Echo's Bones

by Samuel Beckett

  ‘Now to move the limbs of the body . . . now not’: noted in DN (143) and based on Augustine (VII, xix).

  ‘divide, multiply . . . mind by thinking’: the act of distinguishing images of the essential soul from phantasms; also taken from Augustine (VII, xvii) and noted in DN (141).

  ‘Mary nor Martha’: in the Bible, Mary and her sister, the servant Martha, are emblems of contemplative and active lives, respectively (John 11:1). Moran’s servant in Molloy is also called Martha.

  ‘bubble me’: expression taken from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (XII; VII), and entered in the ‘For Interpolation’ section of the ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook, kept toward the writing of Murphy.

  ‘In fine’: Latin ‘in the end’.

  ‘humblecumdumble’: the word, meaning ‘humble servant’, appears in Letter 10 of Swift’s Journal to Stella. Beckett used the word to sign off letters to Arland Ussher (1934) and Jocelyn Herbert (16 June 1966).

  ‘Death . . . improved’: cf. ‘Draff’, Hairy Quin ‘was greatly improved’; his ‘face improved rapidly’ (MPTK 180).

  ‘incorruptible . . . uninjurable . . . changeability is of the narrowest’: DN contains the note ‘incorruptible, uninjurable & unchangeable’ (124), from Augustine (VII, i). Beckett quotes it, unchanged, in Dream (41). The word ‘incorruptible’ appears in the essay ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (Dis 70), the poem ‘Malacoda’ and Murphy (118). The guard in ‘A Wet Night’ has an ‘incorruptible heart’ (MPTK 72). Cf. also I Corinthians 15:52: ‘and the dead shall be raised incorruptible’.

  ‘after the manner of all the earth’: quoting Genesis (19:31), where the daughters of Lot seek to lie with their father.

  ‘toe the scratch’: colloquial; to be ready and willing.

  ‘call his name Haemo’: echoes the angel Gabriel’s words when announcing to Mary that she will conceive, and will ‘call his name Jesus’ (Luke 1:28-31).

  ‘puddle of iniquity’: a note in DN (889) reads ‘more envious than the pox (porky quean) & within a puddle of iniquity’, and is taken from Burton (III, 205).

  ‘me made a father’: quoting Burton (III, 104), ‘She made me a father’, and noted in DN (862). Cf. Dream (117).

  ‘Shameful spewing’: More Burton (II, 246) from DN (821): ‘Woe be to him that makes his neighbour drunk: shameful spewing shall be upon his glory’. Cf. also Dream (123) and the poem ‘Home Olga’.

  ‘clubbed index’: Beckett has another ‘index’ in mind here, as an entry in DN (472) shows: ‘clubbed penis of the exclusive masturbator’, from Garnier (288). The subtext here is that Gall masturbates excessively and ‘exclusively’, something that in popular belief causes infertility.

  ‘vestryman’: cf. Dream (79) and the 1929 poem ‘Return to the Vestry’ (CP 245).

  ‘Moll’: common name for prostitute, and she is also syphilitic; cf. DN entry ‘syphilis; toga virilis’ (486), amended in a letter to MacGreevy of 8 October 1932 to ‘toga mollis’. Moll is also the name of Macmann’s lover in Beckett’s novel Malone Dies.

  ‘Olympian’: the word is recorded in Rachel Burrows’s notes from Beckett’s TCD lecture on Corneille. Belacqua has ‘Olympian fancies’ in ‘What a Misfortune’ (MPTK 116).

  ‘die . . . intestate’: to die without having made a valid will, so that the estate comes under the rules of inheritance. In the absence of an heir, Lord Gall’s estate would revert to Baron Extravas.

  ‘Picking at the bed-clothes’: a medical symptom indicating the approach of death.

  ‘Hungry dogs eat dirty puddings’: taken verbatim from Burton (III, 103; footnote), and entered in DN (861).

  ‘more God in an elephant than in an oyster’: based on Augustine (VII, i); in DN this reads: ‘More God in an elephant than in a sparrow (Sophistry of spatial divinity)’ (126). Lord Gall’s response can be related to another passage from the Confessions (III, 7) recorded in DN: ‘God’s being not bulk; for the infinite bulk contains parts lesser than its infinitude; so not wholly everywhere’ (87).

  ‘Oh les femmes et les framboises’: quite possibly the chanson ‘Les fraises et les framboises’, adapted by Serge Claude with music by E. Wolff.

  ‘non-spatial divinity’: from Augustine (VII, i); in DN this reads: ‘More God in an elephant than in a sparrow (Sophistry of spatial divinity)’ (126).

  ‘centre your notes like a lepidopterist’: as lepidopterists display butterflies and moths.

