Echo's Bones

by Samuel Beckett

  ‘a little bird’: as in superstition; cf. Murphy (105).

  ‘that his hour had come’: as in John 13:1, referring to the divinely appointed time when Jesus would be glorified through death.

  ‘take it by the forelock’: possibly derived from Robert Greene’s Menaphon: ‘Thinking now to . . . take opportunitie by his forelockes’.

  ‘bald’: the text as a whole emphasises Lord Gall’s baldness, playing on the belief that lack of hair was related to impotence.

  ‘Saint Paul’s skull’: in Christian art, St Paul is most commonly depicted as bald but with a black beard.

  ‘dundraoghaires’: possibly an Irish version of ‘dundrearies’, long side whiskers worn without a beard. Beckett may also be alluding to the Dublin port of Dun Laoghaire.

  ‘belcher’: ‘a neckerchief with blue ground, and large white spots having a dark blue spot or eye in the centre, named after a celebrated pugilist called Jim Belcher’ (OED).

  ‘help to holy living’: noted in DN (372), taken from Cooper (100). Beckett had also just been reading Taylor.

  ‘Schenectady putter’: invented by Mr A. F. Knight of Schenectady, NY, and patented in 1903.

  ‘caoutchouc’: India rubber; produced from the resinous juice of certain gum trees, which becomes elastic on exposure to air. Cf. Dream 81.

  ‘cap-à-pie’: French for ‘from head to foot’. Beckett may be alluding to the ‘fatherly’ attributes of Lord Gall by way of Hamlet, in which Horatio tells Hamlet that the Ghost was ‘A figure like your father, / Armed at point exactly, cap-à-pie’ (I, ii).

  ‘gutta percha’: latex taken exclusively from the Malayan gum tree; it differs from caoutchouc, which loses its elasticity when cooled.

  ‘tarboosh’: ‘cap of cloth or felt (almost always red) with a tassel (usually of blue silk) attached at the top, worn by Muslims either by itself or as part of the turban’ (OED). Beckett may be thinking of Flaubert, who famously wore a tarboosh.

  ‘lost your ball . . . What a shame!’: Another reference (via golf this time) to Lord Gall’s infertility. The words, which provide the title of ‘What a Misfortune’, the seventh story of MPTK, derive from Voltaire’s Candide when a eunuch is startled by the beauty of Cunégonde: ‘O che sciagura d’essere senza coglioni!’ (‘What a misfortune, to be without balls!’). Beckett used the phrase in his anonymous satire ‘Che Sciagura’, which mocked the Irish ban on the importation of contraceptives and was published in T.C.D.: A Miscellany 36 (14 November 1929).

  ‘giant’: introduced as a ‘colossus’, then a ‘strange figure’, and now a fairy-tale ‘giant’.

  ‘hundred thousand in a bag’: golf balls compensate for Gall’s lack of potency.

  ‘Lord Gall of Wormwood’: wormwood is a bitter shrub that sprang up along the writhing track of the serpent driven from Paradise; it is commonly associated with gall: ‘Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall’ (Lamentations 3:19; see also Deuteronomy 29:18). For Burton (II, 4), wormwood or Artemisia absinthium is a cure for melancholy. It is most commonly seen as an emblem or type of what is bitter and grievous to the soul. Cf. Hamlet’s ‘Wormwood, wormwood’ in an aside on hearing the Player-Queen’s protestations of eternal fidelity to her dying husband, referring to the bitter taste her promises will produce. Beckett will have come across the name of Gall in Garnier’s Onanisme seul et à deux (83), as well as Praz’s The Romantic Agony (146). In the latter, the reference is to the German phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall, as used in Mercier and Camier (32). Finally, Beckett is aware of the distinction between ‘Gael’ and ‘Gall’, native Irish and foreigner, as used for example in George Sigerson’s 1907 book Bards of the Gael and Gall: Examples of the Poetic Literature of Erin. Beckett reused the story of Lord Gall as told here in Murphy (59), and in Watt, the Galls, father and son, are piano tuners, as is their namesake in Joyce’s Ulysses.

  ‘Possibility of issue is extinct’: legal terms of succession; Lord Gall is unable to produce a male heir. Cf. also Beckett’s review ‘MacGreevy on Yeats’, where he mentions ‘the issueless predicament of existence’ (Dis 97).

  ‘The law is a ginnet’: more commonly, ‘the law is an ass’, used in (attrib.) Chapman, Revenge for Honour (1634); the substitution here anticipates the discussion of asses and ginnets.

  ‘dream, or rather a vision’: another nod towards Dream, Rimbaud’s ‘visionary’ poetry and Yeats’s A Vision.

  ‘could not go on’: cf. the closing words of The Unnamable: ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’; also of course Belacqua’s attitude in Dante’s Purgatorio.

