this latter essay is a provocative one and although she identifies numerous echoes from the canon of English literature, I cannot accept her premise; my view is that in turning from English to French Beckett never, rather surprisingly, abandoned English literature. For a fuller discussion, see my “Ill Seen Ill Said: Beckett’s Pastoral Elegy,” Postscript 9 (1992): 31–40. J. A. Richardson, in Falling Towers: the Trojan Imagination in “The Waste Land,”“The Dunciad,” and “Speke Parott” (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), p. 52. Indeed this reputation dates from the poet’s own day; in the testimonies prefacing the 1928 edition of The Dunciad, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, pp. 326–7, Pope includes one from John Dennis, who had said of The Essay on Criticism that “this youngster had espoused some antiquated muse.” Cf. A. Alvarez, Samuel Beckett (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), p. 13: “Beckett, even at his jauntiest, reads like a man who never had a childhood.” Ill Seen Ill Said (New York: Grove Press, 1981), p. 51; subsequent references to Ill Seen shall be to this edition and shall be given within my text. Cf. How It Is, where the sheep of the tradition are “like granite” (p. 31) and the crocus is now “in a pot in a basement” (p. 21).

Notes 205 29. Cf. Ill Seen, p. 36, where the lamb is said to be “reared for slaughter like the others.” The lamb and the crocus appear within two lines of one another in Pope’s “Spring” (lines 31–3). 30. “Lycidas,” line 125; “The Ruined Cottage,” line 422. 31. Cf. Spenser’s “withered flowers” (The Faerie Queene, Book 1, Canto 8, Stanza 41, line 9); Milton’s “cowslips wan that hang the pensive head” (“Lycidas,” line 147); Pope’s “Ye Flow’rs that droop” (“Autumn,” Pastorals, line 27); George Crabbe’s “yon wither’d leaf” (The Village, line 210); Keats’s “droopheaded flowers” (“Ode to Melancholy,” line 13); and Shelley’s “broken lily” and “withering flower” (“Adonais,” lines 54 and 286). As early as Dream, Beckett had mentioned “tattered flowers” (p. 52), “doomed flowers” (p. 157), and “withered leaves” (p. 188). See also the reference in Murphy, p. 196, to a Hindu who for many years had been writing a monograph entitled The Pathetic Fallacy from Avercamp to Kampendonck. 32. It is worth noting that stones in the pastoral tradition have often posed a threat to the sometimes limited vegetation as well as to the safety of the flock. For example, see Virgil, Eclogue I.7: “Happy old man! So these lands will still be yours, and large enough for you, though bare stone cover all, and the marsh chokes your pastures with slimy rushes.” 33. For just two examples, see the following: Thomson, who questions in “Spring”: “Ah, what shall language do? ah, where find words/Tinged with so many colours. . . . ” (lines 475–6); and Crabbe, The Village, who promises: “I paint the cot,/As truth will paint it, and as bards will not” (lines 53–4). It is interesting to note that as an Honors student in Modern Languages at Trinity, Beckett in the Hilary term of 1924 was asked to write on Spenser, one of two possible subjects being this: “Spenser is the greatest painter in words in English literature” (stet.). See University of Dublin, Trinity College, Honor Examination Papers, 1924. 34. “Epistle to Mr. Jervas,” line 13. Suggestions of pastoral painting appear early in Beckett’s fiction, as in Dream, p. 129: “He whistled the Roses are Blooming and danced home down the road under the moon, with perhaps a greyhound or two to set him off, and the dew descending. . . . ” 35. In The Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1984), p. 231. In Murphy, p. 228, Beckett mentions “Trafalgar Square,” clearly meaning the National Gallery; the National Portrait Gallery is right around the corner. See Vivian Mercier, Beckett / Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 88: “As far as I can judge, most of Beckett’s knowledge of painting and sculpture has been acquired by tramping unweariedly through museums and haunting exhibitions, rather than from the written word.” 36. Cf. Beckett’s letter to Axel Kaun dated 9 July 1937, reprinted in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 172: “Is there something paralysingly holy in the vicious nature of the word that is not found in the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved . . . ?” 37. The Last and Greatest Art: Some Unpublished Poetical Manuscripts of Alexander Pope (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984), p. 91. 38. Cf. Pope’s “Epistle to Mr. Jervas,” lines 41–4:

206

Notes Yet still how faint by precept is exprest The living image in the Painter’s breast? Thence endless streams of fair ideas flow, Strike in the sketch, or in the picture glow.