  ‘seamstress’: the word appears in DN (474) and is taken from Garnier’s Onanisme seul et à deux (448):

  the breastless } frixatrix (seamstress)

  sabre-flat }

  Beckett may be referring here to ‘invisible mending’, repairing cloth by taking and then reweaving individual threads of the same type from concealed parts of the garment.

  ‘Père, Fils and Saint Esprit’: French for Father, Son and the Holy Ghost.

  ‘out of Pernod’: Pernod Fils was a popular brand of absinthe before it was banned in 1915. One of its ingredients was wormwood, and when drunk excessively it caused impotence.

  ‘Fernet Branca’: a very strong liqueur, which is also drunk in Dream (37).

  ‘Ach Kinder!’: German for ‘Oh Children!’

  ‘a few oysters’: because they have aphrodisiac qualities; the phrase ‘oyster kiss’ is entered in DN (922) from Burton (III, 256), and used in Dream (17), ‘Le Concentrisme’ (Dis 39) and Murphy (71).

  ‘oysters . . . too succulent’: Cf. entry in DN, ‘succulent bivalve’ (639), possibly deriving from the ‘Circe’ chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses.

  ‘prehended the bole’: i.e. grasped or seized the trunk of the tree.

  ‘cataclasm’: a violent breakdown or disruption.

  ‘omnia vincit’: Latin for ‘conquers all’; a subversion of the Wife of Bath’s ‘amor vincit omnia’ in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, as in ‘Text 3’: ‘Niño, you need a shave, / but Vaseline omnia vincit’ (CP 38).

  ‘exanthem’: anglicised form of ‘exanthema’, a rash. Borrowed, with subsequent phrasing, from Dream (82).

  ‘tree trunk yawn’: common motif in fairy tales and children’s books.

  ‘ostrich’: cf. the ‘peacostrich’ in the poem ‘Spring Song’. The ostrich is a version of Geryon, the griffin that carries Dante and Virgil in Purgatory.

  ‘Strauss . . . simply waltzes’: Beckett is punning on the German word for ostrich, ‘Strauss’, and the composers of waltzes, Johann Strauss the Elder and Johann Strauss the Younger.

  ‘care to pry into mysteries . . . great enterprise’: because Belacqua had just stated ‘I never care to look into motive’. The groundsman in ‘Draff’ also ‘lost interest in all the shabby mysteries’ (MPTK 174).

  ‘she DOES’: responding to the implied question (asked also in Dream, 223), ‘Does she do it?’; in the typescript, Beckett originally wrote ‘does she –’ before replacing it with ‘would she –’.

  ‘mollified’: an entry in DN (449) reads: ‘molles (effeminate) St. Paul’; this is taken from the New Testament in Latin, I Corinthians 6:9, and also appears in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (II, 146). This note thus links ‘Moll’ with ‘Gall’ through St Paul’s baldness. Lousse tries to ‘mollify Molloy’ in Molloy (42).

  ‘galling’: is to Gall what ‘mollified’ is to ‘Moll’.

  ‘Diana’s well’: taken from Burton (III, 285–6): ‘Diana’s well, in which maids did swim, whores were drowned’ (DN 962). As Lady Gall has contracted syphilis from Baron Extravas, the answer does not surprise. Also used in Dream (34).

  ‘to go in unto’: biblical formulation; given Belacqua’s surname, Beckett may specifically be thinking of the story in Genesis 38:2–4: ‘And Judah saw there a daughter of a certain Canaanite, whose name was Shuah, and he took her, and went in unto her. And she conceived, and bare a son; and he called his name Er. And she conceived again, and bare a son; and she called his name Onan’. Cf. also Genesis 16:2, as it relates to infertility. ‘And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the Lord hath restrained me from bearing: I pray th
ee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her’.

  ‘puella’: Burton (III, 238) furnished Beckett with the following note in DN (913): ‘a lascivious & petulant virgin puella’. Winnie in the story ‘Fingal’ is a ‘quiet puella’ (MPTK 26).

  ‘clitoridian’: the word is noted in DN (456) – ‘clitoridian (exuberance)’ and derives from Garnier’s Onanisme seul et à deux (78–9); cf. ‘clitoridian puella’ in Dream (111), a letter to A. J. Leventhal (26 July 1934) and a letter to Thomas MacGreevy (8 September 1935), in which he describes Nuala Costello as ‘unclitoridian’ (LSB I 274).

  ‘cacoethes’: uncontrollable urge or ‘itch’; most famously used in Juvenal’s seventh satire as the itch to write, as noted in DN (1018): ‘cacoethes (scribendi, loquendi)’. The ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook gives ‘tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes’ (84r). Used in Dream (133) with regard to Joyce. The word ‘kakoethes’ appears in the deleted opening of the poem ‘Serena I’ (CP 284).

