The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989

by Samuel Beckett

  Despite such dehumanized immobility, these figures (one hesitates to call them characters) and their chronologically earlier disembodied voices retain a direct and fundamental dramatic quality of which Beckett was fully aware. Despite occasional protestations to the contrary, Beckett encouraged directors eager to stage his prose and developed several thematically revealing stage adaptations of his short narratives. When the American director Joseph Chaikin wrote for permission to stage Stories and Texts for Nothing, for example, Beckett encouraged him in a letter of 26 April 1980 to mount a single Text, for which he proposed a simple, precise staging: a single figure, “[s]eated. Head in hands. Nothing else. Face invisible. Dim spot. Speech hesitant. Mike for audibility.” Beckett wrote again on 1 August 1980 developing his adaptation:

  Curtain up on speechless author (A) still or moving or alternately. Silence broken by recorded voice (V) speaking opening of text. A takes over. Breaks down. V again. A again. So on. Till text completed piecemeal. Then spoken through, more or less hesitantly, by A alone.

  Prompt not always successful, i.e., not regular alternation VAVA. Sometimes: Silence, V, silence, V again, A. Or even three prompts before A can speak.

  A does not repeat, but takes over where V leaves off.

  V: not necessarily A’s voice. Nor necessarily the same throughout. Different voices, 3 or 4, male and female, might be used for V. Perhaps coming to A from different quarters.

  Length of prompt (V) and take over (A) as irregular as you like.

  V may stop, A break down, at any point of sentence.

  Chaikin ultimately rejected Beckett’s staging, preferring his own vision of a medley of texts, and Beckett conceded in a letter of 5 September 1980, “The method I suggest is only valid for a single text. The idea was to caricature the labour of composition. If you prefer extracts from a number of texts you will need a different approach.” Chaikin finally chose another, more “theatrical” approach, but Beckett’s adaptation of his story remains astonishing, a dramatic foregrounding of the mysterious voices, external to the perceiving part of self. What is caricatured in Beckett’s adaptation is at least the Romantic notion of creativity, the artist’s agonized communion with his own pure, uncorrupted, inner being, consciousness, or imagination. In Beckett’s vision the author figure “A” has at least an unnamed collaborator, an external Other. “A” is as much audience to the emerging artwork as its instigator, as he folds the voices of Others, origins unknown, into his own.

  Shivaun O’Casey, daughter of dramatist Sean O’Casey, worked with Beckett to dramatize From an Abandoned Work, and Beckett likewise detailed a staging for her. O’Casey’s initial impulse was to mount the work on the analogy of Play, but Beckett resisted. “I think the spotlight face presentation would be wrong here.” He went on to offer an alternative that separated speaker from spoken: “The face is irrelevant. I feel also that no form of monologue technique will work for this text and that it should somehow be presented as a document for which the speaker is not responsible.” Beckett’s outline is as follows:

  Moonlight. Ashcan a little left of centre. Enter man left, limping, with stick, shadowing in paint general lighting along [sic]. Advances to can, raises lid, pushes about inside with crook of stick, inspects and rejects (puts back in can) an unidentifiable refuse, fishes out finally tattered ms. or copy of FAAW, reads aloud standing “Up bright and early that day, I was young then, feeling awful and out—” and a little further in silence, lowers text, stands motionless, finally closes ashcan, sits down on it, hooks stick round neck, and reads text through from beginning, i.e., including what he had read standing. Finishes, sits a moment motionless, gets up, replaces text in ashcan and limps off right. Breathes with maximum authenticity, only effect to be sought in [sic] slight hesitation now and then in places where most effective, due to strangeness of text and imperfect light and state of ms.13

  In such an adaptation the narrative offered to the audience is, as Beckett says, separated from the stage character, who is then only an accidental protagonist in the drama, more messenger, say, than character. It was a form of staging that Beckett preferred for most of his prose, a compromise between an unadorned stage reading and a full, theatrical adaptation where characters and not just the text are represented on the stage. When the American theatrical group Mabou Mines requested permission through Jean Reavey to stage The Lost Ones, Beckett approved at first only a “straight reading.” In rehearsals, however, the work developed into a complex, environmental adaptation with a naked actor “demonstrating” the text with a host of miniature figures. Beckett’s comment on the adaptation was finally, “Sounds like a crooked straight reading to me.”14 With O’Casey, Beckett resisted the resurrection of a dramatic structure he himself had by then rejected, the monologue, a form he developed in prose with the four nouvelles in 1947 and adapted to the stage with Krapp’s Last Tape in 1958. The monologue form embraced an ideology of concrete presence, a single coherent being (or a unified ego or, in literary terms, a unified character), an idea with which Beckett was increasingly uncomfortable (witness the tapes themselves in Krapp’s Last Tape) and all pretense to which was finally abandoned in the “trilogy” and the subsequent Texts for Nothing. In the theater Beckett gave full voice to that disintegration of character and the fragmentation of monologue in Not I and with the incorporeal, ghostly figure of May in Footfalls. When consulted about stagings of his prose, Beckett invariably rejected, as he did with Shivaun O’Casey, adaptations that posited a unity of character and narrative that the monologue form suggests. When I prepared with him stagings of first his novella Company and then the story “First Love,” he offered possibilities almost identical to those for Chaikin and O’Casey respectively.15 The central question to Beckett’s dramatization of “First Love,” for instance, was how to break up an unrelieved reading of the text, again discovered in a rubbish heap:

  The reading can be piecemealed by all kinds of business—such as returning it to bin (on which he sits to read)—exiting and returning to read to the end—looking feverishly for a flea or other vermin—chewing a crust—‘getting up to piss in a corner with back modestly to audience—etc. etc. making the poor best of a hopeless job.16

  Actors, then, have intuited what literary critics have too often failed to articulate, that even Beckett’s most philosophical and experimental short fictions have an immediacy and emotional power, “the immediacy of the spoken voice,” which makes them accessible to a broad audience and places them firmly within a tradition of Irish storytelling.

  Beckett’s first short stories, “Assumption,” “A Case in a Thousand,” “Text,” and “Sedendo et Quiescendo,”17 however, retain the rhetorical ornament and psychological probing characteristic of much high modernism. These stories, the latter two fragments of a then-abandoned novel, are finally uncharacteristic of the narrative diaspora Beckett would eventually develop, but they are central to understanding its creative genesis. Beckett’s first two stories, for instance, were written as if he were still preoccupied with literary models. In the first case Beckett seems to have been reading too many of Baudelaire’s translations of Poe; in the second, too much Sigmund Freud. But it was with such derivative short fiction that Beckett launched a literary career in 1929, less than a year after having arrived in Paris, in Eugene Jolas’s journal of experimental writing, transition. Jolas was in the midst of championing James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake by publishing not only excerpts from the Work in Progress but essays about it as well. Beckett had impressed Joyce enough that he was offered the opportunity to write an essay comparing Joyce to three of Joyce’s favorite Italian writers, Dante, Bruno, and Vico, for a volume of essays defining and defending the Work in Progress. Jolas (and evidently Joyce himself, for the essay would not have appeared without Joyce’s approval) thought enough of the essay to reprint it in transition. Along with the essay, Jolas accepted a short story from Beckett, “Assumption,” which opens with the sort of paradox that would eventually become Beckett’s
literary signature, “He could have shouted and could not.”

  The story details the fate of a young, anguished “artist” who struggles to retain and restrain “that wild rebellious surge that aspired violently towards realization in sound.” The silent, unnamed protagonist, however, commands a “remarkable faculty of whispering the turmoil down.” He can silence “the most fiercely oblivious combatant” with a gesture, with “all but imperceptible twitches of impatience.” He develops as well an aesthetic that separates Beauty from Prettiness. The latter merely proceeds “comfortably up the staircase of sensation, and sit[s] down mildly on the topmost stair to digest our gratification.” More powerful are sensations generated when “[w]e are taken up bodily and pitched breathless on the peak of a sheer crag: which is the pain of Beauty.” The remainder of “Assumption” develops just such an aesthetic of pain, which echoes the German Romanticism Beckett never quite purged from his art. As the artist struggles to restrain the animal voice that “tore at his throat as he choked it back in dread and sorrow,” an unnamed Woman enters. She flatters and finally seduces the artist manqué, and “SO [sic] each evening in contemplation and absorption of this woman, he lost part of his essential animality.” After he is seduced, “spent with extasy [sic]” the dammed “stream of whispers” explodes in “a great storm of sound.” The story ends with the sort of epiphany that Beckett would recycle in the final line of “Dante and the Lobster”: “They found her caressing his wild dead hair.” “Assumption” works through (and finally against) the image of a Promethean artist: “Thus each night he died and was God [the Assumption of the title?], each night revived and was torn, torn and battered with increasing grievousness….” But whether the artist transcends the worldly through this experience to unite with something like the Idea, or pure essence, transcends Schopenhauer’s world of representation to achieve the pure will, or whether the title refers simply to the arrogance of such desire may be the crux of the story. The protagonist’s romantic agony (in both senses of that phrase) may simply describe postcoital depression, and so travesty the belabored agonies of a would-be artist.