39. Cf. Company (New York: Grove Press, 1980), p. 35: “Next thing you are on your way across the white pasture afrolic with lambs in spring and strewn with red placentae.” Both images contrast sharply with the following: “Two Swains, whom Love kept wakeful, and the Muse,/Pour’d o’er the whitening Vale their fleecy Care . . . ” (Pope, “Spring,” lines 18–19); and “In boundless prospect – yonder shagged with wood,/Here rich with harvest, there white with flocks!” (James Thomson, Autumn, lines 658–9). 40. James Knowlson, “Extracts from an Unscripted Interview with Billie Whitelaw,” in Journal of Beckett Studies 3 (Summer 1978): 89. 41. Cf. “Lycidas,” lines 42–3: “The Willows and the Hazel Copses green/Shall now no more be seen.” Certain lines of Goldsmith’s poem are curiously suggestive of Beckett’s poetic story: “Bends to the grave with unperceived decay,/While resignation gently slopes the way . . . ” (lines 109–10); “She, wretched matron, forced, in age . . . / To seek her nightly shed, and weep till morn” (lines 131–4); and “Could not all/Reprieve the tottering mansion from its fall!/Obscure it sinks . . . ” (lines 237–9). John Montague, in “A Few Drinks and a Hymn: My Farewell to Samuel Beckett,” New York Times Book Review (17 April 1994), p. 24, reports that the writer mentioned Goldsmith within two weeks of his death. 42. Beckett does something comparable in Enough (1966), reprinted in No’s Knife, p. 159: “Now I’ll wipe out everything but the flowers. No more rain. No more mounds. Nothing but the two of us dragging through the flowers.” 43. The lines from Pope allude ironically to Matthew 10: 29: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.” See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. edn (1959; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 709n. 44. “An Interview with Beckett,” reprinted in Samuel Beckett: the Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 148. Cf. p. 28 below. 45. Watt (1953; New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 62. 46. I rely here on Donald W. Nichol, “Pope’s 1747 Ethic Epistles and the Essay on Man Frontispiece: an Abandoned ‘Opus Magnum’?” in Alexander Pope: Essays for the Tercentenary, ed. Colin Nicholson (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), pp. 230–2. Pope’s drawing includes a sarcophagus on which rests a skull adorned with bay, a guttering candle, and an open book of music along with a broken wind-instrument, while nearby is a shattered classical statue, a half-dead tree, a cobweb, and in the background the remains of the Roman Colosseum; in the middle distance is a bearded figure seated on the ground (perhaps the stereotypical poet?), blowing bubbles. 47. Alexander Pope: the Genius of Sense (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 159. Hogarth’s illustration was intended as the tailpiece to his collected engravings. 48. English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century: 1700–1740 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 545.

Notes 207 49. The Rape of the Text: Reading and Misreading Pope’s “Essay on Man” (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), pp. 160–2. Subsequent references to Solomon shall be included within my text. 50. “The Preface of 1717,” in Poems, p. xxviii. 51. In borrowing Pope’s phrase for the title of his recent biography of Beckett, of course, Knowlson has tacitly acknowledged the connection between the two writers. Cf. An Essay on Man, Epistle 4, line 284: “See Cromwell, damn’d to everlasting fame!” 52. Malone Dies (New York: Grove Press, 1956), pp. 18–19. 53. On this matter see Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: a Life (W. W. Norton and Co., 1985), pp. 292–3. 54. Cf. Pope’s “Autumn,” line 94: “Farewell ye Woods! adieu the Light of Day!” 55. Christopher Ricks discusses this important pun in Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 95. 56. In The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1950), lines 1–10. 57. The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 60. Cf. S. E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 18: “Embracing the aleatory, he also insists on maintaining considerable conscious control.” 58. Alexander Pope: the Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 318. 59. Worstward Ho (New York: Grove Press, 1983), p. 33. Cf. Pope’s word “unmeaning” in An Essay on Criticism (line 355), and “unwriting” in “Martinus Scriblerus, of the Poem” (The Dunciad Variorum, in Poems, p. 344).

Conclusion 1. Happy Days (New York: Grove Press, 1961), pp. 57–8. 2. James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (New York: Vintage Books, 1955). It is difficult to be certain about the nature of Joyce’s involvement in the writing of the book, although it was clearly substantial. See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, new and rev. edn (1959; Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 616. Beckett’s comment on criticism and bookkeeping is to be found in “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce” (1929), reprinted in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), p. 19; subsequent references to this essay shall appear within my text. 3. See Gilbert, Chapter 14, pp. 294–312. 4. Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1931), p.18; cf. p. 29. Subsequent references to this work shall appear within my text. 5. Dream of Fair to Middling Women (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1993), p. 12. 6. Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 1. Cf. The Unnamable, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 303: “Ever murmuring my old stories. . . . Is there really nothing new to try?”; subsequent citations of this novel shall be to this edition and shall be given within my text. Cf. also Beckett’s review of “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934), reprinted in

208

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

Notes Disjecta, p. 70: “[T]he younger Irish poets evince awareness of the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again. . . . ” Molloy, in Three Novels, p. 32; subsequent references to this novel shall be to this edition. Cf. P. J. Murphy, “On First Looking into Beckett’s The Voice,” in The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives, ed. John Pilling and Mary Bryden (Bristol, England: The Beckett International Foundation, 1992), p. 76: “There is indeed ‘hearing other than its own’ – as Keats heard Chapman who heard Homer and as Beckett has heard all of them.” The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonomy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 221. Quoted in Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 139. Citation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), p. 13. Finnegans Wake (1939; New York: The Viking Press, 1962), pp.182 and 424. Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1931), p. 20. In “A Tale of a Tub,” etc., ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd edn (1920; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 130. Subsequent quotations shall be to this edition and shall be cited by page number within the text. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). In what follows, I have been particularly influenced by Bate’s Chapter 2: “The Neoclassical Dilemma.” In The Poems of Alexander Pope (one-volume Twickenham text), ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), lines 247–8. Subsequent citations of Pope shall be to this edition and shall be cited within my text. Dunciad Variorum, in Poems, p. 328. See The Spectator, No. 253, in Addison and Steele: Selections from “The Tatler” and “The Spectator,” ed. Robert J. Allen (1957; Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1970), p. 348. Used for convenience. Burton in these few pages cites Gesner, Scaliger, Jovius, Callimachus, Cardan, Macrobius, Seneca, and many others. For convenience, I have used the excerpts from the Anatomy in Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry, ed. Robert P. Tristram Coffin and Alexander M. Witherspoon (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946), pp. 160–1. Subsequent citations of Burton will be to this anthology. The original in Burton reads: “Yea, but you will infer that this is actum agere, an unnecessary work, cramben bis coctam apponere, the same again and again in other words” (p. 60). I am grateful to Mary Bryden for locating the Latin citation in Beckett’s notebook and for supplying the nice translation. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 283. In the word “gloomy” I intend to echo Louis I. Bredvold’s famous essay titled “The Gloom of the Tory Satirists” (1949), reprinted in EighteenthCentury English Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism ed. James L. Clifford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 3–20. “Imagination Dead Imagine,” in No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose, 1945–66 (1966; London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), pp. 161–4.

