Appendix II:
Faux Départs
1
Plus signe de vie, dites-vous, dis-je, bah, qu’à cela ne tienne, imagination pas morte, et derechef, plus fort, trop fort, Imagination pas morte, et le soir même m’enfermai sous les huées et m’y mis, sans autre appui que les Syntaxes de Jolly et de Draeger. Mon cabinet a ceci de particulier, ou plutôt moi, que j’y ai fait aménager une stalle à ma taille. C’est là, au fond, face au mur, dans la pénombre, que j’imagine, tantôt assis, tantôt debout, au besoin à genoux.
Dois-je me présenter? Bah.
2
Plus signe de vie, dis-tu, dis-je, bah, imagination pas morte. Stalle, un mètre sur trois. C’est là. Par terre les Lexiques de Jolly et de Draeger. J’éteins. C’est là, dans le fond, nez au mur. Debout, assis, à genoux, selon. Toute la nuit naturelle. Me présenter? Bah. Nous tourbillonnons vers l’hiver, moi, mon coin de terre. Si ça pouvait être tout sur moi enfin. Et seuls désormais l’autre vide, le silence et le noir sans faille.
3
Le vieux je est revenu, ne sachant d’où, ne sachant où, dénué desens, inchangé.
Plus ou moins de syllabes, de virgules pour le souffle, un point pour le grand souffle.
Petits pas pressés, le pied qui se pose vient de trop loin, le ferme plus bas a trop loin à aller, il n’y a pas eu de chemin.
II parle à part lui à la dernière personne, il se dit, Il est revenu, il ne sait d’où, il ne sait ou, il n’a pas eu de chemin.
Le pied se pose une dernière fois, l’autre monte le rejoindre, il est rendu. Il peut lâcher son bâton blanc, il n’y a plus de bons ni de méchants, et s’allonger.
4
Imagination dead imagine.
Imagine a place, that again.
Never ask another question.
Imagine a place, then someone in it, that again.
Crawl out of the frowsy deathbed and drag it to a place to die in.
Out of the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no, not that again.
A closed space five foot square by six high, try for him there. Couldn’t have got in, can’t get out, did get in, will get out, all right.
Stool, bare walls when the light comes on, women’s faces on the walls when the light comes on.
In a corner when the light comes on tattered Syntaxes of Jolly and Draeger Praeger Draeger, all right.
Light off and let him be, sitting on the stool and talking to himself the last person.
Saying, Now where is he, no, Now he is here.
Try as well as sitting standing, walking, kneeling, crawling, lying, creeping, in the dark and the light.
Imagine light.
Imagine light.
No visible source, strong at full, spread all over, no shadow, all six planes shining the same, slow on, ten seconds to full, same off, try that.
Still his crown touches the ceiling, moving not.
Say a lifetime of walking crouched and drawing himself up when brought to a stand.
When it goes out no matter, start again, another place, someone in it, keep glaring, never see, never find, no end, no matter.
Appendix III: Nonfiction
The Capital of the Ruins
ON WHAT A YEAR AGO was a grass slope, lying in the angle that the Vire and Bayeux roads make as they unite at the entrance of the town, opposite what remains of the second most important stud-farm in France, a general hospital now stands. It is the Hospital of the Irish Red Cross in Saint-Lô, or, as the Laudiniens themselves say, the Irish Hospital. The buildings consist of some 25 prefabricated wooden huts. They are superior, generally speaking, to those so scantily available for the wealthier, the better-connected, the astuter or the more flagrantly deserving of the bombed-out. Their finish, as well without as within, is the best that priority can command. They are lined with glass-wool and panelled in isorel, a strange substance of which only very limited supplies are available. There is real glass in the windows. The consequent atmosphere is that of brightness and airiness so comforting to sick people, and to weary staffs. The floors, where the exigencies of hygiene are greatest, are covered with linoleum. There was not enough linoleum in France to do more than this. The walls and ceiling of the operating theatre are sheeted in aluminium of aeronautic origin, a decorative and practical solution of an old problem and a pleasant variation on the sword and ploughshare metamorphosis. A system of covered ways connects the kitchen with refectories and wards. The supply of electric current, for purposes both of heat and of power, leaves nothing to be desired. The hospital is centrally heated throughout, by means of coke. The medical, scientific, nursing and secretarial staffs are Irish, the instruments and furniture (including of course beds and bedding), the drugs and food, are supplied by the Society. I think I am right in saying that the number of inpatients (mixed) is in the neighbourhood of 90. As for the others, it is a regular thing, according to recent reports, for as many as 200 to be seen in the out-patients department in a day. Among such ambulant cases a large number are suffering from scabies and other diseases of the skin, the result no doubt of malnutrition or an ill-advised diet. Accident cases are frequent. Masonry falls when least expected, children play with detonators and demining continues. The laboratory, magnificently equipped, bids well to become the official laboratory for the department, if not of an even wider area. Considerable work has already been done in the analysis of local waters.