  When Beckett came to publish another story in transition in March 1932, he selected an excerpt from the stalled novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which he called “Sedendo et Quiescendo” (but which appeared as “Sedendo et Quiesciendo”). The story includes a sonnet from the protagonist, Belacqua Shuah, to his lover, the Smeraldina, which developed the same sort of yearning for transcendence and union with the “Eternally, irrevocably one” evident in “Assumption.” The means to this end was to “be consumed and fused in the white heat / Of her sad finite essence….” In the sonnet the speaker claims that he “cannot be whole … unless I be consumed,” which consumption provides the climax to “Assumption.” The parallels between story and sonnet extend to the recycling of imagery and phrasing: “One with the birdless, cloudless, colourless skies” (untitled sonnet to the Smeraldina); “he hungered to be irretrievably engulfed in the light of eternity, one with the birdless cloudless colourless skies” (“Assumption”). Even the image of the “blue flower” reappears: “Belacqua … inscribed to his darling blue flower some of the finest Night of May hiccupsobs that ever left a fox’s paw sneering and rotting in a snaptrap” (“Sedendo et Quiescendo”); “He was released, acheived [sic], the blue flower, Vega, GOD…” (“Assumption”).

  Beckett’s fourth published story, “A Case in a Thousand,” appeared in Bookman in August 1934 along with his critical article “Recent Irish Poetry,” the latter, however, signed with the pseudonym Andrew Belis. “A Case in a Thousand” features one Dr. Nye, who “belonged to the sad men.” Physician though he is, Dr. Nye “cannot save” himself. He is called in on a case of surgeon Bor who had operated on the tubercular glands of a boy named Bray, who had then taken a turn for the worse. “Dr. Nye found a rightsided empyema,” and then another on the left. He discovered as well that the boy’s mother, who has been barred from the hospital excepting an hour’s visit in the morning and another in the evening but who maintains a day-long vigil on the hospital grounds until her appointed visiting hour, is actually Nye’s “old nurse,” who on their meeting reminds him that he was “‘always in a great hurry so you could grow up and marry me.’” Mrs. Bray, however, “did not disclose the trauma at the root of this attachment.” There are then at least two patients in this story, the Bray boy and Dr. Nye. As the boy’s condition worsens and a decision about another operation must be made, the doctor regresses, “took hold of the boy’s wrist, stretched himself all along the edge of the bed and entered the kind of therapeutic trance that he reserved for such happily rare dilemmas.” At that moment Mrs. Bray “saw him as she could remember him,” that is, as the boy she had nursed. The young Bray does not survive the operation, but after the funeral the mother resumes her vigil outside the hospital as if her child were still alive—as in a sense he is. When Nye appears, “she related a matter connected with his earliest years, so trivial and intimate that it need not be enlarged on here, but from the elucidation of which Dr. Nye, that sad man, expected great things.” The undisclosed incident, at once a “trauma at the root of this attachment” and an incident so “trivial and intimate that it need not be enlarged on here,” is at the root of the story as well. The matter is certainly sexual, particularly Oedipal, and at least one critic, J. D. O’Hara, has surmised that the “trivial and intimate” incident involves the young Nye’s curiosity about female anatomy, in particular whether or not women have penises. Dr. Nye’s nurse may have answered the question by anatomical demonstration, and the unexpected disclosure may have left the young Nye impotent, which condition would help explain why as an adult Nye was “one of the sad men.” The “Case in a Thousand,” then, is not (or not only) the young boy’s empyema but Nye’s disorder, impotence perhaps, as well.

  Thereafter, Beckett returned to his stalled and incomplete novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Having published two excerpts as separate stories, “Text” and “Sedendo et Quiescendo,” he now cannibalized two of its more detachable pieces, “A Wet Night” and “The Smeraldina’s Billet-Doux,” retaining the protagonist, Belacqua Shuah, to develop an episodic novel, More Pricks Than Kicks, whose lead story, “Dante and the Lobster,” was published separately in This Quarter in December 1932. (The story “Yellow” was also published separately in New World Writing but not until November 1956, twenty-two years after the publication of the novel.)

  Beckett’s subsequent venture into short fiction began just after the second World War, after the writing of Watt, when he produced four stories in his adopted language. Originally, all four of the French stories were scheduled for publication by Beckett’s first French publisher, Bordas, which had published his translation of Murphy. But Bordas dropped plans to issue Mercier et Camier and Quatre Nouvelles when sales of the French Murphy proved disastrous. Subsequently, Beckett suppressed for a time the French novel and one of the stories. The remaining three nouvelles of 1946 were finally published in France by Les Editions de Minuit (1955) and in the U.S. by Grove Press (1967) in combination with thirteen Texts for Nothing (“First Love” being published separately only in 1970). Although conjoined, the two sets of stories remained very separate in Beckett’s mind, as he explained to Joseph Chaikin. Beckett resisted Chaikin’s theatrical mixing of the stories, noting that “Stories and Texts for Nothing are two very different matters, the former the beginning of the French venture, the latter in the doldrums that followed the ‘trilogy.’” When Chaikin persisted, arguing that Stories and Texts for Nothing could all be read as tales for “nothing,” Beckett corrected him by return post: “Have only now realized ambiguity of title. What I meant to say was Stories. Followed by Texts for Nothing.”

