Dream of Fair to Middling Women

by Samuel Beckett

  Thus Dream provides us with some precious, almost archaeological, insights into the developing aesthetics of a remarkable mind, demonstrating the path that the later works were to follow. For example, we see the artist in turmoil with himself and with art:

  The mind suddenly entombed, then active in an anger and a rhapsody of energy, in scurrying and plunging towards exitus, such is the ultimate mode and factor of the creative integrity, its proton, incommunicable; but there, insistent, invisible rat, fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art surface.

  As Samuel Beckett struggles with the essence of the artistic experience, solutions become apparent:

  … we do declare and maintain stiffly (at least for the purposes of this paragraph) that the object that becomes invisible before your eyes is, so to speak, the brightest and best.

  The future form of writing, if not yet apparent in the exuberance of Dream, may be seen, nonetheless, clearly taking shape:

  I was speaking of something of which you have and can have no knowledge, the incoherent continuum as expressed by, say, Rimbaud and Beethoven. Their names occur to me. The terms of whose statements serve merely to delimit the reality of insane areas of silence.

  Indeed, the expression of his unique vision was only to be fully realised later, when he returned spiritually to the “chest” to find once again the way forward:

  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.

  Dream should not, however, be considered only with a backward glance from the vantage point Samuel Beckett's completed œuvre provides us with today. Whatever its progeny may have been in the author's later writings, it stands on its own, imposing itself on us with its exuberant wealth, a full-blown “rhapsody of energy”, indeed, as Be-lacqua says. Harvey, most appropriately, alludes to the “verbal exuberance”, the “undisciplined fantasy” and the “intellectual virtuosity” to be found in Dream. The young Beckett delights in words, he is exhilarated by the use of several languages, inebriated by the sheer joy of inventing new words and coining new phrases which abound “scurrying and plunging towards exitus “. Much of the very lively wealth of Dream lies in that turmoil of language, in that inventiveness which is far from being merely clever intellectual gymnastics, but much more essentially the expression and deep imprint of Samuel Beckett's vital sense of humour. Dream is a book of humour—of “laffing and laffing”—which, like so much of his later work, already belies the serious misconception that his work is only of the dark and gloomy side.

  A few words need here be said about the editing of Dream. The first is to express the debt I owe my co-editor, Edith Fournier, a life-long friend of Samuel Beckett who has translated some of his works from English to French. Without her help I would have been unable to complete the task of editing which became a much more complex assignment than I had originally envisaged. Precisely on account of the verbal exuberance and inventiveness of Dream, we had not only to be obsessional in proofreading—not as straightforward a task as might usually be the case—but, more importantly, we had to discuss nuances that might have been typographical errors made by Samuel Beckett or intentional word-playing and word-coining, precious “margaritas”, not to be lost in the proceedings. In Dream, Samuel Beckett crossed the barriers of language from English—and English as used by the Irish—to French, from German to Italian and Spanish, and he resorted quite often to Latin. He also experimented with words and deliberately flaunted grammatical convention at times outrageously so that in truth there were occasions when only he could have said what was intended. In such instances we had to rely as much on our knowledge and understanding of Samuel Beckett, the man, as of his writing. If we have failed him, the responsibility is ours.

  We were faced with a decision to delete short pieces of text only twice, when of two almost identical passages, one was obviously the weaker preliminary draft of a later improved version. This replication served no purpose and Samuel Beckett, we believe, would have done as we did had he been reading the proofs. First, the passage on pp. 68-70 (“Ne suis-je point pale?” down to “helmet of salvation”) was retained in preference to a shortened, but essentially similar passage which had followed the paragraph ending with: “… she was the living spit of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede” on p. 15. Secondly, the Dartmouth manuscript contains two versions of the novel's ending, the final part of the subsequent version being hand-written by Samuel Beckett. We have chosen the latter, which does not differ in meaning but is so much better in expression than the earlier version.

  We have also been careful not to distort through correction Samuel Beckett's idiosyncrasies of punctuation and spacing. In his typescript, he emphasised intervals of time, interludes, and changes of mood by varying the conventional line-spacing and indents. The subtlety of this contrivance might easily be overlooked but we believe it important that it be retained, unusual though it may seem at times. Dream, after all, is an unusual book.

  In the same way we have been faithful to his use of italics, none where none intended. Wisely, because of the profusion of various languages, Samuel Beckett desisted from applying to foreign words the usual italics which he reserved solely for the purpose of emphasis.

  The manuscript we relied upon was the original one in Dartmouth College, which had been typed and corrected by Samuel Beckett, though the Reading copy, which was not transcribed by him and differs from the Dartmouth original in minor respects, was also consulted.

  Whatever the scholastic merits or demerits of Dream are judged to be, in introducing the book sixty years after it was written, we do so knowing that it will bring considerable wealth to many, perhaps especially to youth, for the book has not aged and it is a book of humour and sensitivity, of hope and music, much music. Dream can be read at two levels at least. Continuing the musical analogy, the reader can simply hum the tune and the air is a catching one, or he can, if he has the mind to do it, study the music and fail not to be enthralled. It is also a book of colour, pervaded by Samuel Beckett's technique of invoking colour to heighten mood with a unique chromatic intensity.

