The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989

by Samuel Beckett

  S. E. GONTARSKI

  Dunedin, New Zealand

  Notes

  1. “Mr Artesian,” The Listener (3 August 1967): 148—49. Reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 286-291.

  2. No Symbols Where None Intended: A Catalogue of Books, Manuscripts, and Other Material Relating to Samuel Beckett in the Collection of the Humanities Research Center, Selected and described by Carlton Lake (Austin, TX: Humanities Research Center, 1984), 133.

  3. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (New York: Harper & Row [Harper Colophon Books], 1985), 19.

  4. The work finally seems to have wound up anthologized with Beckett’s prose via an exchange between publishers. The dramaticule “Come and Go” was originally published in the U.K. by John Calder, to whom the work is dedicated. Faber has subsequently published “Come and Go” in anthologies of Beckett’s drama, and Calder published “From an Abandoned Work” in anthologies of Beckett’s prose.

  Beckett’s short story “Lessness” was also performed on the BBC, on 25 February 1971 with Donal Donnelly, Leonard Fenton, Denys Hawthorne, Patrick Magee, and Harold Pinter.

  5. Even Beckett’s earliest critics like Dylan Thomas referred to More Pricks Than Kicks as a novel; see New English Weekly (17 March 1938): 454—55.

  6. Letter to American publisher Barney Rosset dated 11 February 1954.

  7. Ibid.

  8. No Symbols Where None Intended, 81.

  9. Rosset letter to Samuel Beckett, 5 February 1954.

  10. No Symbols Where None Intended, 90.

  11. A reference to this abandoned work appears in “Why Actors Are Fascinated by Beckett’s Theater,” The Times (27 January 1965): 14: “Mr. Beckett is at present finishing a novel called Fancy Dying, and also writing a play”—the latter presumably Play. The source of the information is apparently Jack MacGowran, who was not only playing in Endgame at the time but also preparing a one-man performance of Beckett’s prose writings, which became Beginning to End.

  12. “From an Unabandoned Work,” Evergreen Review 4.14 (September—October 1960): 58—65.

  13. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978) 578.

  14. No Symbols Where None Intended, 140.

  15. For further discussion of adaptation of Beckett’s prose to the stage see my ”Company for Company: Androgyny and Theatricality in Samuel Beckett’s Prose,” Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company, ed. James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (London: Macmillan Press, 1987), 193—202.

  16. Samuel Beckett letter to the editor dated 12 September 1986.

  17. The title alludes to Dante’s Purgatorio, “Sedendo et quiescendo anima efficitur prudens” (roughly, sitting quietly the soul acquires wisdom).

  18. Cited by Chris Ackerley, “Fatigue and Disgust: The Addenda to Watt,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui: Beckett in the 1990s II: 179.

  19. Some twenty-two years later, directing his play Footfalls in Germany, Beckett returned to this theme as he told the actress playing May, “Words are as food for this poor girl…. They are her best friends” (Walter D. Asmus, “Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Samuel Beckett’s That Time and Footfalls,” On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, ed. by S. E. Gontarski [New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1986], 339).

  20. “Some Ping Understood,” Encounter (February 1968): 85—89. Reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, 291—301. The original publication of the essay, however, contains line numberings to the original publication of “Ping” in Encounter 28.2 (February 1967): 25-26.

  21. Hans Vaihinger from The Philosophy of As If, cited in Kermode (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 40.

  22. This oft-quoted letter to Barney Rosset of 27 August 1957 objects to a staging of All that Fall. Beckett’s full wording is: “If we can’t keep our genres more or less distinct, or extricate them from the confusion that has them where they are, we might as well go home and lie down.” Beckett subsequently authorized several stage versions of All that Fall.

