Echo's Bones

by Samuel Beckett

  ‘protector . . . reversioner’: Baron Extravas will inherit the Wormwood estate should Lord Gall fail to produce an heir; the estate in that case would be in ‘entail’. Lord Gall’s dilemma is used, in very similar terms, in Murphy (61 and 62).

  ‘fiend in human guise’: a ‘fiend in human form’ appears in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (ch. 1).

  ‘spirochaeta pallida’: syphilis.

  ‘mourning envelope’: envelope with black borders, used during a period of mourning.

  ‘ashes and dusted a liberal sprinkling of these over his skull’: Lord Gall’s version of the practice, conducted on Ash Wednesday, of placing ashes (usually from palm crosses burnt on the previous year’s Palm Sunday) on the foreheads of the faithful as a sign of repentance. See for example I Maccabees 3:47: ‘That day they fasted and wore sackcloth; they sprinkled ashes on their heads and tore their clothes’.

  ‘maffick’: to rejoice wildly; the term derives from the relief of the British garrison besieged in Mafeking during the Boer War in May 1900 (OED); here rather oddly used in conjunction with ‘grief’.

  ‘Disentail’: to break or cut off the entail of the estate whereby its succession is determined.

  ‘double-fisted attack on his breasts’: cf. entry from Ovid, Metamorphoses (III, l. 481) in DN (1116): ‘nudaque marmoreis percussit pectora palmis’ (‘He beat his bare bosoms with marble palms)’. Cf. also Dream 227 and ‘A Wet Night’ (MPTK 73).

  ‘peppered’: infected with venereal disease.

  ‘blobbers’: thick or protruding lips; Sucky Moll in Malone Dies has a ‘blobber-lip’, concealing her syphilitic ‘solitary fang’.

  ‘sine qua non’: Latin for ‘without which not’; refers to an essential condition, element or consequence.

  ‘considering cap’: Ignatius Gallaher uses such a cap in Joyce’s story ‘A Little Cloud’ (in Dubliners), ‘when he was in a tight corner’; Belacqua also wears one in Dream (63).

  ‘Lord Doyle’: presumably Beckett’s error, anticipating the introduction of the character Doyle in the third part of the story. However, names are interchangeable in this text – see for example the very next line.

  ‘Baron Abore . . . Partepost’: Latin for ‘by mouth’ and ‘from behind’, the two terms deriving from the entry in DN, ‘extra vas, ab ore, parte poste’ (478), taken from Garnier (428, 479, 531). All of these terms denote sexual activities that do not lead to conception; the following passage contains several references to homosexuality.

  ‘I have it’: words also uttered by Celia in Murphy, having picked up Murphy’s horoscope. Murphy however, with the response ‘Don’t I know’, thinks she is referring to the pox.

  ‘Hair!’: a poor joke, as Lord Gall has neither ‘hair’ nor an ‘heir’.

  ‘chaps’: jaws or cheeks.

  ‘impubescence’: that is to say, prepubescence; absence of hair is throughout the story linked with infertility.

  ‘perish the day!’: cf. Job: ‘Let the day perish wherein I was born’ (3:3).

  ‘bald as a coot’: proverbial, and cf. Burton (III, iii) – coots are water birds whose heads appear to be bald.

  ‘It is time I was getting on’: taken from Dream (195).

  ‘Frascatorian’: Beckett is thinking of Girolamo Fracastoro (1478–1553), Italian physician and poet famous for his Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (Syphilis or The French Disease). Cf. also letter to MacGreevy (6 February 1936): ‘Translate Fracastoro’s Sifilide e poi mori’ (LSB I 314), a reference to the famous line ‘vedi Napoli e poi muori’ (see Naples and die).

  ‘eversore’: Beckett noted ‘Carthaginian Eversores’ in DN (86). He took the word from Augustine’s Confessions, where ‘eversores’ refers to the ‘overturners’ who aimed to overthrow Carthage; Baron Extravas similarly aims to ‘ruin’ Lord Gall.

  ‘squared up . . . gamecock’: boxing imagery.

  ‘dauntless’: an entry in DN, taken from Lockhart’s The History of Napoleon Bonaparte (552), reads: ‘Did he humbug you Hinton, dauntless boatswain’ (66). Elsewhere in Beckett’s early work, the word is linked with Dean Inge’s description ‘St Teresa: undaunted daughter of desires’ (DN 695); in Dream, the Alba is the ‘dauntless daughter of desires’ (222), also in ‘A Wet Night’ (MPTK 68), and the poem ‘Sanies I’ refers to the ‘dauntless nautch-girl on the face of the waters’.