  ‘wild civility’: Robert Herrick praises a ‘wild civility’ in his poem ‘Delight in Disorder’.

  ‘ripping . . . topping’: archaic public-school slang for ‘splendid’ or ‘excellent’; both words carry sexual double entendres.

  ‘lapped’: at the beginning of the story, Belacqua’s eyeballs are ‘lapped in gloom’.

  ‘Lethe’: in Greek mythology a river in Hades, the waters of which induce forgetfulness.

  ‘uterotaph’: a version of one of Beckett’s favourite words, ‘womb-tomb’, combining here the Latin and the Greek roots respectively.

  ‘essentially a girl’: which leaves Lord Gall without an heir.

  ‘So it goes in the world’: these are the words that conclude the story ‘Draff’, and thus MPTK as it was published. The phrase is taken from the Brothers Grimm story ‘How the Cat and the Mouse Set Up House’; Beckett quoted the German original in a letter to George Reavey (26 May 1938) and in the letter dated 20 August 1970 in which he told Kay Boyle that he had ‘capitulated’ to requests to have MPTK reprinted. Beckett’s shorthand for a weary acceptance of the ways of the world, it is also found in letters to Pamela Mitchell (7? January 1955) and Barbara Bray (23 August 1967 and 27 May 1977).

  ‘see above, page 7, paragraph 2’: that is, back on the fence, after his adventure with Zaborovna.

  ‘total extinction’: in a letter to MacGreevy (4 August 1937), Beckett stated that Samuel Johnson had been in ‘horror at ultimate annihilation, to which he declared in the fear of his death that he would prefer an eternity of torment’ (LSB I 529).

  ‘R.I.P.’: ‘Requiescat in Pace’; before inserting this ‘rest in peace’, Beckett on the typescript had originally written ‘inscription, which had no literary value’. In ‘Draff’, Hairy Quin tells the Smeraldina that Belacqua had once told him an inscription ‘he would have endorsed, but I can’t recall it’ (MPTK 190). Beckett’s interest in headstone inscription is epitomised by the narrator in ‘First Love’, whose epitaph ‘meets with my approval’ more than any of his ‘other writings’: ‘Hereunder lies the above who up below / So hourly died that he lived on till now’ (26).

  ‘sea’: the fact that the graveyard is by the sea brings to mind Paul Valéry’s poem ‘The Graveyard by the Sea’, as well as Greystones cemetery, where Beckett’s father is buried.

  ‘Attic’: pertaining to Attica or its capital Athens, with connotations of classicism and elegance.

  ‘classico-romantic’: this whole passage is a pastiche of Romantic and Homeric material, and was transferred to the end of the story ‘Draff’ after ‘Echo’s Bones’ had been rejected by Chatto & Windus. The antithetical play between ‘romantic’ and ‘classical’ is taken, nearly verbatim, from the opening paragraphs of Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony.

  ‘words of the rose to the rose: “No gardener has died, within rosaceous memory.”’: The source is given in DN (581): ‘R. de d’A. Ephemeral sophism. Fontanelles [sic] rose that said no gardener had died within the memory of roses . . .’ From Bernard de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), but taken by Beckett from Diderot, Le Rêve de d’Alembert (1769). Cf. also Dream (175) and ‘Draff’ (191), where the ‘rose’ is the nozzle of the gardener’s hose. Beckett cited the line in a letter to Avigdor Arikha dated 14 January 1977, adding that the ‘conceit’ is in Fontenelle.

  ‘a little song’: adapting Léo Daniderff’s comical song Je cherche après Titine (1917), later made more famous when Chaplin sang a garbled version of it in Modern Times (1936). Beckett replaces ‘I’m looking for you, Titine’ with ‘I love you’: ‘I love you, Titine / I must love you forever / Because you are the raisin / In the cake of my life’. The groundsman (Doyle) sings a little song at the end of ‘Draff’ (MPTK 191).

  ‘submarine of souls’: echoing Charon’s ferry carrying souls across the river Styx and into Hades in Greek mythology. Cf. also Belacqua’s funeral in ‘Draff’, ‘All aboard. All souls at half-mast. Aye-aye’ (MPTK 185), and the poem ‘Malacoda’: ‘All aboard all souls / half-mast aye aye’ (CP 21).

  ‘Alba’: Belacqua is not the only familiar character in this post-mortem world; Alba Perdue, based on Beckett’s love interest Ethna MacCarthy, is one of the main female characters in Dream and MPTK. In ‘Draff’, we are told that the Alba died ‘in the natural course of being seen home’ (MPTK 175).