  A special word of thanks to Jérôme Lindon who made this undertaking possible, to Paul Bennett who patiently withstood our numerous typesetting changes, to the Board of Black Cat Press, most especially Ted and Ursula O'Brien, and Tona, each of whom understood the importance of Dream. I am also indebted to Kevin and Kate Cahill, Caroline Murphy and Edward Beckett, John Calder, the Dartmouth College Library, New Hampshire and the Beckett Archive, Reading University. In their different ways all participated in bringing this prodigal novel to awakefulness.

  Eoin O'Brien,

  Seapoint,

  June 1992

  DREAM OF FAIR

  to middling

  WOMEN

  A thousand sythes have I herd men telle, That ther is joye in heven, and peyne in helle; But—

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  ONE

  Behold Belacqua an overfed child pedalling, faster and faster, his mouth ajar and his nostrils dilated, down a frieze of hawthorn after Findlater's van, faster and faster till he cruise alongside of the hoss, the black fat wet rump of the hoss. Whip him up, vanman, flickem, flapem, collop-wallop fat Sambo. Stiffly, like a perturbation of feathers, the tail arches for a gush of mard. Ah…!

  And what is more he is to be surprised some years later climbing the trees in the country and in the town sliding down the rope in the gymnasium.

  TWO

  Belacqua sat on the stanchion at the end of the Carlyle Pier in the mizzle in love from the girdle up with a slob of a girl called Smeraldina-Rima whom he had encountered one evening when as luck would have it he happened to be tired and her face more beautiful than stupid. His fatigue on that fatal occasion making him attentive to her face onl
y, and that part of her shining as far as he could make out with an unearthly radiance, he had so far forgotten himself as to cast all over and moor in the calm curds of her bosom which he had rashly deduced from her features that left nothing but death to be desired as one that in default of Abraham's would do very nicely to be going on with in this frail world that is all temptation and knighthood. Then ere he could see through his feeling for her she mentioned that she cared for nothing in heaven above or the earth beneath or the waters under the earth so much as the music of Bach and that she was taking herself off almost at once and for good and all to Vienna to study the pianoforte. The result of this was that the curds put forth suckers of sargasso, and enmeshed him.

  So now he sagged on the stanchion in the grateful mizzle after the supreme adieu, his hands in a jelly in his lap, his head drooped over his hands, pumping up the little blirt. He sat working himself up to the little gush of tears that would exonerate him. When he felt them coming he switched off his mind and let them settle. First the cautious gyring of her in his mind till it thudded and spun with the thought of her, then not a second too soon the violent voiding and blanking of his mind so that the gush was quelled, it was balked and driven back for a da capo. He found that the best way to turn over the piston in the first instance was to think of the béret that she had snatched off to wave when the ship began to draw clear. The sun had bleached it from green to a very poignant reseda and it had always, from the very first moment he clapped eyes on it, affected him as being a most shabby, hopeless and moving article. It might have been a tuft of grass growing the way she ripped it off her little head and began to wave it with an idiotic clockwork movement of her arm, up and down, not to flutter it like a handkerchief, but grasping it in the middle to raise it and lower it with a stiff arm as though she were doing an exercise with a dumb-bell. The least reference of his thought now to these valedictory jerks, the monstrous grief in the hand clutching the livid béret like a pestle and pounding up and down, so that every stroke of the stiff arm seemed to bray his heart and propel her out of his sight, was enough to churn his mind into the requisite strom of misery. He found this out after a few false starts. So, having fixed the technique, he sat on working himself up to the little teary ejaculation, choking it back in the very act of emission, waiting with his mind blank for it to subside, and then when everything was in order switching on the tragic béret and the semaphore vale and starting all over again. He sat hunched on the stanchion in the evening mizzle, forcing and foiling the ebullition in this curious way, and his hands were two clammy cadaverous slabs of cod in his lap. Until to his annoyance the fetish of her waving the béret in the manner we (concensus, here and hereafter, of me) have been at such pains to describe, refused to work. He switched on as usual, after the throttling and expunction, and nothing happened. The cylinders of his mind abode serene. That was a nasty one for him if you like, a complete break down of the works like that. He cast round in a kind of panic for some image that would do to start things moving again: a Rasima look in her sunken eyes towards the end of the evening, the dim fanlight of the brow under the black hair growing low and thickly athwart the temples, the dell at the root of the nose that she used to allow him to palp and probe with his forefinger pad and nail. And all to no purpose. His mind abode serene and the well of tears dry.

  No sooner had he admitted to himself that there was nothing to be done, that he had dried himself quite with this chamber-work of sublimation, than he was seized with a pang of the darkest dye, and his Smeraldinalgia was swallowed up immediately in the much greater affliction of being a son of Adam and cursed with an insubordinate mind. His mind instructed his hands now to stop being clammy and flabby in his lap and to try a little fit of convulsions, and they obeyed instanter; but when it instructed itself to pump up a few tears in respect of the girl who had left him behind her, then it resisted. That was a very dark pang. Still on the stanchion in the mizzle that would not abate until everybody had gone home, wringing his hands faute de mieux, mindless of the Smeraldina-Rima, he pored over this new sorrow.