  ‘aspermatic’: lacking, or unable to ejaculate, semen; the words ‘dry priapism, aspermatisme’ are found in DN (470), taken from Garnier (280). Cf. also Beckett’s reference to ‘months of aspermatic nights & days’ in a letter to MacGreevy (12 September 1931; LSB I 87). In his ‘German Diaries’, Beckett noted the fact that during a lecture on Proust, Professor Brulez cited Huxley’s ‘intellectual masturbation’ (Eyeless in Gaza), and responded in his diary: ‘Better at least than mental aspermatism’ (19 November 1936).

  ‘my position’: Belacqua’s foetal position in Dante’s Divine Comedy and in Beckett’s Dream (227).

  ‘Stand up . . . little soldier’: another poor joke, as Lord Gall’s little soldier does not, metaphorically speaking, stand up. Already in ‘Yellow’, Belacqua ‘must efface himself altogether and do the little soldier’ (MPTK 163).

  ‘zebra . . . act on the brainwave’: taken from Renard’s Journal (27 January 1905) as noted in DN: ‘rapid as a zebra’s thought’ (239); thus Lord Gall is thinking ‘rapidly’. Also used in Dream (184) and Murphy (27).

  ‘Wine is a mocker’: citing Proverbs 20:1: ‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise’.

  ‘tilly dawson’: a night-cap.

  ‘barmaid . . . bit her’: the joke reappears in Murphy (‘Why did the barmaid champagne? . . . Because the stout porter bitter’, 85) and subsequently in Watt (with the whiskey ‘Power’).

  ‘facile, sweet and plain’: citing Taylor (III, 2), with the preceding words being ‘The work of our soul is cut short’, but with a nod toward Dante’s ‘dolce stil novo’ (sweet new style), used in ‘Ding Dong’ (41) and the poem ‘Home Olga’ (‘sweet noo style’).

  ‘distinct . . . extinct’: the issue of the discussion may be ‘distinct’, but the issue in terms of an ‘heir’ is extinct.

  ‘borne up on the way down’: referring to Luke 4:9-14, as Satan suggests that Jesus cast himself from the Temple trusting that he will be ‘borne up’ by angels.

  ‘yoke . . . lightly’: citing Matthew 11:30: ‘my yoke is easy, and my burden is light’.

  ‘wring your withers’: stir the emotions or sensibilities; cf. Hamlet: ‘let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung’ (III, ii). Cf. also ‘A Wet Night’ (MPTK 51).

  ‘husbandlike’: Lord Gall may be capable of husbandry, but not of acting like a husband.

  ‘keep up your pecker’: colloquial, in terms of remaining cheerful or steadfast, but with a sexual pun.

  ‘Emptybreeks’: as Liam O’Flaherty states in The Black Soul (1928), ‘the deadliest insult’, since being ‘childless was to be impotent’.

  ‘afternoon had . . . worn away’: as in Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (ch. 26).

  ‘quinquina’: French name for a South American aperitif introduced to Europe by Spanish missionaries in the seventeenth century. Also anticipating the appearance of Capper ‘Hairy’ Quin.

  ‘anxious to be gone’: in Krapp’s Last Tape, Krapp is ‘burning to be gone’ (10).

  ‘quomodo’: the manner, or means by which to get going.

  ‘Moby Dick of a miracle’: in DN, Beckett noted the expression ‘Whale of a miracle’ (209), taken from Augustine (XIII, xxvii) and used in Dream (181). Here the quote is coupled with Melville’s novel, which Beckett had read since writing Dream (letter to MacGreevy, 4 August 1932).

  ‘forrader’: colloquial or dialect form of ‘forwarder’, of being further forward.

  ‘Don’t rip up old stories’: don’t repeat yourself; as an entry in the ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook indicates, Beckett took this from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (IX, vi). Cf. also Murphy (11).


  ‘image . . . shadow’: the correlation is set up in the myth of the cave in Plato’s The Republic.

  ‘precluded from looking into my eyes’: Belacqua’s narcissistic habits are denied.

  ‘Shuah’: Beckett took Belacqua’s surname from Garnier (16), as an entry in DN reveals: ‘Er, Onan and Shelah, sons of Judah & Shuah’ (425); as Genesis 46:12 states, Shuah is the mother of Onan.

  ‘bottle and a mirror’: Burton – ‘spending her time between a comb & a glass’ (quoted DN 858). Cf. also Dream (50).

  ‘old itch’: DN (443) contains an entry – ‘prurience, prurigo, prurit’ – from Garnier (24, 35, 131), all referring to ‘itching’; cf. Dream (19, 56, 108, 181), the ‘rationalist prurit’ in Murphy (115) and Mr Nackybal’s ‘diffuse ano-scrotal prurit’ in Watt. Complaining about requests by publishers to cut passages from Murphy, he told MacGreevy that his next work would fit on sheets of toilet paper, and ‘also in Braille for anal pruritics’ (LSB I 383).