  ‘goat’: an image of the preterite, those passed over, as in the ‘small malevolent goat’ of ‘Enueg I’ (CP 7). In the Bible, Christ separates sheep from goats (Matthew 25:32). In Waiting for Godot, one of the boys tends goats, the other sheep. There are more goats than sheep in Beckett’s work: for example, in Murphy, Celia averts her eyes ‘like an aborting goat’s’ (84), while Wylie wonders whether ‘a real goat’ had been in the house, and in Watt, a goat witnesses Mr Hackett falling off the ladder. Goats also appear in ‘The Calmative’ and Molloy.

  ‘Adeodatus’: the name of St Augustine’s illegitimate son, as noted by Beckett in DN: ‘Adeodatus (Augustine’s bastard)’ (175); based on Augustine (IX, vi), the name appears four times in ‘Echo’s Bones’. Cf. Dream: ‘that old bastard of Augustin’ (32).

  ‘vexed to the pluck’: ‘pluck’ here in the sense of ‘entrails’, hence ‘annoyed to my innermost being’; Beckett will have found this obsolete usage in Swift’s Journal to Stella: ‘It vexes me to the pluck that I should lose walking this delicious day’ (eighteenth letter, 10 March 1710–11).

  ‘quiverfuls’: playing on the biblical sense of ‘quiverful’ as in Psalms 127:5, where it refers explicitly to children: ‘Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them’. Lord Gall’s quiver may hold many putters, but he has no offspring.

  ‘edible mushrooms’: the appearance of mushrooms in this distorted landscape adds to the fairy-tale aspect.

  ‘When our Lord . . . should go no farther’: based on the story of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday; when the animals refused to carry ‘our Lord’, he cursed them with sterility. Lord Gall, himself ‘sterile’, or at least incapable of producing any offspring, praises the ass, who would have done the job ‘unconditionally’. In All That Fall, Maddy Rooney thinks that Christ rode into Jerusalem on a hinny (a cross between a female ass and a stallion). The issues of sterility in cross-breeding were familiar to Beckett from his reading of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1932. At some later point, Beckett noted in his ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook: ‘I think those authors right, who maintain that the ass has a prepotent power over the horse, so that both the mule & the hinny more resemble the ass than the horse; but that the prepotency runs more strongly in the male-ass than in the female, so that the mule, which is the offspring of the male-ass & mare, is more like an ass than is the hinny, which is the offspring of the female-ass & stallion’ (80r–81r; loosely quoting Darwin’s chapter on ‘Hybridism’).

  ‘pigdogs’: anglicised version of common German term of abuse, ‘Schweinehunde’.

  ‘Primo . . . Secun —’: in an undated letter to MacGreevy (summer 1929?), Beckett told him that Proust’s writing was ‘more heavily symmetrical than Macaulay at his worst, with primos and secundos echoing to each complacently and reechoing’ (LSB I 11). Having finished writing the study Proust (published 1931), Beckett thought it was ‘not scholarly & primo secundo enough’ to be accepted by publishers Chatto & Windus (letter to MacGreevy, undated (17 Sept 1930); LSB I 48). Cf. Dream 51 and 69.

  ‘rosy pudency’: cf. Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, where Imogen is described as having ‘A Pudencie so Rosie’ (II, v).

  ‘hog’s pudding’: a version of the proverbial ‘dog’s dinner’; possibly based on an entry in DN (861), taken from Burton: ‘Hungry dogs eat dirty puddings’ (III, 103).

  ‘tenants in tail’: legal terminology, des
cribing a situation where sitting tenants inherit property.

  ‘drownded’: obsolete variant spelling of ‘drowned’.

  ‘croop’: old spelling of ‘croup’, to ‘cry hoarsely’ or to ‘croak like a raven, frog, crane’ (OED).

  ‘bronchi’: the two branches of the windpipe.

  ‘pleura’: the membrane covering the lung; the word also appears in Dream (139).

  ‘Mazeppa’: title of a poem by Byron, in which the eponymous hero dies after delivering his message; the joke here is presumably that Belacqua has had to wait for Lord Gall to tell the story.

  ‘translated into Gaelic’: a common motif in Beckett’s work, used for example in All That Fall. In ‘Draff’, the example Hairy gives as being inexpressible in Gaelic is ‘O Death where is thy Sting’ (MPTK 186). See however an entry in the ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook: ‘a sentence that deserves to be translated into a dead language’ (46r).

  ‘In a vision’: thinking of Yeats’s A Vision.

  ‘impervious to blandishment’: cf. note based on Augustine (VII, i) in DN: ‘pervious to Thee’ (123).