These few facts, chosen not quite at random, are no doubt familiar already to those at all interested in the subject, and perhaps even to those listening to the present circumlocution. They may not appear the most immediately instructive. That the operating-theatre should be sheeted with an expensive metal, or the floor of the labour-room covered with linoleum, can hardly be expected to interest those accustomed to such conditions as the sine qua non of reputable obstetrical and surgical statistics. These are the sensible people who would rather have news of the Norman’s semi-circular canals or resistance to sulphur than of his attitude to the Irish bringing gifts, who would prefer the history of our difficulties with an unfamiliar pharmacopia and system of mensuration to the story of our dealings with the rare and famous ways of spirit that are the French ways. And yet the whole enterprise turned from the beginning on the establishing of a relation in the light of which the therapeutic relation faded to the merest of pretexts. What was important was not our having penicillin when they had none, nor the unregarding munificence of the French Ministry of Reconstruction (as it was then called), but the occasional glimpse obtained, by us in them and, who knows, by them in us (for they are an imaginative people), of that smile at the human conditions as little to be extinguished by bombs as to be broadened by the elixirs of Burroughes and Welcome,—the smile deriding, among other things, the having and the not having, the giving and the taking, sickness and health.
It would not be seemly, in a retiring and indeed retired storekeeper, to describe the obstacles encountered in this connexion, and the forms, often grotesque, devised for them by the combined energies of the home and visiting temperaments. It must be supposed that they were not insurmountable, since they have long ceased to be of much account. When I reflect now on the recurrent problems of what, with all proper modesty, might be called the heroic period, on one in particular so arduous and elusive that it literally ceased to be formulable, I suspect that our pains were those inherent in the simple and necessary and yet so unattainable proposition that their way of being we, was not our way and that our way of being they, was not their way. It is only fair to say that many of us had never been abroad before.
Saint-Lô was bombed out of existence in one night. German prisoners of war, and casual labourers attracted by the relative food-plenty, but soon discouraged by housing conditions, continue, two years after the liberation, to clear away the debris, literally by hand. Their spirit has yet to learn the blessings of Gallup and their flesh the benefits of the bulldozer. One may thus be excused if one questions the opinion gene
rally received, that ten years will be sufficient for the total reconstruction of Saint-Lô. But no matter what period of time must still be endured, before the town begins to resemble the pleasant and prosperous administrative and agricultural centre that it was, the hospital of wooden huts in its gardens between the Vire and Bayeux roads will continue to discharge its function, and its cures. “Provisional” is not the term it was, in this universe become provisional. It will continue to discharge its function long after the Irish are gone and their names forgotten. But I think that to the end of its hospital days it will be called the Irish Hospital, and after that the huts, when they have been turned into dwellings, the Irish huts. I mention this possibility, in the hope that it will give general satisfaction. And having done so I may perhaps venture to mention another, more remote but perhaps of greater import in certain quarters, I mean the possibility that some of those who were in Saint-Lô will come home realising that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again. These will have been in France.
Notes on the Texts
Despite a pattern of errors running through the editions of Beckett’s prose published by John Calder, some of the Calder texts contain Beckett’s latest revisions. Beckett revised his stories of 1946, for instance, for Calder’s separate edition of First Love (1973) and the first collection of the four stories, Four Novellas (1977). These texts were subsequently reprinted, with minor revisions to later stories as well, in Collected Shorter Prose, 1945—1980 (1984). With the notable exceptions discussed below, namely The Lost Ones, “All Strange Away,” “The Image,” and “neither,” the Collected Shorter Prose, 1945—1980 texts have been adopted (and corrected) for this current volume.
For Beckett’s first short story, “Assumption,” the text reprinted here is that corrected and collected in Transition Workshop (1949, vide below). Two separately published stories from Dream of Fair to Middling Women have been included in this collection because they were published as separate stories, “Sedendo et Quiescendo” and “Text,” and the texts established by Dr. Eoin O’Brien based on his editing of Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1992; and New York: Arcade Press, 1993) have been adopted here.
As the text of Samuel Beckett’s first published short story, “Assumption,” suggests, editors have not always been kind to or careful with Samuel Beckett’s work. It seems astonishing that for so important a publication, his first story in a journal publishing James Joyce’s Work in Progress, (transition 16–17 [June 1929]: 268–71) “Assumption” should have been so poorly edited and proofread. If we except the obsolete spelling of “extasy” as indeed Beckett’s (although it was revised in the reprint cited below), no fewer than five glaring typographical errors mar Beckett’s first published piece of short fiction. Those errors were corrected only twenty years later in the reprint for transition workshop, edited by Eugene Jolas (New York: The Vanguard Press, Inc., 1949), 41–44; that text is reprinted here.