Notes 209 23. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 4. 24. Samuel Beckett: Nayman of Noland (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1986), p. 12. 25. Three Dialogues, in Disjecta, p. 145. 26. In James Joyce: an International Perspective, ed. Suheil Badi Bushrui and Bernard Benstock (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1982), p. vii.

Index Abbott, H. Porter, 33, 52, 92, 103, 194 n.13, 198 n.56 Adams, Robert M., 183 n.47, 199 n.8 Addison, Joseph, 5, 12, 14–16, 77, 157–8 The Spectator, 162 allusions, 6–7, 21, 173 n.32 in Beckett vs. Joyce, 6 density in early vs. reduction in later works, 8, 11 see also Beckett, “‘footnoting’ technique” Alter, Robert, 67 Alvarez, A., 20, 61, 204 n.27 Arnold, Matthew, 164 Atherton, James S., 173 n.26, 195 n.19 Austen, Jane, 16, 18, 47 Sense and Sensibility, 18, 47, 184 nn.2, 3 Bair, Deirdre, 11, 15–16, 58, 69, 110, 112, 171 n.4, 175 n.11, 180 n.9, 188 n.49, 191 n.25, 203 n.17 Balzac, Honoré de, 8 Barry, James, 127, 201 n.38 Barth, John, 47, 67 Bate, W. Jackson (“burden of the past”), 161 Battestin, Martin, 65, 154 Beckett, Samuel his aesthetics vs. Joyce’s, 145 his aesthetics and Pope’s, 132–3 anxiety regarding originality, 158 apocalyptic tone in, 153, 163 combination of ironic and heroic in, 129 “dialogue” with predecessors, 8–9, 31–2, 96–7, 156–7 disease, life as, 151 dying writers of eighteenth century, identification with, 156; compare Fielding, Johnson, and Swift

emphysema of, 121 English language, rejection of, 17 failure, art of, 3 “footnoting” technique, 22, 24, 41, 178 n.51 formal innovations in eighteenth century, interest in, 156 literary impotence, sense of, 61–3, 104–6, 145, 151–2, 160 memory, power of, 11, 21–4 mocking of eighteenth-century style, 57 “Mr. Beckett,” in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 71 oxymoronic style, 148–9 plagiarism of oneself, 160 poetic diction, use of, 135 as post-Joycean modernist, or postmodernist, 9 puns in, 42–3, 153 “Quin,” ur-Watt in MS of Watt, 15–16, 48–9 “Sam,” character in Watt, 24–5, 40, 49, 117 as satirist, 35, 37 scholarly vs. creative self, 20–2 slapstick in, 38 as Swiftian misanthropist, 37–8 tragic in, 127 his “unheroics” (Ellmann), 164 see also language Beckett, Samuel, works All That Fall, 49, 64–6, 111, 119–20, 123, 139, 146, 183 n.45, 188 n.48 “Assumption,” 66 The Calmative, 138 Company, 70, 86, 140, 143, 206 n.39 “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce,” 2, 91, 196 n.34, 207 n.2 Le Dépeupleur, 37 210

Index Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 7, 16–17, 20–2, 30, 55–6, 70–3, 81, 85, 91, 108, 119, 127, 137–8, 158, 173 n.27, 176 n.33, 180 n.13, 181 n.18, 185 n.9, 186 n.30, 190 n.17, 191 nn.23, 24, 193 n.48, 205 nn.31, 34 Echo’s Bones, 50, 126 “The End,” 123 Endgame, 49, 67, 111, 119–20, 123–4, 146, 201 n.35 Enough, 44, 206 n.42 Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, 157 “The Expelled,” 102 Film, 196 n.33 Footfalls, 143, 192 n.37 From an Abandoned Work, 22, 96, 138, 148, 186 n.25 Happy Days, 7, 13, 21, 50, 156, 178 n.55, 185 nn.11, 19 How It Is, 21, 67, 121, 123, 138, 159, 194 n.8, 204 nn.20, 28 Human Wishes, 12, 25, 111, 114–18, 125, 127 Ill Seen Ill Said, 132, 140–4, 152–3, 205 n.29 Imagination Dead Imagine, 85, 163 Krapp’s Last Tape, 31, 111, 201 n.30 The Lost Ones, 37 “Love and Lethe,” 54 Malone Dies, 4, 8, 25, 31–2, 35, 37, 49–53, 60, 62–4, 81–3, 91, 96, 98, 100–1, 103–5, 107–9, 111, 114, 117–18, 120–1, 127–9, 150–1, 158, 163, 186 n.20, 188 n.44, 194 n.10, 197 nn.39, 44, 48, 201 nn.33, 34 Mercier and Camier, 48–9, 181 n.28, 184 n.6 Molloy, 8, 50–1, 64, 81–4, 90, 96, 100–1, 103, 111, 119–20, 125, 127, 136–7, 152, 158–9, 163, 183 n.42, 197 n.46, 198 n.55 More Pricks Than Kicks, 3, 6–7, 13, 18, 21–2, 24, 28–31, 47, 50, 53, 56–7, 73–5, 126–7, 134, 136–7,