  ‘algum tree’: citing II Chronicles 2:8, which refers to the trees Solomon used to build the Temple in Jerusalem, and appended to a list of words in DN: ‘analgesia, analgia, analgetic, rectalgia, algum trees out of Lebanon’ (1007). Algum trees also appear in the poem ‘Enueg I’, which gave rise to Beckett’s remark in a letter to MacGreevy: ‘Devlin didn’t know what an algum tree was and I couldn’t enlighten him’ (9 October 1933; LSB I 166).

  ‘Highth’: obsolete today, but etymologically more correct, this spelling was still used by Milton. Cf. Beckett’s letter to MacGreevy of 6 November 1955 (LSB II 565), in which he quotes Milton’s ‘Insuperable height of loftiest shade’ (Paradise Lost IV, l. 138).

  ‘rub- rather than sud-orem’: as noted in DN: ‘the body roused up ad ruborem, non ad sudorem’ (799), based on Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy: ‘till they become flushed’, ‘not till they sweat’ (II, 71). Cf. also Dream 17–18.

  ‘ad quem’: ‘limit to which’; in DN given as ‘terminus a quo & ad quem’ (‘limit from which and to which’; 719). Cf. Dream 159 and ‘German Diaries’, on walking in the Ohlsdorf cemetery ‘dully without ad quem’ (25 October 1936).

  ‘bole’: the stem or trunk of a tree.

  ‘vulvate gnarls that Ruskin found more moving than even the noblest cisalpine medallions’: most probably referring to Ruskin on the painting of trees, which occupies much of volume I of Modern Painters, disparaging the idealised landscapes of both early northern Italian and Classical French painters such as Salvator Rosa, Tintoretto, Claude and Poussin – presumably the producers of those ‘noblest cisalpine medallions’ – and praising Turner for his rough naturalism. The word ‘vulvate’ is an odd amalgam of obvious words but may well gesture slyly towards the legend that Ruskin was unable to consummate his marriage to Effie Gray because he was repulsed by either her pubic hair or menstrual blood, or indeed both. A reference to Modern Painters also appears in Dream (16).

  ‘hellebore’: type of medical plant often used as a purgative or poison. From Burton (II, 18), Beckett noted: ‘Hellebor helps – but not always’ (DN 793).

  ‘Fräulein Dietrich’: Marlene Dietrich; Beckett frequently used the phrase from the song in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1928), ‘sonst, in the words of the song, gar nix’ (for example in Dream 11 and 17).

  ‘vagitus’; birth-cry, cf. Murphy (14 and 44).

  ‘my own, my dear bowels’: from Burton (III, 86), as entered in DN: ‘My own! my dear bowels!’ (843); used to address Arland Ussher in a 1934 letter.

  ‘bosses of the buckler’: recorded in DN: ‘I ran against the Lord with my neck, with the thick bosses of my buckler’ (133), taken from Augustine (VII, vii).

  ‘rhinal meditation’: relating to the nose, in this case Belacqua’s desire to pick his nose.

  ‘Sedendo et quiescendo’: DN (311) has ‘sedendo et quiescendo anima efficitur sapiens’ (‘sitting and meditating the soul grows wise’); this description of Dante’s Belacqua is taken from Paget Toynbee’s Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante (1898) (74). Beckett used the phrase as a title for an extract from the unpublished Dream, which appeared in transition, 21 (March 1932).

  ‘who said that?’: based on DN, ‘Who made all that’ (32), taken from Lockhart’s History of Napoleon Bonaparte (215), quoting Napoleon on ‘looking up to the heaven, which was clear and starry’. Cf. ‘Who said all that?’ in Dream (73).

  ‘I came, I sat down, I went away’: playing on Caesar’s ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’; Beckett also used the line in his French essay ‘Le Concentrisme’ (Dis 38).

  ‘quintessence and the upshot’: taken from DN (790): ‘The melancholy man is the cream of human adversity, the quintessence and the upshot’, from Burton (I, 434). Cf. Dream 77.

  ‘Little wealth, ill health and a life by stealth’: variation on Swift’s ‘Little wealth, and much health, and a life by stealth’, from the end of Letter XXV in Journal to Stella.

  ‘rape’: following on from Zaborovna’s ‘rape’ of Belacqua earlier in the story. In DN, Beckett entered Thomas Aquinas’s word for rape, ‘Stuprum: illicita virginis defloratio’ (433).

  ‘oyster on the Aeschylus’: Aeschylus, the Athenian dramatist, was told by the oracle that he would die by a house collapsing. He withdrew to the countryside, but an eagle took his bald head to be a stone and dropped a tortoise on him. Beckett took the story from Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying (I, i), where an eagle drops an oyster (not a tortoise) on Aeschylus. Being bald, Lord Gall’s skull could easily appear as a stone.

  ‘top-gallant’: a nautical term, meaning the head of the topmast of a ship.