  23. No Symbols Where None Intended, 53.

  Samuel Beckett:

  The Complete Short Prose,

  1929–1989

  Assumption

  HE COULD HAVE shouted and could not. The buffoon in the loft swung steadily on his stick and the organist sat dreaming with his hands in his pockets. He spoke little, and then almost huskily, with the low-voiced timidity of a man who shrinks from argument, who can reply confidently to Pawn to King’s fourth, but whose faculties are frozen into bewildered suspension by Pawn to Rook’s third, of the unhappy listener who will not face a clash with the vulgar, uncultivated, terribly clear and personal ideas of the unread intelligenzia. He indeed was not such a man, but his voice was of such a man; and occasionally, when he chanced to be interested in a discussion whose noisy violence would have been proof against most resonant interruption of the beautifully banal kind, he would exercise his remarkable faculty of whispering the turmoil down. This whispering down, like all explosive feats of the kind, was as the apogee of a Vimy Light’s parabola, commanding undeserved attention because of its sudden brilliance. The actual imposition of silence by an agent that drifted off itself into silence a few tables away was merely the easy climax of a long series of subtle preparations: all but imperceptible twitches of impatience, smiles artistically suppressed, a swift affection of uninterested detachment, all finely produced and thrown into the heat of the conflict, so that the most fiercely oblivious combatant could not fail to be neatly and intolerably irritated. Then, when his work had been done and an angry lull was imminent, he whispered. As with all artists, this casting of an effect in the teeth of his audience was the least difficult part of his business; he had been working hard for the last half-hour, and no one had seen him; that long chain of inspired gesture had been absorbed unconsciously by every being within the wide orbit of his control, and accepted as normal and spontaneous. To avoid the expansion of the commonplace is not enough; the highest art reduces significance in order to obtain that inexplicable bombshell perfection. Before no supreme manifestation of Beauty do we proceed comfortably up a staircase of sensation, and sit down mildly on the topmost stair to digest our gratification: such is the pleasure of Prettiness. We are taken up bodily and pitched breathless on the peak of a sheer crag: which is the pain of Beauty. Just as the creative artist must be partly illusionist, our whispering prestidigitator was partly artist. A member of the Browning Society would say that he played on the souls of men as on an instrument; a unanimist, that he imposed his personality on a group. But we must be careful not to imply that the least apostolic fervour coloured what was at its worst the purely utilitarian contrivance of a man who wished to gain himself a hearing, and at its best an amused experiment in applied psychology.

  In the silence of his room he was afraid, afraid of that wild rebellious surge that aspired violently towards realization in sound. He felt its implacable caged resentment, its longing to be released in one splendid drunken scream and fused with the cosmic discord. Its struggle for divinity was as real as his own, and as futile. He wondered if the Power which, having denied him the conscious completion of the meanest mongrel, bade him forget his fine imperfection beside it in the gutter, ever trembled at the force of his revolt. Meanwhile that flesh-locked sea of silence achieved a miserable consummation in driblets of sound, as each falling leaf saps the painful vigour of a tree in a cruelly windless autumn. The process was absurd, extravagantly absurd, like boiling an egg over a bonfire. But in his case it was not a willful extravagance; he felt compassion as well as fear; he dreaded lest his prisoner should escape, he longed that it might escape; it tore at his throat and he choked it back in dread and sorrow. Fear breeds fear: he began to have a horror of unexpected pain, of sleep, of anything that might remove the involuntary inhibition. He drugged himself that he might sleep heavily, silently; he scarcely left his room, scarcely spoke, thus
denying even that rare transmutation to the rising tossing soundlessness that seemed now to rend his whole being with the violence of its effort. He felt he was losing, playing into the hands of the enemy by the very severity of his restrictions. By damming the stream of whispers he had raised the level of the flood, and he knew the day would come when it could no longer be denied. Still he was silent, in silence listening for the first murmur of the torrent that must destroy him. At this moment the Woman came to him….