  ‘mirror . . . wipe my face off it’: from Renard’s Journal (18 February 1892); marked in Beckett’s personal copy and noted in DN (218): ‘Quand il se regardait dans une glace, il était toujours tenté de l’essuyer’ (‘when he saw himself in the looking-glass, he always tried to wipe it’). Also used in Dream (22, 47, 128). Like Narcissus, Belacqua consistently sees his own image in a mirror.

  ‘continent . . . sustenant’: drawing on DN: ‘The 2 virtues: to contain (oneself from so-called goods of this world); to sustain (the evils of the world)’ (183), summarising a passage in Augustine (X). Cf. also Dream (46, 73).

  ‘titter affliction out of existence’: a version of the risus purus, the laugh of laughs about unhappiness in Watt (39), and cf. ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness’ in Endgame (26).

  ‘Christian . . . bleeding science’: Belacqua’s assumption of Augustinian ideas is rapidly dismissed by Lord Gall. Members of the Christian Science Church, founded in the late nineteenth century, rely on prayer to God for healing rather than medicines or surgery; as such they normally refuse blood transfusions.

  ‘steps . . . drew them up’: Beckett is here referring to the well-known image of the ladder of knowledge, first used by the Ancient Greek sceptic Sextus Empiricus in Against the Logicians; Beckett rediscovered the idea in his reading of Fritz Mauthner and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who use it to discuss what language cannot convey.

  ‘Magna Graecia’: ‘Great Greece’ of antiquity, and by extension ancient philosophy; a hand-drawn map of ‘Magna Graecia’ can be found at the beginning of Beckett’s ‘Philosophy’ Notebook’ (TCD MS10967).

  ‘apex of neutrality’: possibly inspired by W. R. Inge’s Christian Mysticism (7), as an entry in DN suggests: ‘apex of the mind’ (676), St Bonaventura’s apex mentis.

  ‘Socrates . . . white-headed’: cf. DN, ‘Socrates was as cold as January’ (968), taken from Burton (III, 301) but replacing Sophocles with Socrates (as in Dream 61). Cf. also Lennox Robinson’s popular Irish comedy The Whiteheaded Boy (1916).

  ‘delicious irony . . . turned up the tail of his abolla’: the abolla was a garment in ancient Roman times worn by peasants, soldiers, and by philosophers ‘as an affectation’ (OED). The reference here is to Socrates, on trial for his life, lifting the tail of his abolla in order to observe the call of nature (and thus exposing his buttocks). Hence the ‘delicious irony’. The line is reproduced in Murphy (120).

  ‘walls, happily padded’: as are the cells in the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat in Murphy (101, 109).

  ‘aerie’: the nest of a bird of prey, or more generally the nest of any large bird, esp. one that nests high on cliffs or tall trees. Murphy’s garret is described as an ‘aery’ (99).

  ‘aerie . . . children’: the proximity of these two words may suggest that Beckett was thinking of the ‘aery of children’ in Hamlet (II, ii).

  ‘Bide a wee’: the affected tone of the previous exchange slips into dialect, as Lord Gall uses a Scottish accent (Belacqua retaliates with Middle English).

  ‘I mot gon hoom . . . the sonne draweth weste’: Chaucer, Legend of Good Women (l. 153, B text in Skeat’s edition). Beckett had copied it, together with the beginning of the subsequent line ‘To Paradys . . .’, in DN (1176); the reference to ‘Paradys’ is tellingly omitted: Lord Gall’s view of Wormwood as a ‘terrestrial Paradise’ is not shared by Belacqua. This anticipates the coming of dawn later in the story, before which the ‘ghost’ Belacqua must be gone, as must Hamlet.

  ‘green as Circe’s honey’: the line ‘Green honey of Circe’ is in DN (710), and derives from Homer, Odyssey (X, 166). This is Beckett’s version of ‘miel vert’, as he read the book in Bérard’s French translation (cf. letter to MacGreevy, September 1931). Cf. also Dream 155.

  ‘asphodel’: most likely with the symbolism it carries in Odyssey (XI, 539): a flower made immortal by poets, and said to cover the Elysian fields, according to Greek myth and religion.

  ‘An ego jam sedeo?’: ‘am I now sat?’; the line is said to be Seneca’s regarding the rich fool who was lifted from his baths onto a soft couch, but Beckett presumably took it from Taylor (I, iii).

  ‘Latin flogged into us at school’: when asked about the origin of his Latin proficiency, Johnson answered ‘My master whipt me very well’ (Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson; noted by Seán Lawlor).

  ‘woolpack’: popular name for ‘fleecy’ cumulus clouds (OED).