  Meanwhile a cobalt devil of a very much less light and airy high and mighty description was biding its time until the Adam grievance should have shot its bolt as all Belacqua's grievances did, leaving him in a disarmed condition that was most disagreeable. For him the Great Dereliction was the silver lining and its impertinent interventions. For the mind to pore over a woe or in deference to a woe be blacked out was all right; and of course for the mind to be enwombed and entombed in the very special manner that we will have more than one occasion to consider was better still, a real pleasure. But this impudent interpolation of the world's ghastly backside, dismantling his machinery of despond and hauling him high and dry out of his comfortable trough, was a solution of continuity that he objected to particularly.

  Not that he could complain that the texture of the current dejection had been seriously faulted in this respect. There had been no lull of any consequence between the break down of the love-ache and the onset of the pang. Indeed whatever little interspace there was had been filled by an ergo, the two terms had been chained together beautifully. And now in the very process of his distress at being a son of Adam and afflicted in consequence with a mind that would not obey its own behests was being concocted a gloom to crown his meditation in a style that had never graced the climax of any similar series in his previous experience of melancholy. A positively transcendental gloom was brewing that would incorporate the best and choicest elements in all that had gone before and made its way straight in what at first sight would have the appearance of a conclusive proposition. Needless to say it would be nothing of the kind. But considered in the penumbra of a clause on which to toss and turn and whinge himself to sleep it could scarcely have been improved on.

  He was still grinding away at No. 2, with the hands back in the lap in a pulp, when suddenly the impression that there was a rough gritty man standing before him and stating what sounded unpleasantly like an ultimatum caused him to look up. It was only too true. It was the wharfinger, seeking whom he might devour. Belacqua gave heed to what was being said to him, and elicited in the end from an exuberance of coprolalia that the man was requiring him to go.

  “Get off my pier” said the wharfinger rudely “and let me get home to my tea.” This seemed fair enough. It even seemed natural enough to Belacqua that the man should speak of the pier as his. In a sense it was his pier. He was responsible for it. That was what he was there for. That was what he was paid for. And it was very natural that he should want to get home to his tea after his day's work.

  “To be sure” said Belacqua, rising from the stanchion, “how thoughtless of me. May I…” He felt in his trouser pocket for a sixpenny bit or failing that a shilling, and pulled out all that he had left—twopence. Belacqua stood hatless in the mizzle before his adversary, the foreskirt of his reefer flung back, and the discoloured lining of the pocket protruded like we cannot think what. It was a very embarrassing moment.

  “May you what?” said the wharfinger.

  Belacqua blushed. He did not know where to look. He took off his glasses in his confusion. But of course it was a case of locking the stable-door after the steed had flown. Dare he offer such a heated man twopence?

  “I can only apologise” he stammered “for having put you to this inconvenience. Believe me, I had no idea…”

  The wharfinger spat. No smoking was allowed on the pier but spitting was different.

  “Be off my pier” he said with finality “before that spit dries.”

  Belacqua thought what an extraordinary expression for a man in his station to use. The phrase was misapplied, he thought, surely something was wrong with the phrase somewhere. And in such weather it was like inviting him to postpone his going till the Greek Kalends. These conceits passed through his mind as he walked rapidly landward down the wharf with his oppressor hard on his heels. When the gate had slammed safely behind him he turned round and wished the wharfinger a cour
teous good-evening. To his surprise the man touched his cap and replied with quite a courteous little good-evening. Belacqua's heart gave a great leap of pleasure.

  “Oh” he cried “good-evening to you and forgive me, my good man, won't you, I meant no harm.”

  But to acknowledge an obvious gentleman's courtly greeting was one thing and to pooh-pooh offhand a flagrant act of trespass was quite another. So the wharfinger hardened his heart and disappeared into his hut and Belacqua had no choice but to hobble away on his ruined feet without indulgence, absolution or remission.

  God bless dear Daddy, he prayed vaguely that night for no particular reason before getting into bed, Mummy Johnny Bibby (quondam Nanny, now mother of thousands by a gardener) and all that I love and make me a good boy for Jesus Christ sake Armen.

  That was the catastasis their Mammy had taught them, first John, then Bel, at her knee, when they were tiny. That was their prayer. What came after that was the Lord's. Their prayer was a nice little box and the Lord's was a dull big box. You went down in a lift and your only stomach rose up into your craw. Oooaaah.

  He got up and got into bed and the blue devil that had been waiting for just such an opportunity got in beside him and represented to him there and then and in the most insidious terms that it was a nice state of affairs when the son of Adam could quash the lover of the Smeraldina-Rima or any other girl for that matter and if that was all being in love with a girl from the girdle up meant to him the sooner he came off it the better. Thus he was crowned in gloom and he had a wonderful night. He groped, as one that walks by moonshine in a wood, through the grateful night to the impertinent champaign of the morning. Sin is behovable but all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. Inquit Grock…