  He was listening in the dusk when she came, listening so intently that he did not hear her enter. From the door she spoke to him, and he winced at the regularity of her clear, steady speech. It was the usual story, vulgarly told: admiration for his genius, sympathy with his suffering, only a woman could understand.… He clenched his hands in a fury against the enormous impertinence of women, their noisy intrusive curious enthusiasm, like the spontaneous expression of admiration bursting from American hearts before Michelangelo’s tomb in Santa Croce. The voice droned on, wavered, stopped. He sketched a tired gesture of acceptation, and prepared to withdraw once more within that terrifying silent immobility. She turned on the light and advanced carelessly into the room. An irruption of demons would not have scattered his intentness so utterly. She sat down before him at the table, and leaned forward with her jaws in the cups of her hands. He looked at her venomously, and was struck in spite of himself by the extraordinary pallor of her lips, of which the lower protruded slightly and curled upwards contemptuously to compress the upper, resulting in a faintly undershot local sensuality which went strangely with the extreme cold purity stretching sadly from the low broad brow to the closed nostrils. He thought of George Meredith and recovered something of his calm. The eyes were so deeply set as to be almost cavernous; the light falling on the cheekbones threw them back into a misty shadow. In daylight they were strange, almost repulsive, deriving a pitiless penetration from the rim of white showing naturally above the green-flecked pupil. Now as she leaned forward beneath the light, they were pools of obscurity. She wore a close-fitting hat of faded green felt: he thought he had never seen such charming shabbiness. … When at last she went away he felt that something had gone out from him, something he could not spare, but still less could grudge, something of the desire to live, something of the unreasonable tenacity with which he shrank from dissolution. So each evening, in contemplation and absorption of this woman, he lost a part of his essential animality: so that the water rose, terrifying him. Still he fought on all day, hopelessly, mechanically, only relaxing with twilight, to listen for her coming to loosen yet another stone in the clumsy dam set up and sustained by him, frightened and corruptible. Until at last, for the first time, he was unconditioned by the Satanic dimensional Trinity, he was released, achieved, the blue flower, Vega, GOD…. After a timeless parenthesis he found himself alone in his room, spent with ecstasy, torn by the bitter loathing of that which he had condemned to the humanity of silence. Thus each night he died and was God, each night revived and was torn, torn and battered with increasing grievousness, so that he hungered to be irretrievably engulfed in the light of eternity, one with the birdless cloudless colourless skies, in infinite fulfillment.

  Then it happened. While the woman was contemplating the face that she had overlaid with death, she was swept aside by a great storm of sound, shaking the very house with its prolonged, triumphant vehemence, climbing in a dizzy, bubbling scale, until, dispersed, it fused into the breath of the forest and the throbbing cry of the sea.

  They found her caressing his wild dead hair.

  Sedendo et Quiescendo

  DOWN YOU GET now and step around. Two hours menopause. Drag your coffin my lord. Half a day and I’ll be with. HIER! The bright beer goes like water through the nearsighted Frankfort porter. In Perpignan exiled dream-Dantes screaming in the planetrees and freezing the sun with peacock feathers and at last at least a rudimentary black swan with the bloodbeak and HIC! for the bladderjerk of the little Catalan postman. Oh who can hold a fire in his hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus. Here oh here oh art thou pale with weariness. I hope yes after a continental third-class insomnia among the reluctantly military philologists asleep and armed as to nasals and dentals. Laughter. Ten Pfenigs in such a dainty slot gives the la I am bound to concede and releases the appropriate tonic for the waning lust-affair. Moderate strength rings the bell. I don’t believe it. Così fan tutte with the magic flute. Even in the Xmas holidays. Half a day and I’ll be in.

  Up to time then after this little railway-station rectification she advanced up the railway-platform like a Gozzi-Epstein, being careful not to lose the platform ticket that yet ten Pfenigs cost had, insisting on the Garden of Eden in Mammy’s furcoat, scarcely suggesting within the mild aphrodisiac of cheap loose black leather Russian boots legs that even flexed nervously in black stockings stretched to the absolute limit of intensity and viewed from a certain very special Blickpunkt against a very special quality of hard light during a period of oestruation were not alas reasonably exciting. The truly tremendous bowl of the hips (frequent and easy) breaking out and away from the waistroot (she won’t need no Lupercus) like a burdocked bulb of Ruffino and the two great melons of the buttocks received an almost Rhineline from the dark peltsheath. Sheath within sheath and the missing sword. Not forgetting this was the suit he had bought for next to nothing from a lefthanded indivisible individual, with a charitable desire to justify his fatigue he forced his right hand down past the craggy coxa (almost a woman’s basin in these trousers) into the glairy gallant depths and fished up a fifty. A cigarette quick for the cheekbones and the ticket handy there in the breast of my reefer and the heavy valise to snatch him skilfully detached and extenuated into the loveglue and a smoke after that was nearly as good as in the Maison du Café.