211

148, 158, 176 n.33, 181 n.21, 186 nn.23, 24 Murphy, 4, 7, 22–5, 28, 31–2, 34–5, 37, 75–6, 90–1, 112, 126–7, 136, 158, 181 n.17, 182 n.32, 184 n.4, 192 n.31, 205 n.31 No’s Knife, 190 n.14 A Piece of Monologue, 118 Proust, 10, 12, 16, 158, 177 n.39, 183 n.50, 194 n.8 “Recent Irish Poetry,” 203 n.10, 207 n.6 Rough for Radio II, 12–13, 23, 58, 101 “Stirrings Still,” 138–9 Stories and Texts for Nothing, 102, 130, 197 n.41 That Time, 142 The Unnamable, 8, 21, 49, 52, 57, 64, 66, 81, 86–8, 90, 98–100, 103–6, 111, 120–1, 123, 125–7, 154, 158–9, 163–4, 178 n.53, 183 n.49, 185 n.14, 191 n.22, 197 n.37, 198 n.58, 200 n.26, 201 nn.33, 34, 202 n.40, 203 n.15, 207 n.6 “The Voice,” 23 Waiting for Godot, 21, 49, 64, 83, 87–8, 91, 99, 133, 146, 148, 200 n.21 “Walking Out,” in More Pricks, 53, 134–6 Watt, 8–9, 15, 24–5, 38–46, 48–9, 56, 58–9, 61, 68, 90, 116–18, 120, 125, 146, 179 n.63, 183 nn.41, 44, 188 n.52, 192 n.31, 194 n.4, 195 n.25, 201 n.38 “A Wet Night,” in More Pricks, 22, 48, 53, 73, 137–8 “What a Misfortune,” in More Pricks, 57 “what is the word,” in As the Story was Told, 108–9 Whoroscope notebook, 4, 10, 18, 20, 28, 47–8, 53, 99, 111, 133, 151, 172 n.16, 178 n.54, 186 n.20, 196 n.32, 199 n.9, 202 n.5 Worstward Ho, 86, 108, 188 n.50 Bedlam (Bethlehem Royal Hospital), 34–7, 181 n.26, 182 n.31

212

Index

Ben-Zvi, Linda, 111, 175 n.9 Berkeley, George, 2–3, 11–12, 17, 28, 39, 92, 111, 199 n.7 Commonplace Book, 17, 194 n.11 Siris, 98 Blake, William, 16, 67 Bloom, Harold, 1, 4, 8, 27 Boswell, James, 3, 19, 110–11, 114–15, 117–18, 120, 122–5, 128–9, 177 n.43, 194 n.11, 201 n.35, 202 n.40 allusion to, in Murphy, 19, 24 Beckett’s use of Boswellian word “company,” 123 Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, 18 Life of Johnson, 5, 7, 18, 24–5, 111–12, 114–15, 118–19, 122–5, 127–8, 178 nn.61, 62, 194 n.11, 201 n.32 Brater, Enoch, 20, 196 n.36 Broadley, A. M., 112, 131 Bronson, Bertrand, 129 Brower, Reuben, 154 Bryden, Mary, 8, 200 n.16, 208 n.19 Bucknill, J. C., 95 Burke, Edmund, 92, 157 Burton, Robert, 162, 193 n.43, 208 nn.18, 19 Byrd, Max, 103–4 Byron, Lord, 16, 176 n.30 Calder, John, 11, 174 n.3 “Captain Shaw’s List of Students with Distinctions, 1924–31,” 175 n.21 Cash, Arthur H., 103 Cazamian, Louis, 130, 176 n.23, 198 n.5, 200 n.25 Cervantes, Miguel de, 107 Don Quixote, 97, 101 Persiles y Sigismunda, 97 chain of being, Beckett’ s inversion of, 145–6 Chaplin, Charlie, 40, 164 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 14, 16 Chesterfield, Lord, 5, 7, 12, 19, 134, 158, 177 n.43, 200 n.20 Cibber, Colley, 152, 161 Cioran, E. M., 177 n.47, 179 n.4 Coe, Richard N., 177 n.34 Coetzee, J. M., 48, 184 n.7