  ‘flamingo’: in the poem ‘Sanies I’, the ‘old black and flamingo’ relates to Ethna MacCarthy’s attire.

  ‘One hundred and fiftythree iridiscent fish’: the reference is clarified in DN: ‘153 fish taken in the Sea of Galilee = (12 Apostles)2 & (Trinity)2’ (703), which Beckett took from Dean Inge’s chapter on ‘Nature Mysticism and Symbolism’ in Christian Mysticism: ‘Yet surely there is a vast difference between seeing in the “glorious sky embracing all” a type of “our Maker’s love”, and analysing the 153 fish caught in the Sea of Galilee into the square of the 12 Apostles & the square of the 3 Persons of the Trinity’ (272).

  ‘gaff’: barbed spear used for fishing.

  ‘closed his eyes . . . vision’: in the 1930s Beckett equated writing, and the writing of poetry in particular, with sight and vision; often this is linked, as here, to Rimbaud’s visionary poems, and to ‘The Drunken Boat’ in particular, which Beckett translated in May 1932. In a letter to MacGreevy written on 18 October 1932, Beckett stated that the kind of poetry he wished to write would possess something he found ‘sometimes in Rimbaud’: the ‘integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind’ (LSB I 135). Beckett is here also referring to what he called Rimbaud’s ‘eye-suicide – pour des visions [for visions]’ (letter to MacGreevy, 11 March 1931; LSB I 73), relating to the child in the poem ‘Les Poètes de sept ans’ who rubs his eyes in order to produce distorted visions.

  ‘No, nor anyone else either’: echoing Hamlet’s ‘Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither’ (II, ii); adapted by Joyce in the Scylla and Charybdis episode in Ulysses.

  ‘Draff’: the title of the last story of MPTK as eventually published; it was also to be the overall title of the collection until Chatto’s editor Charles Prentice asked Beckett for a ‘livelier title’ (25 September 1933). The word ‘draff’ is taken from Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ (III, xv): ‘I saw them delight in swine’s draff’ (DN 590). Another possible source is the Prologue to Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, which also furnished Beckett with the title of Dream: ‘what eyleth thee to wryte / The draf of stories, and forgo the corn?’ Finally, the word also means ‘the lees left after brewing’.

  ‘Doyle’: the unnamed groundsman in the story ‘Draff’, left to finish Belacqua’s burial.

  ‘zoster’: a belt or girdle. Cf. the ‘Blaupunkt zoster’ in Dream (67).

  ‘tumtum’: tummy, i.e. stomach.

  ‘Stultum Propter Christum’: ‘A Fool on Account of Christ’, deriving from Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ (I, xvii) and noted, with translation (‘A fool for Xist’), in DN (573). Cf. I Corinthia
ns 4:10: ‘We are fools for Christ’s sake’.

  ‘ikey’: slang term for a Jew, especially a Jewish moneylender or receiver; but also ‘crafty’, ‘artful’; applied to the pyrotechnist in Dream (86).

  ‘doesn’t know Bel’: Smeraldina’s pet-name for Belacqua in Dream; Doyle understandably does not know Belacqua, who was already dead in ‘Draff’. Cf. Hamlet, in conversation with Horatio in the graveyard, stating of (the dead) Yorick: ‘I knew him’ (V, i).

  ‘hallowed mould’: in Milton, Paradise Lost (V, l. 321), Adam is ‘Earth’s hallowed mould’.

  ‘like the pile-driver in the story’: probably a reference to the Brothers Grimm story ‘Strong Hans’.

  ‘headstone’: at the end of ‘Draff’, reference is made to ‘the company of headstones sighing and gleaming like bones’ (MPTK 190). Beckett describes his father’s headstone in a letter to MacGreevy, 27 July 1933.

  ‘machine-moujik’: a moujik is a Russian peasant or serf, here potentially undertaking factory work.

  ‘Fool’: unto Christ, as Doyle’s tattoo indicates.

  ‘I am the body’: as in the Eucharist, setting up the parallel between Belacqua and Christ in this scene.

  ‘natural body . . . spiritual body’: the distinction as made by Paul in the Bible: ‘It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body’ (I Corinthians 15:44). Beckett cites this passage, and the preceding four verses, in a letter to Georges Duthuit of February 1950: ‘De ce salaud de Paul j’ai dû te citer un fragment du passage suivant’ (LSB II 180).

  ‘went away and came back’: the first of many times Doyle goes away to relieve himself.

  ‘Reach hither’: echoing Christ’s words to the doubter Thomas: ‘Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing’ (John 20:27).

  ‘a little cavity’: in a letter to MacGreevy of 18 October 1932, Beckett states that of his poems he prefers those which are not ‘construits’ and are ‘written above an abscess and not out of a cavity’ (LSB I 134).