  “At last!”

  “Beloved!”

  “Taxi!” Vie de taxi. Je t’adore à l’égal.

  Carry your coffin my lord. Manner. Moving east to the segregation of the sexes. Ausgang on the right. Rule of the road. Lady on right arm. Nonsens unique. Astuce. All the same sleep on right side. Gentle reader don’t overlook will you the fact that he celebrated the signing of the armistice with a pubic lanugo and

  BELACQUA

  we’ll call him and no indolent virgin is his sister (indolent virgin!) and he doesn’t much care whether he plays the tinkle-tinkle of a fourhander or not but he won’t facing the keyboard observe the rule of the road (a megalomaniac you see with his head in his thighs as a general rule) so we ask you to humour what of course naturally looks merely like so much intestinal incohesion, remember he belongs to the costermonger times of a pale and ardent generation, pray that he’ll let a few sighs out of him ere it’s too late and speedy promotion from the Godbirds. And the lady that even in this very short and public space of time and notwithstanding that fur has no conductive properties of the appropriate kind worth speaking of has succeeded in transmitting certain unexpectedly stimulating sensations to her young visitor, what shall we call her. What name would you suggest? I’m rather inclined myself to think

  SMERALDINA-RIMA

  and anything that comes in handy for short. He handed her into the cab of the Wagen with its charming deep Bluepoint zoster and spoke an address confidently to the chauffeur who but a moment previously had thought to light a cigarette and who now naturally was in no humour to start his engine and set off but was not slow to yield to the promising accent of the young tourist whose heavy fibre case he hoisted vigorously on board on his left beside him and clipping the yet intact Ova between his rubbery helix and hypertrophied mastoid process gratified in his dialogue doubtless his nearest colleagues with what no doubt was a passionate Hessian epigram, set his machine angrily in motion, suffering with a kind of hopeless interest the refracted deportment of his clients. Down the cobbled avenue then of bitter Xmas trees, trembling in many and many a shadowy stasis between tram and sidewalk, the superb Wagen ran towards the spire that eliminates in impeccable imperial align
ment the now dim height of Hercules and the meagre cascade sullen and abandoned dropping, what there was of it and because it bloody well had to, down the choked channel of Hohenzollern rocaille, snowclad, upon the castle. Blocus sentimental. Belacqua took her hand and drew it down upon the skirted, nearly the thighjoy through the fingers, and all the same he enquires:

  “Where did you get the hat?” A glaucous helmethat.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Very nice do you?”

  “Oh I don’t know do you?” Snotgasp of reliefhilarity in honour of private joke.

  “It goes with the ring.” He turned over the hand and looked at the warts. Two dwindling warts in the shadow of the Mount of Venus. Warts in the valley of the shadow of.

  “Your warts are better.” Ostentatiously he dropped his mouth upon the place. She squeezed the Giudecca of her palm against the centre of distribution, nailing his cheekbones with thumb and index. In the rue Delambre with a silk handkerchief did he not staunch the vomitdribble of a littérateur deaddrunk and cornuted what’s more into the bargain on Pernod and Pickmeup? How often had he not denied all knowledge of Hernani? Poor Hamlet rolling his belly waxes and tapers the spike of his navelthread for the red waistcoat. The beadlust. By no thinking shall he consume that enterprise, by no new thoughts shall he be altogether released from the postulate of his undertaking. Fast in the black sand.