Cohen, David, 23 Cohn, Ruby, 110–11, 199 n.15 Collins, John Churton, 94–5, 198 n.55 Congreve, William, 14 Cooldrinagh, 138–9 Crabbe, George, 205 nn.31, 33 Craik, Henry, 94–7, 100, 178 n.60, 198 n.55 Crocker, Lester G., 5 Cross, Wilbur L., 98–100, 102, 197 n.40 Culler, Jonathan, 79 Damrosch, Leopold, 77, 127–8 Dante, 3, 8 death, theme of in From an Abandoned Work, 96 in Malone Dies, 100 see also Fielding, Pope, Johnson, Sterne, and Swift Defoe, Daniel, 2, 18, 49–52, 67, 159, 177 n.36 in Beckett’ s “Serena I,” 50, 177 n.36 Robinson Crusoe, 18, 47, 49–53, 185 nn.11, 19 Descartes, René, 3 Dew, Miss Rosie, and the pastoral tradition, 136 “diary-fiction” (H. Porter Abbott), in Defoe and Beckett, 52 Dickens, Charles, 16, 164 Oliver Twist, 72 Dictionary of National Biography, Beckett’ s use of, 112 Diderot, Denis, 17, 54 disease and eighteenth-century writers, see Fielding, Johnson, Pope, and Swift Dobrée, Bonamy, 147–8 Dobson, Austin, Vignettes of the Eighteenth Century, 97, 100 Doherty, Francis, 38, 180 n.8, 182 n.36, 200 n.20 Donoghue, Denis, 27 Dryden, John, 13–15 Dublin University Calendar, 11, 174 n.4 École Normale Supérieure, 16 Ehrenpreis, Irvin, 27, 93, 184 n.51

Index Eliot, T. S., 1–2, 16 Ellmann, Richard, 8, 17, 90, 96, 145, 164, 206 n.43 Farquhar, George, 18, 177 n.41 Federman, Raymond, 40–1 Fielding, Henry, 3–5, 8–9, 12, 17, 49, 53–7, 61, 67, 86–8, 99–101, 159, 161, 177 n.36, 186 n.29 building up and tearing down of “show,” 55–6 experimentation of form in, 156 image of dying writer in, 92, 98–100, 104, 107–8 as literary optimist, 163 “perhaps” and hesitating rhetoric in Fielding and Beckett, 55–7 visual arts, allusions to, 54 writing as living in, 66 Fielding, Henry, works Amelia, 18, 177 n.40 Jonathan Wild, 18, 47, 53, 68, 184 n.3, 192 n.32 Joseph Andrews, 17–18, 47, 49, 53–4, 68, 74, 76, 187 n.32 Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, 18, 47, 53, 92, 97–100, 184 n.3, 196 n.31 Tom Jones, 7, 12, 17–18, 47, 49, 53–7, 61, 66, 68, 70, 74, 78, 87, 184 n.3, 186 n.26 Fish, Stanley, 89 Fletcher, John, 4, 40, 50, 58, 69, 179 n.3, 184 n.7 Foucault, Michel, 35, 42, 44–5 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 63 Garrick, David, 80 Gay, John, 18 Geulincz, Arnold, 3 Gibbon, Edward, 3, 5, 157 Gide, André, 21 Gilbert, Stuart, 157 Goldsmith, Oliver, 5, 12, 28, 92 “The Deserted Village,” 143, 206 n.4 The Vicar of Wakefield, 17–18, 47 Gontarski, S. E., 26, 173 n.33, 185 n.16, 189 n.6, 207 n.57

213

Gray, Thomas, 13, 20, 159, 178 n.55 “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” 12, 140 Greenblatt, Stephen J., 1 Gullette, David, 175 n.14, 203 n.7 Hardy, Thomas, 24 Harries, Elizabeth W., 63 Harvey, Lawrence E., 50, 188 n.54, 197 n.50 Hawkins, John, 112, 116, 124–5, 199 n.14, 201 n.36 Heidegger, Martin, 3 Hogarth, William, 54, 186 nn.26, 27, 200 n.26 “The Bathos,” 147 Harlot’ s Progress, 54 Hone, Joseph, 17, 29, 94–5, 114, 119, 180 n.10, 196 n.32 Horace, 154 Hunter, J. Paul, 51, 82, 182 n.37, 185 n.17 Hyde Park, in Molloy, 136, 203 n.12 “influence,” vs. “affinity,” 3–4 Beckett’s use of term, 2–3 as dialogue, 2 Ireland, nostalgic image of, 138–9, 204 n.24 Iser, Wolfgang, 68, 73, 85, 189 nn.5, 6, 191 n.22 “gaps” or “blanks” in text, 72–3, 191 n.22 mock intimacy described, 77–8 Johnson, Samuel, 3–5, 8–9, 20, 90 arithmetic, fondness for, 122–4, 201 n.32 asthma, gout, and dropsy, 112, 119–20 Beckett’ s identification with, 111, 115–16 Beckett’ s “Johnson fantasy,” 110ff., 198 n.2 Beckett’ s visit to Johnson’s birthplace, 111–12 his conversation as escape from “vile melancholy,” 122

214

Index

Johnson, Samuel – continued and deterioration, and depression of Beckett’ s characters, 111, 115, 118–22, 124–6, 134 fear of death or annihilation, 115, 120, 123–4 impotence, Beckett’ s theory of, 113–15 as inspiration to Beckett, 12, 111, 126–7 as “novelistic figure,” 118 opium and laudanum, and Beckett’s characters, 125–6 self-consciousness, 122 solitariness, 121 stroke of, 123–4 as “tragic figure,” 115–16, 127–8 walking, awkwardness of, 119, 126, 128, 202 n.40 Johnson, Samuel, works Aegri Ephemeris, 114 Annals, 119, 201 n.30 Dictionary of the English Language, 111, 198 n.58, 199 n.9 The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, 18, 111 “Letter to Lord Chesterfield,” 12, 200 n.20 The Lives of the English Poets, 18, 111 Prayers and Meditations, 119, 127 Rasselas, 18, 127, 130, 134, 164, 196 n.31, 202 n.43 “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” 110, 117, 130, 202 n.43 Joyce, James, 2–6, 8–9, 27, 61, 65, 68, 145, 156–7, 159 aesthetics of, 133, 163–4 allusive technique, 8, 156–7 Beckett not his “apprentice,” 55, 163 Beckett escapes the shadow of, 159 Beckett his “legitimate descendant,” 27 Beckett’ s respect for Joyce’ s work and heroism, 164 fascination with Swift and Sterne, 156 image of dying Joyce, 108 influence of eighteenth-century writers through him, 156–7