The original text for “Sedendo et Quiescendo” is even more corrupt than that for the original printing of “Assumption,” except that the story has not heretofore been reprinted and so errors in the first printing have not been corrected. The number of errors in these first two transition stories suggests that Beckett never read proofs for either of them. For “Sedendo et Quiescendo,” for instance, even the title was incorrect: the transition version reads “Sedendo et Quiesciendo.” Like Dream of Fair to Middling Women, of which it finally became a part, “Sedendo et Quiescendo” is filled with the sort of Joycean wordplay that makes distinguishing error from linguistic play very difficult. Moreover, the version incorporated into Dream of Fair to Middling Women has been substantially revised—in places rewritten—so that the novel is not always an accurate guide to Beckett’s thinking for this story version. On the whole, the ludic elements increased as Beckett absorbed story into novel. What in the story, for instance, was “a shadowy stasis between tram and sidewalk” became in the novel “an umbral stasis twixt tram and trottoir”; the “cold in the head” of the story became the “constipated coryza” of the novel; the story’s “Wonderful” became the novel’s “Wunnerful.” The editor has, however, retained the integrity of the original story version in this printing so that readers can make their own comparisons.
The text printed in this current edition was corrected as follows:
“garden of Eden” to “Garden of Eden”;
“he doesn’t mush care” to “he doesn’t much care”;
“properties of the appropiate kind” to “properties of the appropriate kind”;
“mailing his cheekbones” to “nailing his cheekbones”;
“on him or to horn” to “on him or to him”;
“(Nth Gt. Georges St.” to “(Nth Gt. George’s St.”;
“a kind of contapuntal” to “a kind of contrapuntal”;
“Bramaputra” to “Brahmaputra”;
and finally, “he’s gota bit wasted” to “he’s got a bit wasted.”
For “First Love” Beckett evidently made a series of revisions for the British text that never appeared in the American edition. The third paragraph of the American text begins, “Personally I have nothing against graveyards….” But Beckett evidently could not resist a lastminute pun and revised the British text to “Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.” Such late revisions were not uncommon for Beckett. Barry McGovern reports (Independent on Sunday, 31 December 1989), for instance, that Beckett for a time was tempted to revise the last sentence of “Dante and the Lobster” from “It is not” to “Like hell it is,” but that revision never appeared in print. The revision to the British text of “First Love,” on the other hand, has appeared in print as Beckett’s latest revision and so has been adopted here. In the book version of “Sedendo et Quiescendo,” however, Beckett changed “I don’t believe it” in the first paragraph to “Like hell it does.”
A number of other small changes have been made to the American text of “First Love”: “But my father’s yard was not among my favourite” was changed in the Collected Shorter Prose 1943–1980 to “amongst my favourites.” The first American printing missed the g in “grottoes,” which has here been restored. And “To put it wildly” of the first British and American editions has been corrected to “To put it mildly.” “They would have had to gas me out” of the American printing has been revised to “nothing less than gas would have dislodged me,” as it appears in Collected Shorter Prose 1943–1980. Likewise, “I hate forgetting a proper name” became “I hate to forget …”; “sotto voce” became “beneath her breath”; and “even more dead than alive” became “even more dead than alive than usual.”
The three British editions of “All Strange Away,” including the separately published volume (London: John Calder [Publishers] Ltd., 1979), contain errors corrected only in the Grove Press edition, Rockaby and Other Short Pieces (New York: Grove Press, 1981), for which, evidently, Beckett read proof—at least the “toward” of the British editions, for example, is revised to the form Beckett preferred, “towards,” in the Grove Press text, and “towards” is decidedly not a common American usage. (See, for example, Nicholson’s American-English Usage: “the -s form is the prevailing one in Brit., toward in the US,” p. 595.) In addition, all British editions print the following, “Last look oh not farewell but last for now on left side….” “Left,” however, was revised to “right” for the Grove edition. The Grove text, furthermore, contains a phrase missing from all British texts, “… better unchanging black or glare one or the other or between the two….” With Beckett’s revision the sentence near the end of the story then reads, “All that if not yet quite complete quite clear and little change likely unless perhaps to complete unless perhaps somehow light sudden gleam perhaps better fixed and all this flowing and ebbin
g to full and empty more harm than good and better unchanging black or glare one or the other or between the two soft white unchanging….” Moreover, the word “head” is missing from the following sentence in all British texts: “thus the fall back to where she lay wedged against wall….” The corrected Grove text reads: “thus the fall back to where she lay head wedged against wall….” In all, the Grove text contains some twelve to sixteen corrections or revisions of the British text, depending, of course, on which British version is being compared. The Journal of Beckett Studies printing contained, for instance, typographical errors corrected for the separately published and collected printings.
The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 Page 27