  ‘Archipelagoes . . . glades’: echoing ll. 83–4 of Rimbaud’s poem ‘Le Bateau ivre’, which Beckett translated (‘Drunken Boat’) in early 1932: ‘I saw archipelagoes of stars and islands launched me / Aloft on the deep delirium of their skies’ (CP 66).

  ‘pollards’: trees that have their upper trunks and branches cut back to give them uniform shape; ‘bald-headed’ (obsolete).

  ‘Cut out the style’: referring to Belacqua’s imitation of Rimbaud’s style (in particular the use of plurals).

  ‘young person, paddling in the moat’: cf. last line of Rimbaud ‘Les poètes de sept ans’.

  ‘a sweet column of quiet’: from Burton (III, 249), referring to a ‘good wife’, as indicated by the note in DN: ‘a column of quiet (a good wife)’ (916). Cf. Dream 23.

  ‘partner of my porridge days’: entered in DN (542) and deriving from Giles’s The Civilisation of China (192), in which it refers to Sung Hung’s loyalty to his wife with whom he has endured poverty. Cf. Dream (183).

  ‘vieux jeu’: literally ‘old game’, meaning old-fashioned.

  ‘champaign land’: from Alphonse de Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques, and used variously by Beckett in Dream (9 and 43), ‘Fingal’ and ‘Walking Out’ (MPTK 24 and 103), the poem ‘Enueg I’ (CP 6), and Mercier and Camier (77).

  ‘diadems’: crowns, adornments.

  ‘crocodile’: colloquial term for children walking two and two in a long row. This is the second appearance of a parade of characters new and old.

  ‘Festooned’: presumably Smeraldina is pregnant with Hairy Quin’s babies, as it was Hairy who proposed to replace Belacqua in her affections in ‘Draff’. There is a ‘festoon of words’ in Dream (226) and in ‘A Wet Night’ (MPTK 72).

  ‘cynic in a spasm’: an entry in DN reads ‘cynic spasm [?]’ (477), and is taken from Garnier (409ff); according to Garnier, these are convulsions produced by masturbating with objects.

  ‘Nazi with his head in a clamp’: Beckett is remembering his visit to the torture chamber in the castle at Nuremberg in April 1931, and assimilating this to the fact that the city was an early stronghold of the Nazi party, from September 1933 onwards.

  ‘monster shaped like mankind exactly’: a parody of the act of the Christian God or Prometheus forming mankind in their image, with a nod toward Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Goethe’s poem ‘Prometheus’.

  ‘Dáib and Seanacán’: Gaelicised versions of David and Jonathan (Book of Samuel). Their names appear in a list of classical models of male friendship in Burton (III, 28); Beckett entered some of these into DN (813):
‘Damon & Pythias’, ‘Pylades & Orestes’ (used in ‘Ding-Dong’; MPTK 37), ‘Nisus & Euryalus’ and ‘Theseus & Pirithous’. David and Jonathan are very close friends, as indicated by the reference to the ‘four legs in three tights and half a codpiece’, and the fact that they are ‘related’ when they are next mentioned.

  ‘passed by and passed away’: copied from Augustine (XI, vi) as noted in DN: ‘The non-eternal voice / For that voice passed by & passed away, began & ended; the syllables sounded & passed away, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so forth in order, until the last after the rest, & silence after the last’ (189).

  ‘pram I found most moving’: cf. the scene in Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, in which a pram slowly rolls (moves) down the Odessa steps. Beckett would write a letter to Eisenstein in 1936 asking whether he could join his film institute in Moscow.

  ‘utile dulci’: from Horace, Ars Poetica (l. 343); quoted by Burton on the frontispiece of The Anatomy of Melancholy: ‘Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci, lectorem delectando pariterque monendo’ (‘He that joins instruction with delight, profit with pleasure, carries all the votes’).

  ‘cutwater’: placed at the head of a ship, the cutwater divides the water before it reaches the bow; associated with the Frica’s breasts in Dream (215), and the corresponding passage in ‘A Wet Night’ (MPTK 61).

  ‘Night fell like a lid’: as it does toward the end of the first act in Waiting for Godot – ‘In a moment it is night’ (43).

  ‘the fare’: in Dream (211) the burden of paying the Jesuit’s tram fare falls to the Polar Bear.

  ‘conductor’: the conductor in Dream (158) is both slow and Irish.

  ‘the bone is still there’: an allusion to the title of the story, ‘Echo’s Bones’.

  ‘Only time (if and when he eats it)’: from the Latin ‘tempus edax’, the idea of time as ‘devourer of all things’ found for example in Ovid, Metamorphoses (XV, l. 234). The Latin tag appears in ‘Walking Out’ (MPTK 113).