links Beckett and Swift, 28 near-blindness, 119 “tamed” the literary voices in his head whereas Beckett could not, 158–9 “telescopic eye” vs. Beckett’ s “microscopic eye,” 145 Joyce, James, works Dubliners, 80 Finnegans Wake, 6–7, 28, 67, 69, 91, 94, 99, 157, 160, 162, 173 n.26, 190 n.7, 191 n.24, 193 n.2, 201 n.32 “Twilight of Blindness,” 94 Ulysses, 68, 102, 111, 157, 171 n.5, 199 n.8, 203 n.9 Jung, Carl, 66 Juvenal, 130 Keaton, Buster, 38 Keats, John, 16, 23, 139, 205 n.31 Kelly, Lionel, 200 n.30 Kenner, Hugh, 4, 41, 67, 182 n.39 Kermode, Frank, 135 Knowlson, James, 12, 21, 25, 69, 111–12, 173 n.30, 174 n.3, 176 n.23, 180 n.9, 185 nn.11, 19, 207 n.51 Korshin, Paul, 116 Kristeva, Julia, 160 language: lack of linguistic confidence in Ill Seen Ill Said, 143–4 failure of in Sterne, 61–4 failure of in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub and Beckett’s Watt, 40–3 and Pope’s “aesthetics of decay,” 133, 144–5 Legouis, Émile, and Louis Cazamian, 176 n.23, 198 n.5, 200 n.25 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 3, 186 n.20 and Malone Dies, 52 Leslie, Shane, 94–5, 181 n.18 literary heritage Joyce’s vs. Beckett’s view of, 160–1, 163 and optimism of Thackeray, Dickens, Arnold, and Fielding, 164

Index Pope’ s view of, 161–2 Swift’ s view, 160 Lodge, David, 160 Luce, A. A., 2, 11–13, 15, 175 nn.18, 20 Macaulay, Thomas, 131 MacGreevy, Thomas, 4, 10, 16, 19, 26, 29, 47, 53–4, 58, 64, 90, 95, 111–16, 126, 150, 157, 175 n.15, 177 n.36, 184 n.3, 186 n.28 Macpherson, James, 13 Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, 25, 32, 35 Malebranche, Nicolas, 2 Manning, Mary, 112–14, 119, 126 Marlowe, Christopher, 16 Marvell, Andrew, 139 Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, 11, 57 Mays, J. C. C., 34 McDowell, R. B. and Webb, D. A., 174 n.9, 175 n. 11 McKeon, Michael, 57, 187 n.32 Mercier, Vivian, 4, 172 n.10, 205 n.35 Milton, John, 14, 16, 53–4, 142, 146, 176 n.26, 186 n.25 “Lycidas,” 134, 140, 202 n.5, 205 n.31, 206 n.41 Paradise Lost, 12, 53; compare 153 More, Sir Thomas, 176 n.26 Morris, David B., 147 Muir, Edwin, 3 Murphy, P. J., 23, 173 n.21, 208 n.8 Nabokov, Vladimir, 136 National Portrait Gallery (London), 142, 205 n.35 Nelson, Daniel W., 73–4 New, Melvyn, 2 nothingness, theme in Watt and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, 102–3 and Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, 43–6 O’ Brien, Eoin, 138, 180 n.8 O’ Neill, Chris, 183 n.43 Ong, Walter J., 77, 81 oxymorons, in Pope and Beckett, 149

215

Pagliaro, Harold E., 98 Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Verse, 14 Pancoast, Henry S., 176 n.23 pastoral tradition, 139–41 All That Fall reflects, 139 Beckett echoes Pope’ s use of, 132–7, 144 Ill Seen Ill Said as pastoral elegy, 139–44 Molloy, Pope’s Essay on Man, and the escape into the world of the pastoral, 136–7 More Pricks and the conventional landscape of, 134–5 Murphy and withdrawal into the “green old days,” 136 pastoral nostalgia in The Calmative, From an Abandoned Work, and Stirrings Still, 138 the “young pastoralist” in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 137–8 Patch, Thomas, 197 n.44 Perloff, Marjorie, 17, 174 n.2, 204 n.25 Picasso, Pablo, 55–6, 68 Pilling, John, 3, 11, 18, 20, 48, 188 n.49 Pinter, Harold, 60 Pirandello, Luigi, 97 Pope, Alexander, 3–4, 9, 12, 15–16, 69, 154–5, 158, 162–4, 177 n.43, 183 n.49 Beckett’ s explicit allusions to, 19, 158 Beckett’ s reading of, 14–16 Beckett’ s sense of a falling off from the age of Pope, 154 death, view of, 149–50 dependency on the past, 163 diminished man in, 147 experimentation with form, 156 and the Golden Age, 134–6, 153–4 the impossibility of the new, 163 and literary pilfering, 161 as pastoral poet, 142 and “the Sister-arts” (poetry and painting), 142 style of, 132, 148–9 and Trinity Honors Examination, 14 “uncreating” (The Dunciad), 163