  ‘Mumm’: champagne produced by the house of Mumm in Rheims.

  ‘Haemo’: meaning ‘blood’.

  ‘plethoric’: ‘suffering from or affected by plethora; having a ruddy complexion and a full, fleshy body; excessively full of blood, congested’ (OED).

  ‘collops’: a slice of meat; cf. also ‘collop-wallop’ in Dream (1).

  ‘I imprecate the hour I was got’: as in Job 3:3: ‘Let the day perish wherein I was born’.

  ‘scantling of small chat’; the line ‘a narrow scantling of language’ is found in DN (196), applied to Augustine’s Confessions.

  ‘crow’s nest’: here and elsewhere, the tree house is compared with a ship; ‘crow’s nest’ here also anticipates the appearance of the submarine.

  ‘Richilda, relict of Albert, Duke of Ebersberg’: taken from Taylor (I, 2), where the widow Richilda petitions Henry III to restore some of her husband’s lands to her nephew Welpho; just as the king is about to consent, ‘the chamber-floor suddenly fell under them, and Richilda, falling upon the edge of a bathing-vessel, was bruised to death’.

  ‘happy little body’: such a ‘happy body’ also appears in the poem ‘Sanies II’ (CP 14), in Dream (199) and in the short story ‘A Wet Night’ (MPTK 47).

  ‘genuine Uccello’: Paolo Uccello, Florentine Renaissance painter. ‘Uccello’ is Italian for ‘bird’ – hence a ‘genuine’ Uccello. The reference also adds to the wealth of bird imagery in the story. Referring to his application for a post at the National Gallery in London, Beckett told MacGreevy: ‘Apart from my conoysership that can just separate Uccello from a handsaw I could cork the post as well [as] another’ (9 October 1933; LSB I 167); this in turn is a play on Hamlet’s insistence that he knows a ‘hawk from a hand-saw’ (II, ii). Beckett also refers to Uccello in a 10 May 1934 letter to Nuala Costello, and in the short story ‘Draff’ (MPTK 182). Cf. also the common slang definition of ‘uccello’ as ‘penis’.

  ‘O.H.M.S.’: On Her/His Majesty’s Service.

  ‘grating or triangles’: forms of punishment taken from Cooper (366), as noted in DN: ‘Do they tie you to the grating (navy) or the triangles?’ (379).

  ‘unstuck’: as Belacqua had come in ‘What a Misfortune’, according to the story ‘Draff’
(184).

  ‘black velvet’: beer cocktail of stout (usually Guinness) and champagne.

  ‘The jealous swan . . . bode bringeth’: ll. 342–3 from Chaucer’s The Parlement of Foules, recorded in DN (926); the source here is Burton (III, 262).

  ‘supreme abandon’: Dream opens with a ‘supreme adieu’, taken from Mallarmé’s ‘Brise marine’ (‘l’adieu suprême’).

  ‘hold in tail male’: this means that the entailment upon the estate of Wormwood may only be inherited through the male line.

  ‘terrestrial Paradises’: cf. Dante’s Purgatorio XXVIII.

  ‘chaplains . . . natural, absolute, perpetual and antecedent’: in the chapter on ‘Impediments in Particular’ to marriage, Canon Law states that ‘Antecedent and perpetual impotence to have intercourse, whether on the part of the man or of the woman, which is either absolute or relative, of its very nature invalidates marriage’. In Lord Gall’s case, it is ‘natural’ in that the condition was not brought about by some accident or intervention; ‘absolute’ in that the impotence manifests itself with any partner; ‘antecedent’ in that the ‘condition’ was apparent before the marriage contract; ‘perpetual’ in that it is incurable. In canonical terms, impotence is ‘relative to the concept of consummation’.

  ‘a fruitful earth’: from DN: ‘Onesiphorus, a fruitful earth’ (207), based on Augustine (XIII, xxv). Cf. also Psalm 128:3: ‘Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine’.

  ‘priapean’: denoting the lascivious or the phallic, the word (often used in the form ‘priapic’) derives from the Greek god Priapus and his cult. Beckett entered the words ‘priapic scenes, priapism’ from Praz (198) into DN (317). The word also appears in the early poem ‘it is high time lover’ (CP 48).

  ‘Baron Extravas’: the name appears in DN (478), in notes taken from Garnier (428, 479, 531): ‘extra vas, ab ore, parte poste’, Latin terms meaning ‘outside the vessel’, ‘by mouth’ and ‘from behind’. The name suggests that although Extravas has had sexual intercourse with Lord Gall’s wife, he has not made her pregnant. See also letter to MacGreevy, 12 December 1932: ‘I’ve been reading a lot of German & trying to write obscene Spencerian stanzas about the Prince of Extravas but I can’t do it’.