  The four stories, “First Love,” “The Expelled,” “The Calmative,” and “The End,” written before, almost in anticipation of, the “trilogy” of novels, and the thirteen Texts for Nothing form the bookends to Beckett’s great creative period, which has
memorably been dubbed the “siege in the room” and which in some regards was anticipated by the final two paragraphs of “Assumption.” The “trilogy” seems almost embedded within the Stories and Texts for Nothing as Beckett’s first two full-length plays, Eleuthéria and En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), are embedded within the novels, the plays written, as Beckett confessed, “in search of respite from the wasteland of prose” he had been writing in 1948—49. In fact, the unnamed narrator of this four-story sequence, almost always suddenly and inexplicably expelled from the security of a shelter, an ejection that mimics the birth trauma, anticipates the eponymous Molloy, even in the postmortem story “The Calmative,” and remains a theme through Fizzles, where in “For to end yet again,” “the expelled falls headlong down.” In these four stories what has been and continued to be one of Beckett’s central preoccupations developed in its full complexity: the psychological, ontological, narratological bewilderment at the inconsistency, the duality of the human predicament, the experience of existence. On the one side is the post-Medieval tradition of humanism, which develops through the Renaissance into the rationality of the Enlightenment. Its ideology buttresses the capacity of humanity to know and adapt to the mechanism of the universe and understand humanity’s place in the scheme. This is the world of the schoolroom and laboratory, the world of mathematics and proportion, the world of Classical symmetry, of the pensum. For Beckett’s narrators, the punctum, the lived, sentient experience of existence, the being in the world, punctures and deflates that humanistic tradition, the empiricism of the classroom, although the latter never loses its appeal and is potentially a source of comfort (although it apparently destroys Watt). The opening of “The Expelled,” for instance, focuses not on the trauma of rejection and forcible ejection but on the difficulty of counting the stairs down which the narrator has, presumably, already been dispatched. There is little resentment here at the injustice of having been ejected from some place like a home. The focus of injustice in Beckett is almost never local, civil, or social, but cosmic, the injustice of having been born, after which one finds one’s consolations where one may—in mathematics, say. As the protagonist of “Heard in the Dark 2” (and Company) suggests, “Simple sums you find a help in times of trouble. A haven…. Even still in the timeless dark you find figures a comfort.” The experience of living is dark, mysterious, inexplicable, chthonic, in many respects Medieval but without the absolution of a benign deity. Such a dissociation had preoccupied Beckett in his earlier work, chiefly in Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Murphy, Watt, and the long poem “Whoroscope,” through the philosophical meditations of the seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes, that is, in terms of the conflict between mind (pensum) and body (punctum), although Schopenhauer’s division of the world in terms of the will and its representations is never very far from the foreground. Here the hormonal surges in even a spastic body like Murphy’s conspire against the idealism and serenity of mind (or soul or spirit). But in the four Stories Beckett went beyond Descartes and descended further into the inchoate subconscious of existence, rationality, and civilization, beyond even the Freudian Eros and the Schopenhauerian Will into the more Jungian Collective Unconscious of the race, and the four separate narrators (or the single collective narrator called “I”) of these Stories confront those primeval depths with little sense of horror, shame, or judgment. The stories retain an unabashedly Swiftian misanthropy: “The living wash in vain, in vain perfume themselves, they stink” (“First Love”). In “The Expelled” grotesqueries acquire comic effect even as they disclose psychoanalytic enigmas: “They never lynch children, babies, no matter what they do they are whitewashed in advance. I personally would lynch them with the utmost pleasure.” The theme will resurface in the 1957 radio play All that Fall when Dan Rooney asks wife Maddy, “Did you ever wish to kill a child…. Nip some young doom in the bud.” This is depersonalized humanity sunk in on itself: “It is not my wish to labour these antinomies, for we are, needless to say, in a skull, but I have no choice but to add the following few remarks. All the mortals I saw were alone and as if sunk in themselves” (“The Calmative”). It is a descent, most often into an emblematic skull, from which Beckett’s fiction, long or short, will never emerge. The image anticipates not only the skullscapes of the “trilogy,” but the dehumanized, dystopic tale The Lost Ones, and what is generally called the post—How It Is prose. Such a creative descent into “inner space,” into the unconscious, had been contemplated by Beckett at least since the earliest stages of Watt. In the notebook and subsequent typescript versions of the novel, Beckett noted, “the unconscious mind! What a subject for a short story.” “The Expelled” seems a fulfillment of that wish to plumb “perhaps deep down in those palaeozoic profounds, midst mammoth Old Red Sandstone phalli and Carboniferous pudenda… into the pre-uterine… the agar-agar… impossible to describe.”18