216

Index

Pope, Alexander, works “Discourse on Pastoral Poetry,” 133 The Dunciad, 18, 53, 67, 133, 145–6, 151–3, 155, 161–3, 177 n.39, 207 n.59 Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, 140, 142, 150, 177 n.39 Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 12, 132–3, 149–51, 164, 202 n.6 “Epistle to a Lady,” 143 “Epistle to Mr. Jervas,” 142, 205 n.38 Essay on Criticism, 14, 18, 133, 144, 151–2, 161–2, 189 n.59, 204 n.27, 207 n.59 Essay on Man, 12, 133, 137, 144–9, 207 n.51 Pastorals, 18–19, 132–3, 135, 139–41, 205 n.31, 206 n.39 Poetical Works, 132–3, 145, 150 “Preface” to Works, 148 The Rape of the Lock, 12, 14, 18, 150 The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated, 150 “On Solitude,” 140 The Temple of Fame, 150 Windsor Forest, 149–50, 154, 161 Portrane Lunatic Asylum, 29 postmodernism, 49, 55, 105, 160, 163 Pound, Ezra, 53 Poussin, Nicolas, 140 Prentice, Charles, 75 Preston, John, 88 Probyn, Clive T., 60, 77 Proust, Marcel, 2, 70 Quin, James (Beckett’ s persona in Watt manuscript), 15–16 Rabelais, François, 4 Rabinovitz, Rubin, 177 n.41, 200 n.20 Rawson, C. J., 27 reader Beckett’ s implicit compliment to, 88 Beckett’ s passive–aggressive relationship with, 77 characterized in Swift, Fielding, and Sterne, 73–8

“curious reader” in Swift and Beckett, 75 direct addresses to, 69–70, 73–4, 78–9, 81–2 entrapment of, 68–9, 78–80, 83–5 Fielding’s reader, 68, 70, 74–7, 192 n.37 gaze of Beckett’ s reader as source of discomfort, 141 “gentle reader” of eighteenth century, 71 goading by narrator in Tristram Shandy and Malone Dies, 80–3 intimacy and mock intimacy in eighteenth-century texts, 81 mocking and remaking of reader, 69–72, 74–5, 88 reading as “rhetorical game,” 72–3, 76–7, 86 role, difficult or ambiguous, 70–3, 81–3, 84–5 text invites a particular response from, 70 Reading University, 114 Reason, Age of, 5, 35 Reavey, George, 110, 113, 116 Rexroth, Kenneth, 3 Richardson, Samuel, 13, 18, 33, 52, 186 n.21 Clarissa, 33 Pamela, 33 Ricks, Christopher, 58, 91, 194 nn.7, 9, 195 n.21, 207 n.55 Rolleston, Sir Humphry, 114 Rossi, Mario, 95, 180 n.10 Rudmose-Brown, Thomas, 176 n.25 Ruskin, John, 16 Salomon, Harry M., 148 Sartiliot, Claudette, 160 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 63 Schlack, Beverly Ann, 172 n.19, 173 n.32 Schleifer, Ronald, 130 Schneider, Michel, 8 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3 Seccombe, Thomas, 112, 131 Shadwell, Thomas, 16 Shakespeare, William, 12, 14–16, 87, 101, 176 nn.24, 26

Index Shaw, T. B., 175 n.13 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 47, 184 n.4 Shelley, Percy B., 205 n.31 Shenker, Israel, 145 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, The School for Scandal, 18, 177 n.41 Sidney, Sir Philip, 14 Simpson, K. G., 56 Smith, Sir William, Specimens of English Literature, 12–13, 190 n.15 Smollett, Tobias, 2 character “Watt” or “Wat” in, 48 Humphry Clinker, 18, 47–9, 91, 182 n.34, 185 n.9 melancholy invalids in, 48–9 Quin, James (the ur-Watt) in, 48 Solomon, Harry M., 148–9 Spenser, Edmund, 14, 16, 139, 142, 176 n.26, 205 n.31 Starkie, Walter Fitzwilliam, 97, 195 n.29 Steele, Peter, 105, 197 n.40 Steele, Richard, 157 Stein, Gertrude, 68 “Stella” (Swift’s friend Esther Johnson), 6–7, 28, 30, 32 Stendahl, 158 Stephen, Leslie, 94, 112, 178 n.60, 198 n.55 Sterne, Laurence, 2–5, 8–9, 18, 20, 49, 58–63, 67, 159, 186 n.29, 187 n.36, 188 n.49 “aesthetics of the fragmentary and unfinished,” 63; compare 191 n.22 beast of burden in Sterne and Beckett, 63–4 Beckett “an important heir of” (Christopher Ricks), 58, 161 courage of last days, 92, 103–4, 108 cultural recycling in, 161–3 death, theme of, 101–4 literary experimentation, 107, 156 medical problems of, 64, 66, 101–4 music and painting in, 63 quotation marks, lack of, 80 silence in advance of the moderns, interest in, 65 view of life as “Beckettian,” 63–5, 104 writing as living, 66

217

Sterne, Laurence, works The Journal to Eliza, 106–8, 197 n.51 A Sentimental Journey, 47, 49–50, 58–9, 65, 92, 102, 188 n.50 Tristram Shandy, 4, 12–13, 23, 47, 49–50, 57–66, 68, 70, 78–80, 101–7, 188 nn.44, 48 Works, 58 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 72 Stravinsky, Igor, 68 Swift, Jonathan, 3–9, 13, 91, 157, 163 Beckett’ s allusions to, 12, 16–19, 26, 30–1, 34–7, 71–2, 158, 177 n.36, 180 n.12, 180 n.17 Beckett “in dialogue with” or identifies with, 31, 96–7, 156 Beckett’ s interest in Swift’s biography, 6–7, 13 Beckett’ s “modern” interpretation of, 9, 93–5 Beckett’ s reading of Swift at Trinity and after, 12–19, 93 Beckett as Swiftian misanthropist, 37–8 Beckett’ s Swift vs. Yeats’s Swift, Joyce’s Swift, 93–4 as character in “Sanies I,” 29 “chief end . . . to vex the world,” 69 fed Beckett’ s creativity, 93–4, 156, 159–60 formal experimentation in, 156 image of the dying Swift, 24, 92–4, 96–7, 104, 108–9 “Lemuel,” character in Malone Dies, 32, 35–7 mathematics in Watt and A Tale of a Tub, 43 Ménière’s syndrome (Swift’s disease), 95 and the “prisons of the self” (C. J. Rawson), 27 “Presto,” Swift’s nickname for himself in More Pricks, 32 puns in, 42–3, 153 reading Swift as if he were Samuel Beckett, 27 “Wat” or “Watt” in the Holyhead Journal, 38, 182 n.34

218

Index

Swift, Jonathan, works Battle of the Books, 12, 159–60, 183 n.41 Bickerstaff Papers, 18, 28 Drapier’ s Letters, 14–15, 18, 28, 31, 34 Gulliver’ s Travels, 6, 17–19, 28, 30–1, 35–7, 68, 71–2, 74–6, 85, 108, 163, 173 nn.27, 28, 176 n. 33, 180 nn.13, 14, 181 n.19, 195 n.21 Holyhead Journal, 38 Journal to Stella, 5–7, 18, 28, 30–8, 106, 181 nn.20, 26, 193 n.42 Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, 36 A Modest Proposal, 37 A Tale of a Tub, 4, 6, 18, 25, 28, 34–6, 38–46, 61, 71–4, 76, 103, 160, 179 n.68, 180 n.13, 183 nn.41, 42, 190 n.18 “Thoughts on Various Subjects,” 194 n.7 On the Trinity, 46 A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind, 46, 184 n.51 “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” 12, 28, 108 “When I come to be old,” 108 Thackeray, William M., 164 Theocritus, 139 Thompson, Alexander H., History of English Literature, 12, 47, 175 n.12, 176 n.23, 186 n.21 Thompson, Geoffrey, 34 Thomson, James, 142, 203 n.9, 205 n.33, 206 n.39 Thrale, Hester Lynch (Piozzi), 112–16, 118, 182 n.33 Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, 112, 122, 201 n.31 Tindall, William York, 4 Trench, Wilbraham F., 176 n.25 Trinity College Dublin, 2–4, 8, 10–21, 26, 28–9, 47, 93, 97, 101, 130, 174 n.9, 175 nn.10, 12, 13, 18, 176 nn.23, 24

Beckett’ s thorough academic preparation at, 20, 132 Beckett’ s Honors in English, 10, 13–16 Beckett’ s Honors in Modern Literature (French and Italian), 8, 11, 13–16, 47, 97, 202 n.5, 205 nn.5, 33 1923 Entrance Examination, 12–13, 59, 144–5, 159–60, 175 n.11, 188 n.46 Examination Papers, 12–13, 174 n.9, 202 n.5, 205 n.33 Honors vs. Ordinary Examinations, 14, 27, 175 nn.19–21, 176 nn.24, 25 MA in Modern Literature, 11 post-Trinity reading of eighteenth-century literature, 17 “the Unadversity of Dublin,” 20 University Calendar, 11, 13–14, 174 n.4, 175 nn.20, 21, 176 nn.22, 23 “Vanessa” (Swift’ s friend Esther Vanhomrigh), 6 Van Velde, Bram, 164 Vico, Giambattista, 91 Victorianism, 5, 164 Vigny, Alfred de, 58 Virgil, 8, 139, 154, 205 n.32 Voigt, Milton, 195 n.20 Vulliamy, C. E., 112–13, 118, 121 Walpole, Horace, 157 Warner, John M., 2, 171 n.5 Watkins, W. B. C., 128 Weinfield, Henry, 139 Whitelaw, Billie, 143 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3 Woolf, Virginia, 5, 8, 65, 92, 172 nn.17, 20, 182 n.28, 184 n.2 The Common Reader, 199 n.15 “Dr. Burney’ s Evening Party,” 5 Orlando: a Biography, 5, 94, 199 n.15 on Sterne’ s A Sentimental Journey, 194 n.12

Index Wordsworth, William, 16, 140–1 Wyatt, A. J. and A. S. Collins, Intermediate Textbook of English Literature, 176 n.23

219

and Walter H. Low, Intermediate Textbook of English Literature, 14, 176 n.23 Yeats, W. B., 92–3, 154 Young, Edward, 19

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